DID YOU KNOW? Every living cast member of Cheers appeared on Frasier sometime during its run, with the exception of Kirstie Alley, who refused to appear a show portraying psychiatry in a positive light.
My beloved high school friend Shana once said that this blog was "slowly becoming dominated by pictures of salads" and I never knew whether that was a bad thing, but I noticed that it's gone away for a little bit. Mostly I've just been so busy with lab and running and piano practicing that by the time I get home and actually cook some dinner I'm too lazy to go all food porn all over it.
But I was waiting for an experiment to run around 12:30 PM today, so here's some pictures of my lunch, which was seriously fantastic; like, top five lunches I've ever packed.
First I had a salad with some lettuce, heirloom tomato, cucumber, honeydew melon, and a few mint leaves that I tore up right before leaving the house when I remembered that we never ended up getting around to mojitos at our housewarming. With some salt and pepper on top, it didn't even need a dressing--the juice from the tomatoes and honeydew had really permeated the vegetables by lunchtime.
Then to get some carbs into me I had some flax pasta (tastier, healther, and cheaper than regular pasta at Trader Joe's, who knew?) with some long beans, chives, spinach, lemon zest, and Greek yogurt. It was pretty good hot, but the lemon zest flavor just intensified in the fridge and made it outstanding. It was also my first time using Greek yogurt--I bought some because it was on sale and Heidi uses it in like every other recipe she writes, and I have to say, it's kind of awesome, and I didn't have to use that much, mixed with the pasta water, to get a nice creamy sauce.
Anyway, that's my life right now. Stay tuned soon for a weekend update. I have oh so much to tell you.
DID YOU KNOW? Darren Aronofsky is in talks to direct a revival of Robocop.
Last Thursday Ruthie and I went to the MIT Club of Northern California East Bay meetup at Jupiter. I knew there wouldn't be any free beer, which was cool because I'm not crazy about their beer anyway, but yo, I was like "Hey free pizza let's go!" It turns out that there was actually no free pizza bu that was cool because we got to meet a lot of cool people, like a 61-year-old dude who biked across the country last year and a literature major and my 10.10 TA and his wife.
And Yau-Man. I don't actually watch Survivor, but I read enough about it on Television Without Pity to know that he's basically the most beloved Survivor contestant ever. He opened heavy crates by using his knowledge of physics and played possum and outplayed everyone and would have one except he made a deal to give this dude named Dreamz a car in exchange for immunity, and then Dreamz was like "Oh just playin'" and Yau-Man lost. He's an MIT graduate and is actually the computer coordinator for the college of chemistry here. So extensive is his reality TV fame that during our library orientation last year, the head librarian was like, "And if you need to do any of this, you'll need to see Yau-Man... from Survivor."
So, I mean, Ruthie and I were just sitting there, munching on some assorted pizzas named after Jupiter's sexual liaisons (best one: Io, although I would have picked a spicier pizza to correspond with the most volcanically-active body in the solar system) and I was all, "Oh man, that dude in the corner? It's Yau-Man. From Survivor." Granted, Paella Dan is best friends with Chris from Beauty and the Geek, but still, Survivor carries a certain prestige. Those of you who know me know I'm all about the recognizing barely-celebrities in random situations and then kind of stalking them, so I was pretty excited about this whole deal.
Turns out that my mutant power wasn't really needed this time, because on his way out Yau-Man was like, "Hey, look at me! I'm the only MIT alum ever to be on a reality show!" No, he really said that. "Hey, look at me!" I mean, I'm a famewhore, but it's not like I go into MIT prefrosh chat rooms and get all "Hey, look at me!" Then he gave us all postcard-sized pictures with his name and face on one side and Survivor cast photos in the other. Because, you know, he carries those around in his jacket.
And that's when I leanded over and said, "Man, Yau-Man just became one hundred times less cool than he was an hour ago."
But, you know, I kind of forgot about that by the end of the night when we were walking through a Taco Bell drive-thru in search of Chicken McNuggets and wandering to Berkeley Bowl in search of a five-pound bag full of Mason jars.
So that was Thursday. Then today I headed over to the UC Berkeley faculty club in search of a free lunch and it turns out that yo, they really do exist. Basically last week I had just gotten an e-mail from someone named Arlene that said, "Please join us for lunch at the Faculty club" and I was like, "Oooh, that sounds free" so I ended up being the first to respond which is, you know, only slightly embarrassing. I read a little further down the e-mail and saw that it was a talk about toxic chemicals in consumer products and, yo, that sounded pretty cool too.
So I showed up in my finest I-don't-know-if-it's-casual-or-not attire and grabbed some free lunch and it was okay lunch, but you know, also free, and headed back to the auditorium. On the way I caught up with Hagar, who was like, "Oh man, I was so glad to hear that Arlene was speaking today! I tried to catch her at a women's lunch the other week but I was out of town."
And I was like "Hmmm, that's interesting." Because the crowd wasn't so big but the room was still awkwardly full and it was hard to eat without bumping into people. I introduced myself to the older lady next to me and it turned out that she was the wife of the late George Pimentel, who has like eight things named after him. In her adorable British accent she revealed that she wasn't a scientist but she had gotten involved in the department through her husband, although she only knew Arlene from her mountaineering days.
