"Is someone paying you to say that stuff?"
She giggled. "Sorry, babe, it just pops out sometimes. I didn't mean to pitch you. I'm supposed only to do it to my girlfriends."
"What?"
"Ignore me. You know how hard it is to keep track of one's placements."
"Placements?"
"Placements. Why are you making that face? You're looking at me like I'm some kind of freak."
"You have a lot of -- placements?"
"Oh, don't get on your high horse. You don't work, either. What do you do for cash? If a girl doesn't want a straight job, she has to monetize her social network."
Raj, Bohemian
Raj, Bohemian
Bartenders Debate Whether Vodka Deserves Their Hate
Oh snap: Neyah White, fresh from a dinner sponsored by Absolut, is still having none of it. "I am on the record as blaming Absolut for starting the whole vodka thing with their ad campaigns in the 80's and 90's. They were very cool, but got people looking at the bottle and caring more about it than the stuff inside." He went on to tell us that he doesn't hate on vodka just because it's what all the cool kids are doing, he just genuinely hates it.
"Vodka, as a category, is full of liars. A rudimentary understanding of how a column still works will tell you the much-hyped 'number of times distilled' is completely meaningless. The filtration techniques are a means of hiding poor craftsmanship in the distillation, and they remove anything that might have been interesting to taste or smell from the spirit. The vast majority of 'hand-crafted' vodkas are actually rectified spirit purchased and processed -- people selling themselves as artisanal craftsman are buying tankloads of industrial spirit from the same same factories that supply perfumers and chemical makers, running it through their little copper still a few times, passing it through charcoal to try to get the esters out, and calling it hand-made."But my my biggest complaint with the category is that the pricing is just plain disrespectful. The bottle costs more than the juice inside. Compared to every other category, vodka is the cheapest spirit to make. Yet, the premium brands blind the consumer with fancy bottles and meaningless production trivia then charge them $35 a liter. It is quite obvious that the people who put together crap like this do no respect to me or the drinking public. I don't like doing business with people who don't respect me."
Tags: dnalounge
Current Music: Asuka Sakai & Ado Mizumori -- Makka na Bara to Gin Tonic ♬
Cocktail SCIENCE!
Why Do My Shaker Cans Get Sucked Together?
You've no doubt noticed that when you properly shake an alcoholic drink, the parts of your shaker are drawn tightly together by an internal vacuum force. Why does this happen and how big is the force?
A couple of cool things are happening when you shake. First, the air that's in your shaker starts off at room temperature. As you are shaking, this air gets cooled just like your drink does. Cooling the air causes the pressure to go down, which causes a vacuum. That isn't all that's happening, though. Ice is less dense than water. When ice melts, it actually contracts in volume. When the volume of liquid plus ice in the shaker contracts, the volume of air in the shaker increases. Since you aren't adding more air molecules, increasing the volume decreases pressure, causing more vacuum. Third, as your liquor gets colder, its density increases, again shrinking in volume and creating more vacuum. A third factor may be a small amount of expelled air when the bartender slams down on the cans before the shake. The last effect is hard to calculate mathematically. [...]
Plug in all the numbers, and the inside of the shaker has a negative pressure of about 1.7 psi. Since the small shaker measures 3 3/16 inches across, the force to pull the cans apart should be about 13.6 pounds.
North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets
Don't suspect your neighbor, report him
The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea's near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers' phoned and texted reports on Web sites.
[...] The North Korean government can monitor cellphone calls, but tracing them is harder, so the police rove the countryside in jeeps equipped with tracking devices.
The informants call him once a week; they never give their names, and they hide the phones far from their homes. Despite those precautions, they are sometimes caught. This month, Mr. Ha's Web site reported that an arms factory worker was found with a cellphone and confessed to feeding information to South Korea. A source said the informant was publicly executed by firing squad.
Tags: big brother, doomed, grim meathook future, phones
Current Music: Carsick Cars -- You Can Listen, You Can Talk ♬
I like this device.
And also this device.
DNA Lounge: Wherein Godwin is invoked.
I thought I'd share with you an incident report that I recently received:
At or around 12:30AM on the evening of Friday, Mar 26th during the Trannyshack event, I was at the back door when I observed a customer (black male, 5' 10" - 6', average build) wearing shorts, a vest and glasses pull down his pants and begin urinating in the garbage can located in the alcove to the back door. I approached him and informed him that he was no longer welcome in the venue. He shoved me and refused to leave. I repeated that he was no longer welcome in the venue and he attempted to shove me again. I physically restrained him and began moving him towards that back door. He became verbally abusive. [Another staffer] approached and began speaking with him and I reentered the venue. The customer remained in the vicinity for approximately 90 more minutes. [Staffer] persuaded him to leave after he retrieved his property from coat check.
What the report doesn't mention is that during those 90 more minutes, the customer stood on the sidewalk screaming that we were Nazis.
Because do you know who else didn't let you piss in hallway trashcans? That's right. Hitler.
You may recall that this is not the first time I've told a story very much like this one. What the hell is wrong with these people?
Photos are up of the Pentagram + Ludicra + Slough Feg + Orchid show last week. Also, a couple of reviews.
This week, Justin.TV released their free iPhone app. This means you can now watch the DNA Lounge video webcast on your iPhone! It seems to work pretty well.
Speaking of the webcast, the panning camera -- the servo-mounted camera that is mounted on a beam and does most of the work of covering the stage during live shows -- finally lost its mind, so the webcasts of live shows have been a bit static lately. We suspect that one of the Filthy Clowns destroyed the cable coming out of the camera while stomping around up there doing aerialist rigging. (It's not the first time they've done this; clown riggers are remarkably careless about other people's gear, you will be unsurprised to learn.) But, the cable in question is hard-wired in to the camera and difficult to replace, so I bought a new (used) version of the same camera from eBay. It hasn't arrived yet. Hopefully it will be no more flaky than the current camera, but I'm not holding my breath on that.
For the Google Juice: Do not buy a Panasonic WV-NS324 camera, it is junk! One of the worst electronics purchases I have ever made.
I probably should have tried to find a better camera, but it's actually pretty difficult to find a pan-tilt-zoom camera that is A) good in low light, B) network-controllable, and C) has an NTSC video output. Most networked cameras are shit in low light, and only output digital video over the network, which doesn't help me.
