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From time to time we like to revisit spirits we’ve spent time with in the past. Management changes. Production practices change. Formulations change. Climate changes. And stuff varies from bottle to bottle even when none of the above changes. Sometimes our reviews are identical. Sometimes they’re wildly different.
Today we look again at Casa Noble, a venerable ultra-premium tequila line that we last reviewed in 2009. Very little seems to have changed on Casa Noble’s end, and from my perspective, very little has changed too. My ratings are all the same, with one slight (yet watershed) upgrade for the masterful anejo.
You’ll note some slight packaging changes (the reposado bottle is no longer blue but is now clear; the anejo is still in its distinctive purple bottle), but otherwise I expect nothing much has been altered behind the scenes of these three tequilas. (Amazingly, prices seem to have fallen a bit in the last few years!) All are of course 100% agave and all are 80 proof.
New thoughts follow.
Casa Noble Crystal (Blanco) – Pungent on the nose, with deep, deep agave notes, white pepper, and cayenne. The body isn’t nearly the agave bomb you might be expecting. It is both sweet and peppery, but not really vegetal at all. Instead you’ll find notes of tart lemon juice, caramel sauce, and a touch of rhubarb. Very well crafted. Everything a blanco should be. A / $35
Casa Noble Reposado – Spends 364 days in French white oak, making this a very well-aged reposado. The nose has that trademark peppery pungency of the blanco, but with an undercurrent of stone fruit — peaches and apricots — to give it some balance. The body is very fruity, slight tropical notes atop lemon and oranges, plus notes of chocolate peppermints and ample wood-driven vanilla. It doesn’t drink nearly as leathery and “old” as my prior comments indicated, but perhaps that’s just my increased experience with tequila over the last five years talking. Still delightful, either way. A / $45
Casa Noble Anejo – Aged “to perfection” for two years in French white oak. Nicely dark, but not overdone. That peppery agave is still front and center on the nose, with more of a caramel/marshmallow character attempting to overtake it. The body shows that it’s a silky dessert sipper all the way. The palate starts with bittersweet chocolate and graham crackers, then hops to burnt caramel and dark brown sugar notes. The fruit is absent save for a little flamed orange peel, which plays nice with the molten chocolate cake character that bubbles on and on on the finish. A benchmark anejo that mixes a racy attack with a silky sweet finish. A+ / $50
Last week, a "self sustaining electrical turbine generator" was found on Kickstarter. Another name for the product is a perpetual motion machine. (We saw this story first on GigaOm.)
Put simply, a perpetual motion machine is a machine is an engine that can continue to move indefinitely without any external source of energy. However, by the law of physics, this would be impossible — due to friction with the surrounding air causing energy loss.
Kickstarter's rules would appear to prevent this sort of thing: One of them requires developers be "honest" about their projects. And, honestly, this project is not going to result in a perpetual motion machine.
The current rules for Kickstarter projects are very simple; there's only three of them:
Projects that involve forming new types of hardware need to abide by additional rules. They need to show a prototype, as opposed to just a rendering. Project starters are also prohibited from using photorealistic renderings.
Yet the turbine generator doesn't break any of Kickstarter's rules — you are not obliged to display a prototype if you are not offering the device. Backers who pledge $250 receive a baseball hat, holiday cards and a poster — unfortunately not a self sustaining electrical turbine generator. They only receive that if the campaign reaches its $10,000 goal.
Before June, a lot of ridiculous campaigns like this wouldn't have made the website — each campaign proposal was reviewed by a human team at Kickstarter. But since June, things have changed: Kickstarter introduced Launch Now. It gives campaign starters the option to launch their projects whenever they are ready or, to get feedback from one of the site's community managers before they launch it.
One of the most memorable efforts taking advantage of the new rules was "Potato Salad" — where someone infamously managed to raise over $55,000 ($49,990 over the target) to make a potato salad. As things escalated, and more money came in than expected, the creator started setting new goals, such "calling a chef to get a better recipe" when the campaign reached $300.
The self sustaining electrical turbine generator has currently raised only $3. But there are 23 days left. Don't forget to donate!
SEE ALSO: A Guy On Kickstarter Has Raised Over $23,000 (And Counting) To Make Potato Salad Alone In His Home
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Hotels are usually just the places you stay while visiting your actual vacation destination, and depending on the destination travelers end up spending as little time as possible in their hotel room.
