Hasta La Gadget!

Queer community building in 2015 happens, more than ever before, in an online context.

In light of this, a new app called “Q” aims to create the biggest and most all-inclusive queer social networking platform that allows all people identifying as queer to connect, no matter what their gender. While other queer apps tend to be for specific kinds of bodies or meeting people for specific kinds of connections, “Q” aims to complicate the way that the queer community meets and interacts with one another in online space.

Creator Eric Cervini decided to build the app out of a frustration with how most apps made for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community tended to be for white, masculine gay men looking for sex.

“When we log on, we’re constantly told to be a man, to have a perfect body, to act or to talk a certain way, to be someone other than who we truly are,” Cervini said in a press release. “We deserve better. ‘Q’ is open to anyone who identifies as queer, and we rely on our members to tell us how we can be as inclusive and user-friendly as possible.”

Users on “Q” are required to display their first name and a photo, and are encouraged to share their stories through “memoirs” that have no character limit. As “Q” is currently in the early stages of development, Cervini emhpasized that changes and developments would be made based on the experiences and feedback of the “Q” community.

Want to learn more about “Q”? The app is currently engaged in a Kickstarter campaign. Head here for more information.

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Modestly put, this is the best cocktail I have ever made. One of the best I have ever tasted, strawberry or not. It uses homemade mango tequila and a strawberry-pepper shrub.

To get that Mango Tequila, you do need to make it at home. You can find a recipe on YouTube but I recommend the technique in Infused by Susan Elia MacNeal. Basically, it’s a standard 750 ml bottle of tequila, 3 cups of diced fresh mango, and ¼ to 1 cup of sugar syrup. Mix them, let them stand in glass container for a month, then strain into another glass bottle and let that mature for at least one more month. For many, many lovely ideas you do want to scan the lovely, lively pages of Infused.

The Strawberry-Pepper Shrub is inspired by Shrubs by Michael Dietsch. My recipe follows below, and I have adjusted both the quantities and the technique. But the core idea is from Michael.

Here’s the recipe for the cocktail itself. It does use a new orange liqueur I’ve discovered, Liqueur à L’Orange au Cognac, a French product developed in 1959. It’s become my favorite orange ingredient with a deep flavor that does not bite you back as do so many unsophisticated orange liqueurs.

The Tequila Mango Strawberry Pepper Shrub Wonder

Yield: 1 large cocktail

Ingredients:

• 2 ounces mango tequila
• 2 ounces strawberry-pepper shrub
• 1 ounce simple syrup
• 1 ounce orange liquor [ideally Liqueur à L’Orange]

Preparation:
Place all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice. Shake vigorously for 30 seconds and pour into a chilled glass.

Source: Brian O’Rourke

Photo Information: Canon T2i, 18-55mm Macro Lens, f/5.6, 1/50th second, ISO-3200

Strawberry Pepper Shrub

Yield: 2+ cups

Ingredients:

• 2 cups strawberries, hulled and quartered
• ½ cup sugar [or more to taste]
• 2 tablespoons peppercorns, crushed with mortar and pestle
• ½ cup apple cider vinegar [or more if you prefer]

Preparation:

Place the strawberries and sugar in a metal bowl. Using a pastry cutter, chop through the berries to mash them and mix with the sugar. Add the crushed pepper and stir to mix. At this point, taste test and if you desire add a little more sugar or pepper.

Cover the bowl and refrigerate for a day.

Remove the bowl, taste test again, and adjust again. Pour the bowl contents into blender, add the vinegar and process. Taste test, yet again, adding more vinegar if you desire. Your preferences here are your guide. What you do want to taste is the pepper. It will be dominated by the strawberries and vinegar at first, but the pepper should ultimately rise to the occasion and should provide finish.

Put the blended and adjusted contents back into a bowl and refrigerate for another day. This gives everything time to meld for 24 hours and let you get every bit of berry flavor into your shrub.

Now, you have a decision to make. You can use this shrub as it stands, thick and viscous. Or you can create a very fine syrup by sieving the contents to eliminate the solids. I’ve done both, enjoyed both. If you are a purist and want no solid sensation on your tongue as your drink, then you do want to sieve. But, when you do, press hard to extract every drop you can get.

For many more cookbook reviews and hundreds of excellent recipes, please visit Suzi’s Blog at www.cookingbythebook.com. While you are there, you can learn how we use the kitchen for culinary teambuilding.

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Bill O’Reilly is wrong. Rap is not to blame for the current crisis in American Christianity. Blame Elvis, that’s what I say. He is the main culprit in the current cultural transformation shaking the foundations of religion in America. Elvis Presley’s appearance on television in the late 1950s signaled the beginning of the end of Christianity in America, and birthed a religious rival to the Christian churches that is now, finally, winning the hearts and minds and souls of more and more Americans.