"Mountaineering?" I asked.
"Why yes!" Turns out that I came to the totally overbooked speech of the leader of the first all-female expedition up Annapurna I. And, I mean, it's not one of those physical feats like the Boston Marathon where the women's winner finishes like fifteen minutes behind (only because Paula Radcliffe has not yet entered): Arlene's expedition was also the first American ascent of the peak and among the first ten overall.
So, I mean, good job Arlene. Then I listened to her speech (introduced by Mrs. Pimentel, who made the example that "some people here didn't even know of her mountaineering!") and found out that she also attempted to climb Everest (the first woman to do so) within six months of having a paper published in Science and pretty much single-handedly got carcinogens out of children's pajamas. Currently she's working on a colloborative effort to help keep toxic chemicals out of consumer products since the government basically does nothing to achieve that end; in fact, the flame-retardant IKEA couch Ruthie is sitting on could be killing her as we speak.
And at the end of Dr. Blum's speech, she was like, "I have copies of my book here if you want them." And you know? You know, Yau-Man? I did want a copy of her book. But I couldn't get to her in time and I had to take some samples out of the ellipsometer. So I'm going to pick it up from the library tomorrow. But it got me thinking about fame a little bit. Because, yo, first author in Science and climbing Annapurna is totally deserving of free solicitation of personal materials. Fourth place on Survivor? Well, not so much.
Thus I will stop introducing myself to strangers as former MIT blogger Sam Maurer.
DID YOU KNOW? Samuel L. Jackson provided the voice of God for an audio book version of The Bible.
And a hearty welcome to Sam's Mom, who was referred to the new blog by my dad. I knew it was only a matter of time--a matter that grows ever shorter when one's explicit goal is to become the number one hit for "Sam Maurer" on Google. For those of you wondering, Sam's Mom ended up liking my award-winning cover of Sad, Sad Toaster, pronouncing it "very bohemian almost coffee-house-ish even though I know they don't do things like that any more" and now I wished I had taken her to that event in San Francisco where people were doing read-aloud poetry slams of Yelp reviews, but we were really tired and busy moving.
Also, you know, apologies for the coarse language.
On Tuesday night I was thinking a lot about who I am and how my philosophy of life works. It was really caused by my inability to resist temptation and eat a Ben & Jerry's filled ice cream sandwich made with cookies from Safeway. Honestly, that was kind of delicious. I've always said that the road to enlightenment is paved with self-deprivation (which is why I still observe Lent and try to give up coffee every single year) but now I think it might be paved with ice cream sandwiches. But only ones filled with cookie dought ice cream. God, it's the greatest idea in polyphasic dessert since the time we poured cake batter on top of cake as a sauce.
Luckily, the internet had some answers for me.
I was RSVP'ing to my the Coffee-Dong wedding and I decided to look around on their website and noticed that I made the "special thanks" section, which has really always been one of my goals: to be thanked specially. Or thanked for being special. I'm not too sure really. Anyway, not only was the couple nice enough to think of me on their website, they wrote a most flattering and exhaustive biography.
Really, not much more need be said. I am, in fact, playing piano at their wedding, which has been just a journey of self-discovery that will be chronicled in a later post. Today I did have to ask Shannon if I could play an easier piece instead of The Blue Danube because the waltz is my new nemesis (you're off the hook, Daniel Gross) and I hope that she lets me, because, you know, messing up someone's wedding, that's not really something you live down.
I mean, when I go back and think about it Sarah's wedding band had a false start on their "God Only Knows" processional music, but it was forgiveable because they were generally so amazing and because I met Cuddy. I just need to bring Cuddy to this wedding somehow.
So, you know, I was feeling pretty good today, reading that biography and kind of digging the music I'm gonna be playing, getting some fixins for our housewarming party with Ruthie and finding two sweet shirts at Buffalo Exchange. After some debate and some increases in train pricing (seriously, people, buy Amtrak tickets early), I decided that I would, in fact, spend a day of Midwest Wedding Explosion going to Cedar Point; seriously, I took a solo train journey for seventeen hours to see a statue of Freddie Mercury, so going to arguably the world's greatest theme park is small stuff for me. One caveat is that it does cut my time down in Chicago to one weekday, which means I'll likely have at most one chance to get tickets to a taping of Oprah.
I did some snooping around her website and found out that tickets for this season haven't been released yet because the schedule hasn't been finalized, and that the best way to find out when the schedule is finalized is to sign up for her mailing list. I mean, I'm pretty fastidious about things, usually (fastidious, self-depriving, male, lived next to Shannon--all stuff I found out about myself) but even I lack the dedication to visit Oprah's website every single day to find out when tickets go on sale.
DID YOU KNOW? Periods don't actually matter in your gmail address. Google totally ignores them.
Like most things, I don't really know about the economy; I don't know whether I should be preparing for total bloodcar apocalypse as some people seem to suggest or just kind of a gentle restructuring and the country I grew up in not being quite the badass it once was or if Al Gore leads us to a new utopia of nuclear energy and public transportation. One thing I've heard a lot lately is that we made it through the 80's and we can certainly make it through this, but then again in the 80's we had Ronald Reagan and he was recently voted the greatest American citizen ever (no, really).
