On the website Chow, they have a selection of chocolate bar recipes that are designed to replicate, as closely as possible, commercial bars like Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Almond Joy.
Now, if you’re getting into making chocolate bars, I think it would be best to try out your own recipe. But if you wanted to get your feet wet following along, this would be a great place to start!
(via the Globe and Mail, thanks Matt!)
Tee hee! Nothing spells delight like C-A-T!
First, if you happen to live in California, vote yes on Prop 19.
It’s embarrassing to me, as a Canadian, that you’re going to beat us to it. But I believe that taxation and regulation is the best way to handle mind-altering recreational substances, whether it’s marijuana or alcohol.
Now, a Colorado company is offering marijuana soda — if you have a medicinal marijuana license. They’re available in eight flavours from Dixie Elixirs.
Now, how long before someone makes a vodka cocktail using this marijuana soda?
Aside: According to the New York Times, legalizing marijuana is good for the newspaper business:
“Medical marijuana has been a revenue blessing over and above what we anticipated,” said John Weiss, the founder and publisher of The Independent, a free weekly. “This wasn’t in our marketing plan a year ago, and now it is about 10 percent of our paper’s revenue.”
…
Alternative weeklies are not the only publications raking in medical marijuana lucre. Dailies like The Denver Post and The Bozeman Daily Chronicle in Montana are taking advantage of the boom and making no apologies.
“My point of view is, for the moment at least, it’s legal,” said Stephanie Pressly, publisher of The Daily Chronicle, adding that the paper generates about $7,500 a month in advertising from medical marijuana businesses. “The joke around here is that it’s a budding business.”
Some of the largest newspapers — even staid, conservative ones — are even producing regular supplements devoted to marijuana. Now that’s interesting.
(via Discovery News)
I cannot thank Francis Lam at Salon enough for this recipe:
Candied bacon
Adapted from the amazing Andrea Albin and her recipe for frozen peanut butter pie in the September 2009 issue of Gourmet.Makes 10 strips
Ingredients
- ½ pound bacon (10 strips)
- ¼ cup sugar
- Dash ground cinnamon (optional, to taste)
- Pinch ground coriander (optional, to taste)
- Pinch ground chile powder (optional, to taste)
Directions
- If using spices, stir them into the sugar and mix evenly.
- Lay the bacon in one tight layer in the heaviest, widest skillet you have, and set it over medium heat. If you can’t fit all the bacon at once, do this in multiple batches. Cook the bacon, flipping after a few minutes, until it’s nicely shrunk, starting to brown, but still pliable, about 6 minutes in the pan. (If you want to make a whole bunch, do it in the oven: Lay the bacon out, again in one layer, on a rimmed, parchment-lined sheet tray and bake in a preheated 350 oven. Check on the bacon in about 20 minutes.) When ready, pour off the fat, saving it for other, delicious uses, and let the bacon drain on paper towels.
- If you plan on serving the pieces in half, cutting them now is a good idea, and it will probably let you fit more pieces in the pan at once. Set the skillet back on medium heat with as much bacon as it will take in one layer. (Sorry, bakers; you’ll really want to do the candying step on the stove so you can keep an eye on the sugar.) Sprinkle the sugar over the bacon, remembering to save some if you’re doing this in multiple batches, and let it cook until the sugar melts. At this point, turn the heat down to medium-low and keep a close eye on it, making sure it doesn’t get too dark and burn. With tongs, swish the bacon around so that it’s entirely coated in the molten sugar. When the bacon looks dark and shiny, and the sugar has taken on a light brown color of its own, remove the bacon to a plate or a cutting board to cool. Make sure you give them some room so they don’t stick to one another, and DON’T PUT IT ON PAPER TOWELS. Trying to rip the stuck bits of paper towel of candied bacon is more impossible than trying to de-toilet-paper your tree. Once it’s cool, trick or treat!
Note: Candied bacon can be stored out of the fridge in an airtight container for a day, but will lose its crispness. If you want, you can precook the bacon and refrigerate it, and then candy it with the sugar the day you want to serve it.
At a special chocolate event at Winnipeg’s The Forks Market, I got to try a wonderful thick-cut bacon that had been dipped in spicy chocolate. It was delicious.
Let’s say you’re not a very good capitalist consumer. Let’s say you didn’t score very well on the logo recognition test.
Perhaps you even hold that as a point of pride. Perhaps, you say, it is just that you “place all such capitalist icons into their proper perspective (i.e. into the banal, derivative, generic, and irrelevant categories).”
That’s excellent. As a person who was just the right age to have Naomi Klein’s No Logo make a gigantic impression on me,* I am completely sympathetic.
That’s why I think you might be interested in this (ahem) product:
It’s the brainchild of one Jeffrey Crouse, and with about a month to go, he only needs about $1,100 in donations to get it up and running.
Do I love it? Yes. Do I think it’s perfect? No.
