Cafe Creativity

At face value, the lines between verbal irony, sarcasm, and compliments can be blurry. After all, the phrase 'That looks nice' could be all three depending on the circumstances. In the final of a three part series on irony, Christopher Warner gets into the irony you may use most often and most casually: verbal irony.

Composer Steve Hackman is creating mash-ups, like Drake & Tchaikovsky or Radiohead & Brahms, so more people will learn to love classical music.

What exactly makes a poem ... a poem? Poets themselves have struggled with this question, often using metaphors to approximate a definition. Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream? Melissa Kovacs shares three recognizable characteristics of most poetry.

Replika is a chatbot that creates a digital representation of you. It's strange and fascinating -- but the story behind it is even better.

Performance artist and unlikely chef Tom Brown is bringing strangers together around the tiny kitchen, where he's serving up tiny foods and words of wisdom. Along with his fully functional portable kitchen, Tom has made more than 300 utensils and tools that he uses to cook up real, edible miniature foods. He may be passing out free lunches, but the gifts he gets from his customers are worth all the work.

Last round, my efforts to recreate the fabled McDonald's Szechuan Sauce were wild, flailing shots in the dark, pathetic and meager attempts to recreate a long-lost condiment out of scanty information and back-alley sources.

There's milk, dark, white, and now, ruby chocolate. It's made naturally from ruby cocoa beans and tastes sour.

Rodney Dangerfield made a career on thumbing his nose at social mores, making sexual advances toward older women, and eating a giant sandwich made out of hors d'oeuvres.

This sustainable initiative is helping to save Haiti's forests.

Regular Show regularly shows some fantastical and impossible food items - sandwiches that kill you, wings that kill you, skydiving pizza pockets - but few are quite so worthy of recreation as the Ultimeatum, the burger-within-a-burger-between-two-burgers. And ketchup from the Himalayas. Follow along this week to see if we can beat Chef Ajay Maldonaldo at his own game.

We had a panel of kids prepare and taste test 100 years of sandwiches from 1900 to today. Here's what they thought about PBJs, po' boys, paninis, and everything in between.

Pre-order my first cookbook, Eat What You Watch: A Cleverly-Titled Romp Through the Fanciful Fetes of Fiction! Really it's just called Eat What You Watch, but I totally should have called it that instead.

A 31-year-old woman has turned her back on expensive rents and property prices - by living full time in a van. With an interior measuring just 13ft 2in long, 5ft 8in wide and 6ft 2in high, Eileah Ohning's home is her Freightliner Sprinter High Top van. The photographic producer from Columbus, Ohio, has lived in her compact four-wheel home since May 2017. Complete with a memory foam mattress, storage compartments, a desk and a camping stove, she even has plans to add in a shower, toilet and fridge. Eileah parks her van close enough to her workplace that she never needs to worry about the morning commute and showers at her local gym.

Wes Anderson's films are rife with clashing color schemes, furrow-browed pedantry, and rich character development set against an oddly symmetrical backdrop. In the case of The Grand Budapest Hotel, it's also home to a pastry as precious as its parentage.

Visiting Sideshow Collectiblers's massive booth at Comic-Con is always a treat, because the collectibles company puts stunning prototypes of figures and statues on display. We pick our favorite things at this year's booth, including a sixth-scale Hulkbuster and a life-size K-2SO from Star Wars!

The Impossible Burger is meatless, but it tastes, smells, and bleeds like the real thing. The secret ingredient? Neuroscience.

Ash and his team of clowns, musicians and dancers are 'play specialists' who work with children in refugee camps across Europe. The aim is to allow the kids "to feel good, feel daft, and feel playful".

Once Upon a Time in Mexico, against all odds, played a large role in the creation of BwB - my first-ever DVD, its special features showed me that I could one day be a filmmaker *and* a chef. In this 2003 Banderas action-comedy, Johnny Depp inexplicably caps a cook for making this Yucatanian special a bit too perfectly; as director Robert Rodriguez says, make at your own peril.

MIT's self-folding origami technology that could change how we design everything from airbags to wearables.

Imagine you were asked to invent something new. It could be whatever you want, made from anything you choose, in any shape or size. That kind of creative freedom sounds so liberating, doesn't it? Or ... does it? if you're like most people you'd probably be paralyzed by this task. Why? Brandon Rodriguez explains how creative constraints actually help drive discovery and innovation.

Special thanks to SCJ for shooting - the ultimate breakfast sandwich for hangovers, one-night-stands, or both. This video was made in response to a Reddit AMA question: What's your favorite breakfast sandwich?