The science of artificial flavor allows us to taste things that we'd normally never eat. Prank marketing group MSCHF (previously at Neatorama) ran with that idea and offers us Illegal Chips. This is a limited-edition selection of (possibly potato) chips that come in the flavors of forbidden food. You can try horse meat chips, fugu fish chips, and casu marzu chips. Casu marzu is the Sardinian cheese that contains sheep milk and live maggots.
Wanna try these Illegal Chips out? It will cost you around $4 for a 3-ounce bag, but only until they sell out. There are risks involved, even though the chips don't contain any of the foods they purport to taste like. One the one hand, they could taste awful. On the other hand, you might find you like one of them so much that it induces a craving for a dish you can't obtain, or obtain easily.
You can watch a video of a taste test of the fugu-flavored chips at Boing Boing.
The a cappella group Six13 (previously at Neatorama) presents their annual Chanukah production! This year, it's a medley of familiar tunes from the Broadway musical West Side Story. The six singers channel the Sharks and the Jets as they sing about the Jewish Festival of Lights and the history behind it. The video was appropriately recorded on the streets of Manhattan. While you know the songs from the 1961 movie, the newest film version of West Side Story is due in theaters on December 10. Chanukah begins at sundown on Sunday and lasts until the evening of December 6. Chag Chanukah same’ach!
PS: I have often spelled the festival as Hanukkah, but used Chanukah this time as that's the spelling that appears in the video. Both are considered correct.
The turducken is a turkey stuffed with a duck that was stuffed with a chicken, all deboned, separated only by a layer of sausage stuffing. It was a regional delicacy in Louisiana before 1996. New Orleans butcher Glenn Mistich had built somewhat of a reputation for providing turduckens, so he was enlisted to make one for legendary sports announcer John Madden. That happened when the St. Louis Rams played the New Orleans Saints on December 1, 1996. Madden was a well-known food enthusiast, and made no bones about what he found delicious as he narrated football games. Mistich went to great lengths to deliver the best turducken possible to the Superdome before the game. After a run-in with security, he delivered the dish, posed for a picture with Madden, and left.
It was an unwritten rule that Madden got to eat first, but the realization had hit that there were no utensils or napkins.
After a good 30 seconds of people scouring the booth and coming up empty, Madden couldn't take it anymore. He dug his hands into the turducken, ripping chunks off and eating them as the bemused crew laughed and asked him how it was. "I love it," Madden said between mouthfuls. "I absolutely love it."
Madden kept eating the turducken through the game, and made the dish a national phenomenon. The story of that day takes us through the history of the turducken, Mistich's method of creating them, and what that game meant for turducken chefs in the decades since. And it's pretty funny, too. Read the whole story at ESPN. -via Digg
A team of restorers in England were preparing for a building repair when they discovered some well-preserved Tudor wall paintings. The artworks were hidden away under layers of plaster, in a semi-derelict parlor block, until they noticed signs of early wall paintings. According to Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust, a British building conservation nonprofit leading the restoration, “never in my own 27 years of working in historic buildings have I ever witnessed a discovery like this.”
Image credit: Tom Burrows; courtesy of Landmark Trust
Photographer Slim Aarons is known for showing the public a glimpse of the lives of the rich and beautiful. The late photographer worked for publications such as Town & Country, Harper's Bazaar, and Life magazine, and has taken wonderful photos of aristocrats and socialites. From champagne parties on snowy retreats to lounging in different villas around the globe, his photos exude luxury, elegance, and money. In a new book discussing Aarons’ work, Shawn Waldron and his colleague shared that instead of taking the photos to celebrate or critique the lavish lifestyles these people had, he was merely driven by curiosity.
Image credit: Slim Aarons
A new study discovered that there’s actually a possibility that our friendly, adorable puppers know when we’re lying to them. Ludwig Huber, Lucrezia Lonardo, and their colleagues from the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna, Italy found that dogs react differently to people who told them a lie without realizing it than they did to a person who knowingly lied to them. Majority of the 260 dogs involved in the study responded when they were told the truth rather than a lie. Learn more about the study here!
Image credit: Victor Grabarczyk/Unsplash
US-based artist Angela Hao creates colorful, whimsical, and somehow comforting illustrations of different Japanese storefronts inspired by her trips to Tokyo and Osaka using Google Street View. According to Hao, her art focuses on architectural illustration. She recreates the shops she sees while using the application, and then adds dreamy touches, like luscious plants, expressive signage, and adorable cats.
Image credit: Angela Hao
It looks stunning!
Luxury fashion brand Burberry has launched a pop-up store in Jeju Island, South Korea. The brand added more beauty to the tourist destination with their scenic mirror landscape that promotes their outerwear collection. According to the company, the huge scenic pop-up store aims to blur the lines between “nature and technology, the indoors and outdoors, the real and the imagined.”
Image credit: Burberry via HYPEBEAST
Plankton is a catch-all name for the tiny lifeforms that inhabit our water. They come in a ridiculous variety of sizes and shapes, but mainly two types: plants (phytoplankton) and animals (zooplankton). Within those categories are an entire encyclopedia of different plankton species, each with their own ecological niche. Plankton drift along with the current, mainly reproducing and waiting to be eaten. As they are the bottom of the food chain, they are essential to all life on earth. They also excrete oxygen as a waste product and perform other chemical processes that help to keep ocean waters healthy for other living things.
Dutch filmmaker Jan van IJken recorded different types of plankton through a microscope and assembled this gorgeous compilation of their forms. Some look like inanimate objects, while others resemble critters we might recognize if they were bigger. A few of them may as well be aliens from a science fiction fantasy. -via Geeks Are Sexy
While the basics of America's Thanksgiving feast are widely known and eaten across the country: turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie, there are regional variations in the menu that you might never have heard of. Or maybe your family has a tradition of serving something that you would be surprised to find doesn't exist nationwide. Then again, there might even be a local variation in your own area that you aren't familiar with!
Does your family serve Frog Eye Salad, Wild Rice Casserole, Sopapilla Cheesecake, or Funeral Potatoes for Thanksgiving? Find out where these are common and why at Atlas Obscura, and if they pique your curiosity or hunger, follow the links to a recipe for each. You'll have to Google the recipe for persimmon bread, I'm afraid.
Note: The list does not include cranberry pickle pie.
(Image credit: Flickr user SK)
You wouldn't go online to hire someone to commit murder, would you? Of course not. First, it's wrong, immoral, and illegal. Second, it's dumb. You would know right off that a site called RentAHitman is a joke. Apparently not everyone is so internet-savvy. A woman in Michigan pled guilty earlier this month to soliciting the murder of her ex-husband through the site! Wendy Wein was contacted by a police officer posing as a hitman from the service and received all the evidence he needed, including a $200 deposit. She is expected to be sentenced to nine years in prison.
Bob Innes launched RentAHitman in 2005 as a joke and a website test. He ignored it for some years, but eventually went back to clean it out and found hundreds of messages. A lot of them were trying to enlist his "services." Innes took his concerns to police, who contacted other law enforcement agencies all over the world to check out the messages. This was easy to do, since earnest potential clients filled out a form with their own information plus personal information on the person(s) they wished to exterminate.
“I don’t get it,” Bob Innes, the owner of the joke site, told the Washington Post in a recent interview. “People are just stupid.”
Read about the many people who were caught trying to hire a hitman through the website at Gizmodo. And when you visit RentAHitman, do not add your own joke by filling out the inquiry form.
(Image: RentAHitman)
🦏 A white rhino battles a Cape buffalo in the Kariega Game Reserve in South Africa in this thrilling head-to-head battle. Who'll win? Despite being far outweighed by the rhino, the buffalo stood its ground and didn't give an inch!
🥧 This Thanksgiving, give these two unusual pies a try: the cinnamon roll pie and the Reese's Peanut Butter Pie. Yum!
📺 The Simpsons have been on the air, like, forever, so it shouldn't surprise anyone that they've found a 2,200-year-old statue that looks just like Lisa Simpson.
📚 In space, no one can hear you shush. Here's a real life job opening that'll require you to prove your geek cred: science fiction librarian.
🐶 A family in Peru got a ruff surprise when they found out that their pet dog turned out to be a fox.
⚛️ Vitruvian Genius: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." (Love that? View more Science T-shirts)
More neat posts over at: Supa Fluffy, Homes & Hues, Pictojam, Pop Culturista and Laughosaurus.
Check out the NeatoShop for more awesome tees for Christmas!
Many communities stage a Christmas parade to kick off the holiday season (see: Macy's), but there's an inherent problem with having one right after Thanksgiving. Everyone's too tired and bloated to march, due to eating all that turkey, dressing, side dishes and pumpkin pie!
Glen Arbor, Michigan, took that idea and ran with it. The town's Chamber of Commerce encourages everyone to come out and do their Christmas shopping on Black Friday wearing pajamas. Their parade begins in the morning, and features beds rolling down the street! One of the parade's organizers says it's hysterical. You can put wheels on a bed, but they often lose them before they get to the end of the parade, and end up being carried. So much for resting up after Thanksgiving. But it's an annual traditional that Glen Arbor is proud of.
Last year's parade was canceled due to the pandemic, but it's back on for 2021, beginning at 9AM Friday. -via Fark
We sure love our fried potatoes. Which kind do you like best? There are french fries, curly fries, Tater Tots, potato wedges, and more, and you have to admit they are different, even though they are all fried potatoes. The Fry Universe gives us an elaborate 3D visualization of how they are different, which is a matter of surface area vs. volume. It's all in the frying, meaning how much of this food is potato, and how much is fried. Sure, we like both parts, but the frying is magic. Still, I am a bit disappointed they didn't include hash browns or latkes. -via Metafilter
Marvel Studios dipped its toe into the world of martial arts films this year with Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings. Screen Junkies are here to point out how this movie uses all the usual tropes from Marvel superhero movies plus all the tropes you expect from a martial arts film (plus father issues), and yet it works better than you'd ever expect. After all, those film elements became ubiquitous because audiences liked them. While there's plenty to say, it's obvious that our favorite film critics really liked Shang-Chi and the Legend of The Ten Rings. Even if they are really bracelets.
