Life’s Greatest (?) Mystery Solved. 10-pack hot dogs, 8-pack hot dog buns. Why?:
Before about 1940, hot dogs were bought and sold from local butcher shops and were not packaged as they are today. Shoppers would simply ask the butcher for the number of sausages they needed and would be charged by the pound. This brings us up to modern-day meat packaging, wherein meat is still typically sold by the pound. One standard American hot dog is approximately 1.6 ounces. If you do the math, that means it takes 10 hot dogs to get you to one pound. It simply makes sense, from a meat-packing and butchering perspective, to sell them by the pound, not by the piece.
Similarly, modern bakehouses are optimized for efficiency with standards and systems set firmly in place. Buns are typically baked in clusters of four in pans designed to produce eight rolls apiece. It simply doesn’t make sense for most bakeries to completely upend their production systems and pan designs to accommodate the average number of hot dogs in a pack.
Canada to the rescue?:
The light at the end of the tunnel: In 2022, Heinz and Wonder Bread partnered to solve this very issue in Canada by brokering a partnership to create 10-packs of buns. Maybe a similar deal is on the horizon for the United States.
Just one more reason why moving to Canada has become more attractive.
When Toxic Ash Migrated To Malibu. Well, not officially toxic, because it wasn’t tested:
Besides posing a humanitarian problem, an insurance problem, an economic problem and a public-health problem, the Los Angeles fires of 2025 posed a daunting garbage problem. The incineration of 50,000 acres of Los Angeles County converted some 18,000 homes into 2.6 million tons of waste. That is more than the entire city of Philadelphia produces in a year — and it doesn’t even account for all the charred vehicles and trees. Where would all the trash go?
A further complication: Much of the waste was probably toxic. Any home built before 1980 is most likely coated with lead paint and insulated with asbestos. Nearly every residence in the United States can be safely assumed to contain batteries, cleaning solvents, computers and plastics. Even compounds naturally found in soil, like trivalent chromium, can be transformed by wildfires into the highly carcinogenic hexavalent chromium — the contaminant made famous by the movie “Erin Brockovich.” Because of these assumptions, it is standard practice, after a fire, to clear structures, remove six inches of soil and conduct tests to ensure that no hazardous compounds remain.
State and federal law requires hazardous waste to be sent to permitted hazardous-waste facilities. The closest one, in the San Joaquin Valley, is 2½ hours north of Pacific Palisades, but only when there’s no traffic on Interstate 405, which is like saying Los Angeles is rainy but only when it’s not sunny. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated that it would take at least 110,000 dump trucks to clear the debris from Los Angeles County. (In fact it would be more than twice that.)
In the case of the 2.6 million tons, at least, somebody in a position of influence at the state or federal level — the person’s identity may never be publicly known — hit upon an ingenious solution. The fire ash would simply not be tested for hazardous compounds. If you didn’t test the ash, you couldn’t prove it was toxic. And without evidence of toxicity, all the ash could be shipped, immediately, to the nearest residential landfill.
Hello-o-o, Malibu:
The nearest landfill to Pacific Palisades is a scenic, tortuous, 30-minute drive up Malibu Canyon. It lies in the high saddle of the gently sloping Santa Monica Mountains, in a depression carved out of the chaparral. Administered by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, the landfill is encircled by, and overlooks, one of the nation’s wealthiest communities, in recent years home to, among many others, Will Smith, John Travolta, Justin Bieber, Kevin Hart, Jessica Simpson, Jake Paul, Katie Holmes, Kanye West and a bunch of Kardashians: the city of Calabasas.
When viewed in isolation, the statements made by Calabasas residents during the last few months are indistinguishable from those heard in recent years in places like Flint, Mich.; Jackson, Miss.; and Mossville, in the heart of Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
By most other metrics, however, Calabasas is the anti-Flint, the anti-Jackson, the anti-Mossville. It is one the richest cities in the United States. Only one in 40 residents is Black. Its schools are among the best in the state. The life expectancy far exceeds the national average, as do the rates of advanced degrees, electric-vehicle chargers and equestrian barns.
Thereby hangs the rest of the story. Fair use compels me to stop here. Read it if you can. It’ll get you thinking.
How Spain Beats The Heat With Natural And/Or Crocheted Canopies:
As Spain takes a breath after yet another brutal summer heatwave, with temperatures above 40C in many parts of the country, the residents of the sherry-making town of Jerez de la Frontera have come up with a novel way to keep the streets cool.
Green canopies of grapevines festoon the town, reducing street-level temperatures by as much as 8C. “We’re planting vines in the old city because we hope that in two or three years we’ll be able to brag that this has put an end to stifling temperatures,” said Jesús Rodríguez, president of Los Emparrados, a group of residents who aim to beautify and green the city’s streets:
In the Andalusian town of Alhaurín de la Torre, 125 miles east of Jerez, the streets are shaded under a canopy of colourful crocheted blankets. This is another community initiative, the work of Eva Pacheco, a local crochet teacher, and her students, and provides shade over an area of 500 sq metres.
The Musical Genius Who Is Blood Orange–Who Is He?:
After releasing his first Blood Orange album, Coastal Grooves, in 2011, Devonté Hynes co-wrote and co-produced what is, by my approximation, the best pop song released in my lifetime: Sky Ferreira’s “Everything Is Embarrassing.” After doting on a marriage of Brit-pop and emo-folk under the banner of Lightspeed Champion, his work on that one Ferreira track, along with his command on a slinky and evocative collision of dapped-up R&B, out-of-time New Wave, and cosmic electro-pop, put him in rooms with Solange, Lorde, Britney Spears, and Kylie Minogue—artists with “insane pop knowledge,” as he calls them. “It’s fun, because I don’t think that way—and I know I don’t think that way. And I’m okay with not thinking that way. I know what I can do, and I know what I can’t do, and I’m very sure in both of those arenas. It allows for me to have a lot of fun and have my mind blown. There’s a story and a lesson learned, every single time.”
But what feels even more improbable is that the hand Hynes has lent to pop’s current mecca is one of the least fascinating things about him. Sure, his recent CV includes playing guitar on “Favourite Daughter,” the best part of Lorde’s great new album Virgin, singing on Erika de Casier’s brilliant track “Twice,” and supplying drums to Vampire Weekend’s “Prep-School Gangsters.” But in another lifetime he was a teenaged guitarist in the post-hardcore band Test Icicles. Then he became a quiet mouthpiece for social justice, using photographs of trans women as album covers (in a way that reminds me, loosely, of what the Smiths did with their cover imagery 40 years ago) and putting trans women in his songs, pilling interludes with clips of spoken-word and Black film, and evoking the concrete poetry of Saul Williams and the melodic diversity of Mingus Ah Um.
In the last half-decade alone, as his side-quests have grown even more radical, he’s scored films like Queen & Slim and We Are Who We Are, collaborated with Philip Glass, and curated the music for Francesco Risso’s Marni fashion shows. And, after accepting an invitation from Hanif Abdurraqib, Hynes brought three classical works—Inheritance, the piano concerto Happenings (which he originally wrote for a sextet but later expanded for the BAM ensemble), and Fields—to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Opera House stage in 2022 and drafted Adam Tendler, the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, and Third Coast Percussion to perform them.
It’s quite the comprehensive piece. But then, Devonté Hynes contains multitudes. No wonder his music fascinates me. As does he. Listen, hope he fascinates you as well as he sings us out:
