The one where they try not to jerk off was pretty good back in the early ’90s but that was before you had entire networks dedicated to 24-hour masturbation coverage, I don’t know if it holds up. There was an episode where they were waiting in a Chinese restaurant the whole time that I recall enjoying, although it is probably problematic by today’s standards? Maybe the one with the babka. That’s about all I remember.

★★★ The clearing where the children were waiting for soccer camp to start was still mild and shady, with a deep blue sky showing above the trees. Clover whitened the fenced-off lawn and plantain sent up its spikes. One or two dandelions, then one or two more, stood up compact and yellow. An evaporative breeze crossed the top of Columbus Circle, meeting the light sweat from the walk out of the Park. The heat was firm but bearable, with clouds interrupting the sun before it could build to its worst. Grand Street was uncrowded. The afternoon glare caught the grime on the apartment windows. The three-year-old descried a rainbow in the iridescent plastic of the ancient floor lamp where it faced the west. The long bright evening allowed time after dinner for racing on the two-wheeled scooter and then on the three-wheeled scooter and then on just plain feet. Blank blue clouds hung in the west, like a subtle color gradient flattened in digital video.

Before Amazon announced that it would be pulling confederate flag merchandise, five of the six top “Movers & Shakers” in Amazon’s “Patio, Lawn & Garden” section were variations of the Confederate flag. In sixth place was a grill; behind that, two citronella candles, then, finally, a $5.80 Gadsden flag.

The most popular flags’ sales were up 3,620 percent, 2,940 percent, and 1,914 percent. Here, for a glimpse into the buyers’ motivations, are selected reviews of 3X5 FT REBEL FLAG 3X5 FT REBEL FLAG, which sells for $3.95.

I bought this flag for my son; for some reason, he is currently into this kind of ‘decor’…thinks he is a redneck 😉 Not a racist, a redneck…he wants me to specify this 🙂 It was delivered fast, and was a better product than I expected for the money.

Bought it for my boyfriend for his birthday. He loved it. And still has it hanging in his room. Nothing wrong with it!

love the south it aint never coming down i love the south and this flag is perfect i love it ima buy another

Very durable and nice design. I wish they sold american flags. I put this flag on a flagpole on my truck and unlike the dozens of flags before it, this one doesnt fall apart when i drive 80 mph

Had to tilt it when hanging it up horizontally…nobody will notice except for me. I guess that’s what $6 will get ya

The flag arrived on time, look just like the one on line. My son wanted it for Christmas to put on his golf cart. Order it, you will
be pleased.

This flag is cheap and crappy. It’s almost tissue paper….

Do NOT buy this flag with any expectations of actually flying it more than 10 minutes.

we buy a few rebel flags before every summer because we fly them in our truck beds, due to the wind they get ripped up pretty fast so for a few bucks these are well worth it and they shipped pretty quickly!

great flag, risky to have in a dorm room but all in all provides great comedic effect

I Really think that the south should have won the war, if they had then that stupid colored pansy wouldn,t be our pesident

Very vibrant colors, nice symmetry on the flag. Save your confederate money, cause the south gonn rise again. Deo Vindice.

Trapezoidal not rectangular, I bought it to prove that the confederate flag doesn’t represent slavery. It is one of the last flags that represent freedom. The south had a right to succeed from the union and the us didn’t allow it. The north wasn’t fighting to end slavery as much as it was trying to keep the south. My family is from the north side of the u.s., there are no slave owners, and if anything my Irish background was probably enslaved. Racism sucks don’t buy into it and don’t call people out for no reason racist. I have been called racist, it’s not true. The true racism is the guy calling it.

i just got it yesterday and its amazing the packedgeing was small but its a big flag i have it on my wall

This was just as described. It is actually a great buy for the price of this flag. It is thin material, so it works well for an indoor decoration. We bought it to decorate my daughters bedroom. I think it would tear easily if flown outdoors though.

You get what you pay for. The flag is made of thin material. This flag is NOT made to be flown behind a truck, but it is good to hang on on a wall.

Beautiful showmanship of southern pride. Put it on the wall in front of the door as soon as you walk in. Looks great and everyone loves it!

I was just trying to find a large flag for my son and didn’t expect for the price that this would be high quality, but it ended up a half way decent flag, the material isn’t rather thick, but for the price it turned out fairly well and the kid is happy.

Perfect! It looks awesome on my dorm wall. Would definitely recommend it to a friend.

I love to fly this flag as ancestors before me have. Its sad though that so many people feel it means racism even though it does not. Would recommend this to any rebel here.

And, finally:

My husband loves his flags.

Iced coffee, a category long occupied by the humble acrid just-throw-some-ice-cubes-in-regular-hot-coffee coffee water or the venerable ultra-sweet melted-coffee-ice-cream, is now impossible to order on my block — which is, haha, mid-stage gentrification — for less than $3.50, because it has become subject to the trend tyranny of cold brew. If I wanted, I could go to any of several fancy grocery stores and get Stumptown in a stout glass bottle that looks like it should contain Jamaican beer, or a milk-box-like container of Blue Bottle’s New Orleans Iced Coffee (which is quite good). Yet nobody gives a shit about iced tea, which is better suited for long-term summertime drinking. It’s crisp and dry in a way that’s much more quenching than iced coffee, most of which requires milk or cream to even be palatable. And it’s even easier to make at home.

One plant, Camellia sinensis, is responsible for every form of true tea: white tea, green tea, oolong tea, black tea, and every other variation. The difference is in how the leaves are processed and prepared: Pu-erh, a Chinese black tea, is oxidized and fermented, while gunpowder, a variety of green tea, is made by tightly rolling the leaves into balls. Other true teas consist mostly of plant material from the tea plant but have some additives, like genmaicha, a Japanese tea that includes toasted rice, or jasmine tea, which includes jasmine blossoms.

There’s also a large category of beverages that are sometimes called “herbal teas” or “tisanes” because they are brewed in generally the same way as true tea, but don’t include any material from the tea plant. These would include peppermint tea, hibiscus tea, ginger tea, and chamomile tea. Most herbal teas do not have caffeine, though some, like yerba mate, have some kind of similar stimulating chemical. It is, or should be, considered extremely bad form to care about the differences between tea and herbal tea, except in terms of basic knowledge of their properties that might help in their preparation.

There are several parts of the world that favor extremely sweet iced tea, like the American Southeast, Thailand, and your bodega’s cooler. Others insist on adding lemon, artificial or otherwise. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s most popular iced teas are sweetened or flavored. (Japan stands out as favoring unsweetened iced tea.) Some of these variations can be tasty! Others are gross as hell. But none of them are really what I’m looking for on a hot day. Good sweetened tea is very nice when you just want to sip on something that tastes good; it is basically uncarbonated soda. Unsweetened iced tea is different — more refreshing and soothing than a sweetened beverage. It’s slightly bitter, but just enough to feel dry, rather than unpleasant, and that dryness lends itself to summertime beverages. There’s a reason we drink gin in the summer: Mild astringency feels good when you’re sweating.

Tea, true tea, has a whole mess of various chemical compounds that contribute to flavor and, sometimes, mess with our brains a little. The one that most people think of is caffeine, which tea does have, but in a much more limited dose than coffee. What’s more interesting is the concentration of various phenols and polyphenols, aromatic compounds that are responsible for flavors and aromas. Tea has high levels of a few different types of astringent compounds, notably tannins and theaflavins, which can be brought out by the drying and fermenting process. In general, the more intense the curing, the more bitter the tea, which is why black tea is generally more bitter than the relatively natural green tea. But the way you brew tea can also have a major effect on the concentration of these compounds that leach out of the leaves and into your water; high temperatures typically will secure you more bitterness than lower temperatures.

Anyway! Iced tea is extremely easy to make, and generally follows the same rules as iced coffee. You can brew regular hot tea and pour it over ice, and you’ll end up with a totally adequate beverage. Herbal teas in particular take well to this; they lack some of those chemical compounds that can turn true teas astringent when rapidly cooled. Or you can plan ahead a bit and end up with something that, yes, tastes better — not so bitter, a bit smoother — but more importantly, takes less work when you actually want some iced tea.

The basic setup is the same as cold brew coffee, which uses no hot water at all and instead relies on a very very long brewing time to extract flavor. The best tool for this is a French press, but a pitcher and a strainer (either double-layered or lined with cheesecloth) will work almost as well. You’ll want to combine tea and cold water in the vessel of your choice and let sit for quite awhile, at least six hours and preferably overnight, before straining out the solids.

You can use either tea bags or loose-leaf tea for this method. There are intense tea snobs (little-known fact: rarer, but actually worse than coffee snobs) who will yell about this, but tea bags are generally fine for iced tea. The lack of extreme temperatures and brewing times in iced tea are much more gentle on the leaves than in hot tea, and you’ll get decent to good results from any reasonable-quality tea bag. You’ll want to drink iced tea by the gallon, so don’t go too nuts. (That said! As with any beverage, you don’t want to go too cheap, either; the tea found in Lipton or other mass-market tea bags is, aside from being kind of shitty, chopped extremely finely to maximize surface area within the small space of a mug. It also usually includes what’s known as “fannings,” which is a tea snob word for, basically, garbage dust found at the bottom of a tea barrel.)

Because we’re brewing in a large container, it is also kind of a perfect scenario to try out loose-leaf tea, because the leaves have room to spread out and float around, and there’s such a low level of precision required due to the cold water and long steeping time that you don’t really have to worry about messing the tea up. Loose-leaf is often barely more expensive than bags, will last at least as long, and will, in many circumstances, taste a lot better.

The ratio of tea to water is fairly important; you want to have about one tea bag, or roughly two teaspoons of loose-leaf tea, per cup of water. A standard-sized French press technically holds eight cups of water, but with the press and the tea in the carafe you won’t be able to do quite that much. Experiment with around five or six tea bags (ten-to-twelve teaspoons of loose-leaf) until you figure out how much you like. Adding more tea will make the final beverage stronger, but not bitter, the way over-steeped tea is, so don’t be too worried.

Add the tea to water in your French press before you go to bed, stir it up once or twice, and by the next morning, it’ll be done. Pour it into a glass container of some sort and serve over ice. If you want to make this more complicated, there are certainly possibilities, though.

Iced Green Tea With Cucumber And Lime

Make iced green tea as usual; gunpowder green tea is good for this. After you strain out the tea leaves, add about half a cucumber’s worth of thin cucumber slices and allow to sit for another day. Serve over ice with a squeeze of lime and simple syrup, if desired.

Iced Black Tea With Bourbon and Mint

Make iced black tea as usual; a smokier one is probably best, like lapsang souchong. Make a mint simple syrup by bringing water and white sugar in a ratio of 2:1 to a boil, then pouring over a whole bunch of chopped fresh mint. Cover and let sit at room temperature until cooled. Mix iced tea with the syrup and a shot of bourbon, serve over ice with a slice of orange.

Iced Peppermint Tea With Gin and Basil

Make peppermint iced tea as usual (Moroccan mint tea will work just as well; it’s a blend of spearmint and green tea). Mix with a little bit of honey, and shake with gin and a little lime juice. Serve with chopped basil.

Most teas and herbal teas work very well with the cold brew method; I particularly like peppermint iced tea. These also make an excellent base for cocktails if you like a tea-based cocktail. Herbal and black teas work well with bourbon, green tea with vodka or gin (or rum).

But mostly I like them as a cool-down afternoon drink, unadulterated except for ice. No sugar, no dairy, no fancy packaging, no old-timey fonts. Just some nice iced tea.

Photo by Pen Waggener

What’s your grandpa up to these days?

by Brian Feldman

Do you know what Minions are? I’m serious. I keep thinking that I know what Minions are, and then I’ll lose three hours on poorly maintained Facebook pages and Pinterest tags and emerge from my trance sweaty, short of breath, and somehow more baffled than I was before.