I would prefer to be able to download it as a filter, say, for Final Cut or iMovie or something. I think his idea of an uploadable server is interesting and cool, but far too single-point-of-failure for me.
Still, I keep thinking about a trip that Amy and I took to Cuba a couple of years ago, when we were surrounded by LITERAL PROPAGANDA everywhere we turned, and all we could think of was what a nice relief it was to not have our brains assaulted by advertising at every juncture. Now that’s a vacation.
(via BoingBoing)
____________
* One of the worst side-effects of 9/11, in my opinion, was the way it completely derailed all the wonderful youth protest movements that were just getting started.
In fairness, some of these logos are a little obscure. But others are very, very common, and I still whiffed on them. I think I got about 20 per cent, at first blush, and mostly those were the logotypes with just their letters and a unique colour scheme. Or Target. Target was easy.
Logo designer Graham Smith has made this an ongoing project. Check out a bunch more circle logos at his Tumblr, called Unevolved Brands, or in the Flickr set.
Yeah, what if Mario could fight Luigi, but they had to use words, and it was on Facebook, that’s what I meant.
Here’s how it would go down:
(via Dorkly)
Both Hacked Gadgets and Lifehacker point to a cool online app that lets you pinpoint your location on Google Maps, then select a wall, and will custom-generate a vertical sundial for you to print out and put up.
Sadly, I don’t have a good sun-drenched wall to put this on, but I could see tracing it onto something more permanent than paper, and turning it into a cool, permanent addition to your yard or garden. Any wood- or metal-workers out there?
Generate your own vertical sundial here.
I don’t mind a little banter between the on-air personalities, and I know they have to push other avenues of getting the news, like the station’s website, or Twitter feed or whatever, but this spoof of the social network explosion in news coverage feels pretty spot-on.
Better? It was produced by the actual Fox news team in Dallas-Ft. Worth.
According to a blog on the Dallas Observer, the video (which was originally posted to the station’s Facebook page) appears to have been produced for the Lone Star Emmys.
Boom. Roasted.
(via tdw)
That’s not true, I like clowns. I actually think what’s scary is in the inversion of simple childhood pleasure. But clowns are an effective way to do that. Now:
As one YouTube commenter says, “I don’t know if this is an actual movie or a fake trailer and I am not sure which I want it to be.”
Internet memes, the online one-hit wonders (of a sort), occasionally serve a purpose greater than making us smile for a second before we click away through the never-ending world of primarily third-rate entertainment. One of those greater purposes is to remind us of true, top-notch entertainment.
True, the Internet also provides us with this good stuff. And, also true, Internet memes can sometimes be great in and of themselves. And, sure, the web can….you know what? My whole thesis has fallen apart already.
I was referring, in an overly oblique way to the “Smell Like a Monster” video that has been making the rounds. If you are the person that hasn’t seen it yet, here you go.
My point was that sometimes brand new videos, for example, can remind us of real classic entertainment. The kind of thing that was produced before anyone gave any consideration to the ideas of “stickyness” and “viral” and such. A more innocent kind of entertainment…
If it sounds like I’m reaching, it’s because I am. I just want a reason to post the next video. Then again, do I really need a reason to post a Grover video?
I think not.
Single-serving coffee seems to be all the rage these days, with Starbucks’ VIA being the prime example.
Iced coffee, too, is a popular product, so it follows that single-serve pouches of iced coffee powder would be a natural. And they are.
But check this out:
It’s a single-serve pouch … and a straw!
Oh! So! Clever!
You can even see if in action, in a video:
Caution: Not yet a real product, just a very cool idea.
(via Yanko)
As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Kathryn Borel Jr was going to be in Brandon to, in part, teach Grant how to properly saber a bottle of champagne.
Here, in video form, is that instruction and its results….
If I had seen this recipe about a month ago, so that there was time to brew it before Hallowe’en, I would have been all over it. All. Over. It.
Next time, Gadget. Next time.
by Amy Breen
Gravity’s Rainbow is probably Thomas Pynchon‘s most famous and recognizable book. It’s currently sitting on one of my bookshelves, in the queue of “books I need to read at some point in my life.”
So I probably can’t appreciate (as much) The Thomas Pynchon Fake Book:
Thomas Pynchon is one of the great unheard lyricists. His award-winning novel, Gravity’s Rainbow, is full of song lyrics. Depending on how you count, there are around 100 in the book. Over the course of a year, the Thomas Pynchon Fake Book managed to set twenty-eight of them to music. A limited run CD the group put out also featured two bonus instrumentals inspired by the work, “The White Visitation” and “The Lonely Rocketman.”
The project doubled as an experiment in online music collaboration. Thirty seven people and three animals across four states contributed tracks. In June of 2009 the group held a CD release party in Portland, OR. Check back later for footage from that event.
It’s a pretty interesting project, and just one more reason to read Gravity’s Rainbow.
