Category Archives: Friends

Facebook and the Coming Zombie Apocalypse

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My good friend Daniel Priest recently posted the following to his Facebook profile:

Daniel Priest is a tree climbing fool

I thought that it was important that the conversation that ensued be available for posterity outside of Facebook’s domain, so here it is. When the undead rise up, you’ll thank me.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 8

Fanny, apparently you’ve married a monkey. I bet he looks cute in a ten-gallon hat.

Jonathan Hunter, May 9

Trees are pretty.

Sean McMains, May 10

It’s good to know that when the zombie uprising comes and I need someone to hoist me into the upper branches of a magnificent magnolia to escape the zombies’ brain lust, you’ll be around.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Wow, I just learned that zombies can’t climb trees.

Sean McMains, May 10

Have you ever seen a zombie perched in a tree? Well, there you go.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

Matthew, Sean may have learned this from Shaun of the Dead. One of the characters, Diane, is able to escape the zombies by hanging out in a tree until she is rescued by the British Army.

Sean McMains, May 10

(Of course, I’m discounting the rare South American Arboreal Zombie here…)

Daniel Priest, May 10

The zombie lore on display here is sadly lacking. Zombies may not climb trees, but they do climb other zombies. And when the moaning, staggering pile of mindless undead under the tree reaches high enough…

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

The only thing I have ever heard of zombies being able to ‘climb’ is stairs. You would have to have a zombie staircase. That would pretty much never happen, since zombies are not capable of cooperating intelligently.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Zombies might be able to pull themselves out of their graves by using the bodies of other zombies if they were buried in mass graves, but to accept the possibility of anything beyond that I would have to see an example.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I think Matthew is onto something here. In order to make plans and such, one has to be conscious. But zombies aren’t conscious, so they can’t make plans. It’s logic.

The only way, then, that a zombie could get someone from a tree would be if it just so happened that a bunch of bodies and other artifacts were piled up in a a certain way and that zombie just so happened to make its way up that pile. But, as Matthew said, that would pretty much never happen.

Sean McMains, May 10

Jonathan: I call shenanigans on your logic here. How can you possible assert that zombies aren’t conscious? Certainly it takes consciousness to shamble and to cry “brains! BRAAAAIIIINS!”

I think you’re just a closed-minded lifeist.

Daniel Priest, May 10

Big sigh.

Let me spell it out here, since the bunch of you have evidently watched a total of about 25 minutes worth of zombie movie material. Zombies smell living human flesh up in the tree. The first zombies start moaning and clawing at the tree. Additional zombies are drawn by the moaning of the first zombies. As the mob grows, zombies at the middle of the pile are trampled, piled upon, etc. Over the course of the night this zombie mound gets higher and higher.

Y’all are the meat snacks in the film who climb the tree at the beginning of the night, look down at the zombies, and say something like “Alright, I think we’ll be safe here,” before being awakened in the middle of the night by a cold hand gripping your ankle, dragging you down to immediate dismemberment.

It’s when you think you’re safe that you’re in the most danger. When you think you’re in danger, well, you’re in danger then too. You’re never safe. Remember that.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

Daniel,

It’s not the herd instinct that I question. It’s the sheer physics. I don’t believe everything I see in movies. Movies are unreal scenarios as we all know well.

Any movie maker who scripted the scene you’re describing would have to be ignorant of the problem. As soon as your hypothetical mound reaches the height of a human being, unless it is the width of a football field with a gradual grade, zombies have to climb. Zombies don’t climb. They walk.

By the time enough zombies have pooled to create a nice pleasant hillside stroll to the top of my tree, the US Marines have arrived and helicoptered me out of the joint because it has been three days.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 10

I never said zombies weren’t conscious, for the record. I don’t care if they’re conscious. They’re not capable of cooperating intelligently.

Ross Richie, May 10

SIGH.

Okay, everyone take notes. THIS IS HOW IT REALLY WORKS (points to Priest for trying):

ROMERO ZOMBIES: are mindless. Priest’s example is true there.

