Abetrujillo

Whether because of a dispute with the studio or just a plethora of unused material, a director often feels the need to re-release a classic (or not-so-classic) film.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I hereby release Taco Bell to use this as an ad campaign.

Today's News:

Here's your meal plan for August Week 2! We've got Grilled Veggie Pizza, a Smashed Cucumber Chicken Salad, Spicy Turkey Burgers, and more!

Continue reading "Meal Plan for August Week 2" »

Natural peanut butter is delicious, but the initial stirring causes a mess. The minute you put in a spatula, the oil on top overflows everywhere. Instead, try this stirrer integrated into a screw-on lid ($10). With a few quick turns, the peanut butter is completely mixed with zero spillage. Plus, when you remove the stirrer from the gasket once you’re done, it automatically cleans the stirrer! These days, my husband actually sneaks in a new jar of peanut butter just so he can mix it up before I get to.

[This is a Cool Tools Favorite from 2007]

Dashi is the foundation of Japanese cuisine, but its potential uses go well beyond that. Got a jar of instant dashi on hand, and wondering how to use it? Here are some ideas. Read More

When I get on a plane to Japan, breakfast is the meal I anticipate most. Not ramen, not a sushi omakase or pristine slices of sashimi, but a "Japanese breakfast": salted salmon, rice, and miso soup, with a few optional and customizable accompaniments. There is no better breakfast in the world. Read More

 Zucchini season is starting to take off, which means we are going to need lots of creative uses for this vegetable.

Whether you grow it yourself, know someone who grows it, or just buy it at the market, when it’s zucchini season, it’s abundant!

Continue reading "Taco-Stuffed Zucchini Boats" »

If you’re a parent, then you know that finding a moment alone is nearly impossible. With the chauffeuring and the meal prep and the endless attempts to force everyone to pick their damn clothes up off the floor, it’s pretty rarifying to enjoy a moment of pure, uninterrupted peace.

Fortunately, other moms out there totally feel your struggle and are here to offer a few bits of hilarious parenting observations. After all, even if you’re barely holding it together while juggling your responsibilities, at least you can take comfort in the fact that you’re definitely not alone.

Although, maybe just for this moment, you can pretend like you are — at least until your kids find you and start banging on the door.

31.

30.

29.

28.

27.

26.

25.

24.

23.

22.

The post 30+ Memes To Quietly Laugh At When You’re Hiding From Your Kids In The Closet appeared first on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

Our guest this week is Dan Ruderman. Dan is a physicist and technologist. He is faculty at the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine of USC, where he applies machine learning to individualized cancer treatment. Dan enjoys overseas travel, and picking up enough foreign language to never again order a plate of organ meat.

Subscribe to the Cool Tools Show on iTunes | RSS | Transcript | Download MP3 | See all the Cool Tools Show posts on a single page

Show notes:

Anki NihongoShark.com Kanji Deck
“There’s this program called Anki, which works both on your desktop computer but also on your phone. I think it costs like $25 or something like that, but it’s well worth it, and you can synchronize them. It’s basically a platform for flashcards, and people have uploaded all kinds of flashcards decks for all kinds of subject matter: sciences, chemistry, physics, pathology, history. All kinds of thing you want to learn about, there are flashcard decks on those things. Well, someone has put together a particular flashcard deck around Kanji that I really like, and it’s called NihongoShark Kanji. So it has the 2200 Kanji that you need to learn to be basically proficient, and then it has their meanings in English on them — and it has some of the Japanese as well — and so you can learn them. ….What’s wonderful about Anki is it doesn’t just give you the new cards that you’re supposed to learn this day, but it also goes through and reviews the previous ones that you’ve supposedly learned and maybe have forgotten. It takes you back to them, and so it’s continually reinforcing your learning while it’s having you learn new things.”

