kitchenmage

How Loggers Open Lagers

Just in time for America's annual burn meat and blow things up week, opening beer with manly tools.

I wonder how many beers were sacrificed while he learned this.

ps-thanks to Brian from Awesomeography for the title upgrade.

 

Laugh and Learn, Learn and Laugh...and My New Thing

First up: Laugh as you learn how to open a milk carton. Seriously. A high-ranking official of the Austrian Milk Board is called upon to demonstrate how to open the sort of milk carton Americans give our small children. (The style is new there.) Hilarity ensues.

Learning with a few laughs along the way is the intent of my newest feature, launching this week.

The Food Blog User's Guide (FoodBUG) is a new series in which I will use my expertise at explaining strange and arcane technologies to Fortune 50 companies to take a good hard look under the apron of food blogs. People have many questions about how this "new media" works and FoodBUG will help to answer them.

Most of the information will apply to blogs and other non-corporate (i.e., relatively independent and unregulated) web sites in general, so if you read web media, it might be worth a follow.

Feed for Food Blog User's Guide posts

Follow theFoodBUG on twitter.

(There is a slight technical delay due to fresh cat gouge in my hand. First post should be up shortly just as soon as things around me stop coming unglued.)

Noisy Jelly: Magical Musical Game

This thing looks like pure fun!

A couple of technomages in Europe have conjured up Noisy Jelly, this odd-looking device consisting of a box with electronic bits and gelled cones of agar-agar/salt solution. They describe it like this:

With this noisy chemistry lab, the gamer will create his own jelly with water and a few grams of agar agar powder. After added different color, the mix is then pour in the molds. 10 min later, the jelly shape can then be placed on the game board, and by touching the shape, the gamer will activate different sounds.

Technically, the game board is a capacitive sensor, and the variations of the shape and their salt concentration, the distance and the strength of the finger contact are detected and transform into an audio signal.

This object aims to demonstrate that electronic can have a new aesthetic, and be envisaged as a malleable material, which has to be manipulated and experimented.

Note : This project is a fully working prototype made with Arduino and Max/Msp, there are absolut no sound editing in the video...

Noisy Jelly press kit (from which I also extracted the photo)

I can see many of you nodding along with blank looks on your faces (me too at first) but here it is in action.

NOISY JELLY from Raphaël Pluvinage on Vimeo.

Is that the coolest thing you have seen lately?

From what I can see this is not likely to hit the store shelves any time soon but it is a fascinating and fun convergence of food and tech.

Creators:

Raphaël Pluvinage
Marianne Cauvard

More information:

Noisy Jelly press kit
Noisy Jelly flickr set 

By the way, this bit of wonder came my way via the Very Short List newsletter which delivers a blessedly brief bit of "cultural gems from a different curator every day." I only signed up recently and find it more interesting than not, which is saying something these days.

Gideon's Kitchen ~ Key & Peele

This captures the emotional manipulation of cooking shows just about perfectly.

from Key & Peele

Vegetables: A song (chomp chomp)

Just the other day I was thinking, there are not enough songs about food, especially healthy food. The next evening, over a cup of tea, the Keepers of one of my favorite Happy Places said "You have to hear our latest song!"

Ask and you shall receive...

Vegetables (Beach Boys) presented here by Sunrise and Jessica Fletcher. Perhaps the only song with vegetables being eaten as percussive instrument—Paul McCartney sat in on celery on the original...how cool is that?

Apologies in advance for the earworm but it is worth it.

399 moments of zen

It's like printing...with water...in midair.

As I said to someoneElse, "Japan gets all the cool sh*t." He corrected me, "Japan MAKES all the cool sh*t." (Though in this case, it's German artist Julius Popp.)

In either case, this is one of the best things I have seen in a while. Relaxing. Great use of technology. Enjoy!

Happy New Year from Lunch Lady Land!

I debated posting this, sure that Farley's portrayal of the lunch lady would offend someone. My trepidation was assuaged by the number of schools that posted video of their lunch ladies performing in a cover skit of the song.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Sandra Lee's Kwaanza Cake - the Rest of the Story

If you hate love love to hate Aunt Sandy, you know this cake.

An abomination made with all sorts of semi-edible crap, with bonus cornnuts, this cake is the epitome of all that is wrong with celebrity food media today. Tone-deaf, ugly, disgusting and just a bit of cultural offensiveness thrown in for good measure...that's the Kwanzaa Cake.

Here's what you don't know...

Paula Deen's Paper Towels

Happy Saturday from the confluence of two of my favorite things, food and comedy.

Betty White's Muffin on NPR on SNL

Somewhere, Alec Baldwin is plotting how to get Betty White into one of his Schweddy Balls spots.