On last week’s This American Life, Fred Armisen co-hosted with and as Fred Armisen. The first five minutes are totally worth it:
Fred Armisen worked up an imitation of Ira and put it into a skit on Saturday Night Live a couple years ago. But when they rehearsed it with an audience, there was not a roar of recognition; it seemed like Ira might not be famous enough to be mocked on network TV. So today Armisen finally gets a go as Ira’s doppelgänger in our studios by co-hosting the entire show.
What better way to ring in 2012 than to restock your bar? If you’re anything like me, you’re probably running a bit low after this holiday season… Or maybe you just need some guidance re: what essentials (and what brands) to purchase?
The Kitchn offers up some thoughts, including 12 essentials that “every bar should have”:
I’d substitute some of the brands (Templeton Rye and Carpano Antica, totes) but it’s hard to argue with the overall set of ingredients. Toss in some Domaine De Canton (ginger liquer), some St. Germain (elderflower liquer) and some Campari/Aperol/Averna, and you’ve got me taken care of for a long time.
Meanwhile, Serious Eats has an alternative recommendation: pick a few cocktails and then shop for the ingredients. Cheaper than buying everything at once, for sure:
It’s nice to have a stocked liquor cabinet so you don’t have to run out and get supplies when you read an intriguing cocktail recipe or get a craving for an old classic, but as Cocktail 101 columnist Michael Dietsch wrote last year, it can be expensive to go out and buy one of everything all at once, even if it’s just twelve bottles. And if you don’t use it, that bottle of brandy may just gather dust in the back of your cupboard.
Instead, it makes sense to do some drink planning—rather than naming essential bottles, pick 3 or 4 cocktails you like to drink, and stock up on supplies to make those. If your four favorite drinks don’t call for dry vermouth, then don’t buy it until you decide to make something else.
Either way you go, tasty tasty drinks are just around the corner!
So much for Apple’s lack of support for Flash in iOS being a disadvantage… Adobe today announced (in a blog post awesomely titled “Flash to Focus on PC Browsing and Mobile Apps; Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5”) that they’re dropping Flash for mobile devices:
We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.
As Gruber says:
Apple didn’t win. Everybody won. Flash hasn’t been superseded in mobile by any sort of Apple technology. It’s been superseded by truly open web technologies. Dumping Flash will make Android better, it will make BlackBerrys better, it will make the entire web better. iOS users have been benefitting from this ever since day one, in June 2007.
At least now the whining can finally stop. Buh. Bye.
Cormac McCarthy EDW Lynch has a Tumblr where he posts his Yelp reviews, written in the style of Cormac McCarthy. These are, by far, my favorite reviews of anything. Check out The Apple Store or this great one of Taco Bell:
And so the man defied the villagers and ate the taco. In defiance of the will of those people but also in defiance of some order older than he. Older than tortillas. Than the ancient and twisted cedars. How could we know his mind? We are all of us unknowable. Blind strangers passing on a mountain road.
The man laid there in the village square for three days and nights and took no food and spoke to no visitor. The older villagers said that the man should not have eaten the taco and no sane man would do so and the price of such folly was known to all.
On the fourth day an old lady asked the man was he ill and did he need a doctor. The man told her he was indeed ill but that he wished to see a priest. And she crossed herself and left and in the sweltering afternoon sun a priest came down to the square to see the man.