gargleblaster

Update: Saw the movie. My expectations were too high. There were some truly inspired scenes, but the whole just didn't congeal. Still, go see it if you haven't and definitely, above all else...VOTE Beeblebrox!

Since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens today, I thought I would see if I could find a good receipe to make my own Pangalactic Gargle Blaster to drink beforehand. A Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster is an alcoholic drink which "induces a sensation almost exactly like having your brain smashed in by a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick. Possibly chilled." Unfortunately, the original ingredients are a bit exotic:

Pan Galactic Gargleblaster
Juice from 1 bottle of the Ol’ Janx Spirit
Combine with one measure of water from the seas of Santraginus
3 Cubes of Arcturan Mega-gin melted into mixture (it must be properly iced or the benzene is lost)
4 liters of Fallian Marsh gas
Use the back of a silver spoon to float a measure of Qualactin Hypermint extract
Drop in a tooth from an Algolion Suntiger and watch it dissolve
Sprinkle with Zamphuor
Add an olive

Drink.

I found some more pedestrian approximations online that I will have to attempt.

I even found one article about a bar in munich that server a version which exploded in the face of patrons:

imperialism is good sometimes?

From RealBeer.com: "Flying Dog Brewery in Denver is brewing a beer to honor the late Hunter S. Thompson. Gonzo Imperial Porter is a 9% alcohol by volume and will carry a label designed by Ralph Steadman, who illustrated much of Thomspon's work and who has created Flying Dog labels for years. " Flying Dog has announced that the beer will be ready in June 2005. Sad? Fitting? Who knows. No Sympathy for the Devil.

This article made me feel worse about, well, everything. While these foreign sites made me feel a bit better:
Beer and Loathing: Strange and disquieting dispatches from Dublin's Pub Scene
eXile: A Moscow Based Alternative Newspaper

On a somewhat related note, recent science findings suggest that alcohol gets the brain hooked by causing the production of MORE nerve cells. When I went to swim laps today, I noticed that they were playing One toke over the line during the senior aquatic aerobics class at the gym

If you had a time machine would you erase the Nelson Brothers?

Someone just signed me up for the Matthew & Gunnar Nelson official fan newsletter. Since I just watched Primer, I wondered if perhaps my doppleganger from the future sent it to me as a joke. Pretty funny, future self, pretty funny.

I'm still on the fence about the movie though. I fell asleep during parts, but it's really stayed with me, and it had one of my favorite lines in recent memory, "I can think of no way in which this thing would be considered even remotely close to safe".

I was searching for reviews to help me make sense of it and I saw that Christian Answers had reviewed it. I was curious to see how religion dealt with the ethics of time travel. The review was far more than I expected, with no easy answers about the movie or time travel. It touched on everything from Duchamp, Col. Kurtz, and Milton's Lucifer:
"Does the title implicate time as a "primer" upon which we inscribe self and history? The movie suggests that reality is a dynamic palimpsest with a primer covering a previous version even as it prepares to receive the succeeding one, mediating between past and present in a modality that is very much like time travel. "

video breakfast

Hi, I'm PaperRad, and I'd like to blow your mind with some 4 dimensional psychedelic music videos featuring gumby, puppies, and magic. Bubble Puppy is my favorite.

Check out the shorts and music videos fromAdam and Dave. I can't decide which one is my favorite.

links via Antville

Back in the skillet again!

Reuters is reporting that KFC will go back to calling itself Kentucky Fried Chicken in the US:

"After 14 years of trying to downplay the image of its food as greasy and unhealthy by calling itself simply KFC, the U.S. chain on Wednesday opened a new restaurant in its hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, under its former name and plans 50 more this year."

The full story is over atReveries.

Does this mean that it's cool to be southern again? Could it mark a new chapter in brand image of the South as a whole? Did the Col. go on a diet? Only time will tell.

According to Snopes it turns out that the real reason they changed their name to KFC in the first place wasn't because of negative health connotations either. Nope, it was something far stranger...and it involves neil diamonds, horses, and weed.

If you can't wait here's a receipe courtesy of The Chitterling Site

1 frying chicken, skin removed if you
want lower fat. I leave the skin on.
3 teaspoons Lawry's Seasoned Salt
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup vegetable oil

1. Season chicken with all seasonings.
2. Roll chicken in flour until covered. Shake off
excess flour. Sprinkle additional seasoning.
3. Simply fry chicken in frying pan until golden
brown. I like it crispy so I cook it a little longer
than most.

You can start out with the oil very hot and then
reduce it later. This seals in the moisture and
flavor, then cooks it.

not what they seem

"And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through 27 minutes of complete darkness - the blankness between frames. when I show a film i am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus with which I can take advantage of a certain human weakness"
-Bergman

This video Human by Danish band Carpark North and directed by Martin De Thura is simply fucking amazing. It makes me want to be a better deceiter a better conjurer.

link via antville

Mapping Merce

Interesting post from Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends
on a Stanford project that collected data on a Merce Cunningham dancer:
"We're looking upside down, inside out, at the human body," said course director Amy Ladd,, MD, professor of orthopedic surgery. "It's not the way any single discipline would frame the study of movement."

Merce Cunningham Dance

An art process in not essentially a natural process; it is an invented one. It can take actions of organization from the way nature functions, but essentially man invents the process. And from or for that process he derives a discipline to make and keep the process functioning. That discipline too is not a natural process. The daily discipline, the continued keeping of the elasticity of the muscles, the continued control of the mind over the body’s actions, the constant hoped-for flow of the spirit into physical movement, both new and renewed, is not a natural way. It is unnatural in its demands on all the sources of energy. But the final synthesis can be a natural one, natural in the sense that the mind, body and spirit function as one.
-Merce Cunningham

photo by Jack Mitchell

arise and stumble

A sublime video from Silver Mt. Zion and Kurtis Hough for the already sublime song
stumble then rise on some awkward morning