A Philly cheesesteak, easily mistaken for a dirty diaper. (Source: Pat’s King of Steaks)

The Art of Manliness did a piece on how you can make an authentic Philly cheesesteak at home. Being from Pennsylvania, I know that there will be some who take issue with this article. Mainly, with the very idea that an authentic Philly cheesesteak would be something that a person could make at home.

According to Pennsylvanians, the authentic Philly cheesesteak is something that a person can only find in Philadelphia. If the sandwich was assembled anywhere else, it’s not an authentic Philly cheesesteak.

It might seem petty to say that a sandwich is not authentic for having been made in a different location, even though it’s assembled with the same ingredients in exactly the same way, and that’s because it is. To understand this pettiness, one needs to understand the mystique surrounding the Philly cheesesteak.

To Pennsylvanians, there is no such thing as a bad Philly cheesesteak, and they hold the Philly cheesesteak as beyond reproach. If you don’t like the Philly cheesesteak sandwich, then it’s because you didn’t have an authentic one. As already mentioned, authentic Philly cheesesteaks are only made in Philadelphia. If you had one there, and still didn’t like it, then you went to the wrong place.

This provides ample opportunity for the Philly cheesesteak to escape criticism, because there are a number of restaurants in Philadelphia that claim to offer the authentic Philly cheesesteak, and in each case, there is dispute surrounding their claim of authenticity. So, you can’t criticize the sandwich unless you’ve had one from every possible establishment in town, otherwise, there’s at least one place for the fanboys to retreat to to defend their beloved sandwich.

For one thing, I don’t want to have to eat a couple dozen cheesesteak sandwiches before I decide I don’t like them. One should suffice. The fans can instead explain to me just what it is that each of these restaurants do that’s any different from one another, and explain just how that impacts the quality of the sandwich.

But what if you were to lose your mind and decide to go eat at every cheesesteak joint in Philadelphia? Upon completion of this task, do you finally have the right to criticize this sandwich?

Not quite.

There are different ways to order your cheesesteak. Not only that, you’re expected to order it with a proprietary cheesesteak lingo. For example, if you want a cheesesteak with onions, you’d say,

“Wiz wit”

And then you’d feel like a moron, because it’s impossible to talk like that without sounding like one. Decoded, what this means is “with Cheeze Whiz, with onions”.

And no, I’m not kidding. The Philly cheesesteak is made with Cheez Whiz. While you’re mulling over just what tragedy of thinking resulted in a major American city accepting a sandwich made with Cheez Whiz as its representative sandwich, here is the Cheez Whiz ingredients list:

Whey, canola oil, milk, milk protein concentrate, maltodextrin, sodium phosphate, contains less than 2% of whey protein concentrate, salt, lactic acid, sodium alginate, mustard flour, Worcestershire sauce (vinegar, molasses, corn syrup, water, salt, caramel color, garlic powder, sugar, spices, tamarind, natural flavor), sorbic acid as a preservative, milkfat, cheese culture, oleoresin paprika (color), annatto (color), natural flavor, enzymes.

I thought it was illegal to call something “cheese” unless it actually contained cheese, but to Kraft’s credit, they don’t technically do that. They call it “cheez”, which may sound identical, but is spelled differently enough to get around the law and still trick poor people.

Another way to sound like a moron while ordering a sandwich is to say:

“Wiz wit-out”

Which might have made your ears perk up a little, because even though it still sounds like toddler speak, it sounds as though there’s a variant without Cheez Whiz, and a sandwich made with steak and onions sounds pretty decent. The catch is, the “wit-out” part is referring to the onions, so you’d be ordering a steak and Cheez Whiz sandwich.

You can order the sandwich with provolone instead, but the catch is, you’re still going to come across those who will say that it’s not an “authentic” Philly cheesesteak unless the topping used is Cheez Whiz. And they might be right. The most famous cheesesteak stands in Philadelphia order huge containers of Cheez Whiz to slather all over their sandwiches.

