Matt Garber

via web.eecs.utk.edu

(2004)

Joe Petagno, 1978

When Pizza Hut failed to brings its oft-discussed pizza perfume to full retail reality, it seems a space was created in the eau de food space-time continuum, waiting for some other product to waft in and fill the void. So of course, one company did, and thus we have $20 1-ounce bottle of pizza perfume on the market.

The company’s website admits that it’s a “departure” from its usual fare — despite the fact that Demeter also sells dirt, bourbon and earthworm as scents — and this one stretches “the boundary of the concept of wearable fragrance.”

“But we had to try – tomato sauce, creamy mozzarella, a touch of oregano – perfectly balanced for the adventurous.”

Yeah, or for the hungry who just can’t be eating pizza all day, every day because some people in society frown on that. Stupid society.

Anyway, Gothamist checked out a bottle of it and it sounds like the reviews are a bit mixed. On the one hand, pizza! On the other, smelling like you rolled around in pizza!

“It’s like what living with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles must smell like,” one staffer notes.

And another: “Crust. Slightly burnt. Few days old. The job is getting you down but you persevere. You haven’t tasted anything but mozzarella and tomato sauce in months. You’ve forgotten what the ocean smells like. The line between thin crust and thick crust seems monumental. Life is what happens when you’re too busy smelling like pizza. Fin.”

I don’t know if I’m intrigued, scared or hungry. Or all three. Someone hold me. And bring pizza.

Pizza Perfume Is Here To Seduce That Mutant Turtle Jailbait You Long For [Gothamist]

Want to play with LEGO bricks but you’re at work? Or sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s? Or maybe you just don’t own any LEGO sets anymore. If you’ve got Google Chrome, you could be building virtual, blocky worlds without having to deal with the hassle of cleaning up (or the horror of losing) all those tiny plastic pieces.

Build With Chrome is a joint venture between Google and LEGO that does exactly what you think it would do — let you place various LEGO bricks on a surface to build stuff on your computer.

Alas, it’s not as easy as it might sound just yet. My attempts to monkey around with Build With Chrome were more than a bit glitchy and the navigation — especially in the “explore” mode that is supposed to let you see what others have built on a worldwide, LEGO-ish Google map — is kind of a nightmare. For example, any attempt to add an “extra” piece (door, window, etc.), resulted in my building plot vanishing from the screen.

That said, it did just launch so we hope it improves because this is exactly the kind of thing we all need to be doing on our laptops and phones during boring conference calls.

UPDATE: Some readers have written in to point out that Build With Chrome wants to use your location so you can, in theory, build a LEGO structure on the very site you’re currently occupying, then share that creation with the world. Some are concerned that this location-based aspect may unwittingly be sharing users’ real addresses with the public. This is especially a concern when it comes to children. You can deny the site access to your location and you can also change the Google+ settings so that your structure is shared only with certain people on Google+ or with no one at all.

Three different covers for the same 1970 book

Those wacky aliens and their human masks

Trevor Webb (via Ships & Vehicles - Science Fiction Art)

The Sadist knows how to eat!

superseventies:

1970s Rappers menswear.

Here's an American version of the popular Japanese game show Silent Library.

(Via Steve Silberman)

Republicans are increasingly skeptical of evolution. All in all, a third of Americans reject evolution.

If you’re a fan of a band or a TV show, you want branded merchandise that shows your support. Why shouldn’t it be the case for fast food? In recent years, White Castle brought us their shop, with a Snuggie-sleeping bag hybrid designed for hardcore vegetation. Now Taco Bell has opened a store to spread their message of “Live Más,” if “Más” means wearing Taco Bell jewelry and hats.

You might recognize the rings for sale in the Taco Bell Gift Shop when the company sent rings to a variety of famous pretty ladies with Twitter accounts. Now ordinary people can have the same wire jewelry mailed to glamorous models, except that we have to pay $25 for the set and look like plain old boring lumps while we wear them. From my computer at least, it’s not possible to add this “Limited Time Offer” to our web carts. That’s probably just as well.

