Ho ho hobot.

It's the holiday time of year again. Vacuously True is going to take a break to take care of some important holiday mirth spreading. Look forward to more inane garbage next year.

Tech Speculation III-ish

I know when I started this series I had three technologies in mind… for the life of me I can’t remember what the third one was. I’m taking that as a sign that it probably wasn’t an important trend.

So instead I’ll submit a rant about digital cameras in its place. I’ll try and format that rant so it feels like an extension of the technology speculation series.

At some point digital camera manufactures are going to have to face a grim realization. Increasing the number of mega pixels a camera can capture is going to result into no perceived value for the end user. There should be some point when having a bazillion pixels and having a bazillion and one pixels makes no difference to the user. It may be possible to construct an argument that we’re already there.

I think that once manufactures accept that the race to have the most megapixels is over the first chapter in the book of digital camera development will be finished. Since their introduction digital cameras have been striving to reach parity with their film camera cousins. Film cameras set the standard of what a camera should be and digital cameras did their best to live up to that standard. Film cameras captured more detail than digital cameras so digital cameras kept increasing their pixel counts. I think now we are close to the point of parity (whether we’ve passed it or not I’m not sure). Can anyone successfully inspect a picture and be 100% sure that it was taken with a film camera?

Now it is time for digital cameras to surpass their analog forbearers and do things that film cameras simply cannot. They will expand the definition of what a camera can do. Here are a few features that I look forward to in future generations of digital cameras. Some of these features have already started to appear in one form or another.

GPS enabled cameras. I remember back when having a camera that could do a date/time stamp was a cool thing. Sure it marred the corner of the photo, but at least you’d know which Christmas the photo was taken at. Digital cameras fixed the corner marring issue by simply encoding the date and time in the photo’s metadata. Now I want my digital camera to have a built in GPS so it can not only record when the photo was taken but where it was taken. Besides simply being cool, this will give us another way to sort our photos, geographically in addition to chronologically. Think of how powerful of a search tool that is. As things get further back in your memory which is easier to recall, the exact date something took place or the location it took place? Combining the two you should be able to construct a pretty tight set of candidate results.

I want my digital camera to have wireless connectivity. There are a bunch of different media card standards (compact flash, SD, SmartMedia, MMC, Memory Stick, etc) and it shouldn’t matter which one of those the computer I’m currently at does or does not support. The camera should support Bluetooth or similar technology and simply be able to connect to the computer wirelessly (I don’t want to have to carry around extra cables) and make my photos available. I suppose the reason this isn’t more common is the fact that due to the increased number of megapixels a single photo is often a couple of megabytes. I guess we need to wait for a wireless Bluetooth-like standard that can move a serious amount of data around.

I want magnetic induction charging. This goes for all gadgets, not just cameras. For years I’ve kept my electric toothbrush on my bathroom counter on its little stand. While it sits there it charges itself up. I don’t need a special cable; I don’t have to plug it in. Why aren’t all my gadgets charged thusly? A camera (or any gadget) should be able to sit on a little pad that keeps its battery topped off. Then when I pick it up it should have a full charge and be ready to go. I dream of a day when you just place your gadgets on a table or in the console of your car and they call start charging automatically and wirelessly.

Technology Speculation II – The Surface

The next technology that I really like is surface computing. Microsoft unveiled the Microsoft Surface computer platform earlier this year. Basically, it was a computer built into a coffee table with a multi-touch touch-screen on the top (multi-touch means more than one finger, or object, can be providing input at once). The multi-touch screen on the current, which is to say first, generation of Surface computers is accomplished via cameras inside the table that watch the surface instead of standard pressure sensitivity. The advantage of visually identifying where things are on a touch the screen instead of feeling them via pressure is that in addition to sensing where the object is, the computer might be able to read an identifying label on the object to know what is. This opens up some interesting possibilities.

Why should I care about a table computer? The reason I dig this technology is it offers the possibility of redefining how we interact with computers. The traditional computer interaction paradigm is for you to sit down at a computer. The monitor is your window into the computer’s world. You are given a keyboard and mouse with which you may interact and manipulate things in your window to the computer’s world. Don’t get me wrong, the system works great, but anyone who has helped a computer illiterate person try and use a computer may appreciate how non-intuitive this paradigm can be.

The surface computer can certainly operate using the traditional paradigm, after all, it’s basically a big table sized monitor. But it offers something more. The surface computer offers a new paradigm that I think can be more intuitive than the old one. The surface computer can act as a magic surface that reveals the secret nature of object placed on it.

For instance, say you place your cell phone on the table. If the surface computer can recognize the object is a cell phone (say through a barcode sticker or RFID chip) then it can attempt to communicate with the cell phone (say through bluetooth). Once the surface computer has connected to the phone it could do a couple of interesting things. It could show you all the contact information on your phone or perhaps have all the pictures you’ve taken on your phone spill out onto the table so that you can sort and organize them. The interaction is basically you place a finger on a picture and drag is where you want it on the surface. By placing two fingers on the picture you can scale or rotate it around. These are more intuitive ways to manipulate objects then trying to figure out how to get a mouse to tell the computer what you want to do. If second or third person placed their phones on the table the contents of their phones would also be revealed and you could start swapping contact info or photos simply by dragging them around the surface and back onto the phone you want them to go on.

You can abstract the phone concept to any electric gadget. I think having the contents of the gadget revealed is a powerful concept. Even more powerful is the basic concept that you’re taking something real and tactile and placing it on the surface to reveal something hidden about it. Let’s think about uses for non-gadgets. Let’s pretend there is some sort of labeling system for items in your pantry. Every time you place an item on your surface it knows what you placed on the surface and reads meta-data associated with it. If you place a can on the surface it may notice that the contents are expired and then draw a big red ring around the can to warn you. Perhaps you place a handful of ingredients on the surface and it starts to recommend dishes you can make using the available ingredients. In this case you really are indirectly interacting with a computer. You’re just moving stuff around your kitchen and gleaning a little extra information that is being provided to you by a computer. Nifty.

Of course, you’re not likely to see a surface computer in your house anytime soon, they’re still pretty expensive. Microsoft is initially pitching them for use in hotels and restaurants or any place where a large interactive communal screen would be handy (of course my line of thought is where is a large interactive screen not handy). The idea is they could be used to show you the menu at a fancy restaurant and you’d be able to order drinks or food directly on the surface of your table. While you’re waiting for your drinks and food the table could show you advertisements or some sort of entertaining content.

Once the cost of technology comes down I expect this concept to take root. The ability to interact with real tactile objects and at the same time interact with their meta-data is a powerful one. I haven’t even started to discuss the promise of board games on a surface computer. The computer could take care of random board construction and enforce rules and scoring without sacrificing the tactile joys of table top gaming. That’s something I’m looking forward to quite a bit.

The Future of ink!

I thought it might be fun to speculate about future technological trends. I mean, obviously it sounds fun; let’s see if I’m any good at it. I’ll share a few technologies that I think are interesting but are still in the early stages of development. Presumably, if I’m right, you’ll see these technologies hit the mainstream in a few years. I suggest that you bookmark this post and set a reminder to check the page in about five years to see if I was even close.

[Originally I was going to try and highlight three technologies in this post…but I find that I blab too much and don’t feel that I can share my excitement in such a concise manner. This may be a multi-part series of blogs.]

E-ink. Ok, this is a safe bet. “E-ink” may not yet be a household term, but this technology is already starting to be incorporated into gadgets. Have you heard of the new Amazon Kindle, the electronic reader? That uses E-ink (Sony also has an Ebook based on the technology). So what I’m speculating here is that E-ink will aggressively expand and replace a significant portion of the non-TV/non-primary computer screen LCD market in the future.

Why, what is it? For those of you not hip to E-ink (which probably means you’re just hip in general) here’s a quick rundown. E-ink is a displaying technology sort of like an LCD screen with a couple of big differences. One of the main advantages of E-ink is that looking at an E-ink display is almost exactly like reading a paper document. Part of the reason for that is the crazy high contrast ratio E-ink provides and part of the reason is that E-ink displays aren’t constantly refreshing like an LCD or CRT display. Normally computer displays refresh very very quickly so that the human eye cannot perceive it (remember the flicker on old monitors and TVs….that was the refreshes happening), even if the contents of the screen aren’t changing those displays have to refresh. E-ink displays only update when they have to change the contents of the screen. You know how some people will complain that reading a lot of text off a computer screen is “hard on the eyes?” That complaint should go away with E-ink.

