STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

[MIKA27]

A German Airbus A320 Has Crashed In The French Alps

A passenger aeroplane operated by German airline Germanwings — Lufthansa’s low-cost division — has crashed in the Alps in southern France. The Airbus A320 crashed close to the mountain village of Barcelonette during a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf.

The French TV station iTele reports that there are at least 142 passengers and six crew members were aboard. Newspaper Le Figaro reports that crew made a distress call at 10.47am before disappearing from radar at around 11.20am.

François Hollande, the French Prime Minister, has said that it is likely that there are no survivors.

[MIKA27]

NASCAR's Original Racetrack Is An Abandoned Ruin Today

The North Wilkesboro Speedway opened in 1947, nearly a year before NASCAR was founded. The short track near moonshine country was where the first NASCAR champion, Robert “Red” Byron, was crowned. Today, five years after being abandoned, the historic speedway is just a rotting pile of sticks, crooked chairs, and faded glory.

The celebrated abandoned spaces photographer Seph Lawless recently visited the North Wilkesboro Speedway on a trip across the country. Lawless found the race course to be symbolic for America’s rapid decline and decay. The former dirt track held sanctioned events until 1996 but was left to rot after a campaign to save the speedway by the same name failed to attract investors.

“This arena was once filled with thousands of people now it sits eerily silent and completely abandoned,” Lawless told Gizmodo. “It was apocalyptic.”At least the apocalypse is a least a little bit beautiful — as the manmade structures yield, and nature takes back what was always hers.

[MIKA27]

INVESTIGATING THE ALPS PLANE CRASH WILL BE A PUNISHING TASK

GERMANWINGS FLIGHT 9525 crashed in mountainous terrain so rugged and remote that authorities must be flown in by helicopter, which will make recovering the bodies and determining what went wrong a slow, punishing task indeed.

The Airbus A320 went down in the French Alps with 148 people aboard on Tuesday morning, about 50 minutes after leaving Barcelona, 25 miles west of the Italian border. Shortly after reaching a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, the plane descended rapidly for eight minutes until air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane at 6,000 feet. Emergency crews dispatched to the plane’s last known location soon spotted debris, but no sign of any survivors. The small pieces—none bigger than a car, according to one local official—indicate the plane crashed at high speed, and searchers have already located one of the aircraft’s two black boxes.

More than 400 police officers, firefighters, and others are on the scene, according to The New York Times. The BEA, France’s equivalent of the National Transportation Safety Board, sent seven investigators, accompanied by experts from Airbus and the company that manufactured the plane’s engines. They’ll be joined by three German investigators.

The goal of any aviation accident investigation is to find out what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. It’s a process that requires a huge amount of data, and, especially without survivors, is like a massively complicated jigsaw puzzle, with missing parts.

The problem here, French president François Hollande noted in a press conference, is that the crash site is in a “very difficult area to access,” so physical evidence is hard to reach. The Airbus 320 hit the ground near the commune of Prads-Haute-Bléone, a village of fewer than 200 people, in an area that is both remote and difficult to get around. Elevation in the area ranges from 2,000 to 9,000 feet, and the debris is spread over steep mountain faces where most ground vehicles can’t go. “The mountains are very hard to access—there is no road access, neither in the summer nor the winter,” a local mountain guide told the Times.

That makes helicopters the most practical way of reaching the site, which creates problems for investigators, says Steven Meyers, an aircraft accident investigator and head of DVI Aviation.

Helicopters have limited capacity for passengers and cargo, making it far more difficult to get people into the area and debris out of it. Unlike aquatic crashes, there’s no risk of debris sinking or moving with the current, but it can be scattered by the wind or buried beneath snow. It’s still “perishable” evidence, Meyers says, which makes quick recovery a priority.

In a standard investigation, every bit of debris (including human remains) found would be documented, tagged, and moved to a secure location. That’s tricky under the best conditions. Here, it will be difficult at best. “Everything is pulverized,” a local official told The Associated Press. “The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car.” Video from the scene, shot by France TV, shows debris scattered all over a mountainside.

