Lingbo Li
Kickass Cupcakes to add ice cream cupcakes
kickass cupcakes
Kickass Cupcakes, the Davis Square cupcakery (which famously abhors Yelp) is announcing a new line of ice cream. The inaugural flavor is vanilla with chocolate chunk – with the added kick of choco and vanilla cupcake bits. One cone is $2.99, 3.99 with frosting, and a pint is 5.99.
I always liked their Cupcake happy hours on the last Monday of the month when they give out free mini cakes. And I give them major points for flavor creativity. However, they’re not noted for excellent service (as Yelp will attest) – I remember trying to buy 5 separately boxed cupcakes for a friend’s birthday present last year to um, mild hostility. Hopefully, the sugary addition of cake bits in ice cream (frosting is over-the-top) will go far to redeem them.
Are you going to try these out?
How to convince people that your liberal arts degree is useful
A souless yuppie in American Psycho
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with an American expat.
We happened to be at a faux-exclusive club in Shanghai with shark tanks and a glittering, ghostly clientele. It was a clear night, save for the fuzz of smog that filtered the 24th floor view through the violet gauze of pollution.
He asked where I went to school. I was a rising junior at Harvard at the time; he had graduated from Georgetown a few years back. Then he asked what I was studying.
“Social anthropology,” I said.
“That’s nice,” he said, eyes widening. He paused to collect his words. “But that’s not like, something you could build a house with.”
He settled into his velvet seat with a cigarette and a shit-eating grin, looking pleased with his metaphor.
I forget how I replied.
The truth is – and I’ve learned this from those smarter than myself – that what you study in undergrad probably won’t be directly applicable to a job. And if you’re a humanities/social science major like myself, you’ll occasionally have to converse at length with douchebags in suits (DBIS). Disclaimer: not all corporate dudes in suits are like this. But a few are. They’re probably rather young, and high on their own importance.
If it’s a short conversation, it’s better just to nod, smile, and escape. But if you’re stuck across a dinner table from a DBIS, you might want to build a convincing argument that you’re an intelligent life form, too.
Here’s how.
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Crowdsourcing my blog entries
A cool photo my friend Sam took that I'll put here for no real purpose other than looking good in it.
Hi denizens of the Internet, Asian women, unseemly lovers of Asian women, Harvard students, and their ilk:
I want to try something out.
Actually, I want you to figure out what I should try out.
After all, you know better than me what to do with stale cake, why Chinese food is so damn cheap, why I’m wrong for eating innocent whale flesh, and where to grocery shop in Boston.
So I want you to leave me a comment below – it’s easy! it takes two seconds! – letting me know what you want me to write a blog post about.
Have you always wanted to hear what I think about pickup lines? The best places to study in Harvard Square? What that molecular food class at Harvard is like? My picks for hair products, chopsticks, lip glosses (I have many), cookbooks, nonfiction reading, or best-looking celebs?
Whether I’ll do another beauty pageant? My favorite self-tanner? The thrills of slurping Cantonese-style congee?
Part of this comes from realizing that an awful lot of you like to click the “life” tab on the navigation rather than the “food” tab. If you want to hear about life… let me know what topic you’d like to hear about.
I can’t promise that these will all get done ASAP, but I’ll get around to all of them eventually.
A few ground rules:
1) Nothing inappropriate, based on my judgment. I like the fact that my parents and employers read this.
2) Nothing horribly expensive.
3) Um, if I think of anything else, I’ll put it here.
Please! If no one leaves me anything to write about, I’ll eat my foot. Mmm, foot.
Why is Chinese food so cheap? Guest blog by Chinese food expert Sam Lipoff
The famous chicken at Boston's Hamersley's Bistro
In response to my post asking for reader opinions on why Chinese food in the US is so cheap, I got some amazing, intelligent responses.
They ranged from Big Think’s Lindsay Beyerstein‘s hypothesis that it was cheap overhead and ingredients, to Boston food writer’s MC Slim JB‘s observation on different cultural perceptions of what makes a good restaurant. Friend Sam Jackson and Jimmy Li thinks it’s a marketing/image issue. Serious Eats intern Leah Douglas cites her history class and the economic class of immigrant foodways. Another SE intern, Aaron Mattis postulates it might be lack of restaurant culture.
But no one quite tackled the issue quite as thoroughly as my friend and Chowhounder/Chinese food expert Sam Lipoff who emailed me a 1,000 word treatise on the topic.
I’m posting it here, with some minor editing for conciseness and flow. Definitely worth a read if you’re interested in the topic.
Why is Chinese food so cheap?
By Sam Lipoff
In the modern world, how does food become haute?
Typically by applying French technique to the traditional ingredients.
Conceptually, Chinese food doesn’t follow this rule, one possible reason why the American-Chinese version is inexpensive. The other line of thinking is sociological.
The sociological reasoning would say that since the first Chinese restaurants in the United States were started by very poor people, and served inexpensive food, this “register” for Chinese food is what the American public became accustomed to. By contrast, by the time Japanese immigrants came to the United States, post-Meiji restoration Japan was a wealthy and powerful country.
I’m sure there is some truth to this, but I don’t buy this explanation.
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Starbucks adds free Wi-Fi to all stores = I may go corporate
As much as I champion independent coffeehouses with their hipster clientele (skinny boys with Macbooks, bald men with Asian fetishes, baristas with pixie cuts) 76% of the reason I go to coffeeshops at all is to get work done. In my own room, I am a worthless sack of procrastinating, self-hating, sloth-like ineptitude.
Put in me at a tiny table with a small coffee, however, and boom! 15 page essays, DONE! I’m actually not even really exaggerating. Ok, so the citations take awhile.
However, Starbucks announced today that they’re offering free wi-fi at stores nationwide beginning July 1st.
The consequences will be monumental.
Us students, sneering hipsters, and other such brethren that frequent coffeeshops are really just freeloaders. We like paying $1.85 for the privilege of sitting at tables for 5 hours, smugly hoarding our precious real estate, refreshing our Twitter account in masturbatory glee.
This was previously impossible at the majority of Starbucks unless you were willing to shell out $$ for wi-fi access. Being the cheapasses that we are, we sought out the places that would give us the Internet in exchange for hyper-sweetened muffins.
But with this change, Starbucks is creating a free hotspot on every block. Or in the case of densely populated urban areas, thrice a block.
I predict a run on coffee – and wifi – by a cheapskate clientele which was just too cool for Starbucks drinks before. Hey, I shop at thrift stores too. Nothing like a good deal – even if it’s a multi-national chain that’s offering it.
Lana Lingbo Li
I'm a world traveler / enthusiastic eater who's now blogging and producing videos over at HelloLana.com. Visit me there!
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