on bovril and the nature of things

it occurred to me the other day whilst reading james herriot (who, i'll have you know, is actually named something like alfie wight, or "elf counsel undead living being"), i happened to notice the conspicuous use of the word "bovril". well, i said to myself, what exactly can be a 'bovril'? is it a bit like a weevil or other pestilential beastie? or perhaps it is some obscure part of a sailing vessel (as in "avast ye, hoist the bovril!"). but no, i found out that bovril is in fact (or at least in theory) a food. according to unilever, it arrived at its unusual appellation by the following means:

"the name Bovril comes from an unusual word Johnston [the product's inventor] found in a book. 'vril' was 'an electric fluid' and he combined it with the first two letters of the latin word for beef 'bos'. "

what the hell kind of book was this?!? and why is a thing theoretically related to beef being named after "an electric fluid"? never mind. i'd rather just have a few laughs looking at some other absurdly-named foods i turned up after this little incident. the hypothetical goal? to find out which nation has the stupidest set of names for food. the data, and then the results:

the UNITED KINGDOM
as well as all the classic british haute cuisine (e.g. spotted dick, crumpets, "mushy" peas, and toad in the hole to name but a few), there were a few packaged favorites.

1. bovril (above), a.k.a. the amazing johnston's fluid beef (1870)
2. marmite (some kind of deranged vegetable spread created in 1902)
3. twiglets ("a snack food shaped like small twigs and flavoured with a substance similar marmite, created c. 1940-1950)
4. cheese flavoured moments
5. daddies favourite (i'm just going to stop at saying that this product resembles ketchup. first spotted 1904)
6. nik naks (colorfully classified as "an extruded corn snack" , first appearance c. 1985)
7. pot mash (sold by "pot noodle" 1998 - 2000 RIP)
8. twisted juice (again, so many ripe, inappropriate allusions 2002)
9. weetos (as if weetabix weren't idiotic enough...1930s?), and of course...
   
10. the infamous pork faggot (british "offal-based" meatball product, first seen 1851, but, incredibly still eaten by real human beings).

AUSTRALIA

1. cheezels (the use of "z" [or zed] with the word cheese is unforgivable. burn! c. 1971)
2. parwill / vegemite (created c. 1923, the infamous spread has some great backstory. supposedly, the original name [parwill] was taken from an ad which ran: "marmite, but parwill!" ma might what? eat cheezels?)
3. lolllygobble bliss bombs (i could not make this shit up. a popcorn snack of the 1970s)
4. promite (ah, promite. definitely goes under the heading of "food names which could easilly be mistaken for the title of an industrial manufacturing company or vermin extermination product. made in the 1950s)

the US of A

1. bonox (the us equivalent of bovril. "i ate bonox and now my face is frozen in a grimace of pain! c. 1918)
2. ro*tel (created by some guy in texas in the 1940s for queso accompaniment. a noble goal, but alas, no one could buy it due to an inability to ask for it at the store. )
3. eat-more (well. that's subtle. get a load of the advertising slogan, though: "it's unique, but are you unique enough to eat it?" what the hell does that even mean? thanks hershey. on the bright side, this abortion of a food product is technically canada's fault.)
   
4. u-no-bar (me no eat-more? see below)
5. screaming yellow zonkers (another hideously named popcorn product. continuing the legacy in the 1960s. cool box, though.)
6. poppycock / fiddle-faddle (just rounding out the stupid names for popcorn covered in some foreign substance. i'll just dip my in bovril, thanks. you can still buy this stuff now, unfortunately.)
7. avoderm (technically this is a dog food, but i just had to give it temporary honorary status as food because it was so medically-themed. i wonder if you need to inject your dog with this stuff sub-cutaneously?)
8. funyuns (a classic, the name of which was coined by a texas professor. these are not fun, incidentally, if you have ever made the mistake of eating them [as i have].)
9. product 19 (what is it? TOP-SECRET!)
   

ELSEWHERE (MOSTLY JAPAN)

1. a38 (another government-weapons-sounding food product. with this one, the secret's out: it's "fermented milk product". hailing from denmark)
2. junket (apparently, both my mother and my grandmother have some strange affinity for this bizarre material. mystifying. more denmark.)
3. tender vittles (that sounds like something a drunk scotsman would yell after someone kicked him in the balls: "AUGH me tender vittles!" apparently it's a pet food though. meh.)
4. sporade (it's like gatorade. except. instead of gators, we're using MUSHROOM MEN EGGS. shhh don't tell anyone it's a secret. in peru.)
5. bakauke (japanese rice crackers. not to be confused with bukake under any circumstances ever. ev-ar. don't google it either.)
6. let's party roasted crab! (japan. where else? these are whole crabs, including shell, guts, and small packets of soy sauce. in a bag. at least they're enthusiastic.)
7. science noodles (a taiwanese innovation. they stimulate your brain!)
8. i'm dripper (apparently this is a japanese coffee brand. no articles prepositions you!)
9. homo sausage beef jerky (wow. japan.)
10. fart (poland apparently. a possibly apocryphal internet story about this: "in poland, for a brief time they sold a drink called fart. roughly translated to english, it means "luck". when I was back there this summer i looked for it, but no such fart.")
    

