I’ll bet White Castle never thought of this. Supposedly you warm the can in boiling water and then just pop it open and eat. Here’s some snapshots posted over at Something Awful, taken by a guy in Germany who tried one out…
Note that they sell for a mere Euro 3.95, which currently works out to about $5.87 as I write this. Just the thing for your urban apocalypse survival kit. It comes with the usual mix of condiments apparently. But just in case the tiny little pickles aren’t to your liking, there’s always this…
Yes…what goes better with Cheeseburger-In-A-Can, then Pickle-In-A-Can!
Take that McDonalds. Looks like the U.S. is loosing the junk food war. Damn. And that was the one thing I thought the rest of the world could never do better then us.
…taken just a few moments ago while I strolled around the area by my hotel just before dawn. And brought to your computer through the magic of digital photography and the World Wide Web. Seriously…an old friend of mine called me on his cell phone late last night as he was driving south through Wilmington Deleware, and there I was chatting with him on my cell phone while I was strolling around U.S. Route 1 in Key Largo and you have to appreciate that we both grew up in an era when telephones had wires connecting to them to the wall and a long distance call to just the next state over was a lot of money, and there we were chatting to each other with little devices that just fit in our pockets, he in Wilmington and I in Key Largo. And we haven’t really lived all that long.
I’m taking a holiday break with my new car, and we’re driving south, hopefully to enjoy a warm beach somewhere before winter really sets in here in Baltimore. So posting will be lite and random, but may include some photos.
Enjoy your holidays. Have fun…eat recklessly…make the ones you love smile…
Via Slog… Geeze…if you want to see what the end of the world would look like…the island of “Gunkanjima” is probably the place to go…
Off the westernmost coast of Japan, is an island called “Gunkanjima” that is hardly known even to the Japanese. Long ago, the island was nothing more than a small reef. Then in 1810, the chance discovery of coal drastically changed the fate of this reef. As reclamation began, people came to live here, and through coal mining the reef started to expand continuously. Befor long, the reef had grown into an artificial island of one kilometer (three quarters of a mile) in perimeter, with a population of 5300. Looming above the ocean, it appeared a concrete labyrinth of many-storied apartment houses and mining structures built closely together. Seen from the ocean, the silhouette of the island closely resembled a battleship – so, the island came to be called Gunkanjima, or Battleship island.
Eventually, the mines faced an end, and in 1974 the world’s once most densely populated island become totally deserted. The island, after all its inhabitants departed leaving behind their belongings, became an empty shell of a city where all its peopl disappeared overnight, as if by some mysterious act of God.
Wow. Check out the photos. Man…my cameras and I could have a grand old time there…
Weather Report, For My Family In California Where They Don’t Have “Weather”
Yes, yes…it looks like New England is getting clobbered right now. Yesterday NOAA was calling for freezing rain this morning here in Baltimore, but the freeze line had apparently moved north by late last night and right now we’re only getting our usual miserable cold wet drizzle. Good thing it’s not cold enough for snow though, or we’d be getting socked in too.
P.S.: I hear you had a very severe cold snap out there recently. Temperatures plummeted all the way down to…thirty-eight, was it? It must have been awful having to…you know…put on a jacket or something…
Somedays, it is my profoundest wish that the one true god turns out to be some refrigerator that washed ashore on some remote island in the pacific. And that nobody but the natives there, and there alone, worship.
Visualizing this made me smile. It gave me the warm fuzzies somehow. The creator of All That Is embodies one day as a refrigerator and washes ashore on some lost and out of the way island, where it’s venerated by the natives there…and by them alone. What a completely goofy…and yet evocative image that is…
Well I reckon Disney World’s out. Thanks for the warning about the crowds during Christmas week guy. And here I was wondering if they were even open then…
After Mitt’s wee tirade on religion the other day I found myself presented with a torrent of LDS history crossing my screen, some of which I’d never heard of before. A hat? I’m sorry…a hat? And this man is bellyaching about secularism being an invented religion???
Anyway…reading the LDS story of Elohim and his spirit children who live on a planet circling the star Kolob, it crossed my mind that you can tell which religions were founded after the invention of the telescope because they always read like bad science-fiction novels (praise Xenu), whereas the ones founded before the telescope read like planet earth is at the center of the universe, with a somewhat ambiguous heaven floating above it.
I think at the moment that Huckabee has it cinched in the heartland, and if he doesn’t get the nomination the base is going to be very, very upset.
Peterson Toscano is in town today, to do a performance of his Doin’ Time In The Homo No-Mo Halfway House at Goucher College, and I had a chance to hang out with him for a bit this morning. One of the things we discussed over lunch was fund raising ideas for Morgan Jon Fox’s documentary on the Memphis Love In Action protests, This Is What Love In Action Looks Like. I’m already in it for several grand, helping out in a way I’m not completely free to discuss, so between that and my new car I don’t have a lot of money to spare for a while and I explained this to Peterson and I guess his imagination is much better then mine because he suggested something that never occurred to me, but which should have because it’s obvious. I can help raise money for the documentary, by auctioning some of my artwork on eBay.
