Turkey vs. Spam II Turbo HD Remix

When you get to where you want to be

2010-09-30T01:25:00.000-07:00

You know, this has been a pretty good blog over the past two or three years, but I always feel like I'm trying to watch what I post to keep it from becoming a food blog, because there are already too many of those. So instead of posting pictures of food I think of long, drawn-out things to write about, and I start writing something or I think of a clever post title, and then I never finish and it's the 30th of the month and what have I done? I don't think this kind of short-term minimally-revised public journal is really useful for where I am in my life right now, although maybe it was when I started.

Well, maybe this blog just wants to be a food blog, and maybe posting pictures of food is what I should be doing. But maybe it should have a new name if I'm going to do that, to reflect its change in focus.

Rejected names: This is the Dream of Wine and Tagine, Hungary vs. Spam

So here it is.

Anyway, I think that over there is where I'm going to be chronicling my life for the foreseeable future. So, yo, I'll catch you over there!

Simmered for four hours

2010-08-28T20:44:00.000-07:00

It's my friend Greg's third "gay birthday" tomorrow and to celebrate he is running the Escape From Alcatraz Triathlon. I think that everything else you could ever want to know about Greg is contained in this song. I'm really proud of fitting in all this information while also preserving the original rhyme scheme and (most of the) scansion. This is probably the most noteworthy thing I will do for the rest of the year.

Congratulations Greg!

UPDATE: It was actually the San Francisco Triathlon at Alcatraz, which is apparently involved in some sort of triathlon war with the Escape from Alcatraz. ALSO, Greg finished in 3:31. DOUBLE ALSO, I got a $25 gift certificate to Sports Basement for cheering him on! What a good weekend this was.

Form a line to the throne

2010-08-24T23:29:00.000-07:00

Just last month while seeing The New Pornographers in concert in Oakland, ensconced in a corner with Jeff, Chelsea, Ian, and our two new friends, I was describing, less coherently than I would have had Ian not been able to obtain unlimited free beverages using his Visa Signature Card and the indifferent attitudes of Fox Theatre employees--anyway, I digress--I was observing that the best New Pornographers songs all have this section where all the singers erupt into some non-lyrical scat singing or howl. The oo-ooo-oo-ooo on "Letter From An Occupant", the hey-la-hey-la on "The Bleeding Heart Show", the djum djum on "Mass Romantic", the na na na na na on "The Laws Have Changed". It's like they are trying to express to you such incredible bliss, such unrestrained joy that finally they break free of even lyrics and just start shouting nonsense, their pop hooks too powerful, too perfect for any words to contain.

I kind of feel this way about Mineral King, an area of Sequoia National Park that I visited with Ian and Randy last weekend. I could say a lot about the solitude, the stone, the alpine lakes, the endless sunset, the clear air and shooting stars--but honestly, when I tried to do that in an e-mail to my Couchsurfing buddy John, who visited the park a couple days later, all I could come up with was the same phrase he had used in an e-mail to me: "so fantastic". Let's face it--this is probably no more eloquent than my original description of The New Pornographers' boundless energy at The Fox Theatre. Words fail. Hey-la-hey-la.

Mineral King does have an interesting history--miners struck silver there in the later part of the 19th century and named the area according to their hopes of turning it into the most profitable community in the Southern Sierras. However, it turned out that there was actually no ore to refine in the area and all they were left with was a beautiful valley, perhaps a sovereign but not replete with minerals as originally thought. Then Disney wanted to turn it into the largest ski resort in California, lots of preservationists opposed it, and finally Congress was like "no no no!". This was a pretty good idea. It's astounding that places like this exist within the state in which I reside. Ooo-oo-ooo-oo.

Probably my favorite words that I have heard recently were, "I can't believe that real people can make food like this." You know, Jeff and I did pretty well on Saturday cooking for ten people, kind of just throwing stuff together in the kitchen as it came in. Leftover beans, kohlrabi greens, three colors of potato. Oh, blanch this corn and put it in the salad; it's better than the white corn. Let's puree some tomatoes to thicken the dressing. I love this stuff. As long as I had an immersion blender and a cast-iron skillet, I could do this forever. I think that should be my new career path: Iron Chef.

Sam Maurer, Age 24

2010-07-13T23:57:00.000-07:00

If you have hung out with me for more than three hours you know that I have a list of strange names that I would consider giving to my children. This is because after hanging out with you three hours I have probably run out of things to say and defaulted to this--just ask Justin from BU how his first date with me went. Anyway, given that Sam's Mom and my dad were considering naming me Marya Maurer and Ishmael at various points of my pre-infancy, I'm just going to guess that this predilection towards strange names runs in the family. Perhaps eventually I will think better of it too, and my kids will have only weird acronymic initials to contend with.

Now, you may have looked at that list and thought, "Gosh, those are some strange names, even Gwyneth Paltrow would not name her kid something like that." Well, let me just tell you that I am getting a little freaked out because some of my names are starting to turn up in the real world and it's freaking me out! Take, for example, the case of Muni Bart Perzov, who has been missing since last May, last seen--of all places--in his 1998 Audi. Now, you know, maybe he changed his names at some point to celebrate public transit in San Francisco, or maybe he was just born to live in the Bay Area.

Then there is this new movie starring Annette Bening with short hair and Julianne Moore as lesbian mothers who have named their daughter Joni and their son LASER. You know, I was pretty surprised by this one, because I honestly thought I was the only person who has ever sat down and thought, "I wish my name were Sam Laser," and then discovered that Laser kind of goes with any other name you can think of--Laser Jones, Laser Suarez, Courtney Laser, Galileo Laser.

But there's more. The Laser storm hit my beloved Axe Cop, which is the greatest thing on the web right now for so many reasons--seriously, I could write as much cultural commentary about Axe Cop as my friend Greg can about Lady Gaga. Anyway, if I haven't told you, Axe Cop is this webcomic written by a six-year-old and illustrated by his twenty-nine-year-old brother, so it's basically like giving a kindergartener a magic canvas that preserves everything he thinks for future generations. You should sit down when you have four hours to kill and read the first one, because seriously, you will not be able to stop and you will want there to be more (this is true even if you have already read the entire saga from beginning to end multiple times).

In this case, the six-year-old kid, who incidentally is named Malachai, took a break from his candy monsters that poop exploding cars and dreamed up an army of good zombie vampires, all of whom are named Laser Scott, assisting zombie vampire killers Jack and John in their battle against Satan and a copy of Satan. Seriously, Malachai, what? Did you sit down and wish your name was Malachai Laser? Or Malaserchai? You are just lucky that you have a brother to draw whatever you want and all I had was an MITblog--otherwise I would be the famous one, for sure.

Anyway, in conclusion, I think my list of child names, once widely ridiculed, has become prophetic, and that our first female president will be named Malaria Vaccine. Right.

For the halibut

2010-06-14T22:27:00.000-07:00

The microwave died today. Since I was a child, well, I've just had the worst luck with microwaves. There was the one at Aunt Jeannie's which didn't display numbers unless you knew how to tap it just right with the knuckle of your index finger, like some culinary Fonz. There was the one in undergrad that randomly generated electrical storms and shot lightning bolts into your food as a result of a somewhat successful ball-lightning experiment. There was the one in my apartment that John just got rid of--and honestly, I don't know what the problem was other than the fact that the number "2" would be entered every 30 seconds, so when you wanted to use it you just had to plug it in and enter your time and then press start before Maxwell's Microwave Demon could press "2". And then there was the one John replaced it with, which just stopped working this morning. No demons, no lightning, no Fonz--just a whimper. And a ding.

Well, I thought, I can be Alice Waters and live without a microwave and maybe I will even start poaching my eggs in a bonfire I build in the backyard rather than using natural gas. After all, the only thing I use the microwave for is making milk tea, which is half milk, half cold water, one teabag, placed in the microwave for four minutes and twenty-five seconds, and then mixed with honey. It's steamy and perfect. But pretty much everything else I think you can do on the oven, or the stovetop, or the counter.

Then it came time tonight when I wanted milk tea, and--well, I had to get out a saucepan, pour into the saucepan, pour out of the saucepan, make sure I didn't scald the milk, make sure I didn't set the teabag on fire. This is really hard, Alice Waters, and the tea tastes a little funny too. Well, no, it's not that hard, but it's just different, it's a disruption in one of the little rituals in my life to which I anchor myself, and for the time being it's not working.

The point I am trying to make is that I don't know why I'm blogging about this because since the last time I blogged I stood on top of the highest point in the continental United States--no, not the one pictured above, because as you can see, in that photo there are higher points on top of which I am not standing--but you can extrapolate what the view from the top looks like from there. It's weird, what I think about this blog now, because two years ago it was reflections on pants and one year ago it was a beautiful picture dump and now I was on top of Mount Whitney two weeks ago but I haven't had the urge to write anything yet.

Maybe I will have something to say about that experience, other than waking up at 3 AM and seeing the cold shimmering stars and the clouds milky like my Earl Grey tea hanging in the thin clear air. But is it really important? Am I more defined by the fact that I could strap on some crampons and haul myself up six thousand feet, or by the piece of halibut that I bought on impulse on Saturday? Jeff and I cooked half en persillade (Thomas Keller's phrase for "with breadcrumbs, takes three times as long as you expect") and then I pan-roasted the rest last night. So is it me standing there in the snow at 4 AM breathing heavy in the moon-shadow of cold granite? Or is it me standing there in my kitchen alone at midnight picking through pea tendrils because I knew that I could make the greenest sauce I had ever known? What will we be?

I am soup, thanks for asking

2010-05-10T22:18:00.001-07:00

First of all, you should play this flash game for about three minutes, because it is beautiful, but only for about three minutes, like the drive from Oakland to Los Angeles on I-5.

Hokay, are you back?

Here is a bowl of soup. Like all of my favorite things that I have made, it was pretty much improvised from junk I had in my refrigerator--and honestly, I'm pretty proud that I've reached a stage in my life where said junk allows me to assemble duck confit tacos in less than five minutes at 1 AM.

Anyway, listen. I sauteed some onions and some of John's dried peppers and some carrots to get them nice and sweet. Then I added some of the chicken broth I had leftover from this blog entry. I let it boil, I tossed in some kaffir lime leaves that I bought on impulse a few weeks ago, I tossed in some green beans (which taste a little like coffee when I eat them raw--does anybody else get this?). I let it boil until the green beans were almost done, then I added in some julienned squash and some sad-looking cilantro that I had finely minced. I love throwing things--really throwing them--into hot pots and pans, the blast of air you get coming back at you carrying the first hint of the aroma of whatever you threw in, your sad cilantro or your questionable shallots now wild and bright.

And that would have been good, but wait! Last week I had made some coconut milk, and I swear that I will never, ever do that again because that is the most difficult cooking process I have ever embarked upon, but it did lead to the discovery that when you make coconut milk and then refrigerate it the fatty part splits off into coconut cream. So I took my leftover coconut cream and I whisked in some hot broth and then right when I was ready to eat I poured the hot coconut broth back into the soup.

This was fantastic. Seriously. The broth: just the right background of chili and lime, spiked with coconut, but still round and full in your mouth like only homemade chicken stock can be. The vegetables: some crunchy, some chewy, some soft, some noodly. The colors, the warmth, the salt, the surface slick with oil. Pretty much everything about this soup was perfect.

But beyond the five senses, what's really beautiful for me is everything that went into this soup that I threw together in half an hour from leftovers in my fridge reminded me of somewhere I had been or someone that I had been eating with or something I had done: some impulse buys, the hot peppers that John always has on hand, the chicken that I roasted for dinner with Dan and Adam and Jeff and Ariel, the page in Ad Hoc At Home that taught me how to cut carrots obliquely, the coconut cream that I will never make again, the windy bike ride home wondering what to do for dinner. This is the last month of my life in a bowl of soup.

It is possible that I will never do better than this.

The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue

2010-04-28T19:36:00.001-07:00

I was thinking yesterday about the anti-war song by The Monkees that is kind of psychedelic and has a chorus that starts with "Why don't you cut your hair?" I was thinking about this quite deeply because I could not for the life of me remember the title, except that it was three words, and had a man's name in it, and wasn't "Sloop John B." And I was thinking about this even more deeply because I was on a bus at the time and not able to get off the bus and look up the information immediately, which frustrated me to no end.

So I thought about how if I had an iPhone, I could just go on Wikipedia and look up the answer in ten seconds, and how iPhones have thus far been kind of a bummer to me because they deprive me of the joy of thinking about things like this.

And then I thought about what life would be like if the iPhone hadn't been invented yet: I knew that I could probably use my cell phone to call Sam's Mom, who would surely know, so I would the answer in less than two minutes.

But what if cell phones hadn't been invented yet? Well, I'd have to wait until I got back to lab, where I could look at the title of the mp3 of the song on my computer. From my current position, stuck on a bus, that would have taken a couple minutes.

But what if there were no mp3's? Well, maybe I could look it up in a search engine. And what if there were no internet? Well, I'd have to go home and look through my Monkees LP's until I found the one that had that song on it, and then I'd have to put it on my record player until I verified that I was right. That would take a few more hours than waiting to get back to work.

And so on and so forth--I continued this strand of logic, going backwards in time until I was a Dutch count in the year 1830 and I had to adjourn to my study to find a reference book in which I could find the name of Beethoven's only opera.

So let's say that this represents the average amount of time for someone of my general social group to look up some arbitrary piece of information (since it's 2010 and I live in the Bay Area, let's say that the average person owns an iPhone). Or let's say that we figured out an average amount of time for the average person in the world to do the same thing given the access of the average world citizen to the internet or cell phones or Monkees LP's or a study to which he or she could adjourn. And let's plot one or both of these values against time.

And, well, I didn't go through and do all this when I got home--that sounds like it would be a master's thesis in sociology or something--but just thinking about it I started to realize how quickly information is being consolidated and how quickly our access to it is increasing. A few years ago Mitra suggested to me a drinking game in which you think of some arbitrary thing and then guess how high the Wikipedia entry for that thing will show up in Google. Then you actually Google that thing and you take one drink for how many search results you missed by. Nowadays there's not really any point to that game. It doesn't matter if you're looking up Mike Oldfield or Piltdown Man; the answer is always one. Everything is on Wikipedia and Google is the fastest way to look it up. This fact is also borne out by the Wikipedia-heavy bibliographies of the design reports that I graded this term.

I'm thinking if you made this graph that I have described you would end up with something along the lines of Kurzweil's generalization of Moore's Law, except with lookup time on the y-axis instead of calculations per second. It would be a semi-log plot because those are the best kinds of plots. And if you followed the line of best fit out to 2020 or something you'd end up with a lookup time on the order of hundredths of a second. I could just touch my fingers to my temple on the bus and say "Monkees song, cut your hair, bleep bleep bloop" and it would be delivered directly to my brain through some sort of bluetooth in my ear or microchip implanted in my skull or some new technology of which I can't even conceive, much like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan couldn't conceive of space communicators smaller than a car phone even though they would become ubiquitous 20 years later.

Then I got very lonely sitting there on the bus when I realized how I'm only 24 and how technology is already passing me by because I don't understand how to use a touch screen or how exactly Twitter is supposed to work, and how by the time I'm 34, I'm not going to remember whether you're supposed to say "bleep bloop" or "bloop bleep" to activate instant Wikipedia lookup from your brain, because one activates Wikipedia and the other activates YouTube so that you can watch the puppy who can't get up on the inside of your contact lenses.

But then I remembered that the title was Randy Scouse Git, and in an epiphany I remembered most of the lyrics too, so I started rocking out to that in my head and it wasn't quite so bad.

ABBA O'Riley

2010-04-21T23:24:00.001-07:00

Tonight I would like to blog about the song "The Winner Takes It All" by ABBA. Again.

I have had a thought that I need to commit to paper. Well, by paper, I mean "the internet", since it's 2010, and I have a better chance of ending up in the Library of Congress through blogging than through any other creative profession.

Aww, here goes:

When I was a senior in high school our AP English teacher gave us a summer assignment in which we had to read and make notes on two novels in preparation for an essay quiz given during the first week of class. I selected Moll Flanders, which was hilarious, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which kind of kicked off an "I am Stephen Dedalus" phase that lasted through a series of pretentious and obnoxious college admission essays. Well, I guess it worked out better than having an "I am Moll Flanders" phase, which didn't happen until I was 22.

Anyway, the edition of A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man that I had bought had a foreword analyzing some of the major themes of the work, which in general I always thought was a stupid idea, talking about the novel and giving away all the major symbolic points before you even start reading it. Because it was a stupid idea I don't really remember anything about it except that the author of the foreword kept harping on the idea of chiasmus and how central it was to the novel. Chiasmus is the Greek word for an ABBA form. So if you say something like,

Apologise,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologise.

as James Joyce does on one of the first pages of Portrait, that's chiasmus. He does it all over; my old dog-eared copy tells me that he also says "The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him" moments before Stephen's epiphany. Apparently also this represents the central conceit of the book, how in creating a "portrait of the artist" the artist, surrounded by his society, looks into a mirror and creates a mirror image of himself with a mirror image of society behind him and--well, you can look this up on Google Books, since they own all writing now, or something.

So lately I have been singing the song "The Winner Takes It All" a lot, for a bunch of reasons, many of which involve Meryl Streep. The more I sing it the more I get to analyzing the chords and the melody and Agnetha's intonation and the lyrics and the whole idea behind the song. I've come to the conclusion that even though some of the lyrics are a little out there in an English as a Second Language Rhyming Dictionary sort of way, as a whole they make a great narrative, contain some beautiful images and metaphors ("no more ace to play") and have a kind of intricate rhyme scheme that nevertheless feels completely natural in the confines of a pop song. Until you try to sing it yourself and really think about what it means, you don't quite realize how well it's written, how the rhymes work, how the phrases vary in length but come off as just the unpretentious confessional speech of a Swedish woman. It's kind of beautiful.

And, well, just take this passage from the second verse:

I was in your arms
Thinking I belonged there
I figured it made sense
Building me a fence

Building me a home
Thinking I'd be strong there
But I was a fool
Playing by the rules.

And, well, look there. Thinking, building, building, thinking. There it is. Right there. Chiasmus. Your ABBA form. In ABBA. It all comes full circle. Yes.

His beautiful husband

2010-04-20T22:21:00.001-07:00

It's funny, or perhaps ironic (but that is a word which, like passive-aggressive and Orwellian, is grossly overused). Anyway, it's funny because when I was applying to graduate schools, my Statement of Purpose--oh, what a noble descriptor that is, like I was serving some higher purpose at age 22--well, no matter what grad school I was applying to or what kind of honor I was applying for, it always included something about the time in undergrad when our fluidized sand bath broke (we heated it up too quickly, and in case you never knew, it turns out that sand can scorch into a black mess) and I had to go to the recycling center on campus and take some scraps of cardboard out of the trash and duct tape them together into a gigantic cardboard box, then place the sandbath into the box, hoist the box onto the pallet, strap it to the pallet with a cable tie gun (which is the third most fun kind of gun to use, after labeling and staple), and then figure out a way to ship the pallet back to New Jersey.

Basically, since a lot of my livelihood in undergrad came from blogging, I composed all my statements of purpose like blog entries--overblown, meandering, and convinced that nobody on the planet had ever done anything more interesting than taping together a giant cardboard box and using a cable tie gun. But, anyway, at the time it was a successful strategy because I did get into all the graduate schools to which I had applied.

So, anyway, all of this is very funny (or perhaps ironic) right now because I am corresponding with this man named Roland in Germany who is trying to give me advice on how to fix my ellipsometer, which is so old that the drivers that tell it how to operate have to be run on Windows 95, an operating system which I am running on a computer that is so old that I recently had to replace the CMOS battery, which might not be that big of a deal to anyone who has ever taken a computer science class but I felt like a pretty badass engineer when I was doing it. After opening up part of the ellipsometer upon Roland's suggestion and verifying that the laser and the analyzer belt still worked, I got an e-mail today enumerating two ways in which I could proceed:

I had been out of office for a couple of days. The situation with the ellipsometer is a bit unclear for me, so we have two options now:

1. you will send the whole system (ellipsometer + computer) to us for repair.

2. you figure out more exact what is wrong under my brief guidance. This has to be done completely on your own risk.

Regarding point 2: Attached you find a sheet of the Voltages on the backside of the ellipsometer. Please measure those and let me know. Note: always turn the whole system completely off before you unplug any connection.

Now, when I applied to the PhD program at UC Berkeley, remember, the one thing that I cited, the one technical skill that I had that would set me apart from the other applicants, the one shining moment of three-and-a-half year undergraduate research career, was packing up expensive instruments and sending them across the sea. Seriously, if I had any ambition of applying for a real job at that point I think I would have applied for like, "thing-packer", because I was so into this idea of having assembled a giant box and used a cable tie gun in conjunction with that box. And now, with an ellipsometer? It scares me straight up. Seriously. I could break something. I don't even know where to get a pallett. This is very worrisome.