Investigators caught their first break when they recovered the cockpit voice recorder. The search continues for the flight data recorder, which keeps constant track of hundreds of flight parameters like airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude, autopilot engagement, and the position of various flight control surfaces. Both devices have a location beacon that activates in the event of a crash, and they’re made to survive massive impact (including acceleration up to 3,400 g). Both will provide key evidence for figuring out what brought down the A320.

Physical evidence will be vital. If parts came off the plane as it crashed, each piece of debris will have its own trajectory and impact angle, which can indicate the position of the jet in its final moments. Problematically, that math gets trickier when the debris pieces are small and numerous, which is the case here—investigators may only be able to roughly approximate the descent and impact angle of the plane.

A photograph of the right side of the large three-dimensional TWA 800 reconstruction, with the support scaffolding visible

The smaller the piece, the harder it is to identify, Meyers says. “You’re a detective at that point.” That’s partly why Airbus personnel are there, since they know the plane better than anyone. “It’s really like a puzzle, putting it back together.” Close examination of wreckage will provide clues. Scorching or soot suggest a fire. The manner state of the debris can if the plane blew apart, broke up at altitude, or hit the ground intact. Looking at whatever’s left of the cabin and cockpit will yield more information—if, for example, the oxygen masks were deployed.

If necessary, investigators will reassemble the airplane; in the case of TWA 800, the Boeing 707 that exploded off the coast of New York in 1996, authorities put the pieces back together in a hanger. Because the black box recorders didn’t indicate what went wrong, rebuilding the plane helped determine what caused the explosion. Such a step is not always necessary, however. If the flight data recorders and other evidence provide enough clues, “then it becomes less important to reconstruct the entire airframe,” Meyers says. “You can focus on a particular system.”

But more information is better than less, and investigators can use all the data they can get to figure out what happened to this plane and the 150 people on board, and do whatever they can to stop it happening again.

[MIKA27]

WE WANT TO BELIEVE: THE X-FILES IS COMING BACK TO TV

GOOD NEWS, CONSPIRACY theorist sci-fi fans: Mulder and Scully are coming back.

Although the network has not set an air date, Fox announced today that X-Files creator Chris Carter will come back to helm a new six-episode limited run of the series; the miniseries begins filming this summer.

“I think of it as a 13-year commercial break,” Carter told Variety. “The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories.”

It’s excellent news indeed. But what should you do until we get these smoking new episodes? Binge-watch the original show, obviously! With nine years’ worth of episodes ranging from creepy to batshit crazy, chances are you don’t remember every detail as well as you should.

Now fire up that Netflix account (or dust off that VHS box set) and start catching up on all the unexplained phenomena and sexual tension now. You are not alone.

[Habana Mike]

TAG HEUER MONACO V4 PHANTOM WATCH

Murdered out yet undoubtedly elegant, the Tag Heuer Monaco V4 Phantom is a love letter to the lack of color. Its 41mm case is made from Carbon Matrix Composite, as are the movement's seven bridges, both micro-blasted to give them a brushed appearance.

The entire dial is also in shades of black and dark grey, including the hands, which are finished with a titanium carbide coating and anthracite grey SuperLuminova. Only the 48 jewels show a hint of color, as not even the titanium folding clasp of the matte black alligator strap escapes the darkness.

Limited to 50 pieces.

Have to sell the Ferrari to afford this one.......

[MIKA27]

ARTIST USES FRESH COFFEE TO MAKE FANTASTIC STAR WARS PORTRAITS

Rather than using acrylics and inks, she uses different types of coffee blends and brews as the basis for her impressive artworks.

The strength and weakness of each brew provides her with a different palette of shades to use, from soft beiges to burnt browns. She then carefully and masterfully blends them together to create these remarkable portraits of some of her favourite characters (she loves Star Wars) and iconic personalities in popular culture.

[MIKA27]

The Saga of ‘Kumiko’: To Her, ‘Fargo’ Was Real

Werner Herzog defined his brand of “ecstatic truth” in 1999 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a cinematic truth greater than mere facts, or “the truth of accountants”: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” Fifteen years later, filmmakers David Zellner and Nathan Zellner unveiled Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, their own sublime approximation of Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” based on an urban myth that had its own origins, fittingly enough, in the snowy climes of the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

It was near one such Minnesota lake that 28-year-old Tokyo office worker Takako Konishi was found dead by a local bowhunter on November 15, 2001. She wore boots and a miniskirt, was in possession of a crude hand-drawn map, and upon arriving in Minneapolis from Japan, they say, she’d hitchhiked her way across the state in pursuit of the fictional buried fortune from the 1996 film Fargo.

