Jet Plane
This one is a stellar flier.
This one is a stellar flier.
Kathie Jenkins wrote an article entitled “10 cheap eats under $10” in the Thursday, September 27, 2007 edition of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. Naturally, the Pioneer Press doesn’t have a version of the article online, and Jenkin’s Pioneer Press-hosted blog only has a teaser for the article, probably due to editorial restrictions. That said, some of the comments at her blog about cheap eats are rather helpful. So, I’ve decided to reproduce her list here, since I’ve been to exactly one of these places and would like to keep them in mind for the future. So, to be clear, what follows is Jenkin’s work, abbreviated here because the Pioneer Press apparently doesn’t want the advertising revenue that could result from carrying old articles. Finally, I’ve eliminated IKEA from the list of places to eat, because my experience there was atrocious. A list of 9, then!
And that’s the list — I look forward to trying out some of their inexpensive yet (apparently) tasty offerings in the future.
A gift from Katy.
You may enjoy the discussion at Slashdot about an Eden Prairie, MN school attempting to punish students for pictures of the students drinking found on Facebook.
It is absolutely true that Facebooking one’s pictures is akin to posting personal Polaroids on a (searchable, indexed, cross-referenced) community bulletin board in an accessible space. However, no matter how public the incriminating evidence is, schools should have absolutely positively zero power to punish for actions taking place off of their premises.
Best comment from the Slashdot discussion involves the US drinking age:
21? What country is this? Iran?
Surely you’re not telling me the legal drinking age in the US is 21? Hell.. I the worst hangover of my life was the day of my 16th birthday when I could finally drink legally (everyone in this country drinks illegally from about 14). The second worst hangover was at the school party that year where they’d thoughtfully provided free drinks..
You’ll never learn to drink responsibly unless you’ve drunk irresponsibly a few times when you’re younger. OTOH I was drinking wine with meals at 7 years old, so was kinda used to it by then.”
The thrill of the forbidden exacerbates our youth’s problem with drinking. Though slightly tangential, it’s still helpful to bring up the forbidden toy study. This psychological experiment has shown that the harsher the punishment for an enjoyable activity, the stronger the draw to that activity when repercussions are removed. For example, the US defines adults as 18 years of age, yet punishes them severely for choosing to consume alcohol under the age of 21. When most legal repercussions are removed at 21, psychology reveals that there is a stronger draw to the formally forbidden activity of drinking.
While an interesting venture into the intersection between sociology and psychology, railing against America’s high drinking age won’t get us anywhere in this debate. Let’s start with a quote from the Star Tribune article:
“Everyone thinks it’s pretty weird,” [Kalaidis] said. “I think it’s a huge invasion of privacy.”
No. It’s not a huge invasion of privacy. Facebook is ostensibly… actually, by definition a public space. Hey kids, you are not posting pictures and sharing stories in a private virtual tree house club — Facebook is (I’ll repeat it) a public, searchable, indexed, cross referenced, tagged, linked, advertised, popular public space. This definition precludes student’s delusions about privacy. As far as I’m concerned, the Eden Prairie school district can troll Facebook all day long looking for pictures depicting underage drinking parties. What they can not do, and what infuriates me, is twofold:
In this digital age of photo manipulation, you can just as easily insert a beer can as a gun into the hand of a person in a picture. What would a school, misled into unjust punishment while reacting to photo manipulation, say? And as for those students who signed “I will not drink” pledges for athletics and scholarships, the questionable evidence issue applies again: “prove it,” becomes a completely acceptable argument. I never drank anything before I was 21, yet I was still at parties in high school where there was underage drinking… and I’d say I was pretty responsible. It’s easy to imagine how the entire situation could get out of control in a hurry, with false accusations, overreactions, and the accompanying hysteria that can infect the small town atmosphere of a high school.
Finally, my second point about jurisdiction of the school should be mind-numbingly obvious. The famous high school cases that have gone to the Supreme Court are all about issues of discipline and control on school grounds. There’s Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District about going to school wearing black armbands in protest of war, Goss v. Lopez about due process in suspensions, and Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier about administration’s right to edit school-sponsored student newspapers.
But you see, all of these cases were rooted in events which took place on school grounds. I can’t find a Supreme Court ruling about high schools punishing students for actions taken outside of schools (which sets me up for the logical fallacy of appealing to ignorance — but I’m having trouble locating the resources to search for the appropriate court cases). Perhaps the lack of these court cases is because the following is abundantly obvious: when students are off of school property, their actions are patrolled, supervised, and regulated by many authorities, but the school is not one of them.
Well, this is about the best quasi-scientific explanation I’ve read that makes the fact I enjoy oatmeal make any sort of sense at all:
In our modern, energy-rich environment, supertasting may be cardioprotective, due to decreased liking and intake of fat, but may increase cancer risk via decreased vegetable intake. It may be a cause of picky eating, but picky eaters are not necessarily supertasters, and vice versa.
I love love love sugar (but not pure sugar things)… so, doughnuts = yes! oatmeal with sugar = yes! but pop = not really and chocolate = yes! So, I think a bite of fatty chocolate goes further for me in terms of the taste experience than it does for other, less tasty tasters. Maybe. (Also, oh heavens, I just said ‘taste experience’… perhaps mouthfeel would be better). All that said, I don’t know if I’m even a super taster at all.
This post sponsored by the letter “I” for “ignorance!”
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