I think I am going to find a voltmeter.

But not revenge

2010-04-14T20:55:00.000-07:00

If we were on Family Feud and you were J. Peterman or Al from Home Improvement and you were to ask me to name the least exciting meat, I would probably say "chicken" right off the bat. Seriously, chicken. I think I bear a greater enmity toward chicken than I do toward things that I actually do not eat. I mean, at least lobster and mussels usually look good even if they taste to me like sea water that has gone up my nose. Chicken breast always seems, in the words of an angry food writer, to be "the skim milk of the protein world."

Then again, Thomas Keller says that chicken is the best animal in history and that everybody starts with chicken as their first food memory and loves it unconditionally, so I'm ready to admit that perhaps I am wrong in this judgment.

So this week I rediscovered the joy of roasting a chicken. It's not just the meat--especially if you're a moron like me and accidentally roast it upside-down--it's the process, the ritual, the rain of salt, the hot bubbling drippings, the hour of anticipation, the crack of the knife piercing the skin, the clear juices flowing from the wound, the forest air as rosemary hits the pan. It's cutting off the first drumstick and carving out some white meat and sharing with friends and eating the rest with your hands.

But wait, there's more. Yes. Then it's time to make chicken stock. So right when you're getting ready for bed you take the chicken bones, stick them in your biggest stockpot, and roast them while you're brushing your teeth. You cover them in water, turn down the oven heat as far as it will go, and go to sleep. You wake up eight (six?) hours later and your whole house smells like chicken soup; seriously, the air is moist and heavy and redolent of snow days, like chicken fat is stuck in the cracks of the walls. Yes. Then you open the oven, skim the foam from the stock, toss in a quartered carrot and onion, and get ready for school, or work, if you have a real job that helps people.

Oh, and then comes the sensual part. Perhaps this description will make you wonder whether it's a good idea ever to become sensual with me, but here goes: After you've strained the stock and stuck it in the freezer, you take the chicken carcass and you start pulling it apart, disarticulating, dissecting, picking, searching for all those little bits of meat that got boiled off the bone, and you save those, because after all, it's good chicken. Well, kind of--at the same time, it's not really good chicken, because all the flavor is in the stock, so it tastes like nothing. But, like I said, it's not about the meat, it's about the process.

So yesterday I had this leftover chicken (but not chicken) hanging out in my fridge, and I was leaning back in my chair at work and it came to me, much like the theory of relativity--chicken mole. Perfect, since it was Taco Tuesday. I got home around six, and yo, I like having a pantry, and I was really proud to just wing this out of things I assembled from my pantry and have it all done before it was dark outside. A caramelized onion, some sesame seeds, toasted walnuts to stand in for pepitas, garlic, cumin, a few spoonfuls of last summer's tomato sauce I defrosted, some hot peppers that I pilfered from my roommate and blackened. Blend it into a paste, fry the paste in oil, whisk in some chicken stock, slowly now. One brick of bittersweet chocolate, throw in the chicken, and shred it.

Plus corn tortillas, leftover guacamole, and pickled red onions. Forty-five minutes, two pans, delicious. Yes.

Different from all other blog entries

2010-03-31T23:06:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? LBJ needs pants.

I came home from work today, opened my front door, and screamed because there was a strange young woman descending the staircase in my apartment.

"AAAAAH!"
"Hey! Oh, I knew this would happen. Hi, I'm Ariel!"
"Okay, I'm Sam."

After a short discussion I remembered the e-mail that my roommate John had sent me about someone named Ariel coming white he was in Sumatra so that she could pick up some things that had been left in our shared closet.

"So, yeah, I just needed to take some of John's camping stuff, and then I might be back tomorrow morning to get some things too."
"Oh, cool, I'll probably be here. Where are you going camping?"
"Well, it's Passover, so we're going to Death Valley."
"Okay, this is not an association that any of my Jewish friends have made before, but cool!"

Apparently Ariel participates in something called Wilderness Torah, and apropos of our discussion of exclamation points last week, I think this can only be spelled Wilderness Torah!. So I guess for all the major Jewish holidays you go out in the Wilderness and celebrate and learn about yourself and camp and things like that. We got into a little discussion about the symbolic aspects of doing this in Death Valley.

"So, yeah, I'm taking a ton of stuff... we're in the desert but it's not at all like wandering around lost in the desert for 40 years."
"Well, you know, you have a car, why not pack heavy?"
"Right, right!"
"I bet Moses would have taken one too if they hadn't left in such a hurry."

I know that every goy and every shiksa who has ever attended a seder thinks that the seder he or she attended is the coolest seder ever, but seriously, seder in Death Valley does sound like the best that could possibly happen. Sorry, seder I went to with Colin 2 where we ate three-year-old macaroons that had worms in them.

However, I think as far as religious celebrations go overall, my favorite is still the Christmas where Cousin Sarah kept requesting that we sing the carol "with Satan's fire." That was pretty good.

Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs

2010-03-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Frank Chu, whom everyone in the Bay Area has seen in person, turns 50 years old today.

After some financial finagling over winter break I was able to convince Berkeley to buy our lab this new instrument that cost ninety-six thousand dollars, all so I can study a form of cellulose that I apparently have to obtain by asking people on Craigslist if I can steal some scum out of their aquariums (Gunda et al 2009). Anyway, that's a lot of dollars--in order to win that kind of money on Pyramid, you'd have to get LeVar Burton to guess what category corresponds to "the Torah, a hall of fame baseball player."

Anyway, the thing finally arrived this week, and so the first thing I did on my new instrument was set up the computer, utilizing only about eight hundred of the ninety-six thousand dollars that were spent on my behalf, and make a desktop background.

The second thing I did was get it connected to the internet and the third thing was write a blog entry, I guess.

I have been making a list of things that I am good at and/or like to do. This includes:

being taller than people

making numbered lists for people to follow

making desktop backgrounds

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find a vocation that incorporates all of these. I am thinking that I will travel the country giving first grade classes step-by-step instructions how to make desktop backgrounds. I think this is how these people arrived at their job.

Things that are enshrined.

All things good and ungood

2010-03-18T15:01:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The McDonald's hamburger on the left is twelve years old.

It's official, I have become the worst kind of blogger--the kind that has a month-old post apologizing for not posting and resolving to post more in the near future. Seriously, xkcd once said that this was the worst kind of blogger, so it must be true. Also the kind that forgets to put up a post for his mother's birthday.

To celebrate Sam's Mom's birthday, I did not send her a DVD of Mamma Mia!, because I figured that she wouldn't really like it, and also she doesn't really have a DVD player, and I am always skeptical of whether or not she watches the DVD's of films that she actually likes that I send her. I could have sent back the ABBA ultimate collection two-disc set that I stole from her six years ago, but, you know, I might want to listen to A Man After Midnight in a car sometime, whereas I can get the best scene from Mamma Mia! on YouTube anytime.

I think I am on track to get tired of watching that in about 2013, which is after the apocalypse, so no worries Meryl Streep. "Their minds as COLD as ice!"

I like titles that end in exclamation points; one time I sent an e-mail to Shana and Maura because there was a question on Jeopardy! about Baz Luhrmann and it made reference to his film Strictly Ballroom!. This was of course a vintage clue because the correction question was "What is Moulin Rouge!?", which had just come out at the time. Anyway, I wrote this e-mail to Shana and Maura and it ended "STRICTLY BALLROOM!! ON JEOPARDY!! Note: The double exclamation points are not meant to convey excitement--this is the correct way to punctuate these titles." Shana cleverly responded, "But the fact that you send us an e-mail entirely in capital letters was meant to convey excitement, right?"

SEGUE, changing the way we build cities! Another thing I did to celebrate Sam's Mom's birthday was deciding not to go up to Seattle to visit my beloved high school friend Shana, only because I was trying to figure out how to get there and back and it seemed like ridesharing would be the best idea. Ultimately I decided against that whole idea, figuring that a visit to Seattle would work out better with more planning and more time for Shana.

So the question of what would happen if I were a little more impulsive goes unanswered for now; which is okay because it doesn't work out so well for Leela in that one episode of Futurama. Speaking of being impulsive and most of the letters from Futurama, my roommate bought tickets to Sumatra yesterday, and he'll be back in three weeks.

Start to make it better

2010-02-21T18:55:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Meryl Streep filmed the "choice scene" of Sophie's Choice one time and refused to do it again because it was too painful.

What happened was that I got a birthday card about a month ago featuring a portrait of my grandmother as a giant flying snake (courtesy of my four-year-old cousin) and it made me reminisce about first grade while I was at the laundromat later that evening, and I started writing a big essay about that, and the past, and the future, and Geraldine's Big Snow, but I never finished it, and that kind of turned me off from blogging for a little bit.

So I think I would like to return to blogging except with shorter-form posts. I know that my dad and Sam's Mom always start their e-mails with, "Hey, since you haven't blogged lately, what's up?", so maybe this will help to bridge the communication gap a little bit, and also get me back into writing and thinking critically on more of a daily basis. The only trouble will be coming up with a DID YOU KNOW every two days or something.

I've been sick for the past few days, in pretty much all conceivable ways, like a physical kind of way and an "Oh Rose, thou art sick!" kind of way and a "You're so sick, Oedipa" kind of way. Anyway, I came up with this drink that makes me feel less sick, just for a minute. It hasn't really done anything to cure my sickness yet, but it feels a lot better when I'm drinking it.

Chop up an inch of ginger, zest half a lemon, squeeze the juice of the lemon into a little pot. Fill a chowder mug with water, pour the water into the pot. Sprinkle in some nutmeg into the pot, get it boiling, turn it down to low and let it steep for about 20 minutes. Meanwhile, fill the chowder mug with so much honey that the entire bottom is covered in a 1/4-inch-thick layer. Pour the boiling water through a strainer over the honey and stir.

I realized that the reason this sounded so good to me right now is because it is basically a hot toddy without whiskey, and I had a hot toddy at Genie's, the greatest breakfast place in the northern hemisphere (I'm coming, Tierra del Fuego).

Your first subject

2010-01-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? First person tetris.

I ended up taking Russian again this term even though the class that I'm TAing conflicts two days a week. I'm really excited! At the end of last term I really felt like I was beginning to get a handle on Russian and I was really sad that I'd have to miss it for a little bit. So far the class been working out really well, but then again, apparently we have a quiz on Friday, so I guess I should hold off on my judgment until then.

Today our teacher, who makes me want to look up "silver fox" in Russian, described to us the verbal adjective, which looks like the gerund but is NOT the gerund ("I'm a linguist, and seriously, what is a gerund?"). Apparently in English the -ing form of a verb can have a lot of different functions, while in Russian each of these functions has a unique ending. He illustrated this with three example sentences:

to form the progressive aspect:
"He is smoking a cigarette."

in a participial clause:
"Smoking a cigarette, he remembered his troubled youth."

as a verbal adjective:
"The children ran through the smoking leaves."

These are all good examples of the respective verb functions--the second one even allowed a tangent about dangling modifiers, since the participial clause always modifies the subject (he is smoking, not the youth!). And, as promised, the professor showed us the Russian ending for the verb in each of these situations.

But seriously, what kind of person comes up with these as examples? The first one: it's 2010 and we're at UC Berkeley; you can't say the word "cigarette!" The second one: okay, fine, I guess that's what you would do while you're smoking a cigarette. The third one: WHAT? Why are children running through smoking leaves? Is this a thing in Russia? Or anywhere? Did you do that as a child?

All of this was to illustrate a sentence from Eugene Onegin that went something like, "The poured tea, to which Olga was an instrument, ran into shining cups." Or, rather, "Olga poured the tea into shining cups" but backwards. It made me think of how AWESOME $100,000 Pyramid would be in Russian. In the English version, if you wanted to get your partner to say "things that flow" and you said "the generously poured wine" or "the pumped pipe-contained water," the jerk in the booth would buzz you and Dick Clark would sympathetically tell you that your clue for the $200 level was "too descriptive," then suggest that you should have said "a stream, a chart, a good presentation." In Russian you could just say two words for "the poured tea of Tatyana, to which Olga was an instrument" and everyone would know what you were talking about.

Please comment with the best "in Soviet Russia" joke you can think of to end this entry.

Caught up together with them in the clouds

2009-12-30T17:06:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The second-highest-paid woman working in television is Judge Judy.

I am sitting in the Dulles International Airport writing this via a wireless connection provided by Google, and overall this whole idea of sitting in an airport searching for free wireless is really bringing me back to my most crazy of summers as a MISTI reporter in Europe. You should go read the 200 pages I wrote about that experience.

WHOOSH!

Okay, you're back. Contrary to its name, the Dulles International Airport is not the dulles, but rather the mos interesting airport I have seen in this country. I would say that it definitely wins the award for "airport whose design was most clearly inspired by 1970's science fiction television series." Seriously, the crazy fonts advertising the airline names, metal everywhere, glass panes with random lines on them. All it's missing is some hexagons. Then in order to get to my terminal I had to step through what basically amounted to an airlock into a "mobile lounge," which was raised and lowered like a jack in order to mobilize me from security check to the terminal. It was crazy. I feel like I am in the future and the past at the same time.

Speaking of security check, the dude took a long hard look at my bag in the x-ray machine today, then asked me, "Do you have a pepper mill inside?" In fact, I did have a pepper mill inside; if you know me pretty well you probably could have guessed that. But overall I would have felt a little safer if the onus had been on me, the passenger, to provide an explanation for what was in my bag, instead of just confirming his guess.

Hokay, boarding!

Two slightly distorted guitars, mandolin

2009-12-25T14:57:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? For his last meal, former French president Francois Miterrand dined on ortolan--a small, finch-like bird captured, force-fed, drowned in Armagnac, roasted whole and then eaten whole, bones and all.

It is Christmas Day and so far I have gotten some pretty great presents. First of all, Aunt Rachel got me a mandoline. That is a really good gift, because it is something I will use but would never buy for myself. Homemade potato chips, here I come. I also got a set of pictures that Brett took the Pixar and Friends holiday party, which I assembled into this lovely animated GIF (because it is 2003 and I need an avatar for my internet message board). The GIF kind of describes my excitement upon receiving a mandoline.

I also got to help out Sam's Mom at her new job as an undercover CIA operative, and it turned out to be more fun than you would think. Here is the transcript of an argument we had because there was a little green on my potato chip:

"And you remember that one episode of Mork and Mindy where they're escaping from the evil people... the Necrotons, and they get sucked into a vortex into the past?"
"No, not really."
[n.b. -- they are actually escaping from Kalnik, the Neptunian, and are sent to the past via Mork's malfunctioning time-travel shoes]
"Well, I remember I was crying, and you told me that everything would be okay in the next episode."
"Okay."
"And guess what! It was the last episode of the series because it was supposed to be a cliffhanger but the show got cancelled! So Mork and Mindy are still stuck there in the past."
"Oh, well, that's terrible."
"You lied to me! You just made something up to placate me!"
"Well, you were very upset, like that time you saw on TV that the sun was going to explode, and I didn't realize that it was the last episode of the show. And you know what? I think there was a reunion special."
"You're doing it again!"

I also discovered, mostly because Liza With A Z came on TV, that Sam's Mom, before she became Sam's Mom when I was in high school, used to call herself "Sammy's Mammy." Ladies and gentlemen: Liza Minnelli.

Small, I know

2009-12-20T12:12:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? A volcanic eruption in the year 186 in New Zealand is thought to have been so powerful that it was visible in ancient Rome and China.

I woke up this morning and my hand hurt a lot. I think the word excruciating would be a little overdone, but, indeed, my hand really hurt. I didn't want to alarm Sam's Mom because she worries about me enough without having to worry about me sleeping (and pooping), but I just had to get up and take some Tylenol and ask her for an ACE bandage, because the pain was actually preventing me from sleeping. And if you know me, you know that almost nothing can keep me from sleep--neither the rattle of the F-Market, nor the rush of a plane taking off, nor every graduate-level kinetics lecture of 2008.

So, all ACE bandaged up, I did a quick left-handed Google search and learned that it's not a fracture, or carpal tunnel, or lupus. I think I am just going to give it some HI-RICE and hope it clears up in a day or two, since it's already feeling a lot better. I also learned that WebMD, which diagnosed me with shingles, is not very useful for hand troubles, and that there are myriad WebMD knock-offs of even more dubious quality, such as one which gave me the following helpful synonyms for my symptom of "hand pain."

Thanks, internet. You are a Pain in the Hand (one hand).

This land is my land

2009-12-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Universal has announced production on a Candy Land motion picture.

On Saturday I am going to a holiday party that is also a toy drive. The price of admission is a wrapped toy, which is pretty cool. I kind of wish I had thought of that for the holiday party I am throwing the following day. Anyway, my friend has hosted this party for the past two years, and I've gotten in the habit of bringing Candy Land. It's fun, it's durable, it's timeless, it's Made in USA, and it teaches kids about math. I pretty much attribute all of my academic success in the fields of science and engineering to playing Candy Land as a child, trying to figure out the difference between green and double-green. And, you know, I rocked it. I never lost at Candy Land. This may reveal that I was a needy child more than it reveals any actual skill.

However, it's come to my attention that there have been a few changes in Candy Land since my childhood, most of them for the worse. Here's a sample of the most troubling:

1. The last space was changed from purple to rainbow.

Genius is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. Similarly, Candy Land is ten percent actually moving and ninety percent sitting four spaces away from the end waiting for purple. There's no other rainbow square on the board! That doesn't even make sense. Now the games end way sooner, and kids will never learn to appreciate the satisfaction of drawing that final purple. Yo, television has shortened our attention spans enough. Candy Land used to be a sanctuary from the breakneck pace of the outside world. Now Hasbro has totally destroyed that. Destroyed it with rainbows.

2. Plumpy was changed to Mamma Ginger Tree.

Way to go, Candy Land. Remove the one reference to actual fresh fruit on a board filled with confections. And what do you replace it with? Squire Strawberry? Yablok, the Apple Gnome? No. Gingersnaps. Also, it's not even correct from a botanical perspective. Ginger doesn't grow on a tree; it's a root.

You know, my favorite fruit growing up was plums, and looking back on it, I can probably attribute that to Candy Land. Sure, Plumpy was the worst card to get--you're one purple away from winning and then you draw Plumpy, so you have to jump back to the sixth space on the board or wherever he was.* AWW, PLUMPY? COME ON! But you know what? It got us talking about Plumpy. It created a dialogue about plums in every household across America.

Growing up, there were a lot of images of cartoon characters promoting unhealthy foods. But as kids, we could always count on two things to show us the way: 1) Doug, which was obviously produced by the beet lobby, and 2) Plumpy. What do kids have now? Veggie Tales? Please.

3. Queen Frostine was changed to Princess Frostine.

What? Because women can't be in a position of power? Okay, besides that fact, notice that Queen Frostine actually rhymes. It's mellifluous. It flows off your tongue. And it's appropriate, because she's the last character on the board. There she is, up at the top, regal, haughty, surveying her domain of plums and mint and licorice from beyond the ice cream sea. You can win in two moves if you draw Queen Frostine and then double-purple. I should know--I used to stack the deck while Aunt Jeannie was in the other room making spaghetti. Nothing feels better than drawing her on your first turn and squealing in delight as you read her name: Qu-EEN Frost-EEN!! Game over. Unless I get Plumpy. Princess Frostine? That sounds like a stripper.

Anyway, for these reasons, this year, I'll be purchasing a copy of Chutes and Ladders. It uses more math, and it also taught me that you can't ice skate while riding a horse, lest you fall back 46 spaces. Going with the present I'm planning to buy for Secret Santa this year, it should make an interesting shopping trip.

*New editions of Candy Land also include a rule that you don't have to move backwards if you draw a character card for a space that is behind you. WHAT IS UP WITH THAT? Sometimes, in life, you face setbacks. You should learn to face them in Candy Land, too.

Fat people twister

2009-11-29T11:46:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving on the first Monday of October every year.

Yesterday Chelsea got mad because I had used up all of the leftover mashed potatoes making eggs in purgatory (or, as Giada DeLaurentiis, the recipe's creator, might say, "eegs een purgatoree-o!"), even though she had said SIX HOURS beforehand that she was totally tired of leftovers. Anyway, I was struck by a bolt, not Usain Bolt, but a bolt of inspiration, almost possessed by some divine creative spirit as I suggested, "Well, you could fry stuffing instead of frying mashed potatoes; there's still some stuffing left." Chelsea called my bluff: "Oh? Really? That sounds good. Could you make some for me?"

