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My roommate Dean created this video about some peculiarities in our store bought eggs:

Now I’m not sure what these guy’s are doing with their chickens, but frankly the result is a little freaky. With a name like “Lally Farms,” I think anyone would be suspicious.

I made some tacos tonight (eggs, grated carrot and some sliced red pepper on top) and was greeted to the doubly-yolked surprise. Though honestly, the surprise has worn off since this has been going on for weeks with multiple cartons of eggs. Now it’s just foreboding.

+Update: Checkout this blog entry from Notes on an Eclectic Mind about what double yolks may signify.+

*Alternate Title:* May I? You Mayo.

I’m not sure if it’s a Lowell thing, a New England thing, or a Ben-is-woefully-ignorant thing, but there has been some major innovation in terms of “salad.”

I put salad in quotes because this is not your leafy green, or even weedy weird, salad with the pine nuts, raisins if you’re lucky, and maybe a little balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil to round it out.

No, dear reader, this is the meat meet mayo abomination that, having taken hold in our church socials, is fattening it’s way towards mainstream America. So far I count:

# Egg Salad (The classic cholestrol coronator)
# Tuna Salad (A little fishy)
# Seafood Salad (It’s not tuna salad)
# Chicken Salad (Poor bird)
# Ham Salad (The even whiter meat)

Only God knows what substance they Mayonaise Advisory Council will think of adding next.

_Dean eats his heart out_

Took this with my bud Dean Jansen. For anyone that says that community media and a participatory culture won’t have a positive effect on society, at the very least it keeps us well-dressed.

I was over at my pal Dean’s place in Jamaica Plain today. In addition to lots of semi-expired foodstuffs he snags from behind the Co-Op next door, he also has the screens and materials for t-shirt printing. Previously I had been helping him up in Lowell filming some promos for his Democracy Player channel, “Telemusicvision”:http://telemusicvision.com; today we were putting stuff on t-shirts.

The design I decided to print was one of the doodles I had done a week or so ago for the DigitalBicycle Project while waiting for Jessica to get done with her homework .

The process basically was:

1. Clean off a screen, which is a fine mesh in a wooden frame
2. Mix together the emulsion, which is a bunch of thick green stuff, with a little bit of yellow photo sensitive hardener. Apparently on their own they like to stain, and together they really like to stain.
3. Scrape this emulsion concoction on the screen very thinly, but enough to fill in the mesh. Let dry a few hours in Dean’s oven—it wasn’t turned on, just a good out of the way place.
4. Print the design out onto a transparency. It has to be monotone-mesh doesn’t do gradients. I tried to get to those little halftone circles like Lichtenstein, but Adobe Illustrator was having none of it-I had designed the thing in Inkscape, my preferred drawing program and was working off a PNG.
5. Get the (now) dried emulsion convered screen. It is photosensitive—not sensitive like photographic paper, but just don’t point a spotlight at it.
6. Lay it down on something black, in our case a t-shirt—this keeps reflections from hitting the underside; place the transparency on top and then we dropped a piece of glass over that, just to keep it flat.
7. Shine a hundred watt light on it for about 40 minutes.
8. The light hardens the emulsion. So after it’s been hardened, take the screen in the bath and spray warm water on it, which will wash any emulsion from the screen that was covered by the design—since this was blocked by the light and thus not hard.
9. Tape off any non-emulsion filled parts that aren’t part of the design
10. Put on top of t-shirt and now scrape some special black paint over it. Lift off and voila. Our screen wasn’t perfect, so we had to use a q-tip with paint on the end to touch up.
11. Let the paint dry. This being Massachusetts in March, we put it on top of a space heater for an our
12. Lastly, you have to iron the design on the shirt, letting the iron heat each part for about 60 seconds. This somehow “proofs” the paint so that it won’t run in the wash.
13. Rock it.