even as now

guardian: A Dormouse appears to be laughing as it sits on top...

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 06:00:09 -0400

A Dormouse appears to be laughing as it sits on top of a yarrow flower. The amusing photograph, taken by Italian photographer Andrea Zampatti, in Italy, shows how the heat had a strange effect on this little critter. Photograph: Andrea Zampatti/HotSpot Media

Photo

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 18:00:29 -0400

architectureland: House Holman - Durbach Block Jaggers Sited...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:00:17 -0400

architectureland:

House Holman - Durbach Block Jaggers

Sited on the edge of a 70-metre high cliff, the plan of Holman House refers to Picasso’s painting The Bather. It contains a complex series of fluid living spaces set within a meandering perimeter that arcs, folds and stretches in response to sun, landscape and views. Living and dining areas cantilever out over the ocean, allowing dramatic views up and down the coast. The lower floor forms a base that is built from rough stone walls like an extension of the cliff below. These walls continue along the cliff edge to form a series of eccentric terraced gardens and a vase-shaped rock pool.

edamessiah: alchemicalalice: thesylverlining: thesixtysevenchevyimpala: thermodynamicglowstick: ...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 06:00:04 -0400

edamessiah:

alchemicalalice:

thesylverlining:

thesixtysevenchevyimpala:

thermodynamicglowstick:

gothamshitty:

kushdrinker:

sweet dreams are made of cheese

who am I to diss a brie

Travel the world for some cheddar, please

every gouda’s looking for something

some of them want to a-bleus you

some edam want to get bruz from you

Totoro = <333333333333

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:00:29 -0400

Totoro = <333333333333

tranqualizer: tranqualizer: When eating organic was totally...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 12:00:29 -0400

tranqualizer:

tranqualizer:

When eating organic was totally uncool

Before hipsters got rooftop gards, my poor, refugee family ate that way because we had to. And we were ashamed

by Pha Lo

To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.

I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.

Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.

I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.

We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.

We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.

With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.

But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.

“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.

My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.

The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.

As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.

My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.

Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.

But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.

I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.

But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.

Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.

beyond relevant right now as we witness yet another trend of pushing for urban gardening as this hip new trendy thing.

gloriousclio: aparadoxinflux: niftynif: theaveragedream: Harr...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:00:08 -0400

gloriousclio:

aparadoxinflux:

niftynif:

theaveragedream:

Harry Potter Mixology: My Favorites!

Bellatrix Lestrange

Ingredients:

1 oz Vodka

1 oz Bailey’s Irish cream

1 oz Amaretto

1oz cream

Chocolate syrup

Top with cinnamon/crushed almonds

Directions:

Place martini glass in freezer to chill

Add Baileys, amaretto, vodka and cream to shaker with ice

Shake

Remove glass from freezer

Rim inside of martini glass with chocolate syrup

Pour contents of shaker into glass

Top with almond crumbles or cinnamon

Fleur Delacour

Ingredients:

3 oz Nuvo

1 oz Vodka

3 Raspberries

1 Strawberry

Directions:

To chill Vodka: Add ice and Vodka to cocktail shaker

Shake

Add Raspberries to bottom of champagne flute

Strain chilled vodka into flute

Add Nuvo

Garnish with strawberry

Fred and George Weasley

Ingredients:

1 oz Vodka

½ oz Chambord

½ oz Peach Schnapps

Splash of Pineapple juice

Strawberry Pop Rocks

Directions:

Fill martini glass with cold water and place in freezer for 2 minutes to chill.

Pour all ingredients except candy in a shaker with ice.

Rim martini glass with Strawberry Pop Rocks

Pour in contents of mixer.

Goblet of Fire

Ingredients:

1 oz vodka

1 oz blue curacao

3 oz lemonade

Splash 151

Pinch of cinnamon

Directions:

Pour vodka, blue curacao, and lemonade into a goblet-type glass

Top with a splash of 151 proof rum

Light on fire

Add the pinch of cinnamon to the flames (cinnamon will spark)

*** Blow out flames before consuming! ***

Luna Lovegood

Ingredients:

1 oz Grey Goose Le Citron vodka

½ oz Elderflower liquor

7 raspberries

1 tsp sugar

Pink lemonade

Lemon wedge garnish

Directions:

Muddle 6 raspberries with sugar in a tall glass.