RUSSO ZOMBIES: are smart, capable of thought, can wield tools, etc., and can talk to you, crying out for brains. Those zombies will climb that tree, no problem, and this is NSFW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPc7c4W6btY&feature=related

Or, as you can see in this clip, they have the ability to try to talk to you and smash through the trap door in the attic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD8_GFEO-HY&feature=related

For those taking notes at home: Russo and Romero collaborated and created the genre in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, got into a Lennon and McCartney-esque squabble, split up, and individually created competing zombie franchises, hence creating seemingly conflicting rules to how the zombie mythology works.

Ross Richie, May 10

Amateurs. I love you guys.

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I was going to let Daniel have the last word, but I can’t let this go.

Romero zombies wouldn’t be able to climb trees, as Matthew has demonstrated. And if we’re talking about Russo zombies, then you wouldn’t be silly enough to climb a tree. So, it doesn’t matter what kind of zombie we’re dealing with. They wouldn’t be able to pluck you out of a tree.

Ross Richie, May 10

HOOO-KAY. Didn’t wanna play this card, but looks like I’ll have to.

Everyone that’s published (i.e. poured 10s of thousands of dollars into) a series called ZOMBIE TALES that is a signature part of your corporate identity, raise your hands.

Now that we’ve gotten that outta the way… (HARSH!)

Romero zombies will get you in exactly the way Daniel laid out. They’re a swarm monster, and the swarm will pile up and attain height….

RE: climbing a tree in a Russo flick, if you’re willing to hide in an attic, you’ll hide in a tree. And they’ll climb it, while crowing about the need to snack on your brains.

LOVE YOU JONATHAN, MEAN IT!!!

Jonathan Hunter, May 10

I feel like I’m in crazy town and Ross is the mayor.

Everyone that had a normal childhood (i.e. played outside with other children instead of rotting away in front of the television box while eating pork rinds) that is a signature part of your personal identity, raise your hands.

Romero zombies COULD get you in that way, but they don’t swarm fast enough. The Marines would rescue you first.

I wouldn’t hide in the attic, so I also wouldn’t hide in a tree.

Matthew Christopher Davidson, May 11

Pouring 10s of thousands of dollars into zombie literature doesn’t automatically make you right. In fact, it might make you stupid. Oh snap.

I am grateful for this broadening lesson, however.

I know very little about zombies, but I do not accept statements merely on the basis of varying and respectively unquestionable zombie traditions. I am trying to learn by questioning everything and using careful reasoning. In this way I hope to one day truly be a philosopher.

Daniel Priest, May 11

Ross–thanks for the input. What did you think of World War Z?

Jonathan–I think you’re right. You aren’t the sort to hide in an attic or tree. I think you might be the zombie imitation sort, try to make your way into the countryside by walking, moaning, etc. like a zombie, thereby escaping notice. Good luck with that.

Matthew–Physics of zombie accumulation. We assume a maximum slope of 45 degrees and a cone height of 40 feet. Sean specified the upper branches of a magnificent magnolia. In the thin alkaline soils of central Texas <i>Magnolia grandiflora</i> will attain a height of no more than 50 feet, so if we’re in the very upper branches the zombies would need to be approximately 40 feet high to be in ankle grabbing distance. This is an absurdly generous estimate of both tree height and sturdiness of upper branches, btw. But I’m a generous guy.

The zombie cone will have a volume of approximately 67000 cubic feet. Assuming an average zombie volume of 10 cubic feet, you’ll need 6700 zombies to arrive during the night. If zombies shamble at 4 miles an hour every zombie within 32 miles could conceivably arrive within the course of the night. And there’s a hell of a lot more recently dead and/or soon to be bitten and infected people within 32 miles of San Marcos, Texas.

If only 3 zombies spot us initially, and each of them with their moaning alerts only 3 additional zombies, each of whom alert 3 more, etc, and each of them does so within 30 minutes (again, very generous–in an urban setting far more zombies are likely to hear, and much more quickly), then we could conceivably have 20,000 zombies at the tree within 5 hours.

Not that they’re all going to come for us–there are presumably other equally tasty people in other trees–but I think the plausibility of the scenario has now been pretty well established.

Jonathan Hunter, May 11

Daniel, I thought you would know me better than that. I’m not the imitating type. I’m the joining type. I wouldn’t hide in a tree or attic because I would rather become a zombie and come after all of you myself. I’ll admit that I don’t understand how the conversion process works, but that would be optimal.

Ross Richie, May 11

MCMAINS!!!! MCMAINS!!!! THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, MCMAINS!!!!

Sean McMains, May 11

Ross,

If my studies in Zombie Lit. have taught me anything, it’s that the person who sets himself up as a pompous authority figure will be among the first to be devoured by the ravenous hordes.

Thus, by erecting yourself as an authority figure — a verb I here find particularly apt, given your apparent desire to turn this into an exercise in comparative phallic metrics — you have thrust yourself — verb, ditto — into the head — noun, ditto — of the line of victims.

Sean

P.S. New personal best for oblique naughty jokes in one sentence! YES!

Sean McMains, May 11

Daniel,

While I’m loathe to give offense to the very person on whom I will be relying to save me from the apocalypse, I do find a few of your premises troubling:

1. A 45° slope seems singularly optimistic, especially with modern, low-friction synthetic clothing. Perhaps this would be reasonable if the zombies weren’t wearing much (not unreasonable in San Marcos), or were wearing clothing with natural fibers that would have a higher coefficient of friction. I would hold that a figure closer to 30° is likely. That would give us a radius for the cone of 69′, and therefore a volume of 199,427 cubic feet.

2. 10 cubic feet is an absurdly large figure. Consider that human bodies are approximately as dense as fresh water, as shown by the fact that many of us can sink or float in a pool depending on how deeply we breathe in. Water weighs 62.4 pounds/cubic foot. American men average around 180 pounds, women around 140. Thus, a 160 pound “average person” would have a volume of around 2.56 cubic feet. (Alternately, think about how many foot-square boxes Steve Buscemi would fill at the end of Fargo.)

Thus, with the new figures, we’d need 77,901 zombies to build a sufficient pile.

3. Your zombie-alert figures presuppose that zombies’ communication is at least sophisticated enough to convey bearing and distance over miles. I’m not sure how much nuance one can pack into the word “Braaaaiins…”, but my tentative experiments this morning with my coworkers aren’t promising.

Alternatively, perhaps zombies work like ants do, and leave a pheromone trail to food sources. This bears further investigation.

Ross Richie, May 11

McMains — the new popular variant in horror is that they can SMELL the living.

Doesn’t make a whole lotta sense to me, but characters in THE WALKING DEAD smear themselves with zombie smell and sneak past the zoms undetected. The horror community’s glommed onto that and adopted it.

Of course, all this goes out the window if you are loyal to Romero, who established the zoms are getting smarter in LAND OF THE DEAD, where they begin to use tools. LAND OF THE DEAD zoms would be able to scale that tree, no problem. Hell, they’d prolly grab some power tools and just cut it down…

In the trailer here, you’ll see they reference “they’re thinking, they’re communicating” and there’s a brief clip of them using a machine gun, so maybe it’s all moot, they’d just SHOOTCHA OUTTA THE TREE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atXJB9luiko

The Man Who Makes Sing…Awesome

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A couple weeks ago, Kathy and I went up to Baylor University in Waco for their annual Sing event, a four-hour long song and dance revue. The show was, as always, terrific. The best part for me, however, is the post-performance debrief with my friends Jason Young and Barry Brake, who are integral parts of the event, having long been key figures in selecting, arranging, and performing (in the pit band) the music that makes up the show. This year, the Baylor newspaper published an excellent article on Jason that captures nicely what a labor of love the show is for him. (They did omit the fact that he also builds a number of large-scale props for the various acts.)

It’s great to see these guys doing something they so clearly love, and to be able to so directly enjoy the fruits of their labors.

UPDATE: for those of you wondering about Sing, here’s a good overview of this year’s acts and a nice photo gallery.

Mistletoe Furlough Redux

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We’ve made it home safely from our grand Christmas roadtrip, and are enjoying the comfort of sleeping in our own beds once more. I don’t have the time or skill to do the trip justice, but here are a few of the highlights that stick out in my memory:

  • A wonderful extended time of visiting with the Adams family. Though we unfortunately never were able to visit them in Uganda while they were doing teaching and mission work there, having a full week with them was a good bit of make-up. It was terrific to get to enjoy long talks, trips to the park, ice cream, Carcassonne games, etc. without the time pressure that often characterizes our visits with family and friends.
  • Visiting the Frontier Culture Museum. This historical park recreates farms from the homelands of the various people groups that settled in the area by transporting buildings piece-by-piece from their land of origin and training guides to explain life at that time in character. It’s a fascinating place with  sound educational value.
  • A mini college reunion. My old college friends Jonathan and Nadja were kind enough to put us up for two nights in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. To my surprise, they also coordinated with Steve and Debbie and Bob and Sonia to bring together a wonderful dinner of old college chums. It had been a decade since I’d seen most of these folks, and I was struck with how much I still enjoy their company and the richness of their friendship.
  • Laughing about the “5 kid tour”. Three of the families we visited with over the course of our trip had 5 children in their family. For the first time ever, I felt like a bit of a procreative underachiever!
  • Going snow tubing at Ski Roundtop. We had hoped to do a day of snowboarding at some point on the trip, but weather and schedules conspired to make that an impossibility. Two hours sliding down a snow-packed hill on tubes was a decent substitute, good enough that Liam declared it his favorite part of the trip.
  • Visiting the museums and zoo in Washington DC. I was particularly thrilled to see Spaceship One, as well as a giant piece by Andy Goldsworthy at the National Gallery. (If you haven’t seen Rivers and Tides, the documentary on Andy’s work, it’s well worth renting.) We also got to see the Giant Pandas at the zoo feeding and quite enjoyed the bird displays.
  • Staying with Rob and Kim and Glenn and Michelle in Nashville. Glenn and Rob were among my closest college friends, and it was an absolute pleasure to get to catch up with each of them and their families. I only wish we had been able to linger — the visits both seemed far too brief!

To my surprise, the kids did really well with the long car rides, which topped out at about 14 hours in a single day. They were, however, pretty gleeful to see the end of their time trapped in the back of the vehicle, rolling around on the ground and squealing with glee when we returned home at last.

Thanks to all who contributed to the success of the trip. We enjoyed it a great deal, and are very glad to be home safely!

SuperNerd!

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Last night I posted to Twitter:

Watching a Nova show on string theory. (It was a requirement to maintain my supernerd certification this month.)

This morning, my friend Jeff presented me this, created in cooperation with his wife Fazia:

SuperNerd Certificate

This of course immediately became one of my new favorite things. Be sure to appreciate the seal and the signatures!

Of Teddy Bears and Farting Dogs

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My friend Amy Boyd has, over the time that she has worked at Texas State University, acquired a fairly impressive collection of stuffed animals. This was not because she bought them herself, or even because she’s particularly fond of them, but because someone gave her the first one as a joke. Other people got it into their heads that she collected them, and have given them to her as gifts until her desk was awash in them.

Among these unsolicited stuffed critters was one Walter the Farting Dog, a stuffed canine apparently based on a children’s book series of the same name. Walter is a scruffy-looking beast who, when squeezed, emits a distinctive flatulent sound. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view), his batteries were eventually exhausted, and his noisome and noisy gastric distress came to an end.

I thought that Walter deserved a second lease on life, but that it would be much funnier and more surreal for Walter to do something entirely different when resuscitated. While on an outing with Abigail, we happened across a Build A Bear workshop, where I noticed a good selection of voice boxes for their bears — just the thing for Walter! I explained to Abby what I had in mind, and we rooted through their selection of sounds until we finally settled on this. The woman at the desk was a little baffled that I only wanted the voice box without a bear around it, but happily obliged me when I started waving around the Lincolns.

A couple of weeks later, I divulged the plan to Jeff Snider, and we kidnapped Walter early one morning to do the necessary surgery on him. Putting his old scouting skills to good use, Jeff deftly snipped Walter’s belly stitches, extracted the old sound box, slipped in the new one, and with a surgeon’s precision, sewed him back together so neatly that one would never know by looking that Walter had been through trauma. (Photo gallery is here.) We thought about neutering him while we had him sedated, but decided that with the romantic hurdles he already faced, it was probably unnecessary.

Walter in the Operating Room.

Walter in the Operating Room.

We discreetly replaced the dog on Amy’s desk, and then began the most difficult part of the whole process: waiting for someone to discover Walter’s new personality. Neither of us could go squeeze him ourselves, as we would give ourselves away all too quickly. But nobody who was already familiar with Walter had any inclination to squeeze him any longer, as his batteries had died long before.

Fortunately, we were rescued from our purgatory about a week and a half later, when Whitten picked Walter up and gave him a good squeeze.

“Let’s go shopping!” chirped Walter.

“What the h***?” responded Amy promptly.

A few more squeezes elicited more of Walter’s new vocabulary, all delivered in a cloying preadolescent whine:

“Hey, Girlfriend!”

“It’s great to have a new friend like you!”

“You look great!”

“You are too cool!”

All of this happened while I was at lunch, alas. After our earlier Cuckoo Clock prank, Jeff and I were immediate suspects, and since I lack the ability to lie well, all the details quickly spilled out. Amy thought it was hilarious, and has now demanded that we install the flatulence voicebox into her stuffed spider.

What My Friends Are Up To

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One of the best things about being me is that I’m blessed with some amazing, creative, interesting friends. Here are a few things that they’ve been up to lately:

  • David Barnard has started an iPhone software company called AppCubby, and has just released their first product, TripCubby, the sine qua non of mileage tracking for the iPhone. David has worked extraordinarily hard to get this venture off the ground, and that effort shows in the quality of the work that AppCubby is doing. (I’m also excited about this because I did some of the copy writing for David — one of my first professional jobs writing prose instead of software.)
  • Misty Jones has released a song called Gasoline on iTunes. Misty’s musicianship has impressed me all the way back to high school, and I really dig this latest effort. You can check out 30 seconds for free, or get the whole thing (DRM-free, even!) for a mere $0.99. She plans to finish out the album on which this song will go soon.
  • Ross Richie continues to helm Boom Studios, an increasingly successful comic book publishing venture. One of their bolder efforts of late has been releasing some of their books for free viewing online. They’ve recently added RSS feeds, which makes it super-easy to follow the books as they’re released page-by-page. There’s some very high-quality work in their stable, so if you’re in to the medium at all, go check their stuff out!

Blasted Nonsense From The Past

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Back when dinosaurs roamed the Internet and you could get a cup of coffee and a shoeshine for a nickel, before the kids all had their newfangled “Mybook” and “Facespaces” and the blink tag still seemed a pretty nifty idea, there was Brain Sausage.

Brain Sausage was an early proto-weblog, created before such things actually existed. I wrote the software for it because I wanted to learn Perl, and enlisted the aid of Robert Leahey and Chris Morris to help populate it with interesting links and a liberal dose of snarkiness. Chris also wrote a super-cool little ticker for Windows that would alert interested parties when there were new posts.

While most of it has been lost to history at this point, I was amused/delighted/horrified to discover that the good folks at archive.org had actually preserved a few pages. The logo, sadly, appears to be lost, either by the vagaries of the program that collected the information or by the good judgement of a censor somewhere. But here are a few bits that historians, masochists, and the easily amused might enjoy having a look at:

A few other horrors I pulled from the archive:

Make Software? Make Money? Help Cure Cancer

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My friend and occasional boss Seth Dillingham is gearing up again for the Pan-Massachusetts Challenge, an annual bicycle ride fund raiser that benefits the Dana-Farber Institute, a research organization that battles cancer.

Part of Seth’s fund raising each year includes a big Macintosh software auction, for which he’s now collecting donations. If you make Mac software and wouldn’t mind donating a few licenses to a very worthy cause, give him a hand! If you don’t create software, you can still support his efforts in other ways. Please do what you can to help!

Stupid Guy Trip VI

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I’m just back from the sixth Stupid Guy Trip, an annualish gathering of my brother, me, and a few of our oldest and dearest. This year Chris McMains, Daniel Priest, Mike Brack, Ben Mengden, Ross Richie, Jason Young, and Jonathan Hunter made up the roster. More than ever this year, it was an experience I can’t really do justice to in a weblog post. A few of the highlights, however, were these:

