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November 5th, 2009
09:30 pm
The TV is on and a rerun of House is running. I don't really follow the show, so I'm off on most of the ongoing story lines, but it's good random background filler. I came in half way through, but Kumar has croaked. At the end of the show, there's some suicide awareness blurb. Wait, did Kumar really croak... wikipedia knows all.
Still, it's prone to silliness. So I had to read this a few times: "Kalpen Suresh Modi, best-known by his stage name Kal Penn, is an American film actor and politician who is serving as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement in the Barack Obama administration." Wait, what? Kumar? Well, Harold was Sulu, so maybe... nah.
Actually, yeah. I checked in a few places; it's true. This just struck me as strange enough to share. Kumar really did go to White Castle.
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November 1st, 2009
09:26 pm - Cartoon Sake
Yesterday we did Mitsuwa with a Mitsuwa virgin, we'll call him E. Loosecanon and I were talking over each other in our excitement. "Come, see this. No this. Over here." E liked anime, but didn't seem to have seen the newer stuff. I pointed out a "Death Note" notebook at the gift shop, which he hadn't seen. I later made him get some of the munchies L chows on in the show; he'll thank me later. The gift shop also had a Hello Kitty toilet seat, which I hadn't seen before. I broke down and got a soroban, even though it was way expensive for a dinky cheap plastic thing.
E wanted sake and we found a couple women promoting a brand. They were holding little paddles with a single eyeball on them. It didn't make sense until you noticed the tie in. The brand was based on, of all things, the manga "GeGeGe no Kitaro". He got the one with the main character, shown here.
I had fun with one of the sales woman. I swear she was flirting with me ( not something I'm at all used to, seems to happen with Japanese chicks. ) She stood very close and being barely five foot was probably looking right up into my brain through my nostrils. She assured me her product was very good, made from a special part of the rice, etc. I asked if she'd actually tell me if it sucked. She said she would not lie, but very adeptly dodged the question.
I'd commented to E before we'd found her that Japanese sales people are fascinating in their pointed unwillingness to ever say anything negative. After a few exchanges, she seemed to be getting uncomfortable, so I apologized. She then said, I'm not making this up, "It is ok. I know. You are messing with my mind." Totally not what I expected to come out of the mouth of a small woman from Japan. We all laughed. She knew of the yokai peep show place I learned of from Danabren's blog. She was impressed I'd heard of it.
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October 20th, 2009
02:05 pm - Lunch: dairy and Japanese?
I'm currently on a yogurt kick. It's one of the few foods I really like that won't kill me.
I'll have yogurt for breakfast, lunch, or both. The problem is sugar. I'm not over worried about the lactose and I favor the Greek style ones that have even less of that. It's the added stuff. Stuff I like, that's dangerous.
For just plain yogurt, I like granola. Which, of course, has sugar. Sure, I could make my own, but at that point I'd probably go without.
So, I'm eating my plain Fage yogurt and it wants something. I reach for the granola and something completely different catches my eye. Something that may have never been seen in yogurt before. Something so crazy it just might work. I leave the granola untouched and grab the... yukari.
Yukari, in this context, means the red / purple shiso leaf stuff you put on rice to make "yukari gohan". It's a little salty, slightly sweet, vaguely floral. It style of furikake, which basically means things Japanese doctor their rice with. In fact, mine is this very package.
We don't do a lot of savory with yogurt in the US. But, hey, I love labneh with olive oil and zatar. Greeks use this very yogurt in savory dishes. What they hell...
Yukari "yooguruto" doesn't suck! I'll probably have that again. I imagine a number furikake would work, but yukari still seems a little odd; my favorite fruit yogurt is blueberry. Mustn't think blueberry with yukari, hurts brain.
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October 19th, 2009
08:58 pm - New Hope
Why do I suddenly think of Star Wars? Damn, I'm a geek. New Hope is actually a quaint little tourist village in PA, across the river from the equally quaint Lambertville in NJ.
