Delicious, but unportable, the ice cream float is one of the few summer pleasures that food scientists have proven completely incapable of reproducing in bottle form. Every once and a while, the sages of Coca Cola or Pepsi or ABC will claim to have come up with the secret, only to slap a picture of a cartoon hugel of ice cream on the label and serve up a foul slime infused with so much chemical vanilla that a single sip causes the mucus membrane to melt away like a Fruit Roll-up dipped in toxic waste.

Over at the Mother Boing, our Cory spotted the Fizz Cup, an ingenious accessory to correct the shortcomings of the beverage industry through excellence of design. You simply scoop a mound of ice cream into the Fizz Cup and snap the top onto a bottle of Coke or Root Beer. Instant ice cream float satisfaction. Genius. And at £6.95, cheap enough for the impulse buy.

Fizz Cup [Firebox via Boing Boing]

Gavin Anderson snapped this picture of the "Sub Marine Catcher," a traditional claw game that replaces the moldy stuffed animals with adorable clacking lobsters. Snuggle up with a crustacean tonight!

There should be a bonus token that you can capture that, upon removal from the tank, causes the entire contraption to heat to boiling and spits out bibs and cups of melted butter.

Marine Catcher or the claws of Death! [Flickr via Serious Eats via Eat Geek]

Inside "Dave's Adjustable Hot Sauce" bottle are two chambers, one filled with scorching hot sauce fit only for braggarts and masochists, while the other holds a mixture barely hot enough to merit the name. Click the dial at the top to select your preferred place on the Scoville scale and then give it a press; the commingled sauce will spray out like mace all over your Mexican breakfast.

Inspired, I've created a similar product for French fries that allows you to select your preferred mixture of malt vinegar and mayonnaise. I'll release it once I figure out how to aerosolize mayonnaise, after which I'll replace the malt vinegar with more mayonnaise.

It's $10, plus shipping.

Catalog Page [DavesGourmet.Peachhost.com via Uncrate via Thrillist]

Keg Works is selling purportedly authentic British Imperial Pint Glasses: exact replicas of the stout receptacles that might be smashed into your face after a long night of binge drinking by an infuriated punk in Camden Town. This, for the record, is called glassing, and it's not fun. According to the site:

These are 100% authentic, imported from Europe, and feature the official European Union pint seal etched in the glass. The CE mark – which, in French, stands for ‘European Conformity’.

That there is an official committee to authenticate pint glass volume is an interesting glimpse into the Rube-Goldberg-esque workings of European bureaucracy, in and of itself.

The pint glass will cost you 7 bucks, which is probably worth it: there is a certain solid heft to a genuine pint glass that makes drinking a beer more pleasurable. Of course, 7 bucks is still 7 bucks more than stealing one from your local would cost you... the preferred method of stocking your cupboards in Albion.

Authentic British Style Imperial Pint Glass with Etched Seal [Kegworks]

I am an appreciative consumer of alcohol endorsed by rock musicians. I lost my virginity to a freaky girlfriend wooed into the folly of sleeping with me by goblets full of KISS-brand wine (or, perhaps more likely, the engorged, 14-inch long protrusion of Gene Simmons' tongue prominently displayed on the label). I also like absinthe — not for the taste, which is fermented Listerine, but for the pretentiousness: the ornate louching rituals, the vague idea of opium-scented absinthe parlors, fluffy cravats and decadent poets tormented by wormwood-induced spectres.

So I would think I would be all for Marilyn Manson's new absinthe, called Mansinthe. I'm not. Oh, yes, at $56 a bottle, it's not direly expensive, which is a plus. And as a product between Manson, Absinthe.de and Matter-Luginbühl AG, it should, at least, be just as drinkable as any absinthe. More, probably: it's won the gold medal at the 2008 San Francisco World Spirits Competition. Heck, it even has a pretty incredible bottle.

But ultimately, it's the name. Mansinthe. This is the exact name of the house specialty at a strange underground absinthe bar I was dragged to in San Francisco's Castro district a few years back. You don't even want to know how they louched it.

