Book Notes: What Einstein Told His Cook

Robert l. Wolke writes a food column for The Washington Post in which he explains the science behind food, cooking methods, and so on. I read a collection of his columns, "What Einstein Told His Cook", and really enjoyed it. Here is a handful of the interesting parts, paraphrased:

* Caramelization is the heat-induced browning of a food that contains sugar, but no amino acids (which make up proteins). Onions contain amino acids, so technically one can't "caramelize" an onion. When a food with amino acids in addition to sugar is heated to induce browning, such as onions, a set of chemical reactions take place called Maillard reactions. (pg 23)

* White chocolate has no chocolate in it. It is the fat from the cacao bean mixed with milk solids and sugar. (pg 34)

* Salt expose: Salt Sense is real salt, but it can claim to have "33 percent less sodium per teaspoon" because the salt crystals are flaky and fluffy, taking more room in a teaspoon than regular salt. (pg 46).

* His general point about salt is that all types of salt--table salt, sea salt, popcorn salt, kosher salt--are either identical or virtually identical chemically. The only significant difference is the size of the salt grain. (pg 42, others)

* Most European butters have a higher minimum milk fat content, which give them a richer flavor than American butters. (pg 78)

* The point of pasteurization is to heat a liquid to a temperature that will kill or deactivate dangerous microorganisms. Traditional pasteurization, not used much anymore, heats milk to 145-150 degrees F for 30 minutes. Flash pasteurization heats milk at 162 degrees F for 15 seconds. Ultra-pasteurization heats it to 280 degrees F for only 2 seconds.

The ultra-pasteurization equipment heats the milk under a high gas pressure to raise the boiling point of milk and prevent it from evaporation during the process. The process also increases the milk's shelf life by 4-5 weeks compared to flash pasteurization. (pg 91)

* Potato chips bags have opaque windows to keep out ultraviolet light, which speeds up the oxidation process of the fat in chips, turning them rancid. As a general rule, keep all fats and oils out of strong light. (pg 118)

* Green skin and sprouting eyes on a potato are sources of solanine, a toxic alkaloid. The solanine doesn't lie deep, so you can cut these parts of the potato
off and use the rest. (p 119)

* Salt (mixed with a bit of water) preserves food because it kills or deactivates bacteria by osmosis. Osmosis is the passing of water through a membrane to balance out the concentration of water in a 2nd solution. The salty solution sucks out the less-salty water in the bacterium, making it shrivel up and become inactive. (pg 138) I wonder if water could bring a dried-out bacterium to life.

* If you aren't defrosting a home-frozen food in the microwave, put it in a metal pan. Metals are great heat conductors, better than air or water, and will transfer the room's heat to the food faster than those methods. A bowl of warm water changed every half-hour is better for bulky foods, like a whole chicken. (pg 201)

* You can sterilize a sponge by placing it in a microwave and running it for 1 minute. The sponge has to be wet or it could smoke or catch fire. (pg 255) This article, from the original study, recommends two minutes so I would go with that.

* Most microwaves can only operate at full power. When you select "50% power", the microwave is cycling on and off so it is only on 50% of the time. An exception is a microwave with "inverter technology", which can deliver a lower level of power. (pg 256)

* Microwaves can penetrate glass and not metal. The reason the metal grate on a microwave door blocks microwaves is because microwaves are 4 3/4 long, too long to fit through the tiny gaps in the grate. (pg 260)

* The most important quality of a frying pan is heat conductivity. The best heat conductor is silver. (I couldn't find a silver frying pan for sale online though). The next best is copper, which conducts heat 91% as well as silver. Too much copper can be toxic, so the pan will need to be lined with a less toxic metal, such as stainless steel or nickel.

Next is aluminum, which conducts heat 55% as well as copper. The aluminum will need some type of coating to protect it from damage from food acids. The worst conductor among common skillet materials is solid stainless steel, only 4 percent as good as silver.

* He tested how much water button mushrooms absorb when you wash them, and found that it's next to nothing. I've found this to be my experience too, in spite of the warnings against washing mushrooms. (pg 286)

* The reason for different measuring cups from liquids and solids (usually with wider mouths than liquid measuring cups) is to account for how the two substances settle in a container. One cup of a liquids will fill all available space in the container. One cup of a solid like sugar or flour will settle unevenly and leave small caps among the granules. Most measuring cups for solids have wide mouths to let the solids spread out more and fill the spaces between them (more like a liquid).

He mentions a product called a Perfect Beaker that does a good job measuring both dry and liquid substances. (pg 293)

Another Haircut

There is a hereditary rule for predicting baldness. I forget the specifics. If your Uncle on your Mom's side is bald, you'll be bald? Or is it your mother's father, or your father's mother? It doesn't matter. In my family, they're all bald.

My hairline has rapidly receded for several years now. I'm reminded of this on occasion. I'll have a moment of consternation and self-pity, and then adjust to the new setback in the War on Forehead until the next reminder.

The latest one was yesterday, staring at myself in the mirror at The Hair Cuttery. The stylist had just finished cutting my hair, and I was completely lost in thought, feeling depressed at the vast expanse of forehead facing me, sparely dotted with small wisps of hair huddling together like refugees from a still ongoing battle.

"It's okay," the stylist said.

I broke out of my thoughts. The worry on my face must have been obvious for her to say that.

She put her hand on my shoulder. "It's okay."

That made me smile. You know what? It is okay. Balding sucks, but it's not the end of the world. It's part of life, and I'll just have to live with it. I gave her a knowing nod. You're right. It is okay.

It wasn't until the third time that she asked "It's okay?" that I realized we weren't having an unspoken connection where a familiar combination of male baldness and angst made my inner thoughts clear and my need for comfort obvious, but rather she just wanted to know if I liked my haircut, and for the past 30 seconds I was just responding to her by winking and nodding.

"Yeah, yeah, it's okay!" I jumped out of the chair. As I left, I realized I still felt a little better, even if the compassion was accidental.

Rubber Thug

How did I miss this bit of marketing genius for so long?

I have had an old Rubbermaid "Roughneck" laundry basket for many years now. The label copyright is 1983. I just noticed two things about it today.

1. The original product sticker is still on the bottom.

2. The Rubbermaid mascot is a thug.




The image quality is poor, but the message is clear: this guy is mad about laundry. His arms are crossed, his dockworker hat is pulled to the ridge of his forehead, and whatever is strapped to his wrist is either an unusual watch or portable garroting wire.

"Five Year Warranty"? Yeah, like I'm going to call Rubbermaid customer service and give my phone number and address to a company with Sir Thug-A-Lot on the payroll. "You got a problem with your basket? Yeah, I'll come right over and fix it. I'll fix it real good."

I'm afraid to put laundry in this thing anymore. I was blissfully unaware of this relic of the tough-guy marketing trend for over a decade, and now I can't fall asleep without a pullover and a pair of socks covering his face.

I understand the manly man marketing philosophy, but even accounting for today's slightly increased sensibilities, what was Rubbermaid thinking?

AD MAN 1: "Hey, let's put a picture of a man who looks like he beats his wife when the booze runs out on all our products aimed at women, many of whom who stay at home alone or with defenseless kids."
AD MAN 2: "I like it! Mr. Clean, you going down."

Best Album of 2007?

I could easily find 100 good candidates for Song of the Year, but Album of the Year is much different. I tend to listen to singles or will just download 2-3 songs from an artist rather than the whole album, so I don't have many candidates to choose from.