  • A visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Great collection housed in amazing architecture. Most notable was the giant, bird-wing shaped sunscreen that opened and closed over the solarium several times a day, but the rest of the space was fantastic as well.
  • Nearly getting into a fight with some people vying for a parking space near the mob scene that was RiverSplash. They noticed the license plates on the rental car, and shouted repeatedly at us “Go back to Idaho, you potato-*****,” which was a wholly novel epithet for us.
  • Touring the Lakefront Brewery. Our guide was funny and personable, the beer was good, and the company excellent.
  • The Safe House, a spy-themed bar. To gain entry, one has to know the password or perform an embarrassing act in front of the video cameras that pipe your image into the bar ahead of you. Once cleared, a bookcase swings aside and admits you to the establishment proper, which features all sorts of cold war/James Bond/spy memorabilia, as well as a “secret passage” that locks behind you as you go through it. (I ended up having to exit the bar altogether and lobby the doorkeeper for re-admittance.)
  • Seeing a Brewers game. Miller Park is beautifully constructed, and we had a great view of the ball field from our relatively-cheap seats. It was especially enjoyable to see how seriously fans there take their tailgating; we could see the smoke rising from all the grills from half a mile away, and actually getting in required dodging a number of thrown beanbags from an inexplicably popular game that was played throughout the parking lot. Plus, it’s the only ball park I’ve been to with a slide, though it was sadly not open to the public.
  • Trocadero, a European-style cafe where we enjoyed a fantastic brunch twice. The service was great and the food amazing. (I got to try ratatouille: yum!)
  • Playing full-contact whiffle ball in a park near Jonathan’s apartment. We attracted a fair number of spectators, a couple of injuries, and innumerable grass stains.
  • The biggest highlight for me, however, is always the company and conversations. I count many of these friendships in decades now, have been through a ton with these guys, and am very grateful indeed to be able to carve time out of our lives to nurture those relationships. (Though from the outside, it may be hard to distinguish “nurturing relationships” from “insulting each other’s mothers”.)

A special thanks to Jonathan for hosting our octet of malodorous males in his efficiency apartment.

Tamale Party

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A highlight of this past weekend was a tamale-making party at my friend James Buratti’s house that he and his wife Jen hosted. Tamale-making is a ritual that holds a certain mystique in Mexican culture, with recipes and techniques handed down from generation to generation and horror stories of young people’s apprenticeships in the kitchen during the process. While I adore tamales, I’d never gotten to be a part of their production, so was quite excited to get to participate and to be a part of that cultural institution.

Jen and James had things well organized, so we got right to work. They were each trying different approaches to the process: Jen using the traditional techniques and recipes handed down through her family, James working with a recipe from the grocery store that looked good and trying every time and labor-saving innovation he could think of.

The first step was mixing the masa. While you can get a big bag of masa from the grocery store pretty cheaply, it needs further preparation to be used for tamales. We mixed in salt, chili powder, and alarming amounts of lard and vegetable shortening, working the mixture until it had about the consistency of hummus and would float in water. We tried doing so both by hand and using a mixer. The latter produced a fluffier masa, and was certainly less work than doing it by hand. On the downside, one didn’t get the lovely hand-conditioning benefits that the lard provides for practitioners of the manual technique.

Next we spread the masa onto the corn husks, which had been prepared by trimming off the tops and soaking them in water. (Again, you can get bags of corn husks at your better grocery stores if you don’t happen to have a corn field handy.) We started using spoons and fingers to do the spreading, but James, who had been drywalling a lot lately, pulled out a few different sizes of putty knives, which eased the process considerably for me, though they got mixed reviews from others.

Next, we spread fillings in a line and wrapped the whole husk/masa assembly around the filling core like paper around a pencil. The most traditional filling for tamales is actually pulled from a whole cooked pig head, but fortunately nobody was feeling quite that traditional. We settled for spiced pork and beef fillings, with a few raisins added for sweetness in some of them. (Later, beans and cheese and chicken fillings also arrived, though that was after Liam and I had headed home for Christmas decorating. Some of the best tamales I’ve ever had also had strips of poblano peppers and cheese for the center.)

Finally, the finished tamales were steamed for about 45 minutes. And while I thought I loved tamales before, I must say that the ones I have had paled in comparison to these freshly cooked ones — hot, fluffy and delicious!

My only complaint about the whole process is that, as with many things, once I saw what goes into them, my enthusiasm for tamales was diminished a bit. I’m not a fan of lard in general, and watching big blocks of it going into the masa caused a disturbance in the force that I’m sure my cardiologist felt all the way across town. James and I discussed the possibility of substituting olive oil, which might make slightly less-savory tamales, but would certainly make me feel better about eating them!

James took lots of photos of the process, which you can see here. Thanks, Burattis, for putting together such a great event!

UPDATE: Here’s the post from James & Jen’s weblog.