They're usually just a place to rest our heads comfortably, but what if the hotel itself is the ideal vacation destination?
The Poseidon Undersea Resort in Fiji is one hotel sure to make you want to stay in your room all day long, if you're in to staring at undersea life up close and personal while lying in bed.
If you're not comfortable sleeping with the fishes then you might want to book a room at the Berggasthaus Aescher in Switzerland, centrally located in the Appenzell Alps. The accomodations aren't luxurious, but boy what a view!
Looking for a hotel that will let you sleep under the stars, without all that hiking and yodeling?
Take a trip to Kenya and stay at the Loisaba Lodge, where you can book one of their Star Beds "located among a kopje of rocks in one of the eastern valleys overlooking the 'Kiboko' waterhole." Now that's roughing it in style!
Check out the rest of the 10 Awesome Hotels Worth Traveling For here
When I first saw this photo of a Mastiff armoured vehicle being loaded onto a C-17 Globemaster , I thought: this is how a Transformer probably looks in its mother's mechanical womb.
Designer playing card producer theory11 collaborated with magician Steve Cohen to create a deck of playing cards fit for a millionaire.
theory11, whose works have been featured in the Museum of Modern Art, Barneys, Colette, and Paul Smith was challenged to create a deck of playing cards for a display at the legendary Waldorf Astoria, the gathering place for royalty and the ultra-wealthy in New York.
Cohen, also known as the "Millionaires' Magician," has performed sold-out shows to the likes of Warren Buffett, David Rockefeller and the Queen of Morocco at the Waldorf since 2000. In 2012, Cohen became the first magician in a half-century to sell out Carnegie Hall.
Aristocratic gold ink patterns flourish the outer packaging and reveal matching decks in both red and blue. The cards are sold individually or as part of a Luxury Edition Collector's Box, which is handcrafted in the U.S.A. with laser-etched English Chestnut, stained wood and secured with a branded, authentic, leather strap.
The cards are currently for sale online.
Client: Waldorf Astoria
Designed by: theory11, Steve Cohen
City: New York
Country: U.S.A.
Any good work of art deserves a closer look, but the illusions in these masterpieces really reward the viewer who makes a thorough inspection.
This sumptuous dual portrait of Jean de Dintevill and Georges de Selve emphasizes their wealth and worldly knowledge. The top shelf and bottom shelf contain objects representing the celestial sphere and the terrestrial sphere, respectively. Also on the bottom shelf is a lute with a broken string, a common symbol of strife. Given the particulars of the painting, here it is thought to specifically reference the discord brewing as Henry VIII prepares to break from the church.
The painting’s most obvious feature is a distorted image in the foreground that breaks sharply with the striking realism of the painting. The elongated blob is revealed to be a skull, but only when the painting is viewed from a certain angle, a technique known as anamorphosis. The skull is a common, unambiguous symbol of death and mortality but the illusionary rendering imbues it with a little more nuance — the skull can only be seen when the rest of the painting is obscured, and vice versa.
In the case of “The Ambassadors,” the anamorphosis was employed as an artistic flourish within an otherwise conventional painting. But the technique could be used to obscure an entire image. Such is the case with this “secrete” portrait of Charles Edward Stuart, a Jacobite pretender to the English throne. After a rousing defeat at the Battle of Culloden, the Jacobite cause was effectively eliminated and to support Stuart’s claim to the kingdom was considered treason. Those still loyal to Charles, however, could continue to raise a glass in his honor with this tray. When a reflective glass was placed in the middle, the meaningless blur would reveal a portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie.
Street art is increasingly recognized and respected as a medium, and Aakash Nihalani has found an untapped niche with his use of neon tape to create bold geometric shapes that challenge the viewer’s sense of perspective. The illusions created are relatively simple, the same way you can draw a cube that looks three-dimensional, but his work takes advantage of the cityscape and, in his latest series, even city-dwellers.
Of course you can’t talk about illusions in art without talking about Salvador Dali, whose surrealist paintings played on a number of optical illusions. In this painting, Dali is exploiting a specific feature of how the human mind processes images. Dali had read a Scientific American article about the number of pixels necessary to identify a human face. In response, he created this work which, when viewed from close up seems to portray Gala watching the Mediterranean sun, but when viewed from twenty meters away is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln composed of 121 distinct “pixels”.
