According to CNN Health, the McNuggets sold in the U.S. (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain a chemical preservative called tertiary butylhydroquinone (tBHQ) – a petroleum-based product. The Nuggets our U.S. McDonald’s sell also contain dimethylpolysiloxane which is an ‘anti-foaming agent’ that is commonly used in Silly Putty.

McNuggets sold in Britain (170 calories, 9 grams of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain neither tBHQ or dimethylpolysiloxane. Ruth Winter, author of A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, reports, “I would certainly choose the British nuggets over the [U.S. version].”

Lisa McComb, who handles McDonald’s global media relations, informs us that dimethylpolysiloxane is used in U.S. McNuggets for safety reasons – to keep the oils used in cooking from foaming. The chemical, a form of silicone, is quite common in cosmetics manufacture and Silly Putty. And, in fact, the World Health Organization completed a literature review of animal studies on dimethylpolysiloxane and found no adverse health effects with its use.

McDonald’s limits the amount of vegetable oils and animal fats in the McNugget to .02 percent – tBHQ is a preservative for these oils. This is not a significant amount, but according to A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives, just one gram (1/13th of an ounce) of tBHQ can cause nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse. So maybe there is something to the health reports that filter in from parents of toddlers high on McNuggets…

McDonald’s reported that the minor differences we find are are due to taste tests performed in the U.S. and the U.K.. Americans seem to like their McNuggets coated, and then cooked, while Brits enjoy their Nuggets cooked and then coated. Not only does this ordering alter the flavor, but Britain’s Nuggets are also then able to absorb less oil and be processed with less fat.

“You would find that if you looked at any of our core food items, you’d see very little regional differences. We do taste testing of all our food items on an ongoing basis,” Lisa McComb recently reported in a news brief. McComb currently oversees the media relations for over 32,000 McDonald’s locations in 117 countries.

Some of the differences are subtle – for example, U.S. McNuggets are listed as including “spices” whereas the U.K. McNuggets specify that they include pepper and ground celery.

But what about the bigger differences? New York University professor and author of What to Eat, Marion Nestle, says the small amounts of butylhydroquinone and dimethylpolysiloxane in U.S. McNuggets are unlikely to pose any health risk. However, Nestle, like most other health-conscious food advisers, recommends not eating foods that include ingredients you cannot pronounce.

As most American’s with a television set in their home remember, McD’s launched their ‘all-white-meat’ McNugget in 2003 after a federal judge called the old Nuggets “a McFrankenstein creation of various elements not utilized by the home cook.” When the Nuggets changed, however, tBHQ and dimethylpolysiloxane stuck around. Cook’s Illustrated magazine founder and publisher, Christopher Kimball, suspects the chemicals are necessary for U.S. McNuggets to maintain their familiar shape and texture.

And when recent health/cook celebs like Jamie Oliver highlight the vast number of McNuggets consumed by U.S. elementary school children, one has to wonder if overdoing any particular food item — or just processed junk in general — leads to some of the epidemic health problems we find in the United States.

Oliver succeeded to some degree in the U.K. with his Ministry of Food… but were Brits ever as bad off as the S.A.D. (Standard American Diet) currently is? And what about our food quality in general? Kimball (like Oliver) reports that “The regulations in Europe, in general, around food are much stricter than in the U.S.”

As so many others have pointed out (Fast Food Nation, Diet For a Dead Planet, Food, Inc., In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Supersize Me, The Cove, The End of the Line) there seems to be a very big problem here, and it extends far beyond the U.S. chemical concoctions in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets…

Burlesque Star Miss Dirty Martini

Blank Mag are great fans of burlesque. We love its sexiness and it style and its music.
Popularised by stars like Dita von Teese it harks back to the spectacle and glamour of the old times, and is a nostalgic counterpart to the see-it-all nature of porn. It is all about the tease so so but you may surprised to learn that originally it didn’t have any stripping at all.

Burlesque has its origins in 19th century British music halls, where the term referred to a theatrical entertainment of a satirical comic bent.

Beginning in the 1840s, burlesque comedy skits entertained the lower and middle classes by making fun of (or “burlesquing”) the operas, plays and social habits of the upper classes.

In the 1860s shapely, underdressed women were introduced to keep audiences interested. In the Victorian age, when proper women went to great lengths to hide their physical form beneath bustles, hoops and frills, the idea of young ladies appearing onstage in tights was a great thrill.

Brit Lydia Thompson was burlesque’s first star and was instrumental in exporting burlesque to America. In the late 1860s her burlesque troupe – the “British Blondes” – became New York’s biggest theatrical sensation. Their first hit was Ixion, a mythological spoof that had women in revealing tights playing men’s roles. Underdressed women playing sexual aggressors, combining good looks with impertinent comedy – in a production written and managed by a woman, unthinkable! No wonder men and adventurous wives turned out in droves, making Thompson’s troupe the hottest ticket in American show business. Her first New York season grossed over $370,000.

Lydia’s success launched a US burlesque explosion. Mabel Saintley became America’s first native-born burlesque star, when she feminised the popular minstrel show as “Mme. Rintz’s Female Minstrels”.

By now burlesque was a mix of male performer comedy and a chorus girl leg show with song and dance. It was all very tame compared to now – but a bit of leg back then drove audiences wild.

In France they had their own take on it with the cancan and the spectacular music halls of the Folies Bergère and the Moulin Rouge.

For the first part of the 20th century burlesque shows flourished on both sides of the Atlantic.

But by the 1920s, film and radio was eating into burlesque’s popularity. So the strip tease was introduced as a desperate bid to offer something that vaudeville, film and radio could not.

Strippers had to walk a fine line between titillation and propriety – going too far (let alone “all the way”) could land them in jail for corrupting public morals. The strippers soon dominated burlesque, and their routines became increasingly graphic.

To avoid total nudity but still give the audience what it wanted, the ladies covered their groins with flimsy G-strings and used “pasties” to cover their nipples. This was usually enough to keep the cops at bay, even though pasties were far more vulgar that a plain naked breast. Stars of this era were fan dancer Sally Rand and Gypsy Rose Lee.

By now men went to burlesque shows to watch women strip – period. The comedy was no longer a key attraction. The more the gals took off, the more the audiences liked it. At a time when fear of personal scandal and sexual disease were rampant, burlesque was a relatively safe source of titillation for married men and youngsters alike.

In the latter half of the 20^th century its popularity  waned but we are glad to see that it has now made a successful revival.

Viva burlesque.

Miljenko Parserisas Bukovic is a newspaper vendor from Valparaiso in Chile who has spent the last ten years – and about $3000 – having 82 portraits of the actress tattooed on his torso and arms.

Mr Bukovic, 56, started his collection after watching  Miss Roberts’ Oscar-winning performance in the film Erin Brockovich. He says all the tattoos are inspired by scenes in the film

(man to woman via text)

Happy Days are Not To Be …It Really Isn’t You It’s Me.
(man to woman via)

Dear X. I know I have been a cow and I am sorry. I know you are coming home tomorrow but I will not be there to see you. David and I are getting married and I will not be seeing you any more. Deep down inside of me I love you, but I love David even more. Bye Y xx
(woman to man via letter)

Happy Birthday! Enclosed is your birthday present which I hope you like ….I am thinking of you especially today …because I have decided that although I love you I don’t feel that you are God’s One for me. Anyway I relay hope you like the present and that you have a fantastic birthday.
(woman to man via letter)

Dear X
There are things that I love so much about you but there are things I hate too. I guess you should know that I think more about the things that bother me about you now.

The time you slaughtered that lobster.

The ways you shouted and clapped at those cows to get them out of the road . Why couldn’t you have just waited for them to pass? We could have missed the cinema…

The haphazard way you chop vegetables.

Your constant negativity.

It took me three coats of paint to paint over where you left your phone number on my wall in red pen. I know that I was redecorating but it was a complete waste of paint.

y

Do you have a great break up letter?  send it to

The celebrity cookery show, which featured DJ Nihal and former athlete Tessa Sanderson, averaged 4.673 million viewers and a 22.3% share between 8pm and 9pm, according to unofficial overnights.

“Goals don’t mean anything. They’re mostly crap. There is a level above goals which is vision. Visualise your self in the future as you want to be. male that into a picture. Then step into that picture. Do this constantly.”

“Belief takes work. It takes persistence. But if you believe it works, it starts to work.”

http://www.viceland.com/wp/2010/04/streetwatch-miami/

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A man’s home is his castle so says the English phrase. But his home can also be his gaff, his shack, his dig, his roost, and his crib.

The English language is constantly evolving. And on urban streets it evolves at an alarming rate. With new words and phrases emerging al the time.

Anyone who watches The Wire will attest to that. The street kids and drug kings speak English, but not as most people know it. The language is peppered with slang that make it almost impossible to understand. Its creator David Simon’s goal was to never dumb down the dialogue like on network TV, but to use it so you could pick it up over time.

It took me about 5 episodes to work out that “hoppers” were kids that worked the “corners” I imagine they are called that because of their flighty nature, hopping from one leg to another, always looking out for trouble / cops, although I don’t know for sure.

I love that they call money “cheese”. Again not sure why, because they see themselves as rats? I dunno know.

4 seasons in and I’m still having trouble working out what they are saying.

The British Library may not be able to help you decipher all the dialogue in The Wire, but their latest exhibition will help you understand how the English language evolves.

Evolving English explores the English language in all its national and international diversity.

The exhibition places iconic books and manuscripts alongside everyday texts and media to show the many social, cultural and historical strands from which the language has been woven.

Treasures such as the only surviving manuscript of Beowulf, Shakespeare 'quartos', the King James Bible, Dr Johnson’s dictionary and recordings of famous speeches by Churchill, Gandhi and Mandela are on show— together with early examples of advertising posters, lists of slang, early newspapers from around the world, trading records, comics, adverts, children’s books, dialect recordings, text messages and web pages.

Visitors to the exhibition can record their voice and have it added to the British Library audio archive as a piece of the collection. This will provide a snapshot of voices in 2010 for future analysis in the decades to come.

Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices is at the British Library until 3 April 2011. Entry is free.

British Library

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