Reading and Language & The Weird Wide Web 24 Sep 2005 12:55 pm
Pistachio Blaster
Don’t you hate it when you get down to the end of a bag of pistachios and you have only the closed-shell ones left? Maybe, if you are a cheapskate pistachio freak like me, you try to crack them or smash them open. That’s always messy and unsatisfying.
A better sorting machine has been developed for pistachios. The “Pistachio Blaster” drops nuts one-by-one onto a steel block and listens to the sound each nut makes. If it clicks like an open-shell nut, it’s allowed to pass, but if it clonks like a closed-shell nut, a blast of air shoots it into the reject bin.
The thing is about 90 percent accurate, processes about 25 nuts per second, and is probably the coolest pistachio sorter ever invented.
“That’s my new futurist name!” is a game that Josh and I sometimes play, based on a conversation I had with McJulie many years ago. (What’s your futurist name, Julie? I can’t remember. Something like Prissy Turpentine?) “Heavenly Whack-a-mole” was my futurist name yesterday, from a conversation about hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Today, it may be “Pistachio Blaster”. Or possibly that’s my new space-opera hero name — imagine a dashing Zorro-in-space figure as played by Bruce Campbell, with a zap gun in one hand and an épée in the other.
on 24 Sep 2005 at 11:44 pm 1.Grouchy Chris said …
We call her Bouncy Turpentine.
on 25 Sep 2005 at 12:30 am 2.Cam Sculpin said …
Ah!! Right! Thank you!
on 25 Sep 2005 at 2:22 pm 3.Ted said …
If you’re lazy (like me) you can buy shelled pistachio nutmeats from Trader Joe’s. Salted or unsalted.
on 25 Sep 2005 at 3:07 pm 4.Cam Sculpin said …
I did that once. They were delicious. So, so delicious. Oh, my aching tummy.
The shells slow me down in my voracious pistachio-gobbling, and that’s not really a bad thing.
on 25 Sep 2005 at 6:03 pm 5.Rechercher said …
The pistachio blaster sounds cool, but I was thinking at first of a toy gun that you could use to shoot rapid-fire pistachios at people. Fun, but probably too expensive anyway.
on 08 Apr 2008 at 11:10 pm 6.sasan zeini said …
dear sir
we want to have imformation about pistachio sorting machine.also some machine which lose aflatoxin.
could you please introduce us your those machine
best regards
sasan zeini