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“Not only is it high, fast, and windy, but the fear of chais snapping and falling out your seat is just to apparent to ignore.” — BROXTER

Hey Adela, why’s your dad so weird? (Thanks for the tip, werttrew!)

Surely you’ve known there was Wine for Dummies. Now there are Wines for Dummies. Actual wines, made for dummies to drink.

Don’t act so shocked. You knew this was coming. In fact it’s a pretty good idea: Package up cheap wine in a familiar package so utter novices can get their feet wet with the stuff. At $10 a bottle, it’s a harmless — if inelegant (and, well, far from “discriminating”) — way to explore the world of vino.

To even consider drinking these wines you really do need to be an utter, rank novice. None of them are particularly good, and the iconic black+yellow+red/green labels (complete with pronunciation guides — “kee-yahn-tee“) are not something you’re going to bring to Easter brunch. Instead, they are purely for investigative purposes. Try the wines, then hide the bottles at the bottom of the recycling bin so the garbage guys don’t judge you.

That said, from a business standpoint, how great an idea is this! It’s genius, really… but why stop at wines? Where’s my Microwave for Dummies? My TV for Dummies? My Car for Dummies? If nothing else, the Dummies people should be dominating the entire grocery store. Who needs to think about what to put on their salad when they could be using Dressing for Dummies!?

Ah, progress. Thoughts on the wines follow.

2012 Wines for Dummies Pinot Grigio IGT – A real Italian Pinot Grigio. Mildly tropical and atypical for Pinot Grigio, with a touch of funk beneath the fruit. Not much acidity to speak of, which is unfortunate but unsurprising at this price. Not sure if this is an apropos introduction to Pinot Grigio, but it’s at least a harmless wine on the whole. B-

2011 Wines for Dummies Chianti DOCG – Italian DOCG Chianti for just 10 bucks? Hard to believe, and proof that decent Chianti needn’t cost a fortune. Classic, intense red cherry character is the dominant flavor here, though the nose has some curious black tea character as well. The body is a little tart, a touch too balsamic on the back end, but overall a decent intro to the way Chianti — or at lease Sangiovese — is supposed to taste like. B

2011 Wines for Dummies Chardonnay California – A minimally oaked Chardonnay, this is actually an easy drinking wine with modest melon, lemon, and white peach character. Some vanilla on the back end. Simple, but reasonably appropriate as an intro to California Chardonnay, though a far cry from the more buttery, heavily oaked styles that drinkers are more likely to encounter. B

2011 Wines for Dummies Cabernet Sauvignon California – My least favorite of this bunch, a simple and not very lively Cab that offers a modest plum body, backed with somewhat harsh tobacco and leather notes. It finishes off with a rather unpleasant finish. C

each $10 / winesfordummies.com

There are plenty of interesting ways to deck out your bicycle, but MonkeyLectric may have come up with the ultimate way to make it stand out on the road. The company's new Monkey Light Pro is a set of LED bars that attach to a bicycle wheel and can be programmed to play colorful animations... Continue Reading Monkey Light Pro turns bicycle wheels into colorful, animated displays

Section: Bicycles

Tags: Animation, Bikes, Kickstarter, LED, Safety

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• Monkey Kit offers numerous tablet-holding possibilities
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• Cyglo bike tire embedded with LED lights
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• Revolights LED bike wheel lights now available

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submitted by TheGuyWithTenFingers [link] [1 comment]

The thirst for Kanye’s Yeezus is nearing desert-like proportions with the project’s official release just three weeks away. Unfortunately, anyone who thought about pre-ordering the album to somewhat quench the thirst will have to guess again. According to A.P.C. founder and good friend to ‘Ye, Jean Touitou, there will be no pre-orders. Touitou, who may have worked with ‘Ye on the upcoming album, tweeted out the above image on Tuesday evening, alerting fans of ‘Ye’s decision. The image also features an alternative and minimalistic look to the project’s album cover, which doesn’t seem to be a cover at all.

Goddamn, that was just absurd. When you consider just how routine and expected LeBron James's displays of dominance of have become, it's really a wonder that he can still surprise us with plays like this.

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When adults fall asleep behind the wheel, the results are tragic and horrible. But when toddlers do fall asleep when they're driving their Power Wheels cars, it's hilarious and adorable!

