2009-07-22

mattbell: (Default)
2009-07-22 12:12 am

Moon protests 40th anniversary of moon landing by calling a "sun-strike"


In some alternate universe, I went to India to watch the solar eclipse with [livejournal.com profile] crotchgoblin .  Here is what she saw...




mattbell: (Default)
2009-07-22 06:42 pm

Challenges in musical composition

This only has 80,000 views so perhaps it hasn't covered the the entire internet yet.



(Jump to about a minute in if you're impatient)

They took some video of a cat "playing" a piano and turned it into a real composition. This illustrates that you can more or less take any source material and turn it into something interesting and aesthetically pleasing by cleverly filling in the gaps. I've seen it with writing, tattoos, sculpture etc.

Separately, it turns out I've missed all these internet memes because I had "something better to do", so this thing utterly confused me as I didn't know either of the source memes.
mattbell: (Default)
2009-07-22 06:58 pm
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Chocolate-dipped beef jerky results

I wrote a while back about trying to do chocolate-dipped beef jerky.

Yesterday I gave it a try.  I created a crude double-boiler and dipped various different kinds of jerky into it. 

I tried the combinations of:

Chocolate
- 74% spicy Dagoba chocolate
- 100% Ghirardelli baking chocolate (no better brands available)

Jerky:
- Teriyaki Turkey jerky
- Classic style beef jerky

The beef jerky worked somewhat better than the turkey jerky.  The 74% chocolate was too sweet, and didn't mesh well with the savory taste of the jerky.  The 100% seemed more right taste-wise, but the texture was bad.  Unfortunately, 100% chocolate is really sticky when it melts, so the mouthfeel isn't very good.  It tends to coat the inside of your mouth.  I'm guessing a chocolate more in the 85-90% range, which is actually designed to be eaten straight, would work better. 

I think another issue was that the chocolate/jerky mix was too heavily weighted toward the chocolate.  Since I was using thin strips of jerky, the chocolate coating was often as thick as the jerky itself.  I think the chocolate works better as an accent, so I either need to use thicker jerky of find a way of thinning the chocolate.  Suggestions are appreciated.  :-)
mattbell: (Default)
2009-07-22 11:03 pm

"She was rockin' the beer gut"

I heard this song on the radio at my public storage locker facility. 

Hey, the message is good.  Sexiness comes primarily from self-confidence, so letting go of poor body image is more important than looking like the mainstream ideal. 

It's too bad the song is so cringe-worthy.  Here are the lyrics.

Current music video... looks like they're hitting it big and are going to do a new music video.  Hopefully it will feature an actual woman with an actual beer gut.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_YmBp2acdc