Britain’s The Klaxon Institute has developed a revolutionary technology that is one small but significant step toward solving world hunger.

As the name suggests, reverse liposuction, or the stretch-and-blow technique, is liposuction turned on its head. Developed by Dr Herod Richards at the Klaxon Institute on Harley St, London, it involves the removal of excess fatty tissue, as with ordinary liposuction procedures. The crucial difference is that this valuable resource is not wasted. Instead, the excess fat is stored and then introduced into the bodies of those with a shortage of fats. This could be for purely aesthetic reasons – but the Klaxon Institute has pledged to use it for humanitarian reasons. Fat from the west is flown out to some of the poorest people in the third world and donated to them. This allows people who would otherwise starve to build up a reserve of fat that they can live off for months at a time, removing the need for them to try to feed themselves.

Watch the video. But more importantly become involved by donating to the Klaxon Institute here.
 

 
Via Who Killed Bambi

 
Better yet, keep your Italo disco. Here’s some actual Krautrock. Yes, It’s the Sauerkraut synthesizer, the work of one Gordon Monahan.

Gordon Monahan’s Sauerkraut Synthesizer is an experimental synth, built around fruits, vegetables, and a jar of sauerkraut as voltage controllers for a software synthesizer, built with ppooll-max/msp and an Arduino interface.
The video captures a live performance on the Sauerkraut Synthesizer at the Subtle Technologies Festival, on board a cruise ship in Toronto Harbour, June 5, 2010.
The Sauerkraut Synthesizer is based on a technical prototype using lemons (The Lemon Synthesizer), developed as a collaboration between Gordon Monahan, Akemi Takeya, and Noid, in Vienna, March, 2009.

 
Witness the majesty of the Lemon Synthesizer after the jump…

 
In 1946 George Orwell was commissioned by the British Council to write about food in Britain. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Britain was in the middle of a period of severe food rationing and Orwell’s manuscript, “British Cookery,” was seen as being a celebration of culinary extravagance at a time of enforced austerity. It was never published.

In this excerpt from “British Cookery,” Orwell shares a recipe for Christmas pudding. Suet is a critical ingredient in this particular pudding and there’s really no substitute for it. Butter or lard just won’t do. Unfortunately, obtaining suet may be difficult in your neighborhood. You can find it at some butcher shops. Good luck.

In the second half of the midday meal we come upon one of the greatest glories of British cookery—its puddings. The number of these is so enormous that it would be impossible to give an exhaustive list, but, putting aside stewed fruits, British puddings can be classified under three main heads: suet puddings, pies and tarts, and milk puddings.

Suet crust, which appears in innumerable combinations, and enters into savoury dishes as well as sweet ones, is simply ordinary pastry crust with chopped beef suet substituted for the butter or lard. It can be baked, but more often is boiled in a cloth or steamed in a basin covered with a cloth. Far and away the best of all the suet puddings is plum pudding, which is an extremely rich, elaborate and expensive dish, and is eaten by everyone in Britain at Christmas time, though not often at other times of the year. In simpler kinds of pudding the suet crust is sweetened with sugar and stuck full of figs, dates, currants or raisins, or it is flavoured with ginger or orange marmalade, or it is used as a casing for stewed apples or gooseberries, or it is rolled round successive layers of jam into a cylindrical shape which is called roly-poly pudding, or it is eaten in plain slices with treacle poured over it. One of the best forms of suet pudding is the boiled apple dumpling. The core is removed from a large apple, the cavity is filled up with brown sugar, and the apple is covered all over with a thin layer of suet crust, tied tightly into a cloth, and boiled.”

Recipe after the jump…

 
Pulitzer prize winning food writer Jonathan Gold’s annual list of 99 essential Los Angeles eateries is a big deal for us Angelenos. The man has exquisite taste and a feel for this great city like few other contemporary writers. This year a few motivated foodies have created more user-friendly forms of said list, making it easy for us all to eat our way across the city over the holidays. There’s a Google Maps version here and a spreadsheet here. I’d like to personally recommend the absolutely over-the-top temple of fat, Animal and the revelatory Oaxacan cuisine of Gueleguetza where the Laner family will be having Pavo en Barbacoa this Thanksgiving.
 
via Fishbowl L.A., thanks !

 
This latest gem to be excavated from that endless trove of inscrutable weirdness known as Soviet era Ukrainian TV is a small masterpiece of people’s collective comedy. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned somewhere in all of this. But no matter ,I’m a sucker for peppy musical numbers that involve deconstructed instruments, factories, mimes and sausages. That’s entertainment !
 

 
Thanks Yewknee !

 
George Franju’s 1949 film Le Sang Des Bêtes (blood of the beasts) is one of the most beautiful and horrifying movies ever made. Filmed in the backstreets of Paris, Franju contrasts bucolic scenes of fog-shrouded streets, canals, deserted junkyards and children playing, with the nightmarish events taking place within two slaughterhouses. Marcel Fradetal’s stunning black and white cinematography turns the horrific into a brutal kind of poetry that if it had been shot in color would be unbearable.

Observing the workers going about their gruesome work with emotionless efficiency is the most disturbing aspect of the film for me. How much of our humanity is sacrificed for a plate of meat? Franju’s intent may have been no more than to compose a work of visual art, but as I watch Le Sang Des Bêtes I can’t help but be reminded of the fact that France was still reeling from the effects of years of war and in these images of animals being murdered I am aware of the thin line between man and beast, killing one is not so different from killing the other. Is not the abattoir a concentration camp for animals? Is the flesh of the beasts any less sacred than our own? Or have we arrived at the place where nothing is sacred? And if so, isn’t that hell?

Outside the walls of the abattoir we watch life go on, while inside we watch it come to a cruel and bloody end.
 

 
Parts two and three after the jump…

 
Sally Davies photographed a McDonald’s Happy Meal over 6 months. This is the result.

Now you know, if you want to leave a beautiful corpse live off McDonald’s.
 

 
Via Henri Podin
 

 
Politically incorrect? Yes. Funny? Yes.

Apparently some viewers find the ad offensive. Not me.

I love that twist ending.

The song is “If It Don’t fit (Don’t Force It)” by Barrel House Annie. The ad is from Australian agency Marketforce.
 

 
Via copyranter

 
English occultist Aleister Crowley wasn’t merely a poet, painter and the Great Beast 666, he was also an aspiring chef! That’s right and if you’d like to make some magick in the kitchen tonight, The Master Therion’s recipe for his “famous” (or would that be “infamous”) curried rice dish, “Riz Aleister Crowley” has been posted on the Music is the Heart Tumblr blog, after being found among his papers at Syracuse University in New York.

Bon appetit! (Larger page 1 here, page 2 here)
 

 
Via Coilhouse

Hamburgers = Heroin!

A commercial made to raise awareness in a current social epidemic and to draw attention to those whom the artists believe are most responsible in a bid to drive discussion and action to reverse the downward trend.

(via TDW)