Month: November 2008

In the 2000 British comedy film Kevin and Perry Go Large, the antagonist is one “DJ Eyeball Paul”, who does vodka shots via his eye in order to get the alcoholic buzz as quickly as possible. I remember laughing at this gag when I saw the movie, but never thought people would actually try it.

Apparently, they are. According to a report in the Brit tabloid Metro, students have been tipping vodka into their eyes.

“Relax,” you might say, “it’s a tabloid. The story’s probably fake.”

A quick search on YouTube proves that this is not the case; I got over 500 results using the search term “eye vodka”, and a quick perusal of the results pages confirms that most of them feature people actually doing eye vodka shots. Here’s one:

Keep in mind these videos feature only those people who chose to record their eye vodka hijinks and then post them to YouTube. I have no doubt that there are many more eye vodka shot incidents that go mercifully undocumented.

I have no idea how those kids do it. I don’t even like taking eye drops.

[This article also appears on my tech blog, Global Nerdy.]

NewTeeVee reports it, and I’m repeating it here: Monty Python now has its own official YouTube channel. Cue the sound of comedy fans – especially geeks, who love the troupe so much that there’s a programming language named for them – rejoicing!

Here’s their very enlightened response to all those YouTubers uploading their videos for the past three years:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube.

No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing – HQ videos delivered straight from our vault.

What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new HQ versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there!

Of course, they want something in return:

But we want something in return.

None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

There are currently 24 videos on the Monty Python YouTube channel, and they’ve given the impression that more will be posted. Most of these videos are some of their most popular clips; a couple are interviews with the Pythons. Here’s one with Eric Idle talking about what it was like to write with other members of the troupe:

…and here’s one with John Cleese on Monty Python and music:

Enjoy! (And try to get some work done today, willya?)

I’ll close with the official YouTube editions of a couple of clicks that were favourites of both me and my Dad, proving that I am indeed my father’s son. Both are from Life of Brian.

First, there’s the “Biggus Dickus” scene:

And now, the “Stoning” scene:

Here’s an informative and entertaining video about Japan’s food system. It’s in Japanese with English subtitles and cover the issue of food production in Japan.

Japan produces only 40% of the food it consumes and imports the other 60%, a ratio that is the lowest among developed nations. This is due to the change in the Japanese diet, which has gone from rice, fish and vegetables to what the video refers to as “meat, fat and oil”.

The video proposes very Japanese solutions: going back to more a more traditional Japanese diet, favouring food produced in Japan and for farmers to be more efficient.

The video’s animation style (slightly abstract, isometric-projection-ish and constantly changing zoom levels) and “J-pop” music kept reminding me of the Katamari Damacy series of videogames. I kept expecting to see a katamari roll over the scenery.

For comparison’s sake, here’s some video of the “Sumo Wrestler” level of We Love Katamari, in which you have to roll a sumo wrestler over food items to make him reach a certain weight class before the time runs out:

I’ve posted a couple of articles that non-programmers might enjoy on my tech blog, Global Nerdy:

• The Star Wars Storybook: scans from a 1979 storybook featuring a condensed adaptation of Episode IV: A New Hope and MP3s of the accompanying vinyl record.
• The Star Trek Movie’s Second Trailer: Yes, there’s a new trailer, featuring a scene in which a young James Tiberius Kirk recreates the “chicken run” stunt from Rebel Without a Cause.
• Steve Jobs Giving Big Blue the One-Finger Salute: An amusing photo of an eighties-era Steve Jobs and a quick overview of the seemingly-always-torrid relationship between Apple and IBM.

Today’s predicted temperatures for Accordion City are:

• –3 C (27 F) in the morning
• -1 C (30 F) in the afternoon
• -7 C (19 F) tonight

Bundle up!

If you work in an office with a microwave in the break room, there’s a chance you’ll catch a strong chocolate aroma during break time. That’s because the “Cake in a Mug” recipe, which requires a coffee mug, a microwave oven, hot chocolate mix and a few other easy-to-get ingredients has been making the rounds on the forwarded-email circuit.

The Recipe

There are a few variants of the recipe floating around the ‘net. This is the simplest one and comes from Wired’s “How-To” wiki.

Ingredients

• Egg: 1
• Flour: 4 tablespoons
• Hot chocolate mix: 9 tablespoons
• Non-stick cooking spray
• Oil: 3 tablespoons
• Water: 3 tablespoons

The Steps

1. Spray the non-stick cooking spray into the mug.
2. Add the flour and hot chocolate mix to the mug and store them together.
3. Add the egg and stir.
4. Add the water and oil and stir until you have a cake batter-like mixture. Be sure to scrape the bottom of the mug so there aren’t any pockets of dry ingredients left.
5. Microwave the mixture at high for 3 minutes. As it makes, a cylinder of cake will rise from the mug. It’ll shrink slightly after the baking is done.
6. When the 3 minutes are done, take the mug from the microwave and tip the cake cylinder out of the mug into a dish. Use a fork to break the cake into quarters, which will allow steam to escape from the center.
7. Let the cake cool a little, then dig in!

I Want to Believe, But Can’t

The problem with the recipe is that it uses a microwave for baking.

Microwave ovens work by bathing the food in low-energy microwave radiation, which creates an alternating electrical field in the oven. Water molecules, thanks to their shape, are more positively charged at one end and more negatively charged at the other. Because of these charges, they will align themselves with an electrical field, and if you constantly alternate this field, they will constantly realign themselves with the field, which creates molecular motion, which creates heat.

The practical upshot of all this is that microwaving is essentially boiling without the immersion. As long as the kind of cooking you’re doing is steaming or boiling (or their kissing cousins, thawing and reheating), a microwave oven will do the job, and more quickly than conventional boiling. However, if you want to get the complex flavours that come from the breaking down of proteins and the caramelization of sugars, you need temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. That’s why boiled food is bland and why chefs have long scoffed at microwave ovens.

That’s also why I think Cake in a Mug won’t be any good – it’s essentially a boiled cake.

Some folks at the SomethingAwful forums gave the recipe a try, and the general consensus is that while it smells great, the taste and texture of the cake are terrible. One particularly curious person replaced the chocolate mix with Strawberry Quik and ended up with this pink horror:

 

I don’t think I’ll bother trying out the recipe.

The bar for "Crazy Cat Owner" is higher than I thought: