Krabler

I spotted black pepper tofu on Ottolenghi’s* Instagram last week, a fine place to gush over food. The recipe is from Plenty, an excellent cookbook that I happen to have, which means I could make it right away. However, rather than making it and then still feeling a loose obligation to make a vegetable side dish or salad, I decided to add eggplant. From there, everything went south. I don’t have three types of soy sauce. I can get them, theoretically, but I was feeling lazy about it. I was pretty sure five tablespoons of crushed peppercorns and eight thinly sliced red chiles would make my children run screaming from the room; 11 tablespoons of butter was a bit rich for my tastes. But here’s the thing with this and, I think, all recipes. Much ado is made about “internet recipe commenters” and their “I changed eight ingredients and it didn’t work, zero stars”-type presence on websites. I’m often asked how I don’t “lose patience” with these types of comments and here comes an opinion, you just know I had one brewing:

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“Girlfriend’s mom was a Kindergarten teacher and had her students provide their favorite recipes. Here’s just a few!”

(via source)

“Girlfriend’s mom was a Kindergarten teacher and had her students provide their favorite recipes. Here’s just a few!”

(via source)

The post Kindergarten Cook appeared first on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

These 4-ingredient cheese balls are super melty on the inside and crispy on the outside. You will never believe it's not real cheese!

Filed under: Etc.,Videos,Safety,China

One woman was seriously injured and another was killed when they exited their vehicle in a Chinese drive-through animal park and were attacked by a tiger.

Continue reading Chinese woman killed by tiger in animal park

Chinese woman killed by tiger in animal park originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 25 Jul 2016 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I brought this up once and everyone looked at me like I was crazy!!

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Brooke Colman and her hands in the 'Hand Jobs' book

Brooke Colman's hands are six meters high and made of fiberglass.

Granted, not her actual physical hands—but when Nikon wanted to launch a new digital camera by placing giant statues of it in various major world cities, and needed some giant hands to hold it in position, it was Colman the company turned to.

"Yeah, that was a weird one," she says. "I had to go to this studio in North Wales and hold my hands in the exact position they wanted for hours while they poured in this silicon putty stuff. After it set, I had to wiggle my hands out very gently. Then they made a plaster cast and used digital imaging to scale it up to six meters. On the launch day, the hands were standing in central London, Berlin, Paris, Milan, Warsaw, and Zurich. I had to go down to Covent Garden and be filmed wiping the lens of the giant camera they had made, in some sort of ultra-meta 'the real hands interacting with the giant hands' kind of publicity thing."

Colman is a professional hand model. This is what she does. You have more than likely bought products at least in part because you've seen her hands holding them on billboards and in TV commercials—from washing up liquid and nail varnish to cheese spreads and high-end jewelry.

Hand modeling is a strange concept. There is a whole mini industry of people who star in some of the most important, visible, and expensive ad campaigns in the world—yet we never see their faces. Colman recently collaborated on a photo-book project exploring the lives of hand models with the photographers Oli Kellett and Alex Holder, called (of course) "Hand Jobs." We caught up with Colman to hear about the highs, lows, and general weirdness of having people take pictures of your hands as a career.

Colman with her massive hands

VICE: So, first off, how does one get into hand modeling?
Brooke Colman: My granddad was a props and stunt man on films, and he used to sometimes say that I had "hand model hands," though at the time I didn't really know what he meant. Then I got accepted to study acting at Lee Strasberg in New York and was like, What can I do to make money to pay for my flight and the course? So, just on a whim, I googled an agency, got my mom to take some pictures, and went to see them. Literally the next day, I had a casting for Aquafresh Toothpaste and got the part—I think in that ad you probably saw about one inch of my finger. I'm still with that same agency, Hired Hands, now.

If you're an actor and you do one commercial, it can stop you from doing any others, because your face is recognizable and associated with that brand. But with hands, it's much more anonymous and you can keep working.

So you have campaigns with multiple brands going on at once?
Yeah, when I watch telly or walk around London, I'll often have moments where I go, "Oh wait—hold on a minute, those are my hands." The weirdest ones are where they use my hands with someone else's face or body.

Behind the scenes shots of Colman pretending to be someone else's hands

That is quite weird.
Well, advertisers don't want anything at all to distract from the product, and hands are really noticeable—especially in close-up. So I spend a lot of time in really awkward positions crouched under or behind fashion models, trying to keep my hands in shot, but the rest of my body out.

It can lead to quite strange relationships. The models can start thinking, What's wrong with my own hands? And the hand models think, Are you mad? You're this totally stunning creature, and all they want me for is from my wrists up. It can actually be quite hard on your self-esteem.

I remember I did one shoot and this model got upset and snapped, "Can you stop touching my face now?" I think she just felt claustrophobic—and it must be strange to have someone else's hands on you. But I really try hard to be respectful and make everyone feel OK with what's going on.

So even really big name models will have someone else doing their hands?
Yeah, I know models who've done Kate Moss's hands, and people like Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Brad Pitt. I did a really funny one where I had to be Dec from Ant and Dec's hands for Tatler. I guess the whole thing was a joke that they had really feminine hands, so I was wearing all this jewelry and sort of cradling Ant, pretending I was Dec. I was crouching behind him, while he stood on a box—but they were both very lovely and charming.

When I did Julia Roberts's hands, she wasn't even on set that day, but there were about 20 people in the crew, all to shoot me pulling some mascara out of a tube. The camera was over my shoulder, and there was this whole rig of tripods and magic arms to keep the mascara tube floating exactly where it needed to be for the shot. I had to maintain these really horrible positions all day. It's funny—that can happen quite a lot: The crew set everything up really carefully, but sometimes forget that there's actually a model attached to the hands and don't leave space for you. So you end up suspended from the ceiling or crouched on the floor—anything to stay out of shot.

Sounds quite tiring.
Quite a lot of hand modeling is about maintaining what are essentially stress positions for hours at a time. It's not easy work—physically or mentally. I do a lot of yoga and see an osteopath pretty regularly.

A lot of times, directors and photographers—especially if they're new—will start to treat your hands like inanimate objects, and begin moving them around like props. It feels very odd—you become invisible, but attached to this weird five-fingered object. But I'm lucky in that, by now, I actually have relationships with certain directors. The really great ones are those with the experience to know the best results come when they communicate what they want and let me figure out how to achieve it.

That objectification thing is interesting; it reminds me of stuff I've read on the male gaze, and how it can almost slice women up, fetishizing them into a series of "ideal" body parts.
Well, you mention fetishes... you do have to deal with a bit of that. You start to look at people who follow your YouTube channel, then realize that every single one of their videos involves hands or feet in some way. I was approached by one guy through my own website to do a charity event—and of course I was like, "Sure, I want to help." Then, as we spoke, it turned out that he'd seen my stuff, and what he wanted me to do was wrap my hands around his neck and choke him in some sort of asphyxiation thing. Needless to say, I walked pretty quickly. But I think whenever someone has to use the internet to generate work, they make themselves vulnerable.

Colman's hands in a Burberry advert

On that note, tell me about Hand Jobs.
Ha! That joke never gets old, does it? Hand Jobs is a photo book by Oli Kellett and Alex Holder exploring the lives of hand models. I guess it is quite an odd community to look at. I've been involved in this for a while and have seen how it has changed. For instance, in the past year or so, I've been really encouraged that the scene is getting much more diverse. Obviously this could go even further, but it really used to be only white hands, and now there's much more variety.

It can get a little competitive sometimes, too, but really there's a little hand model community—we try to look out for one another in case there's an agent doing something shady, or a production company that doesn't treat people right or something. And there seems to be kind of an interest or fascination about hand modeling. Like, I'm a trained, working actress, and I'm producing this amazing new play called The Greatest Fight, about Muhammad Ali—but all anyone ever wants to ask me about is the hand modeling.

Every article about it just seems to ask the same things—do you really moisturize 30 times a day, and are your hands insured for loads of money? The answer to both of those, by the way, is no. Those are myths, or at least pretty major exaggerations. The only concession I really make is that I use a dishwasher and avoid most of the cleaning products I actually advertise, which I guess is another strange unreality of this world—we use these images of "flawless hands" to sell products that no one with flawless hands could ever use.

Now that I stop and look, your hands do actually look pretty cool.
Thanks. I always thought they were a bit long and spindly, really—but I guess they work well on camera.

Hand Jobs is available to buy through Hoxton Mini Press.

One look at a vintage catalog will show you that interior decorating is a fickle mistress. What's hot one day could fall from graces the next. So how do you stay on top of trends and, more importantly, is there a turning point that marks when a fad is dead? In related news, your mouthwash now comes in chevron.

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Gabrielle Bernstein and Brad Yates, two YouTube tappers

"When my first major panic attack happened, I actually thought I was having a heart attack. I got my husband to phone the ambulance. It was horrendous—a horrible space to be living in. I was going through a lot at that time, and I was going to bed at night and waking up with the attacks. The doctor said, 'No, you've got anxiety' and just put me under that umbrella term. I just found it so frustrating that they weren't helping me, so I got connected with EFT." When Caroline Robinson from Warwick, England, started practicing the alternative therapy Emotional Freedom Technique, she found herself at the beginning of a slow but steady recovery.

"Eventually, I could think rationally. I could be helpful. I reduced the trauma attached to the events that were triggering my anxiety, and now when I think of them, there's no emotion. Now I see things with a different perspective and can carry on as normal." She is now teaching EFT to her young kids, so they can carry these tools into their future.

EFT is also known as "tapping." It was invented in the 90s by a guy called Gary Craig and draws on various theories of alternative medicine. Mostly it's based on the Chinese energy meridians—or Chi meridians—used in acupuncture. The basic idea is that these lines of meridian points are like rivers in the body flowing with energy. Each point corresponds to a major part of the body. Sometimes blockages can form, from strong emotions or trauma, while optimum health needs a balanced flow.

"All the information in these meridians is stored in your subconscious," explains Karl Dawson, an EFT practitioner. "As we tap on those points, it's like pressing a reset button." During the tapping, emotions are given attention and acknowledgement and gradually released, until the excess energy is supposedly cleared helping to restore balance in a person. With acupuncture, this is done with needles. With tapping, you're using your fingers to apply pressure while you repeat words.

If you could tap on your chin and it'd get rid of severe anxiety, would you do it? Yeah, obviously—like most alternative therapies, it sounds too good to be true. But it's gathered considerable interest over the last few years. Go on YouTube, and you'll find many, many videos of people frantically tapping themselves to absolve all their sins and deliver their hearts' desires. Gabrielle Bernstein is a best-selling author and one of the most popular New Age YouTubers, hailed a "new-thought leader" by Oprah herself. She is also an advocate for "tapping." In a video where she shows people how to relieve stress, she taps on her forehead, chin and hand, repeating the words: "Even though I am totally stressed out and overwhelmed, I deeply and completely accept myself." You can repeat this at any point in your day to supposedly brilliant effect, but realistically, you would not want to be caught doing this in public or in front of anyone you know.

She's not the only public face into tapping, and they're not all New Agers. Paul McKenna, the famous hypnotist and self-help author, started going on about tapping on TV and how it could remove your food cravings and Lily Allen attributed the technique to her drastic weight loss. Whoopi Goldberg used it to conquer her fear of flying, and Alex Reid, Katie Price's beefcake cage-fighter ex, used it to overcome the stress of newfound fame.

If you want to learn this in the UK, you'll probably go to Dawson, one of 28 EFT "founding masters." He started to learn in 2002 after he had pain that doctors couldn't heal and mild depression and fatigue. "I was on a detox retreat and fasting, and one of the resident therapists there knew about EFT," he said. "Tapping on yourself to get rid of pain seemed ludicrous at first. But ultimately I tried it and the pain started to diminish over several months. Even though there was something physically wrong, as I started to deal with emotional issues, negative beliefs, and past trauma, every part of my life began to change, and the depression lifted, the pain went away. After a while, I realized, as many practitioners do, that I wanted to help other people with this, so I became a practitioner."

Karl Dawson, EFT founding master

If tapping the correct point of your body to ease your physical or mental pain works, then why the self-help mantra that goes along with it? "Originally, there were two sides to the verbal message. One side was, 'This is what I'm working on, I've got this sharp, angry pain in my left knee,' and then the other side of it is, 'I accept myself any way,' so it was just a form of self-acceptance. Over the years of doing this, I've come to the conclusion that it's more about resolving the problem and what's going on in your body—that's the key thing, rather than that self-acceptance."

According to Dawson, this is never supposed to replace traditional Western medicine, but works alongside it. However, the range of ills it claims to cure is longer than anything you'd be advised to try by your doctor, besides exercise and a healthy diet.

As you can imagine, at this stage, there is a level of cynicism about tapping. Dr. Becky Spelman, psychologist and CBT therapist at Private Therapy Clinic, is not in favor. "While energy meridians are an interesting concept, scientific investigation has thus far been unable to confirm their existence," she said. "Formal studies of the efficacy of EFT have, to date, indicated that any positive results probably have more to do with the placebo effect than anything else. For this reason, while further studies would certainly be welcomed, very few clinical psychologists consider it to be a valid therapy, and are more likely to suggest a proven approach, such as Eye Motion Desensitizing and Reprocessing (EMDR) for patients suffering distress in association with particular memories, circumstances, or experiences."

That's not to say that educated, scientific communities have entirely laughed it down. Researchers at Staffordshire University are leading research into EFT in the UK and have called on the NHS to start providing it as an effective form of therapy for depression, anxiety, and anger. On average, it has been said that just over five sessions are required to treat clients, which compares well with other therapies such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), where six to 20 sessions minimum are typically required.

