Posts from November 2013

I had a Happy Tgiving yesterday! My girls and I spent the morning in bed watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This was by far the best part:

What time is it!?

Anyway, I hope everyone had a happy food coma!

Happy Food Coma!

(via New York Post)

Finally: the Solution to All Life’s Problems!

Y’know how if you have refrigerator-cold butter and you wanna spread it on a piece of bread, that just ain’t gonna happen? It’s too durned stiff!

Well, now Japanese company Metex has created the perfect solution: The “Easy Butter” butter grater!

You just toss in a stick of butter and twist the contraption, and out comes vermicelli-style butter noodles! You can then spread these to your heart’s content on account o’ their softness.

It actually is a pretty ingenious little device, a variation of a cheese grater but designed specifically for butter (though according to their website you can use it on cheese).

The thing is, it’s just so huge. Lookit that thing! And also, who puts this much butter on their bread:

Slow down there! Heart-attack alert!

It is available to purchase online for all the occasions where you might wanna transform your stick of butter into noodly goodness.

Via Laughing Squid

I’d be a goner without these tips!

Facing such incredible danger is unbelievably brave. But I’m glad someone had the courage to make this video, because there is now a baby in my life. What will I do if when Avery attacks me?

Now, thanks to Gavin McInnes, I have some great tips that might will someday save my life:

I wonder if there is any correlation between a baby’s cuteness and its ability to fight. The baby in the video is pretty durned cute, and it has mad fighting skillz. But just look at how cute Avery is!

She’s ready to Karate me!

I’d be a dead man for sure without the knowledge of how to fight a baby!

This wasn’t invented by no turtle… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv3py3Ap8_Y

That wacky non-turtle Leonardo (the Da Vinci one) invented a whole heaping mess of all sorts of confabulous fraptraptions way back in the olden-timey days. We all know that, right?

Well, in the pages of the Codex Atlanticus (which is really a compilation of a bunch of his journals/sketchbooks) one could find illustrations outlining an idea for a keyed string instrument like a piano, but with spinning wheels that played the strings like a viola. It has come to be generally known as the Viola Organista (or Geigenwerk).

From all accounts Leo never actually made the instrument. Well, recently a guy named Sławomir Zubrzycki did make a Viola Organista, and played it at the International Royal Krakow Piano Festival!

It sounds pretty cool, almost like an Cello/Viola/Harpsichord, or an entire string section at times. It’s a very impressive technical and artistic achievement.

But it should be noted that this isn’t the first time an instrument like this has been produced. The Geigenwerk was developed way back in the late 1500s by Hans Haiden[1], and Akio Obuchi has been making them since 1993.

But at any rate, this is the first time I’ve ever heard this olden-times instrument. And it seems to be pretty popular; that YouTube video has well over a million views in just two weeks!

Via The Age

1. ^ Edward L. Kottick, A History of the Harpsichord, Volume 1 p 236

Mobile Version!

Do you notice anything different about ThisisChris.com? Well, if I did my job correctly, you probably don’t… unless you are looking at this site on a small screen.

Remember way back in July when I said I was planning a responsive re-design on my website? You don’t? Well, that’s not surprising.

Anyway, I had a big brain burst this past weekend and cranked it out. So the website looks pretty much exactly the same, but there’s a bunch of new CSS under the hood. I should say it looks the same until you look at it on a mobile phone (or a smaller browser window).

Go ahead: gradually shrink this browser window and watch how my website now responds to the size of the window!

There are still a few tweaks to work out; the “You Might Also Like” links are pretty borked. And I haven’t yet found a good way to shrink both the height and the width of iframes. Does anyone know a good trick for responsive iframes that does not involve wrapping them in another

tag? I don’t want to have to go back through ten+ years of this blog and wrap all my iframes.

Finally, the Solution to All of Life’s Problems!

Do you enjoy twitter, but just don’t have the energy to actually, you know, read all of the tweets? We’ve all been there. It can be just so inconvenient to have to look at the tweets and take the effort to read them.

Well, worry no longer! Now, Jason J. Brunet (aka Three Ninjas) will read the tweets for you!

Yes, that right. Every week on “What Happened on Twitter Today” Jason will get rather inebriated and read his twitter feed for approximately five minutes. He’ll even include hand-signals for things like colons, quotes, and hashtags! Also, he’ll refuse to say the word “Fart!” It’s just this simple:

It’s remarkably entertaining. Kinda like “My Drunk Kitchen” except it’s more My Inebriated Twitter. Episodes started being uploaded in mid-October, so go watch the whole back-catalog! Go on! How else will you win at twitter?

And maybe someday, if you’re lucky, your tweet might be read on a future episode of “What Happened on Twitter Today” (keep the dream alive)!

Open Mike Eagle Can’t See but He Can Rap

Yesterday my pal Mike Eagle posted on instagram the above photo of himself wearing glasses with the innocent and funny caption, “Somebody make a tumblr called rappers in prescription glasses.”

Well, approximately 11 minutes later this mysteriously appeared on the internets:

rappersinprescriptionglasses.tumblr.com

So far it has photos of Eminem, Jay-Z, The RZA, and more (including the pic of Mike of course).

I really like living in the future, where someone can snap their fingers and somewhere on the internet their wish will be granted as if by future magic!

As Mike Eagle put it himself in this follow-up instagram picture: “Nothing is faster than internet magic.”