all the presidents’ meals

The always brilliant Everlasting Blört refers us to a rather incredible, wide-ranging study from Foreign Policy on official White House State Dinners and how the evolution of the menu reflects changing tastes, health trends and American cuisine. Harry S Truman, hosting Dutch and British prime ministers Willem Drees and Winston Churchill, most certainly served samples of a certain new corn chip called Fritos and a couple of old fashioneds.
Nixon lost his creative flair after Watergate and recycled Bibb salads.  Jimmy Carter held the biggest state dinner with dignitaries from all over Latin American invited to attend the US transferring ownership of the Panama Canal. At one of the Reagans’ events, John Travolta danced with Princess Diana. Inventions of the kitchen—special sauces and desserts—were often named after the guests of honour. Reflecting popular diet fads of the 1990s, the Clinton White House only served beef on two occasions. Beautifully presented—plated, the interactive presentation that covers nearly nine decades of gastro-diplomatic fêting, we are ready to dig in and sample the courses through history.

peak curtains

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn about a couple of new and innovative IKEA undertakings that aim to augment and improve environmental conditions on a personal level which hopefully scales up.
Scheduled to go on sale in stores next year, the Gunrid drapes are made with a textile with a photocatalyst material that passively breaks down and absorbs air pollutants. The other development, based off the design of its toy boat the Småkryp, has already been pressed into service, trawling Deptford Creek in southeast London and collecting trash, twenty kilogrammes a go. This demonstration project is set to expand and the Good Ship IKEA are remotely controlled—as well as autonomous units—equipped with web cameras that provide a live-feed and shipping-report on conditions as they ply the waters. Much more to explore at the links above.

drawn together

Hamburg-native and illustrator responsible for bringing to life English author and playwright Julia Donaldson’s Gruffalo, Axel Scheffler, has called London home for nearly four decades but since the Brexit referendum and the UK’s departure imminent, these days he’s anguishing over the outcome. In response, he invited some of his colleagues to illustrate their visions of Europe united and divided.

the fame monster

The always brilliant Nag on the Lake directs our ears to the neo-Baroque canon and counterpoint of arranger and performer Vincenzo Culotta in his adaptation of the 2009 release “Bad Romance.” Learn more and get the sheet music at the link above but I don’t think the artist managed to work in a G-A♯-G-A♯ tonic-dominant progression.

👑👠💰

Emoji are popping up more and more as evidence in court cases, as Slashdot informs, subject to interpretation and double-entendre, and often demonstrate that judges and attorneys are not prepared to deal with a level of innuendo and implicit deniability.
The inherent ambiguity in language is of course nothing new and employees legions of legal experts to study and in some cases capitalise on shades of meaning, but the case in point—trying to determine the guilt or innocence of a man entangled in a prostitution sting operation and whether he was proposition the undercover informant with the emoji string in the title in a text message—proceeded by the phrase “Teamwork make dream work”—is interesting to ponder because their seems, without further context, compelling arguments either way.
What do you think? Moving beyond the realm of awkward advances that can quickly become harassment or grounds for infidelity (sometimes an aubergine is just an aubergine), parsing meaning and intent becomes even more fraught as one is asked to judge what’s insulting (💅), threatening or intimidating—confounded by the fact that reception of messages sent as positive or negative is not insignificantly coloured by the forum and platform that one uses.