Ruy Fortini

Advertising Agency: ABJ Genius, Seoul, Republic of Korea
Creative Director: NOH Da Hye
Art Directors: SON So Hyun, SON Sang MIn
Copywriter: Jung Kyu (RHYS)LIM
Planner: Jung Kyu (RHYS)LIM
Illustrator: SON So Hyun

So you've started beefing up your cooking skills, but the process is still a little tedious. Here are 10 surprising kitchen techniques that will save you a bunch of time—not to mention wow your friends.

10. Deseed a Pomegranate in Seconds Using a Wooden Spoon

If you don't love pomegranates, it's either because you've never had one or you hate how much work they take to deseed. While many people recommend peeling it in a bowl of water, it turns out there's an even faster method: just break it open and bang on it with a wooden spoon. You should have all those seeds in a bowl in about 10 seconds.

9. Stop Peeling Boiled Eggs and Just Cut Them in Half

Peeling a hard boiled egg is a pain in the butt, and there's a much easier way to get to the goods inside: just cut it in half and spoon it out of the shell. It should slip out pretty easily, though you should make sure there aren't any tiny pieces of shell still stuck on it before you go shoveling it in to your mouth. If that isn't enough of a parlor trick for you, though, you can always use use the peel-and-blow method shown at the left.

8. Unload a 12 Pack of Soda Into Your Fridge in 10 Seconds

Most 12 packs of soda are designed to sit in your fridge, but who needs an entire box sitting in there? You can never tell how many you have left, and it always takes up lots of space, even with only one or two sodas in there. To unload it without tediously moving each can one-by-one, just open up both ends, stick it on the shelf of the fridge and push them through. Check out the video to the left to see how it's done.

7. Make Pancakes with a Squeeze Bottle

Ladling pancake batter into a pan is a recipe for a mess. Instead of dripping batter all over the place, put that pancake batter in an old condiment bottle and squeeze it out. You'll get perfectly shaped pancakes without any drips or unevenness. Just make sure you wash that ketchup bottle thoroughly first, because otherwise...ew.

6. Split an Apple in Half Without a Knife

If you don't like eating apples whole (they can, after all, get a little messy that way), but don't always have a knife around, you can actually break them in half with your bare hands pretty simply. Just remove the stem and get a good amount of leverage near the hole at the top. Not only is it convenient, but it makes you look like the Incredible Hulk (you know, sans anger issues). See the video to the left for a demonstration.

5. Decant Wine in Less than a Minute with a Blender

True wine lovers use a long, drawn-out process called decanting to aerate their wine before drinking for better taste. True life hackers throw it in a blender for 60 seconds instead. You may scoff at this method, dubbed "hyperdecanting", but it's a quick way to improve almost any red wine. A lot of people have taste tested this method (See the win experts from Vinum Vita share their opinions in the video to the left), and definitely noticed a difference—though whether it's good enough to stand up to properly decanted wine is up for debate. Check out the full post for more info on how it works and more taste testing videos.

4. Peel a Head of Garlic in Seconds with Two Bowls

If you have a particularly garlic-heavy recipe to make (so brave!), don't waste time peeling each head by hand. Just crush your garlic as normal and throw it all into a big salad bowl. Then, with another big salad bowl, shake the garlic up for a few seconds, and you should find it's fully peeled and ready for cooking. Just remember to neutralize that garlic breath after the meal with a glass of milk.

3. Peel a Potato in One Step

If you don't want to sit there peeling countless spuds just to get your mashed potato fix, you can use this simple method for peeling them in seconds. After boiling them, place them in a bowl of ice water for a few seconds. Then, just grab it with both hands, twist, and pull apart. The skin should slide right off.

2. Make Quicker, Less Messy Bacon in a Waffle Iron

A list of kitchen time savers wouldn't be complete without something from life hacker extraordinaire Alton Brown. He has a lot of tricks up his sleeve, but our favorite would have to cooking bacon in a waffle iron. Not only does it get you delicious bacon with less effort, but you also don't have any grease to clean up—because once you're done, you can use the leftover bacon grease to cook another piece of your breakfast. Skip to 2:50 in the video at the left to see the waffle iron method in action.

