chocolate-chip ice-cream-sandwich cake with butterscotch sauce
Here’s a party-size ice cream sandwich that everyone will love. We use two 9-inch-diameter cake pans so that the cookies keep their round shape when baking. And there’s no need for last-minute fuss; this can be made up to three days ahead.
Ingredients:
Butterscotch Sauce
3/4 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
1/2 cup dark corn syrup
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick) unsalted butter, diced
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup whipping cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract Cookies
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
Beat the summer heat with a mouth-watering ice cream for dessert!
Resources for
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05/16/08 Toad’s Place New Haven, CT
Discography
05/22/08 Slims San Francisco, CA 05/24/08 Les Schwab Amp Bend, OR 05/25/08 Sasquatch Festival Quincy, WA 05/28/08 Henry Fonda Theater LA, CA 06/06/08 Wakarusa Festival Lawrence, KS 06/07/08 Slowdown Omaha, NE 06/08/08 Bluebird St. Louis, MO 06/10/08 Bricktown Ballroom Oklahoma, Ok 06/11/08 Granada Theatre Dallas, TX 06/12/08 Warehouse Live Houston, TX 06/13/08 Emo’s Austin, TX 06/14/08 Rev Room Little Rock, AR 06/15/08 Hi-Tone Memphis, TN 06/17/08 Southgate House Newport, KY 06/18/08 Mr. Small’s Theatre Pittsburgh, PA 06/21/08 Popped! Festival Philadelphia, PA 06/25/08 Pemberton Festival Pemberton, BC 08/01/08 Lollapalooza-Grant Park Chicago,IL 08/08/08 All Points West Liberty State, NJ 09/26/08 Austin City Limits Festival TX
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Mates of State are back with Re-Arrange Us, coming out May 20th. Let me tell you that this girl-boy duo knows great pop music.
I first heard about them on a 2003 CMJ compilation with a little song called "Ha Ha", but I didn't think much of it. By 2006, after being signed to Barsuk Records, I remember I started seeing that distinctive "indie cover" artwork with Mates of State's husband and wife team, Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner, in a very strange half embrace.
There's some great pop tunes on Re-Arrange Us, but the song that the record label approved us to use is "My Only Offer", which I already liked so I have no problem with using this particular song. I thought the trumpet, played by Gary Olson, was a very nice addition to the song.
There's a few great songs, including, "Jigsaw", which basically has Jason repeating lyrics sung by Kori (actually, after reading the credits, it lists Ben Gibbard, from Death Cab For Cutie, as backup vocals). It's really easy to sing along, so I think this would be a great live concert pleaser. Also would play great is "Now", which has the simple, but catchy "Now now now now now now. Now now now now now now, who who who?"
I also really dug "The Re-Arranger", which is basically what the album was named after. This song sounds like it's escaped from the 60s and made a stop in the 80s, before resurfacing now.
The duo are currently doing some tour dates to promote Re-Arrange Us, so catch them if you're able. According to their official website, if you pre-order the album, it should arrive in your mailbox on the 20th, but you can usually find Barsuk records at most good record stores.
PS, apparently the band is a fan of the "Little Boxes" song (there is a live rendition on their myspace). I wonder if they got involved with the song because of Death Cab for Cutie's version or because they're also doing a theme song for Weeds?
Not exactly worst airport ever but it has seen better days.
Covers "crazy train"
My final project for Intermediate Flash. I had to create a project where one could change properties on an object using buttons. You had to change the position of the object constantly while a button was pressed, as well as transparency (alpha). You also had to demonstrate turning the object's visibility off and on via buttons, as well as resetting everything. I chose to drive a little Pac Man around, because that was the first thing that popped in my head when I started doing the project. You can drive him with the directional arrows that are around the "joystick", adjust his alpha with the arrows there, toggle his visibility off and on using the faux-checkbox I made, and reset everything. Bonus stuff I did was make him respond to arrow keys (you have to click inside the movie first before it will respond to them, and some other trickery to make the checkbox seem like a toggle.
When Adobe first launched Photoshop Express (from hereon in, PX) a month and a half or so ago, it featured integration with three online sites: Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa. Unfortunately, I don't use any of those for photos. So when I saw that there was an update to add Flickr support, I dug out my old registration - the one that required me to claim I was living in the US, sigh - and had a very quick look.
Flickr appears under the "Other Sites" heading on the left nav - or is it a palette? - of the main window. Clicking the "Flickr" item asks you to authenticate, although somewhat oddly it uses desktop-style auth, so instead of using a nice redirect, PX instead uses a pop up window, which was naturally blocked. It also means you manually have to click about three more buttons than you would with web based auth. Perhaps this is explained by the amount of client-side code, but it still jarred for me. I expect users who don't have to wrangle API auth code would probably cope, though.