One thing I do know is that this article from last month's Newsweek is the worst article on any subject that has ever been written. You know it's going to be bad right there in the first paragraph, when Daniel Gross writes, "American employers axed 49,000 jobs in May, the fifth straight month of job losses—an event that signals a recession sure as the glittery ball dropping on Times Square augurs a New Year," which is a simile that induces nausea sure as misoprostol induces labor, but oh my, then it gets far, far worse. Look down, ye mighty, and despair.
"Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, tells NEWSWEEK that "home sales and prices in most of the country will improve during the second half of 2008." (Yun is the Little Orphan Annie of forecasters. He's always sure the sun will come out tomorrow.)"
"Thehead winds that drove the economy into this dead calm— a housing and credit crisis, and rising energy and food prices—have strengthened rather than let up in recent months."
"Banks are extricating themselves from the home-equity-line-of-credit business in the same way college students get themselves out of relationships gone bad: abruptly."
"But today banks are acting more like dried sponges, absorbing the liquidity the Fed is providing to shore up their balance sheets and make up for losses, rather than releasing the cash into the economy."
"The upshot: the Fed's adrenaline isn't really circulating through the commercial bloodstream. "
"Five months later, the global economy seems to have decoupled faster than Jessica Simpson and John Mayer. "
"Sorry, Tom Friedman, the world is no longer flat. "It is upside down," says Mohamed El-Erian, co-CEO of bond mutual-fund giant PIMCO."
"But as this decade motors toward its close, it seems powered by China, and Russia, and Dubai and Mumbai. It's as though we're home watching reruns while everybody else is out partying."
"Worse, some of those benefiting the most from the new tilt on the Risk board are hostile to the U.S., like Hugo Chávez of Venezuela."
Seriously, Daniel Gross? "New tilt on the Risk board?" "Decoupled faster than John Mayer and Jessica Simpson?" "Little Orphan Annie of forecasters?" Oh, wait, he does finish that one up.
"For signs that tomorrow really is a day away, look to the thing that got us into this mess: housing. "Housing doesn't have to return to the bubble era. It's just that the rate of decline has to stop," says Lakshman Achuthan, managing director at the Economic Cycle Research Institute."
I didn't learn much about the economy from this article, but I did come out with the knowledge that Daniel Gross should be ashamed of himself. Seriously, unless his only goal was to win a bet to see if he could insert a horrible, overwritten metaphor into every single paragraph of an otherwise somewhat informative article, I'm pretty much convinced that he's the worst writer, ever, in the history of journalism.
And seriously, I can sympathize. I think great artists borrow. I referenced Ozymandias up there. I've been known to write "Like a facebook relationship gone awry, it's complicated." And I'm almost ready to stop writing like that, because from this article I have also learned that this writing style is really annoying to everyone who is not me.
But you know? I write a blog. It's about Project Runway and chickens and spraining my ankle while taking a poop. Daniel Gross wrote an article about the economy for Newsweek. And really, it's by far the most terrible thing I have ever read. Seriously, it beats "Snow In August," because that had the most insulting ending of any novel in history but at least that dude knew how to write. Kind of. So it wasn't like he was stabbing you, metaphorically speaking, in every single paragraph.
So Daniel Gross? If you're ever googling yourself and find this, please feel deep, deep shame. I don't really want to find out if you're actually a terrible writer or just a sick joker, but really, I'm convinced that you're generally just awful. You are my new nemesis.
DID YOU KNOW? You can get two-for-one Jamba Juice until the end of July using this coupon.
But in happier news, I just found out that there is a list of every Starbucks in the United States that is closing within the next year and one of them is the one at Shattuck and Cedar right by my old digs in Berkeley. I'm kind of not surprised that it's closing because there are five places to get cheaper, yuppier coffee within two blocks ("better" is a value judgment, but "cheaper" and "yuppier" are objective) and one of them is the original Peet's.
Seriously, when you open the Peet's website as of this writing, these are the first two words you see. "Yuppier" is totally objective.
I guess the two things I miss most about my old apartment are proximity to Monterey Market, the greatest grocery store in recorded history, was its proximity to the original Peet's Coffee and Tea. I always loved having people over who wanted coffee, because then I could be all, "Oh, if you hurry, you can make it to the original Peet's! It's only two blocks away at Oxford and Vine." I've heard that Cole Coffee near Ruthie and me is pretty good, except that they get mad if you don't pick out the exact beans you want or whatever; nevertheless it doesn't have the same cachet as referring someone to "the original Peet's."
Anyway, now that I don't live two blocks from the original Peet's anymore I'm trying to give up coffee again. Basically my entire life is a struggle to give up coffee, except before I had even started drinking it, at which point it was a struggle never to drink coffee. I've kind of worked my way off by drinking only black coffee, rationalizing that my current number one goal in life is to be as butch as possible and lattes are the number one impediment to that other than Project Runway reruns. Yet still, oh, the smell, it just gets me sometimes. The taste is usually just okay, and coffee always does a number on my stomach, but, dang, I've got some sort of like Pavlovian salivary response to the smell of coffee now and it's kind of freaking me out. My best guess is that I developed this conditioning during my sophomore year at MIT, the promise of coffee from the Building 4 Cafe being the only thing keeping me going through Thursday night 18.701 all-nighters.
