Coming off of a beautiful weekend celebrating a beautiful life, we just wanted to remind everyone—ourselves included—to appreciate life and friendship, and to love deeply. Life is far far far too short for anything less.
Behold—another bizarre, new vegetable from a Southern California farmers’ market!
Yes, I know, it’s 100% culturally insensitive and ethnocentric to call something I’ve heretofore been entirely unaware of bizarre, but look at these things.
I’m told by the farmer who tasted these with me Sunday—I’m assuming to prove they were edible/not poisonous?—that these are called winged beans. I’ve never before seen them at a market, farmers’ or otherwise, and was immediately intrigued when I ran across them. This same farmer claimed they’re good eaten raw or lightly sautéed.
We just had them chopped up in a salad, and they provide a dry, slightly bitter taste along with an airy, crisp texture that seems to soak up sauces and dressings. Plus they make these cool star shapes when sliced. Give ’em a try if you see them around and let us know if you find out anything more about them.
They were at the nearly southern-most vendor at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market this past Sunday for anyone in the area and wondering, just before the mushroom tent.
For the month of November, Tony’s Darts Away—the vegan-friendly Burbank pub started by Tony Yanow of Golden Road and Mohawk Bend—asked plant-based tastemakers of Los Angeles to design four signature vegan hot dogs as part of a monthlong Dogs for Dogs campaign. One dollar from each purchase goes to the work of the Beagle Freedom Project, a nonprofit devoted to rescuing and finding homes for beagles used in laboratory research. You can read more about their work and beagles used in laboratory testing on the group’s site (for instance, the very heart-breaking fact that beagles are the most popular breed for lab use because of their friendly, docile, trusting, forgiving, people-pleasing personalities).
Katie + I are very pleased to announce that Tony’s Darts Away asked us to be a part of the campaign and—this week and this week only—you’ll be able to order “The Owen,” a Banh Mi style vegan hot dog named after our very own Owen, who can easily be described as friendly, docile, trusting, forgiving, and people-pleasing. Okay, maybe not docile, but nonetheless, we can picture him in that very same, deplorable, unnecessary (animal tests and human results only agree 5-25% of the time according to one of the world’s largest animal testing labs, Huntingdon Life Sciences) situation and it breaks our hearts to think of.
So help the Beagle Freedom Project out this week by heading to Tony’s and ordering an Owen—a Tofurky Keilbasa with vegan aioli, cilantro, pickled carrots & daikon, cucumbers, fresh jalapeño slices, and sriracha on a toasted bun. If you can’t make it this week, you’ve got three more weeks of special Dogs for Dogs, listed on TDA’s site and on the poster below (Nic Adler’s Frito Pie dog sounds especially intriguing). If you can’t make it to Burbank at all, give to BFP online.
Below, said poster and Owen 100% about to chow down on his namesake.
Katie + I have a pretty long history of dressing up for Halloween; honestly, it’s one of our favorite holidays. It gives us all the thumbs-up to adopt visual themes that’d normally be considered macabre at best, darkly psychotic at worst; employ masks + costumes that allow us to take on whole new personalities; and eat copious quantities of sugary candy—what’s not to like?
This year, we took on a favorite classic—Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, with the main character and a couple of his topiaries. Our friends got a couple quick shots (thanks Connor + Martha) since we were a little too preoccupied with party prep and hosting to get some better-staged photos, but it prompted us to gather some costume pics of old. So, below, enjoy some shots stretching back through almost ten years of dressing up together, with the exception of a year we traveled for a wedding and one where I phoned it in when we were moving the next day.
2014 – Tippi Hedren and a raven from The Birds (which made the finals for KCRW’s Masquerade costume contest last year)
2013 – Día de los Muertos with our friend, Hayden
2012 – Awkward family photo (with split photo backdrops attached to our backs—tricky at parties)
2011 – We attended a non-costumed Halloween wedding, but 2010 – owl + nest
2009 – Edgar Allen Poe and the raven
2008 – Katie played it solo as a black widow
2007 – Marionettes (a costume contest-winning year)
2006 – Tapping tabloids of the moment with Britney Spears + a cornrowed Kevin Federline
And 2005 – A proud showing as Mary-Kate + Ashley Olsen—you’re welcome
We made a trip down to the Huntington Beach Art Center today to catch Common Side Effects, an exhibition of the work of artist and skater Ed Templeton.
The show features mostly Templeton’s photography (and that of five other Huntington Beach artists Ed chose to be part of the show), documenting both the skate + music scene of the nineties and then blooming out into more contemporary subject matter closer to home for Templeton and company, painting a raw, gritty scene of the artist’s hometown.
The work’s impressive, especially for us, who were previously largely unfamiliar with his art and being brought to the show by fans. We’d highly recommend a trip south to see the densely beautiful show—you can follow it up with a stop in to one of our favorite nearly-near-at-hand restaurants, Seabirds Kitchen—one of the best vegan spots in Southern California.