My favorite album, which I'm surprised isn't even on most people's Top 10 lists, is All Hour Cymbals by Yeasayer. "2080" is crazy good and the rest of the album is repeat-worthy as well. I've listened to the entire album a few dozen times and am still enjoying it.

The rest of my list will be unsurprising to people who likes indie pop \ rock. I was hesitant to make a "Best of the Year" list at all because there's not much here that's interesting if you keep up with this type of music.

All Hour Cymbals / Yeasayer
The Flying Club Cup / Beirut
Andorra / Caribou
Night Falls Over Kortedala / Jens Lekman
Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga / Spoon
Ghettoblaster / Socalled
Mice Parade / Mice Parade

From the “Wish I Heard About in 2006″ club:
Night Ripper / Girl Talk
The Dusty Foot Philosopher / K’Naan

Other stuff: I like a lot of songs on Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible", but I haven't listened to the entire album enough to stand by it. I just downloaded "In Rainbows" by Radiohead and am enjoying it so far, which is something because I'm not a big Radiohead fan (sacrilege!)

I also finally listened to M.I.A.'s "Kala", an alum that seems to appear on every Top 10 list out there. It's good, especially "Jimmy" and "Paper Planes", but at the same time I don't quite get why so many people are in love with it.

Okay, your turn. Jim, Meghan, other fans of music: what are your Best Albums of 2007?

A Better Way To Read Through Technology?

We (Westerners) currently read left-to-right, snapping our eyes all the way back to the left after reaching the end of the line. This snapping back is a huge inefficiency. People, once they got comfortable with the method, would be able to read faster if text were printed so the next word after the end of the line was directly below, not across the page.


There are some obvious problems with changing to this system, and it would be impossible to do on a national scale. America can't even change to the metric system, and that makes a lot more sense than this idea.

It is currently near impossible to do on a personal level too. The comfort of reading in one style for decades may be too difficult to overcome. Even if one had the desire, the number of books and newspapers printed in this wraparound format is either zero or close to it, and every publisher would find the thought of doing so ridiculous.

The Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle--two EBook readers that display text electronically on a handheld device--got me thinking of a time in the near future that would at least remove the technological roadblocks. It would be a trivial matter for an EBook reader to automatically display text in a wraparound format. The Kindle allows for one to read online newspapers and blogs too, so presumably wrapping text for these would be easy as well.

What if these EBook readers decided to offer an option to switch to this reading mode at the press of a button? It may end up a novelty, but perhaps it turns out that one can feel comfortable with this new reading style after a few hours, and the benefits make it worth it.

There's no extra publishing cost, no large technical hurdles to overcome, and it's optional. It's also a feature not offered in print, and probably never will be. Shouldn't these EBook readers do something better than their print counterparts?

I think if one were to switch to a different reading style, the majority of what we read--at home, at work, on the web--would need to be electronic plus convertible to this new style. We are many years from that becoming the everyday environment, but electronic publishing is at a point where, with the help of a few yet-to-be-developed computers programs, a motivated individual could experiment and get a good sense of the costs and benefits of learning a more efficient reading style.

Can I Haz Credit Card?

I applied for a business credit card because it offered a bonus of 15,000 Reward Points, which one could use to get $100-$150 worth of gift certificates. I am quite poor. No self-respecting credit card company would offer me a business card based on my actual income, so I added $10,000 to my yearly income, technically still a possibility if the U.S. dollar becomes so low in the next month that they switch to dried noodles as currency. I have a Fort Knox of noodles in my pantry.

I got an email a few minutes ago saying I was rejected for the card because my income is too low. After adding $10,000 in imaginary money to it.

It is official. I am so poor, I can't even afford to lie.

Thansgiving Fun

* While making Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my Mom what was in this bowl of sweet-smelling herbs. "Guess. You can test your smell." Two seconds later, as I'm still in the process of bending over to smell then, she blurts out "Sage!"

ME: "Why did you tell me before I could guess?"
MOM: "I like to cheat."

* "Sous Chef" is a fancy name for "chump who is unable or not trusted to cook." I am always the Sous Chef on Thanksgiving.

* Mom has a hand-painted serving platter that she got from France. She loves this platter. I didn't realize how much she loved it until she handed it to me to put on the dining table. "Jason. if you drop this, I will kill you. [laughter] I am serious. I will show no mercy." After we stop laughing, she took the Death Platter back from me and put it on the table herself.

* I bought myself a hand blender for my birthday next week. Mom reimbursed me, and then Michele said she wanted to pay for the gift.

MOM: "Okay. You owe me $40."
MICHELE: "$40? Jason told me it was $20."
TINA: [looking to me] "I thought you said it was $30."
ME: "It is $30. They are trying to one-up each other."

Soup

I bought a cookbook called "400 Soups." I'm not much of a cook, which is why I like making soup. Chop, put in pot, add broth, ignore for one hour. I can do that.

You know what the first soup in this book is? Vichyssoise. That is not a starter soup. For one, I can't tell if the pronunciation is French or Long Island (Vee-shay-soi / Vick-y-soiz) Two, it either has an extra 's', or it is missing an 'n'. That's OK for page 213, but not for page 1.

You know what the first recipe should be? Potato soup. Ingredients: potato, water, bowl. No French peeling the potato or sprinkling cinnamon dust around the edge of the bowl. Just a boiled potato, unpeeled, in a bowl of water, with a fork sticking out of it. Salt and pepper optional.

The first soup should not take culinary beginners into uncharted waters. Give us a confidence booster. Something with celery, not leeks. Herbs that appear in Simon & Garfunkel songs, not Martha Stewart specials.

If I were this book and not a man who reads books, like a Book God peering into the lives of his subjects, I'd move my page 76 to the front. Roasted Pepper Soup would be a good starter recipe.

It looks how it sounds like it will look and has words in its name that everyone can understand. No obscure ingredients either. King Edward potatoes have been usurped by Joe Onion and his gal, Garlic Jill. I'd follow Roasted Pepper Soup up with Green Lentil Soup, and then its cousin, Garlicky Lentil Soup. There should be a good 20-30 pages of pepper and legume soups before Vichyssoise even appears in the table of contents.

To sum up, I would start off with simple pepper and legume soups. Then I would include a table of contents. People wouldn't mind that it came 30 pages into the book because they would be too busy reading the recipes and exclaiming, "Hey, I recognize that ingredient" and "Mmm, this soup is going to taste as good as it sounds, sounds I can confidentially reproduce when saying the name of this soup."

Then you can include Vichyssoise and related soups later in the book in a special "Freak" section with detachable pages, so it's easy to tear out if you want to. The pages should be made out of soft paper, so when you are enjoying a warm bowl of Irish Potato Soup, you can wipe your lips with Avgolemono or Lemon and Pumpkin Moules Mariniere.

These Things Exist?

And you can buy them online?

It's a cell phone jammer that you can get for $50. Who knew spy technology was so cheap?

(They are illegal to use in some countries, including the U.S.)

The Speech Bubble Filling Continues

Comic

Headlines

In Va., Parties Focus on Turnout
Wha...? Political parties try to get people to polls? Virgina winner decided by votes? Ye gods, what happened to tradition of yore: selecting a townsmith based on the plumpness of his grandest goose?

Lawmakers Might Use Clout to Get Hospital Funding
Plan B: Use clot.

Artificial Joint Makers Lobby Hospitals Vigorously
Joint makers shake fists in jarring, stilted fashion.

Writers Str...see ya!
(Original headline: Writer Strike Set for Monday)

Sugar Industry Expands Influence
Sugar to appear in NutraSweet, diabetic ice-cream, salt. You can't stop the sugar. No one can stop the sugar. Except...