can you pick a winner? i'm hard-pressed! it's pretty tough to be really enthused about picking "elsewhere". not only does it lack the satisfaction of being able to jeer at a particular country, but many of the idiocies were perpetrated by poor translations. the british (and theoretically americans and australians) ought to know better! australia has real quality--after all, who could refuse a heaping handful of lollygobble bliss bombs? however, i'm afraid they fall out of the running through sheer lack of numbers. breed faster australians! we need more stupidly named food products out of you if you want to stay in the running next year!

so that leaves just the americans and their arch-rivals, the britishers. it is a cheese-flavoured moment.

a late bit

i had meant to get to this sooner, but i really did disappear completely for a week (radiohead told me how). in any case, back in action now, more or less none the less for wear. this past charrette was pretty hard, probably one of the most intense i've been through (though this isn't saying that much, i suppose). at least there was this bizarre moment one of the nights when someone put an entire box of sweettarts outside woodshop for general consumption. when i say an entire box, i mean something along the lines of several hundred rolls. i haven't the faintest idea where they came from, but there are a lot of desks / floors littered with neon blue & pink wrappers around the ol' studio now.

aside from that, it's been a bit of an exciting week for seniors hereabouts, as the decisions about who goes where have been made with regard to preceptorships. some humans go to italy, others to new haven. somehow this seems a bit unequal to me, but all's well that ends at yale. actually, having graduated some of the nations most disparagingly low-yielding political minds, i'm not sure if i should be all doe(y?)-eyed at yale. but it is an excellent name. just say it! "yale!" it's what a texan does in distress.

i'm going home soon, so there is much carrying of tables to be done. i hope to ease the psychological burden upon those of you who will be seeing me soon by enrapturing your eyeballs with two more renderings i completed for dawn's studio. one is of the automotive classroom space in the vocational high school, the other (the one with the fleet of tables in attack formation) is the cafeteria. enjoy!

a promissory glob

exciting as charrette may be, even us dedicated students need a break (<---sarcasm has been inserted for your delight). (of course, it's not clear to me or anyone else whether i'm being sarcastic about dedication or about breaks.) (or whether it's grammatically permissible to have a series of sentences largely composed of parenthetical asides.) we won't worry about that. the point of the break idea was to say that i've been playing with some more sculptural 3d modeling software--autodesk's recently-acquired mudbox. of course "recently acquired by autodesk" describes about two thirds of high-end software even vaguely pertinent to my profession. but i'm not complaining! they do produce excellent products. in any case, i've been trying out mudbox and it's kind of creepy how much fun it's been. after modeling, i tried rendering it (below left) as a highly subdivided poly and (below right) as a texture-baked displacement map (see map below the two).
each of the first two images is through an ambient occlusion rendering and was much grainier at higher resolution(s). the bottom one is with standard materials and some interesting lighting; i think it was probably the most successful so far. texture-baking was new to me, though, so we'll have to see what develops.
charrette is upon me and i cower in a corner like a small cat having escaped the raging torrents of the mississippi only to notice that i left my (cat) brother in the river and must return to rescue him should i wish to keep my (catlike) pride. yes, it's rather like that, i think.

in half a day's work

i will keep it brief since i am down a finger temporarily (although inconvenient, losing a fingertip is a sure way to teach yourself to be mindful of the impracticalities of cutting formica with a box cutter). i have a series of interestin' images that i rendered today; the first two are pretty ugly, but the composite is kinda nice. check it out:
(1) the ugliest render ever:
(2) an ambient occlusion pass:
(3) ...and a the composite:
click here to see a higher res version. alright. keep on being alive, all.

hey all!
no one at all has asked me what i've been up to. the logical reaction to this, of course, is to upload photos! this not only answers questions that i've not been asked, it also generates a big, juicy image block rather than dry, dusty text. tomfoolery aside, this is stage one of a structural model i'm working on for dawn finley's studio. i know it looks like wood, but if you squint, maybe it'll remind you of structural steel. okay!


bonus points: reminding me to debug my ftp connection!