Common Side Effects runs through next Saturday, November 7th.
I don’t think we’ve talked about this much—if at all—on these pages, but we’re pretty big fans of The Walking Dead. Knowing how violent, zombie-filled, and off from our normal viewing routine the show was, I actually watched the entire first season myself to see if the show was worth all the gore before deciding it definitely was, recommending it to Katie with my assurances that story, character, and acting were excellent, and immediately re-watching the entire first season with her. Ever since, we’ve been huge fans, along with most everyone else who’s given it a chance.
Last night, as any fans know by now, they supposedly…might have killed off one of the mainstay original characters and one that’s probably the most beloved by viewers and readers of the graphic novel alike—Glenn Rhee.
In the TV show, Glen shows up near the end of the pilot as a disembodied voice calling Rick—who’s just climbed into a tank in the middle of a walker horde—a dumbass. He eventually helps Rick escape and introduces him to the rest of his group. The comic follows a similar introduction to Glen, the first living human Rick encounters after his initial run-in with Morgan and his sun after waking from a coma.
In last night’s episode—number 3 of season 6, eerily titled “Thank You” (Nicholas’ last words to Glen before shooting himself)—we see the troubled/troublesome Nicholas tumble off a dumpster into the depths of yet another walker horde with Glen in tow and are shown a close up of walkers ripping someone’s guts out in a close up of Glenn screaming, leading many teary-eyed fans to believe one of our favorite characters may have breathed his last, screamy breath.
But that’s totally not the case. Glenn is 100% alive.
First off, there is zero way that the writers, producers, directors, and fans (which encompasses all previous categories) would let such a beloved character leave the show in such an ambiguous, hollow way. This is a dramatic fucking show, one that has never been accused of pulling punches or shying away from explosive, bloody excitement. It’s also one that—above all—celebrates and nurtures character development as its primary narrative mechanic. I have absolutely no doubt that they all feel Glen deserves a proper send off, and maybe dying underneath a guy no one particularly likes is not that send off.
Second, following up on that concept, there are too many loose ends. This is not a happy ending show…at all, and it’s also not one that tries to be perfect or predictable in its storytelling, but between the fireworks/flares that Glen still has that were meant to start a walker-distracting fire and the unsatisfactory lack of goodbyes between Glen and his wife, Maggie…and Rick, for that matter, that adds up to too many possible threads to great, tear-jerky stories that no writer in their right mind would just throw away for a less-than-mediocre character death.
Lastly, I’m not an expert (happily), but those screams of Glen’s seem much more of the variety of ‘Oh dear god, that guy on top of me is being eaten by zombie, how am I going to get out of here’, not the ‘Fuck, I’m being eaten alive’ variety. Again, I’m happily no expert on that. Vulture’s got some helpful reminders in the form of animated GIFs if you need a refresher though.
Basically, undramatic, shallow “death” of main character + good writing = no death. So, if we accept that Glen’s not currently dead, which he totally is not; and we accept that the people behind The Walking Dead are good storytellers who would at no cost sidestep telling a good story with one of our favorite characters, we have two possible outcomes:
First, we don’t see Glen for a while, we’re all distraught over the next couple episodes, and then, near the end of the season when we’ve maybe forgotten about him a little bit, Glen appears as some awesome, superhero version of himself to save the day, a la Michonne when we first meet her with the sword and walker guards.
This possibility—I think—is thin and unlikely. It just doesn’t sit well in the whole world that’s been set up for us.
More likely—Glen is alive, but dies very soon. Think about it—they can’t just show us that he made it out and go back to everything being hunky dory…er, as hunky dory as things get in this world. It’d be a let down in terms of cause and effect in this world and would cause us, as an audience, to step back from the world and its believability, not in terms of zombies, but in terms of consequence to actions and choices. If Glen survives and everything’s fine, then anyone can survive in this kind of situation; suspense instantly evaporates.
But if Glen escapes this situation of the zombie pile-on long enough to create some sort of fiery moth-to-the-flame sacrifice that saves not only his friends and these new thin-skinned Alexandrians, but also his wife…that’s a good closer on our friend, Glenn. That’s a send off.
Above, our illustration of the illustration of one of Glenn’s first frames in the original comic, by Tony Moore.
We came across NASA’s massive archive of space photography a few months back doing some research (as we mentioned here).
Earlier today, NASA reposted this shot via their Instagram account (yes, they have an Instagram account), shared earlier via the White House’s Instagram account (yes, they have an Instagram too).
As NASA explains in the photo write-up:
This composite of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope gives astronomers a new look for NGC 6543, better known as the Cat’s Eye nebula. This planetary nebula represents a phase of stellar evolution that our sun may well experience several billion years from now.