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When you name your product the 'Amazing Humidifier' it better be bringing something great to the table. After all, it's pretty hard to get excited over something as mundane as a humidifier. But the fact that this compact version transforms any water bottle into a secret weapon to battle dry skin is, admittedly, pretty amazing.

Powered via a USB connection, the $34 compact humidifier is easy to travel with since it uses any-sized water bottle as its reservoir. So the longer you want it to run without a refill, the larger the bottle you'll need to find, but an average-sized bottle should keep it going for up to eight hours.

A long filter sponge extends deep into the bottle, soaking up water while preventing unwanted particulates from clogging up the evaporation mechanism. Besides a giant wad of cash, there couldn't be a more perfect travel accessory for your next trip to Vegas.

[Amazing Grace via 7Gadgets]

In Star Wars, R2-D2 provided Luke Skywalker with in-flight maintenance and navigation from within a little hatch on top of his X-wing fighter. In this comic, Scott Johnson of ExtraLife applies that same Star Wars tech to create something weird and hilarious.

Comic illustration by ExtraLife. Published with permission; all rights reserved. Read more...

More about Comic, Comics, Humor, Extralife, and Watercooler

If there's something that you can't cook inside a brownie, I don't know it. Becca of Becca Bakes baked Ferro Rocher chocolate and hazelnut candies inside super rich brownies. You can find her recipe at the link.

Link -via Foodbeast

Japan is one place where you can expect all sorts of novelty stuff to crop up, from fancy shirts and footwear to quirky headpieces and accessories. They’ve even got matches that are almost too fancy to use, for crying out loud.

Kokeshi is the brand behind these awesome matches that have faces and other designs printed onto the match heads.

The match heads themselves are stylized in color aside from the quirkily-printed faces. The matches are wrapped up in decorative matchboxes that you’ll want to keep when all the matches are gone.

From paw prints and chicks to mustachioed men, it seems like Kokeshi has thought of it all. You can check out more of their specially-designed matches in the gallery below.

Unfortunately, the matches are only available in Japan.

[via That Should Be Mine via Laughing Squid]

Peppers.com is the granddaddy of hot sauce shops, holding a Guinness Record for the World’s Largest Collection of Hot Sauces, as well as being a premier online hot sauce shopping experience. We’re fortunate to live within a short drive of Chip Hearn’s store and are excited to have an exclusive first look at the new Peppers store and warehouse.

A big thanks to Chip Hearn and staff for the warm welcome.

The post Video tour of the new Peppers.com retail store appeared first on HotSauceDaily.com.

(616): There is always the bar, but 2 30 on a Tuesday just screams alcoholism.

Amazon has decided on the five pilots it will turn into full series—Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy, and Tumbleleaf—have all officially gotten the green light.

These five—two comedies and three children's shows—were selected based on customer feedback out of 14 pilots Amazon put online in April. Bear with us here, because Betas is another series centered around (ugh) Silicon Valley in which "four young entrepreneurs [attempt] to make it big in techland." But Alpha House, the political comedy about four senators who become roommates, sounds promising. It stars John Goodman and features a cameo from Bill Murray. And at least Amazon didn't go with Zombieland.

All five series will be streaming on Amazon Prime Instant Video later this year and in early 2014. Let us know what you think of the selections below. [Amazon]

[komugikokoro/cineraria]

Here’s something cool. A studio called JWT Spain made a 3D app that tracks the trajectories of every ball hit in a tennis match in real time, and then spits out fancy visualizations.

There’s a heatmap that shows where the most balls land; trajectories of the ball for every set, game and point; a particle view that shows where the balls have the most impact; and options to control the opacity of the court, the color of the ball trajectories for each player, and how fast the court rotates. It can be filtered by set, game, or point.

Right now this has only been applied to three past ATP matches, but it would be great if it got a wider application. It's a very fun tool to poke at for now, but something like this for every match played—something similar to Kirk Goldsberry's shot charts for the NBA—would actually be useful for analyzing how matches played out, and broader trends for individual players. [Infosthetics]

Amazon has begun production on five original TV series — Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf — that will debut on its U.S. and UK streaming video services later this year and in early 2014

Amazon unveiled 14 pilots for potential TV shows last month, asking for viewers to submit feedback and vote for their favorites. The chosen series aren't necessarily those with the most votes, but it's fair to assume that user feedback played a part in the final selections.

Interestingly, three of the shows — Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf — are geared toward children, an increasingly important target in Amazon's other divisions as well as competitors Hulu and Netflix. (The latter lost some of that programming last weekend after Nickelodeon declined to renew a deal with the company.) Read more...