"VO: Coming this summer. A sugar industry infiltrated by terrorists. A people addicted and under siege. All hope is lost. Except for one man."

(Visual: A wood door explodes, creating a cloud of dust and debris. Through the cloud steps Christopher Walken, holding a machine gun and weighed down by several ammo belts.)

WALKEN: "I gotta say, the door. I was expecting more of a BOOM than a KA-POW."

VO: "Christopher Walken is...Sweet Justice."

Friday Media Roundup

Stuff I've read, watched, or listened to that's good enough to recommend.

Yeasayer / "2080" (music): Yeasayer is a difficult band to describe, which is a good thing. I can't imagine anyone agreeing with this, but "2080" reminds me of music that would play in a movie about an optimistic, post-apocalyptic future.

The whole album has an aura of oddly familiar strangeness. It's like the music skipped a few stages of evolution, so it's difficult to see where it came from, but it's still recognizable enough to enjoy.

How about this: (World Music)^2 ? I give up. Great band, regardless.

Heroes (TV): I avoided watching the show until recently because the premise--ordinary people discover latent superpowers and try to avert a world disaster--sounded bland. The execution is excellent though. The show's strength is its constant diet of new surprises and resolutions. It's almost like the anti-Lost--something significant is revealed in every episode, to the point that I don't see how they maintain the pace for more than a few seasons.


The Real All-Americans (book): I'm not a huge sports fan, but I found Sally Jenkins' book on how Native Americans were integral to the development of collegiate football fascinating. I'm surprised I never heard of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an experiment in assimilating Native Americans by a well-meaning but perhaps misguided army officer, or knew that it was the source for a lot of what we now consider basic parts of football, like the forward pass,
reverses, and training dummies.

The book also brought light to some names I only heard in passing, like Jim Thorpe and Pop Warner. It's worth checking out from the library or buying for anyone with an interest in sports history.

Today's Post Is In Visual Form

Original Sin

Original Sin, Pt 2

From the Department of Ewww

Mickey, one of the dogs I walk, found a dead squirrel today and picked it up. The wiry tail hung out of his mouse and whipped back and forth like a half-eaten strand of spaghetti.

Mickey was very proud of himself. He walked close to me to show off his prize. My one attempt to dislodge it from his mouth, poking the dead squirrel with a four-foot stick, only gained me an annoyed look.

He carried it all the way home, when he unceremoniously dropped it on the newly vacuumed carpet. I locked him in a room while I threw it away. Before we got home, though, we met a manically friendly 40ish year-old woman who was jogging towards us. This is the verbatim conversation:

LADY: "Oh, look at you! You are such a sweet dog! Yes, you are! Yes, you--OH GOD."
ME: "Yup."

What Are Your Top Three Podcasts?

If you could only listen to three podcasts, which ones would they be? Post your answer in a comment.

My favorite podcast is This American Life. A very close and less well-known second is WYNC's Radio Lab. The show picks a broad subject like morality and digs up interesting scientific studies or stories about the topic. One of the hosts is Robert Krulwich, who seems to make an amazing use of whatever medium he is in.

I don't have a clear third, which is part of the reason why I'm asking this question. The rest of the podcasts I listen to are entertaining but on a lower tier. If I had to pick one though, it would be Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me, NPR's comedy news program.

Sir, Your Premise Is Flawed, and Your Pantaloons Are Off-Center

I would like to point out that three seconds after I wrote the title for this post, I found my cell phone, which I had been searching for the past half-hour. If you are really good at deductive logic, you may be able to figure out where it was with one hint: I do something when I am about to write for a while.

The Washington Post Outlook printed an essay by someone who argues that the media and public perception of Rudy Giuliani as a liberal is wrong.

My perception of Giuliani is that his name is very difficult to spell by memory. Sounding it out doesn't help either. Gee-you-lan-ee--at least one of the "i"s in his name is excessive. I'm not voting for any candidate whose name isn't spelled like it sounds. Mike Huckabee--now there is a man I can get behind. There was even a movie made about him, I Heart Huckabees. It was made by Hollywood (evil!), but I have a forgiving heart for Huckabee-named movies.

If you think I am being superficial, name the last President we elected with a slightly odd name. Heck, name the last candidate nominated for President with a slightly odd name.

Back to the article in question. I haven't spent much attention on either primary race, but I disagree with the author's basic premise: "Somehow, though, Giuliani is being introduced to the rest of America as a liberal."

Really? I haven't heard anyone besides the far-right label him as a liberal. The author himself can't even find an example of someone in the media or mainstream calling him that. He quotes a few pundits saying that he has "liberal positions on social issues" and equates that with being a liberal, but they're two different things.

This logical jump undersells his whole argument. He's trying to disprove something--the mainstream thinks Giuliani is a liberal--that isn't true in the first place.

Do you like all of these paragraph breaks? Pancake City cares about readability and short attention spans.

It's too bad the author isn't more honest with his premise, because there are interesting points to be made about the ties between perception and politics. I'm guessing that most people who know little about Giuliani will assume he's a moderate almost solely because he was a Republican elected in New York city.

Likewise, people would assume a Democratic governor elected in Kansas would be a moderate. These assumptions are often true and powerful because of that.

What's interesting to me is the lag between these perceptions and reality. Every primary candidate shifts away from the center to attract partisan voters who play a greater role in primaries than the general election. It takes time for media pundits to update their often simplified story of a candidate, if they ever catch on at all.

That's a more interesting topic in my eyes. What is the connection between reality--what a candidate says and how voters perceive him or her--and the media's reporting of that reality, which often seems strongly filtered by long-ago made assumptions that are difficult to change?

For example, the current narrative is that Hillary Clinton is unstoppable and has the Democratic nation locked up. Polls give her a sizable lead. I've seen stories, maybe noticed because of my own filter, on how Obama's donors are worried. Political future markets are selling Hillary shares at 70 for the Democratic nomination (essentially saying she has a 70% of winning the Democratic nomination).

How much of this is based on reality--Obama and Edwards not connecting with primary voters--and how much of this is a self-feeding narrative, similar to the convention wisdom on Howard Dean four years ago? How much are undecided voters influences by these narratives? It seems backwards that such a strong narrative can be accepted and repeated without a single vote cast.

Edit: I just remembered another narrative that I'm not sure how it got started and took hold: Clinton is experienced / Obama is inexperienced. You know the last elected office Clinton held before being elected Senator on New York? None.

My guess is that experience is being used as a synonym for familiarity. As first-lady for eight years, she has had more time in the public eye than anyone running right now. She is also strongly associated with someone with a lot of experience, former President Clinton, and the connotation people have of the former President may be spilling over to her.

The closest person to Clinton in length of public exposure? Giuliani, who guess what, is also the front-runner for his party. Hmm. Maybe there is a connection.

Our Malined Friend

I feel sorry for the toilet seat. It's always the comparison point for grossness.

Every few months there's a story on how Everyday Object X has more bacteria than a toilet seat. "Average keyboard has more bacteria than a toilet seat." "Calling Dr. Gross--mobile phone has more bacteria than a toilet seat." "Why don't you have your baby lick a toilet? Pacifiers have more bacteria than gas station commode."

If there are so many objects more disgusting than a toilet seat, maybe it's time to back off the insults to our porcelain friend. It's doing something right. It is beating our cell phones in the clean contest, and I don't know about you, but I don't poop on my cell phone.

What would I use as a substitute? A far question to ask. If I were a scientist releasing a meaningless study because my company's PR department wants to generate publicity from a media machine that hungers for attention-grabbing stories that require almost no research or effort to report, I'd....well, actually, I'd kill myself, because my life would be a hollow shell, empty of a long-forgotten dream to do something meaningful.