Pimsleur Approach Gold Japanese I,II,III, IV Complete 64 Cd’s Total
“Pimsleur makes language CDs for all kinds of languages, and I’ve found their stuff to be really good. The particular one that I’m using is Pimsleur Approach Japanese Levels 1-4 Gold Edition, and you can get 64 CDs combined, and you can get it on eBay used for like $100. So for essentially like 60 hours of learning, that’s really pretty inexpensive. It’s very high-quality. The language instruction is great. They take you through conversations, they teach vocabulary. It has a good pace. It has male and female speakers, so you’re hearing multiple people say the same words but also different genders. Sometimes you can’t quite make out a sound, but then you’ll hear the other person say it and suddenly it makes sense. Great conversation examples that are useful for the traveler.”

A Guide to Japanese Grammar ($19)
“As I said, I’m taking a multi-pronged approach, learning the Kanji, learning the listening and speaking, but also grammar, of course, is essential. And so you want to find a book that isn’t too dry. You want to find one that is practical, and I really like this book A Guide to Japanese Grammar by Tae Kim. His name is Korean. I don’t think he’s a native Japanese speaker, and so that means that he has some perspective on the process of learning as an adult. … He’ll make sentences that aren’t really sentences in English, but they are sentences in Japanese or they’re concepts, and so you really get this sense from the very beginning of the way the Japanese think in terms of their language, and I think that’s a really important thing to do.”

JapanesePod101 Youtube Channel
“A great part of learning a language is trying to get immersed as much as possible in the culture and see how it works in real life, and what I love about JapanesePod101 is it has those real-life aspects where they’ll go and they’ll do something. They’ll go to tea shop, and they’ll talk to the guy that sells tea, and they’ll see what the tea is all about. And so it’s these real-world activities, the kinds of things you want to do as a tourist. Now, what’s great about it also is you have English subtitles. So they may be talking Japanese, you see the English subtitles. But more than watching a Kurosawa movie, you also have the Japanese there often with it. So you will have the spoken Japanese, you’ll have the written Japanese in full Kanji and Hiragana, you’ll have the Latin alphabet transliteration, and then you’ll have the English. But what’s great about YouTube is … Once they say something, you can pause, see all the text together, take your time, and learn it.”

We have hired professional editors to help create our weekly podcasts and video reviews. So far, Cool Tools listeners have pledged $341 a month. Please consider supporting us on Patreon. We have great rewards for people who contribute! – MF

Like many millennials, I spent elementary school in an American Girl–obsessed fog. I reread each doll’s book series (five during my childhood: Felicity, Kirsten, Addy, Samantha, and Molly) to the point of memorization. Recently, I assembled used copies of my bygone American Girl cookbook collection and prepared to answer what I’d always been dying to know: Which American Girl’s cuisine reigned supreme? Read More

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
I'm gonna start a graphic novel about a world where there are no crowds, buildings, bicycles, cars, or horses.

Today's News:

In this video we’re taking a look at a pocket microscope. I picked this up for around $6 on Amazon and by using the link in the description to get one for yourself, you help to support my videos and the Cool Tools blog.

I half bought this thing just to see what a tiny $6 microscope even looks like. It comes in this flimsy box, and understandably it’s mostly plastic, but what you get is fairly impressive.

The microscope itself is just this passive lens system that you can focus with your hand. But you also get this series of LEDs you can switch on to add extra light. Switched one way you can look at things under a UV light which is apparently handy for seeing anti-counterfeit marks on money.

I had microscopes as a kid, but they were always the classic style where you had to put samples on a slide, and they were more more or less fixed things.

What surprised me about this cheap, tiny microscope is how much fun it can be to just take it to anything out in the world — the wood grain on a table, the tread of a bike tire, the print in a comic book — all these little hidden worlds open up and you can just instantly peek at them.

If you have kids, it’s a slam dunk. Even if they already have a standard microscope, like my kid, the reaction to this was totally different.

Beyond the novelty, I’ve found this useful a few times for inspecting electronics projects and troubleshooting connections or reading little component values or serial numbers.

And I should also mention that I was able to use this with my smartphone camera to take closeup photos or videos. That’s actually how I shot a lot of this video here. So you can somewhat think of this as a super macro lens adapter for your phone.

Previous Cool Tool Review

[Cool Tools has a YouTube channel with many more tool reviews]

Ideal prank gift of the day: This 1000-piece blank puzzle set, from Japanese puzzle maker Beverly, appropriately named "Pure Hell."


Also available: 2000-piece white blank puzzle, 1000-piece black blank puzzle

If the only seaweed you ever encounter is wrapped around your maki or floating in your miso soup, it's time to learn more about what sea vegetables—from the ubiquitous nori to more obscure varieties, like arame and dulse—can add to your cooking. Read More

Read More

Planning a trip to Japan means choosing what kind of experience you'd like to have while you're there- you can go full urban in big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, go see all the wonderful nature in Kyoto or hop around and combine the two.

Either way, if you're planning a trip to Japan you should check out this TopTenz article that reveals 10 Must-See Tourist Attractions in Japan so you'll know which way you want to go.

(YouTube Link)

You could go visit the wonderfully relaxing "onsen ryokan" hot spring hotels all over the country and unwind, or get wild in the city and see the famed Akihabara and Harajuku districts in Tokyo.

(YouTube Link)

If you're looking for something a bit different why not visit some of the last remaining feudal castles like Matsumoto Castle pictured at the top of the post? Add Maruoka Castle and Matsue Castle to your itinerary and you've got a feudal fairy tale trip in the making.

And if you're planning on visiting Japan with your kids, or you're just a kid at heart, then you may want to check out Tokyo DisneySea, which looks amazing and quite different than all the other Disney theme parks.

(YouTube Link)

See 10 Must-See Tourist Attractions In Japan here

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Perhaps in the future we can equip small children with exoskeletons so that they will start cleaning their rooms.

New comic!
Today's News:

(Image Link)

Once you get past the small talk period with a complete stranger, whether they're an acquaintance co-worker or love interest, it's time to find out more about this person who has piqued your interest.

So you move from the small talk to the icebreaker questions, which help you learn a bit about the person and make both parties feel more at ease in each other's company.

#2: Have you ever met anyone famous?

This question is a fun one, as it taps into the people that your coworkers admire. Folks bond over a mutual love for Jude Law, or have a laugh when a manager shares her story about meeting LeBron James at a gas station.

But before you start in with tired old questions like "what do you do for a living?" or "what's your favorite color?" you should consult the research done by Know Your Company and ask icebreaker questions with appeal.

#24: Do you collect anything?

Skip the boring question, “What are your hobbies?” and ask this instead. You might find that someone is unexpectedly avid butterfly collector (my uncle does this), or enjoys finding a new postcard every time she travels (my mom does this). Regardless, it’s a more unique way to learn about a person’s interest.

#20: How do you like your eggs?

Our customers who ask this question are always shocked by how popular the answers to it are. They discover that colleagues are immensely passionate about scrambled eggs or are sunny-side-up diehards.

Their list is designed for team-building at work but if you ask me these questions work just as well on a date or a new friend, because they get to the heart of a person in a hurry and reveal a lot about their character.

#12: What’s your favorite family tradition?

Cooking Korean dumplings together around the holidays is one of mine. When you ask this question, you get an inside look into your coworkers family’s heritage and the things that bring their family together.

#13: Who had the most influence on you growing up?

A mother, a sports hero, a grandparent, an elementary school teacher… This question is touching to hear the answer to. You’ll gain a sense of respect about who has shaped your coworkers.

See The 25 Most Popular Icebreaker Questions Based On Four Years Of Data here

The Action Figure Therapy Store sells custom built but unlicensed mini figures. As such, they cannot use the real names of the characters, or the set of building blocks that they fit into, but you know them. The newest is the Calm Bearded Tree Enthusiast Painter Dude. Hmm, I wonder who this is modeled after? He joins other fabulously-named products like Wisecracking Burned Up Cancer Survivor Assassin Guy Minibrick Figure and Space Orphan With Daddy Issues And Green Laser Sword. 

Oh, you've got to read the description on the Worst “Bring Your Kid To Work Day” Ever Minifigure Set.

It’s like all you were trying to do was bring your kid up to the fancy, planet-killing space station where you work, show him off to some of your co-workers, and see if had any interest in pursuing the family business.

Then the next thing you know he’s trying to decapitate your boss with his green laser sword, things get crazy, and you get into huge battle.

That's just the beginning. The rest of the story is there, if you can decipher it. -via Boing Boing

Read More