At least that’s how the urban legend told it. The Zellners, Austin-based brothers and collaborators, stumbled across the stranger-than-fiction tale on an online message board before the age of Twitter and insta-info. The mystery sent their imaginations whirring, as they wondered what could compel such a woman to make such an unforgiving journey halfway around the world to her death.

“The headline was something like ‘Japanese Woman Goes From Tokyo to Minnesota for Fortune From Fargo’ and we were like, ‘Whaaat?’” said David Zellner, who directed and co-stars in Kumiko, which he wrote with brother and producer Nathan Zellner. “If that had happened today it would be chewed up and spat out really quickly and debunked. What drew us into it was this fable-like story of a treasure hunt, as if from the Age of Exploration, presented as fact and taking place in modern day.”

Click to view related video: 'This Is a True Story'

“The fact that there was limited information made us want more.”

Eventually, the true facts surrounding Konishi’s ill-fated trip to the Midwest surfaced; there was no mystical treasure map, no deluded obsession with the fictional suitcase of cash stashed under a fencepost in the snow by Steve Buscemi in Fargo, which begins with a disclaimer purporting the film’s events to be true. (The Zellners have yet to hear what the Coen brothers, who wrote and directed Fargo, think of Kumiko.) As detailed and re-created in Paul Berczeller’s 2003 documentary This Is a True Story, the Fargo portion of Konishi’s mythology sprang from miscommunications she had with police in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she’d stopped days before heading toward Detroit Lakes.

“I had never seen the film Fargo, but another officer in the station had seen it and he told me that there was money buried in this movie,” Officer Jesse Hellman told Berczeller. “And then we started to think that she had this false impression that the money buried by a road by a tree was real in the movie. That’s where she wanted to go. We thought that was really odd, but suddenly it all began to make sense.”

When a pocket translator failed to help Konishi communicate in her native Japanese with the Bismarck Police Department, the flustered Hellman called a local Chinese restaurant for help, to no avail. Seemingly determined to make it to Fargo, a four-hour drive away, Konishi boarded a bus headed east and spent two nights at a Quality Inn motel.

“She started asking about seeing the stars,” the night clerk recalled. “Which I thought was a little strange, because it was November and it isn’t that warm outside in the middle of the night, but I wanted to help, so I showed her this place on the map where it would be nice to watch the stars. She seemed to be happy after that.”

The Medical Examiner’s office in St. Paul, Minnesota reported finding a half-dozen drugs in Konishi’s system, including sedatives, tranquilizers, and anti-psychotic meds. She was said to have visited the area with an American lover whom she’d called before her death. Her parents reportedly received her suicide note in the mail three weeks after her body was discovered.

By the time Takako Konishi’s Fargo myth was debunked, the Zellners had already re-envisioned her story as a quixotic dreamer’s tragedy, keeping some of the intriguing elements from early reports: The map, her outfit, that laughable, desperate stab at getting a Chinese restaurateur to translate Japanese. They’d named their heroine Kumiko after taking a liking to the name and imagined her as an isolated misfit with the restless soul of a conquistador—a worn-out VHS tape and its promise of a buried fortune her only escape from the increasingly claustrophobic modern world.

After an existential pause, the Zellners stuck with their vision, building on parallels to Konishi’s life to craft a story more humanistic than the cold and unknowable truths of real life. “We weren’t consumed with cramming facts in, which would have in a very literal sense checked the boxes,” David Zellner explained. “We wanted to approach it more from a human, emotional level rather than the literal facts. That resonated more to us and felt more truthful, in a way.”

The brothers reached out early on to Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi after seeing her Oscar-nominated performance as a deaf teenager in 2007’s Babel, but the project percolated for years. The Zellners went on to make their Sundance 2012 drama Kid-Thing, about a destructive 10-year-old tomboy left to her own devices in the backwoods of Texas, before finally undertaking the international Kumiko shoot in Tokyo and Minnesota.

