My coworker clued me into this, it's kinda freaky, distasteful and intriguing at the same time:
"You Are Where You Live" is based on a "neighborhood lifestyle segmentation" system called PRIZM NE from Claritas Inc. a market research firm headquartered in San Diego, CA. PRIZM NE, which was originally created over 20 years ago, classifies neighborhoods into one of 66 categories based on census data, leading consumer surveys and media measurement data, and other public and private sources of demographic and consumer information.
PRIZM operates on the principle that "birds of a feather flock together." It's a worldwide phenomenon that people with similar cultural backgrounds, needs, and perspectives naturally gravitate toward one another. They choose to live in neighborhoods offering affordable advantages and compatible lifestyles. That's why, for instance, many young career singles and couples choose dynamic urban neighborhoods like Chicago's Gold Coast, while families with children prefer the suburbs which offer more affordable housing, convenient shopping, and strong local schools.
PRIZM is updated annually to reflect the latest available demographic and consumer information. "You Are Where You Live" provides a scaled-down version of the complete PRIZM system. Only a handful of the consumer spending, lifestyle and demographic data available through PRIZM at the ZIP Code level was used to create this ZIP Code look-up program.
And a bit later:
To put the country's marketplace into perspective: today, there are more than 270 million people living in more than 100 million households located in over 260,000 neighborhoods, or Census block groups, across the country. Companies use this information to break through the country's crowded marketscape and understand, locate and reach their customers better. They use it to determine what type of advertising to create and where it should appear, where to put new stores, what kind of merchandising and products to put in their stores, etc.
It is worth noting here that one of the pioneers of this kind of target market research in the United States is a Chinese American woman named Shirley Young. I know this because Mom and I watched this PBS program, Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, and Bill Moyers conducted half-hour-long interviews of several folks for it, including Gish Jen, Maya Lin, and this woman. And I remember as we were watching the Shirley Young interview, and she was talking about developing these new methods that she must have known would change business and marketing and consumerism forever, I thought to myself, "Wow. Asian Americans are capable of unleashing scary shit into the world, too." (I suppose I was blanking out the reality of Michelle Malkin and Frances Fukuyama at the time.)
And for fun, I got this for where Mom and Dad live in Shoreview:
I saw New Empty Nests and felt like laughing and crying.
What do these categories mean? You'll have to peruse and find out.
Today's No Greater Joy Than needs some context. Looking back at some of my older posts, I've noticed that all my previous No Greater Joy Than submissions are about food. This strikes me as very unoriginal. Rather than illuminating joys that are well-hidden or controversial or at least capable of generating a collective "Huh" among an audience, I've been devoting space to something we can all agree on. Sad.
Well, this one's also about food, but with a twist.
I have of late developed a tendency to nap while I'm cooking. This is, of course, stupid and dangerous. But in my defense, I generally only nap while making things that take a few hours to make--soup, red beans and the like. It doesn't help that much of my cooking happens late at night, sometimes into early morning hours. The risk is that my napping can turn into full-blown sleeping. Once, I put on some red beans with a good amount of water, laid down to rest, and awoke 5 hours later, bolted to my beans, and to my astonishment, found they were still fine, just cooked down a lot and only starting to burn on the bottom. You'd think I would have learned after that. But evidently I need some convincing.
I finally got to celebrate the book publication deal with a few friends the other night, and after downing two exceedingly delicious beers (they're Duchesses, red and sweet and so very very good for you) and finishing off Claudia's whiskey, made it home and decided to, um, make some rice. (I get these urges at times. Besides, I was out of cooked rice.) I could excuse this with my impaired mental faculties, but the fact is, rice takes only 20 minutes to cook, and I knew exactly what I was doing, and even though I was tired, I figured rice was one of the safest and fastest things to cook up and the danger was minimal.
So I put a cup of rice in a pot, rinsed it five times, put in twice as much water, brought it to a boil on the gas stove, then turned the heat down to its lowest level and covered it up. I laid down on my futon for what I thought would be just a few minutes.
Next thing I know, the sun has woken me up.
The realization of a mistake is very unusual. Your body is literally jolted upright with a shock of energy, and the memory of what went wrong burns this stunning alertness into your brain, unlike anything you've ever felt. You have instantaneous focus and clarity, and nothing can distract you until you rectify the mistake. So it took about three seconds from the moment I opened my eyes to arrive at the following chain of thoughts:
1) I put on some rice.
2) Rice takes 20 minutes to cook.
3) I started the rice just after midnight.
4) The sun is now up.
5) Therefore, this rice has been cooking for almost six hours.
6) That is bad news.
7) Go stop the bad news.
And at the end of those three seconds I am at the stove, turning off the heat, removing the cover, surveying the damage, prodding the rice with a fork, finding (to my utter relief) that the rice is burnt brown but not black, and there's no smoke, and there's no fire, and I am not dead. So the burnt rice is now sitting in my garbage can in a cylindrical lump, and the pot used to cook it is not ruined (amazingly), and I am still here, and I think there's No Greater Joy Than that.
Being alive rocks! Not being done in by culinary neglect rocks!
I think it's time I get a rice cooker.
Today's No Greater Joy Than needs some context. Looking back at some of my older posts, I've noticed that all my previous No Greater Joy Than submissions are about food. This strikes me as very unoriginal. Rather than illuminating joys that are well-hidden or controversial or at least capable of generating a collective "Huh" among an audience, I've been devoting space to something we can all agree on. Sad.
Well, this one's also about food, but with a twist.
I have of late developed a tendency to nap while I'm cooking. This is, of course, stupid and dangerous. But in my defense, I generally only nap while making things that take a few hours to make--soup, red beans and the like. It doesn't help that much of my cooking happens late at night, sometimes into early morning hours. The risk is that my napping can turn into full-blown sleeping. Once, I put on some red beans with a good amount of water, laid down to rest, and awoke 5 hours later, bolted to my beans, and to my astonishment, found they were still fine, just cooked down a lot and only starting to burn on the bottom. You'd think I would have learned after that. But evidently I need some convincing.
I finally got to celebrate the book publication deal with a few friends the other night, and after downing two exceedingly delicious beers (they're Duchesses, red and sweet and so very very good for you) and finishing off Claudia's whiskey, made it home and decided to, um, make some rice. (I get these urges at times. Besides, I was out of cooked rice.) I could excuse this with my impaired mental faculties, but the fact is, rice takes only 20 minutes to cook, and I knew exactly what I was doing, and even though I was tired, I figured rice was one of the safest and fastest things to cook up and the danger was minimal.
So I put a cup of rice in a pot, rinsed it five times, put in twice as much water, brought it to a boil on the gas stove, then turned the heat down to its lowest level and covered it up. I laid down on my futon for what I thought would be just a few minutes.
Next thing I know, the sun has woken me up.
The realization of a mistake is very unusual. Your body is literally jolted upright with a shock of energy, and the memory of what went wrong burns this stunning alertness into your brain, unlike anything you've ever felt. You have instantaneous focus and clarity, and nothing can distract you until you rectify the mistake. So it took about three seconds from the moment I opened my eyes to arrive at the following chain of thoughts:
1) I put on some rice.
2) Rice takes 20 minutes to cook.
3) I started the rice just after midnight.
4) The sun is now up.
5) Therefore, this rice has been cooking for almost six hours.
6) That is bad news.
7) Go stop the bad news.
And at the end of those three seconds I am at the stove, turning off the heat, removing the cover, surveying the damage, prodding the rice with a fork, finding (to my utter relief) that the rice is burnt brown but not black, and there's no smoke, and there's no fire, and I am not dead. So the burnt rice is now sitting in my garbage can in a cylindrical lump, and the pot used to cook it is not ruined (amazingly), and I am still here, and I think there's No Greater Joy Than that.
Being alive rocks! Not being done in by culinary neglect rocks!
I think it's time I get a rice cooker.
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