It probably doesn’t help that there’s a wide gulf between the Minions that have appeared in two — and soon, three — feature-length motion pictures and how we see Minions on the Internet. The Minions of the Despicable Me canon exist as, well, minions — hapless henchmen for a comically inept villain with a heart of gold (and worrisome body proportions). The Minions as they appear on social media are an altogether different beast.

Let’s start with canonical Minions. They are maybe the platonic ideal of franchise mascot. A better question, for my idiot lizard brain, is what aren’t Minions? They have just the slightest identity to be interpreted as “distinct” or “realized,” but every facet of their design is also so vague that they are nothing. Minions are blank slates of cosmic dust and computer processing power, just like the rest of us.

The Pantone Color Institute, which decides what is and is not a real color, describes Minions thusly:

Just as the sun’s rays enliven us, PANTONE Minion Yellow is a color that heightens awareness and creates clarity, lighting the way to the intelligence, originality and the resourcefulness of an open mind — this is the color of hope, joy and optimism.

Every provable fact about minions reveals thousands of other questions that we do not have the answer to. This trailer for the upcoming Minions movie provides many details, which serve as the seeds from which a myriad of additional questions sprout.

Minions, back in the primordial soup, crawled onto land from the ocean. They have, apparently, not undergone any substantial evolutionary development since then. Their purpose has always been to serve a villainous master. YET! They are very bad at it. This is the comedy: Darwin’s law of natural selection does not apply to Minions; the hapless Minions should have died with the dinosaurs, and yet, they continue to not only survive, but thrive.

All Minions are male (at the very least, they all have male names): Kevin, Stuart, Bob, Carl, Dave, Donny, Jerry, John, Norbert, Paul, Phil, Tim… the list goes on. That said, they care little for traditional markers of masculinity or virility. Though Minions do have butts, it is less clear whether or not they have sexual organs. It would appear that they do not, yet even so, much like Adam and Eve, they choose to cover their shame with flora. (I did not attempt to contact Minions creator Pierre Coffin to find out if Minions can or do fuck.) In the upcoming film, a Minion flirts with two similarly-shaped yellow fire hydrants, leading me to hypothesize that, yes, Minions do fuck. How remains unknown.

Given that the upcoming film Minions tracks the same characters through prehistory up until the mid-twentieth century, it is very clear that Minions are immortal. They were here long before us, and they will live on long after we turn to skeleton and ash. The Minions will comb through the wreckage of what were once our cities and culture, “Banana?” they will ask… but bananas will have died out long ago, a distant fragment of memory, floating on a wisp through the aether of time and space.

Minions do not understand the concept of race. They are all the same shade of yellow. It can be argued that they are post-racial, though in actuality, owing to their eons-long existence dating from the earliest days of carbon-based life forms, they are pre-racial.

The Minion language is similarly ambiguous. From the Despicable Me wiki:

They express themselves through actions, not words: their “language” is fairly basic, they speak in a strange jabber combined with various human languages — evident in some (roughly) English words such as “Banana”, “Bapples” (basically “Apple” with “B”), “Potato”, as well as Spanish-sounding words like “para tú” (roughly “for you”) and “la boda” (means “marriage”), French (poulet tikka masala, et pis c’est tout), Russian words such as “да” (Da”), and Korean words such as “Hana(하나), Dul(둘), Sae (From Set [셋]” means One, Two, Three), and many other languages. Hence, their language is incomprehensible to most humans, though they do understand English. It is also possible to isolate elements of Japanese from their speech patterns.

Minions have been engineered to be everything and nothing at once. They are not sexual, but they can develop romantic interest. They are androgynous but have distinctly male names. Their language is a hodge-podge of others. Their bodies have both a slender skinniness and the curves of fatness. They all need corrective eyewear.

So, really, we know frustratingly little about Minions, but do note enough signifiers which trick us into believing they are substantial. They are paper-thin archetypes that we cast our own ideas, aspirations, and worries onto.