Not that I’m a world renown cartoonist or anything, but some of you may appreciate owning the original artwork to some of my political cartoons, and in particular the cartoons I’ve done about Love In Action. I’m also considering selling some of the original artwork to my cartoon series, A Coming Out Story, but there’s a catch to that. The political cartoons really do look pretty much as you see them on the cartoon page. But all I can sell of the work I’ve done for A Coming Out Story is the final inks on Strathmore board. which look somewhat unfinished. All the cross-hatching and the word balloons for that one are done in Photoshop, after I’ve scanned in the inks. The exception to this are the first four or five episodes, plus My First X-Rated Movie which I did with my old dip pens. They’re almost completely finished cartoons, including the word balloons (which are empty because I just cannot hand letter anything).
The Mark and Josh originals are the same, except I do the coloring in Photoshop. What I can do with those is sell the original, along with a high-quality print of the final cartoon, printed to the same size as the original artwork so they can be framed side-by-side. 100 percent of the proceeds would go to Morgan to finish the documentary.
One other thing I could do, is auction off an original political cartoon, on any topic the successful bidder chooses.
I’m just in the thinking stages of this, so don’t send me any requests or bids on artwork just yet. But I wanted to float this out there to see how much interest there might be in this. When I get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted, I’ll ask the folks on my mailing list how interested they might be in owning some of the original artwork for the series.
Via Slog… Another reason not to check myself into an Ex-Gay ministry…
“A Consequence of Misuse of the Internet”
That’s how a New York judge has summed up this tragically effed-up mess, in which a 48-year-old man (who’d been posing as an 18-year-old Marine in online chat rooms) murdered his 22-year-old rival for the virtual affections of a middle-aged West Virginia mother posing online as an 18-year-old student.
The Associated Press untangles it all for you here.
You know…I’ve never lied about myself on the Internet…about my age or my looks or my income or anything. Not on the Internet, not on the few dating sites I’ve tried. I just don’t do it. Believe that or not as you like, but I’ve never even used a pseudonym. I’ve have always gone by my birth name online. It’s not rectitude, it’s vanity.
I’ll not be posting much here over the weekend as I’ve got Thanksgiving dinner to go to with friends in D.C., and then my high school class reunion on Friday. Saturday I’ll be busy trying to get the next episode of A Coming Out Story posted (you guys still remember that one?). So unless something comes up that I just Have to vent about here, I’ll be pretty quiet until next week.
Look at this graphic…is the dancer spinning clockwise, or counter-clockwise…?
Actually…she can be spinning in either direction. It depends on how your brain initially puts together the visual cues it finds. This from The NeuroLogica Blog, where Steven Novella debunks the notion that this optical illusion reveals left brain/right brain dominance…
Take a look at the spinning girl below. Do you see it spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise? I see it spinning counter-clockwise, and I had a hard time getting it to switch direction. Give it a try.
These kinds of optical illusions are always fun. What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.
The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.
By looking around the image, focusing on the shadow or some other part, you may force your visual system to reconstruct the image and it may choose the opposite direction, and suddenly the image will spin in the opposite direction.
The trick, once you’ve settled on a direction for the dancer’s movement, is changing your mind about it at will. It’s not easy at first…at least it wasn’t for me. Initially I saw her spinning counter-clockwise. It took effort, but after a while I found that if I view the image in my peripheral vision, I can train my eye, while not looking directly at the image, to see her spinning in the opposite direction until it "takes". Then when I look directly at her she’s now spinning in that direction. At first it took a while and a lot of effort, but after some practice I could make her switch pretty quickly.
Thoughts that crossed my mind as I was doing lawn work this morning….
Even if your property consists merely of 1 tenth of 1 percent of 1quarter of 1 acre, nine-tenths of your work around the house will consist of biomass control.
Ivy must come from some other planet. It grows even in a drought. The rest of your lawn could be dead, it could be turning to dust, and the ivy will still be growing. And it always grows in the direction you don’t want it growing toward, and will reliably ignore the territory you are willing to let it have.
Adjusting the anti-squirrel defenses on your bird feeders only raises the intelligence level of the neighborhood squirrels. You are not keeping them away from your feeders, you are training them to solve complex problems.
[Update…]
Bird spit is amazing stuff. That’s Spit, not Shit. Bird SPIT. Ever wonder how those tiny little nests made of nothing but small sticks and twigs manage to stay intact during a thunder storm? It’s the damn spit they use to hold everything together. The barn swallow nests in the parking garage at the Institute are amazing things…tacked literally on the concrete walls by nothing more then dirt and swallow spit. Never mind bird droppings, try cleaning a bunch of old seeds all stuck together by bird spit off the bottom of your bird feeders. It’s Work! If humans could spit glue like birds, we’d probably never have invented nails.
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