Speaking of all-nighters, I'm only finishing up this entry because I'm currently in the throes of an insomnia plague. I've found a lot of things to do, like washing the dishes and getting a platinum medal on Wii shooting gallery and researching methods of killing ants and doing push-ups and starting bread dough, cutting tofu and sending out housewarming party invitations, and also unsuccessfully trying to hang up Pinchy again. Man, that's a lot. But finishing up my new blog entry, that's important too. At this point, I don't know if I should even go to sleep because I want to get to Berkeley Bowl around 10 AM so that I can avoid the crowds.
It's all very nostalgic, because Ruthie just woke up and I was like, "I don't have a problem!" except I was playing Wii Play instead of doing psets and she was going to the free clinic instead of the UA office, and "Should I sleep or should I wake now?" is such an undergrad thing to think. And really, I should be tired. I was in the city all day today. I saw a punk rock marching band and a glass fungus exhibit and the most expensive thrift store ever and ate a burrito with tongue and then the topper was that Ruthie and I split Sam's Sundae at Bi-Rite, which is chocolate ice cream, olive oil, sea salt, and whipped cream. I hypothesize that if you ask for one scoop of chocolate and one scoop of roasted banana ice cream, that would be the most fantastic gourmet ice cream experience of all time.
Ruthie and I saw The Dark Knight at midnight last night, which ultimately was probably a very good decision because it meant I was really tired when I got home at 3 AM, which meant that I was able to sleep, which probably would not have been possible otherwise. Seriously, it's the most disturbing movie I've seen since Requiem for a Dream, and although it didn't quite leave me in a fetal position muttering "Where's Spring?" like that movie did.
It's rated PG-13 and if you let your 13-year-old see The Dark Knight you are totally a bad person. Seriously, maybe it has no swearing or blood or drug use but no other film is going to make you consider and reconsider your own death more than The Dark Knight does. If I had to describe it in two words, I would choose "relentless" and "horrific." And you can combine those, too. "Relentlessly horrific" probably works. "Horrifically relentless," well, not quite so much, but kind of.
Because, seriously, the things The Joker does in this movie are horrific. Like, terrible. Inhuman. They're the worst things any villain has ever done in any superhero movie, ever, and it's not even close, because The Joker wants you think about them. It's not like tying a girl to some railroad tracks or something, it's like, present impossible moral situations to innocent victims at the moment of their death just for the sick pleasure of it. The phone. The barges. It's funny, because I was just thinking about Der Besuch Der Alten Dame yesterday and then The Joker has to go and basically recreate the plot of that play at one point but of course he puts his terrible, insane anarchic spin on it and it's almost too much to bear. And then when someone guesses wrong, Batman doesn't get to fly around the world backwards to reverse time and fix everything.
And, yo, Two-Face? I don't know if you heard. You probably heard he was in the movie, but did you hear that they wouldn't even show his face in any previews because it's too terrifying? AND IT IS. I almost couldn't watch his revelation scene. I got slightly more used to the grotesquerie as the film went on, but still, nothing could prepare me for the utter insanity of his last scene. Seriously, that's twisted.
But, really, even though I'm using adjectives like "horrific" and "insane" I really enjoyed the movie, and that's because it's relentless; it just keeps pounding and pounding away and getting worse and worse and worse and then like one percent better and then the movie is over. The aforementioned Alten Dame choice appears at what you already thought was a climax and then also comes with a 60-minute time limit. The only weak point, I thought, was the major chase scene, which got a little bit carried away in terms of relentlessness. They worked so hard making the Batmobile believable as a clumsy tank and then the Bat-cycle that pops out of it is doing like 180's up walls. Like, spend a little more time working on the other two wheels, Morgan Freeman. It was just a little too much.
And Heath Ledger, too. I really loved his crazy lip-sucking performance, although I feel like critical opinion would be a little more divided if he were still alive, and the character he was handed in the script was totally amazing. What would have been awesome to see would have been V for Vendetta except with Heath Ledger Joker as the hero instead of boring-ass V. My biggest problem with V for Vendetta (the movie, at least) is that there's no suspense because V is basically omnipotent and has infinite resources and it's like, duh, of course he can take down a corrupt goverment when he's unstoppable. The Joker has some elaborate schemes in The Dark Knight, but his execution thereof is pretty much believable. He doesn't really use anything other than knives, gasoline, explosives, and (briefly) a bazooka. And nonstop crazy. And a pencil.
Relentlessly horrific.
But, yeah, twelve hours later, those are my thoughts on The Dark Knight and I kind of want to think about it more and less, both at the same time, because it was awesome but because it's really painful and crazy to think about some parts of the movie. Anyhoo, you should go see it, not with your thirteen-year-old child because that would be horrible, but in the company of responsible adults, and several hours before you go to sleep. Like WALL-E, it is a seriously amazing movie. Unlike WALL-E, it is not uplifting at all and does not have Peter Gabriel on the soundtrack.
DID YOU KNOW? The gourmet salad ingredient lamb's quarters is also known as dungweed in some parts of the country.
