firehose

tanukigalpa:

rosalarian:

I think we could all use a tiny kitten on our screens from time to time.

ugh i love how his tail is just a triangle

samhumphries:

Radio Soulwax - DAVE

Incredible hour-long Bowie megamix by the geniuses of Soulwax…the perfect soundtrack for International Bowie Day!

Some people are defending his abysmal column. Their argument is not very good.

Ta-Nehisi Coates with the laser and on target once again.

odinsblog:

The CBS ’60 Minutes’ Benghazi Hoax Was Overseen By A Former Fox News Executive

The biggest media story of the week was clearly the confession by CBS that their bigBenghazi Hoax on 60 Minutes had relied on a disreputable figure who had lied to pretty much everyone…

Another hiring manager at my first professional job looked me up and down in the waiting room, cataloging my outfit, and later told me that she had decided I was too classy to be on the call center floor. I was hired as a trainer instead. The difference meant no shift work, greater prestige, better pay and a baseline salary for all my future employment.

I have about a half dozen other stories like this. What is remarkable is not that this happened. There is empirical evidence that women and people of color are judged by appearances differently and more harshly than are white men. What is remarkable is that these gatekeepers told me the story. They wanted me to know how I had properly signaled that I was not a typical black or a typical woman, two identities that in combination are almost always conflated with being poor.

World Wide Interweb has created a compilation video of white people dancing. It features a bunch of people who enjoy a good song to get down and boogie to.

video via Dailymotion

TORO Y MOI, CLASSIXX
(Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell) Toro Y Moi is less and less the raw bunch of blips and beats that first wormed their way into your head a few years ago—these days, the kind of polished muse you might quietly drop on party guests who've had a bit of alcohol, but still aren't quite ready to wreck your increasingly fancy furniture. It races. Then it slows. It's not quite danceable. But it's always nice to hear. DENIS C. THERIAULT

SLAID CLEAVES
(Secret Society, 116 NE Russell) On his new album Still Fighting the War, Austin-based folksinger Slaid Cleaves focuses his considerable songwriting skill on the working class, with stories of welders, bartenders, cowboys, and factory workers tucked in among tunes about lost love and Lone Star state pride. But the standout is the title track, a three-minute slice of classic Cleaves: mid-tempo, with a simple but memorable melody delivered by the man's fine-grit voice. In the first two verses, we're introduced to a soldier, home from Iraq for a couple of years but struggling with lack of sleep and support while fighting skeptical employers and banks, not to mention bloody, dusty flashbacks. The third verse, however, lands like a punch to the gut, as the soldier's troubles come home: "Two strangers, holding each other in the dark." Then, "all the happily ever afters turn to broken dishes and slamming doors." It's heartbreaking work from a master storyteller.
BEN SALMON

KREATOR, OVERKILL, WARBRINGER
(Hawthorne Theatre, 1507 SE César E. Chávez) German thrash metallers Kreator seem hell-bent on outlasting cockroaches... and Slayer. In the mid-'80s, the band was one of the foremost metal bands, mixing precision with dark lyrical themes and bloody visuals. Three decades on—and now pushing 50—original members Mille Petrozza and Jürgen Reil are just as pissed off as they were on their 1986 classick Pleasure to Kill, which might make some wonder if someone pissed in their Bitburger. You can't argue with the results, though, and why would you?—the band's latest, Phantom Antichrist, is an absolute beast. Kreator probably deserves more accolades than they receive, and this show is sure to bring out the old-school heshers. If your neck gets sore, just take two aspirin with a Bloody Mary the next morning. MARK LORE

THE BESNARD LAKES, ELEPHANT STONE, DAYDREAM MACHINE
(Doug Fir, 830 E Burnside) The Besnard Lakes are one of many seemingly interchangeable, quasi-psychedelic pop bands in the Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar/Dead Oceans family of labels. On their 2010 album, The Besnard Lakes Are the Roaring Night, the Montreal band evoked the forlorn dignity of Low, but with a greater propensity for shoegaze guitar textures. Their new full-length, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, is shrouded in more reverb and features more grandiose song structures. Its best song, "Colour Yr Lights In," sounds like an end-credits lighter-raiser for a Hollywood romance flick. On their 2013 self-titled album, Elephant Stone make classic, textbook psych pop, as derived from the Beatles, circa Revolver through Magical Mystery Tour, all lightly accented with sitar and tablas and leader Rishi Dhir's smooth, high vocals. As reverent replications go, Elephant Stone's a gas.
DAVE SEGAL