Childlike and socially detached, Kikuchi’s Kumiko works an oppressive office job and lives alone with her pet rabbit, Bunzo; social ease escapes her; she shrinks from human interaction. Wearing a bright red hoodie like a safety blanket (and captured exquisitely by cinematographer Sean Porter), she stands out brightly against the muted palette of her urban prison and against the stark white snow of the frozen Midwest, never truly safe in either world.

To find the “truth” of Kumiko’s journey, the Zellners divide her story into two chapters: life before and life after she makes the impulsive decision to fly to America in search of her destiny. “I am like a Spanish conquistador,” she confides to a library security guard who catches her trying to steal a page out of an atlas she believes is crucial to her expedition. “Recently, I’ve learned of untold riches hidden deep in the Americas.”

Freeing herself of worldly worries, the naïve but courageous Kumiko embarks on a childlike adventure against impossible odds that’s alternately adorable, optimistic, confusing, and deeply melancholy.

“It would be so easy to make her the butt of the joke or to overplay it,” David Zellner noted. “But people get the information they need. Rinko had the confidence to know when how she was selling it was enough.”

Somewhere in Minnesota, Kumiko’s quixotic quest starts to feel all too real, the ghost of Takako Konishi haunting every shuffling step through the snow. Audiences in different cities vary in their take on Kumiko’s mental state, Zellner says, although the filmmakers are keen to see how the film plays in Japan. For most it’s impossible not to watch Kumiko and ponder the psychological traumas that sent the possibly-suicidal Konishi wandering into the woods of Minnesota in 2001.

“I’m a filmmaker, not a psychoanalyst,” said Zellner. “It’s so easy to come off as dismissive and condescending, but there are elements of the real story that we’ll never know about. To reduce her down to some kind of label would diminish her character in a simplistic and patronizing way. That would also be safer for the audience because then they can distance themselves from her character and write her off. But this film is from her point of view, so you have to go all in with her.”

[MIKA27]

STAR WARS R2-Q5 VIRTUAL KEYBOARD

Everyone knows R2-D2, the rebel droid that fought alongside his Jedi friends through the beloved Star Wars films. But few are familiar with his R2-Q5 counterpart, an R2-series astromech droid that worked for the opposition – the Galactic Empire. The Japanese electronics brand imp has showed some love to the bad guys with the release of the R2-Q5 Virtual Keyboard.

First appearing in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi, we imagine Disney’s revisiting of the world George Lucas created may see the return of the black and bronze covered chirping droid. The gadget is shaped like a mini R2-Q5 unit, and projects a red QWERTY keyboard onto any flat surface, along with emitting the droid’s voice. It’s equipped with Bluetooth HID compatibility that works with iOS and Android mobile devices along with Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. The R2 keyboard will be released on May 4th (Star Wars Day), and will retail for $325 through Amazon’s Japan webstore. [Purchase]

[MIKA27]

LAND ROVER DEFENDER 90 PICK UP BY KAHN DESIGN

The folks at Kahn Design continue to showcase their customization abilities as they tackled this Land Rover Defender 90 Pick Up truck.

Based on the standard short-wheelbase 2011 Defender 90 Pick Up, the truck’s aesthetics have been revamped from top to bottom, front to back. The truck features a full body kit complete with a redesigned front grill. The green paint job is accented with contrasting yellow hits throughout, including a set of yellow 16-inch wheels on all four corners. A leather tonneau cover out back ensures your tools stay hidden from would be thieves, and adds a bit more flair to the already head-turning 2-door. The interior features a set of racing eats upholstered in black quilted leather, and an aluminum trim instrument cluster complete with red gauges. While they were quick to swap out all of the exterior and interior components, Kahn had a different outlook under the hood – leaving the engine and drivetrain untouched. Equipped with a 2.4-liter diesel pushing 122 ponies through a six-speed transmission, this go-anywhere vehicle has all the power it needs to conquer anything and everything in its path.