I had a blog entry ready to go on the whole Vanity Fair thing where Ruth and I were going to propose an idea for next month's cover, but I hesitated because I was a little worried that it was too offensive for this generally unassuming blog. Anyway, in my vacillation some lame-o political cartoonist beat me to it, and was way more offensive to boot.
Idonno, I still like our idea better. We thought the picture should depict Senator McCain struggling to comb his hair and looking very wrinkly, standing next to a Terminator robot and yelling "Trollop cunt!" at it. I'm not sure why I think Cindy McCain should be represented in political cartoons by a Terminator robot, but it makes about as much sense as Jon Stewart's apparent insistence that Dick Cheney is actually a duck.
Yeah, the Vanity Fair cover. If nothing else, it resulted in me learning a lot about Angela Davis. Ruthie and I discussed it during dinner last night and I'm still struggling with a synthesis of especially quotable things that I remember from perusing blogs, which is basically my approach to forming all political opinions (if you can even consider this a political issue). Usually I get them confused with some of the cooking blogs I read and then I'm like "Oh man, Obama's move to the right on maple-glazed tempeh is totally not as drastic as people are making it out to be" (it is, however, delicious over brown rice with a little bit of fresh ginger added to the marinade).
In other news, I had to cross a picket line to get to work today, and by "cross" I mean "bike around." UC facilities workers are on strike and so far I haven't really felt any heat from that, but I'm a little curious as to when things are going to start going down. Speaking of workers of the world unite, I'm looking to get a Peace and Freedom Party sign for our front lawn just because Ruth has already expressed interest in putting up an Obama one and, as I've always said, I'm for everyone getting to say what they have to say, no matter who they are or what it is (wait, maybe that should guide my opinion on the New Yorker cover too).
So I went to the party's website and found out that, duh, we won't officially select a candidate until August 23rd. I mean, I might have chosen a slightly less apocalyptic font than they did to convey that, but whatever. I scrolled a little further down and discovered that there are still four people in the running (and major news networks are lamenting the end of primary coverage): my pick, Gloria La Riva, Cynthia McKinney, Brian Moore and... Ralph Nader.
You know, I'm glad that my political party has moved beyond nominating people who are currently incarcerated for President, and I like that no other political party would have the guts to display the subheading "In Jail? You Can Vote!" so prominently on their website. But seriously, guys? If you ask me to put a "Socialist Ralph Nader 2008" sign in my front lawn? I'm not sure I can do that.
DID YOU KNOW? Anna's Taqueria has a secret menu. One of the things that you can order on it is a super quesadilla, an unholy stomach-exploding hybrid of their unbelievably cheesy quesadilla and unbelievably large super burrito.
I was thinking about it recently; I was thinking about people who are geniuses, and mostly I think about this whenever I hear a Prince song because Prince actually is a genius, and anybody who wants to argue with that can listen to "When Doves Cry" because that song was written almost 25 years ago and it still sounds like it came from the future and Prince wrote it in one night and does all the vocals and plays all the instruments on it. Or, you know, his mind-expanding cover of "Creep" from Coachella. I just think we are so lucky to be living in a world that also has Prince in it.
Sure, it's easy to say Mozart is a genius because even if he didn't write like 82,000 different things listen to the first three notes of the "Lacrimosa," or Bach is a genius because he wrote the world's first six-part fugue and he did it on the most difficult theme ever devised according to Schoenberg (hint: Schoenberg is a moron), but it gets a little harder when we get to more contemporary artists whose output is not always as intricate or extensive. So I was thinking about this last night and looking through my iTunes and I came up with a list of all the rock artists who are geniuses and all the rock artists who are potentially geniuses, in approximate genius order.
Because, I don't know, there's a difference between being just really good at what you do (Paul McCartney, MIA) or being revolutionary (David Byrne, The Ramones) and actually being a genius. Like, Jimmy Page is pretty good at guitar, but Jimi Hendrix plays his guitar in quite possibly every way that a guitar could possibly be played during the second solo of "Watchtower" and you can still sing along to it. That's genius, or, well, maybe it is; in any event, it's pretty close.
Or John Lennon, you know, just the first seven words of "Julia" qualify him; half of what he says is meaningless and you don't even need to know what the other half are. McCartney comes close with "Blackbird" on the same album, but really that's just a really tight, nicely-written, catchy, uplifting song with some unexpected melodic turns. The bridge of "Julia" ("her hair of floating sky is shimmering, glimmering in the sun") is just from some other universe.
And Sufjan, yo. I really think he's gonna be the best that music is going to get for a while. Parts of "Seven Swans" just hover, and "Come On! Feel The Illinoise!" is an unstoppable seven-minute workout for what seems like twelve thousand backup musicians. His cover of "The One I Love" arguably improves upon it, which is not easy, and what really seals the deal is his sad sad folksy take on the national anthem that just sounds like unemployment to me.
So, you know, that's it, I tried not to be too descriptive because there's actually nothing more annoying than listening to somebody blog rhapsodically about music that you don't find exciting as he or she does. I'm kind of interested if anybody has any other thoughts on the subject or suggested geniuses. But seriously, everything above is objectively right.
DID YOU KNOW? Kermit the Frog once starred in a video cover of "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads.
