First I hired a gastroenterologist to help figure it out. This disagreement I was having. His name was Dr Man, very nice guy. Though secretly I wished his name was Magnum. Then I could say that Magnum GI was on the case.

It at last came to this because my own belly and I of late have come to certain difference of opinion on the relative merits of wheat gluten. Obviously wheat gluten is delicious. This is the argument my brain and mouth try and tell my other organs. But another faction within body is convinced gluten is some kind of murderous toxin, that it must tie my innards in knots to get rid of it. And so I’ve been trying to go gluten free. Going gluten free is hard. I find myself creating a lot more of my food. I find myself buying oats by the bushel to get that carb fix. Damn I miss [real] croissants. Meanwhile I find myself learning how to bake, owning mysterious ingredients like xantham gum or sourgum flour.

But there are upsides to having to DIY your own baked goods. This awesomeness is one of them. Perfected over the last few weekends for your enjoyment.

1/4 Cup brown sugar (seriously cut down from other cookie recipes)
1 Cup butter (mmm butter)
2 eggs
1 tsp Vanilla (better: 1tblsp ground Tahitian Vanilla)
1 tbsp spiced rum (Kraken, Sailor Jerry or Goslings)
1 tsp Baking Soda
1 tsp Baking Powder
Pinch salt
1 tsp Xantham Gum
1 tsp Guar Gum (in a pinch, 2tsp of either)
1/2 cup Sorghum flour
1/2 cup white rice flour
2.5 cup Gluten-free oats ( on Amazon)
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp cinnamon
1 fistful Candied/Crystallized Ginger

If solid, nuke the butter for 30s or so til mushy or half melted. Then cream it with sugar. Stir in eggs, rum, vanilla. Fold in the dry ingredients and spices (feeling fancy, you can sift together the dry ingredients first in another bowl). Now stir in oats. Rinse or soak the ginger for couple minutes to remove excess sugar. Dry and shop into bit-sized bits. Stir ginger into mix. Spoon cookie dough onto cookie sheets. Makes about 2 baking sheets worth of cookies. 350, 11 min, will do the rest. Allow to cool on the baking sheet before removing.

Serve with a tot of your darkest rum. For dipping. Zomg.

There you have it, awesome super-gingery oatmeal cookies. For my non-gluten-free friends, just call these Oatmeal Dark and Stormies… and thank me later

Internet usage isn’t killing TV; in fact, TV watching has hit record levels in the US. So why aren’t broadcasters rolling in fat autumn piles of cash?

“An audience member was confused about how viewership could be up but ad revenue could be significantly reduced; top network execs patiently explained that just having eyeballs wasn’t much good in a major economic downturn.”

And by “TV” you could substitute… newspapers, magazines, print media, radio, social network page views, fiction, stock photography, analyst reports, movies, music, journalism in general. Did I miss any?

Boy it’s a tough millennium for anyone to be in the content creation business.

Like all new media shifts the beginning of time, digial media, you has a flavor. And by flavor I mean side effects both good, bad and unintended.

It’s not new news that we are moving to an attention scarcity economy. These days we are all consuming more media than ever. Nonetheless, attention is a fixed commodity and fundamentally puts a limit on how much content we can meaningfully demand in a given day. But supply of new media has exploded and there is just isn’t enough attention – which is linked to revenue potential – to go around. Sadly, the falling cost of media production and distribution has not been enough to offset. If anything falling costs, and web2.0 make things worse by flooding the media market with a lot of “cheap” content. Not in all cases is this “cheap” content a perfect substitute for what came before.

It’s time for us all to start thinking of new models in a post digital world.

In the meantime, there is some good news dear content creators and media titans.

At least you are not in the car making business.

link: Americans hugely addicted to TV, but money doesn’t follow

photo credit: Jose_armas

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is “a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces” such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously “a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”. This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures—offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles.

The new architecture, says Mr Mitchell, will “make spaces intentionally multifunctional”. This means that 21st-century aesthetics will probably be the exact opposite of the sci-fi chic that 20th-century futurists once imagined. Architects are instead thinking about light, air, trees and gardens, all in the service of human connections. Buildings will have much more varied shapes than before. For instance, people working on laptops find it comforting to have their backs to a wall, so hybrid spaces may become curvier, with more nooks, in order to maximise the surface area of their inner walls, rather as intestines do. This is becoming affordable because computer-aided design and new materials make non-repetitive forms cheaper to build.

I love these ideas of the sometimes unexpected or unintentional consequences of mass media/technology. The semi-deliberate semi-chaotic long term evidence of technological determinism (the flavours of media) as they become embedded cultural, habits, norms, and even architecture

how does wifi change cubicle culture? how will mobile broadband as accelerating this trend of the new nomadicism.

File under: pls put more electric outlets in your airport terminals, lobbies and public spaces [for the love of god, k thx]

Link: The new Oases – The Economist