[polarbear]

Jeremy Clarkson Set To Be Sacked From BBC, But Top Gear Will Reportedly Go On

Following an investigation into his recent conduct, the BBC has reportedly made the decision to sack Top Gear presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, but the world’s favourite car show will apparently still be made after he’s gone.

According to The Telegraph, the BBC will announce Clarkson’s sacking today following an investigation into an alleged incident where Clarkson attacked a producer. The report says that Clarkson spent a period of 20 minutes abusing a male producer before physically assaulting him.

Top Gear isn’t set to die with Clarkson’s departure. It’s being reported that BBC Radio 2 presenter and former Top Gear guest Chris Evans is being courted for the job.

The BBC Director General, Lord Tony Hall, is expected to make the announcement later on in the day.

I'm calling it now

I give it 12 months before the show is either canned completely, moved to a less popular time slot (and left to rot there) or they get Clarkson back

[Fuzz]

Top Gear will probably be killed off by BBC, then picked up by Sky a few months later, who will re-hire Clarkson et al.

[polarbear]

Top Gear will probably be killed off by BBC, then picked up by Sky a few months later, who will re-hire Clarkson et al.

Or another network will offer him a deal and he'll start another motoring show

The tabloids reckon Hammond and May will walk if they can Clarkson gets the ass

It'll be interesting to see who's all talk when the hammer finally drops

[Philski]

they get Clarkson back

This

[MIKA27]

50 Years Ago, NASA Astronauts Smuggled A Sandwich Into Space

On March 23, 1965, astronaut John Young reached into his pocket and offered his crewmate Gus Grissom a corned beef sandwich. It was in the middle of the Gemini 3 mission, and let’s be clear, they were in space. It was a silly little prank but one that, man, really pissed off Congress.

Gemini 3 was NASA’s first two-man space mission, and among its many objectives was to test newly invented space food. For example, writes Robert Z. Pearlman in Space.com, the test foods were coated in gelatin to prevent crumbling.

The smuggled corned beef sandwich, of course, had no such special coating. Fellow astronaut Wally Schirra had bought the sandwich from Wolfie’s Restaurant and Sandwich Shop two days ago and passed it off to Young before the launch. Food doesn’t taste so good in space, and it’s hard to believe a two-day old corned beef sandwich would be delicious. In any case, Grissom had to put it away after a bite, when crumbs started floating everywhere. Oops, microgravity.

Back on Earth, the House of Representatives’ appropriations committee caught wind of the stunt. “A couple of congressmen became upset, thinking that, by smuggling in the sandwich and eating part of it, Gus and I had ignored the actual space food that we were up there to evaluate, costing the country millions of dollars,” Young wrote in his memoir. NASA eventually had to assure Congress that no, it wasn’t going to allow any more contraband corned beef sandwiches into space.

Young would make several more trips into space with Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, and the space shuttle. Corned beef made it back into space, too, on the first space shuttle flight in 1981 commanded by none other than Young himself.

[MIKA27]

This Lost Map Changed How We Saw The World

In 1815, William Smith drew a map of the United Kingdom which transformed the scientific landscape: It laid the foundations for modern geology, and identified natural resources which would beget the Industrial Revolution. But up until last year, this first-edition copy was considered to be lost forever.

As a geologist in London in the early 1800s, Smith began looking at the alignment of fossils as a way to trace rock layers, therefore pioneering the field of stratigraphy. His work created a formal methodology for geologic surveys, influencing the way that similar surveys were undertaken in other countries. This discovery was nothing less than revolutionary, or shall I say evolutionary: Smith was highly influential in the work of Charles Darwin.

The 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales was nicknamed “The Map That Changed the World” and there’s even a book by that name which asserts the importance of Smith’s accomplishment — as well as the rather sad aftermath. Because he was not a member of the intelligentsia (he was a surveyor and canal worker) he was plagiarized and lived homeless for a decade.

Smith made about 370 copies by hand throughout his lifetime, and several later maps are known to be in existence, but the earliest copies were assumed to be lost. This copy, discovered in 2014 in the Geological Society of London’s own archives, is likely one of the first ten he ever produced. It has been restored and digitised, and will be preserved in perpetuity in the Society’s archives, properly honouring Smith’s achievement.