What I’m trying to say is: Minions are the perfect meme. As one popular Tumblr post refers to them, Minions are “SCREAMING CORNPOPS WHO ARE TEARING APART SOCIETY THROUGH MIDDLE AGED MOM MEMES.”

Actually, wait. Let me revise that. Minions are bigger than memes. I don’t have a word for it. Are they the übermeme? The word “meme” means many things to many people (for instance, it is often incorrectly used as a synonym for, like, the fifty-sixth definition of “macro”), but in general, a meme is intrinsically bonded to a certain, often very granular emotion. Socially Awkward Penguin is tied to social awkwardness, Sweet Brown’s “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” is linked to being too busy, the facepalm is about being very disappointed, cereal guy is about being in the middle of eating but also wanting to add your two cents, the song “Friday” is about trying your best and failing but still having fun, etc. Even certain franchise characters espouse a specific view (Sonic the Hedgehog: nineties edgy raditude, Shadow the Hedgehog: shitty early aughts raditude). The new Pixar movie, Inside Out, takes this “one character-one emotion” structure to its logical conclusion.

But Minions are not tied to any central emotion. They occupy an odd middle ground as a specific piece of intellectual property unbound from a specific feeling or worldview. Minions are sarcastic, honest, smarmy, snarky, playful, mean, and downright sour depending on the need.

They love their family…

They are accepting…

They know about social decorum…

They are mad at young people…

They are confident…

…and they love social sharing!!!!!!!!

Minions have a purpose — serving villainy — but no specific emotional drive to go along with it. I guess that their whole… gestalt… is faux-brutal honesty; the sort of call-it-like-I-see-it posturing that thrives on social media. This makes Minions uniquely exploitable on the memescape. Their central core of mischief applies to many of the feelings that people like to vent through memes: anger, joke-y threats, the idea that whoever’s posting is smarter than everyone else around them. Minions can be paired with many of the same phrases that appear on graphic tees at Target.

In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to find the right analogy, and I think that’s it. Minions are the Target graphic tees of the internet.

Wait, no, wait I just got it. I figured out their appeal. Minions are basically emoji. They’re yellow, they run the emotional spectrum, they function as a malleable shorthand for almost indescribable feelings. Like, do you know what the nail art emoji means? It means a million different things. So does the prayer hands emoji. (This is an emerging area of academic study.) Okay, so… Minions are emoji with arms, legs, and goggles.

And that would explain the bizarre phenomenon of Minions as visual templates. Do you want to see a Minion version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Sheldon from “The Big Bang Theory” or the Green Bay Packers? Well, guess what: They exist. As tattoos.

#miniontattoo #minion

A photo posted by Michele Convertini (@varisvari) on Apr 29, 2015 at 2:26am PDT

Done this today for @orrmatt #minion #miniontattoo #tattoos #tatttoo #tattoolovers #inkmagazine #inkmasters #ink #legtattoo #colourtattoo

A photo posted by williamsyme92 (@williamsyme92) on May 21, 2015 at 9:14am PDT

#tattoobymark at #dinosaurstudiotattoo of #minions #greenbay #packers. #miniontattoo #despicableme #despicablemetattoo #greenbaypackers #greenbaypackerstattoo #greenbaypackersminions #despicableme2 #despicableme3 #cheesehead #cheeseheadtattoo #cheeseheadminion #green #yellow #waukegan #waukeganillinois #weirdwaukegan #explorewaukegan #keepwaukeganweird #lakecountyil #greatlakesnavybase #greatlakesnavalstation #football #sports #footballtattoo @cupycakesweetshop

A photo posted by Dinosaur Studio Tattoo (@dinosaurstudiotattoo) on Apr 23, 2015 at 7:12pm PDT

One of the billions of questions about Minion memes is: why is there a Minion on this???? What does the Minion add? “I like this thing, but with only one eye, and ovoid, and… speaks in gibberish.” Minions stand for nothing. They crawled out of the sea millions of years ago to serve villainy and were reformed by three cute girls in a matter of days. Yet their simple visual style (literally a yellow oval) makes it very easy to riff on the form, and so they pervade. A search for “minion hat” on Etsy returns nearly three hundred crocheted hats. You can make Minion cupcakes pretty easily. Or, I dunno, smoke from a Minion bowl.