Why is it going to be big? A couple of reasons. Besides being easier to look at than current displays, an E-ink display uses absolutely no energy unless it is refreshing the screen. That means after your ebook reader refreshes the screen with a page of text….the device basically turns off and that page is displayed forever until you tell it to refresh the screen with new text. Imagine the power savings! Most of the time E-ink displays are off but you can still read from them. Another interesting property of E-ink displays is they seem to be particularly well suited to making flexible display screens. Think about a screen that could retract like a projector screen when you’re not using it, or displays that can hug curved surfaces….that pretty cool stuff.

Where are we now? Right now most E-ink displays are just black and white. There are some color models out there but that’s still an area of development. The actual display refresh is also still kind of slow and poky at the moment, with time they hope to speed that up. Currently they are also very expensive, but in time that too should come down. Obviously E-ink isn’t going to replace any screen that needs constant fast refreshes (like your computer screen), but any screen where constant refreshes aren’t a priority E-ink offers a very attractive, easy to read, low power consumption, option.

Perhaps I don’t rock it hard enough.

Apartment dwellers with Rock Band beware. One of my assistants recently got Rock Band and I couldn’t be prouder of him.

First off he called yesterday at 7:00 am to inform me that he wasn’t going to make it into work. Today I learned that he called me right before he went to sleep. He had been playing Rock Band all night long….like a true rock star.

Also, he managed to accumulate three noise complaints from neighbors during his inaugural rock tour. I just wanted to take time to stop and salute the true rock stars that live amongst us.

Thank the internet

This morning I see that “w00t” is the Merriam-Webster word of the year, double-zeros and all. The good folks at Merriam-Webster take their poll on the internet so something like this is bound to happen. Some might question the wisdom of a word that isn’t really a real word winning word of the year. I don’t. I might stop and marvel at democracy in action (the people want to do what?)

If anything I’m kind of disappointed in the internet, why’d you have to go and do that? You weren’t satisfied sticking it to the man with your unconventional words made up of letters and symbols? You had to go and beg for acceptance from the man? Tisk tisk tisk. I didn’t know you were so insecure.

For those of you who are not familiar with the word w00t, let me give you a chance to get to know the word of the year. Fortunately Merriam-Webster recently attempted to codify for you:

1. w00t (interjection) - expressing joy (it could be after a triumph, or for no reason at all); similar in use to the word "yay."

Example usage: w00t! I won the contest!

Of course this does have some grim consequences for Scrabble. Will they be forced to add numbers and special characters in future editions to support the evolution of English?

Super Unsatisfied.

I got my grades for this semester back. I got an A+ and a B. I’m very disappointed in the B. Up until now I’ve had a 4.0 GPA in grad school. I had an A going into the final and evidently I bombed the final, which is surprising because I felt that I had done ok on it.

I’ve already sent an email to check and make sure the grade is accurate. The professor said I was a really good student but was below the median on the final. Blah.

Kind of makes me think the week I spent studying for that final was a poor investment of my time. I could have been goofing off and I would have probably been just as prepared for the test. Stupid B.

Please do your own work.

Well finals are finally over. I’m glad to have one more semester behind me. I don’t know for sure what my grades will be, but I’m hoping that I did well.

Just because I’m done with finals doesn’t mean I can’t still play around with test taking, you know, recreationally. The following quiz is largely adapted from a conversation Dawn and I had in the car on Saturday. Watching the second season of Heroes (which wrapped up last week) might help figure out what the heck is going on here. Basically it’s a quiz to help judge the decision making skills of super heroes.

1.
Situation: You are a special individual with the ability to instant transport anywhere, stop time, and time travel on a mission to save the world. You meet another special individual who also appears to have the ability to stop time on his own mission to save the world. You both seem to be at cross purposes but in an awful hurry to carry out your missions.

Do you:
A. Realize that you two are the lone two individuals in the world that have the luxury of taking all the time they need in order to make informed decisions, stop time, and sit down and attempt to figure out what’s going on.

B. Blunder ahead on your chosen course of action, ignoring any new developments, because you feel like you’re running out of time.

C. Realize that you’re running into a lot of resistance at this current time and place and decide that you have the luxury of picking any time and place you please. Simply travel to a time/location when things are more likely to go your way (how about getting there 2 hours before everyone else and leaving before they show up?)


2.
Situation: You are a special individual with multiple special abilities (stopping time, teleportation, flying, walking through walls, telekinesis, mind reading, shooting lightning bolts, etc). Your dubious friend asks you to get inside a locked vault.

Do you:
A. Attempt to clumsily tear the door off using telekinesis even though you’ve never attempted such a feat before, because even though time appears to be at the essence, you’d like to leave as much evidence that the safe was broken into as possible and try new things.