Profits from store sales apparently go to the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens. Actual slogan: “To inspire and enable teens to achieve MAS.”

Live Más Store [Official Site] (via Brand Eating)

Welp, it's launch day for Space Terraria Starbound. It took almost two years.

Read more...

Americans eat a lot of packaged foods, but do you ever wonder what kind of magical land these boxes of convenient tastiness come from? There’s no army of dough-tossing elves trapped inside a pizza factory: the reality is much cooler.

In this clip from the Science Channel’s “How It’s Made,” we watch the birth of frozen pizzas from the mixing of the dough to the final packaging in a cardboard box. Pizzas are never tainted by human hands: pizzas pass under cascades of sauce, cheese, meat, and vegetables that are carefully regulated so that each pizza receives the precise correct amount of toppings. In theory.

Wait: what happens to the sauce and toppings that fall between the pizzas, which are round? They go back into reservoirs to be thrown over more pizzas that roll down the line.

Video: See How Frozen Pizza is Made [Slice] (via Foodbeast)

In a new Evangelii Gadium, Pope Francis has condemned doctrinaire capitalism, "deified markets," trickle-down economics, and the finance industry. He decried the growing gap between the rich and the poor, tax evasion by the wealthy, and characterized ruthless free-market economics as a killer that was inherently sinful.

“I am interested only in helping those who are in thrall to an individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality to be freed from those unworthy chains and to attain a way of living and thinking which is more humane, noble and fruitful, and which will bring dignity to their presence on this earth,” the pope wrote.

He also launched a broadside against former President Ronald Reagan’s signature economic theory, which continues to serve as conservative Republican dogma.

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world,” Pope Francis wrote. “This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system.”

The pope lamented that people had “calmly accepted (the) dominion” of money over themselves and society, which he said was expressed in the recent financial crisis and the continuing promotion of consumer-based economies.

“We have created new idols,” the pope wrote. “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose. The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings; man is reduced to one of his needs alone: consumption.”

Pope Francis rips capitalism and trickle-down economics to shreds in new policy statement [Travis Gettys/Raw Story]

(Thanks, Michael!)

(Image: The Purification of the Temple, El Greco/Wikimedia)

The LeBeau Plantation house in St. Bernard Parish, La., was long considered haunted. Now it's considered toast, having allegedly been burned to the ground by stoned ghost hunters. Local Sheriff Jimmy Pohlmann said that the fire broke out at about 2 a.m. Friday, reports Fox News, with the mansion "fully engulfed in flames" by the time firefighters arrived. [via Fortean Times]

Arrested are: Dusten Davenport, 31, of Fort Worth, Texas, booked with arson, simple burglary and criminal damage over $50,000; Joshua Briscoe, 20, of Grand Prairie, Texas, booked with arson, simple burglary and criminal damage over $50,000; Joseph Landin, 20, of Grand Prairie, Texas, booked with arson, simple burglary and criminal damage over $50,000; Jerry Hamblen, 17, booked with arson, simple burglary and criminal damage over $50,000; Joshua Allen, 21, of Grand Prairie, Texas, booked with arson, simple burglary and criminal damage over $50,000; Kevin Barbe, 20, of Arabi, booked with accessory to arson and criminal trespassing; and Bryon Meek, 29, of Gretna, booked with accessory to arson.

questionableadvice:

~ Urbana Daily Democrat, January 7, 1916

"The kind that mummifies them."

 _  ___          __  __ _____ _____        __    
/ |/ _ \        |  \/  | ____/ _ \ \      / /    
| | | | |       | |\/| |  _|| | | \ \ /\ / /     
| | |_| |       | |  | | |__| |_| |\ V  V /      
|_|\___/        |_|  |_|_____\___/  \_/\_/       
                                                 
 ____   ___       ____  ___ _____ ___    _  ___  
|___ \ / _ \     / ___|/ _ \_   _/ _ \  / |/ _ \ 
  __) | | | |   | |  _| | | || || | | | | | | | |
 / __/| |_| |   | |_| | |_| || || |_| | | | |_| |
|_____|\___/     \____|\___/ |_| \___/  |_|\___/ 

Winter Blues!

It’s been tough going from perpetual sunny Florida to a dark Pacific NW Winter and it hit me hard! Winter Depression is no fun! 

Today the Internet revealed a recipe from a bygone era, one where combining fruit, meat, cheese and mustard got people drooling and set stomachs to rumbling. But since reading the instructions on how to concoct your own Ham Banana Rolls is having the opposite effect on my innards (translation: guts are coiling back up into themselves) we’ve got to wonder if any of you brave souls would like to take this recipe on.

In the old advertisement/handy recipe offered by the United Fruit Company, Chiquita Bananas get a makeover that we can only surmise reflected the popular tastes of the time. Either that or the creators flipped through a book of foods, chose four at random and just kinda went with it.

If you can’t read the recipe, we’ve copied it below for your culinary pleasure. And please, if anyone is brave enough to create and eat this terrifying banana concoction, send us a line and a photo of the evidence at tips@consumerist.com.

How to make “Ham Banana Rolls”
6 thin slices boiled ham
Prepared mustard (it must be ready to do what it’s about to do to those bananas)
6 firm bananas, peeled
Cheese Sauce

Spread each slice of ham lightly with mustard. Wrap a slice of the prepared ham around each banana. Place in a buttered shallow baking dish and pour Cheese Sauce over bananas. Bake in a moderate oven (350 degrees Fahrenheit) 30 minutes or until bananas are tender… easily pierced with a fork. Six servings. Serve with Cheese Sauce from the baking dish poured over each roll.

How to make a CHEESE SAUCE (because ham, bananas and mustard isn’t a gross enough combination on its own)
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
3/4 cup milk
1 1/2 cups grated American cheese (How do you grate American cheese? Shudder).

Melt butter, add flour and stir until smooth. Stir in milk slowly. Add cheese and cook, stirring constantly until sauce is smooth and thickened. Makes about 1 cup sauce.

Then go ahead and douse those bananas in cheese, folks! It had to have made sense to someone, sometime. We’re just not sure who this person with a stomach of steel was or what he or she was trying to accomplish.

*Thanks to Brian for posting this on Facebook!

So you like bad rap huh? We got your bad rap right here!

YouTube has been an existence-proof of forms of video that were lurking in potentia, unable to come into existence due to limitations of the distribution channel. The two-to-three-minute video has now been firmly established as a genre (with the six-second video hot on its heels), but there's plenty of room at the long end of the scale. Case in point: subculture of YouTubers who post full-length train journeys, hours and hours' worth -- and if that's not long-form enough, how about 134-hour sea crossings?

Given the modern vogue/panic about short-reads being mere "linkblogging" and the practice of spinning out a few hundred words into a "serious, long-form journalism" wheeze that is split across eight or more screens, this may just be the video form for our age (and please let it be a short one!).

I was thrilled to learn, via an excellent Metafilter post, about a small online subculture of resistence to the attention-frittering trend: the existence of scores of YouTube videos documenting entire train journeys, some many hours long, from the perspective of the driver in the cab. The video above is nine hours and 53 minutes long – it's available in spring, autumn and winter versions too – and while I won't claim to have watched it all, I've spent some pleasant work breaks in Brooklyn watching Scandinavian scenery go by. But perhaps you'd prefer Glasgow to Fort William and Mallaig in Scotland? It's every bit as rainswept – and bleakly beautiful, especially in its latter stages – as you'd imagine:

Life too exciting? Enter the calming world of full-length train journey videos [Oliver Burkeman/The Guardian]

(via Making Light)