If we view Minions as a template onto which we project ourselves, then sharing a picture of something Minionized is not only saying “I like this,” it’s like saying “This is an extension of who I am…. If the idiot Minions can be Green Bay Packer, then I can be a Green Bay Packer.”

So what have we learned from all this? Nothing? Probably nothing. In closing, here is a cake shaped like a baby, and the cake-baby is wearing a Minion hat.

★★★★ In the dark gray morning, with the ominous forecast, it seemed as if the maximum daylight would go to waste. But there was plenty of time: The clouds parted, and brilliant sun fell on the streets. A warm, energizing breeze played over the streets. Little tattoos were bared. The eight-year-old steered a course for the shady side of the street. By later afternoon there was more heat and less breeze. At the piano lesson, one curtain bellied against the screen and one leaf of a potted plant stirred, but no current made it as far as the couch. Toward dinnertime, dark clouds with ragged edges moved under the high white ones. A seagull, its own study in gray and white, banked and turned. A few raindrops tapped on the window. Upriver the view was clear to the faraway highlands, while 120 degrees away downriver was an opaque gray blur, the water invisible. The gray thinned and a boat appeared between buildings, trailing a white wake. By the time dinner was over, the sky was clear blue, the air calm. The Lincoln Center did its boom-thump skyward. A little girl and her littler sister, in dresses and cardigans, sat on the fountains rim, the older one making conducting or summoning gestures at the waters, then whooping and tipping back her head at a high-flaring eruption. The three-year-old ran himself sweaty, then ran some more, furious that his older brother’s longer stride could go faster. The final traces of the sun edged the clouds in the west with vivid pink. In the night, after that peaceable end, there came a sharp clattering against the glass. A hand stuck outside to test for hail came back drenched.

The other week, Bjarke Ingels unveiled his design for the final tower of the new World Trade Center, a big ol’ stack of boxes. Once completed, the “revitalized World Trade Center” will be “bigger,” “bolder,” “better than ever” and “Manhattan’s new center of gravity — a vision of tomorrow realized today,” according to the World Trade Center’s official website. From a certain point of view, this is not untrue: We are seeing a plausible vision of the Manhattan of tomorrow — an alien colony of largely empty glassy spikes and cubes.

The architect of the twin towers, Minoru Yamasaki, would probably disagree on the point about the World Trade Center being “better than ever” though? In April 1973, the day after the World Trade Center’s dedication ceremony, the New York Times’ architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable, published a fairly scathing review — as did most architecture critics of the time — deriding the lobbies as “pure schmaltz” and the towers as “pure technology” and “the daintiest big buildings in the world,” concluding flatly that they are “big buildings but they are not great architecture.” She criticized in particular the narrow, twenty-two-inch-wide windows as “pure visual frustration” that destroyed “one of the miraculous benefits of the tall buliding, the panoramic view.” (It is not a litle strange reading her review from a post-9/11 viewport; over the years, the Twin Towers became fully iconic, while most of her criticisms would seem presciently applied to any of the structures currently erupting from the 57th Street corridor.)

In response, Yamasaki wrote a long and thoughtful letter to Huxtable. It’s reproduced in full in the World Trade Center issue of CLOG. What’s remarkable to read now is his view of all-glass buildings, which could not be more stark:

Yamasaki’s practical concerns about “enormous panes of glass” are more than outmoded now, but it’s hard to escape the sense he’s not a little right to ask if a “glass world” is really the future we want for cities. We’ll find out in the next five years or so!!!!!

Top photo by BIG; bottom photo by NY NIMBY

Correction: CLOG is an independent publication and not associated with the Guggenheim, although its most recent issue is dedicated to it. I regret the error a lot

.