What have we cooked up now? A robot that forces complete strangers into mortal combat. As in Combat from the Atari 2600.
Sophisticated in its immaturity, Combat demands quick reflexes and a knowledge of how to drive a 70's-era tank while providing non-Euclidian geometry and highly questionable physics.
Interestingly (or, maybe, obviously) everyone over 25 flipped out and loved re-living a cherished and long-forgotten piece of their childhood. Teenagers hung around, looking angst-y. Kids 11 and under thought it was awesome, but couldn't figure out how to play the game. It was too simplistic for the Generation of Wii.
This drink (as far as I can recall) was invented as a response to the challenge: "Zounds! Is there anything made with this stuff that doesn't taste like powdered weasel nose-hairs?" (The "stuff," of course, being Hpnotiq.)
Turns out that the easy answer is: no, most things made with Hpnotiq taste like powdered weasel nose-hairs.
Which really is a shame, because it's such a nice colour. A bit girly, perhaps, but rather pleasant to look at.
After much experimentation, much lamentation, and much driving our enemy (sobriety) before us, we are pleased to present: The Clitini.
1 oz. Hynotiq 1 oz. Ketel One 1 oz. Sprite 1 pomegranate seed
Shake first two ingredients over ice and strain into a martini glass. Add chilled sprite and garnish with pomegranate seed. Put on eyeshadow; drink respectfully.
First, some history. There was this guy who hung out with one of the girls in our circle of friends. He was present only occasionally, and, when he was present, wasn't particularly interesting. He also interacted in peculiar ways; possibly he was schizoid.
Anyway, he once just left a large dinner gathering without telling anyone. It took us a while to realize that he was actually gone, not just strangling a waitress in the back of the kitchen. Someone commented (probably us) that he was a real colostomy bag. It was then pointed out that, while this noun was totally inappropriate for polite conversation taking place over dinner, it would be a killer name for a drink.
Behold! The list of ingredients: Crème de Cassis, Milk Duds(R), and some American beer that tastes like piss (here we chose PBR).
Attach the shot glass to the side of your pint glass with cloth medical tape.
Add three (for good luck!) Milk Duds to the bottom of the pint glass.
What made our salsa so brutal was Tannerite. Tannerite is, basically, ammonium nitrate (it's actually ammonium nitrate and ammonium perchlorate, with a sensitizer made from aluminum, titanium, and zirconium powders). It's very stable, relatively inexpensive as these things go, and a Hell of a lot of fun. Our hypothesis was that using explosives to make salsa would be faster than using a food processor.
We assumed that salsa would fly in every direction, and that not much would be recoverable. So we devised a science-project-esque, trifold-y backdrop to attempt recovery of enough salsa to taste.
"And Samuel said to the Salsa: 'Thou hast done foolishly...'" (1 Samuel 13:13)
Ammonium nitrate is of relatively low brisance (from the French briser - 'to break'), so maybe this was part of the problem. Energy-wise, a good rule of thumb is -5 x 106 J kg-1, and our charge weighed about 0.25 kg, releasing an estimated 1.25 MJ (for comparison, doing all this in our food processor would use about 48 kJ if it took one minute to process). Specific power can be estimated as the product of specific enthalpy of detonation with the velocity of advance of the reaction front, divided by an appropriate characteristic dimension. Because the specific dimension depends on the geometry of the system, calculating specific power is tricky, but 125 GW is reasonable for a dense-phase detonation.
This was probably a tad bit of overkill (two orders of magnitude more energy than necessary, at least) for the amount of tomatoes that we used. Our conclusion was that using explosives in food prep is totally awesome.