B. Simply walk through the vault wall, taking your dubious friend with you if you like. Note: this option would be unnecessarily quick, discrete, and leave two of the three people trying to stop your friend stuck on the other side of the vault wall.

C. Option A. in addition to sticking around to pummel the people trying to stop your new dubious friend. Why is it that everyone you’ve met lately does not like your new friend? They keep making vicious claims about his intentions. Don’t you sometimes wish you could read minds and travel through time and space to check the veracity of such statements?


3.
Situation: You are a special individual with the ability to both read and insert thoughts and suggestions into people’s minds. There are currently two people trying to kill off most of the world’s population.

Do you:
A. Run around and shout at people even though you are possibly the most effective communicator that the world has even known and your shouting doesn’t seem to help.

B. Decide that the quickest way to stop a person is to mentally suggest to a person next to them to stop them. Please keep in mind that the person next to them may have the ability to ignore your suggestions while the person actually trying to end the world would be helpless to resist your commands.

C. Simply mentally command the person who is actually trying to end the world to reconsider his actions and confess his dastardly plot to his dimwitted, albeit powerful, companion.


4.
Situation: You are the geneticist Dr. Mohinder. Your super power is vast and unfathomable naivety, often to the point of stupendous stupidity, in any given situation. You eventually realize that the reason your parents named you Mohinder is that to any situation you are a hindrance. Actually a Mo’hinderance….put more succulently you’re Mohinder (see what I did there…clever eh). You’ve recently been given a gun.

Do you:
A. Continue to put yourself, the world, and anyone you’ve ever cared about in perpetual risk by your nonstop bumbling.

B. Make the world a better safer place by taking one for the team and eating a bullet.


Bonus Essay Question:

Explain how Hiro’s ability to stop time works. Be sure to discuss whether or not he is able to stop electromagnetic waves. If so, explore the inconsistencies of being able to stop light and sound waves, explain what happens to reflections in the world if he moves items around but light is unable to move to update reflections. Does Hiro leave tunnels of darkness behind him if he pushes paused light waves out of his way while walking around? Speculate on what it must be like to walk through a paused sound wave.

Sometimes the Winner is a Loser.

My ANTM streak came to an end last week. Both my ponies were on the chopping block. I suppose it’s good that I lost my secret pony (Heather) instead of my actual pony (Jenah). Although I have to admit that I was kind of sad to see my secret pony go, and it looks like I wasn’t the only one.

If you used the “CoverGirl of the Week” as a measure, Heather just might be the most popular contestant who has ever been on ANTM. She has won CoverGirl of the Week nine consecutive weeks. There has only been ten CoverGirl of the Week awards handed out this season. Lisa won the first one and Heather has gotten everyone since then. She even got this week’s CGofW after she was eliminated last time.

That’s some serious fan support. I wonder if ANTM knew they were dealing with such a fan favorite when they were taping this season? I don’t if that would have influenced the outcome (it obviously probably shouldn’t have).

One thing is clear, Heather might be the ultimate winner of this season once it’s all said and over with. That is, if you define winner as the person who receives enough publicity to jumpstart her career. Sure, she won’t get the title of ANTM, but you can ask Jaslene what that’s really worth (I suggest you ask her by email so you don’t have to hear her response).

I found a New York Times article about Heather; it mostly deals with the fact that she’s put a face on a condition that doesn’t get much attention. It’s an interesting read. I’m impressed with how diplomatic all of her answers are….something you might want in a spokesperson. Speaking of which, she says her future ambitions are to continue to try to model and eventually become a national spokesperson for Asperger’s. That seems like a pretty obtainable goal. Dawn says that she read somewhere that Heather is also entertaining the idea of trying to break into videogame design as a fallback career to modeling. I haven’t read that myself, but that might either be pure genius on Heather’s part or pure fantasy on some gamer’s part.

Neighbor’s Yard, I’m not done with you.

While passing the house in our neighborhood with the inflatable Christmas decorations on the way home last night I slowed down. I slowed down so I could properly radiate my rage upon their humble dwelling. The uninformed spectator might have thought I was slowing down to enjoy the yard display but the discerning viewer would have felt the air temperature rise, if ever so slightly. As I slowly lorded pass the house I half expected Dawn to point out I was being an ass (I am often being an ass).

