We do it #ForTheCultrs
A pisco sour is a Peruvian cocktail and the country’s national drink. Here are the ingredients:
I’ve never had one of these and I don’t remember seeing it on any cocktail menus in the UK, which is a shame.
Read how to make it in Simon Willison’s TILs.
Peruvian food and drink related: What on Earth is a piure?
UnlimitedSteam is an ongoing Twitch stream that shows AI-generated versions of the Steamed Hams scene from The Simpsons. The episodes use OpenAI’s GPT-3, Unreal Engine 5, and some Python packages to get things working. According to its creator, episodes can anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour to generate and they all run for 3 minutes. You’ll get some repeats but, hey, this is Steamed Hams!
I kinda expected it to be called Streamed Hams but whatever. It’s weird and wonderful and showcases the longevity of an iconic Simpsons meme.
Marge vs the Monorail won a recent Simpsons Twitter poll bracket. It beat ‘Homer at the Bat’ in the final. The result was never in doubt. My favourite, ‘Homer Badman‘, lost in the quarter-finals. (Here’s an image of the final bracket in case the tweet link dies)
Disney’s 2000 film Dinosaur ‘started life as a 1988 Walon Green screenplay that Paul Verhoeven was interested in directing as a live-action drama‘. Yep, the guy behind RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls. I wonder if Jurassic Park would have existed in this alternate timeline.
Piure (scientific name: Pyura chilensis) is a traditional South American seafood dish. It is also a tunicate that looks like red squishy tomatoes (or organs) inside a rock. It is often found on the coasts of Chile and Peru. While it is born male, it becomes hermaphroditic at puberty, and has the ability to self-fertilise if left alone.
Outside of its own reproductive system, it is alleged to have an effect on that of humans too with a group of Chilean women claiming that eating large amounts of piure increased their chances of multiple births. There are also suggestions that piure can act as an aphrodisiac and improve erections in people with penises. To be honest, I’d take that all with a pinch of salt. And a dash of pepper.
(via Atlas Obscura)
TIL: Luna Luna, the world’s first art amusement part, is coming back after over 35 years.
I’ll admit when I first saw this article about the lightest paint in the world from WIRED, I thought “oh god, another Anish Kapoor thing” but it wasn’t this time.
In a paper published this month in Science Advances, [Debashis] Chanda’s lab demonstrated a first-of-its-kind paint based on structural color. They think it’s the lightest paint in the world—and they mean that both in terms of weight and temperature. The paint consists of tiny aluminum flakes dotted with even tinier aluminum nanoparticles. A raisin’s worth of the stuff could cover both the front and back of a door. It’s lightweight enough to potentially cut fuel usage in planes and cars that are coated with it. It doesn’t trap heat from sunlight like pigments do, and its constituents are less toxic than paints made with heavy metals like cadmium and cobalt.
I’m all for environmentally friendly and cost-saving paints so I’ll be interested to see if this takes off (partial pun intended)
Paint related: Easy Klein is an ‘Incredibly Kleinish Blue’ paint for everyone to use
You don’t wear the ribbon? Aren’t you against AIDS?
Yeah, I’m against AIDS. I mean, I’m walking, aren’t I? I just don’t wear the ribbon.
Who do you think you are?
Put the ribbon on!
If you did decide to wear the ribbon, you can get one from the National Aids Trust online shop. Or not. We’re not ribbon bullies here.
First, there were Lush bath products and now the latest Super Mario Bros. Movie tie-in is a collection of hot sauces in collaboration with Truff:
Original Hot Sauce (Toad) is a unique blend of red chili peppers, water, vinegar, sugar, garlic, salt, agave nectar, olive oil and black truffles.
White Hot Sauce (Peach) is a unique blend of red chilli peppers, water, vinegar, sugar, garlic, salt, agave nectar, olive oil and white truffles. It also has extra white truffle concentrate for extra truffle-y-ness.
Hotter Sauce (Mario) is a unique blend of red chili peppers, water, vinegar, sugar, garlic, salt, agave nectar, olive oil and black truffles. This one also has red habanero for that extra kick.
I doubt we’ll see this selection on Hot Ones but if you like Mario, hot sauce, and expensive movie merch, then why the hell not?
Hot sauce related: Hellboy Right Hand of Doom Hot Sauce and Satan’s Drano
(via RetroDodo)
Washington Post analysed the language used by tech SEOs when they lay off workers and it’s disgusting how they couch their decisions in vague rhetoric to try and shield themselves from criticism:
A surprising number of these communications address workers using a corporate pet name, a practice that has roots in the ancient tradition of using one’s surname to indicate one’s profession, according to Ayelet Fishbach, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Like Potter or Mason in olden times, terms like Googlers and Vimeans are used today to connect people to their jobs.
But emphasizing communal bonds can be jarring in a layoff announcement, Fishbach said. Company leaders are “trying to remind people that they are family members — except that some people are no longer part of the family.”
A workforce is not a family. Never ever forget that.
Language data viz related: Reuters on pronouns and gendered language
And for a comedic take, you should watch Steve Harvey’s standup on getting fired.
Charlie Javice, former CEO of Frank, was charged with fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday and released on a $2 million bond. She was also named named in Forbes 30 Under 30 – Finance in 2019. Arwa Mahdawi wrote about the growing number of fraud cases in the magazine’s list:
“The Forbes 30 Under 30 have collectively raised $5.3B in funding,” the tech entrepreneur Chris Bakke tweeted on Tuesday. “The Forbes 30 Under 30 have also been arrested for frauds and scams worth over $18.5B. Incredible track record.” The first number comes from Forbes and the second is Bakke’s own back-of-an-envelope calculation, but you get the gist: the line between innovator and fraudster seems to have become alarmingly thin.
Let’s be honest: if one person is making billions, it’s coming at the expense of many others who aren’t billionaires. So this should come as no surprise in principle, but seeing the those back-of-an-envelope numbers is wild in isolation. And knowing funding will continue to flow, fraud cases will pile up, and high bails will continue to be set.
The reason why American radio station names start with the letters W and K? It’s a geography thing.
That’s it. It’s a LEGO piñata, what more did you expect?
One of the weirdest scenes in Batman Returns (and there are PLENTY) was where Selina Kyle (Michelle Pfeiffer) fell from the Shreck office window to her assumed death, only to be “revived” by a group of alley cats. Their method of revival? Finger chewing. But did those cats really chew Michelle Pfeiffer fingers?
Of course not!
But the question remains—what were they actually chewing? IMDB claims the following:
In order to get the cats to surround Selina when she’s knocked out, the filmmakers put tuna on a dummy version of Selina and tuna on Selina’s suit.
It’s certainly more plausible than this wild claim (which I assume is a joke; please say it’s a joke)
Apparently the actor Blake Hudson (1944-1988) donated his body to Hollywood which was subsequently frozen before parts of it were used, as appropriate, for various films, including his hand for Batman Returns’ ‘finger chewing sequence’. I also understand various parts of his body were used for the bravura Normandy Beach landing sequence in Saving Private Ryan.
Please say sike, johnnygobbs
I guess that kinda answers a secondary question I always had: why were the cats chewing her fingers to the point of bleeding? Cats chewing an owner’s fingers can be a sign of affection but, if the person is conscious, they tend to pull away if the biting pierces the skin. Selina wasn’t in a position to stop them while she was “dead” so… they kept on going. That and it’s a Tim Burton film so of course there’s an element of the macabre (and, again, there’s PLENTY more in the movie).
Fish eating in Batman Returns related: Did Danny DeVito eat a real fish in Batman Returns?