The celebrated sandwich of Philadelphia, which you supposedly could not have had unless you made the long journey to that same city, is made with Cheez Whiz. This makes the Philly cheesesteak a paradox sandwich: even if it’s authentic, it’s still not authentic.

If you go to all this effort to have an authentic Philly cheesesteak for yourself, you finally get to say you don’t like it, right? Nope. Even if you’ve consumed every permutation of the set of cheesesteak in the city of Philadelphia and you still say you don’t like it, Pennsylvanians still insist that there is no problem with the Philly cheesesteak. Instead, they’ll say that the problem is with you.

And they’d probably be right. After all, you’d have had hundreds of Philly cheesesteaks just to say you don’t like them.

Don’t play their game. If a Philly cheesesteak fanboy starts going on about how their cheesesteak is great, have them tell you where you have to go to get the right sandwich. If another fanboy is in earshot, they’ll likely disagree about the choice of cheesesteak joint. You’d be surprised how likely this is, because even though not everyone has been to Philadelphia, you’ll find people who consider themselves experts on the Philly cheesesteak everywhere. These experts argue with each other at the drop of a hat, so they’ll be distracted with each other while you make your getaway!

If that doesn’t work, ask him how a Philly cheesesteak is made. You can have fun with this by seeing just how long it takes for the guy to admit that his  sandwich of choice is made with an imitation cheese product. In some cases, they’ll know what you’re getting at, so they’ll try to avoid it for as long as it takes before you drop the fact-bomb yourself. Then you’ll have humiliated his favorite sandwich, and him.

Then you can tell him that you can make the exact same sandwich at home. You just choose not to.

“She’s not a superhero. She’s a normal girl thrust into extraordinary circumstances, so it’s very relatable.”
-Daisy Ridley, presumably talking about Rey

Oh really?

There have been complaints that Rey from Star Wars is a Mary Sue character. While these complaints have been around for some time, they have been gaining traction lately. Is this the case? Let’s look at the evidence.

It should be noted that just because a work of fiction has a Mary Sue character doesn’t mean it’s bad, though it is universally considered a sign of poor writing. While it’s true that there’s no exact agreed-upon criteria for what is considered a Mary Sue character, there are some signs to look out for when considering whether it may be the case.

Usually, a Mary Sue character is one that meets a significant amount of the following criteria:

• Mary Sues are often self-inserts who vicariously act out the author’s fantasies.
• The character is overpowered or has extraordinary abilities or skills that aren’t properly explained in the narrative.
• The character’s experiences come off as wish-fulfillment or power fantasy.
• The character is relatively flawless, or what flaws they have can be made to benefit the character in some way (such as making them more endearing).
• The character quickly makes strong personal connections with all the major characters of an established work, especially among the protagonists. Even antagonists may have a difficult time denying their goodness. This point especially applies to fan fiction.
• The character possesses ideal beauty or high intelligence, and often finds a comparably fantastic love interest.

Also of note is that Mary Sues are usually the main characters of their stories, or are at least major pivotal characters.

Considering all this, there are many examples in the Star Wars films that show that Rey meets almost all of this criteria. The following are a few examples:

• Rey is the main character of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, beginning with Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
• Teedo found BB-8 first, so he had more right to the droid than Rey. However, Teedo releases the droid just because she demanded he do so.
• When Rey is ambushed by a couple thugs intending to abscond with BB-8, she quickly defeats both assailants before Finn, a trained Stormtrooper, could so much as make it to her.
• There’s more. After BB-8 fingers Finn for stealing Poe’s jacket, she cuts in front of him before he could get away with incredible speed, and beats him up, too. She did this to a Stormtrooper that’s been trained for decades in spite of having no formal combat training of her own.
• Rey expertly pilots the Millennium Falcon in spite of the fact that the ship hadn’t flown in years, and she had presumably never piloted a starship before.
• That last point not implausible enough? She, along with Finn, successfully evade two First Order pilots in this craft they had never commandeered before, destroying both First Order assailants in the process.
• Her technical knowledge of the Millennium Falcon is just a little too impressive. She identified the problem with putting a compressor on the ignition, just as Han did, which clearly impressed him. In the original trilogy, Han and Chewbacca still stumbled on various repairs to the craft, even though they personally operated it for years at that point.
• It gets better. Rey bypassed the compressor while the Falcon was in operation, enabling the group’s escape, impressing Han again. As an aside, any skilled electrician can tell you what a terrible idea it is to perform electrical work on a machine that’s powered on.
• When Finn is being dragged about by a rathtar (and being protected by plot-armor instead of being instantly killed), Rey knew just what door to shut on the rathtar’s tentacles and at what precise moment, even though the event was occurring outside her line of sight. Even Jedi rarely exhibit that kind of intuition.
• Luke’s lightsaber called out to Rey while they both were in Maz Kanata’s castle. Why Rey? We still have no explanation.
• When Kylo Ren force-probed Rey’s mind, he was at first successful at identifying her thoughts. Moments later, she turned his own technique back on him and told him his greatest insecurity. This is in spite of the fact that Ren was a skilled user of the technique and had years of training as a particularly gifted Jedi and as a dark side user under Snoke. Rey had no force training whatsoever.
• Minutes later, Rey succeeded in using a Jedi mind trick on a Stormtrooper to get him to release her. Apparently, she didn’t need any training to use that technique either. For that matter, how could it have occurred to her that she could use that technique at that time?
• For the climactic lightsaber duel of The Force Awakens, the big bad is a former Jedi of exceptional potential and extensive training in lightsaber battle versus a junk dealer who never trained in using the force or even used a lightsaber before. Though Rey stood a rabbit’s chance in a tiger pen, she defeated her opponent in convincing fashion. (As this was happening, a pilot in a tiny craft dealt the finishing blow to a battle station with an embedded superweapon that also happened to be a planet, and blew the whole thing up. Because Star Wars.)
• The mission of retrieving Luke Skywalker is among the most important in the history of the Resistance, so it stands to reason that Leah would send someone she knew and trusted to do the job. Either Poe Dameron or Admiral Ackbar would have been ideal for the job. Better yet, Leah could have gone and talked to her brother herself. Instead she sends Rey, who she only just met not long prior. Of course, we know if Rey went to Luke, she could train under him, as though Rey wasn’t strong enough as she was.
• Rey captained the Millennium Falcon on her mission to retrieve Luke, even though Chewbacca had years more experience with the craft and was the first mate to its previous captain. What does Chewbacca have to do for some respect?
• Rey’s idealism is easy enough to portray as a positive trait, but it looks so much better when contrasted with Luke’s cynicism. Let that sink in: the Luke Skywalker was brought down to bring Rey up.
• Once Rey is brought before Snoke, his only criticisms of her are mere stereotypical bad guy taunts. He even says that she “has the heart of a true Jedi”, so even the big bad of the movie acknowledged her virtue.
• Rey displayed as much skill as Kylo Ren in dispatching the Praetorian Guards, even helping him out with the last one as it had him in a neck hold. This in spite of having no lightsaber training, unless you count swinging a lightsaber around while Luke is looking on with no involvement as “training”.
• After the Praetorian Guards are defeated, Ren offers Rey to join him, showing that even her greatest adversary would prefer to have her as an ally.
• Kylo Ren informed Rey that her parents were mere junk traders, and no one of consequence. While it’s interesting to see characters in Star Wars don’t have to be related to other major characters to become someone of significance, it makes Rey’s exceptional abilities even more of an anomaly that we now have even less of an explanation for.
• By the end of The Last Jedi, the only skilled force users in the galaxy were Rey and Kylo Ren, and the Knights of Ren, of which we know Kylo to be the leader. As we’ve already seen, Rey could beat Ren in spite of Ren’s extensive training and Rey’s lack thereof. This makes Rey the strongest force user in Star Wars.