Instead I was surprise when she informed me that my complaints about the house were half-assed. I had done a poor job pointing out all that was wrong with it. So blinded by my rage was I that I failed to notice whole extra dimensions of wrongness that exist. In short, my observations were incomplete. Dawn started to rattle down the list of things she saw wrong with the house that I had failed to mention. I endeavor to recount a few of them here.

The theme of the yard is a runway or landing strip for Santa. To paint the mental picture they have these two rows of blinking lights which delineate a runway through their yard. Various inflatable yard decorations fill the rest of the yard.

One such decoration is an inflatable Santa in a plane, presumably coming in for a landing. This disturbes Dawn to a greater extent than it does me. Evidently Dawn is a strict traditionalist in mythological transportation matters. Santa rides in a sleigh and not in a small airplane. Think of your carbon footprint Santa. Standing next to the runway is another inflatable Santa. Dawn points out how can Santa be riding in his blasphemous plane if he is also standing on the ground waiting for himself to land? She is not down with Santa clones or time traveling Santas or any other rationale for Santa multiplicity.

Near the runway is also an inflatable snowman that is standing next to an inflatable penguin. The penguin was laying horizontal on the ground at the snowman’s feet. The first time we visually parsed this we came to the conclusion that foul play was afoot. But thinking back I think different events must have transpired. My new theory is that the penguin looked around and realized he/she was part of a Christmas decorating travesty and wisely choose to take his/her own life. As we were driving by the snowman probably just discovered the recently deceased bird. I can only hope the snowman realizes the wisdom in the penguin’s actions and decided to follows suit tonight.

At an even greater distance from the runway there are both inflatable SpongeBob SquarePants and inflatable Grinch. Dawn considers this juxtaposition of alternate Christmas universe characters with blatant children’s cartoon character marketing to be a mortal sin. The mere fact that there are Antarctic birds associating with multiple North-pole dwelling mythological beings and despicable cartoon characters and Dr Seuss characters and snowmen indicates to me a certain lack of focus of vision while constructing the tableaux.

The final insult was revealed to us as we turned our eyes upwards….up on the roof….there arose such a clatter…we spied a third Santa. Three inflatable Santa in one display - unforgivable. Dawn was super-unsatisfied with this final observation.

Deck the yard... with trash

I hate inflatable holiday yard decorations. There, I said it. The fact that anyone buys them, or that they appear to be gaining popularity, gives me great pause when contemplating our country’s shared aesthetic values. I have no proof that the same people who buy these front yard abominations are also wearing Crocks….but I have my suspicions. After all, it would take someone with that dearth of personal style to look at a giant inflatable Santa, snowman, or what-have-you and gleefully imagine it disgracing their house and neighbors.

I mean it, I really dislike them (the yard ornaments not the people….well, ok, in all likelihood the people as well). At night, when the inflatable illuminated yard decoration can be said to be at their “best” it’s still not very good. I have two primary complaints about them. I’ll list them in ascending order.

Complaint one: The sameness. Every inflatable snowman decoration you buy looks exactly like every other inflatable snowman bought. There is no individuality. If two people buy the same box of Christmas lights their decorations will look different because lights are amorphous and take the shape of the individual's home (or bush or tree).

Complaint two: During the day your house looks like a landfill. This is my primary complaint with inflatable lawn decorations. In order for them to “work” you have to keep a fan blowing air into them. Most people turn that fan off during the day….meaning that the decorations deflate and then just flop around in their yard. It looks like a giant plastic bag. The very first time I saw one during the day I actually thought it was a large piece of garbage that had unfortunately blown in to the yard….after I realized that it was a large piece of garbage that the owner had purposely placed in the yard….and then staked down so it couldn’t get away - I died a little on the inside. Oh how very ghetto.

Anything this ugly has to be a fad. I suspect the people who buy these decorations will look back years from now and hang their head in shame that they participated in such a grim blight on the holidays. Or at least, they should.

[Someone in our neighborhood has decided to decorate their yard with multiple of these so-called decorations and I have to pass it everyone morning on my way to work and every evening on my way home. I find it to be unacceptable.]

Fetch the lawn clippings, we're making Tiki drinks!

In the past I have gone on record as subscribing to the Alton Brown school of mixology, namely that, a good drink is sort of like a musical chord. There is a base note or spirit, a modifier or mixer, and then maybe an accent (bitters, twist, perhaps and olive). A chord should have at least three notes, strictly musically speaking, but I believe there are probably two note drinks that work just fine. The point of the Alton Brown analogy is to point out what happens if you keep adding more and more notes to a musical chord….eventually you have a dissonant cacophony of noise.