I was looking at the course catalog yesterday. Why? I'm not too sure, really, but I came up with this:
Dang. I'm an instructor. When did that happen? Also, three times as many people are signed up for the recitation sections that are (nominally) assigned to me as for the ones that are assigned to Colin. I mean, it's probably because I currently have all the sweet, non-8 AM recitation times, but really I'm thinking it's because the initials SAM are cooler than the initials CFC.
Also, I really want to win the songstowearpantsto.com cover contest and I need like 400 more hits on this video by Tuesday, so if you could make that happen through your blog or whatever, I'll really be your friend. Sorry, I'm kind of obsessed with this. Just like grocery shopping, as Ruthie will discover oh-so-soon.
DID YOU KNOW? In Idaho, and possibly soon in California, all red lights will officially become stop signs if you're on a bicycle. Also, all yellow lights will become green lights and all stop signs will become yield signs. And at yield signs you'll just get to flip off Priuses.
So, you know, I do like Stephen Colbert and I do own this shirt, but I guess I never really believed that bears were actually the number one threat to America until I spent three days, three nights in a tent in Yosemite this week with Ruthie, worrying about whether we had stashed all our bear canisters far enough away from our campsite or remembered to lock our Purell inside of them or not. In case you're not aware, bears in national parks can smell anything that has a smell and they will come and try to eat it, and if they succeed they will just go crazy on whatever campsite you were at for a month until the park rangers eventually come and euthanize them. Bears.
The only thing you can do about it is rent some bear canisters--inch-thick plastic cylinders--from the park and stuff all your food in those. The bears can smell them, but they can't get inside them, so it'll basically be like me looking for lentils at Trader Joe's. They'll end up unsuccessful, just kind of mutter "aww, man" and go on their way. But seriously, leave out some toothpaste and, as far as my understanding goes, they could go on a rampage and kill you all.
It's serious. We had to down over a dozen off-brand fig bars in two minutes because the were among the last things we had to pack, the bear canisters were almost splitting open, and we deemed them to be more palatable to bears than dry elbow macaroni. I'm hoping that this is the last occasion in any of our lives when the dilemma of "eat fig bars or die" presents itself.
And after a horrible waking dream about our mostly-impenetrable tent being filled with ants and beetles at a particularly insect-filled campsite on Wednesday night (kind of my choice, mostly because I was tired of walking), I also have a deeper understanding of the following line from One Hundred Years of Solitude:
The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.
Seriously, it was like biting ants and beetles from The Mummy. You would have been scared too.
But, yo. Yosemite. Indeed, I went to Yosemite this week, because apparently it doesn't even matter if I'm doing work anymore as long as I take vacations doing things that Professor Radke thinks are cool (having Sam's Mom help me move = bad; taking Sam's Mom to the Marin Headlands = good). We ended up hiking, oh, about 30 miles in three days and climbing over six or seven waterfalls and seeing seventy-two thousand mosquitoes and eating one-third of all the food we brought. Here are some representative pictures.
I know, you're jealous. Just remember: I could have died (had I not eaten four fig bars).
DID YOU KNOW? Patty Hearst was kindnapped within a quarter mile of my current apartment.
This post has major Pixar movie spoilers. Just warnin'.
I just got back from seeing the unpunctuatable WALL E and I think Pixar kind of hates children. I mean, kind of. They obviously like children in the sense that they're devoted to making wonderful, visually stimulating, hilarious, deep, whimsical movies on a yearly basis. But seriously? Is it just me, or do Pixar films have the worst take-home messages of all time?
Like, look at The Incredibles, which is by far my favorite Pixar (seriously, the van landing scene is one of the best movie moments of all time for me). It's astounding, but then one of the final scenes is Dash going and throwing his track meet and the moral of the film is then kind of "be yourself, but don't be too successful at it because then the less talented will feel bad." And all I get out of Finding Nemo is "cross the street without looking and disregard all other warnings your parents give you."
And then there's WALL E. It's no Snow In August or anything, but really? The Earth has been rotting under plastic commercial trash for five hundred years and then one plant makes it back and we get some babies to water it and then, as the credits seem to imply, biodiversity is completely reestablished and we start seeing turtles again within a couple generations. So, I mean, sure, break the Earth now, build some robots, let them have some misadventures, and then in a couple hundred years mankind will come back and start it all over. Nice one, Pixar.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln? Almost unconditional love. Kind of appropriately, given the general content of the film, the worst thing about it was that the humans were in it at all--WALL E and EVE are way more interesting than anyone else going on in the film. I really would have been kind of happy if the only dialogue going on in the film was taken from Hello, Dolly (which, surprisingly, made me squeal with delight). Also, the humans brought with them a plot, which ended up making not too much sense and being resolved, as I described above, in a kind of unsatisfying fashion.
Which is a shame, because the stuff around the plot is some of the best Pixar has ever done. Seeing WALL E's dumpster for the first time is just utterly joyous, and EVE's near-annihilation thereof is equally stunning. Everything the cleaning robot does is pure gold. And physics be damned, that fire extinguisher sequence is one of the most beautiful things ever seen in movies. I was actually on the verge of tears.