Mansinthe [Absinthe.de via Uncrate]

"Activate" is a new line of sports beverages that store the powdered "vitamins and herbs" in the cap. Twist the top and a small plastic blade cuts the seal, opening an armature that allows the ingredients to fall into the water. The conceit is that the vitamins will say at "maximum potency" since they are not deteriorating in water.

It's clever...for showing what a rip-off most sports drinks are. You're paying two dollars or more for a tiny little pouch of flavor powder — new-age Kool-Aid — that could be more inexpensively distributed in bulk. Instead, they're using extra plastic to build a mechanism that could be just as easily replaced by a tub of powder and a spoon. Or if beveraging on the go is your main priority: tiny, dissolving gelatin packets.

At least with a proper soft drink you're getting carbonation. (The occasional can of Coca-Cola and Welches' Grape are one of my favorite little indulgences.)

Product Page [ActivateDrinks.com]

Previously • Twist Cap Releases Instant Tea [BBG]

Sila Sutharat sells Thai roasted chicken at his stall in Bangkok, roasted under an array of sun-concentrating mirrors. It's a simple idea — one that many old solar ovens and newer solar energy farms are using — but it's the cooking time that surprised me: just 10 minutes for a whole chicken, claims Sutharat. Gizmodo's Mark Wilson thinks that the secret is in the marinade which, according to Wilson's theory, is highly acidic, effectively pre-cooking the chickens.

Now I'm curious. Have any of you guys built a solar-powered roaster before? I kind of want to try and make one, but it would probably be pretty wasteful to build a giant concave mirror concentrator just to roast the occasional chicken. This guy's saying he's knocking out 50 chickens a day, but there's no picture of his reflector.

Sun-cooked chickens are hot [BangKok Post (Google Cache) via Gizmodo via Inventor Spot]

A wine importer is selling a Malbec grape wine called "Yellow + Blue" in TetraPak, a container familiar to many in the UK for its use in drink boxes. Dr. Vino took a look:

The facility in Toronto is also certified organic. The wine is put in the one liter boxes that weigh 40 grams each (compared to 500 - 750g for a bottle) and loaded onto a truck for a warehouse in New Jersey. The total amount of wine will be about 10,000 nine-liter cases. Using my carbon calculator, I ran the numbers on this wine, called “Yellow + Blue” (makes green–get it?). I figure that each 750 ml of Yellow + Blue Malbec has about half the greenhouse gas emissions of a conventional bottle of wine from Argentina that followed the same route. The price will follow a similar discount: Yellow + Blue will sell for $10.99 in stores and Cain suggests that the same wine in bottle would sell for about $20. But Yellow + Blue, weighing in at one liter, holds a third more wine than a regular bottle.

But what about recycling? Wine bottles are relatively easy to dispose of properly, but in the US there is not a clear system for TetraPak recycling which can split the aluminum and polyethylene used to line the cartons.

I can't help but wonder if the trick is to stop drinking so much imported wine and trying to buy more locally available options as their available, returning and reusing the bottles. (Not always a good choice, I know.) Even so, a third more wine for the same price is a convincing argument.

Yellow + blue make green: a new organic malbec in TetraPak [Dr Vino]

Although certainly environmentally friendly, there are reasons not to encase your gadgets in the raw, seeping musculature of a freshly-slain bovine, no matter how many times you've seen Videodrome. Yes, it's delicious for a spell. Yes, it's a conversation starter. Yes, it will give you an in with that one goth chick who really has a hard-on for Hellraiser. Yes, it will ward off the smelliest of vegan hippies. But within a couple of weeks, all of these advantages are superseded by the drawbacks: a feeling of constant exhaustion that prevents you from brushing away the flies that keep landing on your eyeballs, the putrid kiwi-sized lumps glistening in your morning evacuations and, of course, the high cost of "freshening" up your protective iPod case every few weeks.

Enter the Mosquito Ruby Pod Rare, an iPod case that looks like you've slathered your MP3 player in glistening, marbleized flesh, but without the stench, the salmonella or the writhing of maggots. Unfortunately, the Mosquito Ruby is about as expensive as it gets for a rubber iPod case: $68 will buy you a lot of prosciutto. Perhaps it's time for the industry to start seriously examining the jerking process as a way to extend the life cycle of our gadgets' protective sheaths of flesh.

