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Celerity

Celerity's Journal
Celerity's Journal
January 27, 2022

Yelp Just Dropped Its List of the Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S. This Year

Most spots on the list offer meals for $30 or less.

https://www.thrillist.com/news/nation/yelp-100-best-restaurants-in-the-us



Yelp has become many people's go-to tool over the years—it's really the only thing powerful enough to end the "what's for dinner tonight?" debate. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic causing many restaurants and local businesses to shutter their doors, Yelp is still helping everyone find the best places to eat. With the new year upon us, the site just dropped its Top 100 US Restaurants 2022 list.

The ninth annual Top 100 list features a diverse array of cuisines. The top slot went to Cocina Madrigal, a Latinx, father-and-son owned eatery in Phoenix, while Afghan cuisine took No. 2 with Aracosia–McLean in McLean, Virginia. To make the list even more enticing, most of the spots are relatively affordable, with meals coming in at $30 or less.

To come up with this list, the crowd-sourced review site said that it "reach[ed] out to Yelpers for their favorite dining spots" before ranking each "by total number of submissions, ratings, reviews, and geographic representation, among other factors." From vegetarian fare in Massachusetts to pizza in Michigan to sushi in Oregon, check out the Top 100 US Restaurants of 2022.

These venues made the top 25 spots on the list:

1. Cocina Madrigal – Phoenix, AZ
2. Aracosia - McLean – McLean, VA
3. Fermentation Farm – Costa Mesa, CA
4. Oriole – Chicago, IL
5. Bird Bird Biscuit – Austin, TX
6. Jackrabbit Filly – North Charleston, SC
7. Junkyard Bistro – Salmon, ID
8. The Goodwich – Las Vegas, NV
9. OSH Restaurant & Grill – Nashville, TN
10. The Riv – The Dalles, OR
11. The Vox Kitchen – Fountain Valley, CA
12. Food + Drink – Reno, NV
13. Santo Bruklin – Brooklyn, NY
14. Skull's Rainbow Room – Nashville, TN
15. Altura Bistro – Anchorage, AK
16. Cultured – Louisville, KY
17. Cafe Kacao – Oklahoma City, OK
18. Machete – Greensboro, NC
19. Copine – Seattle, WA
20. The Bakeshop on 20th – Philadelphia, PA
21. Raku – New York, NY
22. Lola – North Charleston, SC
23. WoodBarn BBQ – Queen Creek, AZ
24. ShabuRo – Palisades Park, NJ
25. 016 Restaurant & Sandwich Shop – Chicago, IL

To check out the full list, click here.











January 27, 2022

Candace Owens Sees Plot to 'Destroy Fabrics of Society' in Minnie Mouse Wearing a Pantsuit

https://www.thedailybeast.com/candace-owens-sees-plot-to-destroy-fabrics-of-society-in-minnie-mouse-wearing-a-pantsuit



Candace Owens argued with a completely straight face late Wednesday that a new campaign featuring Minnie Mouse in a pantsuit in France is evidence of a progressive plot to “destroy fabrics of society” and distract from bacon that she claims costs $30 in the U.S.

Speaking to Jesse Watters on Fox News, Owens appeared to barely contain her outrage. “I mean look, this is why people don’t take these people seriously,” she said. “They’re trying to destroy fabrics of our society saying that there’s issues, so everybody looks over here. Look at Minnie Mouse. Don’t look at inflation, Jesse, look at Minnie Mouse. The world is going forward because you’ve got her in a pantsuit. Never mind that you can’t get anything at the grocery store and you can’t buy a piece of bacon unless you’ve got $30 in your pocket. At least we’re addressing the real problem, which is Minnie Mouse,” she said.

It was not immediately clear where Owens got the idea that Minnie Mouse’s traditional red and white polka dot dress had been deemed a “problem.” Disneyland Paris and designer Stella McCartney made very clear in statements this week that the Disney character’s new garb is only temporary, part of a one-month promotion to honor Women’s History Month in March and Disney’s 30th anniversary of its Paris theme park.

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1486501957300674560
https://twitter.com/DisneyParis_EN/status/1485927791895920644
January 27, 2022

Fletcher Crane Architects creates compact brick house on former garage site in west London



https://www.dezeen.com/2022/01/22/fletcher-crane-architects-brick-tree-house/











Fletcher Crane Architects has completed a two-bedroom house on a brownfield plot in west London featuring grey-brick walls that are left exposed throughout the living areas and sunken bedrooms. Named Tree House, the dwelling was designed by London studio Fletcher Crane Architects for a former garage site in a conservation area in Chiswick that is bounded by rear gardens.











