Whipped Cream Difficulties

A few things I’ve stumbled across over the past couple of days:

“I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.” In which the author visits 30 cities, eats 330 burgers, names a burger place in Portand as having the best burger in the country…and five months later, the places closes.

Each time I was there, my story would somehow find a way into conversation, like the one with my Lyft driver who asked if I liked burgers. Yes, I said tentatively. “Well, we had a great one here,” he said, as we drove over the Burnside Bridge. “But then some asshole from California ruined it.” Or the time, while sitting at the bar at Clyde Common, the bartender came up to me and in a soft, friendly voice inquired if I’d planned on closing any more burger restaurants while I was in town.

I like this story: it’s a good discussion of the impact of criticism on dining establishments, especially smaller ones. But it’s also frustrating: as it turns out, there was more going on with the burger place than just simply being named “best burger in the country”.

Recently retweeted by Popehat:

Okay. History time!

You’ve probably seen photos of Commonwealth war cemeteries, with rows of white graves. They’re heartbreaking images.

What you DON’T see are the thousands of small, tragic stories on each gravestone.

So I’m going to share some with you here. /1 #history #WW1 pic.twitter.com/wr3ucIyMYZ

— John Bull (@garius) October 5, 2018

I don’t like and don’t read the Huffington Post. But this (also by way of Popehat):

It was still dark outside when Amanda woke up to the sound of her alarm, got out of bed and decided to kill herself. She wasn’t going to do it then, not at 5:30 in the morning on a Friday. She told herself she would do it sometime after work.

Glybera is a drug developed in Canada. It’s a hugely effective treatment for a rare genetic condition, lipoprotein lipase disorder. People with this disorder can’t metabolize fat. Their blood literally turns white from all the suspended fat in their bloodstream.

One round of treatment with Glybera can fix this genetic condition. Only 31 people have ever been treated with the drug, and it is no longer available.

Why? One possible reason: a round of treatment costs one million dollars. (But a round of treatment, as far as anyone’s been able to determine, is a permanent cure. This is a drug that literally edits genes.) And this isn’t a “oh, health care in the US stinks” story: the drug was only used in Canada and Europe, pretty much on an experimental basis, before it was pulled.

On the historic significance of “Hee Haw”:

A few words on Hee Haw, following Roy Clark’s passing…

It is, possibly, one of the most interesting and important shows in American television history.

Really.

I’m not talking about its jokes or production. Many other things made it interesting and important.

Here goes…

— Gabe Bullard (@gbullard) November 16, 2018