Category Archives: Oddments

Crusty Infantry

At several points in the course of the Discworld series Terry Pratchett mentions that Sam Vimes is fond of cutting his toast “into soldiers.” I had no idea what this meant: my mind’s eye envisioned the careful carving of paper-doll shapes into a piece of browned bread, which seemed like a lot of effort to go to at the breakfast table.

However, this morning I happened to run across a pointer, on BoingBoing, to an article about the genesis of a clever and handy toast-soldier stamp; it turns out that the soldier is a simple strip of cut toast optimized for poking through the opening of a soft-boiled egg to mop up yolk.

The new stamp improves upon the tried-and-true soldier by sealing the edges of the cut before toasting, supposedly producing a more structurally-robust unit. If I can find a vendor who’ll ship to the U.S., I might have to order one just for the novelty value.

Fun with CGI

I don’t know why this impresses me so much more that the veritable glut of eye candy that issued forth from Revenge of the Sith. Perhaps it’s the fact that it’s embedded in a realistic setting, and reflects its environment so accurately that the only way you know it has to be rendered is that no one yet knows how to build a standalone three-story-tall dancing robot for real.