So I cut up some stuffing pieces, dredged them in flour, dipped them in a beaten egg, and coated them with some brown butter breadcrumbs that I had made as a topping for sweet potato ice cream. I tossed them in a hot skillet, releasing that deep, lusty smell of frying that you only get making the cutlets on Christmas morning. Three minutes later, we had this picture, taken using the Outkast app on Chelsea's iPhone (you actually have to shake it, shake it).

They were too rich for Jeff (how is that even possible?), but Chelsea and I both liked them a lot. Then I googled "fried stuffing" to see if I had, in fact, originated the idea. It should not have surprised me that this was the first hit, or that someone had even thought to make stuffing corn dogs, deep-fry them, and mount them on sticks. You win again, Paula Deen.

Fools like me

2009-11-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Since the reopening of the Bay Bridge after Labor Day, a total of 42 crashes have occurred on it. That's more than one crash every other day.

Whenever people admire things that have grown from my garden, I say something like "Oh, I just planted them; God did the rest." This is pretty much true, I think. Well, during the summer I had to water them every day, but Supertyphoon '09 has left the ground moist enough to nurture growth without constant attention.

So apparently God did not get the memo that I am trying to grow leeks, kale, radishes, and peas rather than onion grass and gigantic three-leaf clovers. Perhaps I should have made louder entreaties to Our Lady of Perpetual Weeding. If you go back and look at Ruth's blog from January last year, you can see the result of allowing these onions and clovers to grow unchecked. Yes. That's mostly onion grass. I could probably pickle scallions for the rest of my life if I wanted, if not for the fact that the onion tops don't actually taste very good. On Veteran's Day I came home early to tear out as many as I could, but when I ran downstairs to grab some mustard greens for dinner, my crop was again studded with clovers. It seems like a losing battle. Yet I am encouraged by the words of Thomas Jefferson: the price of produce is constant vigilance.

In happier produce news, my fava beans are really starting to take off, and I did not know that fava flowers are black and white. That's really pretty. I already like fava beans and now their flowers are beautiful and their leaves are delicious. Good job, fava beans. It's unfortunate that you are forever associated with cannibalism. Someone needs to stage a reclamation of the words "fava beans."

Also I was at Berkeley Bowl today picking some things up and I did the thing where you buy a ton of stuff except the one thing you went to get. In this case, the one thing I went to get was actually two things: cheesecloth and thyme, both of which play key roles in preparation of dishes for our annual Lauren-centric Thanksgiving potluck. The cheesecloth is for straining my pomegranate vodka and the thyme is to add to my braised lamb. I forgot both of them. Bad job, Sam.

In other news, Jeff and I went to Portland, Oregon last weekend and this is the iconic picture. I still can't really explain why I went, but it was a great time. It rained a lot so we mainly just drank everything. Everything. Pretty much everything a person can conceivably drink, except fermented horse milk. Mostly coffee. Also we ended up at Powell's City of Books, the Coruscant of bookstores, and I discovered Food Matters, which is pretty much the cookbook that I have always wanted to write. It teaches you how to eat better, for yourself, without being as much of a turd as Michael Pollan generally is. That's pretty cool. Mark Bittman was already one of my idols, and with this he has pretty much cemented his status as my favorite Mark (other candidates: Marc Summers, Marky Mark).

I could write a blog (I have thoughts)

2009-10-29T22:45:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The total distance flown by all aircraft delivering supplies to Berlin during the Berlin Blockade exceeds the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

I have spent the past few days convinced that I am forgetting something. I keep looking at the dates--10/18, 10/22, 10/26--with the nagging suspicion that I was supposed to remember them for some reason. Yesterday I finally realized that these are not dates that I was supposed to remember, but course numbers from MIT etched in my memory. For example, yesterday, 10.28, was Bioprocess Engineering Lab, one of my favorite classes at MIT, taught by Jean-Francois "Your French Uncle" Hamel. Then I found out that yesterday was also my friend John's birthday. Which he told me last week. Oops.

I went through my computer recently when I was approaching my hard drive capacity and purged a bunch of old pictures. In the process I realized that the overwhelming majority of my old food pictures were totally awful. Trader Joe's goat cheese is an awesome soup topping but not among the most photogenic, and flash doesn't really help with that. So, anyway, I know this picture is not very good, but let me tell you about it.

Yesterday I found a tent on craigslist for $20 and it came with every part and did not smell bad at all. That's pretty awesome. A tent is the only thing I was going to ask for at Christmas this year. A tent and socks. Because I really do need new socks every year; something in the water has made me tragically incompetent at doing laundry since I got to California. In my past three trips to the laundromat, I have 1) forgotten to add soap, 2) exploded a tube of chapstick in the dryer, and 3) spilled half a bottle of detergent in my laundry-toting suitcase. But that's another blog entry. Anyway, so I found this tent on craigslist and went and picked it up. After I expressed surprise that the seller hadn't found anyone to buy it over the two-day interval between my initial inquiry and my arrival at her front door, she just said "Well, you said you wanted it, so I told everyone it was spoken for! I wouldn't sell it to anyone else. That would be downright wrong." I said "You are so nice! I wish anyone else on craigslist felt that way."

To celebrate I decided to buy a cookbook on Amazon because they are pretty cheap on Amazon. I am between two likely overhyped new releases: Ad Hoc at Home and Momofuku. Generally I am not about cooking from recipes--to be honest I still haven't made anything from my signed copy of Barefoot Contessa at Home--but the reviews of these cookbooks seem to suggest that they will not only provide you with new recipes, but also generally improve your cooking, and also make you a better person. People are like, "I got a job because of Thomas Keller's essay on kosher salt!"

So I was pretty settled on Ad Hoc after reading that it provides you with lots of condiment recipes--oh, condiments!--until I found out that the Amazon page for Momofuku has this recipe for ginger-scallion sauce. Although I was skeptical that the listed proportion of ginger, scallions, and oil would even combine into a sauce, IT DID, and it was delicious, and I still have enough ginger for 3 more preparations of the sauce because I have never really had to estimate a half cup of ginger by eye before. I mixed it with some buckwheat noodles and served it with pickled beans and carrots, scallions, chicory, fried brussels sprouts, and wine grapes. All of those were awesome except the raw scallions, which kind of served as a dramatic foil to highlight how much the sauce improved the taste of scallions.

Anyway, now I am once again torn between the two books; maybe I should give Thomas Keller's chicken with dumplings recipe a try. The best line there is "Once the dumplings have cooled, trim any uneven edges with scissors." Oh, Tom, that's why my friend Nghi pays $300 for lunch cooked by you, but skips free brunch cooked by me because he wants to go listen to Oprah.

On the subject of eating, I am going to be Julia Child for Halloween this year and I really don't know if I can wait another 24 hours to totter around in my sensible skirt and pearls. Sam's Mom wondered somewhat disapprovingly*, "Why don't you go as Bobby Flay?" For real, Sam's Mom, who wants to be Bobby Flay? Also I can't make tamales.

* but maybe I'm projecting

Waterloo

2009-10-25T23:11:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Marvel released a special comic book during fashion week in which Tim Gunn becomes Iron Man.

I am writing an e-mail to someone commenting on how much I like his pants and I went on wikipedia just to make sure I had the spelling correct. It turns out that the word is spelled lederhosen (leather trousers). I had always thought it was liederhosen (song trousers). You know, the trousers that you wear when you go out and sing in the mountains with your cows. I think this misconception arose because I was almost forced to wear a pair during the concert scene of The Sound of Music, but was able to avoid that fate by arguing that 1) there is only a 30 second window for a costume change after the preceding scene, and 2) Captain Von Trapp would have probably chosen something that chafes less as he hikes over the Swiss Alps to avoid Nazi persecution. Then they would have become leiderhosen (sadness trousers)--a misspelling also cleared up by the wikipedia article.

The inaugural Radke lab camping trip actually turned out really well! We went down to the beach at Point Reyes national seashore, hiked two miles, and stayed overnight near the beach. We played light-up Frisbee in the dark and accidentally chased deer. I kind of ended up being the planner by default, so I was pretty proud that everything turned out fine without anyone starving or getting attacked by a cougar. "The soup was a really good idea!" "It was your idea, Clay."

Except for one tent being totally stank, it was all shaping up to be a great excursion until around 4 AM on Sunday night, when a storm blew in a few hours ahead of schedule. I fortuitously awoke to hear the first rain drops and pulled my shoes into the tent, but the quantity of water dumped on us over the next five hours made this a sort of "Ze goggles! Zey do nothing!" moment.

So yeah, rain. Lots of rain. And I had such great plans involving oatmeal, too (I get more excited about oatmeal than most people in this world do). Unfortunately the secret waterproof pocket in Ian's backpack that I stuck my cell phone into did not turn out to be as secret or waterproof as I thought, so I returned from my trip to discover that my cell phone was completely out of commission (and only a few days after I marveled to Mitra how strong it was still going after three years). More precisely, I arrived home to discover that my phone was out of commission and my housekeys were lost. After about an hour of stress eating granola bars and contemplating the technical challenges involved in a climb from the back porch over my roof and into my open bedroom window (less steep than Half Dome, but without cables; wet shingles, not dry granite), I was finally able to wedge the back window open with my gardening knife and hop through into a soaked fetal position on the kitchen floor.

If you google "cell phone water damage" you'll find a lot of hits that suggest things like alcohol, dehydrators, ovens, hammers. Whatever. Well, you know, I work in a chemical engineering laboratory. I soaked that sucker in isopropanol, heated it to 40 C overnight, pulled vacuum on it, stuck it in a dessicator for three days. Nothing. He's dead, Jim. Finally on Friday I admitted defeat and headed down to the Verizon store downtown to grab a new one. And as frustrated as the untimely loss of my good old phone left me, I was excited to change my ringtone to No One Receiving.

Let me tell you the tales of your life

2009-10-11T23:36:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? This awful weed, also known as Pigface, is edible, and its flowers are actually a delicacy.

I have a composition for Russian due tomorrow which nobody in class (except Nina) knew about until Friday because our instructor told us about its existence and explained its topic to us in Russian, and honestly, we're only in Russian 2, so when she speaks in Russian more than two consecutive sentences most of us zone out and hope she doesn't call on us. Nina, always on top of these things, suggested that we start a facebook group so that all eight of us can stay abreast of new assignments as a team.

Our composition turned out to be the same assignment as the first composition we did this semester: we have to take a painting, choose a character from that painting, and write about everything that happened prior to the scene that is depicted. It could be difficult if you pick a painting about hunting or something, because Russian apparently has 17 different words for "shoot" and "kill," and you don't get to that until Unit 19 in our textbook.

I picked this one because it was just a spherical woman eating, and I like eating so I always have a lot to say about it. For my first composition I decided to write from the perspective of the watermelon, who was grown in Nice and shipped to Moscow, then cut up and eaten by this fat woman. The watermelon learned how to speak Russian from a potato in the kitchen. She can also speak German, Italian, and Chinese.

This time decided to write a story about the samovar, whose name is Sam (see how that works?). Sam was constructed in Austria around the turn of the century by a blacksmith named Shlomo. Shlomo sold him for $40,000 to Franz Ferdinand in May 1914. But then Franz got shot the next month, so Sam sat unloved in his empty palace until he was stolen by gypsies the following year. The gypsies took him to Moscow and sold him to a merchant for $2. But the merchant liked him so much that he polished him up, and now Sam sits in the merchant's house, where the merchant's wife drinks tea out of him every afternoon.

I am almost as proud of this as I am of a composition I wrote for German 2. The only prompt we were given was "Als ich ein Kind war..." ("When I was a child..."). I wrote about being a child and being asked by my teacher "Wie viele Studenten sind hier im Zimmer?" When I produced the correct answer of "Zwanzig" the teacher said "Ja! Du hast das Auto gewonnen!" and gave me a new car, which I could not drive on the Autobahn until I was 18. I have since lost the story to a hard drive crash, but it was perhaps one of the best things I've ever written; it had really great pacing and well-developed characters.

Upon relating the general plot of this story to Mitra, she remarked, "Is your teacher Oprah?"

Love lockdown

2009-10-09T10:36:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Oysters wrapped in bacon are called "Angels on Horseback."

"Attempted murder! Now, honestly, what is that? Do they give a Nobel Prize for attempted chemistry?"

I got the news after checking a voicemail that Mitra left me at 7:02 AM this morning. My reaction was probably about the same as when I found out that Levi Johnston and Patti Griffin were dating. Unfortunately I had left my laptop power cord at work and exhausted all the battery watching the most recent episode of South Park (shamona!). Later I was on Google looking for the exact text of the Sideshow Bob quote when I discovered that I was not the first person to publish it on the internet this morning. I lose at the internet today (I think the accepted meme is "I lose the internet" but that sounds dumb).

Speaking of memes, I was not the first person to think of "Barack Obama, I'm gonna let you finish, but Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the best Nobel Peace Prize winners of all time." But ten thousand points to whoever got that one.

In other news, due to the mounting University of California budget crisis, our department administration has decided to cut costs by purchasing half as many pre-colloquium donuts on Wednesdays and slicing each one in half. Also, all social events are now subsidized from the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Life fund, to which you can donate!

A supposedly fun thing

2009-09-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

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.

The first of the line is tied to a tree

2009-09-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

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!

If I were a Trader but then again Joe

2009-09-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

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.

If I were a collier but then again no

2009-08-30T18:01:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Upon Warren G. Harding's death, E. E. Cummings remarked, "The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead."

Sam's Mom and I went to the historic Cornwall Iron Furnace today. It was the seventh iron furnace put into operation in the state of Pennsylvania. We saw a bunch of cannons and cannonballs dating from 1776 and almost got killed by a snake. Also I learned that James Buchanan was a heterosexual.

Most interestingly we got to watch a video filmed at Hopewell Iron Furnace. I think I actually watched this video at MIT when I took STS.001: Roe v. Technology. The first section of the video showed us how charcoal was made in the 18th century.

First, you chop down a cord of wood. You take some thin pieces and make a chimney out of them, and then you build a huge two-story pile around it with all the other pieces. The video didn't mention it, but throughout this chopping process you are also on the lookout for brown recluse spiders. You cover the pile with a foot of dry leaves from the forest floor and then a foot of dirt. Then you jump up on the pile, drop some hot coals down the chimney and cover it up with a big chunk of wood.

You let it burn for two weeks. But every day you have to make sure that there aren't any air pockets, because that's dangerous. The pile could collapse or something. So you walk up on top of this flaming mound that is spewing noxious gas out of every pore and to get rid of any air bubbles and prevent it from collapsing, you jump up and down. You stomp it down. Because it might be structurally unsound. Then after two weeks you start digging out the coals with a shovel. Unless they're still on fire. Then you have to seal the pile back up and stomp on it some more and let it sit there until the fire goes out.

It struck me watching this video that colliery is actually first-generation biofuels research c. 1750. You're taking plants and instead of just straight-up burning them, you're making them into a fuel that's easier to transport, has a higher energy density, and burns better. Just instead of enzymes and fermentation you're using a gigantic flaming pile of wood for two weeks.

So, yo, if biofuels researchers 250 years ago were stomping on unstable flaming piles of dirt in the name of their craft, complaining about qualifying exams seems a little overdone.

Your quals got me looking so crazy right now

2009-08-22T20:54:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? David Letterman's sidekick Paul Schaffer wrote the song "It's Raining Men."

Today in people who have never met but look alike for no conceivable reason, we have:

1) free software pioneer, archetypal nerd, MIT professor and homeless man Richard Stallman

2) indie music darling and possible former woman Antony Hegarty

You may not see it unless you have watched this video four or five times today already.

Mitra you need to write a comment telling me to get back to work!! Cougar, thy name is Madonna.

This is my now

2009-08-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Brian Boitano wrote the foreword to the book "The South Park Guide to Life," and is also hosting a new cooking show.

Activism in a Berkeley laundromat at 7:30 PM:

"Excuse me, are you a registered Berkeley voter?"
"Go away! I'm just trying to live from one day to the next!"
"Excuse me, are you a registered Berkeley voter?"
"No, sorry, I'm registered in Oakland."
"Okay, thanks. Excuse me, are you a registered Berkeley voter?"
"Why yes, yes I am."
"Are you aware of Referendum..."
"Actually, I already signed this at the farmer's market... sorry."

How Berkeley can you be? (that parade was cancelled this year, presumably because people were too Berkeley last year)

Now I am watching a seven-year-old girl in purple tights play Frogger. She just died three times. Now I am watching her play Maximum Force. Strangely, she is much better at shooting terrorists than guiding frogs across the street. I'm kind of scared.

All I want to do is

2009-08-07T23:23:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? There is a ship graveyard on the Suisun Bay, just a few miles north of where I live.

I had a surprisingly busy and surprisingly productive week. I like surprises, even though I am a lot like Yoko Ono in that I usually figure out that a surprise is coming before it befalls me. Anyway, it turns out that this was a particularly good week to be surprised by business and productivity, because my qualifying exams are happening in, oh, eighteen days or so. Good job, universe. I mean, good job, Claire, undergrad who patiently obtains all my data for me.

I am the kind of person who celebrates by coming home and using all four burners on the stove at the same time. People always wonder why I never want help in the kitchen when I'm cooking and kind of ask people to stay out. It's really because I just kind of get in a rhythm when I'm cooking, watching over everything at the same time, getting ready for different things to pop up in my head. It's like playing Dance Dance Revolution (Immolation?) and having someone help out by tapping on the back arrow for you. It seems like it would make things easier, but really it's just going to end up with stomped fingers and someone crying.

One task with which I will gladly accept assistance is shelling beans. God, if there's a heaven or if there's a heck, or, well, whatever--one thing I know is that my afterlife is going to involve shell beans. Because fava beans, like the ones here, are totally delicious, but seriously could not be any harder to consume. You have to blanch them--I really, really hate blanching--to separate the beans from the casings, then open up each pod, pull out the three or four beans inside, tear a little hole in each casing, pop the bean out, watch it fly through the air, pick it up off the floor, brush it off, put it in a bowl, and then cook it. It's so many steps. God. Yes, there I will be, marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet shelling an ever-growing pile of fava beans, supervised by Bobby Flay.

In the end, though, it all worked out, since I ended up with not only a sink almost comically full of dishes, but also this barley risotto and fava bean succotash. The risotto was outstanding; a quart of vegetable stock concentrated down to maybe one cup in the barley. It was just exploding with flavor, with the barley still a little chewy but also wrapped up in that delicious starchy risotto broth. I got the idea from Heidi and I was initially a little skeptical, but, yo, it worked out in the end. The fava beans were also pretty good, owing primarily to some "melted" leeks that I saw on David Lebovitz's blog.

Anyhoo, right now I have some bread in the oven and I would have made pickled cherries too, but I literally got every pot I own dirty. I guess I could have used a frying pan or something, but, well, that doesn't quite seem right. My original plan of writing an outline for my qualifying exam paper seems to have fallen through, but that's how it goes some nights in my life.

Food wins again.

Someone good

2009-08-03T20:29:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Bestselling author Sue Grafton became a mystery writer after going through a bitter 6-year divorce and custody battle, all the while inventing stories about harming or murdering her ex-husband in her head.

Those of you who really know me know that I go to bed every night wearing headphones so that I can fall asleep listening to a cassette tape of Tracy Jordan from 30 Rock endlessly repeating "Live every week like it's Shark Week!" That's how I'm so motivated to do awesome things every day like thrift shopping, making omelets and playing Flash games.

Well, it turns out that this week actually is Shark Week and I have been somewhat remiss in obeying Tracy's mandate lately. I'm not sure why--things are going pretty well, but I've just been kind of stuck in a rut for the last month. So, full of intent both to recognize this international holiday and also perhaps to kick my life back into shape, yesterday I decided to go on a bike from my home in Oakland/Berkeley to Palo Alto.

Größere Kartenansicht

Forty-six miles later, yo, I was in Palo Alto, sipping an iced mocha and reading 1491. I don't know if you've been to Palo Alto, but that kind of seems like what you're supposed to do in Palo Alto. I brought a camera but ended up failing to use it because it was foggy for the first half of my trip, strip mall for the next quarter, and "Oh snap I forgot to wear sunscreen" for the rest. But here are a few thoughts that try to capture my experience using the Camera Eye, you know, John Dos Passos style, or maybe Cam Jansen and the Mystery of the UFO style.

- The song of the trip was probably "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed; since I don't wear an iPod when I bike (dangerous!) I was rolling down a lot of hills into canyons singing "It's such a perfect day! I'm glad I spent it with you!" I guess I was talking to my bike, which still lacks a name. Oh bike! You just keep me hanging on, don't you?

- I always wondered how my undergrad professor, Jeff Tester, got to be so good at biking. He totally destroyed me on both Tester Lab bike trips. Like, destroyed. To the point where he was yelling words of encouragement to me like some kind of crazy uncle just so I could finish. And I was 22 and he was 60. Oh man. Now I realize that this was because every gentlemen of a certain age apparently goes out and bikes around hills in regional parks every Sunday morning. Seriously, I must have passed one hundred Jeff Testers in the Oakland hills. Bike on, Professor Tester.

- New favorite city: Union City. I was on Hesperian Boulevard / Union City Boulevard / Newark Boulevard for, oh, about an hour. None of it was very pleasant, at least not compared to the regional parks I had just traversed, but one thing I can tell you about this Boulevard. In Hayward it was a three-lane minor highway. In Fremont it was a three lane minor highway. In Union City it was a two-lane minor highway with a bus lane and a bike lane. You rock, Union City.

- There's a huge wildlife reserve right next to the Dumbarton Bridge! I did not know that. It's kind of weird to think of a do-not-touchy wildlife reserve so close to Interstate 84, but there you go. There were definitely some parts that did not look very reserved for wildlife, like they were funny salt colors not usually found in nature, but what do I know about protected marshlands? Actually I should know a lot because we went to Wildwood like every single year of my elementary education. Oh well. Sorry Mrs. Little.

- I got a little bit lost in Hayward and I do not really know how that happened. It was not the most fun place to be lost. I don't really mean that in a derogatory sense, just that it's not like I was lost and then ended up biking into the world's largest weeping willow tree or something. I guess it was not the worst place to be lost either.

- Caltrain has really great bike cars and is in general a lot like a German train. It was really a lot like being on the S-Bahn. Ways it was similar to the S-Bahn: (1) really great bike cars (2) there were soccer fans on it (go Sounders?) (3) there was a group of people drinking a 12-pack of beer on it.

Well, that was this weekend. I am not going to have any more adventures at all for a while because I have my qualifying exam coming up in three weeks, but if anything cool happens in lab or if I make a tasty salad, well, blog, you know that you will be the first to know.

Make way for cats

2009-07-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Fred Savage from The Wonder Years graduated from Stanford. Man, smartest and most well-adjusted child cast of a television show ever.

Today in the internet:

Along with "Scott Tenorman Must Die" this is pretty much one of the greatest pieces of art of my generation. Seriously, the VP debate was my previous favorite, and I still walk around singing "Pakistan, that's where they live, that's where they are" every so often, which is cool because at least somebody remembers something poor Joe Biden said that night. But this new AutoTune the News, oh man... so catchy, so well-edited, and so profound.

"Do we choose liberty or do we choose tyranny?"
"It all depends: who gets to be the tyrant?"

Seriously, that's some deep political philosophy. At least, I can imagine Howard Da Silva as Benjamin Franklin saying it, which is my main criterion for whether or not something is philosophically sound or not.

As I was composing this quick entry Manoj tipped me off to an article with the ominous title "Cats Know How to Control Humans, Study Finds." Come on, I've been saying that since I was like 14 and people are just now getting around to studying it? I am the Al Gore of cat paranoia. Anyway, I read through that and confirmed my deepest fears and when I got to the bottom I happened to glance over at some of the other "most read stories" for today:

I have to assume that these represent only stories from the Department Of Sad And Implausible Headlines That Would Otherwise Seem To Have Originated From A Satirical Publication.

Ninety percent perspiration

2009-07-11T18:20:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The German word for butterfly is "Schmetterling."

After an epic battle against a yard full of weeds that I personified in my head as Bushroot from Darkwing Duck, this afternoon I took some inspiration from this SFGate article about pasta + broth + vegetables = delicious and this Harold McGee article about cooking pasta in a small amount of liquid, with whole wheat pasta being especially delicious. With a little mental math I came up with pasta + broth + vegetables + Michelle "Biceptor" Obama - extra water = even more delicious.

So I made whole wheat penne in broth with cranberry beans and golden beans from my backyard, garnished with green onions and basil. I cooked the pasta in just about a pint of my homemade vegetable broth and, oh man. Everything kind of melted together, but still kept that awesome crunch that you want in beans. And once all the pasta was done--oh snap, that broth, thick with starch, slick with olive oil, salty with a kiss of basil at the end. Life-changing broth.

I might never make pasta in a pot full of water again, because seriously, it's usually all for me, and heating up a whole pot is such a drag.

Now I am going to make hot chocolate. I love cold summers.

Soy un perdedor

2009-07-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Unpronouncable Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx won every possible award during his inaugural 1969 Tour De France ride, and would have also won the young rider award had it existed.

One of the things I've always been bitter about is my homeroom losing the Superintendent's Challenge when I was in fifth grade. The Superintendent's Challenge was a three-day Olympic-style competition pitting all the fifth grade students in the school against each other in athletic and academic contests, and also some crazy things like RC car racing and shoe golf. We came in second place behind Mr. Davis's homeroom, which is actually pretty impressive because after the second day of competition we were in fifth place and went on to win five out of eight events on the final day of the games. Yes, it was impressive, but still not enough to overtake Room 120's commanding lead.

The main reason I am bitter is that we totally lost because of a technicality. The athletic competitions were divided by gender, much like the Olympics, I guess, and because of a dearth of young boys in my homeroom, I was forced into competing in boys' free throw shooting on the second day of the games instead of Math Challenge. So, of course, the team of Chase Woodford and I came in last place in free throw shooting, with a total of two out of twenty shots between us (thanks for that Chase), and our Math Challenge team, captained by future second-round WNBA draft pick Jen Harris, also did not place well against its formidable competition. If only there were some mechanism that had allowed the two of us to be switched and six-foot-tall ten-year-old Jen Harris had schooled all those boys at free throw shooting, and I had helped the Math Challenge team into first or second place (there was this kid, I think his name was Billy Lyons, who beat me in the schoolwide 24 competition earlier that year before moving to a different middle school over the summer), I know that we would have seen our names engraved on that inaugural Superintendent's Challenge trophy.

At the awards ceremony Mr. Davis copped out and decided that instead of putting "Homeroom 120" on the trophy they would just put "Class of 2003" to celebrate everyone's participation in the competition, but Mrs. Bruce was totally not about compromise. One time she gave the entire classroom recess detention for a week because we had failed to win the "classiest cafeteria class" award for best-behaved homeroom during lunch for the month of October.

I'm thinking about all this in lab this morning because I had a weird dream last night where I ended up in some small mountain town in Pennsylvania at a county fair called Alpaloosa where I entered a "triathlon" competition allegedly containing a running, biking, and hiking component. "Oh boy, no swimming!" I thought, and paid the entrance fee. It turns out that it actually involved doing sprints, stopping, catching baseballs shot at us out of a cannon, sprinting some more, and then cross-country skiing through a giant wooden maze. I did not have any skis, but I borrowed a tiny pair from a kid and skied into the maze, eventually overtaking all the middle-aged women in front of me because there were cryptic clues that revolved around finding a brass rat to unlock the secret exit, and I was able to correctly interpret them, slide down the secret slide, and into a final-stage victory. Despite this, I had neither sprinted quickly enough nor caught enough baseballs to overtake the leader on points, and ended up finishing in third with the "silver hand" and "maze master" consolation awards. It felt like the Superintendent's Challenge all over again.

Basically the moral of the story is that you should always let me win, because if I ever lose at anything it will haunt me for decades.

Bicycle race

2009-07-02T18:14:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Both Mark Wahlberg and Carrie Underwood have three nipples.

I waited 8 hours for the cable guy today. He only missed his window of 9 AM - 1 PM by three and a half hours. Good job cable guy. I mean, I didn't have too much of a problem with it, but what do people with actual jobs do in situations like these?

Anyway, I was able to work from home a little bit while outsourcing my actual lab duties to Socalian undergrads, and in the meantime I did accomplish two major things.

1. With plenty of time to spare this morning, I made my most epic oatmeal ever, and you know my oatmeal is normally pretty epic. This one was my usual seven grains (oats, wheat bran, quinoa, rice, millet, barley, and rye) with curry caramelized onions and a poached egg. It was pretty much amazing. I would have taken a picture but I broke the poached egg yolk and had to eat it really quickly. I hope that this description suffices.

2. I totally beat this guy in a bicycle race from campus to Trader Joe's. This dude in front of me was stopping at every single light and then not noticing when they changed and generally being really slow, so I pulled ahead of him. I hate biking down College because it's really crowded and dangerous, so I turned off on Derby and went down Hillegass instead. When I jumped back onto College at Alcatraz that dude was there again! The lack of stoplights between Derby and Ashby must have worked to his advantage. In my head I yelled "ha ha we meet again!" He got confused by a car making a left turn, which I had anticipated and very safely maneuvered around, allowing me to bolt through the yellow light at Claremont and College and finish all my Trader Joe's shopping before he even made it to the store.

3. In the process of typing this entry I discovered that when you try to type "hokay" into the T9 Word function on my phone it renders it as "inlay."

Inlay, time to make dinner. I must be hungry from playing as hard as I work.

Once in a lifetime

2009-06-27T00:40:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? David Byrne was born in Scotland.

Sam's Mom and I went to see David Byrne tonight. As you know, he is my role model for life and pretty much remains so after tonight. I bought her the tickets to celebrate her 25th birthday. Let me summarize some of the songs for you.

Houses in Motion: OH MAN, this was totally the Hey Mama Wolf; this was always one of my less favorite songs on Remain in Light and here he just jammed the crap out of it and then there was this moment where all the other instruments dropped out and the bass just played do-b-do-b-do for one second before continuing the jamming. People applauded for like five minutes straight.

Crosseyed and Painless: WHAT WAS THAT? It was like soft funk, like David Bowie doing Golden Years or something, except it had the David Byrne Nerd Rap in it and my favorite lyrics, "The island of doubt is like the taste of medicine."

Help Me Somebody: I LOVE THIS SONG and instead of having the sampled radio priest do the yelling, DAVID BYRNE DID IT. It was amazing.

the dancers: They were easy on the eyes, but most of their moves consisted of "make flippers with your hands and run around and sometimes jump over David Byrne." I think David Byrne was a better dancer than all of them (seriously, he looked really good shaking his butt; almost as good as Madonna).

I Zimbra: WHO DOES FREAKING I ZIMBRA IN CONCERT? IT IS WRITTEN IN A MADE-UP LANGUAGE. Also, this song had the best dancing.

Take Me to the River: When I heard the bass riff I initially thought he was doing Billie Jean as a tribute to Michael Jackson (have you heard? he died.) but was equally excited to discover that it was actually Take Me to the River.

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today: What a great title. It's also a pretty cool ballad. Like!

Born Under Punches, The Great Curve: These are way better on Remain In Light, but still kind of worked in concert. Born Under Punches had a little more funk going on then the impossible angular world music on the record, and that was okay. The Great Curve was missing the horns and the guitar solos, but I was really just waiting to hear what he would do with the "WORLD MOVES ON A WOMAN'S HIPS!" part. I had always imagined him hopping around stage like a deranged person; instead, he just cradled his white guitar in his arms like a child as he shouted it out. DAVID BYRNE IS A GENIUS.

Burning Down the House: You have to ask me about this in person; the margins of this blog are too narrow to describe the true marvels of this song, which I normally hate.

Basically the only letdown was after David Byrne released a hundred beachballs into the audience and people started taking them for themselves while the music was still playing. NO. David Byrne put those there for everyone to enjoy.

Jesus is coming... as "lightning"

2009-06-19T19:33:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The Wave, Arizona.

Currently I am at a conference in Illinois and if you talked to me in the past three days you know that I really was not excited about coming. Last night I became even less excited about coming when I looked at the weather report for Urbana, IL, and it said,

PM t-storms, some severe, storms can bring downpours, large hail, damaging winds, and a tornado

Hokay. I don't know if "damaging" is ever a word that I have seen in a weather forecast before, nor is "a tornado". I guess that's good. Just one tornado. However, it seems like most of the damaging winds blew over before we had time to get here (our bus driver said that a six-foot-tall fence in his backyard was uprooted), and right now there's just a light drizzle and some summer thunder.

Thunder is one thing I do miss about the East Coast. Unlike Groker, I do like thunderstorms, and there really aren't any in the Bay Area. It took me a while to notice that, because it's hard to notice an absence, but once you do notice it, it's weird, and kind of unsettling, and probably why rain on the West Coast is just feels kind of pitiful and depressing instead of like some vital, irrepressible force of nature.

Here are some other things that have cheered me up about this conference:

1) moving sidewalk at the Oakland airport
2) lightning bugs!
3) cool poster about Brazil's energy infrastructure
4) delicious mashed potatoes at buffet dinner
5) my sprained ankle is much less purple than it has been

My expectations have been exceeded, but still, I would rather be at home icing my foot for fourteen hours tomorrow.

Yoko and me and that's reality

2009-06-15T16:34:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The sea lions that famously laze on San Francisco's Pier 39 came there naturally, but only following the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Ben and Allison visited Michael J and I in the Bay Area this weekend. We went to the Marin Headlands, In-N-Out, Muir Beach, Alamo Square Park, and generally anything that was conducive to Allison taking pictures. I discovered, for the third or fourth time, that no matter how many things in the Bay Area you show people, Fisherman's Wharf will be their favorite. I also discovered that we walked directly by Humphry Slocombe Ice Cream but did not patronize it. This is probably good, because Ben was already pretty freaked out by the offerings at Tara's.

On Sunday we went to the fake Full House house, which is the Painted Ladies on Steiner. The Tanners have a picnic there in the opening, so sometimes people think that this is where Uncle Jesse lives. Actually, he lives at 1709 Broderick St. I know this not only because I saw it with my own eyes, but also because on Saturday I edited Wikipedia to say that the house used for exterior shots was at 1709 Broderick St., thus ensuring that we would indeed be at the correct place. I think that this is the first time that I have edited Wikipedia with the purpose of altering reality to my will.

Anyway, 1709 Broderick is totally the right house!

Was born with roses in her eyes

2009-06-08T01:12:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The movie "Would I Lie to You?" was retitled after the name that Dustin Hoffman's mother called him as a boy: "Tootsie."

That fact comes from a cryptogram that I solved taking the BART back from San Leandro this evening. I was in San Leandro because I got confused about which BART to take out of the Oakland Airport.

I think Shana is the greatest because we have been together to see both the world's largest book and the world's smallest book.

Also, we own the same Dickies jacket in different colors and I get discounts on chocolate just by standing next to her.

The only girl I've ever loved

2009-06-02T22:48:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The Governor General of Canada recently gutted a seal and ate its heart raw. She was supposedly trying to raise awareness of the plight of some native people, but I really think she just did it so bloggers could make "Sarah Palin eat your heart out" puns.

Mitra mentioned on Friday something about how I don't blog very much anymore but every time I do I post a picture of something delicious.

This is the best breakfast I have ever made, and you know I really like breakfast. It's an omelet containing buttery potatoes and fennel drizzled with miso-walnut dressing, which is the greatest condiment ever, yes, that's right, bite me spicy Russian mustard.

I think it's appropriate that this blog has seen an upswing in food porn because I share my birthday Linda Lovelace. That's what I usually tell people when we have "famous people who share my birthday" discussions. My favorite out of the lot, besides Laura, is probably Jim Croce. I like "Time in a Bottle," but, you know, nobody really knows who Jim Croce is. Linda Lovelace requires less explanation.

I also share my birthday with Rod Stewart and I think it's telling that I would rather be associated with Linda Lovelace than Rod Stewart.

Joe from Choir, who got me onto this topic of discussion, shares his birthday with Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Bill Nye, Caroline Kennedy, and Phillipine revolutionary Benigno Aquino. He decided that if you put all those together, you get the perfect person, and I would find it pretty difficult to argue that. Musical, athletic, scientific, a Kennedy, and revolutionary. Yeah, pretty much the perfect person.

Who do you have for me? Well, besides Jim and Linda, you have... Laura Ingalls Wilder's father, Pat Benatar, and George Foreman. So, you know, you combine all those people and you get a pioneer exhibitionist with awesome 80's hair who invented the grilling machine and died in a plane crash. You know, I'm fine with that.

Tomorrow I'm heading to Seattle see my beloved high school friend Shana. We are going to go to taco trucks and a rainforest, and I fully intend to drink only lattes for 96 hours.

Mirth with thee I mean to live

2009-06-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Super Mario Galaxy 2. Sorry, I usually tend toward something a little more out obscure but seriously everybody in the world should be excited about this.

This weekend I sang in Handel's L'Allegro, et al. as part of the pit for the Mark Morris dance group. Apparently this Mark Morris is a big deal. I thought I was just kind of signing up for some kind of student production to keep me off the streets this summer, but, no, like 4,000 people watched me and and the UC Chamber Chorus sing "Haste thee, nymph" and "These pleasures melancholy give."

Not gonna lie, the best part was probably getting paid $80 for the 40 hours of rehearsal that I put in. I think it is the first time that I have ever been paid for my musical efforts, and it feels pretty great. Unfortunately, because payment comes through UC Berkeley and I am already an employee of UC Berkeley, they just directly deposited it into my account rather than cutting me a check or anything. You know, whatever, I'm always willing to reduce administrative costs in the middle of a budget crisis, but having something tangible to represent singing for my supper would have been a lot of fun.

Anyway, there were a lot of other awesome things about the performance. First of all, staying in the pit for two dress rehearsals and three performances was outstanding. Seriously, I got a front row seat--or, well, stand--for some of the greatest singers I've ever heard. "Come rather goddess sage and holy" almost made me cry five times, or want to castrate myself so that I could become a baroque soprano.

I did not, because being a baroque soprano would also entail having to sing "Sweet bird" which was the LONGEST FREAKING MOVEMENT ever and basically consisted of 7 minutes of wooden flute cadenzas while everyone in the audience laughed at stuff going on in the dance that I could not see because my back was turned. Oh well, at least it was good wooden flute.

You know, joining the UC Berkeley choruses was a really good idea. I thought, oh, blah blah, I'm just going to sing some Brahms gypsy songs, and here in the past year I've sung the War Requiem and some aleatoric music and under Jane Glover, apparently also a big deal. Seriously, just watching her conduct, her little finger movements, her broad arm gestures, her smirks, her winks that are actually at the soloists but I was directly behind them in her line of signs so I pretended they were at me. I'm pretty good at stuff like that.

Anyway, this was a really awesome weekend and I felt that something would be missing from my life if I did not write it down somehow. On Blogger.

More food stuff tomorrow.

If you like it then you should have put it in my pants

2009-05-20T22:46:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? You can get tickets from SFO to Tokyo for $450 on Air Canada right now.

I found my brass rat today. This is the second time that my brass rat has been missing for a seven-day stretch. This is also the second time that I found it exactly seven days after its loss by checking in the pocket of the pants I was wearing at the time that I lost it.

I was trying to put a better "single ladies" pun in the title but I am too euphoric to figure one out right now. I think there is one in there and it has to do with a fact that our ring is the only recent one with a woman (i.e. a single lady) on the seal. Maybe you can figure it out?

The first time I lost my brass rat was at this awful-ass club in SoMa. I was going to a CouchSurfing social and for people who randomly break into each other's apartments and sleep on their couches and drink their scotch, these people were not especially social. I was disappointed. Anyway, I took the Transbay bus home and then when I woke up the next morning I could not find my ring. I looked and I looked and I cleaned my room and I freaked out for a whole week and then finally when I was doing laundry a week later it fell out of the back pocket of the exact pants I was wearing at the club that night. I had already checked them four times, but apparently, not hard enough.

The second time I lost my brass rat was last Wednesday, and it confused me a lot. I went to get coffee with Ian, I came back to lab, did some work, pooped, changed, went running, changed back, and came back. I just needed to find my ring before I went home, but I could not. This is really weird, because I never would have gotten coffee with Ian if I hadn't been wearing my ring, so I figured I must have lost it in lab somewhere. It was frustrating. I cleaned my desk, cleaned my lab space, cleaned the supply closet that I change in. I scoured the floors. I asked other labs that use that bathroom if they found anything there. I looked under monitors. I opened reagent bottles and shook them around to see if the ring fell in. I stress ate. I was just about to go to the UCPD tonight but their lost and found was closed. So I decided to come home and clean my room. The first thing I did was go through the pair of pants that I was wearing the day that I lost it, which I had already checked four times--but, apparently, not hard enough. After flipping them over a few times I noticed a secret change pocket near the waist. Sure enough, I stuck my finger in and BOOM there was my brass rat.

Come to think of it, I bought both of these pairs of pants at Gap. Damn you Gap and your secret spy pockets.

Anyway, I'm sitting here, kind of overjoyed right now, just because I have my ring back and also because of this strange little bit of deja vu, and also because Mitra and I went to YOGURTLAND tonight and it was delicious (but I did not take pictures to post on this blog).