[MIKA27]

Iceland Has Become The Perfect Genetics Experiment

A millennium ago, a group settled in Iceland and have stayed there ever since, with few people coming and going. And so their DNA has stayed remarkably homogenous. That’s a major boon for genetics researchers, who today have released the results of sequencing the complete genomes of 2636 Icelanders — the largest such countrywide project ever.

Researchers at Decode Genetics, an Icelandic company owned by Amgen, have sifted through the complete DNA sequences of 2636 people huntings for mutations that cause disease. This is a massive undertaking, but one made easier by the low level of genetic diversity in Iceland. With fewer genetic variants to sift through, it’s easier to find meaningful variants.

Think of it as a smaller haystack in which to look for needles.

The results are published today in four papers in Nature Genetics. The researchers, who also had access to the medical histories of the participants, were able to identify several new mutations linked to disease. For example, notes Carl Zimmer reporting for the New York Times, a mutation in MYL4 caused early onset of a particular type of irregular heartbeat. And there’s more:

The scientists also found a rare mutation to a gene called ABDB4 that raises the risk of gallstones. And they identified a gene called ABCA7 as a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. Previous studies had suggested a gene in the genetic neighbourhood of ABCA7 was associated with the disease. But the Icelandic study pinpointed the gene itself — and even the specific mutation involved.

The study also identified “human knockouts”, or people who have a nonfunctional copy of a particular gene. Scientists are especially interested in studying these people to figure out how a nonfunctional gene affects them. There’s still, hopefully, many more insights to come from the this volcanic island in the north.

[MIKA27]

Pilot Was Locked Out of Germanwings Cockpit Before Crash

One of the pilots of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps Tuesday morning was locked out of the cockpit as the plane went down, The New York Times reports. According to an investigator with evidence from the recovered cockpit voice recorder, the pilots’ conversation early in the flight was natural, and eventually one stepped out of the cockpit, then couldn’t get back in.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator told the Times. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”

“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

It’s stunning evidence in the ongoing investigation into what caused the crash of Flight 9525 with 150 people on board. Authorities have recovered the two black boxes, an arduous task that required searching remote, mountainous terrain accessible only by air, but one of them, the flight data recorder, is so badly damaged that determining exactly what happened will be a difficult task.

A Punishing Task

One day after the plane went down en route to Dusseldorf from Barcelona with 150 people aboard, investigators had confirmed there were no survivors and begun the process of tagging and analyzing the debris field. Flight 9525 began descending shortly after reaching its cruising attitude of 38,000 feet, and air traffic control lost all contact at about 6,000 feet. The plane appears to have hit the ground at high speed.

Investigators struggled to retrieve data from the cockpit voice recorder, which was found Tuesday, not long after the search began, but eventually managed. The flight data recorder is in far worse condition. Investigators found the crucial device, which constantly monitors hundreds of parameters like airspeed, heading, attitude, altitude, and the position of flight control surfaces, Wednesday. But the memory chip, which contains all that data, is missing. If it wasn’t destroyed, it’s somewhere amid the debris scattered over 2 square kilometers of unforgivingly rugged terrain.

[MIKA27]

OBAN LITTLE BAY SCOTCH WHISKEY

The next time you're out looking for a new scotch to sample, consider one from one of the oldest and smallest distilleries in Scotland. Little Bay is the newest release from Oban Distillery, founded back in 1794, and it's made by taking fully matured Oban juice and resting it in small casks to add additional complexity. The extra maturation serves it well, bringing rich flavors of spice, oak, and citrus to the forefront.

[Habana Mike]

OBAN LITTLE BAY SCOTCH WHISKEY

The next time you're out looking for a new scotch to sample, consider one from one of the oldest and smallest distilleries in Scotland. Little Bay is the newest release from Oban Distillery, founded back in 1794, and it's made by taking fully matured Oban juice and resting it in small casks to add additional complexity. The extra maturation serves it well, bringing rich flavors of spice, oak, and citrus to the forefront.

At least it's a little more reasonable than the black Tag!

[MIKA27]

At least it's a little more reasonable than the black Tag!