1. Open a Beer Bottle With Just About Anything

Whether you've misplaced the bottle opener or you've found yourself in a situation where you don't have one, don't panic. You can open a beer bottle with just about anything, from a hard countertop to a cigarette lighter to even your forearm. Fast forward to 4:30 in the video at the left (and check out this episode of our podcast) to see a few of our favorite methods.

Of course, these are far from the only efficient cooking techniques we've shared. While peeling a banana like a monkey and quickly ripening fruit is useful, we opted to focus on the really wow-worthy parlor tricks. That way, even if you aren't a master chef, you can still impress your friends with your knowledge of strange kitchen time savers. Got any of your own shocking tricks? Put 'em in the comments below.

Back before the age of ubiquitous digital camera set-ups, Hollywood directors and fashion photographers made finger framing a scene or person the universal symbol for the path to stardom. Amazingly, that simple gesture now powers a real camera.

I was really into magic when I was a kid and I was convinced I had magical powers if I would just believe in it enough. My parents gave me one of those magic kits. And I soon realized that magic has nothing to do with powers but with practicing tricks cheating the eye of the audience. I lost interest really fast .

But now being all grown up I like learning couple of of good magic tricks to impressive friends or people I just met. Reading up on magic tricks is pretty dry and just adds confusion. So I found out about the Encyclopedia of Magic being loaded with over 100 videos explaining magic tricks.

Check out this David Blaine Card Trick explained

More info: Encyclopedia of Magic

Sitting through someone else’s holiday snaps is something you will be forced to do at least once in your life. There is nothing fun about it; hearing about everything they ate, every remotely interesting bit of architecture or oddly shaped rock formation they saw. LA based band Hands has revolutionized the homicide-inducing slide show. They do it to music, and all in under four and a half minutes.

Directed by Jack Price, this music video for Warm Night Home uses a nifty set of projections and silhouettes to superimpose a series of images onto the Hands members themselves. There are shots of fields, mountains, waves, rural landscapes and urban street scenes. This video needs more than one watch just to take everything in, not just the images but the dear scruffy indie boys as well.

It is a quiet sort of film clip, concentrating on everyday beauty. The chilled out electronic rock contrasts the grand scope of the images well and evokes a feeling of nostalgia for familiar surroundings just as in the repeated line; ‘I want to go where I know.’

Hands have a new EP entitled ‘Massive Context’ out 10 April on Small Plates Records and are playing as part of the SXSW Festival.

(YouTube link)

In a breakthrough that will affect cosplay and furry cultures, researchers in Tokyo have developed a cat mask that can be controlled by the wearer’s facial movements. So far, only the eyes and mouth are controllable, they are working on the ears and eyebrows. -via The Daily What Geek

See also: Animatronic Cat Ears

This whimsical illustrated chart by Aaron Thong shows some alternate uses for portals, like the ones created by the handheld portal device carried by the main characters in the Portal video game series.

You’d better ask for permission from GLaDOS before attempting these unauthorized uses of your portal gun, or you may be taken offline. Skydiving seems like a fun way to use a portal, but hula hooping looks downright dangerous!

Link  –via JazJaz

The 80s band Van Halen famously (or infamously) had a rider in its contract which required promoters to provide the band a large number of M&Ms in the dressing room. But brown M&Ms were forbidden. If the band found a single brown M&M, the promoter forfeited his earnings. Why? David Lee Roth explains in this video.

It was actually a clever test. Van Halen stage shows were elaborate productions. To get ready, a promoter had follow a set of lengthy, complex instructions provided in the contract. The brown M&M provision was buried, at random, among these instructions. If the band members went backstage and found brown M&Ms, that meant that the promoter had not read the instructions and there were potential problems with the show.

-via reddit

Booty Lovers

ski-line:

40 Biskini by Antonia Corke Photography on Flickr.

When Steve Jobs took the stage at Macworld in 1998, he did something unusual. For the first time in any presentation he had ever given, he ended with a slide reading, “Oh, and one more thing…” This phrase would of course enter the Apple lexicon in the subsequent years. But what was it that was hidden behind this first “one more thing”?

“Think Profit.”

You see, Jobs had just been named interim CEO in September 1997 after successfully pushing out the man who brought him (back) in, Gil Amelio. And he had good reason to do that: under Amelio, Apple had lost $1.04 billion in the prior year and was less than ninety days from being completely broke. Just a few months later, as he announced on stage, Jobs had the company back in black: a $45 million profit — the first profit the company had seen in more than two years.

Jobs’ move wasn’t magic. He slashed thousands of jobs and killed off dozens of products. Walter Isaacson details this time in his Steve Jobs’ biography. One part in particular stuck out to me.

In 1997 Apple was selling StyleWriter color printers that were basically a version of the Hewlett Packard DeskJet. HP made most of its money by selling ink cartridges. “I don’t understand,” Jobs said at the product review meeting. “You’re going to ship a million and not make money on these? This is nuts.”

I was thinking about this in relation to Amazon’s recent earnings. The company posted a record $17.4 billion in revenue in Q4 2011, but from all those sales, they were only able to squeeze $177 million in profit. Compare this to Apple’s most recent quarter in which they posted a record $46.33 billion in revenue and, more importantly, a record $13.06 billion in profit. The margin difference could not be any more stark.

Obviously, the first thing everyone jumps to is to say that Amazon and Apple are in two different types of businesses. Amazon is a retailer while Apple sells hardware. But the line is increasingly blurring between the two companies. Amazon now sells a number of hardware products thanks to its Kindle line. Apple, meanwhile, sells plenty of content via iTunes.

The thing is, even with Amazon entering the hardware game, they’re not making the kind of money that Apple is. In fact, with the new Kindle Fire tablet, it’s believed that they’re losing a small amount of money on each one sold. “This is nuts,” you could imagine Steve Jobs saying once again.

But is it nuts?

Amazon clearly views products like the Kindle Fire as a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them shopping for more content. Apple’s model is the exact opposite. Content sales are a loss-leader to keep customers happy and keep them buying new hardware.

At least for now, one model is working, one isn’t. Not only did Amazon only make $177 million on sales of $17.4 billion last quarter, they’re warning that they could actually lose money this quarter. They have enough money in the bank to sustain this for sometime, but at some point, they’re going to have to get back in the black in a meaningful way. And if they keep selling hardware, investors are going to look at their margins compared to Apple’s and wonder what the hell is going on?

Amazon has said time and time again over the years that they’re perfectly happy to live in the low-margin space. But these most recent margins are likely getting too thin for comfort. The Q4 profit numbers are 58 percent lower than they were a year earlier. Presumably, they have a plan that justifies these losses for the sake of the bigger picture. But again, it’s not unreasonable to think that this bigger picture will eventually pit Amazon against Apple directly.

Amazon may find itself in a race to get to Walmart-size revenues before there’s true competition in the space. Last quarter, Walmart pulled in $109.5 billion in revenue, which led to $3.3 billion in profit. As with Amazon, the margins are awful, but at that scale, it doesn’t matter. Walmart’s quarterly revenue more than doubled Apple’s which resulted in profit less than a quarter of what Apple saw — but at the end of the day, Walmart still walked away with over $3 billion in their pockets. That’s all that matters.

As their dance with the dreaded red line proves, Amazon isn’t anywhere close to operating the way Walmart does yet. In fact, Amazon’s margins are so slim that Facebook, which just filed to go public today, recorded nearly double the profit of Amazon last year ($1 billion versus $631 million). That’s pretty crazy when you think about it.

Jobs’ decision to exit Apple from the printer business 15 years ago proved to be a smart move. Of course, had Apple been selling ink — which has ridiculously high margins — it may have been a tougher call. Amazon’s problem is that the “printers” they’re selling have crappy margins and the “ink” they’re selling has crappy margins. It’s starting to sound a little nuts.

Scarlett Johansson has sexy legs…

It started with Charles Bronson. The year was 1972, and Jsapanese toiletries and men’ skin-care company Yanagiya, trying to reinvent itself, changed its name to Mandom (a portmanteau of human and freedom) and signed up the most macho of men to splash aftershave on his face in its commercials. The campaign exploded, and Dentsu, the ad agency behind it, started importing American stars to Japan by the boatload. Today the market has shifted to Russia and Brazil. For endorsing a product abroad, stars can pull in anywhere from the mid–six figures all the way up to $10 million. Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt each reportedly made around $1.7 million appearing in Japanese ads for SoftBank Mobile, a cell-phone company. In 2010, Julia Roberts reportedly banked $1.5 million for a 45-second coffee ad in Italy. They’ll have to keep grinding if they want to match the reported $4.8 million payday Robert De Niro saw for a 1999 Italian lamp ad, though. And while Madonna would command top dollar anywhere, some countries, like Brazil, are still obsessed with eighties action stars and MacGyver’s Richard Dean Anderson. Click on and watch sixteen variations of stars shilling all around the world.

This post comes from this week's special issue of New York Magazine, which breaks down all the windfalls, paydays and freebies of the celebrity economy.

Read more posts by Adam Raymond

Filed Under: the celebrity economy ,ads ,cameron diaz ,brad pitt ,robert de niro ,commercials

Think you're tough? Probably not as tough as these Chinese soldiers, who played a lethal game of Hot Potato ... with live bombs!

During an exhibition drill in Hong Kong, last month, an elite garrison of 6,000 PLA troops staged a series of impressive exercises for the visit of the island’s chief executive, Sir Donald Tsang. Snipers shot tiny glasses, soldiers carried heavy logs and jumped through rings of fire, but nothing as incredible as a group of men playing a game of pass-the-bomb.

The lethal game is played by six soldiers standing in a circle with a dug whole in the middle. They pass an explosive satchel from one two another, counting down until it detonates. Just before it explodes, one of the soldiers throws it in the hole and they all leap away as the ground trembles and dirt starts flying from the pit. Any miscalculation could mean the end for all six players, but they don’t seem very intimidated by that. They just calmly pass the live satchel as if it were a simple bag.

Link

TheFunded, the site where entrepreneurs can anonymously review venture capitalists, sometimes a reputation for being anti-VC (especially in its early days), but it’s not above showing investors a little love. Today it’s the announcing the winners of its awards for Top Investors 0f 2011.

Adeo Ressi, founding member at TheFunded, says these awards were determined by user ratings, though a five-person committee, including Ressi, made the final choices. The site has given out these awards for the past four years, usually in private ceremonies (this year’s ceremony happened last week), but Ressi says he’s trying to make the awards “more public” this year because of “the massive amount of transformation going on in the investment industry.”

Here’s the list, with descriptions from TheFunded:

• Most Disruptive: Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz — Andreessen Horowitz modeled their fund off of the modern talent agencies to provide a big network of value to their portfolio companies, reinventing the venture capital firm.
• Best New Manager: Dave McClure of 500 Startups — 500 Startups has done over 250 investments in less than two years since launching with deals being done all over the world, making 500 Startups the most prolific early-stage investor operating today. (TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis actually interviewed McClure at the event.)
• Top Rated in Americas: George Zachary of Charles River Ventures — Charles River Ventures has pioneered the seed-stage investing model that has been copied by most venture firms worldwide, and they continue to be one of the most prolific seed stage investors, evolving the seed-stage venture model.
• Top Rated in Europe, Middle East and Africa: Philippe Herbert of Banexi Venture Partners — Banexi Venture Partners is an active early-stage investor in the French startup ecosystem, supporting incubators and other new models to grow the success of European startups.
• Top Rated in Asia: Yuri Milner of Mail.ru Group, Formerly DST — Mail.ru is renown for creating the “DST round,” where top internet and technology companies secure hundreds of millions of dollars at multi-billion dollar valuations, changing the entire late-stage investment market.

And here’s a video of Horowitz accepting his award, where he outlines how his firm mirrors the model of Hollywood talent agencies.

Well played, Internet.

Source: propublica.org  /  via: newsweek