It kind of makes me forget that someone jacked my bike light tonight.

Lettuce, turnip, and pea

2009-05-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The video game Hard Drivin' was originally a high-speed chase simulator that the government rejected. Developers put in loops and sold it as an arcade game.

I promised myself that I would not post anything about gardening until I was actually eating things that I was growing in my backyard and YO, I am eating lettuce out of my backyard now. kind of cool. The lettuce is not yet great, which the internet tells me might be the fault of an irregular watering schedule, so I've been giving them more care and attention recently in hopes of improving their flavor. I think it's been helping; I stole a few leaves out of the salad I made for lunch today and they were not bitter and didn't have the funky banana taste that dominated the first couple of, uh, harvests. Anyway, the point is that it is edible and now when I get up in the morning I can be like "Hmmm I think I want some lettuce with my lunch today; maybe I will go pick some out of the backyard."

Yes. I have successfully gardened. Yes. God, I wish I could wipe that smug smile off of Michelle Obama's face.

(NOTE: that was a 30 Rock reference; I do not actually harbor any enmity toward Michelle Obama although I am jealous of her biceps and have started doing 50 push-ups every day so I can be more like her.)

Here is some of the aforementioned lettuce as part of a tasty yuca salad with spicy mustard. I promise that someday I will write an entry that is not about food I ate.

There are ants in the kitchen right now which initially freaked me out a little bit and got me very worried until I discovered last night that they don't really want to eat the food (knock on wood), but instead the caulking where the countertops meet the wall. I think there are also some living in or near the stove, which is always really funny when I turn on the stove and watch them go scurrying. These are the strangest ants. So far I have watched them eat shampoo residue, caulking, string, and Ruth's underwear (it's because she's so sweet!).

I noticed their affinity for caulking while making dinner last night. I had the best dinner last night. I fried some fava beans still in their pods and tossed them with lots of salt and picked the beans out of their funny little slipper things and ate them and got olive oil and salt all over my fingers that flavored the fava beans as I ate them and then I also licked my fingers and even licked all the salt off the charred smoky pods because nobody else was home to see me (not that this would have stopped me). It was delicious. While doing that I also made some pasta sauce out some onions and garlic and a tomato and ate that with spaghetti. That was also delicious.

I love eating. I have recently realized that pretty much all foods taste good with just olive oil and salt added to them. I think I will try putting that on caulking and eating that. I think it will be tasty.

No, Sam, you will never get Michelle Obama arms with an attitude like that!

Sandwich day

2009-05-09T17:29:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Samuel L Jackson was an usher at Martin Lurter King Jr's funeral.

Today was not the best day. But whatever. Let's talk about good things first. Let's start and end by talking about good things. We can talk about the bad things in the middle. Kind of like making a sandwich.

Because today was not the best day, I had to stress eat. I was going to go to AG Ferrari with Ruth and Lauren, but I had some stuff to take care of on the Oakland front, so instead I stuck around the home. I remembered that I had some mozzarella cheese leftover from my last blog entry, so I decided to use some of that to make two small grilled cheese sandwiches with this really dense loaf of whole wheat bread that did not rise correctly. I put on arugula and tomato so it was kind of like a caprese. They were pretty tasty. So tasty, in fact, that I forgot to drink the glass of white wine that I had poured to accompany it.

That might be a good thing, since while "stress eating" sounds kind of charming in a Tina Fey way, "stress drinking" just sounds kind of sad in a Tracy Morgan way.

One thing I am really into now is searing things and then finishing them in the oven. It's so easy with a cast-iron skillet now. I made some roasted radishes this way on Thursday night, and then today I did that with my breakfast (fried oatmeal) and lunch (grilled cheese). I took a page from the book of Sam's Mom and chopped up the tomato really thin before placing it inside the sandwich, which meant that it was evenly distributed and did not ooze out. Sam's Mom does that with ham instead of tomato, but, you know, they're both pink; same thing.

The bad thing that happened today is that the backlight on my MacBook stopped working. Gosh, I'm glad that my last computer failed so spectacularly that I felt it necessary to get an AppleCare protection plan with this one. Anyway, this required me to go to the Apple Store in Emeryville to get that taken care of.

I really hate Emeryville; so much that when I think about it in my head, I call it "Archenemeryville." Biking there is just a total pain and the Apple Store is pretty much the only one in the East Bay, so everybody from Berkeley is there with their ugly kids and stupid iPhone problems. Anyway, I think everything is going to be okay; just a few days in the shop should fix whatever's wrong with the backlight, so no worries.

I also baked another loaf of bread for future sandwiches. This loaf rose pretty well and generally turned out a lot better. It requires two different day-long fermentation steps and is kind of a hassle, but, really, it's not too much more time-consuming that the no-knead bread I used to bake and it tastes two thousand times better.

I actually like kneading. I remember that I've previously compared baking bread to birthing a child. The kneading process, as you gradually add the flour and watch the dough slowly change and become more sticky and delicious, really makes it even more like the parenting process, I think.

Except with bread you hit it a lot more and then you eat it at the end.

You know I'm no good

2009-05-04T08:41:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? The six consecutive 9's appearing at the 762nd decimal place of pi are sometimes called the "Feynman Point."

I made pizza last night. It was pretty good. I only let the crust rise for 30 minutes because I did not want to eat pizza at 11 PM, but it still turned out pretty crispy and delicious. I am really excited to bake pizzas in the future now. I have never made pizza crust before, except for my 6th grade home economics (okay, actually "consumer education") project and that one time I made apple pizza for apple bake, but this is the first time I have ever proved it to myself as a viable source of dinner on any day of the week.

I drank Cole Coffee on Saturday morning, which is normally wonderful, but I had a large and I ended up feeling pretty blerg. Coffee is really my sweetest downfall. I love the smell more than most smells in the morning, and the taste of dark dark coffee is just amazing, but sometimes I end up just sick and nasty for an entire day. Maybe I could fix things somewhat if I got a latte or something, but, you know, I'm not a loser.

I am wondering what to sing for the ChemE talent show this Friday and I am between You Know I'm No Good, Samson, and Creep, or maybe I will just mash them all up and wear a corset.

Half day play

2009-05-01T08:40:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Chuck-E-Cheese was started by the founder of Atari.

So I had a choir concert at UC Davis on Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon. As a result I got half the day off. When I got back at 2:30 it seemed like going back to lab would be counterproductive, so I decided to run some long-awaited errands instead. I shopped for groceries and did some laundry, which, you know, all and all, made it a pretty good day.

Last night I put the fruits of my grocery shopping to use, and it turned out pretty well.

I made curry granola, inspired by this blog post. I kind of made up the spice ratios and I think it ended up a little spicy/salty, but it's still pretty delicious, especially with a little bit of yogurt to cut the spiciness. Some of the curry powder rubs off in the yogurt, too, and makes it all yellow and tasty.

I made the yogurt, too, inspired by Harold McGee's article, and yo? People always say that doing blah blah blah at home is super easy, but making yogurt actually is super easy. You buy a half gallon of milk, heat it up, cool it down, and add a scoop of already-made yogurt to it. Then you stick it in a warm place overnight. BAM! It's yogurt. Seriously. That's it. I was a little skeptical when I put the yogurt into the milk and it did not thicken at all, but then you just let it sit overnight and the bacteria do some stuff and, well, you have yogurt. It's amazing. I made two quarts of yogurt for like $2.50.

It's the way of the future.

Now it is raining and I'm actually pretty excited about the rain. It will make the flowers grow, and also I kind of just want to sit inside tonight and listen to the rain and drink red wine. It's that kind of night. I think I will cook lentils. It's a lentil night.

My Ramona

2009-04-20T19:03:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? "My Sharona" is Dave Grohl's favorite song.

Today was an improvement over yesterday, which consisted mostly of me sitting naked in the squalor of my room working on my year-end presentation, then going to a park to work on Russian with Robbie and getting covered in salad when a dog jumped on our dinner. But, no, today was pretty good. I took a shower for the first time in four days, I did well enough on my Russian test to avoid spending 40 minutes retaking it tomorrow, and I had carrots and hummus at lunch.

Probably the best thing that happened was that I was taking an unscheduled walk outside talking to one of my friends and he was talking about how he practices a lot, he has become good enough at a particular group activity that he could be considered "an anchor, instead of a Ramona." I asked, "Ramona? Is that the name of somone who sucks?" He was like, "No, it's one of those sucker things that cling to the bottom of whales and ships."

I almost said, "No, that's not quite the right word" but I was having a good day and it was nice outside, so I let it slide. Anyway, the best thing that happened to me today was I came up with this image of Ramona from the Beverly Cleary books with sharp fanglike teeth clining to the underside of a passing whale, and that was pretty funny.

In first or second grade we had to write two of our own chapters continuing the events of one of the Ramona novels we had read. In one of mine, Ramona looked at her cat Picky-Picky and was like "Picky-Picky's getting fat!" and then suddenly the cat has kittens (Picky-Picky is a boy). In the other one Ramona throws up three times in the cafeteria, and the last one smells so bad that the entire school must be evacuated.

I don't like sand

2009-04-15T11:49:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Don Pardo, the announcer for Saturday Night Live, is 91 years old.

I went to see Devendra Banhart last night. First of all, he is basically the skinniest person in the entire United States. I think he weighs less than 46 pounds.

Second of all, one thing I like about going to shows is hearing songs that you've heard before but haven't really taken note of, and then they're awesome live. I have "Hey Mama Wolf" on my iTunes and I've apparently played it like four times, but last night it was just such a soft little groove and I loved it and I never want to listen to any other song again. One thing I did not know is that near the end everyone in the audience is supposed to sing along "hey mama wolf, hey hey mama wolf AWWOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" and I didn't know that but now I'm going to do it every time I hear the song. Sorry, everyone in my lab.

He also did "Shabop Shalom" followed immediately by "Seahorse" and that just blew my mind. I really wanted him to do "Insect Eyes" but it's probably a little slow and repetitive for a live environment. I kind of want to make a movie and using it during a montage of the main character whittling something, and perhaps simultaneously going insane.

He did a lot of songs from his new album. The only one I really remember is called "Angelica," which is kind of an unassuming little Devendra song and then this bass riff comes in and he just BREAKS IT DOWN in Spanish. I can't wait to do stupid dances to this song in my apartment. It is the next "shock me like an electric eel."

I love Devendra Banhart. Just call me "Natalie Portman on Opposite Day."

A bag full of God

2009-04-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? There are 450-pound jellyfish. Oh my God. Credit, as always, goes to Caroline.

I made some carnitas at the end of a particularly productive weekend. It was to celebrate Easter. They were so tasty that I didn't even want to take a food porn photo of them before eating them. I just wanted to have a taco with some pickled red onion and guacamole.

So let me tell, rather than show. I rubbed somepieces of pork shoulder with cumin, cinnamon, paprika, and salt, and then fried them. Then I braised them for three hours in a combination of Tecate and the juice of a tangelo that I had sitting around. I let the whole thing sit in the fridge for a day, then I took it out and heated it up so it got crispy. Basically I took the idea from David Lebovitz, because who knows more about carnitas then a gay Jewish man living in Paris?

Nobody. Nobody, apparently. The whole process was just so sensual with the smells and the color of the pork changing and the juice dripping out and hot pork fat bubbling, bubbling that I resisted the urge to run back to my room for a camera so that I could give the pork a close-up for its star turn on my blog.

This was probably also because I had like ten people waiting to eat pork. Ruthie and I threw an Easter party with pork tacos and a beer scavenger hunt in the backyard, which, I don't know, somehow seemed appropriate. I was really happy with it. I planned things so that I wouldn't have to be running around in the kitchen too much while guests were around--I just threw the pork onto a plate and grabbed the fixins out of the fridge.

It was the first party where I could have invited Ina Garten and felt very proud about how well it all came together (you may think I sound a little more gay than usual today, but at least I'm not writing things like "of course I made Elderberry cosmopolitans").

Plus or minus the square root of b squared

2009-04-07T14:34:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Seth Rogen and Andy Samberg almost made out on last week's Saturday Night Live.

+ My favorite professor almost tripped over me in the hallway yesterday and a few seconds later said "You should call me Susan." It's going to be hard for me. I still have trouble with Shana's Mom and that's going on like six years.

- It's raining and I really don't like rain, although I do like this song "Drinking Whiskey In The Rain" that I found stalking around my Russian conversation buddy's webpage.

+ I've been getting into fried rice lately.

It's so fast to make and healthy and I use leftover rice so that it only gets one pan dirty, and I really like cleaning my cast-iron anyway. You can actually do Rachael Ray's chop and drop thing, where you chop as the recipe goes along. The one above has potatoes, green beans, radish greens, and asparagus.

- When I was at Berkeley Bowl buying said produce I had another "I want to puch a hippie" moment. It's only my second one since moving to the bay area, so I feel like I'm not doing too bad. This one was because I walked outside with my groceries and some lady was telling the lady who was selling Chronicle and New York Times subscriptions, "...and that's why they're responsible for this horrible fascist world that we live in. Sorry that I had to tell you all that. I read it, but I don't buy it." I mean, I'm all for people having their viewpoints, but 1) "Horrible fascist world" is a little overdone and 2) Why are you telling the poor lady selling them in front of Berkeley Bowl? She doesn't really want to be selling papers, but, you know, she needed some work. It's almost as bad as the couple that walked by and said "No thanks, we have the internet." I just looked at the newspaper lady/horrible fascist tool and said, "Hmm, sounds like someone's having a bad day."

+ I made some good soup yesterday. I cooked some barley and mixed it with scallions, then I stacked asparagus around it and cracked an egg on it. I poured some hot miso broth on top off all this and then covered it. The hot broth cooked the asparagus and made it vibrant green and poached the egg too. It was pretty delicious. Next time I'm going to add just a little bit of sesame oil and it will be even better.

+ I made this great graph yesterday entitled "Cellulase Langmuir Isotherms on Avicel." I'm pretty proud of it and I can't wait to present it in our faculty review next week. Sometimes I like grad school.

Four pluses and two minuses--my life kind of rocks.

I GOT MITRA PREGNANT!

2009-04-01T22:36:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? "I want to go to there" is something that Tina Fey's three-year-old daughter came up with.

APRIL FOOL'S! That was actually a Mother's Day prank I played on Sam's Mom in 2005. I remember it clearly. I was in my 5.60 (Physical Chemistry) discussion section and my self-deprecating TA was really excited about explaining to us why rubber bands get hot when they expand. It involved A, and if you know anything about thermodynamics you know that things are always pretty dire when A is involved. I don't even remember what A stands for. I think I always just called it funky free energy, or something less printable.

Anyway, MIT engineers don't really ask questions in recitation, they just sit there and then ask TAs to do homework for them in office hours, so nobody cared that much. I was kinda falling asleep because my mind wandered a lot this semester. The TA suddenly pointed at me and was like "You. What do you think about whether this quantity goes up or down? You don't really care, you just want to get some lunch." He was so self-deprecating! I was like, "No, I just wanna go send a Mother's Day card to Sam's Mom." He told me to also send her flowers because it wouldn't get there in time. Then I saw Mitra in the student center and we decided to buy a happy grandmother's day card and both sign it.

Sam and Mitra are dating.

Speaking of TAing, Colin 2 and I were both given an Outstanding TA award for our work in ChemE 140 last semester. I know that I say "I'm awesome" implicitly at least a few times in every blog entry, but I hope you'll still excuse the fact that I'm saying it explicitly in this one. Now we are eligible for a $500 prize, but first we have to write a one-page essay describing a teaching challenge we faced, the methodology we used to solve it, and the way in which we assessed whether it was effective or not. I am thinking of submitting this blog entry.

Or maybe I could just pretend I came up with an idea as excellent as Ms Rubin's middle school science "bailout package."

Ms Rubin is awesome.

Standing outside a broken phone booth

2009-03-29T14:11:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Mrs Doubtfire takes place in San Francisco.

This month I went to Yosemite, Utah, Tahoe, and Bootie, but the thing I will probably remember most is using a pay phone. I wasn't really sure how one worked anymore, despite the innumerable times I must have used one in high school to have Sam's Mom drop off something or other that I had left at home. Anyway, it's actually not too hard to get working once you get the hang of it, and the clerk at Walgreen's will even make change for you.

I was on my way to Berkeley Bowl for the first time in a long time and I passed this AMAZING table in front of a children's school or something. I always wanted to buy a table and decoupage it, but this one was already covered in hilarious children's drawings. Since I was on my way to Berkeley Bowl, I didn't have my phone with me, because really, why would you need a phone on an epic grocery store trip anyway? Anyhoo, long story short, or rather short story not unnecessarily extended, I called Ruth from a phone booth, biked over, we picked up the table, and now I'm sitting on a coffee table with my computer on this table typing out this entry.

I liked using a pay phone. I think I'm going to leave my phone turned off more often now. I've been sitting at home for an hour with it off and I already feel liberated. Also, I'm probably going to end up blogging less too. Way back when I made the case that it was helping me coordinate everything that was happening to me in the world, but recently I've started doing that in a less public fashion. I'll still post the same kinds of stuff, but I'm at a point where I don't feel bad if I don't blog every three or four days (kind of like pooping).

Simplify, simplify.

I just remembered that Bob Denver is dead and it made me sad.

Mother you had me

2009-03-19T22:51:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Cher actually has a tattoo on her butt.

Hi Sam's Mom. Adam and Dan tricked me into going to Yosemite with them tomorrow and then my Russian class got cancelled too, so I took it as a sign from God that I should go camping.

Well, okay. I don't know about that. Is it going to be very cold?

No, well, maybe at night, but Ruth is letting me use her warm sleeping bag that's rated for 20 degrees, and it's only supposed to be in the 40's. Then it's going to get up in the 60's during the day, so it will be really nice.

Okay. Well, let me check the weather. Where are you going hiking?

I don't really know. Dan's not so much about planning things. His brother has to get on a plane the next morning, so

Is the brother going with you?

Yeah, he's been out visiting for the whole week.

Well, be very careful. The snow is probably melting and it's very muddy and I don't want you to twist your leg again. Who's Dan? Have I met him?

I'm not sure... Well, anyway, they're here to pick me up, so I'll give you a call on Saturday and let you know how everything went.

Well, okay. Please be careful. And call me on Saturday when you get back. I might be at Aunt Jen's watching the baby.

I will.

Okay, love you.

Love you.

Be careful.

Okay. Love you.

Love you.

Alright, bye bye.

Bye. Love you. Be careful.

I will! [hangs up]

Be careful.

Absolutely nothing

2009-03-17T00:30:00.001-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Wolverine was born in the Nineteenth century.

Let's say that the reason I haven't been blogging for the past week or two is that I discovered Blockles, which is an online Tetris game apparently designed by Japanophile hipsters. It's competitive, which means you can send lines over onto your opponents' screens or scramble them up or switch with them or clear your own.

Recently I've been reading David Sirlin's commentary on the UC Berkeley Starcraft class. I'm not sure why, because I've never really played Starcraft. I think I kind of just like peering into rabbit holes and seeing what's up inside. Anyway, I can kind of appreciate the application of technical principles to a gaming environment, even if I don't entirely understand the game that's going on behind it.

So I think Blockles is basically Tetris that requires Starcraft-level technical execution. You make one powerup appear every time you clear a line or series of lines, and then you claim it by getting rid of the line in which it is contained. That means the strategy is to make two hundred lines in the first 30 seconds of gameplay or else when people start using them you're pretty much dead. If you miss one line or drop one thing in a funky way, you are a loser. How often do you see a 4-bar dropped horizontally along the bottom of the screen? Answer: BLOCKLES TIME.

After stockpiling a billion attacks and healing items, you just kind of play normal Tetris as well as you can, but every time you make more than two lines, you send lines over to the other side of your opponent's screen. Your job is to do the best you can without ever attacking, because once you start attacking someone else it's basically mutually assured destruction for everyone. You send lines. You mess up your screen and swap with people. You clear everything. You get a scrambled screen swapped to you. You swap that out. Basically, the attack phase of the game lasts about five seconds before all challengers except one are reduced to a choked-off block-filled hazardous wasteland.

Then you realize that the winner is a 13-year-old girl from San Jose.

Cloudless climes and starry skies

2009-03-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

DID YOU KNOW? Tobacco is a member of the nightshade family.

I know that it's been unusually long since I've blogged, but don't forget that foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

I mean, I can explain. After spending 48 straight hours in lab, I ate some tacos and packed and went to Ogden, Utah. It was a good time. Couchsurfing made it possible. The internet has pretty much been responsible for everything I've done in the past six months, including all the vacations I've taken, all my new friends, and the apartment I'm living in.