Add ice.

Top with vodka and pink lemonade.

Garnish with lemon wedge and raspberry.

Lord Voldemort

Ingredients:

1 oz Tequila

1/3 oz Tabasco sauce

1 jalapeno pepper

Directions:

Muddle jalapeno pepper and Tabasco sauce.

Strain into shot glass.

Add tequila.

Garnish with thin slice of jalapeno.

Firewhiskey

Ingredients:

1 oz whiskey

1/2 oz cinnamon schnapps

Splash of 151 rum

Directions:

Add whiskey and cinnamon schnapps to shaker with ice

Shake to chill

Pour into shot glass

Top with 151 rum

Ignite

***Put out flames before consuming!***

Minerva McGonagall

Ingredients:

2 oz Vodka

6 oz Earl Grey or choice tea

Dash Syrup

1 oz lemon juice

Garnish lemon

2 mint leaves

Directions:

Combine all ingredients into a tall class.

Stir.

Garnish with mint leaves and lemon.

Slytherin

Ingredients:

4 mint leaves

1 oz rum

2 slices lime

3 tsp sugar

3 oz champagne

Directions:

Muddle mint leaves, limes, rum, sugar in shaker until sugar dissolves

Strain into champagne flute

Add champagne

Garnish with mint

reblogging for future analysis

Ohhhhh my god saving this for later

MUSICAL PENGUINS!!!

jhameia: ktempest: lavenderharmony: vanillycake: Oh my God...

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 18:00:21 -0400

jhameia:

ktempest:

lavenderharmony:

vanillycake:

Oh

my

God.

Can we ship this?

Sendhil Ramamurthy in Elle India [x]

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:21 -0400

Sendhil Ramamurthy in Elle India [x]

Your oppressors do not need to be educated

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 06:00:25 -0400

zuky:

they need to be defeated.

zombres: #i have no idea what is going on but an attractive...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:00:32 -0400

zombres:

#i have no idea what is going on but an attractive beardy fellow in suspenders is offering me a french kitten #so okay

jhameia: fantasyofcolor: Sepia Tone Smile by...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:00:34 -0400

jhameia:

fantasyofcolor:

Sepia Tone Smile by ~Strangeknowledge

What up, Captain LaGrange!

the-science-llama: Bat Embryo Skeleton The blue stains show the...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:00:32 -0400

the-science-llama:

Bat Embryo Skeleton

The blue stains show the cartilage

irresistible-revolution: vardaesque: maladicta: so this new...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:00:29 -0400

irresistible-revolution:

vardaesque:

maladicta:

so this new gen Hogwarts thing has been eating away at my mind and i did a thing

she’s a ravenclaw and she’s into historical revisionism and writes lengthy and intelligent articles for the zine. she’s also into mixing ‘alternative potions’, and plays as a chaser for the ravenclaw quidditch team.

she hates how history of magic is taught at Hogwarts though, its all books written by crusty old white pureblood dudes (“there isn’t a single non-human author in the syllabus, don’t tell me that doesn’t say something.”).

this is beautiful oh my god

O.M.G

Photo

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:00:32 -0400

flawless photo <3

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 06:00:25 -0400

flawless photo <3

Photo

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 18:00:24 -0400

LOL FOR LIFE OMG.

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 12:00:20 -0400

LOL FOR LIFE OMG.

Pride and Prejudice - Episode 1 my one true version <3 :D

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 06:00:13 -0400

Pride and Prejudice - Episode 1

my one true version <3 :D

whitefrogthemovie: Mark your calendars - White Frog is...

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:00:16 -0400

whitefrogthemovie:

Mark your calendars - White Frog is officially coming to theaters on May 10th!

JOAN CHEN + BD WONG = ASD:FLKAJSD:LKSHDG:LKSDFJ:LSDKJFLSD !!!!!!!!