The news is aflutter with surveys, commentaries, interviews, confessionals, and reports describing the decline of Christians in America. According to a new Pew study, a spiritual earthquake is dramatically shaking up the landscape of religion in the US. More atheists, more agnostics, more “nones,” more switching, more mixing, more interfaith marriages, more “others” — it all adds up to one stark new reality: less Jesus in American attitudes toward religion.

This is a shocker given the incredibly Christ-ful history of the nation. We are a Christian nation (yes, primarily though not exclusively Protestant), or at least have been from the earliest stirrings of independence until this sudden and disturbing turn away from Christian identity. The story of “religion” in America has always been mainly and primarily the story of “Christianity” in America. The reports about “market share” (with the requisite winners and losers in that model, which translates in Christian terms to affiliation with and attendance in churches, denominations, etc.) and losing “faith” (a category believed to be neutral today but clearly shaped by Christian theology) only blind us to the real story here.

And of course to get to the real story here and now, we’ve got to go back and look in the past for the seeds that explain our present. Which brings me back to Elvis, the progenitor of the religious changes we are seeing today. Many have written about his cultural influence in twentieth century America, and even about his religious background and his status as a cultural American icon after his death (see the brilliant Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus, for example). But what I propose here is that Elvis’s shaking hips and curled lips unleashed two conflicting religious cultures that pitted Christian cultural authority, charisma, and institutions against sacred popular cultures with multiple sources of authority, potent forms of charisma, and a preference for experience and insight over dogma and institutions.

America is different after Elvis. The combination of sexual energy in the performance and its reception by his young audience; sheer pleasure in listening to this particular form of music; and rebellious effervescence liberating fans from conventional cultures in place at the time was a game changer. That young entertainer who magically blended different musical cultures together, including Southern forms of African American and white blues and country, Christian gospel and Pentecostal expression, helped to initiate the rock and roll cultural awakening that transformed the second half of the twentieth century. Many Christians at the time perceived in his lascivious gyrations and obscene gestures a clear and present danger to American society, something so vile, so repulsive, so harmful, his appearances and growing popularity motivated them to publicly decry and attack the young man.

What made this moment, the Elvis moment, different from previous Christian interventions in times of perceived moral crisis, was of course mass media. Radios, phonographs, and television, along with printed materials and concert venues, accelerated and diversified the imprint and influence of Elvis in American lives. The Christian attacks and condemnations directed at Elvis generated a conservative Christian religious culture explicitly obsessed with the new (now old) media’s power to corrupt the youth and blow the lid off of youthful, and especially young female, sexuality.

Like never before, Christians reacted to this unprecedented popular threat with apocalyptic cries of end times and devil worship, and looked for ways to thwart, suppress, and exorcize Elvis and the other demons taking over and perverting the bodies and minds of the American youth, as well as the social body more generally. The culture wars peculiar to the second half of the twentieth century are intimately connected to the rise of this policing Christian religious culture obsessed with the dangers of popular entertainment and purging it of its evils.

The religious sentiments and will to cultural power that helped lay the groundwork for conservative Christian influence on matters of public morality in this period begins with Elvis and everything he represented in the late 1950s. This influence, felt keenly in the 1970s with the rise of the increasingly politically active Religious Right — on the frontlines of our long-running culture wars — has taken its toll on the American psyche.

The report suggests that the culture wars are coming to an end, and the big loser in the aftermath will be both the Religious Right and Christians more generally. More and more Americans, and especially the Baby Boomers as they become senior citizens, and the middle aging Millennial generation, are fed up with buzz-kill Christians who see figures like Elvis, or Harry Potter, or Beyonce, as mortal dangers corroding a puritanical American moral core and who want to impose their own strict, bible-based value systems on American choices.

But Elvis also initiated another religious cultural revival, one that was also tied to his early appearances and performances, and to the responses of the faithful devoted to this popular icon. In other words, the protesting Christians were right, they did have competition and something to fear when Elvis the Pelvis sang and swayed.

This was not, however, obscene and profane as the Christians complained. It was for many revelatory and sacred. The beat and the rhythm, the intonations and gestures, the vibrations and the energy, the words and the sentiments — all the tangible and intangible elements of Elvis’s performance add up to more than their parts; and the reception of the performance by listeners and watchers, whether live or via radio or television, is equally multifaceted and mysterious.

Elvis made it clear that Religion stands no chance against the gods of popular culture. Yes there were other popular singers and screen idols before Elvis, but after Elvis the viability and legitimacy sacred popular cultures is secured and implanted in the youth cultural sensibilities of the Baby Boomers. Elvis was more popular than Jesus — or at least on equal footing — and the moral teachings he preached in songs, performances, conversations, and lifestyle choices, guided the flocks clamoring to see him, hear him, touch him.

The ascendance of Elvis in the late 1950s signaled a cultural awakening, a transitional period from an old and outdated social order to a new and different one that makes more sense, and allows people to make more meaningful sense of their lives and purpose here. These awakenings are often accompanied by great outbursts of religious revivalism and intense scrutiny of self and society. In previous periods of cultural awakening (the historian William G. McLoughlin identifies three previous cultural awakenings in American history), the ultimate outcome of the cultural transition is some kind of reaffirmation of a Christian based social order.

With Elvis Presley, America’s search for a new social order began. His popularity tapped into a youth culture that was primed and ready to break free from the old order as propagated by parents, schools, and churches. It was also open to discover new sources of moral authority and sacred experience, a predisposition that led to increasing experimentation with drugs but also intimate religious engagements with popular cultures associated with music, film, and television, initially.

With each swing of his hips, Elvis rattled the Christian stranglehold on America values and appealed to a very different spiritual sensibility in Americans, one that is not aroused by church music or sermons, but by rock concerts and fan magazines. The hip shakes of course were only the beginning. It took a few decades to come to pass — the protracted and increasingly political culture wars only delayed the inevitable outcome of a brand new religious playing field. But as Pew and other recent surveys indicate, it is here now. Though dominant with the highest numbers, Christianity is not the only game in town, Christ not the only King who rules.

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Archaeologists working in northwestern Kenya say they’ve unearthed the world’s oldest stone tools yet — and the discovery has thrown them for a loop.

Dating back 3.3 million years, the artifacts push back the archaeological record of tool technology by a staggering 700,000 years. That suggests tools were being fashioned even before the emergence of Homo — the genus to which Neanderthals and modern humans belong (scroll down for photos).

“This discovery is important because the traditional view for decades was that the earliest stone tools were made by the first members of Homo, both dating to around 2.4 to 2.6 million years ago,” Dr. Sonia Harmand, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University and the lead researcher, told The Huffington Post in an email. “The idea was that our lineage alone took the cognitive leap of hitting stones together to strike off sharp flakes and that this was the foundation of our evolutionary success.”

(Story continues below slideshow.)

The first tools were discovered by chance in July 2011 during an archaeological expedition in the Nachukui Formation, a rocky outcrop in the desert badlands on the west bank of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. The researchers said they had strayed into an area off their intended path, according to a written statement issued by The Earth Institute at Columbia University, but “could feel that something was special about this particular place. By teatime, local Turkana tribesman Sammy Lokorodi had helped [us] spot what [we] had come searching for.”

By the end of their excavation, the team had found 149 artifacts at the site, including sharp-edged tools measuring six inches in length and weighing six-and-a-half pounds, as well as flakes that were struck off from the tools and rocks that could have served as anvils.

The researchers dated the artifacts by analyzing the magnetic minerals in layers of rock above, around, and below where the artifacts were found. This paleomagnetism technique is used to date artifacts that don’t contain carbon. The minerals act like a sort of “magnetic tape recorder,” reflecting the periodic changes in the Earth’s magnetic field.

Dr. Alison Brooks, a George Washington University anthropologist who was not involved in the research, called the finds “very exciting” in an interview with Science News. “They could not have been created by natural forces … [and] the dating evidence is fairly solid.”

Who made the tools? Scientists aren’t sure.

“We can be fairly certain it was a member of our lineage and not a fossil great ape, as modern apes have never been seen knapping stone tools in the wild,” Dr. Jason Lewis, an archaeologist at Rutgers Univeristy and one of the researchers who made the discovery, told The Huffington Post in an email. “Which of the members of our lineage it was, however, remains to be determined.”

The tool-maker might have been Kenyanthropus platytops, a 3.3-million-year-old hominin whose fossils were found less than a mile from the tools. Other possibilities include: Australopithecus afarensis — another hominin species that was around at the time, the most famous of which is “Lucy” — or a hominin of the Homo genus that has yet to be discovered.

“The Lomekwi tools are sophisticated enough that they are likely not from the first time a hominin tried to knap a stone tool,” Dr. Harmand said in the email. “We think there are older, even more rudimentary stone tools out there to be found, and we will be looking for them over the coming field seasons.”

An article describing the research, “3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya” is to be published in the journal Nature on May 21, 2015.

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