DID YOU KNOW? Fur trapper Hugh Glass trekked 200 miles after being mauled by a bear in 1822.
This weekend I hiked Half Dome with a bunch of ChemE's to celebrate the completion of our qualifying exams (PS: I passed, then I went to a free Alanis Morissette concert).
So to get to the top of Half Dome you have to climb up these cables. It looks really daunting, but actually like 5,000 people do it every weekends during the peak season. Yo, we definitely went on a weekend during the peak season. I was really hoping to have some sort of revelation when I reached the top: something like "YES I just hiked Half Dome; nothing is impossible to me now." The climb was revelatory, but my Joycean epiphany ended up being something more along the lines of "There are some things that are very unpleasant and frightening that I should never do again, even though I technically can." It's like the last line of "Araby": "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
Well, not quite--it was more like gazing down across the dome I saw some neat piles of rocks, and my shoulders burned from forgetting to apply sunscreen. Honestly, the whole hike was awesome, if a little overcrowded, but I would never do anything like those cables again even if you told me that David Byrne and Sam's Mom were waiting on top making gnocchi for me. The historical record shows that they aren't actually too dangerous unless there are extenuating circumstances (extreme dehydration, hail storms, wearing sandals), but it doesn't quite feel that way as you're sitting on the rock watching a steady stream of baseball caps, Nalgene water bottles and walkie talkies plummet to the valley floor.
Anyhoo, the next day we went to Hetch Hetchy, which is actually very beautiful, and also delicious.
DID YOU KNOW? Sean Connery was originally offered the role of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but declined because he didn't understand the material.
I swear, if there were a superhero comic about Ruthie, her archnemesis would be a giant ant, because these ants in the kitchen are CRAZY good at smelling. You may think that this would be somewhat of an uneven rivalry, with Ruthie not being able to smell at all, but don't forget: Green Lantern's nemesis is Sinestro, and while Green Lantern's power ring is only weak to the color yellow, Sinestro's power ring makes only yellow objects and has no weaknesses, and they've gone on fighting for fifty years with no complaints. Anyway, point: these ants are insane. I've wiped down the counter with soap, lysol, vinegar, and cinnamon, and it still has not inhibited their ability to locate their pheromone trail again within seconds. At this point I'm about two days away from spraying an entire can of Raid underneath the cupboard from which they're originating, even though I know that's only gonna be trouble.
In other news, we are in Chapter 8 of our Russian textbook and it is within this chapter that you learn how to be indignant:
Translate the following dialogue into Russian.
"Where are you going?" "To Oleg's." "And then are you [plural] going to the movies?" "Why do you always ask me such questions? What business of it is yours?"
I think I will use that line the next time my instructor calls on me in class, just to show her that I've been keeping up with the homework!
DID YOU KNOW? The following video was recorded in San Francisco at the Trader Joe's on Masonic.
At Trader Joe's today I discovered that they had moved the tofu. I was looking everywhere for it, although "everywhere" is actually not that many places because I knew that it had to be somewhere refrigerated and I knew that it could not be that close to the meat because then somebody would complain about having to look at meat when they're buying tofu. I was also considering going to Berkeley Bowl tomorrow because their tofu is superior. I was just about to hit a 10 on the "Stuff White People Like" scale as I cursed Trader Joe's for running out of non-organic tofu, bringing it down to an 8 or so and paying 30 cents extra for the unwanted absence of pesticides.
Somewhere Andy Rooney says "How can they take pesticides out and charge you more for it?!"
On my way out (and by "out" I mean back to the free sample station) I saw some "marionberry pie" which made me exclaim "Bitch set me up!" I was wondering for a second if this was really a kind of berry or just one of Trader Joe's cute pun product names, like "Granoldilocks and the Three Berries" or "Melange a Trois" frozen red, yellow, and green pepper slices. If you are also confused, it turns out that there is a wikipedia disambiguation page.