Considering this, is Rey a Mary Sue character? YES. No doubt about it. In fact, she’s so Mary Sue it’s surprising to see a character of her sort in a professional work, let alone in such a huge IP as Star Wars.

Not only is Rey an obvious Mary Sue character, she may very well be the most Mary Sue character I’ve ever seen outside of fan fiction. I kid you not, while researching this article, I looked up “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” to determine whether Rey would be just the character that someone with the condition would prefer to see themselves as.

Perhaps the greatest irony here is that the very namesake of Mary Sue comes from Star Trek fandom, Star Trek being a competing IP. At this point, the term “Mary Sue” can be shortened to “Rey”, as Star Wars has once again denied Star Trek what little cultural significance it has left.

Aside from all that, Daisy Ridley and J.J. Abrams made quite a relatable character.

My biggest surprise is that this show is still on the air.

Last night on Jeopardy, one of the categories was football. The host, Alex Trebek, mocked the contestants after they failed to provide a correct question to each of the answers in the category.

Jeopardy is an odd case of something that is not terribly interesting, but can succeed in being around for a long time, and everyone knows what it’s about. In that sense, it’s like The Simpsons, except somehow less entertaining. Like The Simpsons, if someone were to call you while you were watching it and invite you to do anything else, you’d take them up on it, because there is nothing exciting going on in the show.

The premise is that in each round, there are six categories, and in each category, there’s an answer that the contestants are presented with, and points go to the contestant that can provide the correct question that goes to it.

What, you already knew that? So did just about everyone else, but when was the last time you actually watched Jeopardy? I didn’t watch yesterday’s episode, either. I was so bored, that I watched the same movie that I had already seen at least three times already. Who still watches Jeopardy? Or game shows in general? If someone’s just waiting for death, there’s funner things to do in the meantime.

In last night’s Jeopardy game, a football category was presented to three guests, and they failed to get a single point, all while being sassed by the host. A bunch of intellectuals didn’t know a thing about football; who would have guessed?

If they wanted a really interesting program, they could have had the typical categories plus a football category, then they can bring in a bunch of guys who were jocks in high school but didn’t really succeed much beyond that. It would be hilarious to watch the jocks ace the football category, but fail miserably at the rest of it. The contestants on Jeopardy are usually intellectuals, so there’s not much expectation that they’d get the football category, or have much interest in it.

High school is the place where students start selecting courses that have a more direct impact on the college that they attend. This makes high school an important part of a person’s formative years. It’s important for the student to not just come away with good grades, but demonstrate that they can succeed in higher education.

In this environment, jocks are treated like celebrities because of their place on the school’s sports teams. However, they’re dismissed from classes early to go practice, not benefiting from the lessons, and are sometimes even shown preferential treatment by teachers that give them good grades under pressure from the coach that wants them to continue to practice.

I’ve heard it argued that high school athletics do benefit students based on two main arguments:

• Students who play sports can learn teamwork and cooperation, and
• Student athletes may be awarded college scholarships.

For one thing, a student can learn teamwork and cooperation from a number of assignments that have real-world application. Or they can cooperate on essays, presentations, or even large homework assignments. If the goal is to prepare students for career success, why not teach teamwork with assignments relating to their field of study?

Also, if a student is awarded a college scholarship on the premise that they can continue playing football in college, they’re merely delaying the inevitable. The number of student athletes that go on to become professional is a razor-thin margin of one percent. Unless they figuratively win the lottery and go on to play for a professional team, that time that they’ve spent playing games when they should have been studying is only going to waste. Otherwise, they’re going to have to eventually pick a real-life skill and learn it before time runs out on them, because their time spent playing sports in school doesn’t qualify them for much outside of pushing carts at Walmart.