Yesterday we met up with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) alagbon and hazey57 there. Our food spot was closed. Indeed, a number of spots were closed. But not bad enough to dampen the day. We wanted somewhere cheap. The place we found wasn't that cheap, but not too extravagant either. Well, until you add appetizers, desert, coffee... I felt kind of bad about the bill, but it was a good meal.
A pleasant surprise was that long dead "Now and Then" shop has resurrected itself in a closet sized room. A shadow of it's former massive self that used to reside at the end of bridge, it was still quite nostalgic.
The town used to have a good balance of upscale and college chic. For the most part, the upscale seems to have up and left. There are a lot more new agey places, which is kind of amusing. The consignment shop we kept chain mail at also seemed to have reinvented itself; we recognized some of the window dressing.
My back was killing me and I was into a second round of codeine before we were done. I'm glad we kept at it; the last place we hit was a shop featuring lots of stuff from Nepal. The first thing I noticed was a giant dorje. A dorje ( or vajra ) is small ritual object that is usually lightly balanced in the hand. It represents a lighting bolt, but generally looks like stylized barbell.
The store's "Dorje of Doom" was about size of a proper barbell and I expressed my amazement at it to the owner. A white dude, who I believe was married to the striking Nepali woman in the store, seemed grateful that I even knew what it was. "First one in months." I watched him do some yuppie wrangling and ultimately bought a sherpa hat from him. I must have amused him somehow; I believe I was given the family discount for life.
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October 12th, 2009
03:58 pm - Hotels...
I'm still a little in awe of the general hotel service at KWCS. Enough so that I'm here to bitch. There was a light side and a dark side, actually.
First the bad; OMG, prices. After monopolizing a chair in the bar for a few minutes, I felt it only civil to get a drink. I ordered one mojito and one scotch. The mojito, I'm told, was light on booze but pleasant enough. The scotch, single malt (Glenfiddich, nothing exotic) and water, simplest thing in the world, was fail. It came in the same highball glass as the mojito filled to the top with water and ice. I could taste a hint of scotch, but it was so over drowned that I couldn't even tell if it was an honest shot; which I suspect it wasn't. Those two drinks cost twenty three dollars! Um, no, I do not wish to run a tab.
The whole "bistro" was kind of like that, too. Yes, the burger was nice enough. Was it $15 nice? Was it wagyu and made by hand with little slivers of herb butter in the middle? No, it was just a regular burger.
On the light side, the staff was fun. Everyone was at least professional, but many were clearly amused. When I said to the counter chick, a stern looking little woman in a head covering, "I'm sorry, could I pay you for this horribly overpriced soda," she actually cracked up. I had her smiling by the time I managed to fish the bills out of my pouch.
Then there was Tony. I'd seen him in one hotel and then he checked me into our hotel. We got to talking; turns out he had doppelganger named Daryl who was a shorter, lighter skinned black guy, completely different, etc. As I headed to elevator, I gave him a wave, "Daryl, right?" He gave a great "busted" face and just shook his head.
As luck would have it, I happened to pass a guy the next day close enough to elicit the obligatory "hey, how's it going" white noise kind of niceties. Just as he passed I managed to catch that the name tag said Daryl. He fit the description and I was pretty sure we'd never spotted each other. In an rare moment of perfect timing, I hollered "hey" and he turned around to look at me; "Tony, right?" There was an actual jaw drop. I was grinning from ear to ear and he just cracked up. It was good.
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October 11th, 2009
10:25 pm - Class Done. Sleep now.
Event was good.
My class seemed to go well. Time flew by; I needed more of it. I keep thinking of more stuff that I wanted to touch on that we didn't get to. It's only an intro class, but I have a ton of material I want to share.
My greatest fear was I'd just be talking to myself; but I got about a dozen students. The dissected raw hide dog bone was a hit. I happened to meet the other guy who was teaching the same class as me. We talked leather work for an hour and lamented that we couldn't take each other's classes.
