Space tourism

Drinking whisky in space.

And on a happier note

remote-controlled cockroaches!  (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Stackables

I was intrigued to learn earlier today that the inventor of the Pringles can was so proud that he asked for his ashes to be interred in one; further illumination arrives via Alexis Madrigal (and a surprising sequel featuring a can of Pringles and a very young Brad Pitt).

(I well remember the first Pringles I ever encountered as a child. I was probably five years old? They were not in the can; they had been laid out, decoratively, on some sort of a platter at the house of a family we knew from Montessori school, and they struck me as so much the most sublimely delicious food that I basically couldn't believe they existed. The only other early food encounter that holds a candle to it is my first time eating meringues, at my Aunt Pauline's house. Really Pringles and meringues have a certain amount in common [lack of substantiality, simple saltiness or sweetness], and they are both still foods that I can get pretty excited about, though it happens more frequently that I encounter a Pringle than a meringue...)

On invention

My friend Ed Park's sensibility and our mutual friend Jane Yeh's awareness of it are both so particular and vivid that I immediately labeled this NYT profile of Columbia radiation scientist David Brenner a "Jane reads the paper" bit:

He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.

"I am sensitive about the word glue"

They invented the Post-It note! (FT site registration required.)

"The small drama of opening and eating sweets"

At the LRB, John Lanchester ponders Britain's history as the preeminent creator of cheap chocolate:

[A]ll the great chocolate bars are British, and the first of them, and still my favourite, was Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, invented in 1905. Other great British bars appeared in a burst of heroic creativity in the 1920s and 1930s: the Flake in 1920, Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut in 1928, Fry’s Crunchie in 1929, the Aero in 1935, then in 1937 no fewer than three masterpieces, the Rolo, the Kit Kat and Smarties. All British inventions. According to Roald Dahl: ‘In music, the equivalent would be the golden age of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. In painting, it was the equivalent of the Italian Renaissance and the advent of Impressionism at the end of the 19th century; in literature, Tolstoy, Balzac and Dickens.’

Tapping a vein

This fellow really has hit the jackpot!

(Hmmm, I have been worrying a lot about money recently - like almost everyone else in the world! - I do not know that setting out to write a bestseller really is the way to write one, there is an element of the fortuitous that seems somewhat beyond rational ken, but it certainly would be convenient if I came up with a highly lucrative book project in the near future...)

The story is by Alison Flood, for the Guardian:

"I wouldn't say anyone ever singlehandedly created anything (unless maybe they were in complete isolation for their entire lives and then suddenly invented Velcro or something) but I do think that Seth has tapped a vein here," said acquiring editor Ben Greenberg. "I had been aware of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies when the online buzz started a while back, and so when this idea was pitched, it just immediately made sense to me and I thought it was a great direction for him."

The first book, said Greenberg, will be Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, "a presidential biography in the vein of a Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough, but repositioning the president as the greatest vampire hunter to walk the earth". Unlike Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, there is no source material, so the novel will be all original writing. "But rather than just toss vampires in wherever he feels, Seth is doing a lot of research to see where they could fit in properly to the actual events of Lincoln's life – from childhood on," said Greenberg.

In the lab

In the Writers' Rooms series at the Guardian, Heston Blumenthal's development kitchen:

People imagine I wake up in the morning saying something like "I'm going to make an ice-cream that walks", but 80% of the time I'm doing 40 versions of the same ice-cream recipe with different amounts of egg yolk. We're currently working on a new dish called the Mock Turtle Soup Mad Hatter's Tea. There are lots of Alice references and it comes together when the diner dips the most upmarket, gold-leafed, fob-watch-shaped stock cube into a bowl of broth to produce a gold-flecked consommé. However, to serve 250 of these a week will require a heavy-duty freeze drier that costs £40,000. You have to think about it. And the pie on the table? It's for a TV series on feasts, which will be shown next year. It looks traditional enough, but you should know that the inspiration came from the nursery rhyme with four and twenty blackbirds ...