I successfully navigated airport security again. I never remember the things like whether my laptop needs to be out of the case or whether the zip-loc bag needs to be out of your bag or whether it's okay to take razors or whether my belt will set off the metal detector, but I usually err on the side of not getting patted down again with measurable success. HINT: if you're ever unsure about something in your carry-on, just pack a banana in it. Then the security will be like "Oooh, banana." and will fail to notice the can of shaving cream or whatever it was that you accidentally brought.

Utah is wonderfully beautiful. So is the East Bay, but in a different way. So while you can get high up in the East Bay and look over all of San Francisco and the monolithic Transamerica Pyramid and all the streets unfolding underneath it, in Utah you can sit in a hot tub underneath the mountain that you just skied on that afternoon and a lonely prarie moon. Oh, it's different.

Speaking of skiing, in Dan Steele I have found the greatest ski buddy of all time. I am kind of about skiing like I am about roller coasters--why do I need to eat or rest or stop? I just want to do it all day. Also we are not shy about going down runs that are too hard for us and stumbling a little bit while learning about skiing. So while we were hanging out on blue squares at the beginning of our trip, by the end of the second day we were tearing through fresh powder on black diamonds, totally in control and stopping only to look up and congratulate ourselves on our shared awesomeness.

Yo, I just went down that. Also:

Also, regarding Mormons, except for being drunkenly asked, "Wait, you're a gay dude, but you have a beard?", Utah pretty much defied most of my expectations. Good job, society.

I realize that I write less about fantastic vacations than I do about mundane things that happen to me every day, and I feel kind of bad about that. But, you know, it's hard to compendiously describe 72 awesome hours and make sure that you didn't miss anything. Pea soup and bike lanes--I can fit all my thoughts on those into the margins of this page just fine.

Float down the Liffey

2009-03-03T08:35:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? You can't buy alcohol in Utah except on army bases.

What's going on this morning?

0) Still raining. Like the zeroth law of thermodynamics, this has really been the basis of the past two weeks of my life.

1) This lab experiment, which I have been in lab continuously since 10 PM Sunday night working on, is not really happening like I expect it to. I blame the enzyme I was given.

2) I had a pumpkin muffin from Coffee Lab for breakfast and it was not too sweet but very spicy. I dug it. I dug it a lot. I saved a little bit of the top for my last bite, because Seinfeld and life are pretty much the same thing.

3) This is my favorite headline of the year. I guess it's about a car?

Endless rain into a paper cup

2009-03-02T23:31:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The Green Lantern's power ring, which can create green objects, has only one weakness: the color yellow. His nemesis, Sinestro, has a yellow power ring, which can create yellow objects. It, however, has no weaknesses.

I guess I should write a blog entry since I've put off calling Sam's Mom for two days and she probably wants to know that I'm not dead. Sorry. I'm not dead. I just fell asleep for a long time after getting home on Sunday and then I worked in lab all day today. That's how I roll.

Mitra and I ran a marathon on Sunday. It was in Napa. We did that last year, too.

Up until Friday, the weather report had been telling me that there was a chance of scattered showers during the marathon. This is pretty much true, I guess, depending on what scale you are thinking of when you say "scattered." If you mean "a giant 50-mile-wide rain cloud hung over Napa for all of Sunday and showered" then yes, that is true. But how did that rain cloud get there? Someone scattered it there.

This is what we looked like last year, when no showers were scattered around Napa. Anyway, despite the rain, there wasn't much of a headwind (also in the weather forecast), and the temperature was pretty much perfect for some distance running, pretty cool and refreshing. We rocked our personal best time again and finished in 3:44:59. Not too shabby. Mitra was less than five minutes away from qualifying for the Boston Marathon, which doesn't seem like much until you're like "that means I must run each mile 11.2 seconds faster than I did this time." Oh. Next time, Gadget, next time.

And when is next time? I don't know. There are so many cities with marathons around October that I would like to try. San Jose. Sacramento. Portland. Lake Tahoe. Supposedly Lake Tahoe is incredibly hard with really thin air and Sacramento is so downhill that it's barely legal. I do not know. I liked the Golden Hills last year, but that is not one that I am going to be excited about running if it rains.

"No more marathons" says Sam's Mom at home.

Although neither Sam's Mom nor Mitra's Mom, who together comprise the best cheering section on Earth, could make it out to Napa this year, we were joined by several of our closest friends and roommates, who missed us at the finish because we were one second earlier than I had anticipated. Although they didn't bring the boundless enthusiasm of Mitra's Mom or documentarian spirit of Sam's Mom, they did bring donuts, which, after burning 3000 calories before breakfast, are also welcome. Good job, team.

So, that's the end of that story. I'm not dead. I'm in lab, which is pretty much the exact opposite. I'm cleaning off my desk while trying to learn the lyrics to "99 Luftballons." Then on Thursday I am going to Utah.

The moral of the story is that I cannot be stopped.

I loved you first

2009-02-27T22:57:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Famous tenor Enrico Caruso was in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake. He fled the city shortly before its destruction and pledged never to return. He actually made good on his promise, and never again toured in San Francisco.

People tell me that Kenneth the Page is all popular now, because of the whole Bobby Jindal thing. There is a facebook group and everything. I recently saw a clip (which I will not link to) of the soon-to-be-short-lived Jimmy Fallon show where Kenneth the Page went on and imitated Bobby Jindal and when he came out he got tons of cheers from all the ladies in the studio audience, like "WOOOOOO! WOOOOOO! Cat sound! WOOOOOOWEEEEEE!"

I am very disappointed in this, because I basically invented being in love with Kenneth the Page last year. Sure, there was a whole season of 30 Rock before I started watching it, but I'm pretty confident that nobody prior to late 2007 had achieved the levels of devotion that I did. God, in there is one episode where the subplot is Kenneth the Page is throwing a party, and they show flashbacks of all Kenneth's other parties, and there is one where it's Kenneth's Halloween party and nobody shows up except Liz Lemon, who is dressed as Harry Potter, and meanwhile they are playing "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah." That is my ideal party. Me, alone, with Kenneth the Page, dressed as Harry Potter, listening to "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah."

Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know how disappointed in humanity I am. It's my thing. Give it back. Give it back to me.

As long as I have already mentioned something political on Turkey vs Spam today, has anyone ever noticed that Paul Krugman is actually Ben Bernanke in a toupee?

You heard it here first. I think.

I celebrate myself, and sing myself

2009-02-24T15:53:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Jerry Springer was born in a tube station in London, England.

I'm not entirely sure, but I think that I have finally figured out who I want to be when I grow up.

In other news, Buddha has called out the sun, so I think I'm going for a run now. I'm also going for a run in the Napa Valley Marathon this Sunday, and the weather forecast has changed from "rain" to "scattered showers" to "showers possible," so, you know, things are just looking up. My spirits, oh, so lifted.

I just googled "Buddha has called out the sun" to make sure I was getting the reference correct, and it turns out that one of the three hits that came up was a blog entry that I wrote two years ago. Everything old is new again.

Good enough for me

2009-02-24T01:20:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Oscar organizers had offered to allow Sri Lankan rapper and new mother MIA to perform her nominated song "O Saya" from a "fabulous bed" set up on stage. I had actually hoped that they would have done a satellite feed and blue-screened her in, and just had her giant head in the background rapping along with AR Rahman, but I guess that would have been too logistically difficult.

I had one of my "how Sam can you be?" moments last night standing at Safeway at 11:40 PM wearing only an MIT hoodie, pajama pants, and a bicycle helmet, buying five pounds of flour and a bottle of soy sauce. That's pretty much how my life works.

I don't know. I kept opening my pantry to snack on walnuts all day yesterday and I kept seeing this bag full of bread flour, and I thought "oh my favorite cookie recipe uses bread flour, I should use some of that up. Turns out that I should have opened that bag and looked inside of it, because the bag was not actually full of bread flour but rather full of nothing, with maybe two tablespoons hanging out on the bottom for me to use. Go Sam. So that is why I made my midnight trip out to Safeway in the rain.

They say that cooking is an art and baking is a science, and I guess it says a lot about me as a chemical engineering graduate student that I love cooking and almost flat-out refuse to bake. Cooking is all like, browning stuff and making sauces and harmonizing flavors and sprinkling salts. Baking is just preheating the oven and sitting around and making doughs and hoping things don't mess up. That's like, my day job. Why am I going to do that at home?

However, I do make a few exceptions, I guess--I bake my own bread with some regularity, and I'm always pursuing ever-better experiments in chocolate chip cookie technology. To that end, I made a few changes to the recipe--I browned the butter first, added a little more milk, put in some cinnamon, chopped up an SB chocolate bar instead of chocolate chips, and sprinkled salt on the cookies before I baked them, but otherwise everything was pretty much the same. I have to say, pretty much every change was an improvement in my cookie making technique. Refining. I'm refining, is what I'm doing.

I also let the cookies chill out for about 18 hours in the fridge before baking, because seriously, baking cookies at 2 AM on a Sunday is a little out there, even for me. I've always kind of derided this cookie recipe for requiring two kinds of flour and 24 hours of chilling, because seriously, who anticipates a desire for chocolate chip cookies a day in advance, but the brief chill did slightly improve the texture of the cookies, and made sure that they were delivered to me on a day on which they were much more sorely needed.

Because yo, I almost lost my umbrella and favorite shirt today. My umbrella, that greatest Christmas present of all time, and my favorite shirt, which costs five times as much as any other piece of clothing that I have ever bought (Cousin Sarah cut me a sweet deal on it, plus it was Spring Break so money didn't count). I was pretty much inconsolable, and then also it was raining and wet outside and blerg I was just sad and awful and I had to take a bus up to Lawrence Berkeley Lab to take some dumb-o crystallinity measurements of my sample.

But after choir I discovered that my umbrella had actually been hanging out in my backpack since, like, last Tuesday, even though I had checked there like six times. Minutes later, I went back to my laundromat and found out that the the dude working there (Mangero?) had found a few shirts that I had left there on Saturday afternoon and kept them in his dungeon-like office over the weekend, and that my most favored shirt was one of them. Yes. Then I came home and made pasta with pesto sauce and chocolate chip cookies and watched the Mecha-Streisand episode of South Park. I also noticed an error in the episode for the first time: Leonard Maltin claims that Barbara Streisand discovered the first Triangle of Zinthar during the shooting of My Fair Lady, which is odd because Audrey Hepburn is in that movie.

I've got to admit, it's getting better.

But not too late

2009-02-19T23:50:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The bitterness of beer can be scientifically quantified by a metric known as "international bitterness units."

If nothing else, late nights in lab make me feel important, if not terribly productive, smart, or intellectually enriched. Look at me! I'm doin' stuff all night! Nothing is open on my way home! Yeah. That is how I feel.

But fair is fair, because I did get to work at 11:30 AM this afternoon. Grad school. You know. It works. I worked on a skit for Russian with this other dude from my class. It was about a date between Igor Stravinsky and Ivan Pavlov. I put in a really funny joke: "My apartment is small and old." "Small and old? Are you a grad student?" My favorite Russian word is the one for grad student. I don't have Russian typing set up yet, but it's basially "aspirant," except in Russian that's apparently spelled "a c pi backwards-N p a h t." Did you know they use a different alphabet?

I gave a presentation today about this awful, awful paper that was horrible and ridiculous. It's weird because Professor Radke originally introduced this other professor to me as "one of the leading experts on pretreatment" and insisted on me having a private meeting with him and going to his oral presentation and that was kind of helpful, I guess, but two days later, by the time I was ready to give this presentation, he said that the professor was a "snake doctor" and that the paper was essentially an advertisement.

Which, yo, it was. Also there was no good scientific data in it at all. Basically they try to fit data randomly as some linear combination or more-or-less arbitrary parameters, and even when they're using five or six parameters they can still only get an R^2 of like 0.65. In layman's terms, it's kind of like they took the blog fivethirtyeight.com and applied its principles to enzymatic degradation, except without any scientific rigor or merit.

Basically, I think that the data I have collected since beginning grad school is more meaningful than the data presented in this paper (and since I am one of the world's five worst graduate students, that is saying something). It has been cited more than 120 times. I think that makes me a total genius. Yes, that's right. I am a very important genius.

It's epiphanies like these that make working late in lab totally worth it.

Let me die, let him live

2009-02-17T15:35:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? It is illegal to bury human remains within Berkeley city limits.

Speaking of graves... I found The Trilogy Meter recently on another blog. Take a look at it!

Are you back?

Okay, I started reading through some comments, and... I have always known that I am the only person in the entire world that likes X3 better than X2. And yo, I've come to accept that fact. It was probably harder than accepting the fact that I was gay. But I am over it now, and I am not apologizing for it anymore. I am going to have it written on my headstone: "S. Andrew Maurer. The ONLY PERSON who liked X3 better than X2." In fact, I should probably be buried next to the director of X3.

Apparently, judging by the Trilogy Meter, not only am I the only one who likes X3 better than X2, I am also the only person who even finds X3 to be, like, a watchable movie. Maybe it's just that I saw it under particularly enjoyable circumstances? No, I've seen it again since then and I still have this opinion.

HEAR ME OUT. Forget the fact that it has a plot at all. Okay? That's the first step. And then forget the fact that the plot was supposed to be based on, like, the most awesome storyline in Marvel Comics history until Infinity Gauntlet. Okay, yo, the plot doesn't make sense. There are lots of good movies where the plot doesn't make sense. Rejected? Plot makes no sense. Okay?

Here is what I like about X3:

1. James Marsden dies in the first ten minutes.
2. "Don't let it control you!!"
3. Magneto throws FLAMING CARS for like five minutes straight. FLAMING CARS. That is basically the best weapon in history.
4. Also he PICKS UP THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE and somehow magically makes it turn from day to night in five seconds (oops?).
5. Then he moves the metal chess piece at the end!
6. The editing is amazing, in that X3 has been edited down to the point where every single second of film is necessary for the movie to be even coherent. Like, if you removed one frame and showed X3 to people, they would be like "What is going on here?" I think that's quite a technical achievement.
7. FRASIER.
8. "Remember when Jean Grey is tearing Wolverine apart with psychic energy and Wolverine is all 'ain't no thang!' and stabs her anyway?"

Okay, and now here's what I don't like about X2:

1. James Marsden is in the entire movie. Also, it's longer than X3, so you get ten times as much as James Marsden and that is just objectively bad.
2. They use the Dies Irae from the Mozart Requiem during the Nightcrawler sequence at the start of the movie, which is so obvious that it ruins everything.
3. Okay, Magneto breaking out of prison is kind of cool, but seriously, he had to wait for Mystique to jab someone in the butt with iron before he could do it. Also, no flaming cars involved.
4. The ending, where Professor X is like "Yo Mr. President I stroked out all your guards; just letting you know--mutant powers aren't dangerous and we are going to live in peace with you" and it's like "HELLO smartest man on Earth, remember when you almost killed every single person in the entire world using just your brain? Your mutant power is kind of dangerous."

Really, here, the most important things to me are the first and last--James Marsden is just a whiny little skid mark for the entirety of X2, and then the ending is just so extraordinarily offensive to me. Then again, I've always been picky about really bad endings--it's also why I don't like the otherwise enjoyable Snow in August ("And then Golem fixed everything.") and World According to Garp ("And then everyone dies gruesome, contrived, ignominious deaths.").

Anyway, that is what I have to say on that subject. Summary: X3 is so bad it's good, but I find X2 morally offensive. Maybe everyone else in the entire world disagrees. That's cool. I hope they all have to marry James Marsden.

Bongo with my lingo

2009-02-13T09:12:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Eight historical figures have been made honorary Harlem Globetrotters since 1976. They are: Henry Kissinger, Bob Hope, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Whoopi Goldberg, Nelson Mandela, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Pope John Paul II, and Jesse Jackson.

Now that I spent a little time clearing off space on my desk (my awesome desk) last night, I can sit at it and do computer-related things while looking out of the massive window in my room. This window takes up the width of an entire wall, has a bullet hole in it (shot from the inside) and is very poorly insulated, which makes it a real treat in the winter. Anyway, I'm glad I went through all this, because if I hadn't I might not have noticed right now that it is sunshowering. I love sunshowers, both the meteorological phenomenon, and the MIA song, which I'm also listening to right now.

I'm also eating this really pungent blue cheese that I bought a few weeks ago on a free stuff crawl around the Gourmet Ghetto. I bought a really small amount because I was being cheap, but it turns out that it was the strongest blue cheese of all time, and I really can't eat more than a 5 mm x 5 mm bite at a time. It's really great though, and kinda stimulates all the right tang and bitterness receptors. I'm having it on some freshly-baked bread with lots of honey and walnuts.

How Berkeley can you be?

I went to the dentist this week, which was surprisingly fun. My last dental visit did not go so well. It was my first one in two or three years and my brushing regimen had deteriorated somewhat since moving out to California, so basically Dr. Bovafa just kept flossing me and kind of laughed to himself as he showed me how much food was caught between my teeth and how much my gums were bleeding. In the end, he was positive about it. "You have really great teeth, but you need to brush a lot harder to keep them that way." Yeah!

You do catch more flies with honey, especially this fly, who goes through a bottle of honey approximately every two weeks. So I've been brushing way hard and flossing every night and yo, my teeth do look way better now. Dr. Bovafa said that he could tell I'd been doing a better job, and there was no blood spilled throughout the entire appointment. Combined with that sparkling empty feeling that your mouth has after dentistry, it's been a pretty good week after all.

The whole experience kind of reminds me of this card, which pretty much summarizes my election day this year (it's hard for anything to live up to voting against Rick Santorum).

Wednesday night we had a choir concert that was supposed to be tonight, but we didn't want to have a choral songs of love choir concert on Friday the 13th. It was weird. It involved the efforts about eight different choruses, all singing about lovely. The gospel choir was singing about loving Jesus, and one of our songs was about loving death, but still, love was the overarching theme. It was interesteing to hear a capella groups again, because really a capella holds no appeal to anybody after sophomore year in college. Still, the ones here in Berkeley ended up being pretty good and I'm glad that I was at a concert where I got to hear them.

I stayed up until 2 AM last night playing with construction paper and it's going to be great.

My sweetest downfall

2009-02-09T22:07:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? I really can't think of anything right now, but Critical Mass is the stupidest thing ever.

So I can't photograph soup well yet, but yo, I can make a pretty decent eggplant soup now. I don't know why I even buy eggplants. I really do not like them very much. Mostly it's a texture violation. I'm generally not crazy about eating little seeds, like in roasted red peppers or something, and that's kind of all roasted eggplant is. Seeds and strings. Blerg.

However, eggplants are really cheap at Berkeley Bowl, probably because they have basically no nutritional value, and they always look so exciting and beautiful and purple just sitting there. So I buy them and I get home and I'm like, for real? Bite me. What do I do with this eggplant? Here's what I did with it tonight.

Poke some holes in two medium eggplants and start roasting them at 400 F. Heat up some olive oil in a stockpot over medium heat. Throw in one yellow onion, cut into quarters and then thinly chopped crosswise. Add a good bit of salt, some pepper, and half a tablespoon of turmeric. Let that go for about ten minutes until the onions get some color. Add around 3 cups vegetable broth and bring it to a boil. Add 1 cup red lentils. Turn heat to low and let that simmer for 20 minutes. Remove half of it to a separate bowl. Take the eggplants out of the oven, peel them, and throw them in the pot. Blend it until it's really smooth. Then add the chunky part back in. Now it's smooth, so you don't know it's eggplant, but it's also got some nice chunky lentils in there.

I put some Trader Joe's goat cheese on top, and you know that's like my crack but really the eggplant-lentil soup didn't need it. It was actually pretty delicious. The turmeric just made it sweet and the roasted eggplant a little smoky and it also had a peppery bite. I liked it a lot and will make it the next time I regret buying eggplants.

And it has lots of lentils, so you know, my bowels will thank me too.

This is really what I think about all day.

Oh my lover

2009-02-07T00:07:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The only time author Thomas Pynchon's voice has ever been recorded was for two episodes of The Simpsons.

For the first time in my life, I think I realized today that I am claustrophobic and that I like spicy food.

In other news, tonight I baked the first loaf of bread that I have baked in a long time and she is looking pretty good. I tried oiling it up for its second rise, and that seemed to help with loaf shape, if nothing else. I'm pretty excited for toast with peanut butter, honey, cinnamon and salt tomorrow. It's not quite fried oatmeal, but it's good stuff.