It's not my favorite Pixar (Incredibles) or my second favorite (Monsters, Inc.) or my third favorite (Finding Nemo), but, I mean, it's Pixar, it's up there, and it's one hundred percent worth the price of admission just for all the astounding robotic physical humor, which I honestly think is comparable to Charlie Chaplin's best stuff. Actually, it's worth the price of admission just for Presto, the Portal-inspired (no, really) short that precedes WALL E. If not for the fire extinguisher space ballet, it would be unquestionably the best thing that Pixar has ever done.
So, I mean, yeah, you know I get weird messages out of movies (28 Days Later as neocon propaganda), but this is the third Pixar movie out of six (still need to get around to Cars, Toy Story II, and, shockingly, Ratatouille) that has left me really worried about the future of humanity. Basically, I think I only want to hang out with adorable robots from now on and forgo all other human contact.
In conclusion, watching WALL E made me want to purchase more Apple products. I think that was the actual take-home message of the movie.
DID YOU KNOW? During World War II, Julia Child worked on a project that helped develop shark repellent.
I came home the other day and Ruthie was all, "I bought steak!" and indeed she had; it was a really beautiful piece of meat from Whole Foods, which seems to be a reputable-enough place for steak purchase, even if they didn't have veal bones that one time I was looking for them (luckily, the butcher down the block from us now carries them). And writing this blog entry I now realize that I kind of keep track of time in terms of French Laundry at Home blog entries.
I haven't cooked a steak in a while, and I haven't cooked a steak very well (I mean, nicely, not burnt, which is the only way Sam's Mom will eat it) perhaps ever, mostly owing to the fact that my research has helped drive the cost of steaks well outside of my weekly food budget. But still, Ruthie had brought home a nice-ass piece of meat (perhaps also a nice piece of ass-meat; my knowledge of butchery is somewhat lacking) and I wanted to do it as much justice as I could. Plus, I mean, it's a Whole Foods in California, so you know that the steak was probably all grass-fed and organically-farmed and whatever, and they played Enya while they killed it, so I wanted to the poor pampered cow some justice, too. Also, Enya.
So to the internet. Truth be told, I was kind of jumping at this opportunity to utilize my cast-iron skillet for some heavy-duty searing, and the prospect of heating the skillet in a 500-degree oven before putting it on the burner just to get it hotter was too good to resist. So I did that. In the meantime, I put some quinoa on the stove and chopped up some zucchini for Eric Ripert's fantastic "zucchini carpaccio"--you know, you need to put the five hundred degrees hanging out in that oven to good use at some point, right?
And, yo. Dang, that ended up being a good steak. Maybe it needed a bit more searing (yes, more hot metal) but otherwise, dang. I'm down with that. I had it for lunch today in a steak salad with some blue cheese, tomato, cucumber, and arugula and it almost made me forget that I'm in lab on July 4th, which I kind of didn't realize until yesterday anyway. These silicon wafers won't coat themselves with cellulose, although I hope to soon train them to do that, right after I yell at them and tell them to stop peeling off.
Not to be outdone, I had Hung and Adam over for dinner last night, kind of regretful that my lab duties yesterday precluded me from helping them more with their own moving. Adam, after all, was responsible for much of my couch-birthing last Friday night. I threw together a quick pumpkin curry soup with bulgur wheat, having been inspired by this article. Sweat some onions and carrots in curry powder, deglaze with vegetable stock (not homemade... yet), add the pumpkin, a little molasses, simmer, and toss in the wheat with a few minutes left. I needed an excuse to use my cast-iron skillet, too, so I seared the portobello that Ruth generously bought to accompany her steak and threw that in too. All in all, another pretty good dinner but of the vegan rather than the carnivorous persuasion, and also tasty for today's lunch mixed into some quinoa.
Anyway, reminiscing about food. That's how I spend my down time in lab, I guess. And, honestly, it's been a good day. Most of my wafers are looking pretty good in their water bath and I got some more free cookies this morning from my undergrad, Shirley.
"You're here!" "You're here?" "Well, I just wanted to bring you and Professor Radke some cookies!" "Shirley, go home. It's the Fourth of July." "And I thought, you know, since you want to go to that barbecue, I can take the samples out this afternoon when you're done." "What? What? No. Please. Go home. I command you. Go home."
You know, I try to be the cool mom and everything, but really, Shirley is a better undergrad than I could ever possibly deserve. Which I guess, in turn, is how cool moms are supposed to feel.
DID YOU KNOW? Rush Limbaugh's contract was just renewed for another 8 years today.
And that seems like a fitting way to mark the 145th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, doesn't it? I already wrote the definitive blog entry on the subject of the Battle of Gettysburg (at least, it has the definitive title) a few years back. You can go check that out if you want, but suffice to say that growing up all I was told is that General Lee was on his way to destroy my hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania because it was the railroad capital of the North and he stopped at Gettysburg because he heard there was a shoe factory there, and the pivotal battle of the Civil War was fought there; really, all that was left afterwards was for General Sherman to go down and set the entire state of Georgia on fire (sorry, Ruthie). And then at MIT I learned in my History of American Technology class that this was actually true, and also how a bone saw works, and I almost fainted.