The studio was challenged to design a house that makes the most of the compact plot while also meeting strict local planning criteria including a limit to the building's parapet level. To provide the necessary spaces, this required embedding the house in the ground using excavations extending to a depth of 3.2 metres below street level.











"Building on a brownfield site with a series of constraints ultimately created a special home," project architect Harry Reid told Dezeen. "The resulting massing straddles the boundary over a split-level arrangement of four floors," Reid added. "This configuration means no floor is really disconnected from each other and makes the 85-square-metre home feel bigger than it really is."











Tree House is designed to fit unobtrusively in the terraced street, although its geometric form and grey-brick walls mark it out as a contemporary addition. Its name nods to a tree situated on the pavement outside. "The street scene is mature and repetitive, with a significant row of historic villas which are all set back from the road," Reid pointed out. "Our site sits on the street front and we used brick boundary walls to ensure this stitched into the prevailing materiality."









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January 27, 2022

The Republican death drive: Refusing to sacrifice anything means sacrificing everything

Why are they killing themselves? Let's turn to Sigmund Freud.

https://www.editorialboard.com/the-republican-death-drive-refusing-to-sacrifice-anything-means-sacrificing-everything/



More Americans are dying from the Covid in states run by Republicans than in states run by Democrats. In terms of cold political calculation, Democratic governors are striving to save supporters from death. Yet Republican governors seem content hurtling supporters toward it. Why would they do that? When the former president refused to help “blue states” battle the new coronavirus, it was disgraceful and sadistic. Yet it was understandable (again in cold political terms). You’d think the Republicans would want to help their base. But thinking that would mean you’re thinking like a liberal. Republicans don’t do that.



When Republican leaders hurt their own – for instance, by fining business owners for asking customers to mask up, thus spreading the plague more widely – they are not undermining themselves. They are in fact fuelling an already established story about “real Americans” being the “real victims” while the real victims perpetuate political evil. How do sadist policies work with masochistic outcomes to not undermine the GOP project but instead deepen the commitment of Republican supporters to the cause of restoring America to greatness?

For an answer, I turned to Casey Ryan Kelly. He’s a professor of rhetoric and public culture at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln. His latest book is called Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood. In it, Professor Kelly applies Sigmund Freud’s concept of “the death drive” to understanding not only the former president’s incendiary rhetoric but also GOP incoherence. How do you square that circle? I asked.

Casey Ryan Kelly: For nearly 40 years, conservatives have forged their political identity on the assumption that they have been exiled from politics and marginalized by changes in the culture. The problem is you have to square this idea with the fact that conservatives have made huge political gains that have ostensibly resulted in minority rule. So they have to reconcile this contradiction. There is so much legitimacy in being able to claim one is a victim that conservatives are often manufacturing their own marginalization with trivial “culture war” issues: “critical race theory,” confederate monuments, Antifa and Black Lives Matter and so on.

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January 26, 2022

Cozy Up with This Easy Shakshuka Recipe

This gluten-free dish will brighten up your Sunday morning.

https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/shakshuka-recipe-gluten-free-breakfast



Weekend mornings call for lavish breakfasts. But perhaps it’s just a little too cold to trek out to brunch, and you're chasing that oh-so-fancy feeling of eating a poached egg. This is where shakshuka comes in—a vibrant, easier-than-it-looks dish to start your day. The ingredients are accessible, and because all the work is done in one skillet, you can take it straight from the burner and dig right in.

The spicy tomato stew has North African origins, nowadays popular all over the Middle East, especially in Israel, where it is said to have been brought over by Maghrebi Jews. Shakshuka can be eaten at any time of day, though it’s imperative that you have a nice, crusty bread for dipping. And what makes this dish especially great is the fact that it’s naturally gluten free.

This particular recipe comes from The Gluten Free Cookbook, written by Italian chef Cristian Broglia. The former executive chef of Alma (the International School of Italian Cuisine) spent years traveling throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America, learning about a diversity of dishes that are gluten-free by design.

“When something is naturally gluten-free, it means that there is a tradition behind it,” Broglia says. He explains that many of the meals that you’d find in Maghrebian countries are derivative of Shakshuka, using its main components—vegetables, spices, and protein—as a basis. Broglia even grew up eating his own version in Italy, which his mother prepared with peas. “Shakshuka is a dish that you can prepare very quickly, but you have to pay attention,” he says. “You have to understand when all the vegetables are properly cooked, and when the correct time to add the eggs has arrived.”