--

Bread recipe

1. Whisk together 1 3/4 cups water, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1 tablespoon of honey, and a heaping half teaspoon of yeast.
2. Whisk in 1 1/3 cups bread flour.
3. Mix in whole wheat flour by hand or with a spatula in 1/3 cup increments until dough is shaggy. You should use about 1 1/2 to 2 cups.
4. Cover bowl with plastic wrap, let rise 18 hours.
5. Turn dough onto a floured cutting board, cover it in flour and fold it over gently just a few times for about a minute, just until dough stops sticking to the board.
6. Throw dough into a bowl or pot with a little olive oil at the bottom, get it all oily.
7. Let rise 2 hours. Preheat oven to 500 F with a pot in it.
8. Flip dough from rising bowl into hot pot and cover it. Bake at 500 F for 30 min and 425 F for 15 min. Cool on a rack.

I use a calphalon pasta pot with a loose-fitting lid from a different pot, but you could use a crockpot insert or a cast-iron or whatever. Just something oven-safe. Go for it.

Takin' lots of vitamins

2009-02-06T12:06:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Teri Hatcher did not like being a Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies because she thought that the role was not enough of a theatrical challenge for her.

Let me first just say that this method of fixing a broken zipper works really well. Now I can wear my favorite turtleneck fleece from the Army-Navy store again. Plus, I fixed something myself. My handiwork is not quite invisible, but it might have been invisible had I:

1) not gotten a B- in sewing in eighth grade
2) bothered to find matching thread instead of some green thread that Ruthie left sitting on the coffee table
3) not had two glasses of wine prior to embarking upon this sewing adventure.

Good job, internet. In other news, fried oatmeal.

I was writing a whole entry about how much I love oatmeal for breakfast, but whatever. Fried oatmeal. Do it.

I want it all

2009-02-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The sentence "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" does not contain the letter s.

In case you hadn't heard, I collect North Dakota state quarters. I do this because they are the most beautiful piece of currency I have ever seen. Let's look at one.

Look at that. The bison. The plateau in the background. The sunrise or sunset. This is what America is about. I love it. I want to go to there. Or to there.

You know, I've looked at most of the other ones. Connecticut with the flower. Virginia with the ships. Washington with the fish. New Mexico with the outline of New Mexico. Alaska with the mama grizzly. Alabama with Helen Keller. This is totally the best one.

I felt compelled to blog about them this weekend, when my friend Jeremy who works at a bank dropped off a particularly excellent haul. Most of my friends just kind of look for them now and give them to me when they find them, asking nothing in return because it's kind of a marginal cost, right? Well, I'm now up to 82. Eighty-two quarters. That's $20.50. That's an entire Cheeseboard pizza with three bonus slices. At the old Hotsy Totsy, that would have gotten me six gin and tonics. That's a lot of money.

And so I'm kind of in a quandary because, yo, this is kind of getting to be an expensive collection. Even when my collection was at 18, people were like "holy crap that's a lot of North Dakota state quarters." Perhaps one day many years from now I will be blogging from a room in my house where all the furniture is constructed from North Dakota state quarters and laughing at how pitiful a number 82 was.

So now I've been wondering what to do with them. Originally I thought that I would buy a trip to North Dakota using only North Dakota state quarters and blog about it, but that's a little too much like extorting money from all of my friends for personal gain.

So now I think that my goal is to collect all of the North Dakota state quarters. All of them. And then many years from now, when people are collecting all 50 state quarters, I can charge an exorbitant amount of money for them, because I will own all of the original North Dakota state quarters. Thus will I be financially secure for the rest of my life.

I feel kind of like a Bond villain.

And I feel fine

2009-01-29T18:43:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Prior to Russian spelling reform, a single letter which was necessarily appended to the end of nearly all words ending in consonants accounted for 3.5% of all Russian written text.

We're singing Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in University Chorus this semester and I have possibly never been as excited about any concert I have ever performed in. Britten juxtaposes the traditional requiem text with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, who served in World War I and wrote poetry about trench warfare and then died one week before fighting ended in 1918. He's got cred, Wilfred Owen.

So, yeah, there's a lot of trading off between the choir singing in Latin and the tenor and bass soloists singing in English about passing bells for those who die as cattle and everything. It all culminates in the extraordinary Agnus Dei, when the choir is singing about the "lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the Earth" and the tenor is just hovering over that with "One ever hangs where shelled roads part."

It's even better than Viva La Vida.

Today we were practicing the Dies Irae, and our director was talking about how most other composers like to set the day of judgment text as all screamy, like "DIES IRAE DIES ILLA QUA RESURGET EX FAVILLA!" but Britten starts it off really quiet and pulsating, and only gets loud when he's talking about the trumpet's wondrous sound. Why is that? We decided that it's because you're not ready for the judgment day. It could come anytime. So while Verdi's got his sopranos that are like, "Oh no, it's the judgment day!", Britten is like, "Great, it's the judgment day, and I wasn't ready."

It got me to thinking, because just earlier today over e-mail we were talking about World War Z, which I've never read but apparently Ben thinks that some recently-hacked road signs portend the zombie apocalypse. It got me thinking, you know, in all those zombie movies, nobody ever expects the zombie apocalypse. It just kind of happens in some small town/government research facility when you least expect it.

It's kind of like the judgment day as envisioned by Benjamin Britten.

So I have decided that my new goal in life is to compose a Zombie Requiem. It will juxtapose the traditional requiem text with quotations from Night of the Living Dead and 28 Days Later, and also the song "Zombie" by The Cranberries. I think this means that not only will I be prepared for the zombie apocalypse, I'll be prepared for its inevitable conclusion. Just as Britten's War Requiem was premiered for the reconstructed Coventry Cathedral in England, so will mine be premiered at the newly-reconstructed White House or something.

This is the best idea I have ever had.

Memory summons

2009-01-27T16:19:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The platypus appears on the Australian 20 cent coin.

It's weird because I was just talking about sex ed the day before yesterday and I was just thinking about this girl who claimed that your uterus could fall out of your body if you were wearing tight jeans, and how Mr. Frantz was like, "No, I am a professional, and I don't think that is possible." I could not remember her name for the longest time when I was telling this story and I went to bed last night still not remembering it and now this morning facebook informs me that it is her birthday. Oh, what a world we live in.

I just felt like I needed to post something today. I am kind of blerg right now because the prep I've been working on this morning did not work and now it might screw up my Taco Tuesday plans. I started a different blog entry this morning but did not finish it. The gist of it was that my favorite part of any X-Men movie is when Cyclops dies. I think I'm going to take comfort in that. Bite me, James Marsden.

For no one

2009-01-26T23:14:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated during the recording sessions for "Sympathy for the Devil," necessitating a lyric change from "who killed Kennedy?" to "who killed the Kennedys?"

The other day I got this e-mail:

hey i am taking a long long road trip alone.

if you sent me a mix cd i would listen to it a lot. maybe an overly definitive amount. so. if you decide to make one, and send it before i leave (leaving On The Road (in a car) date approx. feb 4) that would be great. you could also send it after and then i would just have it after, when i'm living in my parents house and kicking my feet around my hometown.

address for such possibilities:

And then she leaves her address and her phone number. The really fun thing is that I don't know this girl. She knows some other Sam Maurer who graduated from Mass Academy in 2002, I believe, and went to U Mass Amherst. We have really similar e-mail addresses, and mine is kind of the default e-mail address for someone named Sam Maurer, so I can see why she gets confused sometimes and sends her reuniting e-mails to me.

I am really excited now. I am deciding what songs to put on. I love driving playlists. They are different from regular playlists. Here is what I have so far:

"Electric Feel" -- MGMT
"Michael" -- Franz Ferdinand
"Reckoner Lockdown" -- Kanye West vs Radiohead
"I Want It All" -- Queen
"Piazza, New York Catcher" -- Belle + Sebastian
"Brainwashed" -- Kinks

Do you have any suggestions for a driving playlist for someone you've never met who will be receiving it under false pretenses?

It is real, it is Rael

2009-01-22T09:04:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Jerry Springer's security guard, Steve, has his own talk show.

I forget why, but at some point I signed up for Lufthansa's "Generation Fly" e-mail program, which hooks youths up with discount flight fares. I think you had to give them some information so that I could get access to their special site that has student fares. I went to a lot of trouble signing up and then they gave me the secret code to get into the website, which was like the username "STUDENT" with the password "FLY." Good job, Lufthansa.

So today I got an e-mail advertising "Spring break in Europe from $184*." Well. That must be kind of a big asterisk, there. So I headed over to the Generation Fly website as STUDENT FLY to see that was about. It turns out that $184 refers to one possible one-way fare from New York to London. So, yes, it is technically possible to have a spring break in a European city for $184. I guess it costs more than that if you want to return to the United States after your spring break, but hey, Lufthansa did not make any promises about "Spring break in Europe AND RETURN from $184," now did they?

In other news, tomorrow is our annual Radke lab ski trip and I am pretty excited. Sam's Mom warned me to be careful because there are REAL MOUNTAINS in California. This is also what she said about skiing in Boston, so I guess the mountains I'll be seeing tomorrow will be incredibly, extraordinarily real. I'm down with that. Freedom tastes of reality.

Lovely brunch of coconuts

2009-01-21T19:37:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Vegans who eat honey sometimes call themselves bee-gans. It's official, I think.

I love East Bay Express. Mostly I love the restaurant reviews. They are hilarious. I have never heard food referred to as "unctuous" and "snarky" as much as I have in the East Bay Express. Seriously, what does that mean?

If you dutifully make your way to an East Bay Express news kiosk every weekend and immediately open to the restaurant review page, you would realize some things. First of all, there is so clearly a form that East Bay Express restaurant reviewers fill out. It's like, you go in, you describe the decor, you describe the appetizers as "unctuous" or "snarky," then you talk about one that you didn't like. TRANSITION. "Better were the entrees, which comprised...". At the end, the second-to-last paragraph is always, and I mean always, a description of the vegetarian options. It's beautiful.

But I'm serious--I actually like East Bay Express a lot and I would really be sad if it met its demise as most forms of print media are seeming to do right now. Thankfully, as long as there are people growing marijuana in the East Bay, there will always be plenty of people to buy advertisements in East Bay Express, so I'm guessing that their business model is pretty much recession proof.

Anyway, sometimes they have also have really excellent articles. A few weeks ago, there was one about the world's thinnest condoms. It's a really great read. I'd encourage you to read the whole thing. They talk about everything, even about how changing attitudes towards sex and sex education have shaped the condom market.

This week they had an article about Thai brunch. Thai brunch is this temple in South Berkeley. Basically, you go and you "make a donation" to the temple. You receive one specially-cast Thai brunch token for every dollar you donate. Then you go and stand in line for like, half an hour because five hundred other people came to do this. The vegetarian line is four times longer than the meat line. When you get up to the front of the endless, endless line, you exchange your tokens for food by putting them in a collection bin, because it would be not-Buddhist for the people dispensing your food to handle your currency. The food is pretty good. Their spicy green beans with tofu are beyond compare, and their mango sticky rice is also nice. Then since the weather is never below fifty degrees you sit outside and eat your food. You can even sit on the grass in front of the public library and a poster of LL Cool J.

Recently I haven't been going very much because there are seriously like eight thousand people there, and it's all hipsters who have no intention of actually getting food, they just want to kind of walk around and talk about the beautiful zucchinis they bought at Whole Foods and take up space. I just have this thing about standing in line with people who are less passionate about the service than I am. I think I should get to be ahead of them. Idonno. It's not you, it's me.

But as East Bay Express details in this article, there are some other people who have non-hipster-based objections to Thai Brunch. Namely, they object to the fact that Thai Brunch is supposed to be some sort of church fundraiser thing, but actually it's a restaurant that serves 600 people in four hours every Sunday outside. They say that you put in a "suggested donation" to get your tokens, but I don't think you can actually get tokens without food. And anyway, the whole hand-wavy token system frees them from health codes and taxes. The anti-Thai Brunch people make a bunch of good points, like, "Hmm, maybe if you want to have a Thai restaurant, you should zone for it and actually build one."

Maybe I am just frustrated by lazy hipsters who prevent me from getting Thai food, but I am generally inclined to agree with this argument. Anyway, here are the two most hilarious quotes from the article:

But many temple supporters live far enough away from 1911 Russell Street that they never experience the drawbacks of Sunday breakfast, and have little grasp of what the neighbors are fussing about. "I drive from Point Richmond every Sunday," said Tony Carr, a longtime breakfast-goer who owns Vikram Yoga studio in Oakland. "They have a noodle soup that you can't find anywhere." Carr added that in his observation, most of the houses on Oregon Street have driveways, so he can't understand why they would object to people parking on the street. "I understand there's some problems with the neighbors, but didn't they know about it before they moved in?"

Okay, seriously, just imagine a yoga instructor being interviewed for this article and saying, "They have a noodle soup that you can't find anywhere." How Berkeley can you be?

A February 12 hearing at Berkeley's zoning adjustments board will decide the ultimate fate of Wat Mongkolratanaram's Sunday breakfast, and at this point, said Jennings, the board appears to be split on its decision. "We're trying to be professional reasonable human beings, but the problem is these people have not budged," she said. "I think they're gonna bluff us off again till the 12th, at which point the board is going to bluff on their project." Jennings admits she's a pessimist, but said she finds the board's ambivalence disheartening. "How can they be split on something that's illegal?" she asked, then answered her own question. "It's Berkeley, hello."

Yeah, that's about right.

Apple dapples

2009-01-19T22:43:00.001-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? At a recent charity event in Washington DC, Alice Waters saved a cookbook author's life by telling Tom Collichio to perform the heimlich maneuver on her.

Nice things that happened today...

1) I made apple butter and forgot how lovely that makes your entire life smell. I guess it's good I did it when Ruth wasn't home; filling the house with such odors around an anosmic would be basically criminal.
2) I gave Sam's Mom a call.
3) I went for a run for about 5 miles.
4) I found a coffee table for $10 on craigslist.
5) I convinced Colin to help me pick up this coffee table.
6) As a reward, I gave him the leftovers of the 92,000-calorie banana bread I made on an impulse last night, which I would have probably otherwise finished tonight.

Jigsaw falling into place. In other news, I got into Russian this term and haven't decided whether to take it yet. Oh, I don't know. Pyoo pyoo. I'm going to bed early.

Fearful symmetry

2009-01-15T22:58:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Certain medications can induce blue urine.

For some reason this afternoon I was thinking about Romantic poetry that I wrote in high school. I was always kind of obsessed with how extraordinarily bad the poetry of American Romantic poets was. Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier. The three-named ones. They're the worst. I think this is because I secretly have always wanted to be Walt Whitman.

So when I was asked to write Romantic poetry, I always kind of used them as a template and set about writing bad parodies. My 11th grade work was entitled "Ode to a Ruffed Grouse" and earned the following accolade from Mr. Rosenthal: "Poem almost succeeds!" Oh, Mr. Rosenthal and his faint praise. I don't know, I thought it was a pretty good depiction of the state bird of Pennsylvania (state drink = milk, state flower = mountain laurel, go quiz bowl). All I remember is that there were four or five stanzas and each one ended with the refrain,

Ruffed as thy rough rugged neck,
Ruffed as thy brunneous neck.

I also remember that Mr. Rosenthal did not believe that the word "brunneous" existed and I explained to him that I heard it during the 2001 National Spelling Bee, because I watched the spelling bee every year after my embarrassing choked-out misspelling of "equilvent" in the third round of states.

My poem senior year for AP English was not nearly so accomplished, and I remember that Mrs. O'Brien gave it a lower grade until she read my included "analysis" of the poem and evaluated it in the context of Longfellow et al. The poem was about a lake, which I figured was a great metaphor for nature, poetry, mirrors, oh, just everything. Taking a page from Keats's excellent "To Autumn," which uses "s" "f" and "m" sounds to suggest the mist, blossoming, and laziness of the season, I tried to pick consonants that were generally evocative of lakes for my opening line. I came up with:

HOW QUICKLY! lilt thy rippled swells.

And dang, I was really proud of that, and also the sixth line which rhymed it with,

And stirring clouds of cockleshells.

...which Mrs. O'Brien found to be a hilarious image for some reason. You know, there's a lot of cockleshells, and they're kicked up in clouds by the lilting swells. My poem had an abccba rhyme scheme to suggest waves disturbing a lake. God, I was amazing. In the third stanza I even slant rhymed "eye" with "symmetry" as a homage to Blake's "The Tyger."

And that brings me to the point of this post, which was this blog entry, where some dude asks, "If you could change one line in the canon of all English language poetry, what would it be?" He is really smart and references tons of obscure stuff. But, yo, you know what has always bothered me?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

It's such a freaking letdown to be talking about lambs here. God, William Blake, I know you were all church-y and stuff, but for reals, this is a poem about a Tyger, not Jysus. It's a total letdown after stanzas of "On what wings dare he aspire!" and "When the stars threw down their spears" and my personal favorite, "What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain?" I almost want to start using that as my new expletive. "What the hammer?"

I will tell people it's 90's nostalgia.

I only want to say

2009-01-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Mark Zuckerberg once printed business cards that said, "I'm the CEO... Bitch."

Ann Coulter sure had a good day yesterday. By that, I mean that since her stated life goal is to go on TV and get people to yell at her in order to generate publicity for herself, she was very successful at doing that. Oh, look at me right now, here I am, talking about her twice in two days on my blog. Pyoo pyoo pyoo pyoo!

So she went on The View yesterday and, uh, then there was a ten-minute stretch of nonstop yelling. Uh, don't watch this.

People want to say that Ann Coulter lost and got smacked down or whatever, but, you know, it was basically just yelling, and The View had like five times as many people to yell with, and nobody really made that much sense. Also, The View was talking about Ann Coulter behind her back and that was not cool. On the other hand, Ann Coulter does invoke Hitler near the end, and it's tempting to say that she therefore loses the debate because of Godwin's Law, but, you know, usually when you're talking about Godwin's Law, it's because somebody compared her opponents to Nazis, not herself. Anyway, I think it's safe to say that there are no winners.

But Ann Coulter's thesis is that single mothers will precipitate the destruction of human civilization, and she somehow conflates that with liberalism, and somewhere in all the yelling she says, "And the mothers! They're always whining! Hollywood and everything is all about stories of single mothers and how brave they are and nobody is ever like, 'Oh there's a single man raising a child and isn't he great?'"

And if I were Barbara Walters, I would have been like, "Oh, come on Ann Coulter, didn't you see that nice film, The Pursuit of Happyness?"

That's all. I just wanted to correct that, publically.

I also like that the entire second paragraph of the Wikipedia page is devoted to why they misspelled "Happyness," because that was always bothering me.

She's a woman who understands

2009-01-12T17:23:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The movie Zoolander was banned in Malaysia.

Quote of the day: "I am the enforcer." --Ann Coulter

Sometimes I wonder if I am really meant to be a scientist, a researcher, if I should really be in grad school, what is happening here. Then I have these little moments of scientific realization in my everyday life and I realize that no, Virginia, everything really is going to be okay.

You all know that Special K is my favorite cereal in the world. It is just delicious. Just the right amount of sweetness, and it stays pretty crispy in milk. I love it. It is a 10+.

You probably also know that it is a diet cereal for women. Seriously. It is The Girlie Show of cereals. The logo on the box is a woman's waist. All the TV commercials are filled with women running and going for modest bicycle rides. The backs of all the boxes have pictures of women describing how they lost six pounds in two weeks by eating Special K or Special K diet bars for two meals a day. No, no. It is not even The Girlie Show of cereals. That is too butch. It is The View of cereals.

And so you know that the fact that Special K is my favorite cerealbrings me extraordinary shame. Check out the back of the box from which I ate this very morning:

eat breakfast, weigh less

why breakfast?

It's simple. Research shows that women who eat breakfast, like the Kellogg's Special K Breafast, weigh less. It's delicious and it's good for you... Just like Kellogg's Special K

When you enjoy the delicious Kellogg's Special K Breakfast: a serving of Kellogg's Special K cereal, skim milk, fruit, and coffee, you'll be eating a satisfying meal that has less than 250 calories, and can help you stay on track.

And, you know, my first thought upon reading this, while I was standing there eating my bowl of Kellogg's Special K with bananas and 2% milk:

1) Who did this study?
2) Why does Kellogg's say "women?" Did they do it only on women?
3) What did they control for? Maybe women who eat breakfast also tend to exercise more.
4) Correlation does not imply causality.
5) I am a scientist.
6) Special K is delicious
7) I hate myself for liking Special K.
8) Special K made me feel inferior without my consent.

Sorry, Eleanor.

When yer 22

2009-01-11T21:37:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? There have been 12 arrests in the past year at the Chuck-E-Cheese where my 7th birthday party was held.

If you're going to be sick anyway, there's no point in staying in on your birthday. So, despite the cold that was beginning to rage inside of me earlier this weekend, I went out. I went out. I had a great time. Saying that I felt like death this morning would be an insult to death. The only time I have felt worse is that time senior year when I took Nyquil and I dreamt that the universe was collapsing on itself and woke up on the bathroom floor crawling into the shower when Sam's Mom came in and was like, "You are not going to school today."

