Ultra-right wing potato sandwich launches in India

Shiv Sena, the ultra-right Hindu nationalist party in India, has launched a global brand of snack food called the Shiv Vada -- a sandwich containing deep-fried potato ball. They want to make it as popular as hamburgers.

The initiative is being seen as an attempt by the saffron party, which popularised the 'vada pav', staple diet of many a Mumbaikar, four decades ago, to establish rapport with the 'Marathi manoos', whose tilt in favour of Sena offshoot MNS, cost the party dearly in recent Lok Sabha polls.

"In foreign countries, burger is available 24-hours. Why can't vada pav be also available similarly," Uddhav said. The party, which has started a cooperative to encourage Marathi entrepreneurs, showcases 'Shiv Vada' as its first project under the new initiative, sources said. "To begin with, 25 Shiv Vada stalls would be operational in the city," they said.

Shiv Sena launches 'Shiv Vada'; to take it global

(Image: Jumbo Vada Pav.jpg, CC-BY, Wikimedia Commons

A New Peek Inside Saddam's Old Palaces

Flavorwire has an interview up with photographer Richard Mosse, who recently returned from Iraq, where he photographed what remains of Saddam Hussein's many palaces, which American soldiers have repurposed as combat headquarters. Snip:

This month, the American army is set to handover the last of the palaces back to the Iraqi army. Mosse, who has previously photographed war-torn areas of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, sat down with us to discuss his latest project and the deeply disturbing, though darkly humorous, aspects of the ongoing war in Iraq.

The Architecture of War: A Look at Saddam Hussein's Palaces (image, Richard Mosse, thanks, Caroline Stanley)

Top 10 How-to Cooking Videos

Cooking isn't a skill you can pick up through reading alone. Watch chefs, enthusiastic home cooks, and even a surprise celebrity guest demonstrate cooking skills everyone can use in this roundup of 10 great instructional cooking videos.

10. Cut a mango

A very helpful father shows you how to find the "axis" of a mango, giving you the most efficient yield of a delicious summer treat. (Original post)

9. Separate an egg

There are many ways to extract egg whites, yolks, and shells separately, as WikiHow details, but the easiest method involves the tools you've got built into the ends of your arms. Bay-area video blogger Hilarie shows us how to use your hands and three bowls to separate eggs into elements for baking, health-conscious recipes, or those who just like to keep things orderly. (Original post)

8. Sauce pasta the right way

Italian chef extraordinaire and lover of food talk Mario Batali explains to the Serious Eats film crew the way to sauce pasta—which, for most people, means less of the red stuff. "What you want to eat when you eat a bowl of pasta ... is pasta." (Original post)

7. Gordon Ramsay's "Perfect Scrambled Eggs"

If the idea of smooth, almost creamy eggs makes you cry foul, you won't dig Hell's Kitchen star and renowned British chef Gordon Ramsay whips up what he calls the "perfect scrambled egg," with crème fraîche (or sour cream or yogurt as a fill-in) and absolutely no overcooking. Otherwise, looking at the results, you might join with your Lifehacker editors in hoping for a free weekend morning to try this out and make "the missus" or mister very happy indeed. (Original post)

6. Slice and dice an onion like a pro

Rochester chef Art Rogers demonstrates for Lifehacker how to get consistent slices using the "knuckle guide" technique, and then neat, consistent, less-messy diced onion with horizontal and vertical cuts. Yeah, the video's a little shaky and has its brief out-of-focus moments, but the knife skills are front and center. (Original post)

5. Pit a ripe avocado

Gina shows off her California livin' skills by showing the easy way to pit a ripe avocado and not lose any of that precious precursor to guacamole. (Original post)

4. Mince and crush garlic

Rouxbe, a high-resolution, seriously detailed food tutorial site, is sponsored by the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, and it shows in the step-by-step nature of their videos. Their "Drill-down" on mincing and crushing garlic offers a great close-up view of what a knife should be doing when the recipe calls for either of those things. To be honest, one editor learned that "crushed" doesn't just involve smacking a whole garlic clove with the flat of a knife, so a few other of Rouxbe's free sample videos (full access requires a subscription) might get a viewing later this weekend. (Original post)

3. Make sushi rice

This video, pulled from VideoJug's well-organized Food & Drink section, demonstrates perhaps the most crucial and time-consuming task of sushi making—getting the rice right. Cooking just long enough and using a fan properly are elegantly demonstrated, and by the end, you'll know enough to buy some seaweed wraps and ingredients and try out your first few rolls.

2. Well-done hamburgers that aren't hockey pucks

Whether you're eating healthier, accomodating a food safety fan, or cooking for the little guys, sometimes you've got to grill your hamburgers all the way through. America's Test Kitchen, the PBS cooking show from the creators of Cook's Illustrated, demonstrates the best way to cook a well-done hamburger. Like their magazine recipes and tips, this comes by way of lots and lots of trials and tests, and it's a pretty ingenious work-around: 80 percent beef that seems fatty, but mostly cooks off; a mixture of bread, milk, seasoning, and A1 steak sauce tossed into the beef; and a small divot pressed into each burger's top to make cooking more consistent. Be sure to click the video for the larger view.