From this point of view most Tiki drinks are like listening to an orchestra warm up; perhaps the Rhesus and Langur Philharmonic. To my mind, usually more ingredients does not equal better drink. However, I was intrigued by the Tiki drink article I highlighted yesterday and decided perhaps I owe Tiki drinks another chance. I selected one of the recipes included with the article and decided to give it a try. I selected Hot Coffee Grog, being the cold-ish weather put me in a warm drink kind of mood. I’ll include the recipe here for you non-hyperlink clickers:

Hot Coffee Grog
1 sugar cube or 1 heaping teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon honey
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
Pinch of grated nutmeg
Pinch of ground clove
Pinch of powdered cinnamon
3 strips orange peel, about 1/2-inch wide
1 strip grapefruit peel, about 1/2-inch wide
6 ounces steaming hot coffee
1 ounce dark Jamaican rum, such as Appleton Estate V/X
2 drops vanilla extract
Cinnamon stick.

Place all ingredients in a heatproof glass or mug and stir until butter melts and sugar dissolves.
Yield: One drink.

First off this is not a drink to make if you want a quick cup of coffee. In fact this is probably the slowest cup of coffee you’ll ever prepare in your life. Look at all the ingredients that go into it. Jeeze. The time to make the drink is probably only exacerbated by the fact that it was me making the drink. Anyone who has watched me (and tapped their foot anxiously) while I mix drinks knows what I’m talking about. I like to take my time.

Still I was intrigued by this drink because the coffee is not diluted down with milk or cream or some other ingredient that tries to turn black coffee into something else. The drink is essentially black coffee. There is a pat of butter in it, sure, but there is probably a reason coffee drinkers that require cream don’t reach for Land-o-Lakes when the half-and-half runs out.

I had to make a few substitutions since I didn’t schedule a special shopping trip to make the drink. I ended up replacing all the citrus peel with lemon peel. It was the only citrus we had in the house. I also ended up having to substitute lighter rum for the dark Jamaican rum. I figured if the drink was appealing with light rum the darker rum could only make it better.

Looking at order of assembly, I decided to add the coffee last. I wanted the coffee to be as hot as possible when I added it so it could better dissolve the honey and sugar and I was afraid the drink might cool down too much while I was digging around in my pantry for all of the spices and “measuring” them. As I went about adding all the spices to empty coffee cups I got the strange feeling that I was trying to turn my coffee into an apple pie (cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, etc).

Presentation-wise these drinks were a hit. There something special about see a mug with a cinnamon stick sticking out of it and a little pillow of fat melting away. Stirring the drink with the cinnamon stick to thoroughly incorporate the butter is a fun little interactive game you get to play with your drink before you drink it.

As far as taste goes, I liked it. It tasted like festive black coffee. There was a lot going on, but it was still coffee. I don’t know how different it is than buying a flavored coffee…. I suppose the grog is automatically superior because it has alcohol in it and you get to make sure none of the flavorings are wretched. I think I liked it better than Dawn did, but it’s probably because it’s hard to be weaned of off Starbuck coffee drinks we’re they successfully hide the taste of coffee with milk and sugar. I’d probably make it again while entertaining because the drink just feels special…. Of course I’m also interested in trying to strip it down to a proper three note chord. I’m thinking black coffee, Irish whiskey, and cloves.

Tiki Drink Manifesto

I’ve mentioned this article in the New York Times to a couple of people already; it’s a pretty interesting article about Tiki drinks.

It’s about a guy named Jeff Berry who has been called “the Indiana Jones of tiki drinks.” Basically Jeff’s position is that modern Tiki drinks are sugery and terrible but they don’t have to be and in fact originally they weren’t. He’s made it his life mission to track down the original drink recipes which tend to be more complex and better balanced in an effort to elevate the art of Tiki drinks.

Perhaps a bit of history is in order to put his quest in perspective. According to the NYT article (I’ve done no independent research on Tiki drinks) the Tiki drink movement took root in the 1930’s and lasted about forty years before sputtering out. It’s recently made a resurgence in the last ten years.

At the forefront of the original 1930’s movement was a man named Ernest Raymound Beaumont-Gantt, who (wisely) went by the mixologist name Donn Beach. Donn Beach is supposedly the original inventor of some of the most popular Tiki drinks and his concoctions took the country by storm. To quote:

“… Mr. Beach was a gifted mixologist, and his drinks were the real thing. His “Rum Rhapsodies” were elaborate concoctions that called for multiple brands of rum, fresh fruit juice, crushed ice, obscure syrups and esoteric ingredients like honey-butter mix.”