I guess we must cater to all tastes and budgets. I myself cant afford half the stuff I post!

[Habana Mike]

I guess we must cater to all tastes and budgets. I myself cant afford half the stuff I post!

Actually the Oban is very reasonable for what it is but yeah, some of the stuff you post is over the top. 1% of the 1% stuff!

[MIKA27]

MINUS-8 LAYER WATCH

What do you do after you’ve designed such iconic products as the Nike Fuelband and the Xbox 360?

If you’re ASTRO Studios, you start making stunning watches. The MINUS-8 Layer is professional and modern in appearance and is available in four different colorways—Black-Silver, Black-Red, Black-Gold, and Gray.

The case is made with stacked PVD-coated stainless steel discs that have been layered to create cascading depth in the face. Designed out on the West Coast—MINUS-8 gets its name from the GMT-8 time zone—the Layer watch boasts a clean display with three-hand timing and a simple date window. Complete with a sapphire crystal face, an NFC-enabled proprietary silicon band, and a Japanese automatic movement, the Layer watch from MINUS-8 is a raw, crafted machine that blends design and technology to fit your lifestyle.

[MIKA27]

THE WORLD’S BEST WHISKIES 2015

Last year, the World Whiskies Awards selected a Tasmanian offering as the finest single malt in the world. It was a slap in the face to Scottish distillers known for cleaning up in such categories. If that was a slap, this, perhaps, is a haymaker. Here are some of the winners from the 2015 World Whiskies Awards, including the—once again—non-Scottish brand winner for Best Single Malt.

WORLD’S BEST SINGLE MALT - Kavalan Solist Vinho Barrique

I’ve never had this Taiwanese whisky, but after reading the description from the judges, I'm on a quest to hunt it down. Noted for its bourbon, custard, and coffee profile, the single malt is a sweet treat with a dry finish. Aged in American oak casks that were used to mature both red and white wine, this single malt gets an added depth of fruity flavor thanks to its unique barrel selection.

WORLD’S BEST AMERICAN WHISKEY - Thomas H. Handy Sazerac

One of Buffalo Trace’s “Antique Collection” bottles, Thomas H. Handy Sazerac is named after the man who first used rye in a Sazerac cocktail. In a bold and spicy fashion, this rye is bottled straight from the barrel and packs all that cinnamon, clove, and warmth you’d expect. If you like your booze bold, it’s the best you could ask for.

WORLD’S BEST SINGLE POT STILL - Redbreast 15

The slightly more mature Redbreast expression, the 15 is rich and creamy with notes of citrus and honey. The taste is reminiscent of cooked fruits and butterscotch. Basically, it’s a finer version of the Redbreast you probably already love.

WORLD’S BEST BLENDED WHISKY - That Boutique-y Whisky Company Blended Whisky #1

With only 148 bottles released, we probably won’t ever have the chance to get acquainted with the first blended whisky from That Boutique-y Whisky Company. That’s a damn shame, because the label’s first foray into blended Scotch sounds mighty impressive. Complete with another of the line’s trademark killer labels, the hooch is complex with fruit flavors that develop as you enjoy it.

WORLD’S BEST CANADIAN WHISKY - Forty Creek Confederation Oak

This whisky from Forty Creek has been winning awards for the last five years and shows no signs of slowing down in 2015. The nose is full of vanilla and maple (how Canadian) and the finish is equally sweet and long. Forty Creek’s Confederation Oak Reserve is an iconic Canadian whisky with another medal around its neck.

[MIKA27]

This Video Is Proof That Tokyo Is The Most Unique City In The World

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29WCwZRRd-k

Japan can be both mystical and effortlessly modern but what makes the country so special is how unique it is. The chaos and quirks and creativity and energy of Tokyo all combine to create a city filled with things that exist no where else. Tokyo is an original and this video by Takuya Hosogane does a fantastic job in capturing that.

[Quint]

Been there a few times, I don't know if it's the most unique city in the world but I can tell you it is a tale of 2 cities. During the day it is a thriving metropolitan city with business men/woman and families alike abound. In the evenings families are gone and it becomes an adult city. It's quite a transformation. I love visiting Japan, the culture and cuisine is fantastic.