All in the mood for the final Harry Potter movie? Make some of these cupcakes!
Harry Potter Cupcakes from http://getinmahbelly.com/
Harry Potter Cupcakes
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Category Archives: fun
Nuclear Gastronomy
My Aussie friend, David Morgen-Mar writes a daily web comic using photographed Lego layouts called Irregular Webcomic. He is an incorrigible punster and the many converging and diverging story lines are wonderful to behold.
I must have missed this one back in March, but DMM has coined a new term: “Nuclear Gastronomy” (he was riffing on molecular gastronomy, but claims to be the originator on this one).
Here’s a sample of what nuclear gastronomy involves:
Chocolate Chip Gold Vein Cookies
Cream 1 cup of sugar with 250 grams of butter. Add 2 eggs and a teaspoon of baking soda. Add a splash of vanilla extract and a drop of mercury-196. Mix in 2 cups of flour to form a soft dough, and a cup of chocolate chips. Bake in a slow neutron source for at least 8 hours to convert all the mercury into gold. The gold will appear as attractive shiny flecks through the cookies, and since it is inert these will be safely edible. Warning: Do not use other isotopes of mercury, as they will produce unstable gold isotopes which can decay into highly toxic thallium!
via Irregular Webcomic! #2961.
Oh, any by the way, the comic strip is really funny, too!
Another glorious day in the big easy
We had so much fun today. First was another tour of the Tulane campus, pictures by daylight today! We stopped in at the campus bookstore and I picked some Tulane swag.
Oldest Tulane Building
Mardi Gras Bead Tree
Tulane Student Union
Then we went to lunch at the Commanders Palace, which was really fabulous. Great food and highly attentive service. Their speciality is this bread pudding souffle, which I got to sample. However I was correctly stared to the strawberry shortcake, which was heavenly. The salad to start was suberb, and the crawfish stew was excellent. It came with a whole steamed crawfish on top which was cute and tasty.
Next we went down to the French Quarter and wandered about, and I took tons of pictures. We ended up at Cafe du Mode for cafe au la it and beignets. The beignets had tons of powdered sugar on them, which tended to go everywhere. So much fun! 
After a walk along the Mississippi, we headed of for a bit of a rest.
Finally, we walked over to the Voodoo BBQ for a real tasty meal. Well stuffed and talked out we came back to the hotel and said goodbyes to various family and friends.
Heading back home tomorrow morning. I can see why ppl fall in love with New Orleans!
GuitarTV – The best of the Guitar, 24 hours a day.
I think this may be one of the coolest one topic websites ever. Great looking interface, electric guitar motif. It’s rather incomprehensible, but then so are most guitar solos not done by Roger Gilmore….
What Will The Maid Think?
Bert “the Conqueror” Kreischer — who travels around the world in search of the ultimate thrill ride — engages in playful harassment of the hotel cleaning staff by using pillows, sheets and toilet paper to make funny sculptures in his hotel rooms. Here’s the gallery on his facebook page:
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Bert The Conqueror's Toilet Monster
This looks like trouble….
This should appeal to my feline-identified human friends
This is pretty cute — motorized ears that respond to changes in the wearer’s brain waves (not actually sure if this is so — the article doesn’t describe how this works). But it is funny, and if someone can actually make it change in a predictable way, they could be very fun.
Not yet for sale in the US, unfortunately.
Cartoon in need of a caption
From this week’s New Yorker, caption contest:
Captions we’ve come up with so far:
- “I knew you’d get a lift out of that.”
- “I knew you’d get a rise out of that.”
- “I didn’t know you were so up in the air about having children.”
- “I’m not sure you’re aware of the gravity of this situation.”
Supply yours!
Hand Dancing — Very fun video
This is a fun little video of hand dancing.
via More Interesting that Riverdance – Epic Win FTW -Awesome Photos and Videos.
Watercolour Class
My parents and I have started a beginning watercolour class. I have a little experience with watercolours, but have never had any instruction. This class is proving to be quite fun and informative. We’ve been having a great time.
We do lots of little exercises, which I’m not going to bother posting, because visually they’re rather boring (just swatches of colour, basically). I did post a couple of examples of painting over a corn starch base, even though the pictures are simple abstracts, to show what it looks like. I’ve never done that technique before and it was rather fun!
Today, we did the ski scene. It was rather interesting. We first wet the top half of the paper, above the slanted horizon line. Then we dropped pure blue paint into the water and let it run around, tilting the pad this way and that, and just letting it spread out. Then came the trees, which was just paint applied to the wet blue wash and kind of smudged around to make vague tree-like blobs. I added a bit of red to the green to darken it a bit. Then when it was somewhat drier, we took a palette knife and cut the branch formations into the paint. I’d never ever used a palette knife on a watercolour painting before, so I had no idea what to expect. What came out was really quite interesting!! I think I did a better job with the knife on the second version, but both are pretty acceptable.
The only real problem I ran into was the backwashes. It looked fine when it was wet, but it dried into that horrible blob that’s so visible in the painting. I need to figure out how to get moisture off the paper without taking pigment off. On one exercise I did previously, I tried to blot up the moisture with a paper towel, but it ended up taking all the pigment off as well, so that was a flop. The instructor recommends we use a dry brush to pick it up, but I’ve had no luck with that as well. Somehow I have to figure out how to keep the paper from getting so wet. Ah well, that’s why i’m in a class!
Ski Scene 2