It took me a second or two to see it, but once I did, I just kind of sat in awe at the incredible cleverness.

(Reddit via Wired)

Once again, I give props to people who are dedicated to doing things so I don’t have to!

I’ll add an interesting tidbit: this illusion is an example of anamorphosis, an object or picture that is distorted in such a way that the viewer has to be at a certain perspective in order to see it properly. A good example is the street art that makes it look as if, for example, there is a hole in the ground:

Very cool!

(via TDW)

(Photo: Chris Noto looms over an Irish Whiskey Cocktail on St. Patrick’s Day.)

I’ve blogged about it twice over the space of more than a year, but last night I finally tried the nameless Irish Whiskey Cocktail that was spawned by a challenge the master distiller of Bushmills himself. (Proper credit: Though I mistakenly told everyone last night that the master distiller, Colum Egan, had come up with the recipe, more properly he challenged some top bartenders to create Irish whiskey-based cocktails, and this was the one featured in the article I read.)

The recipe is simple (all three links, above, will get you to it), but also time consuming. Since there were a goodly number of people I had convinced to try this new cocktail, I quadrupled the recipe and did it in a blender, rather than a cocktail shaker.

That means I used four ounces of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, two ounces of cherry liqueur, two ounces of orange juice, and four raw eggs.

Firstly, I’m glad that I used real cherry liqueur and not something like cherry brandy, because they are very different drinks, and this cocktail needed the heavy depth of the liqueur. Secondly, if you try this at home, add the eggs first, because the yolks can ‘plop’ a fairly hefty splash out of a blender if you’re not careful.

A couple of pulses later, and we had a nice, light brown, frothy drink. Poured into martini glasses, it easily served five or almost six, so quadrupling the recipe was no biggie.

Everyone was hesitant (even me), but we all gamely tried it.

Verdict: Delicious!

Although the drink was a tad on the strong side, it was delicious. There was no raw egg taste, and you could hardly taste any of the individual ingredients. Instead, they blended together to create a fully new flavour.

It was like a light, but very spicy egg nog. The whiskey provided the spice, I’m sure, but it tasted for all the world like a Christmas drink transposed to spring. It didn’t have the artificial sweetness or vanilla flavour of a commercial Christmas egg nog; instead it was light and frothy and the egg added a delightful creaminess.

Probably, some nutmeg or cinnamon wouldn’t have been amiss, to sprinkle on top, but I would be wary of too much experimentation.

The original recipe calls for straining into a chilled glass, and I do think that cold ingredients and cold glassware make for a better drink — as it warms, it’s slightly less appealing.

So for Round Two, I plopped a couple of ice cubes into the blender, hoping to lower the temperature. Then we realized that there was mint chocolate-chip ice cream in the freezer, so we added a couple of scoops of that.

Round Two was not a dismal failure, but it was definitely more disappointing than the original. Rather than a minty freshness, or a chocolatey-chip sweetness, the ice cream mostly added a weird colour to the drink. And without the strength of the whiskey coming through, the eggy nature of the drink was more apparent.

In fact, though the second attempt was more dilute, I found it smelled a lot more like raw egg, and it was less appetizing to drink. Stick to the original.

But stick to the original I will. This was a great drink, all in all. And it’s a bit of a fancy one to make, too, with the raw egg, if you like being a showoff.

I’ve just fallen in love with the photoblog Shorpy, which mines through personal and Library of Congress archives to uncover great old photographs, like this one, a view of a wooden-track speedway in 1925:

There are hundreds of pages of photos, too many to even begin to scratch the surface here. Bookmark it, visit again and again. Great stuff.

And, if you’re interested, the name Shorpy has an interesting history.

Okay, it’s six hours of work, but condensed down through the miracle of time-lapse to under two minutes. Cool job.

Designer Lauren sent it to Boing Boing, but she goes into much more detail on this blog entry at Design Related:

If you get a chance to read the books, they’re hilarious. They’re kind of a Victorian comedy of errors, just with werewolves and vampires. And the heroine, Alexia, is more plucky than dark. So with a little less “steam” and a little more “punk”, plus some type with a nod to British punk, we came to the “Victorian punk” kind of aesthetic of Soulless, Changeless, and Blameless.

I remember in 1997 when the Cassini probe to Saturn lifted off. As the first (in a while) nuclear-powered spacecraft, there were all kinds of protests. After the launch, though, you didn’t hear much about Cassini-Huygens, because it kind of takes a long while to get to Saturn.

Then in 2004, images and data from the probe starting coming back. Wikipedia, of course, has a detailed page with many links, that will tell you all you need to know.

But if you really want to fall in love with Cassini, head over to the Boing Boing feature page. In honour of NASA deciding to extend the probe’s lifespan until 2017, they’ve put up a special feature, breaking down the science and what it means — while also managing to display some jaw-dropping images.

It’s the kind of feature that would do any mainstream magazine proud — and I’m happy to see it on a blog. Good work by all involved.

