shrapnel

The Craigslist Missed Connections now come in the form of comics. Note: the Missed Connections are not your usual classifieds:

You write a lot like the boss I had on the job I just quit.

If that is the case and you are he, just know that I did see through the web and that is exactly why I left. Not interested in being set up to take the fall for something that had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Too much like the blind venom on the job at my previous life.

You are still a great guy, though. I will miss seeing you, what little of you I saw. You got a problem, pal… it’s called “denial”. I hope to God you figure it out before your most trusted employee steals you beyond blind. I’d much rather have dated you than worked for you, but I wasn’t your type in either event, unfortunately.

(Via Metafilter.)

A new book looks at exactly what goes in to making a Twinkie. It’s good to know the cockroaches will have something to eat after the end of the world.

“Despite Hostess’s secret recipe, most food scientists will tell you that while the main ingredients in the filling are superfine sugar, shortening (oil), corn syrup, water, polysorbate 60, and salt, the key is that old pastry standby, cellulose gum, which can absorb 15 to 20 times its own weight in water. A pinch sprinkled on water floats like a jellyfish. A moistened spoonful becomes a clear, gelatinous, slimy glob in a matter of minutes. Cellulose gum hangs on to the water in Twinkies’ filling, and thus, like so many other ingredients, keeps it slipperier longer. Its fibers plump the filling up, replacing fat (that is, real cream) with a moist, glossy, fatlike texture, without contributing a single calorie to the cake, because cellulose gum is not digested.”

There’s a scene involving plane spotters in the “Jesus Cured My Herpes” episode of my book Please. I didn’t make these people up.

The New Yorker profiles psycho chef Gordon Ramsay.

The sacking of the “cancerous” Gregory had a bracing effect. A prep cook made the mistake of complaining about his commute (“What? He wants the restaurant to come to him?”) and was told he didn’t have to do it again. Two guys making the amuse-bouches, a small version of the reinvented Caesar salad, dressed the croutons in advance. “So you work for a Subway sandwich shop? Pretend you’re the customer. Why would you want a soggy crouton?” Ramsay asked and, without moving, shouted for Neil, somewhere behind him, and asked him to pay their salaries. “I’ll give you back the money next week,” he said, still staring at the two cooks. “I just want you to know how stupid it feels to be paying these cunts out of your own pocket so they can then come here and not do their job.” But it wasn’t just staffing. At three in the morning, Ramsay (in his fiftieth hour without sleep) went through the fridges and found them filled with lobster and foie gras that had been prepared but weren’t being used: no one knew they were there. (“I could have pissed myself. Neil, I wanted to phone you, even at that hour.” Neil was looking beaten. “I wish you had, Gordon.”) Ramsay examined Gregory’s wine cellar—bottles everywhere, no locks (“Don’t think for a moment he’s the only one who stole something”). He went through the reservations. The restaurant was losing twenty thousand a week in no-shows (fourteen on New Year’s Eve), and every Monday Ramsay was ordering a hundred thousand dollars from the U.K. He called a meeting.

See also the Anthony Bourdain throwdown. 

Following up on my earlier post about industrial decay, here’s the Detroitblog.

The British Psychological Society reports about a man whose brain damage causes him to change his identity according to the situation around him:

When with doctors, AD assumes the role of a doctor; when with psychologists he says he is a psychologist; at the solicitors he claims to be a solicitor. AD doesn’t just make these claims, he actually plays the roles and provides plausible stories for how he came to be in these roles.

(Via Boing Boing)

Discover breaks it down for you.

Stock-market celeb Jim Cramer reveals how the game really works.

Her seat mate is less than impressed:

Paul Trinder, who awoke to see the body at the end of his row, last week described the journey as “deeply disturbing”, and complained that the airline dismissed his concerns by telling him to “get over it” …

“The police even started interviewing me as a potential witness, although I had no idea what had happened to the woman. I just kept thinking to myself: ‘I’ve paid more than £3,000 for this’,” Trinder said.

On Flickr.

And then there’s repo men who repossess ocean freighters from hot spots around the world.

If repossessing a used Chevrolet can be tricky, consider retrieving the Aztec Express, a 700-foot cargo ship under guard in Haiti as civil unrest spread through the country.

Only a few repo men possess the guile and resourcefulness for such a job. One of them is F. Max Hardberger, of Lacombe, La. Since 1991, the 58-year-old attorney and ship captain has surreptitiously sailed away about a dozen freighters from ports around the world.

Slate looks at brands that just won’t die.