Happy Birthday George Washington

 

In my life I have visited Valley Forge countless times but one day it struck me that none of those visits had been in the Winter, and Winter is at the heart of the story of the place. Having decided to make my first Winter visit, I nonetheless kept putting it off until Winter lifted and I had missed my chance. Then I waited for next Winter and then Winter came and I continued to put it off.

But when it came to the point where George Washington's birthday was coming up on Saturday, I had to pull the trigger. Visiting in the Winter on George Washington's birthday was too fitting. So I visited Valley Forge and, for the first time, visited George Washington's headquarters. The people there tell me the wood railing on the stairs is still original so I've now used a railing that George Washington also used.

Aside from visiting in the Winter and honoring the birthday, my other goal was to see the powder horn of Jabez Rockwell. I did a few laps around the museum and didn't see it. When I asked the Park Rangers where it was, they looked at me like I had two heads. No one knew where it was and so that objective ultimately failed. Turning to AI to locate it, it seems to be one of those cases where you get a completely confident answers that are nonetheless completely wrong. One AI answer does tell me this though:

The horn maintains an honored place within the historic collections of Valley Forge National Historical Park.

Oh, does it? Ok, show me. Searching for the horn on the park's website doesn't even return any results. A famous artifact that's nowhere to be seen and not worth mentioning? A "National Treasure" level heist is afoot.

So the final twist of this story is that the Park Rangers actually gave me contact info in case I want to actually call some people up to track this mystery further. Very strange. I may be enough of a loser to do that.

If you'd like to read the story of George Washington, Jabez Rockwell and his powder horn, you can do that here.

The Super Mario 3 Roulette Game Was Rigged

I always assumed that there was something I was missing about the Super Mario Bros 3 sliding picture game - I was sure there was a skill or "trick" to it, but I never figured out what that trick was. The following video goes pretty deep into NES programming, it's not going to be for everyone, but the point is: there is no skill or trick that would guarantee success. It was frustrating because it was always down to blind luck.

Why Not Visit Zombo Com?

 Visit Zombo Com and tell all your friends to visit Zombo Com.

https://zombo.com/

Re-Making Super Mario World in 3D

A guy re-makes Super Mario World so that it's 3D.

This is not so much interesting to me because of the game development - I don't really care - I love the aesthetic of the pixels and colors. It's so visually pleasing.

Late Show - Best of Amy Sedaris

Ah, Amy Sedaris, eases the pain.

Movie Theater Popcorn At Home - Results

 A while back, I shared a video which claimed to have cracked the code on movie theater popcorn at home and I teased that I would try the experiment myself. I have done so and can now report back from the field.

First off, using Amazon and area grocery stores I was able to obtain the recommended elements. Here is my own photo as proof.

The Results

It works. The result tastes exactly like movie theater popcorn in my opinion. In order to be authoritative, I would like to have tried other methods and recipes to determine a ranking but I have not done that so all I can say is this is as authentically movie theater popcorn as I can imagine any popcorn being.

Criticisms and Warnings

Jeers to the original video for not giving ingredient measurements. Yes, everyone is going to need to figure it out according to their own tastes but that's going to happen anyway, you might as well give a starting point. You can keep adding more coconut oil until it's enough, so that's easy, but I overdid the Flavacol and paid the price. So for that I will pass on to you: 1/3 to 1/2 of a tablespoon.

The video mentions using 4 test kernels and waiting until all 4 have popped before adding the rest. It's a small moment in the video but a very important point: wait until all 4 have popped. I lifted the lid and got a kernel pop as I was working with it. The result was a spray pattern of oil on the wall and myself and probably other places that I just haven't found yet. Wait until all 4 have popped.

Other Notes

Part of the movie theater experience is the fake butter chemicals. For the video, I believe that's the "Popping and Topping Oil" that is covered briefly. I love the fake butter chemicals and would have liked to evaluate that as well but here my completionist tendencies butted head-on against my sense of trying not to eat like an absolute madman and I excluded that aspect as overkill. A future consideration perhaps; if you try it, you  let me know.

One of the ingredients that he recommends (and I bought) was the "Movie Theater Butter Salt." That seems unnecessary to me. It's salt and the Flavacol is salt, so why both? Well, you might find at the end it needs more salt, but in that case, why not add more Flavacol? I say you can exclude this item but there may be a nuance I'm missing. Dunno.

What Is This Stuff?

Are you like me, are you horrified by a giant orange vat and a substance called Flavacol? What are we talking about here? Well, here are the ingredients.

Snappy Popcorn Colored Coconut Oil - Coconut oil and beta carotene. So that's actually, surprisingly, not horrifying.

Flavacol - Salt, natural flavors, artificial flavors, dyes. Hmm, so that's not actually horrifying either.

Popping and Topping Oil - Soybean oil, artificial flavor, beta carotene - Don't need more seed oils but not horrifying in the grand scheme of things.

Surprising result! Did not expect that.