putative.com

How to make any drink

I was talking about this cool mixology story in the NYT over -email, but I somehow failed to blog it. So there you go. Or rather *here* you go.

Jill sums it up best: "I’m glad somebody finally wrote about this. We have a fancy edition cocktail book, and reading it was like, 'Wait a minute! There’s only like five existing cocktails, the rest are all variations!'”

Today in Seattle Public Library book graffiti

From this book:

Comes this mark:

(It's a little dark and blurry, but: "We are all meta-phores for something else / rump=ancesteral / chest=symbolic")

Bollywood "Thriller"

Sometimes, you've just got to stop what you're doing and watch the Bollywood version of "Thriller":

The first Japanese-style “meido kafue,” or maid cafe, opens in LA

I think my favorite part of this story is the throwaway phrase "or nerds" in this line: "That spun off in 2002 as a Tokyo cafe where hardcore gamers and anime fans, known as 'otaku,' or nerds, were doted upon by maids who called customers 'master' and would even blow on food to cool it off."

Am I missing something, or is that hilariously snarky editorializing in the middle of a NYT story? My second favorite part is this description of similarly themed restaurants:

Deferential service like that is the norm at maid cafes in Japan, where competition has led to nearly endless permutations of the form. Mr. Macias estimated that there have been more than 50 maid establishments in Tokyo alone. Those have spawned butler cafes that cater to women, and even a mother cafe, where customers are treated like beloved children. One of the latest is a sergeant cafe, where diners must salute and say “yes, sir” to stern waiters in military fatigues.

(Found via Erica, who does not find this humorous even one little bit.)

Dubai plans "moving" skyscraper

Times are good if you're selling oil:

The world's first moving building, an 80-storey tower with revolving floors giving a shifting shape, will be built in Dubai, its architect says. (Thanks for the tip, James!)

How people read online

I missed this nice meta-piece in Slate from a couple weeks back, about paper vs. online reading behavior and (to a lesser extent) its implications. It starts like this:

You're probably going to read this.

It's a short paragraph at the top of the page. It's surrounded by white space. It's in small type.

To really get your attention, I should write like this:

• Bulleted list
• Occasional use of bold to prevent skimming
• Short sentence fragments
• Explanatory subheads
• No puns
• Did I mention lists?

To give you even more of an idea of where this is going, the article is titled "Lazy Bastards."

Rob Heinsoo interview is up

Just posted my interview with Rob Heinsoo for young and plucky lit blog Guys Lit Wire--which caters to teen guys and anyone looking for books for teen guys, hence the numerous anecdotes about Fritz Leiber et al. I also interviewed Rob for Omnivoracious, with more of a mainstream focus (esp. on games in the culture), so once that's up, you can read *even more* about Heinsoo. For those who just can't get enough of Rob. Which, you know, is just about everybody. As near as I can tell.

Better living through plasma furnaces

It's this sort of thing that reminds me why I like reading "I, Cringely":

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms.

Colbert grills Cookie Monster on not wearing cookie lapel pin

Doesn't that make you feel better, Jill? (And thanks to Wolf for the tip!)

From the Dept. of Freaking Your Shit Out

The folks who made the Roomba are now creating a softball-sized military robot that can squeeze under your doorjamb:

"During military operations it can be important to gain covert access to denied or hostile space... We believe that a new class of soft, flexible, meso-scale mobile objects that can identify and maneuver through openings smaller than their dimensions to perform various tasks will be quite valuable in many missions."

Here are the robo-specs:

According to the original proposal from DARPA, in just 2 years a prototype approximately the size of a softball—i.e., 10cm across—must achieve all this:
a) travel a distance of 5 meters at a speed of 0.25 meters/minute;
b) achieve a 10-fold reduction in its largest dimension; and
c) squeeze through a 1 cm opening of arbitrary geometry and reconstitute its original size and shape, in 15 seconds.

It could be a variant on this cute little guy: