I just got back from two days in Louisville, Kentucky.

We had lunch at a BBQ place called Mark’s feed store. They were instantly suspicious of the yankee with the blazer and pink dress shirt.

The good news was that I found a new interesting regional food item. Burgoo. Essentially it is a spicy stew made out of whatever meats they have left over. Delicious. 

Here’s a recipe I found online: [link]

600 pounds lean soup meat
200 pounds fat hens
2000 pounds potatoes, peeled and diced
200 pounds of onions
5 bushels of cabbage, chopped
60 ten-pound cans of tomatos
24 ten-pound cans puree of tomatoes
24 ten-pound cans of carrots
18 ten-pound cans of corn
Red pepper and salt to taste
Season with Wochestershire, Tabasco, or A1 Sauce

Mix the ingredients, a little at a time, and cook outdoors in huge iron kettles over wood fires from 15 to 20 hours. Use squirrels in season.. one dozen squirrels to each 100 gallons.

Now playing: Faithless – In the End

I love this song.

Two explosive related links:

1) WeBlowItUp.com

You’d think that one of the few small pleasures of destroying some gadget that’s been driving you crazy would be doing it yourself. But if you can’t be bothered, a company called WeBlowITup.com (get it?) says that for the princely sum of about a hundred bucks they’ll use explosives to blow up your cellphone, laptop, or “small appliance” for you, and then send you a video commemorating its destruction.
P.S. – Make sure to watch the sample video that’s on there. It’s as porno as non-porno gets.
[via Engadget]

2) Explosive sink and toilet plunger

I went to Home Depot over the weekend to buy two dollar’s worth of hardware … and walked out with over $100 worth of stuff, of course. My prime pruchase was something called a KleerDrain instant drain opener, which combines the fun of explosives with the satisfaction of unclogging a sink.
I was a little wary of spending $30 on this gadget, which looks like a cross-between a plunger and a pogo stick. But Home Depot had one of those videos running next to the set-up, which showed clogged sink after clogged sink giving up its precious bolus of greasy hair to the explosive force of a CO2 cartridge unleashing its entire payload at once. Watching the guy on the demo using the device, with its rifle-like kickback and puff of condensed carbon dioxide gas, mesmerized me. The next thing I knew, I was racing home with my new KleerDrain.
I could hardly wait to use it on a slow-draining sink in the bathroom. I duct taped the overflow drain on the sink, and inserted a CO2 cartridge into the Kleer Drain. I screwed on the rubber cone and then pressed it into the drain opening.
WHAM! A shower of gray grime flew out of somewhere and splashed against the walls, mirror and ceiling. I wiped the junk off my face and turned on the faucet. The water whooshed down the drain, ending with a nice sucking sound, like it was wishing there were more water it could dispose of.
I think I’m in love. Time to stock up on more CO2 cartridges.
[via Boing Boing]

More and more I’m learning that caffeine affects my sleep dramatically. I don’t remember this being a big issue before. Is it just getting older?

I can’t have caffeine after 5pm or else I just can’t sleep right.

Mid last week I got a blind evite from my friend Marc. The title was “Jello Wrestling Extravaganza” and had 250 on the invite list. I didn’t recognise the names of the hosts or 99% of the invites. Here was the evite text: 

Celebrate [edited]’s birthdays with a slippery romp in the wrestling ring. And even if you don’t feel like getting sticky and copping cheap feels, simply come to enjoy the cheap beer, fabulous DJs and overall debauchery. Prizes will be awarded to the wrestlers with the most original smackdown skills and outrageous attire. Wrestlers will also be rewarded with a hot and steamy post-match spray-down in Pash’s group shower. Bring your hot friends, your hot bod and your hard liquor!

NOTE: This is not some sleazy sorority girl thing with airheads wrestling in lingerie. This is serious. This is hardcore. This all about the drama, the fashion, the sport.

Direx: Take the L train to Brooklyn. Get off at the Graham Avenue stop. ..[edited].. You’ll see a large factory building on the left–that’s the place.