VAZ, RABBITS, PRIZEHOG
(The Know, 2026 NE Alberta) Portland's bizarro thrash-sludge trio Rabbits are known for their distorted experimentation. On SOS (Singles, Other Shit), the grime-core hessians tap into their nostalgic side, compiling a track list of 7-inch singles, radio performances, practice outtakes, and more. The unbridled kill-mode aura of tunes like "Riff Fuck Reap" and the feedback drone of "Slow Mars" make this collection a must-have for fans of filth. The record's B-side is stacked with a second-half surge of '80s punk and hardcore covers like Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl," Minor Threat's "Straight Edge," and Black Flag's "Wasted." The band's noise pollution is tailor-made for the endearingly scuzzy confines of the Know, and Vaz is certainly a force to behold in their own right. RYAN J. PRADO

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First mentioned back in February as one of several preferable alternatives to remaining with Up All Night, just slightly above self-immolation, Maya Rudolph has successfully landed her own primetime variety special. Deadline reports that NBC has ordered a Lorne Michaels-produced pilot that will air after the Winter Olympics, testing out its combination of Rudolph-starring sketches and musical numbers on an audience who’s already been primed for splashy spectacle by watching the luge. “And also, the entire show takes place inside a portal only the baby can see,” said an NBC executive, in one last-ditch effort. 

Suggesting Comedy Central sketch shows are increasingly becoming Judd Apatow’s version of a farm team, the producer has partnered with Key & Peele stars Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele to develop a movie for the duo—a deal that comes not long after Apatow made a similar one with Amy Schumer. As with that project, the details are being kept totally under wraps, though Apatow did offer some high praise for his new collaborators by telling Deadline, “I love these guys because they are riotously, make-you-sick-because-you-can’t-stop-laughing funny. I think Key and Peele are capable of making the movie that America desperately needs right now.” So, whatever that movie ends up being, it sounds like it will help America laugh until it pukes up that rat poison it swallowed. Why did you do that, America? Damn it, just hold on… 

hodad

:meat_on_bone:

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Things that I did this past Monday:

• Take a bath that was unreasonably long for a Monday.
• Claim that making a turkey porchetta (a.k.a. turchetta) is the absolute best way to serve and eat turkey.
• Curse myself for not putting on real shoes before taking the dogs out for a walk on a November morning.
• Spill two quarts of boiling broth all over the kitchen floor, making it my biggest kitchen disaster since the great olive salad spill of '09.
• Lie.

One guess as to what I lied about.

Turkey porchetta—deboned turkey breast cured with garlic, fennel, sage, and red pepper and wrapped in its own skin before roasting—might be the best way to cook turkey using a conventional oven, but if you want to really break out the big guns, cooking it sous-vide, followed by a stint in a hot oil bath Peking duck-style, is the way to go.

There are several advantages to cooking meat—particularly lean, delicate meat like turkey that's prone to drying out—using sous-vide methods. First off, it lets you cook the meat perfectly evenly from edge to center. A regular oven cooks at an ambient temperature higher than the final target temperature, which means that there's a temperature gradient inevitably built into the meat. A sous-vide cooker, on the other hand, cooks at the exact final temperature you want the meat to reach.

Moreover, because sous-vide cookers are so precise, you can actually hold your meat at a relatively low temperature long enough to pasteurize it, for juicier, more tender meat that's still 100% safe to eat. How's that work?

Under a microscope, turkey muscles (and all muscles, for that matter), resemble huge bundles of coaxial cable, all tightly grouped in parallel. Each one of these cables contains meaty juices. As the turkey cooks, proteins contract, and the bundles get squeezed—like a tube of toothpaste—causing their juices to spill out. The higher the final temperature of the turkey, the more tightly the bundles get squeezed, and the drier the turkey gets.

So in a normal oven, by the time the very center of a turkey roast gets to around 145 to 150°F, the outer layers will have reached well over 170°F or so. Your meat won't be bone dry, but it won't be as moist as possible, either. With sous-vide cooking, you can get the entire bird to come to the same temperature, minimizing the amount of juices lost. What's more, bacteria are in fact actively destroyed at temperatures far lower than is recommended for traditional cooking methods. Even at 140°F, bacteria will be killed; so long as you let a turkey rest at that temperature for a sufficient amount of time (about 30 minutes), it's just as safe as if you'd cooked it all the way up to 165°F using conventional methods.

So, not only is it possible with sous vide to cook more evenly, it's also possible to cook to a lower final temperature. Both of these facts make for a juicier bird.

Doesn't that look appetizing? No? Well yes, I suppose you're right. While a fresh-out-of-the-bag sous-vide turkey can make for great sandwiches, for a hot table centerpiece, we need to give it some more color and textural contrast. You could do that by searing it in a cast iron skillet or blasting it in a hot oven, but a cast iron sear is never perfectly even, while a hot oven can result in some overcooked meat.

Much better is to do what any gentleman would do when he finds himself in a bit of trouble: pull out the deep fryer.

Ok, technically it's a wok, but it is the best tool for deep frying in a home kitchen, due to its large volume and wide shape, which helps prevent spillovers and splatters.