The only thing is Donn Beach also closely guarded his drink recipes. And not closely guarded his drink recipe like if you asked for the recipe he declined to tell you closely guarded. No, Donn Beach kept all of his drink recipes in code. According to Jeff Berry, “a recipe might say one half-ounce of number two, a dash of number four.”

Jeff learned that some of the bar staff kept their coded recipes black books and over the years he’s been able to acquire a few of them. He now spends his time trying to crack the codes. Jeff has frequented a bar that is run by the son and grandson of one of the original bar staff employed by Don Beach. By ordering drinks and attempting to watch and reverse engineer them he’s been able to figure out a couple of the code names for ingredients like “Golden Stack” (a particular brand of rum) and “Markeza” (that means passion fruit syrup).

In addition to ordering Tiki drinks in bars Jeff also does research by pouring over old cooking magazines and recipe books in the hopes of finding a recipe or two that Donn Beach did make public. If the same recipe happens to be in one of his coded black books he can use it as a Rosetta stone to further decode other drinks. It’s not all smooth sailing though:

“Mr. Berry’s own arrival at the Zombie recipe is convoluted. In 2002, he stumbled upon an old copy of “Barbecue Chef,” a cookbook self-published in 1950 by one Louis A. Spievak that contained a Zombie recipe supposedly given to Mr. Spievak by Donn Beach himself. Following the formula, which called for three kinds of rum, three kinds of juice and passion fruit syrup, Mr. Berry was pleased to discover a superb drink.

A few years later, he found another Donn Beach-sanctioned Zombie recipe — this one in a 1956 issue of the men’s magazine Cabaret. That recipe called for 11 ingredients, only five of them matching the Spievak formula. The drink was equally good but darker in color and heavier in body.

Then the story took one more twist. In 2005, Mr. Berry was given a little black book belonging to a Beachcomber waiter named Dick Santiago that dated to around 1937. The notebook contained a recipe for “Zombie Punch,” which was the drink’s original name. Mr. Berry concluded that the recipe was truly the original Zombie formula, and set about decoding an ingredient listed cagily as “Don’s Mix” (two parts grapefruit juice to one part cinnamon-infused sugar syrup, it turns out).”

So Jeff spends years trying to resurrect Tiki drink recipes. An interesting story no doubt….but is his effort worth it? There are a couple of “original” Tiki drink recipes included with the NYT’s article. Tune in tomorrow and I’ll discuss my experiences with one of them! (I’m sure you can’t wait)

Maybe I rocked it a little too hard.

Looks like I got one of the defective Rock Band guitars. The strum bar on my fake guitar had been intermittently not registering up strums…now it doesn’t register them at all.

While playing Guitar Hero I never once used the up strum option. I only ever down strummed. I never really mastered the more difficult levels and never needed to alternate the strum for speed. For all I know, my Guitar Hero guitar also doesn’t have a functioning up strum.

In Rock Band, however, I’ve have been using the up strum. Partially because I’m getting better at playing fake guitar and need to alternate to handle the faster parts of some songs, but mostly because if you only use up strums while playing bass the game will label you as “Authentic Strummer.” Obviously this is a highly coveted title (it isn’t) and it gives the bass player a little meta-game to play.

EA has come right out and admitted that some of the release guitars are defective. They’ve made it incredibly simple to swap out the defective guitars for functioning ones. They two-day air ship you a new guitar. You put the defective guitar back in the shipping box and send it back to them. It doesn’t cost you a dime and it’s quick and convenient. So props to EA for manning-up to the situation and providing a quick fixing for it.

I have a tracking number to keep tabs on my new guitar. It appears that it hasn’t actually shipped yet though. I’ve read that there is a slight delay because EA is getting pounded by requests for replacements. This situation is being exacerbated by the fact that people without defected guitars are also putting in requests for replacements. Why you might ask? Right now it is not possible to buy a Rock Band guitar without buying the whole Rock Band bundle. Stand alone guitars are not going on sale until the end of January. If you want to play Rock Band with two Rock Band guitars (instead of using one Guitar Hero guitar) you pretty much have to buy a second bundle. Or you can claim your guitar is defective; in which case EA will send you a second guitar. If you don’t ship back your defective guitar they will charge you for it and you have effectively bought a second guitar two months ahead of the street date. Clever, huh?

