A Slice o' Maine Life: Husseys, Guns, Wedding Gowns, and Cold Beer!

My parents were traveling around Windsor, Maine today and captured what has to be the very best store sign EVAR! (And it *is* serious...) What a kick!! Enjoy!!!

Venice: A Blue Marvel?

A week ago, I stayed overnight at the Weston in South Boston, where for the wakeup service your tv would turn itself on to the BlueMarvel channel. I wound up waking up to these sights and sounds of dawn at a basalt beach in Maui!



The whole channel's like that... According to the Maine-based company,
The best way to experience nature is simple. Go outside. For those who cannot, BlueMarvel presents an alternative. This is nature's events at nature's pace, bears on bear time, and the passage of the sun according to its own rhythm.

BlueMarvel pioneered a format we like to call "Experiential HDTV", whereby the viewer is allowed to slow down and develop a deeper relationship with the content, as if it were an open picture window in their home, hotel room or place of business. Our inventory of experiences include sunrises, sunsets, storms, distinct animal behaviors and migrations from stunning and evocative landscapes of our planet, all with crisply recorded natural sound.
Needless to say, their soothing video tour through Venice caught my eye... but not my ear! Natural sound, my foot! While people were shown in some of the shots, you never heard a soul. Not to mention there was no sound from the motorboat (the bow of which you constantly see in the video) taking them around... and last but not least when they finally passed a vaporetto on the Grand Canal, the noise it made was just sort of a generic machine sound, but not the loud characteristic churning, almost grinding sound all Venetians know too well. That's when I realized... they were using SOUND EFFECTS!!

So, not only is it a packaged, technological substitute for the real life of the outdoors (which I can't help but think really tells a lot about our twenty-first century society) but they're even faking parts to make it seem more tranquil than the real world actually is!

Still, I have to admit that they've actually succeeded, and it is pleasant viewing. So, here for your viewing pleasure are a couple of BlueMarvel clips not included on their video website. Enjoy!!

Maine Lighthouse:

Maine Lighthouse - by BlueMarvel -

Elephant Seals at Sunrise:

Elephant Seals at Sunrise - BlueMarvel.com -

Twitter me bad?

A great debate in the media this past week... Print media really seems to want to demonize microblogging!

"Twitter causes immorality nonsense deftly dispatched by bloggers. Most mainstream press lost the plot although Time did a good job and Wired Science were keeping it real."

(via Mindhacks)

VIDEO O' THE DAY: Rube Goldberg vs. the Cadbury Creme Egg!

As they said on the site, "This has to be the most impressive Rube Goldberg contraption I’ve ever seen." (And with cheap household materials, too...) My words can't possibly do it justice. Watch it and enjoy!!




(Thanks to @jackiegerstein for the heads-up!!)

Cooking Tips

What's Twitter Good For? Lots of things, even the NY Times says!

To wit, here are some cooking tips that caught my eye while following @foodimentary (who is apparently somebody who's quit their day job to become a fulltime Twitterer, although I have to admit that I have no idea exactly how that would work...)

Anyway, hope they're also useful/interesting to you! Enjoy!!

  1. Tip for Wilted vegetables: Soak wilted veggies in 2 cups water, one tablespoon vinegar to help bring them back to life. @Vegimentary!
  2. Hint for Spaghetti Sauce: Add a small pinch of bicarbonate of soda to your spaghetti sauce to lower acid taste from tomatoes.
  3. While cooking smelly foods, soak a cloth towel & let it dry in the cooking area. It will absorb the smell, keeping the room fresh!

  4. While frying Onions, add a little milk - this will help retain a rich color & prevent them from burning

  5. If you accidentally burn gravy, just pour it into a clean pan & continue cooking. Add some sugar to cancel out the burned taste.

Twitter!

Twitter is a great microblogging service which allows you to post updates, thoughts, links, etc. in less than 140 characters. It's great for posting interesting yet fleeting and still half-baked ideas, of which - you can readily see - I have many more than the fully-baked ones! ☺ Anyway, if you'd care to follow my posts, I'm at @misciel! You can also follow my posts in the sidebar at right.

I experimented with automatically posting my twitters to the blog, and it didn't work very well, but I'll get back to real blog posting as soon as I can.

Thanks!
Michelle