Dr. Stephanie Franz is a doctor who turned away from treating people in her practice after EFT cured her chronic pain. "It completely cured my health for the better. Sometimes it's hard to work out whether you're depressed because you're in pain or in pain because you're depressed. But with EFT it doesn't really matter. You can address emotional symptoms, physical symptoms. Ultimately, I believed that the way general practices are going, it's going to be difficult for GPs to really help many patients. They just haven't got the time. I felt I wasn't able to address the root causes of many of my patients' symptoms. I decided therefore to leave general practice and move into EFT."

After helping many patients, she's adamant that complementary therapies such as this need to be more readily available. "I've seen people for example who've had thirty years of counseling and on antidepressants have their symptoms reduced within eight sessions. Or people who've been so stressed that they literally couldn't even do anything come to have a really good quality of life, again within less than ten sessions. I've really seen people recover from situations that I haven't improved from traditional counseling or medical treatment."

Whether this sounds like nonsense or not, any supposed effect it could have on the individual can only be found by actually doing it. What's more interesting is what it represents as a form of self-care that costs nothing at a time of austerity. Once you've learned it from a practitioner—or for free on YouTube from someone tapping away at his or her face—you can do it too. If it's helping people with low-level, more minor health issues, then power to them. Just don't do it in front of your boss.

Follow Hannah Ewens on Twitter.

Not everyone has the appropriate setup for a hot tub, built-in or not, with all of the electrical requirements and all. And what if you’re in a rental or plan to move in a couple of years but still want the luxury of having a hot tub you can take with you? The Weltevree Dutchtub, designed by Floris Schoonderbeek, takes care of all of that. In the first month of Design Milk, back in 2006, we posted about The Dutchtub and we’re so glad to revisit this iconic design because it’s now available in four new colors!

It’s simple, bowl-like design burns wood in the connected fire basket and then uses natural circulation to warm the water. Haul the tub to a desired location, set a fire, and enjoy with up to four people!

The Dutchtub only weighs 165 lbs (75 kg), holds 171 gallons of water, and comes in five colors – Dutchtub Orange, Pebble Grey, Olive Green, Pigeon Blue, and Terra Red.

EDGY Media is looking for female talent for their team! An ideal candidate would be:

Attractive non-threatening female. A “10” but not “look” it. Very thin, curvy, not waify. Some ethnic ambiguity but not too much. Black okay. Must be real, down to earth, witty, sarcastic, cheerful, All-American. Can speak a second language. Looks good in all colors, especially blue but pink also a must. Great smile. A real badass. Talent must be comfortable prat falling in high heels. Talent must wear minimum 4" high heels to audition. Needs to be able to hold a gun realistically, but not aggressively. Gorgeous lips. Hilarious! Like Carol Burnett but more attractive. Feet can’t be larger than male talent’s hands. Feet must fit comfortably in the palm of male talent’s hands. Must be able to run in a tight dress, long distances (5K or longer). Indicate if talent has Tarahumara lineage. If talent visibly looks like they have Tarahumara lineage, do not submit. Very smart, genius, but understated. Talent must be okay at times with partial numbness in the face. Working knowledge of origami a must — how to fold a Star Wars speeder bike preferred. Talent must love peanuts. (Do not submit talent if they only “just like” peanuts.) Magic experience strongly preferred but not required. Indicate if talent has sold at least one grand illusion to a magician of importance eg: David Copperfield or the movies. This is a hot dog eating shoot! Talent must not be afraid to eat five hot dogs in a row. Talent must not be afraid to make a heroic comeback after temporary blindness from competitive horse diving. Can cry on command. No dumpy butts. Must have Level-4 clearance to identify and contain chemical weapons that are a threat to national security. Effortless cat eyes. Must have aerodynamic “way of being” — please indicate if talent can literally fly. Must be able to make soup — good soup, like how Mom used to make, but not better. Team player. Must be all the good parts about my old wife. Really stressing the part about peanuts. Talent must not have dated my best friend Mark. No fat chicks. Must jive with audience that doesn’t respond well to female talent.

We look forward to you showing us your stuff!

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Live Life on the EDGY
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“For your amusement, I renamed all my Pokemon to whatever my two-year-old called them.”

(via source)

“For your amusement, I renamed all my Pokemon to whatever my two-year-old called them.”

(via source)

The post Catch ‘Em All appeared first on AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com.

Filed under: Government/Legal,Green,Volkswagen,Emissions,Diesel

The $15 billion settlement in the VW diesel scandal has a lot of ins and outs. Here's a simple explanation of what's happening.

Continue reading VW diesel scandal settlement FAQ: The dirty details, cleaned up

VW diesel scandal settlement FAQ: The dirty details, cleaned up originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 14:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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