So I celebrated my second day of being 23 by staying in bed until 6 PM. Then I went to the grocery store to get some orange carrot juice, because I have this hypothesis that orange things are incredibly healthy. Now I'm up and around and my mucus is clear, so I think it's only going to be a matter of time before I'm in fighting shape again.

In other news, have you ever seen the video for Coldplay's "Viva La Vida"?

I swear, this is going to be the rick roll of the next generation. Like, seriously, this is just ridiculous. The rose. The dissolving into petals. The bell ringing. The "help I am Chris Martin and I am getting blown over by a giant fan" choreography. Oh man. Those hand motions during the instrumental break. It is fantastic.

I like making fun of people.

Got a feeling 23 is gonna be a good year

2009-01-08T23:57:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? According to PETA, fish are now called "sea kittens."

My birthdays are generally not that exciting. Just in general. It works out that way. Like, usually I'm all, "What a great birthday! There was an awesome episode of 30 Rock on. And I saved money on groceries." I usually blame the snow or the rain or the prelim exams. Blerg.

So this year I was looking forward to celebrating the publication of a calendar with my picture in it. I'm November. I know! That was the first thing I saw when I opened my mail today. And I was like, "Oh, just in time for my birthday!" I really thought that was going to be the most exciting thing. Then I noticed that I had a package from Uncle Dennis, and, well, by 11:55 PM, I had received three of the greatest birthday presents ever, seriously, ever, in history.

1) a TransLink pass from AC Transit
2) a book signed by Brian May, from Uncle Dennis
3) a gift certificate to Truck, obtained by Ruthie and financed by many of my other friends

Apparently Truck had never even thought about selling gift certificates before and started only at Ruth's suggestion. That's right. I have the first Truck gift certificate ever distributed. For reals. Basically, I am famous. I feel like a Greek god.

This is already the best birthday ever and it has not even happened yet.

Your mother should know

2009-01-06T23:34:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? New York City smelled like maple syrup again yesterday.

I love the word "phlogiston." I was just reminded of this today. My favorite use of the word "phlogiston" ever was in a Jeopardy! tournament of champions. I think it was the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the one before Ken Jennings won 72,000 games and necessitated the Super Ultimate Tournament of Champions like five years later. Anyway, it was part of the final series of games and the Final Jeopardy! category was "12-letter words." The clue was something like: "Ancient Greeks believed this to be a fifth element, superior to earth, water, wind, and fire." One person had no idea and guessed nothing, but the other two both guessed "What is phlogiston?" One of them even tried to awkwardly misspell it so that it would be close to 12 letters. The other dude was just defiant. I just thought it was weird that both of them came up with the same bizarre, obscure same time, and also that the word "phlogiston" was on television.

The correct question was "What is quintessence?"

Speaking of phlogiston, I realized I never posted those pictures of Christmas in Virginia that I had promised, so here you go.

Sam's Mom will like that she looks pretty good in this picture. I like mountains of meat, so I like it too.

All you have to do is deep fry bread dough, basically, and then put out some sugar for people to dip it in, and you will have the most delicious Christmas breakfast of all time. Aunt Dolores is a master. Or mistress, I guess.

This is what they look like when they're done. Uncle Frankie is featured in perhaps my favorite genre of photograph, "people partially obscured by massive quantities of food."Fil is just a jubilant Santa Claus.

The rest of the day was spent cooking for another, oh, twelve hours. Here's Crystal and Aunt Dolores doing that thing you do to gnocchi to make them indented and pillow-like. Mine always kind of end up like mashed potatoes.

Yeah, mountains of meat. Rock.

A good one, without any fear

2008-12-31T19:37:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The Euro is ten years old tomorrow!

Let me just give you some New Year's advice, okay?

Let's say it's 2009 and you're buying a new computer and you decide to buy an Apple. I mean, that's your decision; I think that buying an Apple and buying a PC represent two different tasks, each with its own pros and cons. But let's say you chose to buy an Apple.

Buy an AppleCare Protection Plan. That was like the smoothest move I have ever made. The last time something on my Mac, it was Christmas Eve and the part was on my doorstep in Pennsylvania on December 26. This time, I kind of... drained my battery beyond all mortal comprehension until there was nothing, nothing at all, no charge left in it, and I called them up yesterday. No questions asked, they sent out a replacement part and it was here waiting on my doorstep on New Year's Eve. And now I can blog. Yes.

The only time this has ever failed me was when the "T" key broke off my laptop and the Apple Genius on the phone was like, "I think you can snap it back in?" and I was like "No, the little plastic knobs broke off" and he was like "No, really you can snap it back in" and then I was like "okay, click" and I almost stole one from a demo computer at an Apple Store, but then some dude noticed at the last minute and decided to help. It was like some kind of picaresque novel.

But for anything except for keyboards, AppleCare has got you mad covered. You're already pretty much overpaying for a working laptop; why not add a little more so that you can get awesome customer service on it?

Stuck on my eyes

2008-12-30T23:39:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? William Frawley, who played Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy, stipulated in his contract that he would be allowed absence from filming of the series so that he could visit New York any time that the Yankees were playing in the World Series. This happened seven times during the nine seasons of I Love Lucy.

My own personal postsecret is comment cards at grocery stores. Grocery shopping is already pretty much my favorite pastime, and combining that with the voyeuristic thrill of minute excerpts from the daily lives of total strangers is just dangerous.

And so was I enraptured by the comments section of the monolithic Whole Foods in Union Square, with regular customers complaining about overcooked scones in the morning or the lack of agave-sweetened lemonade on the drink counter. In stark contrast to the chain's touchy-feely image, the responses from management were remarkably Palinesque, picking out key words and rhapsodizing on unrelated themes. "We offer a number of agave-sweetened coffee drinks and hope that you will continue to purchase them." In conclusion, I pretty much could have spent five days in the Union Square Whole Foods writing short fiction about the lives of the people who posted these comment cards and how they decided to protest their insufficient responses.

Luckily, this wasn't all I did in New York, no. I had five people to visit and I had three goals and I managed to do all of them. Really! All of them. And you know? That makes a pretty good outline for an entry.

1) Visit Caroline.

Oh, did I visit Caroline. I was first encouraged when she said "I usually meet people at the train station at 145th Street, but then I remembered that it's Sam." And, yo, I did find my way to Cedar Point in a police car and to Molvena, Italy via Molveno, Italy and seven thousand buses through the freaking Alps, so Harlem at 7 PM should not be too much of a problem. I ate all of Caroline's manicotti as we talked about every single student she has, and I tried to be like "sometimes my students want me to spend extra time after office hours" while she was like "sometimes my students breakdance in class; but that's okay, at least that means they aren't punching each other, and at least I don't live in the school district where you can't distribute stapled handouts because the students will pry out the staples and use them as weapons." Once again, you can call me Mario, because I just got 1-up'd.

I slept on Caroline's fold-out-aero-couch, which is apparently a new fad that I had theretofore never heard of. My phone rang like 82 times just sitting in her apartment, which is a trend that would continue throughout the weekend.

2) Visit Jed.

So let me just say that I have always been afraid of the New York subway system, like ferris wheels or people walking behind me, so even though all I had to do was take an express train, I was still pretty proud of making it from Harlem to Brooklyn fast enough that Jed was still in the shower when I arrived. Other than pizza for breakfast and the realization that I really like puppies but really, really hate cats, the rest of our visit was kind of, well, not blogsworthy.

A) Go to Pommes Frites.

I read an article recently on whether it's okay to take food on the subway. Apparently in Paris they are really strict about it. They did a survey of French people and one woman was like. "NON. Not even peanuts from a bag." All I could think of was that time that Mitra and I were marathon-rushing to a party at Veena's house but we stopped at Pommes Frites on the way and decided to take them on the subway, and we dropped our sweet chili sauce in front of someone who was sleeping and he kept moving as the train hit bumps and the entire subway car was just transfixed, watching him and collectively praying that the next bump would not send his heel into not-so-sweet chili. The moral of the story is no, not even peanuts from a bag.

But Belgian fries with Caroline and Ben went a little bit better. We stopped in and got a poutine and a large fries and three sauces. I mispronounced "poutine," I think. I have had a lot of faith in my French-pronouncing abilities since I correctly indentified someone as "quebecoise" last summer, but this totally shattered it. Kind of like Pommes Frites' BELGIAN (82,000 prospective MIT students wrote to correct me the last time I blogged about Pommes Frites) fries totally shattered my taste buds. Holy God. They are delicious. Everything about them. It is the best thing that has ever happened to the potato. Ever. Even better than using one to power an alarm clock or something.

3) Visit Howard.

That is not actually a picture of Howard; first we went to 30 Rock and I met Elmo on the way. I actually love this picture because seriously, that is one butt-ugly Elmo, and also he wasn't even pretending to be Elmo, he was just like "Gimme money. Thanks for your donation." in a gruff New York accent. Additionally, there were like three Elmos within a two-block radius of 30 Rock. Crazy. If I were younger than eight, my childhood would have been absolutely ruined.

According to Sam's Mom, my childhood was ruined when I watched a PBS documentary explaining that the sun was eventually going to expand and expand destroy the Earth. She said I just kept crying and crying for hours and she didn't know what to say other than "You'll be dead by then, anyway."

After taking some pictures of the tree, which I did only because of the "Ludachristmas" episode, we headed into the NBC store to meet up with Howard. There were no "Me want food" t-shirts and no Kenneth the Page. But it was still okay.

Then we went to Max Brenner, where we set the world on fire; kind of literally, they give you a grill with your fondue set so that you can toast marshmallows and then fondue them, but if you're an MIT student basically you want to see if every piece of food they served you will burn, and also see if chocolate can catch on fire, and also... well... burning. Burning, burning.

I headed home for my last night at Caroline's and we watched Princess Bride and oh man did you ever notice that Buttercup is pretty much worse than useless throughout the entire movie? Whatever, she's redeemed by Carol Kane.

B) See Equus or Gypsy.

So I headed to Howard's that morning and we had soft-boiled eggs at Le Pain Quotidien and I nearly cried because the perfect soft-boiled egg will make you do that. Kind of full, we headed down to Times Square and braved the extraordinary cold and rain at TKTS in hopes of getting some discount tickets. Score! We scored! We got 50% off tickets to Equus! They cost $60. Man. Making "I saw Harry Potter's Harry Potter" jokes is kind of expensive. I was also kind of disturbed by the massive visage of American Idol reject Ace Young staring me down in Times Square. God, he was atrocious. The three Puff Daddies and Helen Keller were bad enough, and now I have to see Ace Young.

No, really, Helen Keller. She led us, silently, to ramen, which I have previously blogged about, but let me just say steaming pork velvet again, because that was amazingly good. Oh man. Amazingly good. Through a felicitous series of events involving mistaken museum directions and important future-deciding phone calls, we were able to kill time until Equus actually started at 3 PM. We sat down just in time for the first portentous freaky chords and horse dancing, and I personally was enraptured until the ending portentous freaky chords and horse dancing and the line "There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out."

Less enraptured were the people behind us, who were eating barbecue chips for the first five minutes until Howard dirty-looked them out of it, and the people a few rows in front of us, who had the same cell phone go off three times during the performance. Seriously, people. I know I'm just blogging out my anger instead of confronting you about it, but that's what my generation was raised to do. You suck.

Speaking of (online expressions of anger, not speaking of sucking), I was just invited via facebook to the "world's first virtual gay rights march" online. Okay. I need to process that. For a little bit.

4) Visit Joe.

And I did that too! I rule. Joe took the train up from Princeton and we met up with him at the MTV store and then we went and got some French food and I had duck and it was pretty well done although it needed some salt but whatever! It was good stuff. Duck. We walked around for a while, and got some hot cocoa and walked around Central Park, and it was really icy and I could have died, for any number of reasons, but you know, we made it work. Then we walked a bajillion icy blocks to Magnolia Bakery where I took this picture and we talked about my secret plan for wealth and fame that is too secret to even reveal here on this blog, and then Joe went home to Princeton mumbling something about eigenvalues.

5) Visit Bethany.

So in a previous blog entry I already told you about the soup dumplings; what I didn't tell you is that I woke up on a mattress on Howard's floor at around 10:30 AM, fashioned his incredibly soft sheets into a Rami Kashou-inspired dress, walked to the bathroom, took a shower, and was subsequently forced to eat a chocolate chip cookie for breakfast, and then soup dumplings for lunch, and then I had to meet up with Bethany for more soup for Lunch 2. Man. What a day. I threw myself into a closing subway car on the way to meet up with Bethany, and well, I just felt really accomplished, like I had somehow finally mastered New York public transit. I rule.

I forgot to take a picture of Bethany, which was unfortunate because she was wearing the cutest jacket ever, of all time, ever. I mean. So cute. We talked for an hour or two and I found out that she is working at Planet Hollywood and exceeding my salary as a graduate student just in tips, and that she is living a relatively low-drama life, and that she is trying to make it big, and that I have confidence in that, and that American Idol auditions are a waste of time, and that some people from high school are crazy crazes! But yeah, it was a good time. I love catching up with people more than anything. Not 30 Rock. But most things.

C) Have cocoa in Central Park.

AND IT WAS SNOWY. Oh man. This was fantastic. I didn't actually have cocoa in the park with Howard, but I had done that last night, when it was dark outside, and let me tell you, Starbucks' Signature Salted Caramel Hot Chocolate should die. It is atrocious. Anyway, it turns out that Central Park is very slippery when temperatures are below freezing, and Eastern European people like visiting it. I guess it's the economy. At least they are good at walking on frozen ground.

From there, Howard had to field a phone call, so I made a quick change and then Tom Cruised it down to a pizza place near Union Square, to meet up for a "yay no more Teach For America" dinner when I found out that there were even more students that I didn't hear about on Friday night, which I had previously thought inconceivable (oh man, bringing Princess Bride back, so much organic unity, right here).

After a tour of six grocery stores in search of a noodle restaurant, we finally met up with some of Caroline's friend-of-friends, and that was pretty good, and kind of confirmed my "don't not be friends with Caroline rule." From there Caroline headed back home to pack and I headed over to Whole Foods to await instructions from Howard and, well, reread comment cards.

Then Howard and I, well... you can extrapolate the remainder of our evening from Yelp, because this entry is already too long and I'm flying out of Baltimore in like twelve hours, but suffice to say that I did manage to wake up the next morning in time to catch my train out of Penn Station and complete three-fourths of my Christmas shopping for Sam's Mom. I know. I am so good at multitasking. Among other things.

New York, this was your last chance, and hey, you did pretty well. I credit the snow. It made you really beautiful and probably also covered up most of the horrible pervading odor that I usually associate with you. But yes. I had fun. Much. I will return. Sometime. Go New York.

The one where God and sinners reconcile

2008-12-25T20:08:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? It has been suggested that the phrase "a partridge in a pear tree" resulted from the mistranscription of "a partridge, une perdrix." Perdrix is the french word for "partridge."

The DeAngelis family Christmas involves cooking for twelve straight hours, improvising four-part harmony, and dipping doughnuts into tomato sauce. How is it possible that I did not know this side of my family existed five years ago?

Well, it's a long story, but it's basically my fault even though the whole thing happened in 1985. God, even as a fetus I was causing trouble.

But you don't want to hear about that. Pictures tomorrow.

The internet is for

2008-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? Catholic priest Johann Schleyer constructed the language Volapük after having a dream in which God came to him and told him to create an international language. Today there are an estimated 25 speakers of Volapük in the world, yet more than 100,000 articles in the Volapük-language Wikipedia.

Although one thing Caroline said was that food porn was one of her favorite parts of my blog, so no pause in between, come on, let's jam.

My Ballsmas miracle. Fifty-four meatballs. Ready for frying. Oh yeah. This is art.

I am probably the only person on Earth where if I were on Family Feud and Richard Dawson said "name a food associated with Christmas" I would be like "MEATBALLS!" and then if I were on a team with Sam's Mom and she had already said that, my second answer would be "CAMEL-SHAPED COOKIES!" I never understood why our spritz cookie maker has a camel-shaped attachment, but I love it more than anything. Out of laziness, I didn't bother to color the dough chartreuse and purple this year. This is what I was like as a child. Also as a twenty-year-old.

This is ramen from Menkui Tei and the only words to describe it are "steamy," "pork," and "velvet." So arrange those however you would like. Howard and I grabbed some to take shelter from the freezing rain we had briefly braved for Equus tickets, and let me just say, it was the most velvety pork steaming meal I have ever eaten in my life.

These are soup dumplings, which you take a bite out of, put on a spoon, then squirt their insides into the spoon, then eat, then slurp the soupy insides out of said spoon. I would normally hate them because the process of eating them utilizes the words "slurp" and "squirt," which are two of the least appetizing words I have ever heard, but somehow they make it work.

This is two hot dogs from Gray's Papaya and let me tell you that having two hot dogs from Gray's Papaya at 3 AM did basically make me see God a little bit, and oh, just in time for Christmas. You know my favorite Christmas carol is O Holy Night but that is only because they have not yet written one about hot dogs.

New York minute

2008-12-23T12:29:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The New York City subway has twice as many daily riders as every other rapid transit system in the country combined.

Caroline has really got me all worked up because every time we did something in New York City she was all, "Oh man, I can't wait to read about this in your blog." So, you know, I'm going to have to make it work when I go about this.

Anyhoo, this is probably the best picture I took. It was followed shortly by this picture, which was Caroline and Ben turning around and saying, "SAM! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? IT IS COLD AND SNOWING."

The most beautiful thing that happened was when we were walking to 30 Rock and some New York construction-worker-type was standing outside with a REPENT NOW sign saying "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord."

Not that I'm generally excited about the rapture or crazy people foretelling it; it's just cool because as a freshman at MIT I sang John Harbison's "Concerning Them Which Are Asleep" and the part that uses that text is really ethereal and beautiful, and I hadn't thought about it in five years, so hearing it in a gruff New York accent was a bit of cognitive dissonance. Now if you want to know what to get me for Christmas, it's this album.

More later. Lemon out.

But if I go mad no one will know it

2008-12-18T23:32:00.000-08:00

DID YOU KNOW? The first line of John Lennon's "Julia" ("Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you Julia") is a paraphrase on Khalil Gibran.

I really, really hate flying. Everything about flying. I think the thing I hate most about flying is the metal detector, but really, everything about flying. I just hate it. God. Flying. It's atrocious.

The Phoenix airport is my new nemesis. Not really. No, Michael Pollan is still my nemesis. But I don't get the Phoenix airport at all. It is crazy. Every single room is decorated in a different, yet uniformly tacky way. Like one room will have Native-American inspired line drawings and the next will look like a casino and then you step into an entirely green elevator, the door opens on one floor and it's the 1970's, and then the theme of the next floor is sunbursts, and oh, I just don't know. And why do I need to take an elevator to get to the gates? Seriously, there were four down escalators funneling people to baggage check but no up escalators and no stairs. It was like playing Zelda and you're in a dungeon and the dungeon is filled with treasures that are just out of reach, but all the treasures are blocked by down escalators, so you need to go find the hookshot or the magnet boots or something before you can advance any further.

I'm pretty good at going to airports. Seriously. I take my laptop out of the bag. I don't pack liquids. I put my carry-on under the seat. I always take the window seat. I don't talk to you. I don't have children. I sleep the whole time.

On my way from Phoenix to Baltimore today I dreamed an entire episode of 30 Rock. It involved Jack's birthday, Liz being single, and Scrabble. The subplot was all about Tracey. At the end, Liz wanted to go to her brother's house to watch him sleep, while Jack was trying to convince her to go to a Jewish deli and get latkes. Jack's mother was there too. This is totally implausible, because as soon as Jack mentioned latkes, Liz would have been like, "I want to go to there." I think I just wanted Andy Richter to be in my 30 Rock dream. Can you blame me? I think the real show is better than my 30 Rock dream.

The final is over and graded, final grades have been assigned. It's over. I never, ever want to grade a final exam again. I think that I wrote on someone's final in German at one point. By the end I was writing horrible things like "please consider using a pencil next time" because the little monkeys decided to take their entire final in pen and be totally unclear about what was and was not scribbled out. I'm sick, Oedipa, sick.

But anyway, I'm home now, I'm getting cheesesteaks and haircuts tomorrow, and I'm going to New York City in the evening. I should probably figure out what I'm doing there at some point. Basically I want to go to Pommes Frites and anything else that happens is just a bonus. Howard has suggested that we try to get tickets to The View because they give lots of free stuff to the audience. I'm kind of wondering how he knows this. Oh, laid-off investment bankers.