Scholarly Awareness

In Williamsburg, we visited a restaurant named "Food For Thought" that had just opened.  You can read their philosophy in their "About Us".

A truly wonderful meal is a combination of good food and good conversation.  So talk about the special people featured here.  Talk about the contributions that these people have made to the world.  Talk about how everyone can be great in his or her own way.  Talk about how we can each make a significant contribution if we model the same principles and beliefs of those that have gone before us

The walls have large printed quotes and quips of famous theoreticians (Franklin, Twain, Thoreau), the tablecloths are paper, and crayons are present.  In addition to all of this, each table has a set of Trivial Pursuit cards or cards from other games that intend to invoke conversation.  Our table had cards of questions to ask the entire group, such as "Give three adjectives to describe the people at the table."  All of this was largely a gimmick, naturally.  It's a bit pretentious to buy into the owner's philosophy, and I'm not sure if black turtle-necks can even do so.  Rather, they'd probably find the idea shallow and pedantic.

The food was pretty good, from what I remember.  I had the cilantro chicken, and the lady had the portabella stack. Hers looked great and tasted proper when I got a sample.

The whimsy of the place is backed up by the acceptable food; otherwise it would have been a gimmick-restaurant with a confusing motif that tried too hard.  You won't walk out of here with a critical analysis of society, but that's not their purpose.  That's the purpose of Google Scholar, a likely neglected tool outside of finals-week computer labs.

Google Scholar searches through academic journals and bibliographies instead of the public internet.  Unfortunately, I only learned of Scholar.Google.com in my last year of undergrad.  Had I been aware of it sooner, research for my History of Art courses would have been substantially easier (no more diving through the dusty archives of the Tappan library, finding books that were 50 years old and disintegrating in my hands as I read through them).  Also, if Wikipedia had been in existence before then too, life in general would have been simple, especially in biology.

It wasn't until I was on my way out the door at UofM that it dawned on me that without the .edu host, I would not have access to journals found on Google scholar.  Hopefully one day I'll befriend a college kid who can grab my weird articles on pop culture topics.

Try it for yourself.  Type in some of your hobbies, favorite films, restaurants, music, anything.  Academics will write on really strange things (The Three Stooges as Environmentalists?).

Chances are that you are not on an .edu network.  As such, you will only get the abstracts or limited views of articles.  If you have a friend in college, ask them to download and send you the PDF, perhaps even in Google Documents (embrace the cloud).  Google scholar search results will also link to scanned-in Google books and citations, two things which may not be what you want, so click your results wisely. 

Example papers I found:
Die Hard
Talking Heads
David Lynch (a lot of Lacan analysis comes up with a search for Lynch)
Dreaming and David Lynch
Edward Scissorhands
The Godfather
Another Godfather essay
Nip/Tuck
Nip/Tuck (on how the graphic surgery is used to attract viewers)
Miami Vice (Baudrillard and Miami Vice!)
College football
College football statistics
Olive Garden
Cartoon physics
Family Guy
Pee Wee's Playhouse
Seinfeld
George Costanza
Larry David, Curb Your Enthusiasm
Arrested Development

The Most Expensive Breakfast

We drove 12 straight hours from Virginia to Orlando, arrived late at night, and decided to get a big breakfast in the morning.

Since it was the lady's first time to Disney World, she had a priority to-do list:

• Character breakfast with Mickey-shaped waffle
• Mickey-shaped ice cream
• A bunch of other things that I now forget 

The character breakfast is where you eat, usually a buffet, and Disney characters walk around and allow you to take pictures with them.  It sounds cheesy and unnecessary, and it is, but once you're there it doesn't seem horrible.  We walked into the Contemporary Resort.

The Contemporary was built in an era where concrete was considered modern. When you compare it to other Disney World hotels, it seems too cold and serious. I think only business/conference people stay there, my Disney professor said that only boring, cold people did.  The feature that gives the hotel any character is that the monorail runs through the lobby:

The mural in the lobby is by Mary Blair, who the lady thinks was either a genius, or drug-induced nut. (Blair had an astigmatism, and was also an alcoholic).  It's a Small World is an acid-trip through Blair's mind.

Inside this hotel are a few restaurants, including the character buffet Chef Mickey's, recommended to us by a friend who claimed the food was better than other buffets with less screaming kids.

We were seated right away, despite not having reservations.  Some old Dutch guy was our waiter.  The buffet was stacked: french toast, waffles, pancakes, blintzes, donuts, fruit, capers and lox, candy, "breakfast pizza", meats, hashbrowns, a potato/pepper/cheese mix, eggs of many types... it's just excellent.  And of course, they had the Mickey Waffle:

 

Blintzes and something on the left, cereal and CANDY (!?) in the clear canisters.

 

We sat next to a window that overlooked the Magic Kingdom, with the iconic castle and Space Mountain in view.  She cried because it was her first time at Disney World, it was the first morning after a long drive, and there she was overlooking the place as Mickey and other "classic" characters went to each table mugging for photos and autographs.

Overall, the food was really good.  But then there was the bill.  It was around $70 (for the both of us).  This was the most expensive breakfast I will ever have, far more than breakfast at the Ritz in Dearborn, MI.

But the $70 price tag brings in the idea of "experience as a commodity", a distinctly 20th century realization that Disney has perfected.  This breakfast wasn't $70 worth of food.  The price involved having your picture taken with Disney character-suits and being able to look out over the Magic Kingdom.  Having a picture taken is far more important to children, as is the episode where a song started playing and the characters danced.  For $35, she was invited into the Disney culture of paying for memories.
As Adorno said,

The cultural commodities of the industry are governed by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation.  The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms.