The Melt Shop

The Melt Shop is a new chain of fast-food grilled-cheese sandwiches sprouting up all over Manhattan. But this is not your mother’s grilled cheese (if you had the sort of old-school mother who would but some American cheese between two slices of Wonderbread).

I just ate a grilled chicken sandwich, with Havarti, roasted tomatoes and truffle mayo on multi-grain toast. Very delicious.

Note that bobos/SWPLs can eat this type of food if it has fancy-sounding ingredients. But food from McDonald’s with the same cholesterol count is the most evil food on the planet.

Google Docs kind of sucks

I always use Microsoft Word with paragraph marks turned on: a very useful feature for understanding how your document is formatted, and it’s a feature that got even better with the 2011 version because now the paragraph marks are a cyan blue so they don’t get confused with your normal text which is probably black.

Thus, the first thing I noticed on Google Docs was the absence of the familiar paragraph marks, and I tried to figure out how to turn them on… and discovered that this feature which has been with Word for more than two decades is not available in Google Docs.

If you’re the type of person who never even knew you could turn on paragraph marks (and other non-printing formatting marks), then you would probably be happy enough using Google Docs, but I think it’s not for a power user like myself who has been using Word for a really long time.

Charles Murray and League of Legends

I think that this quote from a recent Slate article is interesting:

League of Legends boasts 67 million active monthly players. Broadcasts of its professional title matches draw more global eyeballs than an NBA Finals game. While this year’s event was held in South Korea, and South Koreans make up a healthy chunk of the game’s fan base, a sellout crowd also watched last year’s championship at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. And yet, I could only find one Slate employee who’d ever played LoL before last week. Many among us had no idea what League of Legends even was, beyond a vague sense that it must be some sort of fantasy dealie.

This is a reminder that there are many different subcultures in the United States, and some subcultures have no idea what other subcultures are up to. Here we have the most popular online game, yet most people at Slate, as well as most of my readers, have not even heard of it.

I too never heard of League of Legends until I accidentally discovered Hearthstone (because it was a free download to my iPad), and then I discovered Hearthstone streams at Twitch.tv, and noticed that there was one game that was several times as popular as Hearthstone, and that was this League of Legends game.

One of Charles Murray’s obsessions is that SWPL/bobo types don’t know anything about prole, rural, or Midwestern culture, and because of this they are missing out on some important knowledge, But I bet that Murray has also never heard of or played League of Legends, so he is also missing out on something that’s a major pastime for tens of millions of people around the globe. Is Murray a hypocrite for not taking the time to learn about gaming culture the way I have?

Regarding the game, it took a long time to download to my MacBook Air (because I am away from my desktop PC), and then I was surprised that it ran just fine even though the Air has low-end integrated graphics. Obviously one of the keys to this game’s popularity is that it doesn’t require a jacked up gaming computer in order to play, it runs just fine on any decent laptop, and it even runs on Mac while most games only run on PC. Availability is a key component to a game being as successful as League of Legends. Games that only run on high-end computers with expensive graphics cards are preventing 95% of the potential players from being able to play the game.

And how was the game? I played the tutorial, and can’t really say that I found it interesting enough to want to play more. I think the tutorial isn’t that good. Hearthstone really nailed the tutorial. The League of Legends tutorial ends and then leaves you wondering what you’re supposed to do next.

One of my problems is that I am getting old. Old people just lack the enthusiasm, the desire to learn new things, and the sense of wonder that young people have which allows them to enjoy gaming a lot more. Most old people no doubt think this is a positive thing because they probably feel that playing computer games is a big waste of time. I suppose I have to agree that playing computer games is a distraction from more important things like getting good grades in school, building a career, dating, marriage, raising children, etc., the things that people ought to be doing with their lives instead of playing computer games.

Sesame Street sandwich

Michelle Obama would NOT approve this Sesame-Street-sanctioned sandwich. In 1970, people didn’t care about cholesterol.

Sesame Street not for children?

The DVD of the first season of Sesame Street comes with a warning:

These early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.

No wonder why my generation is so messed up. They made us watch adult content when we were little kids.

It’s not easy being green

Readers in their 40s [and possibly late 30s, 50s are too old] will enjoy this YouTube video. Classic Sesame Street.

Mike Huckabee in the Wall Street Journal

From a Wall Street Journal article:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has been something of an afterthought in the early coverage of the emerging Republican presidential field.

That might be a little shortsighted, according to the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released last week.

Mr. Huckabee, who defied expectations in 2008 by winning the Iowa caucuses, is viewed more positively by fellow Republicans than nine potential rivals, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

Maybe Huckabee is an afterthought among mainstream journalists, but last January I predicted that he would win the Republican nomination. The Lion is ahead of the mainstream media.

Riots

Watching Ferguson burn on CNN.

Hasidic schools suck and no one cares

New York Times article about a former Hasidic Jew who is trying to get New York State to enforce a law which says that private schools have to teach a curriculum that is “substantially equivalent to that provided in the public schools.” The Hasidic schools offer only ninety minutes of secular education per day, with many Hasidic children barely able to speak or read English. Obviously not equivalent, right?

But as Obama knows better than anyone, the government is not required to enforce any law that the executive branch doesn’t want to enforce. That’s true of state government as well as the federal government. And no one in New York City or New York State seems to care about enforcing this against the Hasidic schools.

Hilarious SNL skit about Obama’s executive order

Parody of Schoolhouse Rock. Must watch!

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There is debate about whether it’s intended to be anti-Obama, but most people perceive it as anti-Obama, and that’s what matters.