Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Pinch. His. Cheeks!
Friday, April 17, 2009
Al Capone's Song
While in prison, notorious mobster Al Capone wrote this touching song: While the stars were all aglow
Once I heard a lover singing
To the one that he loved so
Neath the starry sky above
Every night he'd serenade her
With his tender song of love
You're the charm that reposes
In the heart of a song
Let whatever betide me
I will never go wrong
One golden sun
There's only one that I love
You are the one
Till the end I'll adore you
Madonna mia
Many years have hurried by
I can see that sweet Madonna
There's a teardrop in her eye
Left his loved one with a sigh
She said "I will wait forever"
As he sang this last goodbye.
Madonna mia ...
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Today's Post
Susan Boyle: Britian's Got Talent
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Breakfast of Champions
12 strips bacon (enough to render 3-4 oz of fat)
26 oz bottle bourbon
DIRECTIONS
Fry bacon in frying pan, then pour off bacon fat into 2-litre empty bucket. Pour in entire bottle of bourbon; set bottle aside. Stir mixture, then allow to sit at room temperature for six hours. Place bucket in freezer for about two hours so that fats can separate from alcohol and become solid.
Remove fatty solids from top of mixture; this is the first filtration. Strain through coffee filter into empty bourbon bottle, using a funnel. Makes 12 2-oz drinks.
Splatt says that a "slightly unctuous mouthfeel" is desirable, but warns that you can have too much of a good thing. She suggests a third filtration, through a Brita filter (it's not just for water), if you find the fat too noticeable.
For the drink:
1/2 oz maple syrup
dash or two (to taste) of bitters
2 oz bacon-infused bourbon
1 orange twist to garnish
Place syrup and bitters in Old Fashioned glass. Add ice if desired. Add bourbon and garnish with twist. Makes 1 drink.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Introducing the PUMA...
Hey, it's not a flying car, but, man it's SO COOL!!!!
From our colleagues at the Wheels blog:
General Motors may be so short of cash that bankruptcy is among its dwindling options, but the company is still in the business of creating dreams.
Its latest dream, the P.U.M.A. mobility pod, to be unveiled Tuesday in New York, is pretty far out — and as such, requires no big immediate investments. Indeed, Larry Burns, G.M.’s vice president for research and development and strategic planning, said the P.U.M.A. prototype cost “only one half of 1 percent of G.M’s typical engineering budget” for a year.
Of course, the P.U.M.A. (for Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) is not really a car, and it’s not really being introduced, except as a bit of blue-sky thinking about better ways to move around crowded urban areas than driving an automobile.
Mr. Burns has used the phrase “reinvention of the automobile” before, in relation to fuel-cell vehicles like the G.M. Sequel. But the P.U.M.A., a joint project with Segway, the New Hampshire-based creator of self-balancing two-wheel scooters, is quite different. Think of a larger, two-passenger, sit-down version of the Segway PT, with two gyroscopically balanced wheels. The prototype has minimal bodywork, but podlike enclosures (which look like computer mice on wheels) are imagined for production. If it gets that far.
If all of this conjures visions of a rickshaw, well, the prototype does somewhat resemble one. Mr. Burns imagines Singapore, which has rickshaws, as one possible early market.
The P.U.M.A., which will be displayed at the New York International Auto Show (which opens to the public on Friday), is an electric vehicle powered by lithium-ion batteries. James D. Norrod, the president and chief executive of Segway, says it has a 35-mile range and 35 m.p.h. top speed. A three-hour charge costs, not surprisingly, 35 cents. It is, in essence, a neighborhood electric vehicle, or N.E.V., whose limited speed keeps it off highways (and, in most states, off roads with speed limits over 35).
Mr. Burns said that six P.U.M.A.’s would fit in a standard parking space.
A new N.E.V. — many are little more than glorified golf carts— is not going to reinvent the automobile. Despite the claims by proponents that these vehicles could serve the driving needs of many millions, they have failed to make much of a dent in the car market. Ford abandoned its Neighbor N.E.V. when it sold the Norwegian company that made it, Think Nordic, at the end of 2002. Fewer than 6,000 Neighbors were sold in the United States that year. Chrysler still sells Global Electric Motorcars vehicles, which have had some success in gated communities.
In a meeting Monday with editors and reporters at The New York Times, Mr. Burns pulled out his cellphone to make a point: Project P.U.M.A. vehicles would be designed to tap into the two-way communications made possible by G.M.’s OnStar technology, which has six million North American subscribers. The vision is expansive: using “vehicle to vehicle,” or V2V, communications, these “100 percent digital” devices would communicate with one another over a quarter-mile range to prevent collisions, eventually allowing what G.M. calls “autonomous driving and parking.”
Mr. Burns imagines a hands-free urban driver ignoring dense city traffic to concentrate on sending text messages from a P.D.A. clipped-in to serve as a dashboard, as the mobile Internet pod moves toward its destination. “My daughter sleeps with her iPhone in her hand,” Mr. Burns said. “At this point, is using a cellphone the distraction, or has driving become the distraction?”
There’s more: the pods would also be equipped to communicate with the smart grid of the future (as is the Aptera EV, another podlike electric vehicle that is due to be introduced in the fall), returning electricity to utilities during times of peak demand. That’s not V2V, it’s V2G — vehicle to grid.
The Segway PT costs $5,000, so the more capable 600-pound P.U.M.A. would presumably be priced considerably higher, though Mr. Burns declined to speculate where the sweet spot might be. “This is a prototype, not a product,” said Mr. Norrod of Segway. “We have not made a decision to commercialize it.”
Mr. Burns concluded his remarks by offering a glimmer of what his company could become if it managed to transform the urban roadscape. “We were the S.U.V. company, and we accept that,” he said. “We want to become the U.S.V. company — known for ultra-small vehicles.”