This is pretty slick work! Even if it only works from one specific spot:

(via BB)

How fantastic is this, Star Wars nerds? You can buy the postcard for $8 at Zazzle, but I’d love to see it as a poster.

Or a short film. Oh please, a short film.

Update: Turns out the artist is Franco Brambilla, and he’s done a series of sci-fi inspired prints, including this one, which I also love:

Wow — reclusive Calvin and Hobbes cartoonist Bill Watterson has given an email interview. It’s kind of short, but insightful. Says Watterson on the fact that fans still “grieve” for Calvin and Hobbes:

If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.

I think some of the reason “Calvin and Hobbes” still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it.

Read the full interview here. It’s part of a story that ran in on Cleveland.com marking the 15th anniversary of the final strip.

So how did writer John Campanelli score an interview with Watterson, considering that the cartoonist hasn’t done an interview since 1989? Well, according to this piece, he just sent an email and asked.

Wish I’d thought of that!

When it comes to single-issue blogs, I don’t think you can get more specific than The Brown Car Blog, where Ben Kraal highlights all things automotive and brown.

And yet, somehow, there’s a wide variety. I liked the thoughtfulness of this post, for example, on the 1967 Plymouth Sport Fury’s badge:

Consider this: this badge was designed by hand. It would have been transferred from a drawing to a mold by a toolmaker, by hand. After each badge was mass-produced, in all likelyhood in a factory entirely owned by Chrysler, it would have been painted and polished by hand. Each badge would be applied to each car by hand and not by some double-sided tape but by actual holes in the panel.

They really don’t make them like they used to.

Or, bathe in the wonder that is the factory interior of a Porsche 928:

I can’t say that a brown car would really be “me” (heck, when I last bought a car, I bought the second-cheapest on the lot) but I truly admire some of the stuff that Kraal finds.

(via Coudal)

I find the online craft sale Etsy to be hit and miss. But user hammeronsteel, a blacksmith from Massachusetts, is a definite hit. I particularly like the twisted-railroad-spike “churchkeys” to open beer bottles.

I carry a bottle-cap pryer on my keychain (it’s from Sweden — thanks Denise!) but I would love to have a gigantic, threatening-looking one made from an enormous steel nail, maybe hanging from a strip of leather in my garage (I don’t currently have a garage, either).

Best of all is the pointy end, if I happen across a really old-school can that has to be punctured. (The one above has the point bent back for safety, but some of them are left extended. I long to find beer in such a can — I think it’s just tomato and pineapple juices these days.)

Churchkeys with twisty handles are $44, plus shipping (I’m guessing they’re a tad heavy, too). You can also get non-twisty ones for $39. The item descriptions are drool-worthy:

Each of these beer defense tools started off as a railroad spike I found while walking tracks. Years of weather and rust have deeply etched their mark into the material itself. After I bring them back to my shop, I heat them to thousands of degrees, and beat them many times with my hammer. After the final clean-up, all the rust is whisked away, and we’re left with a great tool that has a great history.

On another listing, they are given quite the warranty:

These openers comes with a two-generation guarantee: if they fail for any reason during your life, or the lives of your children, I’ll do what I can to make it right. If it fails for your grandkids, maybe they shouldn’t have tried to take it on interstellar travel.

And, why do I always find such great things a month after I tell people that “I don’t know” what I want for Christmas?

Whoa. Very, very cool — a map drawn by Jack Kerouac detailing the itinerary made famous in “On The Road.”

Useless as a map, of course, but priceless as a cultural artifact.

(From Beau Colburn, via Draplin)

This is a cool little non-destructive hack for your DSLR, if you have a need to follow subjects in motion, and it probably costs less than $10 at a hardware store. Clamp a hose clamp around your focus ring, and drill a hole through it for a drawer pull or some such.

Now, if you’re shooting fast action — or perhaps video — and you know you need to go from, say, 2 o’clock to 5 o’clock focus, you can do so much more quickly and smoothly than fiddling around with the stock focus wheel.

I presume this would also work for the zoom.

It’s like a suicide knob for your camera!

(From lonelysandwich’s Flickr stream, via Gizmodo)

I’ve gone skydiving a few times, and it’s a blast. I wish I had the time, the money and the opportunity to pursue it more. But jumping from a plane doesn’t even come close to what Joseph Kittinger did in 1960 — he rode a weather balloon to the edge of space (over 30 km straight up) and jumped.

According to his Wikipedia bio, he still holds the world records for “highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest drogue-fall (four minutes), and fastest speed by a human being through the atmosphere.”

Now, Felix Baumgartner will try to break those records:

Baumgartner is a well-known BASE jumper already.

This is a fun five-minute animation that gives a brief overview on evil in Western culture. It’s incomplete, and it’s problematic in a few places, but it’s a student animation project, so I’m willing to give it a fair bit of leeway.

Moreover, the poor animator has apparently gotten slammed in the YouTube comments (more recent one are more positive, or spammy), having to edit the video’s info box to clarify patiently that, no, the video doesn’t claim that Elvis actually was evil, just that people at the time thought rock’n'roll was evil.

(Thanks, Ben!)