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January 26, 2022

'Fight Club' has a new ending in China. And this time, the authorities win

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/26/media/china-fight-club-ending-censorship-mic-intl-hnk/index.html



Hong Kong / Beijing (CNN Business)More than two decades after its release, "Fight Club" has been given a very different ending in China — and this time, the authorities win. Chinese fans of David Fincher's cult classic were enraged over the weekend when they noticed a version of the movie available on popular Chinese streaming platform Tencent Video completely removes its iconic ending. The finale of "Fight Club" shocked audiences when the film hit theatres in 1999.

In a massive twist, the narrator, played by Edward Norton, realizes that Brad Pitt's slick-talking Tyler Durden character is his imaginary alter ego, and kills him off. In the final scene, the narrator stands with his girlfriend, played by Helena Bonham Carter, as they watch explosives blow up a cluster of skyscrapers — all part of what was originally presented to the audience as Durden's plan to destroy consumerism by erasing bank and debt records. That amount of anarchy — and the government's inability to stop it — doesn't appear to have passed muster with China's notoriously strict censorship rules, though.

In the version available on Tencent Video, which CNN Business was able to view on the platform, the entire scene featuring the explosions has been cut out. Instead, it has been replaced with a caption explaining to audiences that the authorities arrived just in time to save the day. "Through the clue provided by Tyler, the police rapidly figured out the whole plan and arrested all criminals, successfully preventing the bomb from exploding," the caption reads. "After the trial, Tyler was sent to [a] lunatic asylum receiving psychological treatment. He was discharged from the hospital in 2012."



The new ending has infuriated some viewers. It wasn't clear when this version of the film appeared on Tencent Video, but screenshots of the edited film gained traction in China over the weekend, as commenters complained about the drastic alteration. "This is too ridiculous," wrote one person on Tencent Video's page for the movie. Another called the change "a pillar of shame in cinematic history." "No one wants to pay money to watch a classic that has been so ruined to such an extent," yet another person wrote on Douban, a movie review site.

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January 26, 2022

As Islamic State Resurges, U.S. Is Drawn Back Into the Fray

“ISIS is not over”: Attacks in Syria and Iraq make clear that the militants have lost neither their will to fight nor their ability to do

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/world/middleeast/isis-syria.html



BAGHDAD, Iraq — An audacious attack on a prison housing thousands of former ISIS fighters in Syria. A series of strikes against military forces in neighboring Iraq. And a horrific video harking back to the grimmest days of the insurgency that showed the beheading of an Iraqi police officer.

The evidence of a resurgence of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is mounting by the day, nearly three years after the militants lost the last patch of territory of their so-called caliphate, which once stretched across vast parts of the two countries. The fact that ISIS was able to mount these coordinated and sophisticated attacks in recent days shows that what had been believed to be disparate sleeper cells are re-emerging as a more serious threat.

“It’s a wake-up call for regional players, for national players, that ISIS is not over, that the fight is not over,” said Kawa Hassan, Middle East and North Africa director at the Stimson Center, a Washington research institute. “It shows the resilience of ISIS to strike back at the time and place of their choosing.”

On Tuesday, fighting between a Kurdish-led militia backed by the United States and the militants spread from the embattled Sinaa prison in northeastern Syria to surrounding neighborhoods, swelling into the biggest confrontation between the American military and its Syrian allies and ISIS in three years.



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January 26, 2022

The IRS will soon make you use facial recognition to access your taxes online

The agency is using private company ID.me to verify taxpayers’ identities

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/20/22893057/irs-facial-recognition-taxes-online-idme-identity



The Internal Revenue Service will require people who access and pay their taxes online to enrol in a third-party facial recognition company starting this summer (h/t Krebs on Security). Even those who have already registered on IRS.gov with a username and password will have to provide a government ID, a copy of a utility bill, and a selfie to ID.me, the Virginia-based identity verification company. You’ll take a video selfie with whatever webcam or mobile device you’re using to sign up, which seems likely to cause problems for people with older hardware or who don’t have access to one.

According to the IRS, ID.me is a “trusted technology provider” of identity verification services. Anyone who already has an ID.me account from another government agency can sign in with those credentials. Brian Krebs created a new ID.me account and wrote in his post that the sign-up process was time-consuming and glitchy. He got stuck about halfway through the process and had to start again from the beginning, then was prompted to join a video call with an ID.me representative — with a wait time of nearly three and a half hours.