And believe me, there will be splatters. Perhaps not as many as you'd get when deep frying a real porchetta, but enough that you'll want to gently deposit the bird into the hot oil (350°F peanut oil works best), cover it, and wait a few minutes for it to stop spitting before you open 'er back up.

Like everything that comes out of a deep fryer, it should be seasoned with salt immediately so that the salt can stick to the still-wet-with-fat surface and stay in place. And because it was cooked sous-vide, there is very minimal temperature gradient inside (caused by the deep-frying phase), which means that it can be sliced and served almost immediately after leaving the fryer, maximizing the amount of crisp crust you get.

Can you imagine the looks on your family's faces when this crackling, golden brown, perfectly symmetrical roast emerges from the kitchen to grace the Thanksgiving table? If they didn't have anything to be thankful about before, they sure do now.

Because it's completely boneless, carving couldn't be easier and nobody has to fight over who gets the most skin or who gets stuck with the dried out ends of the skinny part of the breast. The only thing worth fighting about here is who gets to eat the extra-crispy end bits, and in my family, it's not even really a fight. My kid sister and my wife somehow manage to sneak the crispy bits off the cutting board right under everyone else's noses every year.

Pretty, right? If you either have great foresight or are good at taking directions, you'll make at least one more of these than is strictly necessary for dinner: They make fantastic next-day sandwiches.

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Original Source

The Raspberry Pi is being used increasingly in professional products and industrial applications, and this one from Artica and partners is one of most impressive yet. I can’t better their own description of FM Stream as “a beautiful, low cost, carrier grade rack of FM tuners, IP/Internet encoders and broadcasters, using nothing but RaspberryPis, Arduinos, clever electronics, neat mechanics, a shiny aluminium case and lots of passion.”

FM Stream — shiny AND useful

As well as being clever and beautiful, FM Stream does something extraordinarily useful – it takes radio signals from local radio stations and broadcasts them over the internet. It’s designed to be used with no technical experience: just plug an aerial in one end, the internet in the other and off it goes, technomagically turning local into global.

At the heart of things — a Raspberry Pi

There’s a huge amount of hardware and expertise at work here, much of which is detailed in Artica’s blog. On a simpler level it’s fantastic to see the Raspberry Pi at the heart of such a beautifully engineered and useful product.

For a taste of what the FM streamer can do, have listen to this FM station in Luanda, Angola. We’ve been listening to it all afternoon and can highly recommend it — It’s funky.

Artist's impression of a black hole stripping gas from a blue companion star at the right of the image. One consequence is powerful jets seen streaming from the black hole. A new observation has identified heavy particles in one black hole's jets.

NASA / CXC / M. Weiss

Much of the matter falling onto a black hole is channeled into powerful jets that blast it back out into space. Astronomers have used Doppler measurements to determine that particles in jets are moving close to the speed of light, making black holes some of the Universe's most powerful accelerators. How much energy involved in doing so depends on the jets' composition. It requires a lot more energy to accelerate a heavy particle like an atomic nucleus than it does an electron. So what types of particles are actually contained in these jets?

Astronomers have now found the signature of heavy particles moving at two-thirds the speed of light in the jet from a stellar-mass black hole candidate. María Díaz Trigo and colleagues monitored the X-ray and radio emissions from a binary system thought to contain a black hole and found strong emission most consistent with highly ionized iron atoms accelerated to high velocity. Since this system is typical of other black holes in the Milky Way, this new observation indicates that similar systems are likely to all blast protons and nuclei into the surrounding space.

Stellar-mass black holes are formed from the collapsed cores of stars significantly more massive than the Sun. As such, they have masses comparable to those of stars, as opposed to the supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, which may be millions or billions of times more massive. However, the physics of accretion—matter orbiting and falling onto a black hole—for both types of black hole is such that it produces jets and hot disks that emit ultraviolet or X-ray light.

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writing-as-tracey:

Can we have this movie please? [X]

design-is-fine:

Melitta Bentz, the first coffee filter, invented 1908. Dresden, Germany

Fans have to wait until March to check out the latest immaculately assembled Wes Anderson film, The Grand Budapest Hotel, but the director released a short film today via Prada’s YouTube page: Set in 1955, it stars Jason Schwartzman as a race-car driver who crashes his ride in small Italian town. (Prada foot the bill, but its presence is limited to Schwartzman’s racing uniform.) Race cars, a small Italian town in the ’50s, a steering wheel put on backward: It’s all very Wes Anderson-esque.

Hey, remember when we went to the school from Rushmore? That was fun. 

Houston: The Rushmore School 

come to the library where learning is fun

David Cameron prepares to speak on the need for 'permanent austerity' at the Lord Mayor's banquet. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features

Original Source