When a star like the sun begins to run out of fuel, it becomes a red giant. In this phase, a star sheds some of its outer layers, eventually leaving behind a hot core that collapses to form a dense white dwarf star. A fast wind emanating from the hot core rams into the ejected atmosphere, pushes it outward, and creates the graceful filamentary structures seen with optical telescopes.
In the case of the Cat’s Eye, material shed by the star is flying away at a speed of about 4 million miles per hour. The star itself is expected to collapse to become a white dwarf star in a few million years.
Coooooooooool. Again, we highly recommend both NASA’s image archives and image of the day series. Science fans and art fans alike will doubtless appreciate these images.
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/STScI
Twenty years ago this week, the world’s view on vegetarianism + veganism was changed with a single, hilarious, 30-minute-long episode of The Simpsons.
When it first aired, I myself had transitioned from vegetarian to vegan mere weeks before, so it definitely struck a chord with me on a personal level. More than that, it humanized and—oddly enough for a comedic cartoon—grounded the issue in a pretty honest reality, with both Lisa as she begins to identify with animals and with those around her, as they deal with the changes that come about in her personality.
All of this was beautifully rendered yesterday in a Slate article by Washington DC-based writer, Alan Siegel, commemorating the twentieth anniversary The Simpsons episode that Siegel writes “marked one of the first times on television that vegetarians saw an honest depiction of themselves—and of the viscerally defensive reaction that meat-eaters often have to vegetarianism.”
He explains further:
“Vegetarians previously had been portrayed in pop culture, but rarely as anything but one-dimensional hippies. ‘Lisa the Vegetarian,’ which aired on Oct. 15, 1995, was something different: a conversion story, told from the point of view of the person becoming a vegetarian. Lisa, the moral center of The Simpsons, spends the episode wrestling with what it means to eat meat. Her agonizing journey mirrors the one experienced by many in real life.”
We highly recommend reading Siegel’s full article, which details how The Simpsons show runner at the time gave up meat and came up with the idea for the episode and how Paul and Linda McCartney got involved, which resulted in their one and only stipulation—that Lisa remain a vegetarian through the rest of the series. Twenty years later, that never-aging little girl stays as committed to animals as ever.
We re-watched the episode last night so many years later and it really does hold up, both in terms of hilarity and earnestness. If you have cable, you can watch every episode of every season (all 27) of the venerable show via SimpsonsWorld.com or through FXNow via Apple TV or the like. There’s even a random episode button that will doubtless result in many glorious lost hours at our home.
Below, a clip from the show when Lisa’s school becomes concerned with her turn and shows the class an education film titled “Meat and You: Partners in Freedom—Number 3F03 in the ‘Resistance is Useless’ Series”
Just created this to help promote tomorrow’s vegan bake sale at MooShoes Los Angeles benefiting Burrito Project LA.
The day’ll feature a ton of vegan baked goods, raffles, some early Halloween fun, and vegan franks from the spookiest vegan in town, Frankenstand. We’ll be bringing some baked goods ourself. Keep it on the DL, but we’re thinking special vegan hand pies.
Here’s another batty burrito too.
Not sure what the Burrito Project is? Check out this interview with one of the group’s local organizers, Kathleen. And totally volunteer with them.
Hope to see you tomorrow! Details + RSVP.
We just added a branding project to our portfolio that we completed this past spring/summer for a local greenway and neighborhood environmental group, Westwood Greenway.
The group found us—oddly enough—through tacos.
As Greenway Steering Committee member Jonathan Weiss wrote us at the time:
“About a week ago, I went to a bike clothing sale where 100 Tacos was serving up veggie tacos. I took a picture so I could find him later. Searching for him, I found you. And boy, was I blown away. I may have come across you at just the right time…or not. We’re a group of volunteers who have been working to create a park—instead of a parking lot—next to a train station. The park will clean water, restore a native ecosystem, and teach sustainability, among other things.”
Well, it did turn out to be just the right time. We scheduled calls with the members of the steering committee to learn more about the direction they’d hoped to take the Greenway, finding out along the way that they shared an impressively aggressive timeline with the City of Los Angeles as the city government pushed to open the new Westwood/Rancho Park Station of the expanded Metro Line.
After much discussion and focused feedback from the members, and some design exploration, we all decided to keep intact two key elements from the group’s original logo (below)—incorporation of railway imagery/concept to show “accessibility and environmentally responsible transportation” and the imagery/concept of the native Sycamore, which plays strongly into the architectural design of the Greenway itself.
In the end, we arrived at an elegant solution that gave the group more functionality and flexibility in their branding…and we met our event-centric deadlines. High fives all around!
You can watch Westwood Greenway’s video below—which incorporates our new logo—and visit their site to learn more.
