Everybody loves bacon (the meat of the Gods).
And now we can bathe with bacony goodness.
This should be viewed as more of a jackass experiment than a “how to” by a soapmaking expert. I just wanted to see if it was possible to make soap from bacon fat.
The bonus challenge: make the soap look like bacon.
How I Made Bacon Fat Soap: Supplies
• Bacon fat
• 100% Lye (sodium hydroxide)
• Purified water and ice
• Liquid Smoke (optional fragrance)
• Red food coloring (optional coloring)
• Stove
• Pyrex baking pan
• Chemical/solvent/heat resistant plastic bowl
• Measuring cup
• Cotton cloth or paper towels
• Wooden (or stainless steel) spoon
• Metal can
• 1 cigarette
If you don’t do things to ceremoniously embrace Summer, it can often slip by unenjoyed.
A Working List of Things to Do This Summer
• Make lemonade from scratch (even if you have to buy the lemons) and drink it on a porch, stoop, deck, or veranda.
• Go to a beach, lake, or outdoor public swimming pool. Get wet.
• Eat popsicles.
• Have a barbeque - or minimally, eat barbeque.
• Sleep outdoors at least once - either in a forest, on a beach, in a back yard, or on the roof of your apartment building.
• If you have an ice cream man in your neighborhood, buy a popsicle from him at least once. Even if you are in your mid-30’s and look foolish chasing after him.
• Get a sunburn.
• Run through lawn sprinklers, slide on a Slip-N-Slide, sit in a kiddie-pool, wade in a public fountain, or go to a water park.
• Make an extra effort to put ice in all of your beverages. Especially coffee.
• Wear a sunscreen that smells like vacation. Even on a day when you don’t need to.
This is awesome:
Michael Townsend and Adriana Yoto had a nicely decorated 750 square foot apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, for nearly four years. Until the Providence Place Mall security caught them - they made this secret apartment inside the shopping mall.
Their site is rendered in hilarious ‘real estate sales’ format.
“During the Christmas season of 2003 and 2004, radio ads for the Providence Place Mall featured an enthusiastic female voice talking about how great it would be if you (we) could live at the mall.”
C - The KII EMF Meter (with switch modification). $66.95 (or $44.95 unmodified), available through Ghost Augustine.
D - The TRI-Field Natural EMF Meter. Don’t let the name mislead you, it also works with supernatural EMF fields also. $207.99, available through Ghost TRHAPS.
E - The Baketan Ghost Detector 1.0. Strap it to your cellphone, it changes color to indicate the nature of the supernatural presence. Only $19.89, cute ghost charm included, available through Strapya-World.
F - The Baketan Ghost Detector 2.0. Small enough to strap to your cellphone, it changes color to indicate the nature of the supernatural presence, also includes new ‘ghost voice translator.” $19.12, available through Strapya-World.
If anyone knows if this is true - if you can really do this or if this is a hoax - please let us know in the comments section below.
Nevermind. It’s a hoax, but it’s still awesome.
Frustrated with all the unsolicited junk mail you receive? DearBulkMailer.com has come up with a great way to exact revenge on the very people that spam you. Or, put in other words: seeing as how you receive all this unsolicited junk mail every month from spammers, isn’t it s only fair that they should receive something unsolicited from you?
In 4 easy steps:
1) Get the “No Postage Necessary” envelope out of the junk mail
2) Put a brick (or anything) in a box.
3) Tape the “No Postage Necessary” envelope neatly to the box.
4) Put it into those blue mail boxes, the parcel dump at the post office, or in your mail box.
This only works with “No Postage Necessary When Mailed In the US” envelopes, and the kicker is this: when using these prepaid envelopes, the company that receives the piece of mail has to pay approximately 20 cents per ounce on what is delivered to them. This is no problem with a normal letter, but when you tape the no postage necessary envelope to a box containing an 8 pound brick, the junk mailer winds up having to pay $25, with all of the proceeds going to the US Postal Service.
Oh man . . . my creativity gland is sore from spending the day at the 2008 Maker Faire. I don’t even have the energy to make a video of it; below are some photo highlights.
If you live in the Bay Area: GO!
It’s happening tomorrow (Sunday) also.
GO! . . . and be crafty.
What you will need:
• 1 can Dr. Pepper or a trashy Dr. Pepper clone.
• 4 pork chops (boneless or with bone)
• black pepper
• red pepper (leftover packet from pizza delivery is fine)
• 1 cigarette (not menthol)
• skillet
• cooking oil
• tongs or spatula or stick
• stove
• kitchen
Step 1: Put a little oil in the skillet, put the skillet on stovetop, turn stove on to medium setting. Place the 4 porkchops onto the skillet.
Step 2: Pour (or spit) about a mouthful of Dr. Pepper onto the porkchops when they begin sizzling. Dump Pizza Hut packet of red pepper onto the sizzling porkchops. Pour the same amount of black pepper onto the porkchops.
Step 3: Turn porkchops when necessary. You want the Dr. Pepper to reduce (boil down) to a thick sticky syrup, what we will call a demi-glace (borrowing a fancypants French term to sound like we know what we’re doing). As the Dr. Pepper becomes thicker, the sugar in it will caramelize and stick to the pork chops - this is your goal. This may take some time.