1. Chicken on a throne (starring Christopher Walken)

We are not made of stone, and we could not resist including a clip of America's most surreal superstar, humbly demonstrating in his own kitchen how he makes roasted chicken with pears. More important than the crazy vocal cadence or his recipe, though, is the technique, sometimes referred to as beer can chicken or "chicken on a throne," though technically known as indirect grilling. By resting a bird on a moisturized stand (a flap of fat in Walken's case, and a can of soda, beer, or water in most others) and keeping it hoisted, you get juicy interior meat, crispy skin, and a kind of freakishly fun sight to show guests while the meal's cooking.

Blue Angels Cockpit Cam Viewing Experience

I knew the Navy's Blue Angels were good, but seeing their stuff from inside the cockpit actually got a few butterflies stirring in my gullet. [Danger Room]

Mr Das Munshi’s Medical Expenses

Rediff reports:

In the midst of hectic ministry making, the Congress leadership has taken out time to deliberate on the future of one of its senior most leaders who is ill in hospital, Priya Ranjan Das Munshi.

Sources confirmed that his wife, first time MP, Deepa Das Munshi who contested and won from the Raiganj constituency in West Bengal is likely to be sworn in as a Minister of State when the Manmohan Singh council of ministers take oath.

An exception is being made for first term MP Deepa to ensure that Munshi is provided with the same level of medical care as he has been receiving for the last many months.

So, according to this report, Mrs Das Munshi is going to be sworn in as minister just so that her husband gets medical care at state expense. This is another illustration of the the party in power treating state resources as their private property, distributing largesse where they wish. Hell, the money being spent on these ministers did not land up from the sky, that is our money, taken from us ostensibly to serve our needs. The vast majority of the people who have coughed up that money—remember, anytime you buy something in India, you are effectively paying taxes—cannot afford the kind of health care Mr Das Munshi is getting. Why should our money pay for his health care?

The report says that "it was Pranab Mukherjee who sought that Deepa be made a minister for the sake of Munshi." If Mr Mukherjee feels such compassion for Mr Das Munshi, he should pay for the treatment out of his own pocket. Why dig into mine?

Rotten Neighbors Website

There is a new website out that helps you identify whether you are moving into a home with good neighbors or not. Rotten neighbors can make life a lot harder than it has to be. You don't want to buy a home and then find out after your large investment, that you have neighbors who keep complaining at every small incident, who object to drinking or smoking inside your own house, that let their dog poop on your lawn; or have loud parties every other night. That just wouldn't be worth the investment. Of course you can complain, but a true rotten neighbor never stops with their antics. Rotten Neighbors find any way they can to antagonize you. It's just bad. Luckily all of the neighbors I've had throughout my life were all nice people except the current ones. But if you have had a bad neighbor, you would understand why the rotten neighbor website could be of great use.

Google Wave "Is What Email Would Look Like If It Were Invented Today" [News]

Google announced today a new, experimental idea aiming to reshape the future of communication on the web. It's called Wave, and if you believe its developer, it's "what email would look like if it were invented today." It's also going to be totally open source. Intrigued?

Primarily, Wave is about improving real-time communication on the web. I've been waiting all day for Google to upload the video promised on the Wave homepage, but since it's still not there, here's the skinny from Google's mouth:

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Pretty broad, right? Wave is clearly something we'll need to see in action and, even better, use before we completely understand how it works. Like email, Wave has been developed as a standard that will be able to run on any server, so it won't belong to Google. Anyone will be able to run their own "wave," and that wave can compete with Google or do whatever it wants to. But since it's created as a standard protocol, different waves can talk to and understand each other.

This addresses an issue that I (and many others much smarter than me) have had with Twitter—namely that it lives on one company's servers, and your information is subject to whatever that company wants to do with it. RSS, email, and IM work using standard protocols that anyone can take advantage of, and since they use standards, I can, for example, send an email from Gmail to someone using Yahoo Mail and know that they'll be able to read it without any problems.

Tech news weblog TechCrunch has a very detailed rundown of Wave (linked below) and the directions Google has taken it so far (it's still incredibly young), but Wave is also very intriguing in the whole future-of-the-web way. It could amount to nothing, but considering the popularity and direction of Twitter and Facebook, the idea of a protocol that turns a similar sort of communication into an open standard sounds very promising.

Wave isn't available in any practical sense to you and me right now, and much of the technology behind Wave requires HTML 5 updates that we won't see completely implemented in most browsers for at least a little while, but you can sign up for Google Wave updates if you're eager to stay updated on any new developments.

Google Wave [via TechCrunch]

Teaching Copyright -- EFF curriculum for balanced copyright education

You may have seen the new anti-copying educational program the Copyright Alliance is promoting to the nation's teachers. Today, EFF launched its own "Teaching Copyright" curriculum and website to help educators give students the real story about their digital rights and responsibilities on the Internet and beyond.
The Copyright Alliance -- backed by the recording, broadcast, and software industries -- has given its curriculum the ominous title "Think First, Copy Later." But EFF's curriculum (the result of more than a year of work) introduces critical questions of digital citizenship into the classroom without misinformation that scares kids from expressing themselves in the modern world.
There are a lot of good resources on TeachingCopyright.org -- everything from lesson plans for high school students to guides to copyright law, including fair use and the public domain. So it's worth checking out whether you are a teacher, a student, or a parent.

Gummi Bear Surgery

I like this photo from the Instructables article on Gummi Bear Surgery.

North Korea Nuclear Test

"North Korea apparently tested another nuclear weapon and my mind immediately goes to bad jokes. For those who don’t get it: Fat Man & Little Boy. Xeni deserves part of the blame for asking if I knew any Kim Jong LOLs. You’d be surprised how hard these are to make without ripping off Team America or being racist!"