Mosquito Ruby Rod Rare [Rakuten via Dvice]

The new lids from my corner coffee joint look like Salvador Dali spitting brown juice into my mouth.

Bawls, maker of energy drinks, sent in a few bottles of its new high-caffeine "guarana g33k b33r" for review. I don't like root beer much — and root beer it is — and the addition of needless chemical anxiety to the mix made it seem an unappetizing brew.

Verdict: It was actually quite tasty, though the aftertaste of root beer still makes me feel like I've just swallowed cough syrup mixed with pureed housefly. The bottle looks a little too beer-realistic for inconspicuous public consumption. The little nipples on it feel funny.

It didn't keep me up, but I'm fairly caffeine-tolerant. There's 80mg a bottle, for the bean-counters out there — about the same as a cup of coffee.

Note: The quasi-leetspeak horrors in the headline refer to the product's official name.

Product Page [ThinkGeek]

Update: Reader "Shazbot" — are you a Triber or a Mork and Mindy fan? — drops this gem, "They missed an obvious opportunity to call this concoction chroot beer."

These wooden cuffs from Bentwood are made from cast-off architectural veneer and are molded to double as a sleeve for hot coffee cups. They're lovely, as wood so often is, but at $70 CAD about $60 more expensive than they should be. I'm all for not wasting paper, but something about using an expensive zebrawood cuff in lieu of a nickel's worth of cardboard seems strange to me.

Product Page [Contexture.ca via Gadget Lab via Book of Joe]

"Canstruction" holds competitions to create sculptures from canned food, then donates the food to shelters. Matt Boulton created this fine Optimus Prime out of canned goods and what appear to be foil baking trays.

Optimus Prime [Flickr via Serious Eats via Neatorama]

"'s Baggers," a restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany, delivers all its food on winding metal tracks, ordered right from the table via touchscreen. They serve Franconian cuisine "using very little fat," which I don't personally see as something to crow about, but as they've "overtaken the restaurants of the first and second dimension" to "answer [the] global challenge," I'm pretty sure that even the most fat-less dishes will come with a great big side of hyperbole. Still, looks fun!

Company Page [SBaggers.de]

Omlet, a UK company specializing in smartly designed chicken coops, has announced the "Eglu Cube," an even larger model than the original Eglu that can support up to 10 chickens (if you add the optional 3-meter wire run). The Eglu Cube is wheeled to make moving it around the yard simple, while the curved, nook-less surfaces make it simple to hose out while also helping to prevent infestation of red mites.

The wire chicken run extensions also feature a guarantee—"No Foxes Allowed"—by way of a fiendishly clever addition of about six inches of wire that extends flat from the bottom of the fence, making it difficult for burrowing animals to gain entry. (Unless they were smart enough to start digging a tunnel, a la The Great Escape, but my guess is most foxes aren't big Steve McQueen fans. James Garner—ironically—has a huge follow in the marmot community.)

Hens are sustainable, fairly easy to take care of, offer great natural fertilizer, and are surprisingly unobtrusive in even suburban settings. Most communities will allow residents to keep at least a few egg-laying hens (although rarely roosters). I don't know if the Eglu Cube will ever be available in the States, but even if you can't get your protein-craving hands on one, building a coop isn't all that difficult. And certainly cheaper than the £425 - £695 price of the Eglu Cube—if not quite as cute.

Product Page [Omlet.co.uk via Treehugger]

A Japanese company is selling these plastic bottles that hold 1.4 grams of green tea or other additives in the top. Twist the cap to release the tea into the water, creating an instant serving of cold-brewed tea. (The bottles in the picture are actually a kale-based health drink.)

I've no idea how much better the "instant" green tea might taste, but it's a clever, if still wasteful product. Wouldn't it be better just to sell the instant tea? I'm of slightly mixed emotion, though, since one of the things I love about Japan's ever-present vending machines are the cheap, unsweetened green tea always at ready. When I was a sweaty foreigner tromping through Tokyo, I guzzled more than my fair share.