I had an odd moment when loosecanon said, "well, now you done your first SCA class." Wait, what? I've never done that before? Hmm... guess not. I've taught classes in many venues. For work I regularly run long meetings when I present all kinds of material; it's a similar vibe. I never even considered standing in front of a group a people and throwing out information to be remotely unusual. I suppose I should do that more often, it's always fun.
Here are the class notes if anyone is interested. They don't really give a feel for the lecture; they're just a reference for things touched on.
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October 3rd, 2009
05:38 pm - Lovelace
I have a thing for Ada Lovelace. Actually, I find all the strange connections of Lord Byron fascinating; Frankenstein, Dracula, the first computer programmer...
Ada, Byron's only legitimate child, is considered, perhaps debatably, the first computer programmer. She is interesting for who she was, when she was, and what she did. You'd think she'd be more well known than an odd historical footnote. It could be chance, or gender bias; probably both.
Yesterday, in my web wanderings, I happened upon The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage! ( Read the Origin first. ) It seriously cracked me up, but that might be just me. It's clear the author is as jazzed by these historical personage as much as I. Also, there are notes at the end of each comic with author's commentary on the source material. I haven't read them all yet; I'm saving some.
It seems there was an Ada Lovelace Day to raise awareness of her. It was March 24th this year; I didn't know. I've yet to figure out the significance of the day. It's not her birthday; I was born on the same day she was.
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September 30th, 2009
02:48 pm - Phear the foil beanie
Reading about paint to block wifi: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8279549.stm
Don't really care, but the tinfoil hat, protect the woman and children note toward the end struck me as amusingly paranoid.
This led me to this strange study: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We speculate that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.
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September 17th, 2009
09:54 pm - Twa Songs Dexter would Dig
There is a strange song that lurks on my music player in two forms. One is called "The Bonny Swans" from Loreena McKennitt. Another is "Cruel Sister" from Pentangle. They're both variants of The Twa Sisters which appears in numerous forms. Even appearing in Grimm's collection as "The Singing Bone" ( Twa Brothers, in this case. )
The Pentangle version had me singing along on the morning commute and made me think about it again. Then it played at me on the way home ( reshuffle ), finishing perfectly as I pulled in the driveway. It wanted a blog entry.
If you aren't familiar with it, go read or listen to a version, then come back. ( Cue Jeopardy music. ) The basic elements are consistent. One sibling kills the other to take their lover or position. The remains of the dead sibling are found. The remains magically tell the tale of their betrayal, leaving the living sibling to face justice.
For the two sisters, the murdered fair haired sister floats to shore to be found by a bard ( or bards ). In some versions there's an Ophelia-like glamor to the body; it's seems like a swan, graceful in death, etc. "They made a harp of her breastbone"... "took three locks of her yellow hair and with them strung the harp so rare." The harp is then played in the lord's hall and recounts the treachery. Justice done.
When exactly did vivisection become part of the traveling minstrel repertoire? The hair of a fair maiden, I'm with you. But the harvested parts of a drowned corpse? And a breast bone, no less? Witness the amazing bardic bag of holding; lute, rosin... bone saw? I imagine our ghoulish players lent over a body with the classic coroner Y cut, spread open like a frog in bio class and digging for the good parts. Nothing to see, official guild business, move along.
McKennitt's version expands the potential harp harvest, adding "he made harp pins of her fingers fair, with a hey ho and a bonny O." It's kind of an upbeat song, actually.
Of course, this is folklore and applying reason to it is detrimental. Still, I find myself wondering what the teller of the tale and their audience might have envisioned. Is it some shallow glossing over or as graphic as a CSI episode?
Modern readers tend to dismiss, or rewrite, the more grisly aspects of old stories. In one of Rumpelstiltskin's endings, he tears himself in two. It's tempting to see some magical Disney depiction of that, but I think it more likely that a reader at the time would be thinking something closer to drawn and quartered.
Perhaps people from the days of Saint's artifacts mightn't think twice about this. Somehow, that's more off putting.
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September 6th, 2009
09:52 pm - Movies, exactly the same, but different?