In its “privacy bill of rights,” ID.me says it doesn’t “sell, lead, or trade biometric data to any third parties or derive any profit from the sale, lease or trade of biometric data.” It can share information with its partners with users’ explicit permission, according to its website, and when you register for an ID.me account, you have to accept the company’s biometric consent policy. The company collects facial and voice biometrics to verify identity and protect against fraudulent behaviour and to “comply with a request from law enforcement or government entities where not prohibited by law.” And even if you delete your ID.me account, the company may retain your biometric data for several years, depending on “the nature of the data and relevant legal or operational retention needs.”

You may remember ID.me from earlier in the pandemic; more than two dozen states use the company to verify people applying for unemployment benefits. Motherboard reported in June 2021 that ID.me failed to identify some applicants and that they had difficulty reaching anyone at the company to remedy their problem. ID.me CEO Blake Hall told The Verge at the time that it uses a system similar to Apple’s FaceID or the way a TSA agent would compare a passenger’s face to their ID at an airport.

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January 26, 2022

The Swedish Bomb - The Bomb in Stockholm's Basement (secretly the 4th largest nuclear armed nation)



The Swedish Bomb (Part 2) - The Bomb in Stockholm's Basement (the 4th largest nuclear armed nation)

January 26, 2022

Lola T165/70 by Can-Am Constructors



Buzzcocks - Fast Cars













https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1969-lola-t165-70-can-am/

This custom-built Lola began its life as a T160 sports racing car that was delivered from the factory to American distributor Carl Haas in 1968 and was subsequently campaigned in SCCA competition by privateer Jack Hinkle. Chassis SL160/10 was acquired in the early 1980s by Arizona outfit Can-Am Constructors, who updated it to T165 specifications before using it as the basis of a custom-built street car. Completed in 1983, the build features a widened fiberglass Lola T70 Mk III gullwing body and is propelled by a 460ci Chevrolet MK IV V8 with four dual-throat Weber carburetors, an Inglese intake system, magneto ignition, and dry-sump lubrication. Additional equipment includes a synchronized ZF five-speed manual transaxle, Lola T222-specification suspension with adjustable Koni coilovers, Girling disc brakes with adjustable bias, 15×12” and 15×19” magnesium center-lock wheels, and air conditioning. After earning several concours awards with its first owner, the car was acquired in 1985 by Lola collector Mac McClendon, who kept it until its sale to a New Zealand collector in 2004. In 2017 it was purchased by its current owner, who returned it to the US. This T165/70 is now offered on dealer consignment in Massachusetts with a clean Montana title in the name of the seller’s LLC.





Can-Am Constructors was founded in Tempe, Arizona, in the early 1980s by brothers and airline pilots Charlie and Don Bartz, who endeavored to transform Lola racing platforms into road-going performance cars. After converting a T70 Spyder into coupe form, the company shifted its focus to this T160 chassis for its first commissioned build. The aluminum monocoque was reportedly modified by former Shelby American crew chief John Collins, with T165-specification upgrades including heat-treated thicker 0.063”-gauge aluminum, nitrogen-cooled rivets, front structural support modifications, and strengthened suspension pick-up points.





The fiberglass T70 Mk III body was widened by 9” to fit over the broader chassis and was finished in yellow, which has since been complemented by blue Le Mans stripes. Measuring 37.5” high at its roof’s peak, the body features front and rear clamshells, gullwing doors, a wrap-around Perspex windshield, faired-in headlights, blue fender-mounted side mirrors, and an enamel Lola nose badge. Chips and surface cracks are noted in various areas of the finish, as are scuffs on the nose and tail surfaces that contact the ground upon opening of the clamshells. An area of the left-front fender between the headlight and wheel arch is said to have been touched up with a resulting difference in shade from the rest of the car.





Center-lock 15” magnesium wheels measure 12” in width up front and 19” wide at the rear and feature black spokes and polished rims, the latter of which exhibit surface oxidation. Avon racing tires are mounted at each corner. Girling disc brakes incorporate four-piston calipers and 12” vented rotors all around with adjustable front-to-rear bias.

















































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Gender: Female
Hometown: London
Home country: US/UK/Sweden
Current location: Stockholm, Sweden
Member since: Sun Jul 1, 2018, 07:25 PM
Number of posts: 43,590

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