Category Archives: Uncategorized

the joys of summer: bbq game time!

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Well by now we might all be getting tired of the barbeque. It’s been a long, hot summer and it is a fact universally acknowledged that a young person possessed of some nice, red steaks and a barbeque must be in want of a pitcher of Sangria and some friends bringing salad.

I wish I knew more people like that; I’m gifted with salads.

In any case, there comes a point in any activity, even barbequeing delicious foodstuffs, where boredom sets in. People start playing with the controls. Reversing the polarity. Putting sparklers in the coals. Anything to make it different. That heat-up period’s somehow not the anticipation-filled pause that it was back in June; it’s become the unendurably tedious waiting period before you can actually cook some goddam food, goddammit, the very reason we invented indoor stoves in the first place.

We present the following leisuretime activity, highly recommended for fending off bbq boredom, if also highly recommended for pissing off the person who has to clean up after you.

via BlogBling, ladies and gentlemen, CHEESE RACING!

I <3 Cheese Racing!

WARNING!! Cheese racing can be dangerous – the makers of this website CAN NOT be held responsible for any accidents or injuries that may occur. Practice safe cheese racing by following these simple guide lines.

  • Do NOT attempt ‘indoor cheese racing’. This is strictly an outdoor sport. (This includes tents!)
  • Be sure to ingest large quantities of alcohol and/or other chemical relaxant before (and during) play. This will relax the body and nervous system, thus minimising the pain of any injury and enabling you to play on.

Having said that, the sport does have an impressive safety record with zero fatalities so far…

Q: What do you think happens when you throw a slice of processed cheese (without removing the plastic wrapping) onto a lit barbeque?

The plastic melts giving off highly toxic fumes and you are left with a pretty grim cheese/plastic mess welded on to your BBQ, right?

WRONG!

Unbelievably what actually happens, as discovered by the pioneers and inventors of the sport way back in 1997 (read their account of that historic night on a campsite in Osmington here), is that the plastic pouch does not melt – even when the cheese inside eventually boils! Even more incredibly, as the cheese melts and the strange chemicals found in processed cheese turn to gas – the plastic pouch inflates until eventually all four corners lift off the BBQ and the pouch is fully inflated! Now under this pressure you might think that the pouch would eventually burst – but no – most of the time the seal remains intact!

Quite why processed cheese manufacturers choose to use such industrial strength, heat proof plastic to encase their products is something of a mystery – as is why NASA don’t use this material instead of those expensive heat proof tiles on the space shuttle? Such important questions no doubt occurred to the first observers of this phenomenon on that night in Osmington, but that didn’t stop them from coming up with a brilliantly simple sport based on it.

Washington Hockey Cheese Racers

The official CRASS rules of cheese racing

  • All players must place their cheese on the BBQ at the same time.

  • Cheeses must not overlap.

  • After the initial throwing of the cheese onto the barbecue (the “cast”), one poke of the slice (the “poke”) is permitted in cases of accidental overlap when the offending cheeses must be repositioned as quickly as possible. No further touching of the cheese is permitted. 

  • No blowing/fanning the flames under your cheese.

  • The winning cheese is defined as the one whose reaches a fully inflated stage first. Fully inflated means that all four corners have raised off the BBQ and the plastic is taut (distinctive “stretch” marks which appear on the sides of the parcel). This state must maintainable (i.e. it does not count if the bag is pulsing up and down due to springing a leak).

  • Note that springing a leak does not automatically mean you have lost – it is possible for the hole to become sealed with melted cheese and the bag to fully inflate anyway – such is the excitement of cheese racing – it’s not over till it’s over!

  • In the event of a draw. The tied cheese owners will race again.

  • Deliberate breaking of any of these rules will result in your cheese being disqualified and removed from the BBQ.

Okay, so when I use the “Singles” tag here I’m just being a smartass. Sue me.

cartoon o’ the day: Lebanon ceacefire

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Israel go home

from Latuff via Cold Desert

picture this: photojournalism and fairness in the War in Lebanon

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Fair and balanced? 

Here’s an interesting articticle from the New York Times about how the American media is dealing with the challenge of showing the war. Traditionally, media have displayed images from one side of the conflict against images from the opposite side, striving for that journalistic impartiality that everyone worships except Hunter Thompson, and look what happened to him.

But is that really fair or objective, when one sides casualties outnumber the others’ by a factor of ten? What is objective coverage in that case? Ten photos of dead Lebanese for every one of a dead Israeli? And of course, Hezbollah has fired more on Israel than Israel has on Lebanon, although with less effect. So do you show ten times the tracers going south as going north?

What is objective journalism when the facts themselves can be interpreted as prejudicial?

Particularly vexing for many American news organizations is the struggle to determine how and in what proportion images of civilian dead and injured should be displayed in their coverage, when one side’s casualties greatly surpass the other.

The journalistic calculus is made tougher by the involvement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a topic that bedevils news editors like no other, and an organization, Hezbollah, that is considered a terrorist group by the United States government. But the decision-making becomes even more fraught because of the power of photographs and TV images, which are evocative — and provocative — in ways the written and spoken word are not.

Coalition of the Willing, to Power

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Coalition of the Willing, to Power (from V for Vendetta)

Photobucket apparently does not support contemporary social symbolic art.

Well, fuck them.

Never Forget

 

T.W.A.T. Soup…coming immediately to an airport near you

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Airports. Kinda busy latelyBoingBoing has an interesting post from a couple of days ago. What, you ask, are the airport security people doing with the liquids they confiscate? Why, they’re dumping them into big bins, that’s what they’re doing.

Does anyone else see the problem with this?

What's in your cauldron?

If the liquid could be explosive, why are you dumping it in a crowd?
xopl asks a fair question:

 So CNN is reporting: “Because the plot involved taking liquid explosives aboard planes in carry-ons, passengers at all U.S. and British airports, and those boarding U.S.-bound flights at other international airports, are banned from taking any liquids onto planes.”And then they have the photo of the TSA guy dumping a tub of confiscated possibly explosive liquids into a garbage can in a crowd of people.

Figure that shit out for me.

Link

Reader comments:

Gabe says

 And check out this article from Asheville, NC. “Maya Leoni, who is held by Angela Perez, cries as her mother, A.J. Leoni, pours the last of her drink into the receptacle while in line for the security checkpoint at the Asheville Regional Airport.”POUR IT INTO A RECEPTACLE? Don’t you think that some of these potentially explosive liquids might be more dangerous when, I don’t know, mixed in a big vat in the middle of an airport?

Christ, why don’t they just have people put their liquids into a big bonfire?

May one respectfully suggest that, if they really believed people were bringing poisons and explosive chemicals onboard, to mix for activation, that mixing them in a big open bin in the middle of the passenger screening area is, perhaps, not the most efficient way to dispose of said liquids?

They may be this stupid, but even I don’t really think so. 

In related news:

The latest theory is that, rather than an explosive, the bombers may have been set up to make hydrogen cyanide, cyanide gas. It’s easy enough; even I can do it. It would effectively kill everyone in the cabin fairly quickly (and painfully). Not quite the explosive destruct-o-con that the British and American governments led us to believe, with potential casualty estimates of up to 300,FUCKING,000. Reality check, people.