Hollywood is screwing with me. There are two movies that I'm looking forward to; 9 and Avatar. Sort of.
When I think Avatar, I'm thinking the Avatar: The Last Airbender They're dropped the Avatar part, which is good, but it's still on my mind. There is another movie called, ahem, Avatar. The latter looks cool, I'm looking forward to it, but it's confusing.
Another one I've been looking forward to is the big screen production of Shane Acker's brilliant short animation 9. To be released, 9/9/9, I just saw my first TV promo for it. If you haven't seen it, follow the youtube link on the bottom of the wiki page. It's hard to explain.
The completely unrelated film Nine will be out later this year. Seriously? Don't these guys ever compare notes?
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August 16th, 2009
06:28 pm - Movies!
Surprisingly good movie weekend.
Just saw Ponyo. Being able to see a Miyazaki flick in the local theater is a treat on it's own. This is a movie for young kids, age five to ten. Unlike the Hollywood habit of putting adult cookies in kid flicks, this one doesn't pander to the parents. Instead it's just simple and magical. That it doesn't treat children like lobotomized adults has it's own charm. Rather, as an adult, you start to see through child's eyes.
District 9. I saw this one on my own because "it looked like a monster movie." The previews for this movie, while energetic and enticing, don't really do the movie justice. This is a thoughtful, intelligent, science fiction story; a true rarity. Audiences looking for Transformers or GI Joe will probably be disappointed. There is a gore factor, action, special effects; but it's not the story. It starts out docudrama, satire, absurdity and goes deeper as the clown moves from comedy to tragedy.
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July 11th, 2009
11:37 pm - Weather Bad
I was an idiot. Should have slept over. Traffic not moving. Everyone else, stay put. Posted via LiveJournal.app.
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July 7th, 2009
09:05 pm
I feel I would be remiss if I didn't mention the weekend. Friday was an excellent Princeton crawl, with great weather, good Japanese for lunch, a fun time at the toy store, perfect timing in getting to The Bent Spoon ( best ice cream ). Figured that would be the highlight of the week, then a friend invited us to join him for fireworks on Saturday.
The company was good, our kind of geeks. I ended up spending a ton of time chatting with a girl who knew far more about string theory than I; brilliant chick. She was still in high school, made me feel old. She has a website with instructions on how to build a cyclotron and knew our master of ceremonies through a shared interest; the Tesla coil.
Yeah, a Tesla coil. Here it is lit up later in the evening.
I thought throwing obscene amounts of electricity about was the fireworks show, and indeed it was. But not all of it.
After marshalling that much juice, it only seemed proper to have a graphic demonstration of destructive force. The following is an animated image. It's what happens when you pump 30,000 amps through watermelon.
Three innocent fruits met their end this way, all with concussive force. Best firecrackers, ever.
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June 21st, 2009
06:59 pm - Doing the Books and Books
Thinking of moving or just budgeting? The "Living Wage Calculator", with the cheery title of "Poverty in America", is quite interesting: http://www.livingwage.geog.psu.edu/
In other news, I was recently looking for some clip art for a portcullis. Yes, my googling is so facinating. I wanted a logo for a X11 screen locker I'd written ( also exciting ). I'll post the source for that if I ever get around to figuring out the GNOME hook part and how I want to do it.
I also looked up halberd, thinking of crossed pole arms. Halberd didn't work to well, but the results were expected. Glaive. Remember that was the name of uber shuriken in Krull? Yeah, the name is quite popular in fantasy. Same with polearm. Spear was ambiguous at best, but when I typed it, I also saw "spears" was a more popular option. Without thinking I typed spears and was immediately bombarded with a montage of naked flesh.
I told you that to tell you this. In my search I chanced up the Gutenberg Project's edition of The Handbook to English Heraldry. I was amazed that all the images were also included in the edition. Ages ago it was just ascii. This is old news, but it was news to me.
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April 16th, 2009
07:29 pm - It's only a dream... what?
"A lucid dream, also known as conscious dream, is a dream in which the sleeper is aware that they are dreaming. When the dreamer is lucid, they can actively participate in and often manipulate the imaginary experiences in the dream environment. Lucid dreams can be extremely real and vivid depending on a person's level of self-awareness during the lucid dream." -- wikipedia.
I don't really get the full dream experience that often. I can count on one hand the number of satisfying lucid dreams I've had. It's an odd balancing act. If you're too aware, you jump right out. If you're a little less aware than that, you end up shifting to a day dream kind of state where it's more vivid imagining.
The best is when the dreaming part of your brain is still going on with the show and your awareness of it isn't really interfering with the script. Then you get to ride along, editing bits according to whim. Or just play in the VR environment. Eventually the awareness seems to overwhelm the thing and out you go.
The way you get a lucid dream is to somehow notice you're dreaming. There are all kinds of ways to do thing, lots of flaky books and techniques. I'm honestly too lazy for any of it. I know it's possible, that's enough for the rare amusement.
So I'm in deep, paralytic REM sleep; the best kind for this sort of thing. I don't recall all the details, a turned corner, a room, a dentist chair, I'm in a giant dome tent, still in a building. You know, dream logic. Keeping in mind, the absurdity of dreams isn't enough to make you aware of them. For some reason, I really have to relieve myself. A corner of the tent calls to me. No, I didn't wet the bed.
But as I'm being relieved, I start to worry about what I'm doing. This is simply something I'd never do in real life. Why am I doing such a crass thing? What am I thinking... and poof, I realize it's ok because it's a dream and I'm lucid. Whee, I'm lucid and so deep that the realization didn't bring me out. I start to look around. Is that a dog? What's with the tent? Should I just dive out the window and fly somewhere? ... did I wet the bed? Too late to worry. Can't help worrying. Dammit!
I can't even feel my body. I pull out of dream state as if surfacing from under ground. Everything is fine and I've lost the dream.
This little bit of nocturnal strangeness has haunted me all day. Sorry if it was too scatological, I would have left that out if possible.
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April 7th, 2009
09:15 pm - Chain Resturants
I'll admit it, I occasionally patronize those big chain restaurants. Many of them don't stuck, but whole lot of them seem to be coasting and hoping the bar will lubricate the lameness. Maybe they're right, but I don't drink at such places.
I know when they have a microwave and they always have a deep fryer. Chances are, the best the place has to offer sees the deep fryer, but if it just misses the nuker I consider myself ahead. Based on the first rule, appetizers are usually the most satisfying. With this in mind, a few good appetizers and a small entree work pretty well for the Friday's genre eatery.
Today I saw such a amazing fail I had to share. It wasn't that the food was bad ( in this instance ), but the cunning method of cutting corners was so absurd. The victim of the fail? French Onion Soup. The criminal: Appelbee's.
French onion soup is usually pretty safe to order. It's popular, real easy to make, and so much cheaper to do so that even the nuker-rants often have some "from scratch" in it. Caramelize some onions, a little S&P, cover with water and you're there. Sure, some beef stock would be nice, or some wine, but with just the onions it's yummy.
French onion has the bonus of using day old ( or older ) bread. And the bulk of the bowl is liquid, it's soup. Of course, it's always topped with cheese; the fun part, but also the expensive part. Which is why the chain-rant presentation is a mystery.
The "soup" was well covered with cheese. It had bread hearty enough for a thick soup with real caramelized onions at the bottom. Overall, it was quite nice, maybe even a little too thick. However, it was a paltry two inches deep! The broth might have been called a gravy on which sat onions, bread, and cheese. It really didn't have enough liquid to call itself soup. The sering container had been constructed with essentially a false solid bottom, to make it look deeper.
Strange.
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March 21st, 2009
06:36 am - Saturday Morning
Yes, it's 6AM. I've only been up for two hours...
When I was a little kid and woke up at around now, I'd go bother my parents, asking when the cartoons would be on. I would be assured that they would be on soon and, in soothing parent speak, to bloody well keep quiet until then.
The early morning was the crap. You might get weekly kids variety show rerun, like "Big Blue Marble" or Zoom. Or worst, the stop motion Davey and Goliath, which felt like it was running half speed and smelled like old people. Even the talking dog was on downers. If this was meant to instill virtuous Christian values in my child self all it did was vaguely creep me out.
Ultimately the toons would fire up. Production values were generally poor. So much so that thirty year old bugs reruns were often preferable to the new stuff. It would be years before the Japanese would take over, raising the quality of the jovial jerky sketches. In a strange way, Hanna-Barbera was American cartoon innocence.
I didn't care my sketchy entertainers were a little rough around the edges, they were TV for me. I liked the shark that did three stooges impressions. And the loud sack of hair that was supposed to be a cave man. There was an armored hippo that shot pop rocks out of it's head. A number of things that would have made much more sense if I knew what marijuana was. Of course, ancient Warner Bros fare, fresh from the forties with cultural references I couldn't hope to understand. For a three to four hour block on Saturday mornings, there was a shared kid experience.
That shared experience is dead now. Inevitably steamrolled by feeds of kid friendly crap 24/7. So much so that the networks have forgotten what "Saturday Morning" used to mean. It's kind of sad.
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March 7th, 2009
07:18 pm - Watchmen: no spoilers, but warning
First, a bit the history. Watchmen is a strange comic. It's more a character study than a narrative. Though the characters are "masked heroes," it really doesn't have a lot of good super hero action. It's a combination of some seriously angsty existential ruminance and a lot of homage to a comic vigilante genre of ages past. Any pretense to plot is incidental and, to be perfectly honest, the ending is exceptionally absurd.
Forward to the movie.
The movie is very true to the comic. The ending is marginally different; slightly less absurd, but only slightly. The casting is wonderful. The look and mood is spot on; sort of. While the sound track is amusing, it's applied with the subtlety of a fire alarm. "Watchtower" is laughable. There is an needlessly graphic sex scene played against the shameless background of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah". Then again, it might have helped...
Violence. There is a lot of good violence in the comic and no drop of blood was missed in the on screen translation. In anything, the graphic violence is as graphic as possible. e.g. if a bone can be broken, it must be a compound green stick with arterial spray. Subtlety is not a strength, as in most cases implied damage would have been enough, or even better because it would be less of a distraction.
This kind of thing succeeds based on choice of editing the source material. I didn't generally like the choices. I honestly don't know if anyone unfamiliar the comic would be happy or even have a clue as to what they're on about.
To end on a happy note. If you are into the comic and don't mind some horror movie style gore, awkward sex, and a lot of blue CGI penises, this is kind of fun. There are a lot of visual cookies. I don't really know if I could recommend it to anyone other that a comic geek, though.
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February 14th, 2009
12:40 pm - Still Alive
In fact:
Um, yeah, that's me. I need a nap.
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January 18th, 2009
07:42 pm - When lots of other authors write your material...
I've been having some unchristian thoughts. This is actually ok, since I'm not a Christian, but I still feel kind of bad.
Jesus seemed like a sincere fellow. A Jewish protestant, looking to make his religion more accepting, trying to describe a God that was less of a sadistic megalomaniac than the Torah version. He must have pissed a lot of people off. I can respect that.
In spite of trying to fix things for the better, the New Testament is not without issue. It's good there are a lot of authors telling the same story, because then the reader can pick and choose the version they like. Or have it chosen for them. So why is the version that comes through often so exclusionary? So mixed? So antithetical to the original message?
Today, I had an epiphany. You see, the New Testament didn't get written until after the main character had passed on. In some cases, really long since he'd gone, like over a century. Some debate that some books were penned a close to his death, but many indications are that this wasn't the case.
So what is the New Testament? A document consisting of many different works, in some cases by authors that had little or nothing to do with the source material. With untold numbers of contributions never being even accepted as cannon, except by a small, devout following. Only one conclusion can be made; the New Testament is fanfic!
Somehow, it all makes so much more sense now. Did the Gnostics write slash fic? Probably...
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