I managed to get a few details from Marc before the event and it turns out he knows the hosts through his girlfriend and that the jello order was bungled somehow and they are making a last-minute substitution with chocolate pudding (and some peanut oil for extra lubrication).

The journey to Brooklyn always takes longer than you think it should.

The party is wall to wall hipsters of varying degrees of authenticity. We make it past the first room and then the wall of chocolate pudding stench hits. Sure enough they managed to build a 6′ x 6′ ring filled with pudding. The walls were covered in paper as “protection”. We had arrived late enough that virtually every surface had splatterings. There were a couple of female wrestlers walking outside of the ring, but we had missed the main events and were witnessing the unscheduled matchups (all guys) by this point. We tried to schedule the walk through the event room between rounds but you could not escape being pelted by a small amount of chocolate. The intense crowd and intense heat inside meant that we were quick to leave, but nevertheless I experienced an honest to goodness pudding wrestling party.

No, it’s not red – it’s green
Okay, just about everyone has a red laser pointer. Heck, we even sell a fine one here at ThinkGeek. But, we’re pretty sure you want to be a superior geek – and doing it with a green laser is the way to go.

This pointer is significantly brighter (about 50 times) than a red laser pointer and because of its unusual color it is much more noticeable. I mean come on, a 532 nm green laser wavelength is obviously superior to a laughable 650 nm red laser wavelength. And unlike a red laser, the green beam itself can be seen in mid-air in dark conditions, not just the laser beam dot. This allows the green laser pointer to be used for pointing to star constellations (skypointing) and also just generally look cool as hell. The green laser beam dot can be seen at much greater distances than with a red laser pointer.

[via ThinkGeek]

Is it me or is the NBC Olympic coverage finally striking a decent balance between the woman-viewer-focused back stories and actual sports coverage? The human interest stories have been relatively short and to the point.  

So far so good.

The balance of American athletes only vs showing the rest of the world seems better this year. I’ve even seen events where the American team/individual didn’t win!

From this UK site: badgas.co.uk

Who can forget the iconic image of Lynndie England, the ugly she-man, grinning and pointing at an Iraqi prisoner-of-war’s cock?

The image has shocked, sickened and outraged people. But more importantly, it has captured the imagination of young men and women up and down the country who don’t give much of a shit about anything. The result is a new craze called “doing a Lynndie”. If you aren’t “doing a Lynndie” now, you soon will be.

So what does doing a Lynndie involve? Here are the basic instructions:

1. Find a victim who deserves to be “Lynndied”.

2. Make sure you have a friend nearby with a camera ready to capture the “Lynndie”.

3. Stick a cigarette (or pen) in your mouth and allow it to hang slightly below the horizontal.

4. Face the camera, tilt your upper body slightly forward but lean back on your right leg.

5. Make a hitchhiking gesture with your right hand and extend your right arm so that it’s in roughly the same position as if you were holding a rifle.

6. Keeping your left arm slightly bent, point in the direction of the victim and smile.

Ideally, you should refrain from telling the victim what you’re about to do. Victims who are unaware, bemused or angry make for a Lynddie that is more in keeping with the original.

If you’ve “done a Lynndie” and would like it to appear in the gallery, send the picture to nobody at badgas dot co dot uk, along with details of where it was taken.

For example:

I’m very close to opting-out of voicemail at work. I hate it, it isn’t useful for me, it is a waste of time to check and I think I’m done with it.

Voicemails are always “Corey, you missed our meeting”, “Corey, can you do this for me”. In ten years of work-life I’ve never had a good voicemail message.

I’m going to love the telecom department’s reaction – “You can’t just not have voicemail!”, me “Sure I can, just turn it off please.”

Most of you probably heard about how Bush’s new CIA appointee Porter Goss was interviewed by Micheal Moore during the filming of Fahrenheit 9/11 and basically laid out the case for why he’s not even qualified to *be* in the CIA, much less run it.

I didn’t realize the video is available online here. [quicktime link]