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Durian McFlurry at McDonald's Singapore


McDonald's Singapore is selling a "Durian Crunch McFlurry" that combines soft-serve ice-cream with everyone's favorite stinkily delicious T-Rex-testicle-looking fruit. It sells for S$2.80 or about USD2.23. Singapore sports many spectacular shave-ice dessert places that combine durian with things like kidney beans, sweet corn and candied fruit (serving durian cold suppresses some of the eye-watering perfume), and I'd have one of those over anything McHorrible's produces any day.

Our newest McFlurry from McDonald's (via Super Punch)

Synthesizer cake


Here's a spectacular Monotribe synthesizer cake, apparently last year's birthday cake for Moonbuz.

Happy Birthday with Monotribe Cake (via Crazy Abalone)

Quebec's new pizza-and-spaghetti-flavored slushy drink is "love in a cup," apparently


Quebecois convenience store chain Couche-Tard has rolled out a new drink: the Pizzaghetti Sloche, a shave-ice drink that comes in both pizza and spaghetti flavors, which can be combined to customer specifications to make Pizzaghetti flavor. Couche-Tard's slogan for the drink is "love in a cup." Redditor plagues138 posted a photo of the actual Pizzaghetti Sloche machine in situ.

Sloche - Pizzaghetti (via Neatorama)

Ross Sisters sing Solid Potato Salad

Here again is a clip of the amazing Ross Sisters performing a wonderful song about potato salad while performing the most amazing contortions and acrobatics -- like Cirque du Soliel crossed with Hee-Haw performed by the Andrews Sisters. It's from 1944's Broadway Rhythm. Xeni did this one back in 2010, but it warrants a re-watch.

The Ross Sisters - Solid Potato Salad (DVD Quality) Full Video

Han Solo in Carbonite Pop-Tarts


Last October, IGN's Brian Altano announced a bold design fiction: an imaginary line of "Han Solo in Carbonite" Pop-Tarts. Several months have gone by and this is still not a thing. The world is broken.

Would You Eat These Star Wars Pop-Tarts? (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

HOWTO make edible Aliens eggs and chestbursters

Here's a sweet little cookery show that will tell you how to make a facsimile egg from Aliens and a chestburster cake. The former is something you could actually serve at a dinner party (it sounds delicious!), but the cake requires a volunteer willing to lie on her/his back.

Edible Alien Eggs | BITE CLUB - Alien (1979) (Thanks, Jay!)

Drone-delivered pizza

Here's a video showing off a publicity stunt in which Domino's delivers one of its "pizzas" using a drone (and, it appears, two or three cameradrones to document the event). The "pizza" is packed in an electrified, heated bag to keep it warm during the high altitude flight. Their publicity material promises a Domino's flight academy to train their deliverator corps to safely navigate the fast-food-filled skies and prevent midair collisions with flying Chinese takeouts, kebabs, curries, and package liquor delivery.

Introducing the Domino's DomiCopter! (via Digg Videos)

Depressed Cake Shop: a pop-up shop selling grey cakes to raise money for mental health charities


Miss Cakehead writes, "The Depressed Cake Shop will be like nothing ever seen before as it will sell ONLY grey coloured cakes. Raising money for mental health charities, it will also provide a platform for discussion of the illness. The pop up is based in the UK but with other events starting to be planned around the globe."

The Depressed Cake Shop

Ronald McJoker


This terrifying Ronald McDonald/Joker mashup cosplayer was snapped at San Jose's FanimeCon 2013 by David Ngo.

Ronald McDonald (via Neatorama)

Mouldering city built of bread is a metaphor for Earth without humans


Swedish artist Johanna Mårtensson created this installation depicting a cityscape made of bread in 2009, and photographed it as it decayed, creating a series of pictures representing the destiny of all human folly come the day that we make ourselves extinct and vanish from the face of the Earth:


I was inspired by an article about how well the earth would do without us. Within 500 years all buildings would be half fallen or fallen, perfect homes for animals and plants. The forrest would soon grow in cities. After hand buildings as well as pollutions would be taken care of by bacterias and micro-organisms. An ufo that came here in a couple of of hundred thousand years would not see many signs of that a gang of primates ones thought that they where the lords of the planet.

Decor Photoinstallation by Johanna Mårtensson (via Crazy Abalone)

Life in a chocolate factory versus life in a startup


Elaine Wherry took a break from working in San Francisco high-tech startups to work at Dandelion Chocolate, the chocolate maker/cafe that her husband co-founded. She calls her tenure at the chocolate factory her life as "an oompa loompa," and in a fascinating post, she writes about the differences and similarities between working in data-driven startups and in physical, retail-based hard-goods business. It's a wonderful study in contrasts.


For loops are a veritable miracle — At the chocolate factory, something breaks every single flippin’ day. Each morning I gave my evil eye to the roasters, melangers, temperers, wrapping machine, dishwasher, or anything with a screw, fuse, gear, glue, belt, or oil level and asked, “Okay, which one of you little buggers is going today?”

In comparison, code brings tears to my eyes. If that for loop worked yesterday, then barring catastrophic hardware failures or someone checking in code they shouldn’t, it’ll likely work today. That type of, “if you don’t touch it, it’ll keep working” certainty seems divine. I’ve always loved the Web but I have renewed appreciation for redundancy, unit testing, and monitoring now.

what i learned as an oompa loompa (via O'Reilly Radar)

Small batch artisanal high-fructose corn syrup

Matt sez, "Maya Weinstein is an artist who just finished her MFA at Parsons, with the awesomest thesis ever: a DIY kit for making your own High-Fructose Corn Syrup, the industrial sweetener that is, well, let's say problematic these days.

"Amazingly, HFCS is not available for consumers to buy, and as Weinstein discovered, making it yourself requires some pretty unusual (and expensive) components, like Glucose Isomerase. But it's a totally fascinating process, and only the first in what Weinstein hopes will be a series of 'citizen food science' kits."

DIY High-Fructose Corn Syrup by Artist Maya Weinstein

Hemispherical Earth cake with crust, mantle and core


This brilliant hemispherical cake depicting the Earth's surface and approximating its core was baked by Rhiannon of Baking Adventures in Melbourne, Australia. She baked a cake inside a cake, formed a crust of chocolate buttercream, and then applied the seas, continents and islands with marshmallow fondant.


When I started this cake I was determined for pin-point accuracy. I was going to make every country and every island so damn accurate a pilot could use it as their navigation system. But by the time I got to Europe, it was more like, "Yeah, that's the general shape." By the time I got to the Americas I was wondering if that continent was even necessary. I missed a whole heap of islands above Australia and settled instead for the main ones. Cutting out the countries wasn't that cake walk I'd imagined it to be.

I finally got to a finished look for the cake and let my sister take it off my hands. She brought me back a slice so I could share a picture of the inside with you all. The red layer is orange Madeira sponge, the yellow is lemon Madeira sponge and the white cake was a vanilla buttercake.

Commission: Earth Structural Layer Cake (via Geekologie)

How a Mexican drug-lord dines out

When Joaquín Guzmán Loera, leader of Mexico's notorious Sinaloa Cartel, wants to dine out, he engages some rather extreme security measures:

In 2005 on a Saturday evening, Guzmán reportedly strolled into a restaurant in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, with several of his bodyguards. After he took his seat, his henchmen locked the doors of the restaurant, collected the cell phones of approximately 30 diners and instructed them to not be alarmed.[26] The gangsters then ate their meal and left – paying for everyone else in the restaurant.[27]

Culiacán appearance

Later that year, Guzmán was reportedly seen in Culiacán, Sinaloa, repeating the same exploit at a restaurant.[28] According to a witness, in November 2005 Guzmán entered the restaurant in Culiacán with 15 of his bodyguards, all of them carrying AK-47s.[29] The restaurant was known as "Las Palmas", a lime-green eatery with an ersatz tile roof on a busy street.[30] A man in the restaurant told those present the following:

"Gentlemen, please. Give me a moment of your time. A man is going to come in, the boss. We will ask you to remain in your seats; the doors will be closed and nobody is allowed to leave. You will also not be allowed to use your cellulars. Do not worry; if you do everything that is asked of you, nothing will happen. Continue eating and don't ask for your check. The boss will pay. Thank you."[29]

Joaquín Guzmán Loera (via Reddit)

Sugar skull and bones


From November 2011, a set of photos documenting the creation of a sugar skull-and-bones set that can be served with macabre beverages, designed by Snow Violent and made by DR.HC.

Skull Sugar — from sketch to prototype. Part 1 (via Crazy Abalone)