I'm letting Ruthie take my bike around town for the next few days just so she can get oriented and better scope out deals on Craigslist and at IKEA and wherever, so I've been taking the bus to and from work, and let me just say that this has been working out really well for me. AC Transit is pretty clean and there aren't too many crazies (the craziest person I saw this morning refused to board the bus I was on because the driver was reportedly "rude" and "abusive"), and with the exception of the late-night Transbay bus, which requires some tough love, the drivers are generally considerate. Really, I haven't had a bad experience on it yet.
Except this morning, of course, when I missed the bus because I was checking out the menu for the enigmatically-named Flavors of India restaurant--hey, it looked cheap and people on Yelp love it! Not that the two aren't related. Anyhoo, I walked over to the bus as soon as I saw it coming, but seriously, this driver didn't even really slow the bus down to let people get on. Like, the dude in front of me fell into the front window of the bus as the driver was speeding away. So, I mean, maybe it was lucky I didn't get on. Maybe Flavors of India actually saved my life.
Anyhoo, now I had 8 minutes until the next bus came by, so I looked around and decided to head over to Bank of America to drop off the check that Ruthie had written me only fifteen minutes previously. So recent was this check, so hot out of her check book, in fact, that I had totally forgotten to endorse it. So I stood there in front of the ATMs kind of rifling through my backpack, although I knew I hadn't brought a pen with me, asking passersby if they had any pens so I could endorse my check.
The first dude appeared to be homeless--hey, it's Oakland--although that fact didn't seem to preclude him from using a Bank of America ATM that morning. Unfortunately, he didn't have a pen. The second person that came up was a well-dressed lady who wasn't carrying a purse and, as I could tell through her skinny jeans, was also not carrying a pencil, so I didn't bother asking her (I'm actually kind of curious as to what orifice she pulled her ATM card from). The third lady looked like a softball player. So I asked her and she was like,
"Oh, you know? You don't need one." "What?" "No, you don't need one." "I just need to endorse my checks though." "No no, they have your PIN number [ed: ouch] and everything, you can just put it in. I never endorse my checks." "Really?" "Yeah, look, here I go. New check. Not endorsed. I'm depositing it right now."
And, you know, what's good enough for Mia Hamm is good enough for me. So I deposited my three thousand dollars worth of checks (I also had a stray payroll check that couldn't be electronically deposited for some reason) without endorsement, grabbed a receipt, watched the next 51 bus pass across the street, and Tom-Cruise-MI3-ran across the street to catch it. You know, there's something about running to catch public transportation that just gives me a thrill like nothing else. For some people it's skydiving, for me it's making it to the Rockridge BART in under seven minutes wearing a bunny hat. You know, I'm a cheap date.
So, I mean, I'm curious now, if this whole endorsing checks business is actually a scam. I recently read an old New York Times article from a few months back which revealed that "door close" buttons in elevators actually do nothing. So, I mean, endorsing checks. Is it just something that people do out of habit? Does it just make us feel better? I guess we'll see.
This is also likely to be the most successful experiment I have performed in over a month.
DID YOU KNOW? Three quarters of all e-mail sent to gmail accounts is filtered as spam.
I'm really kind of looking forward to figuring out what day of the week it is one of these days, and I need to finish up my LA blogging before that awesome weekend fades from my memory too completely.
Sam's Mom's initial reaction to my new digs was a little bit tepid; it's understandable, the place does look a lot better when it's at least partially furnished. Since Ruthie is actually living here, I wanted to make sure that her initial impression was a little more positive. So I chilled some glasses and had Pimm's Cups ready for her as soon as she walked in the door, with goat cheese salads and BLT fixins awaiting in the fridge. Sam's Mom walked in hungry (only to be disappointed by Zachary's Chicago Pizza down the block); Ruthie walked in to the promise of Pimm's and pork.
Fortunately, Ruthie immediately saw what I saw in the our new apartment, and what Sam's Mom eventually came to see: character. The Hole, the shared closet, the stained glass window in our bathroom. The brick wall. The bullet-shaped hole in my window that apparently came from the inside (better than the alternative?). The shed. The potential garden. Character. I really never should have had any doubt that Ruth and I would see the same things in any potential apartment, and I'm really glad that she's happy about it.
Even more fortunately, Ruth sees way more than I do, aptly demonstrated on our walk back from BART to our apartment--like, before we had even been home yet. We were just traipsing along, carrying our bags the last quarter mile when she spotted a chair across the street with her peregrine-falcon-like vision. She ran over and gave it a visual inspection--it looked kosher, but we decided to hold off on the haul until I could perform a nasal inspection. We ran home and chugged some Pimm's Cup in the backyard when Ruth spotted a wheelbarrow, and half an hour later I took this picture of her sitting in our new living room furniture.
Seriously, living together for less than twelve minutes and we're already a little tipsy on gin rolling a recliner down the sidewalk in a wheelbarrow. It was kind of a rush, all "BOOM! Chair! BOOM! Wheelbarrow! GO GO!" Another two hours and we were in an SUV with a Bostonian we met on craigslist, toting our newly-purchased microwave and dresser back home in the trunk space. Ruthie and I is the best idea either of us ever had.
And, yes, Pinchy is going to be the focal point of our living room and the basis for its color coordination. Fierce.
