Christine Ha was the winner of the cooking competition show MasterChef season 3. She is also blind. Ha and her husband John now co-host the Canadian cooking show Four Senses. Here, she shows us by GoPro how she maneuvers around the kitchen by memory, feel, and a little adaptive technology.
You can follow Christine at her personal website or her cooking blog, The Blind Cook. -via Nag on the Lake
We Have Always Lived in The Castle (Shirley Jackson)
Photographer Charles Roux creates meals from literature in their proper setting for his project Fictitious Feasts. He began the project in 2014. Roux has posted about 50 images so far, and is collecting them for an eventual book. The meals range from the extravagant tea party in Alice in Wonderland to the meager gruel of Oliver Twist. Each meal is an elaborate construction.
Roux even makes all the food in the photos himself. To that end, he’s spent time learning new recipes, including Turkish delight for the Chronicles of Narnia and clam chowder for Moby-Dick. He also eats the food after the shoots—except for some cupcakes he made for his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shoot: They looked tasty but weren’t as good as expected.
“Doing things all on my own was part of my process because I like to work alone, and I think reading is very much an individual process. The project was all about me and how I felt about the books, about their metaphors and their atmosphere, so it just made sense to do everything on my own—the props, the recipes, the pictures,” he said.
Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
See the series so far at Roux’s project page. -via Metafilter
Malgorzata Chodakowska is a sculptor in Lodz, Poland. She makes enchantingly beautiful fountains shaped like human figures (content warning: artistic nudity). The flow of the water completes the images, making them look alive.
Method Design shows off their skills with this motion capture video that will blow your mind. The dancers are real, and they have some wicked costumes, until you realize these aren’t costumes at all! It’s computer generated effects added to motion-captured dancers.
This gives a whole new dimension to motion itself as an art form. -via Boing Boing
When you go to a hospital to have a baby, you probably don’t have a clue how much it will cost. For one thing, most people don’t have a choice of hospitals. You go to the one your insurance will cover, and where your doctor has privileges. Or the only hospital in town. They charge what they want, and knowing won't change that. Johnny Harris and his wife Isabel wanted to get an idea of what the bill might be beforehand, but ran into problems -no one wanted to quote any numbers. It’s a secret!
Luckily, they had insurance, and the insurance company haggled the bill down after the birth. A person without insurance would be stuck with the entire bill, and hospitals rarely negotiate prices with individuals. The “good” news is that if they think you won’t be able to pay the bill, you’ll be sent home within 24 hours. As expected, the comments under this video are full of Europeans shocked that Americans have to pay to have a baby. -via Viral Viral Videos
Will Stephen is a comedian with the Upright Citizens Brigade and a writer who has published with the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and CollegeHumor.
Will Stephen is smart. You can tell because he's delivering a TED Talk. Only smart people get to deliver TED Talks. And, more importantly, only smart people watch and--if at all possible--attend TED Talks in person.
So if you cannot attend a TED Talk yourself, then make sure that you are seen in public watching a recording of one. Or just link to a TED Talk on social media and tell people how meaningful it was to you.
This particular TED Talk would be a good pick. It will prepare you to deliver your own TED Talk, as Stephen explains in detail how to enunciate, gesticulate, and obfuscate in ways that will make you appear intelligent to people who like to watch TED Talks. You know--smart people like you.
-via Swiss Miss
And it totally works! The musical duo called Team Kozan performs Taylor Swift’s hit song “Shake It Off” on the koto, which is a long plucked instrument with 13 strings, and the shakuhachi, which is a notch flute made of bamboo. At the end of the video, they put down their instruments and start shaking it off.
This is 1 of 6 covers of modern songs with traditional Japanese instruments rounded up by Rocket News 24. You can also find “Smooth Criminal” by Michael Jackson and “We Will Rock You” by Queen.
Chef and television personality Alton Brown gives scathing reviews to dumb food gadgets (he calls them "unitaskers") available for online purhase in this amusing video. And as Internet veterans, I think we all know just how bad ripoff, 'net sale-based products can get. Why would anyone ever buy these hunks of junk? Do they simply want to be Wolverine? Let Alton set you straight. Via The Daily Dot