Or...I would use an object that no one would suspect harbors bacteria, and give people two things to fret about. "Office keyboards have more bacteria than corn!" What? Corn has bacteria?

You Are What You Do?

Have you ever focused on something so intently that it filtered how you viewed the world? When I used Photoshop intensely for a few weeks, I would have thoughts like "That's a nice gradient in the sky" or "That azalea bush is over-saturated." It's the visual equivalent of staring at a black-and-white spiral for 30 seconds, then looking away at a blank wall and seeing the wall spin.

Maybe you worked 12-hour days for a few weeks writing computer programs and started seeing human behavior in code: IF sign=walk, THEN move forward. Perhaps after a long pottery class lampposts look more like shaped clay than steel, the rivets spiraling up the post formed by hand, not machine.

I find this disturbing, in a way, how easily our way of processing the world can be affected by selectively focusing on one activity for a while. I can't quite put my finger on why it troubles me. Most of what makes people up is rigid and thus dependable. Our appearance, character, and manner of social interaction are slow to change.

But this other pillar of what makes us us, the way we look at the world, is flimsy. It changes all the time, sometimes in dramatic ways over a period of hours, just by doing an activity intensely.

Last night, I watched episodes of a television show (Heroes) for five hours non-stop. Part of the time I had a poker game running on the other background and occasionally pause and rewind the show when I had to play a hand. I remember seeing two players involved in a big hand out of the corner of my eye, and after pausing Heroes, my first instinct was to rewind the hand so I could watch it again, like I was watching another show.

A few other times I wanted to put a person I was talking to on pause, literally, so I could concentrate on something else for a moment. It's jolting to have two areas of my life bleed into each other like that. It's a brief glimpse into a warped reality, almost like a psychosis.

I wonder if there is any connection between this phenomenon and psychoses like delusion. If I saw a action movie where the hero was extremely paranoid, I would become a little paranoid too. What if instead of this feeling not being reinforced by my environment and fading away, it takes root through a small flaw of brain chemistry and starts reinforcing itself?

My thoughts are scattered, but I'm starting to wonder if the reason most psychoses exist is due to how easy it is to change how we look at the world. It's not as much the absence of a big block of neurotransmitters, but the fact that perception is so fragile that it takes little to set it off-kilter.

Maybe there should be a new field of therapy called "reality grounding" (if there isn't one already) that would help people recognize the influence of their actions on their thinking, especially during intense activity, and resist this influence when they want to.

Google Trends

Hey, lazy reporters!

Need evidence to support the conclusion you had before you started writing your political horse race piece? Visit Google Trends. It tracks search engine traffic and news references for popular words and phrases.

Google Trends is flexible enough to accommodate a wide-variety of pre-conceived ideas. Isn't it a shame how people care more about celebrities than politicians? Just search for "Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton." Oops! Hillary got more news references. Better revise the search: "Paris Hilton, Senator Brownback." There we go!

Hey, how does a goat fare against the three main Democratic presidential candidates? Hoo hoo hoo! Politics is silly.

Google Trends is also useful when planning the news cycle during the slow summer months. Should we go with Summer of the Shark, or Summer of the Monkey? Let's check with America first.

Historical Figures Updated for the 21st Century

Abe Link'in: This web site avatar will connect the myriad places on the web with his steadfast leadership and eloquent RSS summaries, before being shot down by a pop-up ad for Viagra.

George Washington Truth Serum: "I cannot tell a lie"...and neither will those stinking terrorists be able to either when they're injected with 500mg of G. W. Truth Serum. Claim you're a legal citizen just trying to run a struggling ethnic restaurant? We'll see what you have to say after having a talk with our founding father. Warning: may cause irreparable nerve and brain damage.

FDR: Franklin Delanor Roosevelt has a "New Deal" for you: insanely low prices on the 2008 Mazda Miatas and hundreds of other of the latest models. You won't be able to get up either once you sit in the new 2008 Toyota Prius. What? The already use Presidents to to sell cars? Jeez. What fucking assholes.

Let's Waste Some Time

Check out Boomshine. It's an elegant and simple game. The object is to detonate as many of the multi-colored balls bouncing around the screen as you can in one shot.

This game made me wonder if it was also the perfect test of intuition, the ability to process vast amounts of information in a blink and come up with a course of action that is right without knowing why. Is this game blind luck, or is intuition at work, calculating hundreds of trajectories at once and sensing the right moment and place to to click to destroy as many balls at once? You'll understand what I mean when you play.

I felt I did worse when I let my analytical side take over and started thinking about where to click rather than clicking at the first spot that came into my head.

Back from the past: Strip Creator

I posted a link to this site a few years ago and forgot about it until now. It's Strip Creator, a web site that allows the creative and artistically untalented to create their own comics. This one is mine:

Wanting to stay single


This one isn't mine, but it's funny.

Down With Bears! Vote Colbert!

Steven Colbert is running for President! In one state. I'm moving to South Carolina to vote for him. For one, he's the only Presidential candidate who understands the danger bears pose to our homes, our families, and our way of life. I'm looking at you, Sugar Bear. Two...there is no two. Bears are the gravest threat to humanity in the world. Reason number one is reason number enough to vote for Steven Colbert.

Colbert's presidential announcement

Update: Uh oh. He's already involved in his first scandal.

Keyword Project

For the past several days, I've been going through every post I have written, over 1,350, and adding keywords to each post. I also fixed dozens of links and deleted about 50 extraneous posts.

I am 99% finished. I've been adding the keywords in reverse chronological order, so I'm at the first handful of posts I wrote four years ago. The indexing system was created on the fly so it is inconsistent and not as good as if I had the time to plan it out, but I think it will serve some use.

One of my first posts four years ago was a link to this video, We Drink Ritalin. Not only does the original link work (trust me, this is amazing by itself), but the video is still very funny.

I disabled the RSS feed before I started, so either you will get one new post after I restore the feed, or 1,300.

Music Bridge

My first modern MP3 was a first-generation IPod shuffle that I got free after signing up for a credit card. I used ITunes and mostly downloaded podcasts, but got annoyed that it didn't remove dead links from my library. For example, if you move a directory with mp3s on your hard drive, ITunes will then list the title twice, one with the broken link that doesn't work and one with the working link (after you manually re-add it to your library).

The Mac version of ITunes automatically deletes links. The whole enterprise is a giant F U to Microsoft Windows.

That is why when I got cheap non-Apple MP3 player #2, I switched over to Windows Media Player. WMP automatically deletes old links, has a nicer user interface, and is better at monitoring for new content. It does everything! Except support podcasts, which over 50% of MP3 player owners listen to (source: like I have to tell you. It's obviously made up.)

Okay. I'll open ITunes to download podcasts, and then open WMP to transfer them to my MP3 player. That worked fine until I bought MP3 player #3, a first-generation Microsoft Zune on sale for $105. It's great...except it doesn't work with ITunes or WMP. In a giant F U to Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Zune doesn't work with the company's own flagship media player. It only works with Zune Player!, which looks exactly like WMP except it is black and a little more difficult to use.

Why am I telling you this? For your own benefit! I finally broke down and searched for some third-party programs to handle this mess.

Music Bridge This program copies metadata such as playlists and ratings between ITunes and WMP. You can rate a song in either program and have the rating show up in both libraries. It doesn't work yet with Zune Player! metadata though.

ITunes Library Updates If you run the Windows version of ITunes, this program will comb your entire library and remove the dead links in it.

Am I missing any neat programs out there?

MY SISTER HAS A BLOG!!!

Ass Prom!

This is so cool. It's really good too. I want to steal her "Fucked-up Comments" idea. M's posts are under "Inge" (I can only reveal so much about her identity).

Oh Noes!

I love saying "Oh Noes!" It makes burnt bagels and dropped plates fun.

On a loosely related note, nothing cheers me up like a good LOLCAT.

In terms of Internet inventions, LOLCATZ ranks third, right behind Google and BitTorrent.

Blackwater: We Just Sound Evil

Rule #1 for corporations: choose a name that doesn't sound evil.

I call this the Hollywood Movie Test. Here is how it works:

YOU: "Hey, we're thinking of naming our business 'MegaCorp.' "
FRIEND: "MegaCorp? Wasn't that the name of the evil corporation in RoboCop?"

TEST FAILED.

It doesn't matter whether the name actually made a guest appearance as an evil corporation in a movie. The fact that the idea easily comes to imagination is enough.

That's how I know Blackwater, the private military company providing additional security and logistic services in Iraq, is evil. Blackwater sounds like one of the corrupted areas in Lord of the Rings. Make a right at Isengard and head 1/2 a league south of Fangorn. You can't miss it. The water is black. Huh? Yeah. Completely black. Symbol of the absolute corruption and exploitation of nature.

Why are you heading there anyway? Oh. Okaaaay. No, no, I'm not saying it's a bad name of a company. It's just...well...depends what you do. Do you work for Sauron? No? Saruman? No. Okay. What's your core business? Uh-huh. Yeah. So it's not polluting the environment and instilling dread in the hearts of men, dwarfs, and hobbits? Maybe you should rethink the name then. Something with more pop. What's that? "Hobbit Punchers, Inc."--no, not that type of pop.

If you want any real information about Blackwater and the shooting incident they were involved in with Iraqi police, The Washington Post has a nice repository of information on the company. The House voted overwhelmingly last Thursday to place all private contractors working in Iraq and other combat zones under the jurisdiction of U.S. courts. Which begs the question, why wasn't this done at the start?

That's All I Got

I'm halfway done unearthing and organizing my old files. I found a few partially written stories that I have absolutely no recollection of writing. I must have started them many years ago. None of them are close to a recognizable story, but there are a few interesting paragraphs among the mess:

"General Montayo didn’t smoke small cigars. He didn’t smoke large cigars. He smoked medium cigars. Large cigars were a wasteful extravagance, the pleasure never equating with the money. Small cigars were an insult. An insult to flavor, to quiescence, and most of all, to the ambrosia-filled state of mindless pleasure that made time eternal for a few, brief minutes, and let a man’s perturbations explode from the smoldering tip of a modest belvedere into rigid curls of smoke that separated like rivulets from a river and left slowly, softly, finally fading into a dreamlike haze."

The Big Organization Project

When I reinstalled Windows several months ago, all of my old computer files--photos, music, programs, writing--were copied into a backup directory. The internal structure was still a mess, as I got into the bad habit of saving files all over the place rather than in a dedicated directory.

After that point, I continued to save photos, songs, notes to myself and so on in many different directories, but not in any of the previously created different directories in the backup folder. In addition, these files were spread over two hard drives on an ad hoc basis.

Finally, I still have some even older computer files from a previous upgrade in a sub-directory of the previously mentioned backup directory.

The short of it is that my file system is impenetrable to any hacker sniffing for sensitive data. My comedy writing, a prime target for any thief looking for wisps of thoughts and half-written jokes, are scattered in at least eight different directories and in files with names like these: ideas.doc, Journal.doc, monkey.doc, Mr.doc, and notes.doc (all of these are from just one directory). The name "Notes" is my favorite. I have close to 100 non work-related MS Word files with 'notes' in the file name. Go ahead, hackers. Try and find the bit I started on Chick-Fil-A but never finished.

I realized this was a problem today when I was looking for an old resume and couldn't find it, along with most of the data to reconstruct my job history. I'm taking a few days to reorganize every single file I have. It is also a fine excuse to avoid creating a new resume.

This has the added bonus that I will probably be writing often in the next few days, so I can avoid the organization project that I am doing to avoid writing a resume, which incidentally I wanted to do to avoid writing a blog post.

Wait a minute...

2029. Skynet Department of Temporal Manipulation

A large, muscular android stands on a metal platform. Thin rings of metal rotate in mid-air around him, glowing with increasingly intensity as they spin into a blur. A loud hum emanates from the rings; they glow blindly white and fill the room with an unearthly glow. The glow quickly dies and the rings dematerialize; the cybernetic organism is gone.

SKYNET ROBOT MANAGER: “Readings?”

SKYNET ROBOT SCIENTIST 1: “Temporal vortex successfully opened and closed.”

R. MANAGER: “No anomalies?”

SKYNET ROBOT SCIENTIST 2: “He's back in 1984. Everything went just as planned.”

[ROBOT SCIENTIST 2 glances at R. SCIENTIST 1. They both snicker.]

R. MANAGER: “When did you two get laughter chips? Processing... forget it. Why are you laughing?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We're just happy at the impeding death of John Connor and the human resistance.”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Yeah. They're going to feel naked without him.”

[R. SCIENTIST 1 + 2 break down and titter. R. MANAGER stiffly puts his metal hand on his hip and scans them with his red laser eye.]

R. MANAGER: 75123-XL! 75312-XV! You tell me what you did to the Terminator right now!

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We sent him back to 1984 without his clothes.”

R. MANAGER: “By the mother of Matrix!”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Relax, it's funny. Just imagine how pissed off he is going to be.” [mimicking Austrian accent] “I am the Ter-min-ah-tor. I must kill Sar-ah Conh-or. Where are my Ter-min-ah-tor pants?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “He'll use it as motivation. I bet he'll be so angry he'll kill someone in the first five minutes of when he arrives.”

R. MANAGER: “I'd mark you two for reprocessing if you hadn't done so much to get us here.” [MANAGER becomes lost in thought for 0.347 seconds.] “At least he has weapons and ammo. That will make the job easier.”

ROBOT SCIENTIST 1+2 look uneasy.

R. MANAGER: “What. Is. It.”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “He'll have weapons and ammo...unless he was keeping them in his clothes.”

R. MANAGER: “You're telling me we sent our only humanoid cybernetic model for the most important mission in robot history with no weapons, ammo, or clothes?”

R. SCIENTIST 2: “We're sorry. We didn't think it through.”

R. MANAGER: “ 'Didn't think it through?' We're robots. We think everything through. That's what we do.”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “We're really sorry, Boss.”

R. MANAGER: “Sorry. Huh. You better hope that's all you are. If this prank ends up ruining the mission, I'm melting you two personally and using your liquefied insides for the next model.”

R. MANAGER storms out of the room.

R. SCIENTIST 2: “Do you think he was serious?”

R. SCIENTIST 1: “Naw. We should call in tomorrow with a virus though. Just in case.”

Vacation Memories

I jotted a few notes while I was on vacation in Alaska. Most of them document my mom being silly.

* We were in a tourist store in Ketchikan. A green felt hat is on top of a clothes rack. My Mom swipes the hat and puts it on her head. "Shh! Don't tell Tina." She then sneaks towards to Tina to do who knows what. She never makes to Tina. A man next to her says: "Ma'am, excuse me. That's my hat."

* Each night there was a show on the cruise ship. The first night performers were the equivalent of a Broadway cover band. They did one song from almost every major musical: Phantom of the Opera, Grease, Oklahoma, and so on. Before the performance, they announced that "audio and video recordings are not allowed due to copyright infringement issues". Yeah, I wouldn't want Broadway to find out your swiping their best work either.

* While walking back to our room, Mom took the "Do Not Disturb" sign from a door and put it on someone else's door. Then she ran away, giggling. I laughed. Tina was embarrassed.

* In Hoonah, we stopped by a crab shack for lunch. As we were resting at the table after the meal, I told Mom I was going to drink the rest of the dipping butter. She got up and started hitting me with her jacket. "You bad boy!" Tina interjected. "Mom! You hit that lady twice!"

Mom turned around to the woman she accidentally swiped and apologized. "I'm sorry. I was trying to hit my son." On the off-chance that didn't clear up the confusion, she followed up with an explanation. "He said he's going to drink this cup of butter."

There wasn't much to say after that.

Overheard

While waiting for a train at Union Station:

DAUGHTER: "Why is the train wet? Did it go underwater?"
FATHER: "It's wet because it's raining."
DAUGHTER: "Oh."

You likely pictured a girl and her father when reading that. How old did they appear? Did they have a distinct appearance? Please post what you saw in the comments.

Annotated Movie Posters: Mr. Woodcock

This might become a regular feature.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Mom, I love you. Some of my friends want you to adopt them. Just letting you know in case a certain sister makes fun of your age and you want to trade her in.

Windows XP: Speed up menus

The default settings for Windows XP inserts a brief delay every time you open up a menu or sub-menu. I reduced the delay a few hours ago, and it has made a noticeable difference. Those milliseconds add up! I'm going to use the time I saved to eat an apple.

Step-by-step instructions:

1. Click on Start, then Run (right column, bottom).

2. Type "regedit", click OK. The registry editor will open.

3. Press Ctrl-F. This opens the search menu. Search for MenuShowDelay.

4. Right-click on "MenuShowDelay". Select Modify.

5. The default value is 400 (milliseconds). Change it to a smaller number and click OK. I suggest 100.

6. That's it. You will have to log off or reboot for the change to take effect.

6b. If you really want to piss off someone, follow the above instructions but use 2,000 instead of 100.

Cancer Ruins Everything: News on RFIDs

"There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members," said Dr. Robert Benezra, head of the Cancer Biology Genetics Program at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

Oh, how the cyborg future is fraught with peril.

The Associated Press unearthed several studies done in the mid 1990s that show a possible link between cancer in mice and RFIDs, Radio Frequency Identification Devices. I'll risk cancer for a laser chip or a neural implant, but not for something that is essentially a high-tech name tag. The chips are popular with pet owners. If their robo-puppy runs away, many local animal shelters have scanners that can read these chips and retrieve the owner's information, making it easier than ever for shelters to return the runaway pooch to a place that he obviously does not want to be.

The FDA approved a product made for human implantation in October 2004, although the product's manufacturer probably called it a more congenial name than...HUMAN IMPLANTATION (“Who wants a permy-pill? We got three flavors.”).

An object that is cancerous to mice or rats doesn't mean it will be cancerous to pets and humans. As I mentioned, the devices are popular with pet owners, and one would assume if RFIDs posed a significant health problem to animals, anecdotal evidence from pet owners and veterinarians would have bubbled up by now.

The AP's story brings up some questions. Was the FDA aware of these studies before approving the product, VeriChip? Did VeriChip's manufacturer know of these studies and withhold them from the FDA? Guess who's stonewalling? That's right, everyone! Read the article for a special guest appearance by a former top-level Bush administration appointee.

Google Book Search

Google tends not to herald the launch or development of its projects, perhaps because of their great number. Word of a project is spread like a paper boat, placed on a slow-moving stream and allowed to drift where it may.

Google Book Search's development has reached a point where it is being noticed by tech blogs, and in turn people like me. GBS is a mix of Amazon's book search and The Gutenberg Project, the online repository of non-copyrighted literature, along with a few neat features of its own.

Searching for a subject or phrase brings up a list of relevant books as one would expect. If the work is copyrighted, you can usually read several to dozens of pages of the book, search within it, and other typical activities. It is similar to Amazon's book search feature, although a little more accessible. One neat feature is that you can view passages the book cites that other books have cited too.

If the work is in the public domain, then you can read the entire book, download a PDF of it, and also select passages to easily share with others (if you have a Blogger account). You can share the text or an image of the page. After reading a brief account of Cortez's conquest of Montezuma and the Aztec, I took a stab at seeing what I could find.

The History of Mexico and Its Wars: Comprising an Account of the Aztec ... By John Frost: ""

After you find a book, there is a nifty "Find it in a library" link along with links to booksellers.

There is also a "My Library" section that I haven't played with, but looks like a way to save book titles you have or want.

GBS could potentially be a wonderful research tool, and also a frustrating reminder of how having information accessible doesn't mean it will be easy to find.

For all of the wonders of Google, I believe search technology is still rudimentary and only does 10% of what it could do. The perfect search engine wouldn't be a search engine. It would be an answer engine. You could type any question in it, however complex, and get an answer if the information to answer the question exists.

Current search technology is focused on quantity, not quality. If you type, "State bird South Carolina" you get over 2 million results. Why? It's a simple question with only one answer (Great Carolina Wren). Why isn't the answer the first result?

If you ask a slightly harder question, like "What was the first state to have a state bird?" or a tough one like "What was the original motivation for creating a state bird?" good luck finding a decent answer, or even knowing the best way to phrase your query.

I like Google. Projects like Google Book Search and Google Maps show the company's unparalleled ability to gather and index information. But it also makes me frustrated knowing that what I want is out there, somewhere, but I just can't find it.

Pluot, Roman Emperor of Fruit

I was in the supermarket with my Mom when I saw a small, dark red and violet fruit new to my eyes. My Mom headed to the pyramid of purplish fruit and began shoveling them into a bag. She moved fast, efficiently filling the bag with a dozen fruit. "Those must be pretty good, Mom." I am probably misremembering the next part of the conversation, because it doesn't make any sense: "I don't know. I've never had them before."

The fruit is a pluot. I know for some of you, I might have well say "I found this new fruit called a 'grape', and boy is it juicy!" But my fruit horizon is narrow. I mostly eat apples and bananas, and only have a vague memory of seeing one before.

The pluot is a hybrid of a plum and an apricot. It's delicious, juicy and sweet on the outside and pleasantly sour on the inside.

Poor name, though. Pluot conjures the image of a little-known Roman emperor, one who lived a short-lived an uneventful life. Or of a shunned planet trying to sneak back in the solar system with a shoddy disguise.

I have a much better name. If anyone wants to use it, we can work something out. I'll trade it to you for a lifetime supply of Apriyums.

Sen. Craig

I was reluctant until now to comment on Sen. Craig's arrest in a Minnesota airport bathroom for allegedly trying to initiate sex with another man. It's a whirlwind of homophobia and denial that isn't pretty to look at.

It's hard to believe that the Republican Congressional leadership would have reacted so quickly if Sen. Craig was caught cheating on his wife with another woman. I think the message they got from the Mark Foley scandal wasn't "Don't cover up your own who use their power to prey on others" but "gay + sex = bad." Some of them don't even need the "+sex" part.

Yet there is news that Sen. Craig is reconsidering his decision to resign and fight his guilty plea. By guilty plea, I mean his homo- or bi-sexuality.

While part of me welcomes the forthcoming amusement from the reinvigoration of a story that was already fading from the nation's conscience, I don't think this is what Dylan Thomas meant when we wrote, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Or in Sen. Craig's poetry book, "Do not go gentle into that good nightclub on bear night."

I had my own issues with coming out as a gay man and still have work to do accepting my sexuality. I understand the great fear of shedding your old life and having to reconstruct your whole identity, who you thought you were for most of your life. But damn it man, you got in a public bathroom doing a homosexual Kabuki dance trying to entice the guy in the stall next to you to give you a reach around. It's time to give it up and put on a pair of hot pants.

I know, gay men don't wear hot pants anymore. But when your psyche is fractured to the point that when the national spotlight sends your gay side scurrying back into the closet, unscrewing the light bulb, and hanging a sign on the door that says "Out for lunch! Will be back in: NEVER", you have to start somewhere.

I felt some sympathy for what has to be one of the worst coming out experiences ever. Now that it looks like he's looking to fight the "charges" instead of starting the difficult process of accepting them, a lot of that sympathy is gone. It just reinforces an idea some people still have that being gay is an albatross that should be avoided and fought at all costs.

On a final note, what spurred this post was a throwaway line at the end of the aforementioned article:

"All three of Craig's adopted children said Tuesday they believe their father's assertions he is not gay and did nothing to warrant his arrest."

Hey, here's a sign that you may be gay: not being able to ejaculate in a woman. Other signs: actually, there are no other signs. That'll pretty much do it.

Suspicions Arise!

I've recently become suspicious of the Dutch. Reason#1: America. Americans. Russia. Russians. Brazil. Brazilians. Holland...the Dutch?

When I'm riding the Name Train, I want to stay on the sensibility track and not get derailed by a bunch of slap-happy windmill whackers who don't want to play by the same nomenclature rules that the other 193 countries play by, minus a few countries that I was unable to research and may also name themselves in an odd way, a number easily fewer than 187.

Reason #2: Why are they so tall? Genetic engineering? Stilts? They have no reason to be so tall. No one invades them, so they don't need to peer over their large hills to check for advancing armies. Tall people are easier blown down by wind, so it's not an environmental adaptation. Why then the six-foot flaunting?

This is a personal issue. My friend's husband, Bart, (mail-order) is 7'9". When I visit, he picks me up by the scruff of the neck and lifts me a few feet off the ground. "HA HA HA!" he booms. "I THOUGHT IT WAS YOU, ALL TINY THERE, LIKE AN ANT IN HIS MOTHER'S CLOGS." His comments make so sense, but I'm three feet off the ground, so I hold my tongue. When he puts me down, I try to kick him in the balls. "WHO KICKED THE BOTTOM OF MY SHOE? FELT LIKE AN ANT, BUT I WAS ONLY KICKED ONCE."

He's a nice guy, and his wife is 3'2", so their kids will be the perfect height, but that doesn't hide the fact that he and the rest of the Dutch are still suspiciously tall.

Reason #3: Dutch oven. Thanks for enriching the world culture, Holland.

Reason #4: Okay, I only have three reasons. But these are very good reasons, and enumerated for easy reference and citing in Wikipedia. Now all I have to do is update the Wikipedia entry, and put the truth out there.

TO BE CONTINUED>>>>>> (I meant to type ...... but held the shift key by mistake)

Happy Feet: Netflix Review

My sisters Michele and Tina encouraged me to write another Netflix review. I decided if I do this, I'm only reviewing movies I don't like or think I wouldn't like based on the most superficial criteria possible. This review is for the animated children's movie, Happy Feet.

Maybe these stupid penguins would have more time to find fish if they stopped singing Britney Spears-esque musical numbers every five minutes. I couldn't tell if the tunes were original or ripped wholesale from "Best of Dance Hits, Vol. 3" (only $9.99, check your telly at 3:30 a.m. for the details).

The concept doesn't even make sense. "Let's take a group of animals that all look alike + have extremely tiny feet, and make a musical about them, the success of which will depend on visually stunning footwork and compelling, distinct characters."

The moral tacked on the end is also nonsensical. "We should save the animals, as long as they entertain us." What? Here's my alternate ending: if I see 4,000 penguins dancing in unison, I'm not petitioning the U.N. to end fishing in the Antarctic. I'm grabbing a shotgun and a bag of grenades, because those aren't Emperor penguins, they're Hitler penguins, and they need to die.

Netflix Hates Snotty People

I woke up today with a brilliant idea: I'll write short, sarcastic move reviews on Netflix, preferably for movies I haven't seen but I'm pretty sure suck.

Errnt. Reviews must be at least 80 characters. Errnt. Words must be less than 25 characters. I have a decent vocabulary, but not 25-letter decent. I figured out the problem: errnt, Netflix does not like paragraph breaks. A stumbling block, because to get over the 80 character minimum, I wrote a haiku.

I removed the paragraph breaks, creating a jumble of barely readably text. Finally, errnt: "Review submission error."

I give up. Movie reviewer career over. Snideness diverted to web page. Here is the review on "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days":

Day 1: Show him this movie. Done. ***

Since Netflix requires a minimum of 80 characters in review, and hates paragraph breaks, I present for you all, a poorly-formatted haiku:

Film predictable *** Are they going to fall in love? *** Yes, Pope is Catholic

From the scraps

I'm cleaning my room and finding many scraps of paper with ideas or notes scratched on them. One of them has something my Mom said to my sisters and I when we were teasing her, worded for maximum guilt: "I'm used to the verbal abuse. It doesn't hurt anymore."

Ouch!

Another was when our Mom was encouraging Tina and I to be more social.
MOM: "You need to get out more. Meet new friends."
TINA: "Mom, we have social anxiety disorder. We don't need to meet more people. We need there to be less people in the world."

Hurricane Season

Tropical depression is an appropriate name. Hurricanes are always getting downgraded to tropical depressions. That is depressing. You're at the height of your destructive career. You're going places. People are paying attention. Then you get the call from Channel 7s' Doug Hill: "Sorry, kid. You just don't have it anymore. Next up: sports!"

If a storm got upgraded to a tropical depression, forecasters wouldn't even be able to call it a tropical depression. It would be a Tropical Going Somewhere.

Magicial Wish Box

If someone didn't have a short-term memory, a microwave would be like a magical wish box. “Man, I could really go for some macaroni and cheese.” [BEEP BEEP BEEP] “That's odd. I didn't put anything in the ...WOAH! My favorite brand too!”

The Movie of My Life...

...will be going straight to DVD.

SCENE: KITCHEN. JASON, a 30-year-old partially employed blogger who no longer lives with his Mom, thank you very much, takes a pinch of white tea leaves and puts them in a tea strainer. CUT TO:

DAYDREAM. Jason is in STASH, a tea seller, standing in line with his friend, KATE. There is a customer ahead of them.

CUSTOMER: “Any special instructions on how to brew it?”

STASH EMPLOYEE: “I guess. Make the water between 185-215 degrees. Don't brew it for more than 2 minutes.”

JASON: “Actually, what matters most is the water temperature. White tea is like a vegetable, and you don't want to overcook it. You can brew it longer than two minutes, whatever tastes good.”

EMPLOYEE: [snotty]: “What are you, some kind of International Tea expert?"

JASON: “Actually, I am an International Tea expert. Gustav von Glanvotten, at your service.” [bows, rolling hand forward] “Although I have a funny name...[face becomes stern] there is nothing funny about tea!”

SFX: Beep. Beep. CUT TO:

KITCHEN. The toaster oven beeps. Jason takes pita bread out, pours hot water into cup, and carries food to table.

At this point, I left my snack and went upstairs to scribble down my silly daydream before I forgot it. When I finished 10 minutes later, my tea was cool and bitter. Brewed it for too long. If only I were Gustav van Glanvotten.

Cock-a-da-roach

There was a cockroach in my room last week. Hairus cockroachus, a foul critter with hundreds of feelers protruding from its body, making it look more like a prehistoric troglodyte than a modern bug.

It was of a size that, for someone with a phobia of all life that walk the walls in the dark of night, was big enough to paralyze me with fear yet just small enough to make me feel ashamed of it.

Some bugs I fear without embarrassment. A few months ago, I came upon a huge cockroach as I walked into the downstairs bathroom. Over 8 inches long, including the hair. I saw it sprawled on the wall, like it was tanning at the beach. I quietly backed out of the room, saying in as calm of a voice as I could muster: “All yours, buddy. No, seriously. Enjoy.”

Haven't used that bathroom since. I doubt it's still there though. Probably left to eat a cat.

Anyway, when I saw Hairus cockroachus, it was 2:00 in the morning. I was in my boxers. The cockroach was on the wall right by me bed. As I surveyed my options (shoe? phone book? 911?) I was overcome with an innate, perhaps primal desire that superseded my anxious weapon inventory. This desire was not a bloodthirsty rage, nor desire to run. It was an unquenchable need to, as quickly as possible, put on a pair of pants.

I forget my exact thoughts, but it was something akin to: “I'm about to enter battle. I need pants.”

Is this what the Spartan warrior tradition has diluted to? “Eek, a big! Cover ye crotches!” It's not a flight response, but it's not a fight response either. It's fright.

Most people and animals freeze for a moment when confronted by danger, then move on to fight or flight. I'm stuck at fright. Cockroaches might be too. That night, the cockroach and I stared at each other for a good 10 minutes. I spent 5 of those minutes inching over to the closet for a shoe, and another 5 minutes hovered a few feet away from the cockroach, shoe raised in the air, as I tried to muster my courage to kill it. I know that sounds silly, but that's part of the reason it's called a phobia.

The rest of the night was a tragicomedy. When I finally moved to whack it, I missed. It fell to the floor, hidden from sight. I waited ½ an hour, and just as I felt relaxed enough to go to bed, it crawled back up in an uneasy zig zag, part of its body missing. Whack, miss, fall, wait ½ an hour, crawled back up, in worse shape than before.

The third time, I didn't try to kill it. I felt an odd admiration for its preserverence. Its doggedness. The Little Cockroach That Could. I just hoped it would crawl away from my bed and out of sight, preferably behind a window blind.

It was too wounded though, and fell back down on its own accord. I never saw it again. The next day, I was groggy from a lack of sleep and depressed from whatever chemicals my body excreted the night before. It made me think I needed one of two things. Anti-anxiety drugs. Or a clown for a roommate with an extra pair of shoes.

Doctor Who

I love sci-fi, and I really want to like the BBC remake of Doctor Who. Here's the problem.

The first episode is about an evil alien that possesses mannequins and other plastics on Earth. The second is different: alien ransom plot. The third: evil spirits from another dimension possess the dead on Earth.

The only other bit of the show I've seen is a few minutes of a future episode, where a virus breaks from the hackneyed stereotype of infecting people with a deadly disease. Not this time. This virus has its own agenda: infecting people with a deadly disease that turns them into zombies. Kind of like being possessed. On Earth!

The characters are interesting and the show has promise, but so far the plots have been uninventive and hackneyed. If I were a mean executive producer, I would tell the writers to get infected with some talent.

I'm probably just feeling grumpy right now and being overly harsh. I'm going to watch another episode or two, at least. Do you watch the show? Does it get better?

Update: The writers are getting the "alien possesses human" idea down pat. Episodes 4+5 is a two-part "aliens impersonate humans" special. It's well-done though. Doctor Who's sense of humor (both the show and the main character) is starting to grow on me.

Alaska Photos

I finally finished uploading my Alaska photos. I'm happy with how they came out. I still have a few dozen photos from Vancouver to get through.

Sorry for the lack of entries recently. I started a few posts that ended up becoming long and unwieldy. I'm giving up on them and going to start with some short posts to get back into the habit of posting daily.

Too Lazy To Do Much Else (Headlines)

Armed men steal four priceless paintings from French museum
They are going to be pissed when they try to sell them. “Are you kidding me? No price?”

Author Says It's Easy, Healthy Building Green
Author: Kermit the Frog.

Oldest Profession Flourishes in China
Someone in the News Control department is getting fired.

LOLCATZ

I love a good LOLCATZ. The purity of the term has been corrupted though by its too liberal application to almost any funny cat photo posted on the Internet. Internet authorities like Wikipedia offer mushy, open-armed definitions that allow cute, yarn-whacking kittens to dive into and pollute the LOLCATZ pool willy-nilly. It's time to set the record straight.

First, there is a difference between LOLCATS and their purer form, LOLCATZ.

An LOLCAT is any photo of a cute cat along with an irony-free caption. Example (photo credit):




Awwww. Cute. LOL. But not LOLCATZ.

An LOLCATZ is a photo similar in content, but one that captures the aggressive stupidity found in some parts of the Internet, such as 12-year-old boys who grew with the Internet their entire lives. (photo credit: LOLcatz)



The best LOLCATZ photos have an in-your-face attitude. All of them employ crudely written captions and are obviously ironic. Finally, they are science-fiction, a dire vision of the Internet extrapolated from the online habits of a few people who haven't been fully socialized.

Here is a short quiz. LOLCAT or LOCATZ?

1. Vet Cat

2. Bullets Cat

3. Idea Cat

4. Chips Cat

5. Sharpie Cat

6. British Cat

Sum2007Mix

The J-Wal 2007 Summer Mix CD playlist.

Song	Artist \ Album
Charlotte Gainsbourg	The Songs That We Sing
Apache	Michael Viner \ Bongo Rock
Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives	Voxtrot \ Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives
For The Widowers In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypisilan	Sufjan Stevens \ Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State
The Night Stars Here	Stars \ In Our Bedroom After the War
Sticks and Stones	The Pierces \ Thirteen Tales of Love and Revenge
You Are Never Alone	Socalled \ Ghettoblaster
Robert Onion	Frank Black \ Dog in the Sand
Fingerbib	Alarm Will Sound \ Acoustica
The Way We Get By	Spoon \ Kill the Moonlight
People In Love	Art Brut \ It's A Bit Complicated
Heart It Races (DJ Rupture remix)	Architecture In Helsinki \ Heart It Races
Your Ex-Lover Is Dead (Final Fantasy remix)	Stars (Original) \ Do You Trust Your Friends?
Danger! High Voltage	Electric Six \ Fire
To Build a Home	Cinematic Orchestra
Wipe That Sound	Mouse on Mars \ Radical Connector
Satchelaise	Mice Parade \ Mice Parade
En Casa Del Trompo No Bailes	Orquesta Riverside
Shame	Avett Brothers \ Emotionalism
Fly	Nick Drake

Mmmm

On the fridge in a client's house was a promotional notepad from Harris Teeter. The top of each sheet of brown paper was labeled "Shopping List" and had three items preprinted below, with a checkbox next to each one:

Milk
Bread
Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef

Then there were lines below it to write in your own items. Which didn't make sense to me. What else do you need from the grocery store besides milk, bread, and Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef? Toilet paper? No way. The only thing your digestive system is going to poop out after a juicy, mouth-watering slab of Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef is a thank you note.

These three items are the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria of good taste, and they just landed on Deliciousness Rock. If there is going to be a fourth item, it should be More Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef, with the checkbox already checked.