Oblique things

Being laidback, easygoing types, the spouse and I often end up having long and tedious conversations about where to go eat, along the lines of:

“Are you hungry?”

“I guess so.”

“Let’s go out.”

“OK.”

“Any ideas?”

“Umm… don’t mind, really.”

“What kind of food do you feel like?”

“I don’t really have any strong preference.”

I used to have similar problems with Richard in Cambridge, and came up with an idea I called Oblique Restaurants.

It was basically a variation on Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies: a deck of cards with names and locations of local restaurants. I had the idea that notches in the cards could be used to allow you to filter out (for example) all vegetarian-suitable restaurants, or all Italian restaurants.

Then, when faced with a lack of restaurant-related inspiration, you could shuffle the deck and pick a card—but you would then be obligated to go to the restaurant on the card.

A while ago someone implemented Oblique Strategies as a widget for OS X. And now someone else has implemented Oblique Restaurants, except they call it Dine-O-Matic.

Now we just need Oblique Recipes for quick stuff to cook at home.