Step 4: Smoke the cigarette while you watch the meat cook. When the porkchops are cooked, cut off the fatty ends or fatty edges of the meat and leave them in the pan. Remove the porkchops, leave the fat in the pan.
Step 5: Pour the remainder of the Dr. Pepper into the pan with the fatty ends of the porkchops. Let them fry/boil until the remaining Dr. Pepper becomes thick. Remove the fatty chunks (and feed them to the dog), pour the Dr. Pepper sauce onto the pork chops.
Step 6: Eat in a trailer home.
Serving suggestion: On a bed of Cheetos, with lemonade or beer as a libation.
Last Fall, someone tried repeatedly to break into a neighbor’s apartment - windowscreens torn or pulled off, and attempts to pry open the window locks. I helped her to better fortify her windows and I decided it would be wise to protect my own.
I went with minor antipersonnel gardening: planter boxes beneath all of the windows, each filled with cacti. The project itself cost around $25 for each antipersonnel planter box, and it took an afternoon to do. IKEA (at the time) had sets of 3 small cacti for ~$5.00 and single large cacti for ~$5.00 each.
Some points to consider:
• This won’t prevent anyone from breaking in if they are hellbent on doing so. It provides ‘disincentive’ - making it uncomfortable or more difficult to casually approach and open windows from the outside. They provide a visual threat (I’ve considered adding poison oak to some of the planter boxes, also).
• The cost is relatively low.
• It is easy to do - Screw the planter box into the bottom of the window sill. I suggest you use BBQ tongs or pliers to handle the cacti when you’re planting them.
• It is easy to maintain - Cacti are low-maintenance and often only need watering on a monthly basis.
• It looks cool - every time I look out the window, it looks like I’m in Arizona.
If you love pranks, or are just an a$$hole and want to piss off/lose your friends, you may or may not want to check out CalltheFuture.org, a unique service that until April Fools’ Day, I had never heard of. Sure, I’m a little late bringing to the site, but this is still worth addressing for all y’all Dillas out there.
Before I get started, however, let me state that CalltheFuture makes it clear that their service is not to be used for pranks. I personally would never do this, nor advocate it, but that doesn’t mean my buddy (who will remain nameless) wouldn’t… So again, I’m not advocating this– just bringing some interesting knowledge I happened across to the Dillasphere.
CalltheFuture’s service is marketed as a tool to help people remind themselves about important future engagements, from meetings and appointments to other responsibilities, allowing users to schedule “courtesy” calls in the future to any phone number they choose at any given time. In theory, this could be very useful, such as if I have to pick up my buddy from the airport at 3pm a week from now and I’m worried I might forget– I can just schedule a call for 12 noon that day to remind me. Sweet, right? Just type in a string of text you want read to you, plug in the phone number you want to call, type in the number you want to show up as the caller ID(!), and choose one of 7 voices (male or female, aged 30-55) you want to read your text. The rest, as they say, is magic.
Sure, CTF can be useful, but the possibility of tomfoolery is large. My advice is this: don’t not not pull pranks on your friends, such as setting up calls to your roommate at 5am daily, or programming nasty calls to your ex-girlfriend every hour on the hour.
This is Jaimie.
He lives in a geodesic dome in the forest.
He likes building things.
He is currently building a giant 6-legged robot.
You can watch Jaimie’s progress on his YouTube page.
Go, Jaimie, Go!
First we brought you the Bacontini. Now we teach you how to make it…or at least, make the main ingredient in it: Bacon Vodka!
You’ll be surprised though, this isn’t actually very tough. The BrowniePointsBlog lays it out in 8 easy steps:
Fry up three strips of bacon.
Add cooked bacon to a clean pint sized mason jar.
Trim the ends of the bacon if they are too tall to fit in the jar (or you can just throw a bunch of fried up bacon scraps in the mason jar).
Optional: Add crushed black peppercorns.
Fill the remainder of the bacon/peppercorn mason jar with vodka.
Cap and place in a dark cupboard for at least three weeks. That’s right– don’t refrigerate it.
After the three week resting period, place the bacon vodka in the freezer to solidify the fats. Strain out the fats through a coffee filter to yield a clear filtered pale yellow bacon vodka.
Decant into decorative bottles and enjoy.
Click here for a list of various bacon-infused cocktails you can make.
Today I was watching “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” At the monsoon-destroyed ruins of Hotel Citroën on the island of Little Ping, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) notes:
“What a shame. They had a bartender here, Kino, made the best Rum Cannonball I’ve ever tasted.”
The question comes to mind: Is this a real drink, or something invented by Wes Anderson? From internet discussions and references, it’s hard to tell if this drink actually existed before the movie. Based on an average of posted recipes, I made a Rum Cannonball (actual photo).
The Rum Cannonball
•1 part white rum
•1 part gin
•1 part orange juice
•1 part pineapple juice
•1 part lemon-lime soda
•1 part strawberry soda
Serve over ice with a key lime, pineapple, or tropical orchid garnish.
What does it taste like?: Not bad . . . fruity fizzy booze.
An alternate recipe also exists:
•2 oz rum
•Top-off with orange juice
•4-5 dashes of Angostura bitters
What does it taste like?: Not bad . . . rummy spicey o.j.
