Hasta La Gadget!

In Los Angeles, food trucks are heralded as “the new incubators of culinary innovation.“

Vendors line the streets in neighborhoods all over town, offering customers everything from Korean tacos to lobster rolls to wood-oven pizza.

But in other cities, such as Pittsburgh and Chicago, food trucks are marginalized. No street food culture exists, because the people who live there simply aren’t exposed to the possibility of a nontraditional dining experience.

That’s because in many of the major cities in which food trucks are outside the norm, strict laws exist that prohibit these businesses from taking root.

In fact, some of these cities keep food trucks away from brick-and-mortar competition with a 500-foot pole.

That’s the case in Pittsburgh, where the city mandates that food trucks can’t operate within 500 feet of a business that sells a similar product (food trucks also are legally required to move every 30 minutes).

In Cranston, R.I., food trucks can’t be within 1,000 feet of any restaurant.

And in Chicago, food trucks can’t operate within 200 feet of any business that serves or prepares food — from the city’s finest steakhouse to the neighborhood 7-Eleven. To enforce this rule, the city requires food trucks to install GPS tracking devices.

These restrictive laws forced food-truck entrepreneurs Kristin and Greg Burke out of Illinois.

For several years, the Burkes could be found at the helm of their popular food-truck business, “Schnitzel King,” which was famous for its variety of Chicago-style schnitzel sandwiches sold throughout city and around the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus.

“We had a strong, loyal following,” Kristin said. “Unfortunately, because of the restrictive food-truck laws we couldn’t make enough money to survive and support our growing family.”

The Burkes moved to North Dakota earlier this year — Schnitzel King is no more.

Robert Frommer, an attorney for the D.C.-based Institute for Justice, is representing the duo in the case Burke v. city of Chicago, a lawsuit challenging Chicago’s 200-foot limit and the GPS tracking requirement.

“Opening and operating a food truck in Chicago is somewhere between difficult and impossible,” Frommer said. “The city has put together a menagerie of rules that seem almost intended to make it as hard as possible to open up and be successful.”

Frommer said one of the main drivers behind Chicago’s stringent food-truck regulations is the influence of the city’s major restaurant groups. In 2010, the Chicago Tribune uncovered notes from the Illinois Restaurant Association revealing the group’s support of the 200-foot rule, in addition to much more onerous rules, such as requiring all food truck owners to have already established a brick-and-mortar restaurant in order to operate, which didn’t make it into the final ordinance.

The push for harsh regulations in favor of established brick-and-mortar businesses also is the case in Pittsburgh and Cranston, where strict food-truck regulations exist solely to protect the local restaurant industry.

But when it comes to food trucks and restaurants, it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

“The difference between L.A. and other cities is that it addresses public safety concerns and then steps back to let the people decide what they want to eat,” Frommer said.

“As a result, L.A. has not only one of the best food-truck markets in the country, but also one of the best restaurant scenes as well.”

Politicians across the country who have embraced heavy restrictions on who can serve food where should look West and take notice of Los Angeles’ dual brick-and-mortar and mobile restaurant landscape.

Whether it’s made in a deli or a truck, consumers should have the right to buy the food they love, and chefs should have the right to prepare it for them.

The fact that “Star Trek” costars George Takei and William Shatner don’t get along in real life is a sad thing for Trekkies to face.

While visiting “Real Time With Bill Maher,” Takei addressed his longtime feud with the original Captain Kirk. Maher joked, “But he’s Canadian, he should love you!” before Takei went on to explain how, for him, Shatner is the exception to that myth. “Canadians have a certain image of being even-tempered and friendly and all that,” Takei said. “He is a person who is that way with himself … he is very self-centered.”

Takei said that despite their disagreements they still acted like professionals on set, though “with a lot of difficulty.” Check out the full clip above.

 The leaked component that’s being touted as the front screen of the upcoming iPhone 6 got a good workout in a video test by Youtube regular MKBHD (Marques Brownlee) when it first broke cover, and now Brownlee is back with a new video that takes the durability tests even further. This second round involves exposing the supposedly super-strong sapphire-based material to a true test of… Read More

Dr. James McLurkin has a swarm of robots. Individually, they’re not that smart, but a crateful of them behaves in some very complex ways, like the bees that inspired them. Gizmodo got to see the wee machines in action, and while they’re adorable, they represent some serious future bot capabilities.

Read more…

First you have to decide whether to listen to me or not: keep in mind, kemosabes, that Stephen King has sold 350 million novels, and I have sold 11.

So you are forewarned that size matters, and forearmed with no reason to really believe a nobody novelist like me (http://www.amazon.com/Book-OKells-Mother-Journals-Eleanor-ebook/dp/B00KZ52XNC/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1405780146&sr=1-3&keywords=mother+nature). But for a writer–any writer–sales are ephemeral. The only thing that counts is the words on the page. They either live on… or die horribly, the way characters often do in a Stephen King novel.

So here we go, Trojans. Teaching a writing class last week, I went to the top of the bestseller lists and did a blind taste test of Stephen King’s “Mr. Mercedes.” Here’s the third paragraph from the new novel:

“When Augie reached the top of the wide, steep drive leading to the big auditorium, he saw a cluster of at least two dozen people already waiting outside the rank of doors, some standing, most sitting. Posts strung with yellow DO NOT CROSS tape had been set up, creating a complicated passage that doubled back on itself, mazelike.”

Surprise! I used this paragraph to highlight what I consider bad writing. Only later did I realize Stephen King makes these mistakes on purpose for reasons he explains in his how-to “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.” Give me a minute on the road with “Mr. Mercedes” before you strike out in a new direction.

Strike One: “a wide, steep drive leading to the big auditorium” is vague enough to mean almost anything and therefore means nothing. What’s a big auditorium? What’s a steep drive? And why bother with those generic, indistinct details to begin with on the first page of a novel?

Strike Two: what in the name of all that’s scary is a “rank of doors”? Is it some kind of hierarchy or grading system or a band from the Sixties? I have no idea, and if you’re honest, neither do you. It’s a stinkeroo.

Strike three: “a complicated passage that doubled back on itself, mazelike.” I immediately thought of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” one of King’s best concoctions, but this was not a maze at all. The “complicated passage,” as King writes on, was designed “to cram as many people as possible into as small a space as possible,” the way they do in “movie theaters and the bank.”

In fact, the passage is not only not “mazelike” but almost exactly the opposite: a line, like the ones you see at airport security and DisneyWorld, that moves you to the front with no chance of losing yourself because you have no choice. The crammees are in a “cluster” to begin with, rendering the notion of a maze completely incoherent.

A day after the class, a student named Donna Davis gave me King’s “On Writing,” a book full of useful alarums and exhortations about the craft. In the memoir, King decries “lazy writing” and waxes on about “the power of compact, descriptive language.”

“For me,” King writes, “a good description usually consists of a few well-chosen details that will stand for everything else.”

And this: “The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.”

And this: “If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition.”

Wide? Steep? Big? Doors mysteriously ranked? Mazelike non-maze? They prickle me not.

“It’s also important to know what to describe,” King writes about writing, “and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story….”

Within King’s wide, steep discussion of writing there are answer to the big riddle: the story is the only thing that matters. Not words–but story, story, story.

Storytelling “makes up for a great many stylistic faults, as the work of wooden-prose writers like Theodore Dreiser and Ayn Rand shows….”

In other words–and words are all we have as readers–Stephen King has decided that nothing should get in the way of the story. That means words become disposable, an inconvenience, and that throwaway lines are not always thrown away.

That’s just wrong. And here’s why.

Do you think the great painters didn’t care about the paint in their work? Do you think they were willing to let an inferior brushstroke stand just so they could punch the time clock and go home?

Would a great director with final cut allow a bad edit–or the wrong music–to dilute his film?

Would a great composer let the wrong note stand to get on with his “main job.”

No and no and absolutely not–and we as art and movie and music lovers would see the problem immediately because these are mediums where the artist can’t hide. The wrong note cries out for help.

Writers get a pass because–I’m really not sure why writers get a pass: writing fiction is a textual, audible, and visual experience. If anything, the words matter more than paint or film or even music, because words are all we have as writers and readers. Words have many layers and levels of meaning and the writer needs to deploy them consciously. Every word matters in serious fiction.

This helps to explain why Stephen King does not always get the literary cred that he wants. He’s a bestselling storyteller, but for a book to last “big auditoriums” and “mazelike” are just not going to cut it. His stories can be mind-blowing, but for me it takes movies like “The Shawshank Redemption” and “The Green Mile” to bring his ideas to life. If you’re going to write a book about the craft of writing your advice can’t be to skip the details.

It hurts to say this because I love everything Stephen King stands for. I love that he’s everyman. I love that he has a house next to his house this is stuffed with books–a library that he owns next door. I love that he gets $400 per week walking around money and that he “banks” what he doesn’t spend. I love that he drove all the way from Down East to Burlington, Vermont, to watch the University of Maine’s women’s basketball team tangle with the University of Vermont Catamounts, a game I was broadcasting on radio. I love that he came back from a horrible accident after he was hit by a car when walking on a road. There is nothing not to like about Stephen King.

But I’ve never loved his writing, and now I know why. It’s at least a small comfort to know that he has a reason for writing so badly on the first page of his new novel. Who has time these days to make sure every word counts?

In a way, you can’t blame Stephen King for his shortcomings as a writer. Like his audience, he just wants to find out what happens next.