Once logged in, Px starts fetching images from Flickr. This is done pretty nicely- pulling each image is slow, so it will carry on if you're not doing anything else, and present the images it's already found for you. Images are sorted by date taken, which is odd if you're used to Flickr's photostream order, which is by date uploaded. (Dates are, naturally, in American format, which annoys me no end, but let's try and ignore that for now.) However, for me it stopped after just over 550 images, which is only about a tenth of the total. I'm not sure why, or how to get it to look for the rest.
Once the images are listed in the Flickr album, they're editable just like any other image available to PX. The tools aren't as sophisticated as those in the main desktop version of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or even iPhoto: there's no "levels" tool, and minimal highlight and shadow controls, for example. However, the white balance editor is pretty good, and there's a "Pop Color" effect for those images where you want a red London bus in a monochrome city. Beyond desktop apps, I'd also say that it compares fairly shabbily to Picnik, which is also web-based, but manages a much richer set of tools. Handily, Picnik's integrated into Flickr, making it even more likely to be used.
After editing my image, I wondered where the "save" dialog was, and where I'd get to choose whether the original image was replaced, or who'd get permissions on the new image. It turns out that this is all done automatically. An edited image gets uploaded as a new photo, with your default permissions. The title and description are preserved, but tags and date metadata aren't. To me, this is a killer flaw. Firstly, I want the option to replace an existing image. Secondly, throwing away image metadata is something Photoshop hasn't done since about version 7; it's appalling that PX does this today. Thirdly, I want the option to set privacy levels.
Once again, Picnik's Flickr integration gets all of these things right - in fact, it even seems to have an option to bump images up your photostream with comments intact, which is a very clever trick indeed. In contrast, PX looks like it's hardly trying.
One place that Photoshop Express does try very hard - for publicity - is with images that are copied from its library to Flickr. You can explicitly copy an image into the internal library, create an "album" on Flickr (what's more usually called a set, there), and then copy it back to Flickr in that set. Doing this creates a description that lets everyone know you're using Photoshop Express, and, hey, would you like to use it too? I know everyone is after viral exposure these days, but please let me know you're doing it first and let me set something more sensible.
On the subject of albums, PX loads your Flickr sets as a list of albums, although for some reason this didn't happen the first time I tried it. They're listed in alphabetical order, which, like the "date taken" ordering, is a little odd - Flickr preserves set ordering, and it would be nice if PX would honour that, at least as an option. Opening an album, unfortunately, shows an empty screen, even if there are images in the set. I assume the photo download process is linear. Hopefully a later release will change this, and let the UI take priority, as well as adding caching - each time you open the web app, it has to fetch the list of photos and sets from Flickr afresh.
For all this criticism, I do recognise that Adobe's product is just a beta. On the other hand, given how slick Picnik is, and how nicely it's integrated, it's hard to see how Photoshop Express has much to offer Flickr users, other than a brand name.
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I love bacon, and I love sneakers.... so by transference, I would also love Bacon Shoe. These two MCs (Lethal D and Mr. Ruggles) and one DJ (DJ SKU), are a comedy hip-hop crew from rap hotbed of Kansas City.
I couldn't find any information on their debut album, Ass, originally released in 1997, but obviously that's a decade (!!) prior to Back from Stinktion (that's extinction for you non-hipsters).
Although there's no pending pressure that they're on tour or are in need of promotion, I was inspired enough after watching their misadventures in SXSW 2006 (their album came with a bonus DVD) to write about it.
It seems to me that they only had a few booked/confirmed shows in Austin, because the time that they weren't booked, they drove to various bars and started playing music and rapping. What's really interesting is that in one of the videos, you can see the slow buildup of passerby people actually stopping and watching them perform.
They're incredibly mobile and, watching their behind-the-scene stuff, they're quite funny.
The music portion of the album doesn't quite capture their live energy, it makes it up with various comedy bits. Like on "Toine in the Studio" doing some intentionally horrible unrhyming freestyle or on "A New Discovery Shed" where Lethal accidentally dropped "sometime you gotta bend over and take it up the a** a little bit. Erm, no you don't. I'm sorry, That's not true. I never done that before, so don't think I'm like..."
My favorite song is "Cheesedick", mostly because I think of Aqua Teen Hunger Force whenever I hear it.
Bacon Shoe's Back from Stinktion is a great album to have right next to your MC Frontalot collection. The bonus DVD added a nice value to the album, so get the physical copy from CD Baby.
Links:
www.baconshoe.com
myspace.com/baconshoe
last.fm/music/Bacon+Shoe