When it comes down to it, sports like football are only games. Schools sometimes let student athletes out of classes early so they can practice playing sports. If they’re going to do that, why not also let them out to play video games? The reasoning is just as sound, so why discriminate against one form of entertainment in favor of another? When I went to high school, I liked video games. But I didn’t play them during class, and I didn’t kid myself into thinking that they were anything besides entertainment.

Considering all this, it’s only natural that the intellectuals among us are those who didn’t bother with sports in high school, as they didn’t spend their class time that they should have spent self-improving instead playing games. Is it any surprise that the contestants on Jeopardy didn’t get any points on the football category? It would have gone much better if there were instead a category on Super Mario trivia.

Student athletics is a huge scam. What makes it so diabolical is that it plays to a student’s desire to become rich and famous by doing something that’s considered recreation, with the cost of admission being the important formative years of the student’s life. Nearly all of them fail to become professional, however, and they are left to pick up the pieces of their lives and find for themselves the focus that would actually get them somewhere, which they should have done to begin with. And schools come away with huge state funding, especially if the athletic teams do well, and they (might) thank the individual students for their time and energy with meager scholarships. Then they can continue to train to do nothing at all when they should be learning important skills in college! What a deal!

I know that the few football fans who actually watched Jeopardy last night are coming away from it high-fiving one another because they know something that the people who studied math in school don’t, but it’s really nothing in which a person can take true pride. If someone got on a game show and nailed five questions about anime but bombed at everything else, that goes to show where he’s been directing his efforts.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

If you’re a jock and were somehow able to read all this, leave a comment. I’m curious as to how many made it through.

Wah wah~

Google has just announced an end to their “X Prize” contest which would have awarded $20 million dollars to a team that could put a man on the moon. Earlier today, they stated that that they’re not awarding the prize.

Here is Google’s announcement as it appeared on Twitter:

The reason, as given by Google, was that none of the five finalists could meet the March 31 deadline for a launch. Therefore, Google did not succeed in getting someone to the moon by dangling a heap of money as an enticement.

As anyone who has ever argued with their little brother can tell you, victory can still be claimed by changing the conditions of victory and then saying that you’ve met them.

In that light, here is what Google executives have to say on the matter:

“As a result of this competition, we have sparked the conversation and changed expectations with regard to who can land on the moon. Many now believe it’s no longer the sole purview of a few government agencies, but now may be achieved by small teams of entrepreneurs, engineers, and innovators from around the world,”
-Peter H. Diamondis and Marcus Shingle, Google executives (emphasis added)

That sounds great; you were able to challenge beliefs and expectations. But what about actually getting someone on the moon? Also, since when is the truth of any matter determined by mere belief? Why would it take a campaign involving tens of millions of dollars just to challenge the beliefs and expectations of an unspecified “many”?

Of course, we all know that the point of any corporate-sponsored contest isn’t to award a prize, but to win positive publicity for the corporation holding the event. In this case, Google’s Lunar X contest was a smashing success for Google because of all the positive publicity that they’ve gotten since the contest was announced in 2007. After all, the contest did succeed in giving Google a pro-science veneer which is all the rage with the science-chic millennials whose only real involvement with science is using consumer electronics.

Google could at the very least award the cash prize as a consolation to the team that came the closest to the goal. They may not have achieved the conditions of victory as stated in the rules of the contest, but considering how much time and expense the contestants put into it, it doesn’t seem wrong to at least award a consolation prize. I don’t know, but I suspect that the reason has something to do with the fact that such a choice might cost Google $20 million.

Now that Google’s contest has succeeded in netting them their pro-science publicity, they’ll probably go right back to censoring the internet and pushing their political agenda. By the way, Firefox is an awesome browser, and DuckDuckGo is an awesome search engine.

Maybe there’s more to solving problems than throwing a ton of money at them.