The “Graces” here appear to be an amalgamation of the Greek Graces, beauty, charm and joy, and the Three Fates, who control the life thread of every person. In Dali’s depiction of them, the figures are seamlessly woven into their surroundings, with features that appear humanoid from a distance but are actually comprised of entirely separate objects upon closer inspection. Facial features are formed from rocks or horses or even other people. The most ethereal of the Fates on the far left actually appears to be part of a skull, if you look at it just right.
The dome, apse, and ceiling of this Jesuit church in Rome feature some of the most incredible examples of di sotto in sù (“seen from below”) and quadratura, techniques developed during the Italian Renaissance that employ different theories of artistic perspective to give flat ceilings the appearance of grandiose depth. The fresco presents not only an artistic masterpiece but a visual illusion that the church is more opulent than it really is as well. One particular stretch shows an elaborate scene of heavenly splendor that appears to spring out of the architecture itself.
Di sotto in sù and quadrature are themselves examples of trompe l'oeil (“deceive the eye”), a technique that utilizes forced perspective and hyper-realism to depict objects that appear convincingly three-dimensional. This painting of a boy seemingly climbing out of the frame is just one of many examples from the era.
This art installation in the heart of Paris made it seem like acrobatic pedestrians were dangling from the façade of a four-story building. Erlich created this effect by painting a building exterior, complete with three-dimensional windowsills, on the ground and then reflecting the life-sized image into a giant upright mirror.
One of the modern masters of trompe l'oeil, Beever paints sidewalk murals that appear to have remarkable depth. With remarkable realism and deft shadowing, he makes the flat surface appear to be the teetering edge of a tall building or a tranquil reflective lake. Because of the forced perspective, all of his drawings only work from one vantage point. When viewed from any other angle, they appear incredibly distorted.
If you think illusions can’t exist in photographs, think again. Barbéy’s images juxtapose radically unrelated photos to create surrealist works of art that make it look as though a piano’s keys grow out of a zebra’s stripes or mountain peaks crest into horse heads.
Almost all of the oil paintings by Ukrainian Shuplyak employ a similar technique to Dali’s “Enchanted Beach…” Portraits of historical figures are hidden in lush landscapes. The faces of John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud and Charles Darwin are rendered in varying degrees of obviousness by smaller figures or related paraphernalia.
I noted last week that Netflix has now become the consumer champion on broadband issues that Google used to be, throwing their support behind ISP reclassification under Title II, battling fixed-line usage caps and supporting municipal broadband. Google, meanwhile, has been dead quiet on most of these issues -- especially net neutrality. That has been the case even since Google worked with AT&T, Verizon and the FCC to craft rules that didn't protect consumers from much of anything, and didn't even cover wireless networks.
While Google's silence and shift away from former "don't be evil" values flew under the radar for some, the company's support of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has received heightened attention of late. ALEC works with companies to create draft legislation that companies lobby to have passed. Partisan quagmires aside, by and large these laws tend to be anti-consumer and pro-revenues, and in telecom have focused primarily on keeping competition at bay.
Common Cause and 54 other organizations last week expressed their concern in a letter to Google, stating they should follow Microsoft's lead and leave the secretive lobbying organization behind:
quote:ALEC's positions, the group continues, aren't in line with the positions Google has taken historically:
Just a few weeks ago, Microsoft Corporation ended its affiliation with ALEC. This extraordinary measure was due to concerns over ALEC s extreme views; that extreme agenda include denying climate change, defunding public services, curtailing labor rights and opposing net neutrality.
quote:In a statement sent to Ars Technica, ALEC insists they're "a target of activist groups specifically because of the organization s effectiveness at bringing together legislators and members of the private sector to share ideas." Consumer groups, in contrast, argue that ALEC is about hiding excessive corporate influence on the lawmaking process far out of the reach of consumer perception. Google, like any giant corporation, likely finds that a very useful tool in lobbying for what it wants.
During their recent meetings in Dallas, ALEC officers and corporate lobbyists held training seminars to teach legislators how to block legislation that encourages clean energy solutions. Just this past week, ALEC wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission in support of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger in which they signal their opposition to net neutrality.
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