More about Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Internet Video, and Amazon Studios

Never much for the concept of subtlety, director Michael Bay has cast two of the least subtle performance cars as Autobots in the next Transformers explosionfest: a 2014 Corvette Stingray and a Bugatti Veyron.

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(306): I'm seriously considering refraining from drinking on school nights.
(1-306): I like how you say that with 4 school days left of the school year..

Colin Jones, a professional gambler based in Seattle, wants to use Google Glass as a platform for teaching people how to count cards.

Jones already proved himself in the gambling world, having struck it out on his own in 2003 with little more than $2,000 and a math degree. Three years later he was running a 30-person card counting team making $4 million in profit.

Now he puts his efforts toward running BlackjackApprenticeship.com, a go-to site for gamblers that boasts a popular iOS app that teaches people how to count cards.

Jones told us he plans on releasing a Google Glass app as well, meaning users can have in-eye instruction on how to count cards.

When we asked if the Glass app could ever count the cards for us, Jones only said that he looked forward to seeing how far the technology could go. It'll be interesting to see which gets banned from casinos more quickly – Google Glass, or the jokers who walk into casinos wearing Google Glass.

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The blood of an extinct Siberian woolly mammoth has been found, with the photographic evidence provided to Wednesday’s The Siberian Times. The Ice Age era mammal, related to our modern elephants, vanished about 4,000 years ago, but preserved specimens are rather frequently discovered in the retreating glaciers of once-frozen Russian Siberia.

Entire animals, including specimens that still have preserved flowers and other items in their stomachs, have been found flash-frozen in Siberia before. On rare occasions, the meat has been found preserved so well that it’s safe enough to eat — although in this case the fresh meat is going to be studied by scientists, not consumed by hungry Siberians.

What really makes the new find striking is that the 10,000-year old female’s blood had flowed into frozen ice cavities, where it was still fresh enough to flow again when the team broke into the pockets of ice.

At the time of the discovery on Novosibirsk Islands, the temperature was less than 10 degrees Celcius — about 14 degrees Fahrenheit and comfortably below freezing. That makes it doubly odd that the blood could still flow.

Semyon Grigoriev, head of the Museum of Mammoths, said, “It can be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryo-protective properties.”

According to The Siberian Times, the Yakutsk, Russia team has already partnered with South Korean scientists who plan to study the blood, learn the DNA sequencing, and eventually clone living specimens of the long-extinct beasts.

It might seem like a prequel to Jurassic Park, but foreign experts will be allowed to examine the specimen in July and verify the find for skeptics in the rest of the world.

The Russian and South Korean team had previously tried to clone the mammoth in September 2012, but the specimen they used then didn’t have enough living cells. The effort failed.

The new find may put fresh blood into the Siberian woolly mammoth cloning effort.

[Woolly mammoths in Europe as they might have looked in life painting by Mauricio Antón and the 2008 Public Library of Science via Creative Commons]

[blood in test tube photo by luchschen via Shutterstock]

Mammoth Blood Found, Cloning Extinct Species May Soon Be Possible is a post from: The Inquisitr

[bite]

One of the aspects of my personality that I should probably be less proud to admit to is that I can be a tad bit lazy. I often consider doing many things when I could be doing fewer things a bother. Much praise may be given these days to the pursuit of busyness, and days jam-packed with frenetically fun activities, but I’m more protective of time that could be spent daydreaming/staring slack-jawed into space and letting disparate thoughts knit together in my head.

So, last summer when an editor reached out to me about spending a day with a famous cookbook author as part of a larger magazine story, I had no interest. I didn’t know who this mystery person was but it certainly didn’t seem worth all the work that would be entailed in an over 12-hour day. In actuality, that “work” was later revealed to be horrendous things like “having hair and makeup done,” “gossiping with a famous person’s hairdresser,” “drinking pink champagne,” “eating homemade cookies for dinner,” and “meeting awesome people,” but at the time, I didn’t know this, and I turned it down. Then I learned that this “cookbook author” was none other than one of best-selling cookbook authors in American history and easily one of the three patron saints of Smitten Kitchen (other two: Julia Child and any one of our grandmothers) and I was all “SHUT UP” and punched my husband, who sometimes likes to sit next to me but probably not that day, in the arm.

... Read the rest of lobster and potato salad on smittenkitchen.com

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