(I had also packed a whole carton of American Spirit cigarettes, fearing I wouldn't be able to find any in Japan. Then I got there and realize that not only were American Spirits on sale in almost every cigarette vending machine, but they were actually cheaper than in New York.)

Bottle Innovations: Instant fresh tea [Trends in Japan]

Designer Nobuhiko Arikawa has created a line of edible tableware for the Orto Cafe in Japan, baked from traditional sailor's hardtack—a simple dough of flour, water, and salt. The bowls and chopsticks are shelf-stable for several months as long as they are kept dry.

Edible tableware by Rice-Design [Dezeen]

Previously • Leaf Bowls of India [BBG]

BRIAN DUNN, BOY INTERN – I can tell I've arrived at the Gillies Coffee roasting plant from the faint but pleasant smell of coffee that permeates the surrounding block.

Apparently, this is a bad thing.

In 2002, the New York Department of Environmental Protection fined the coffee company for smelling exactly like what it produces. For years, owners Don Schoenholt and Hy Chabbott fought the fine—arguing that it was impossible to stop the smell, until finally acquiescing last year.

The city's negative attention is somewhat unfathomable, given that Gillies has both been around so long—now in its 168th year, the company is both a New York institution and the oldest coffee merchant in the United States—and has such a strong environmental record. In addition to promoting Fair Trade coffee and working with the Smithsonian on preserving bird habitats, the company operates a smoke-free roaster, guaranteeing that the only smells released are from the beans themselves.

Gillies has been around for a long while, but it's managed to stay under the radar, even as coffee appreciation has moved into the mainstream. Schoenholt himself admits that he's not a businessman—he's a coffee man. That's why Gillies abandoned the retail portion of their business, instead choosing to keep the focus on the coffee, which it sells through its website, in Fairway supermarkets, and wholesale to a variety of clients.

After the jump, a tour through the Gillies' roasting facility. Above right, an antique industrial coffee grinder. Directly below, a sponsored mobile widget from Microsoft.

Trademork is reporting that Twentieth Century Fox, rights-holders to the Futurama brand, has trademarked "Slurm," the once-fictional monstrously addictive beverage made from the secretions of a giant worm Slurm Queen harvested by singing Grunka-Lunkas. The trademark covers, "carbonated and non-carbonated soft drinks; fruit drinks; fruit juices; mineral and aerated water; bottled drinking water; energy drinks; syrups and powders for making soft drinks and other beverages, namely soft drinks, fruit drinks and tea; coffee-flavored soft drinks; Ramune (Japanese soda pops); powders used in the preparation of isotonic sports drinks and sports beverages."

I'm waiting on New Slurm, myself.

Slurm [Trademork.com]

"Heita3" makes musical instruments from vegetables. He's made a lovely ocarina from a rather large carrot and played one of the short themes from The Ocarina of Time.

Kotaku has some more videos from Heita3, who also has made a pan flute from carrots, a radish slide whistle, and more ocarinas from broccoli and mushrooms.

Zelda Song Played ON A FRIGGIN' CARROT [Kotaku]

Previously • Vegetable orchestra [BB]

Unless you've stockpiled dozens of cases of Concord Grape Goober in your larder, you'll likely find the £1,400 "Robot Coupe" to be a bit more bread slicer than your average kitchen requires. Cram a rod of French bread in the Robot Coupe and you'll find up to 180 slices in the hamper in just a minute, provided you have a loaf that is at least 1.44 meters long—the Coupe can cut slices from 8mm to 80mm thickness. (Look at me with my big ol' calculator!)

The Oobject gallery (linked below) from which the slicer was pulled is full of over a dozen similar examples of industrial cooking machines, like a "small (read: not small) juicy meat bun maker" and a "generic fried snack food machine." They all make me wish my spring-loaded jaw were rated for a higher snack-per-second intake rate.

Catalog Page [Catering-Machines.com via Oh Gizmo via Oobject]

A fishing cellphone game in Japan rewards some winners with real, raw fish delivered fresh to their door.

When a fish takes the bait, the player is sent to a slot machine screen where, if luck prevails and 3 numbers line up appropriately, the virtual fish is hooked and reeled in. A message is then relayed to the wholesaler, who picks up the real-world equivalent from the local seafood market and delivers it, whole and raw, to the player’s doorstep.

If videogames start rewarding you with actual food I am doomed. Going to get grub is about the only thing that gets me out of the house already!

Ippon Zuri: Catch-and-eat fishing by phone [Pink Tentacle via Gizmodo]

Serious Eats' Adam Kuban documents the "Col-Pop," perhaps the future of popcorn chicken and soda delivery. It's available at BBQ Chicken, which has only a handful of stores open in the U.S. at the moment, but will be expanding soon.

And the genius doesn't stop at popcorn chicken. In South Korea, sister company BHC Chicken also offers spaghetti, french fries, and fried mozzarella balls in Col-Pop containers.

Snack to the Future: The Col-Pop, an All-in-One Chicken Nugget and Soda Cup [SeriousEats.com]

Update: Reader Orlando took the Col-Pop for a spin and posted his field report in the comments:

I actually went and had one around lunch time yesterday at the Manhattan location. First off, they aren't cheap... the large Col-Pop is around 5$. Secondly, while the idea of the container itself is pretty cool, the resulting product was just okay. The chicken balls (thats really what they are, balls of chicken, no need to pretty this up for you) were okay. BBQ Chicken actually fries their chicken in olive oil, which they claim makes it "healthier", but I was under the impression that only using raw olive oil made it a healthier oil. Basically anything fried is gonna make you fatter and more heart attack worthy. Flavour wise, big step up from KFC, which I don't eat, because, well, its gross. The chicken was very lightly breadded, and was, unlike the KFC popcorn chicken, actually contained meat, not just breadded fat. Basically crispy and tender. The major flaw was not that the chicken affected the soda, nor soda the chicken, but that the cup itself began to get soft and flimsy feeling by the end of my snack gorging. So, end result, as I said before, I felt it was an okay product, just that was a little expensive for my taste, and probably wouldn't buy again.

The new "Snickers Charged" candy bar includes 60 milligrams of caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins, about the same as a cup of coffee. (Well, minus the taurine, of course.) Candyblog got a sample and said it had a bitter aftertaste, but should be a fairly good deal as far as cheap blasts of caffeine go, depending on what your local snack shack charges for coffee.

I will probably end up grabbing a couple of these. Frozen Snickers bars are one of my favorite indulgences.

Snickers Charged [Candyblog via Serious Eats]

Previously • BBtv: Blip Festival, Sweet Spot Candy Expo, More Chip Tunes Artists [BBG]
• Sweet Spot: Where I Get to Go Eat Free Candy [BBG]
• Stōk: Coffee Shots in Creamer Tubs [BBG]
• Powder-Filled Gel "Pac" Mints Mistaken for Drugs by Narcos [BBG]

It's a me three-for today on BBtv, with a short vlog showing some highlights from this year's Blip Festival, some video of my trip to the place where they fed me candy, and—for those who really want to get to know some of the guys that make the music—a sit-down discussion with some of the luminaries of the chiptunes scene. The first two are in the clip above, while the longer discussion is below.

To address the question that's been on everyone's lips over the last couple of days: yes, I have a fantastic collection of scarves. And you guys haven't even seen the pink one, yet.

The sound on the second one is rough—the Blip Fest was going on through the walls behind us—and it's not edited down to typical web length just because I wanted to leave it all up for the fans.

Paul Pape is offering these Mii-shaped chocolate treats for Valentine's Day, shipped in a Nintendo Wii-shaped box. The figures aren't based on your own Mii avatars, but that's fine. I'm sure they'd cost more than $15 if they did.

Catalog Page [PaulPapeDesigns.com via Boinkology via YumSugar]

Serious Eats' Erin Zimmer risked gullet and gut to sample a "F'Real Shake," some sort of gas station make-your-own milk shake machine.

Something like a DIY malt shop from the future, it lets you pick from a mini-freezer of ice cream cups (chocolate, vanilla, strawberry or a limited-edition egg nog) and thickness settings (extra, regular or less thick). After dropping my vanilla into the sleek blue machine and choosing extra-thick, the cup levitated to a shake-making heaven. Some bzzt noises later, and it dropped back down to our mortal world