Not really. I expect your karma will be damaged because you’ll be preventing someone without a single functioning guitar from getting one because you’re a greedy little prick. EA has started charging $125 for non-returned guitars, but in a world where people will pay double the street price on e-bay to get an item slightly before its street date, I’m not sure how effective the modest mark up will be.

I'm Only Happy When It Rains

This last weekend I finally got a chance to check out the new fancy-shmancy mall in research park, Bridge Street Town Centre.

First off, I believe I said something about how I dislike the name before… but I want to be thorough, so for the record, I dislike the name. I think the name is one word too long. Bridge Street Centre would have been an OK name or perhaps Bridge Town Centre. Bridge Street Town Centre sounds like just a collection of words having to do with civil engineering. (Oh I got one! Overpass Boulevard Hamlet Junction.)

The mall itself is very pleasant to walk around, albeit still a bit sparse on actual shops. Dawn harbors deep philosophical objections towards outdoor malls in general, whereas I kind of like them. We were there on a cold and dreary day. Dawn used the weather as her case in point, who wants to shop in cold rain? To her the outdoor mall concept is fatally flawed unless you live in San Diego. Getting to shop in nice weather two days a year does not outweigh the fact that shopping will be bitterly cold in the winter and oppressively hot in the summer. From a practical perspective I have to agree with her; however I still find outdoor malls to be a bit more elegant than indoor malls. On the day in question I was perfectly content to shop in the cold rain. In fact, I think I preferred shopping in the cold rain.

First off, it wasn’t really raining…..it was just a cold mist. It’s not like there was any appreciable precipitation going on. Secondly, I like wearing winter wear. My wool overcoat, a bright scarf, my Irish wool hat…what’s not to like making the winter fashion scene? Thirdly, and most importantly, the cold rain kept everyone else away. We basically had the mall to ourselves. If the weather had been nice who knows how many other people might have been crowded in there.

We poked our heads into the few shops that actually managed to open in November. They seemed nice enough, but not appreciably different from shops in any other mall. The cobblestone streets and atmosphere of the mall are very well crafted. Dawn said it best when she pointed out that they successfully created a faux-village feel in much the same way that Paris Las Vegas created a faux village feel. This is to say that it may not be authentic European village shopping but it sure is idyllic.

While there we tried one of the few restaurants that have actually managed to open. (There are a number of restaurants slated to open and I think they will be a big draw for the mall once it is a fully operational battle station.) The place we tried was called Biscuits & Blues. Considering the pains the mall as a whole has gone through to construct it’s idyllic atmosphere the owner of Biscuits & Blues should be dragged to the banks of the fake mall lake (with gondola rides!) and drowned.

The food is Cajun themed…or is it Creole themed? I always get them confused. I know using them interchangeably offends some people from Louisiana…I mean no offense. I ordered a bowl of seafood gumbo which was decent enough; I would consider ordering it again. I feel it bears mention that my gumbo did not come with a biscuit. Dawn ordered a shrimp po-boy. I thought her shrimp were a bit salty, but again, the dish was a reasonable facsimile of the original. The po-boy was also not accompanied by a biscuit. In fact upon inspecting the menu it seemed decidedly sparse on biscuits. Biscuits were only mentioned once, buried about ¾ of the way through the menu as one of many side items. So Biscuits & Blues is not really a biscuit-y place.

How does it rate on the blues theme element? Well the walls are decorated with photos of famous blues musicians….oh wait. No. That’s what they should have been decorated with. Instead they were decorated with a collage of stills from movies. Famous movies? Uh, does Angelina Jolie from Beowulf count? How about Anakin Skywalker from one of the new Star Wars? I think any of the musicians that were on the walls were mostly there because someone made a movie about them… So not much on the visual blues theme element (for the record there were absolutely no photos of biscuits on the walls either).

How about the sound? Well, the only sound that accompanied our meal was the incessant droning of their soft drink machine. That was one loud drink machine. There was NO blues music playing. None. How much of a no brainer is it to play blues music if you’re restaurant has blues in the name? I feel it safe to say that as a themed eatery the Biscuits & Blues is a travesty.

I feel like I’ve harped on the mall enough for the time being. I am looking forward to trying out the new movie theater there though. It has two bars and a section you have to be at least 21 to sit in because you can drink while you watch movies. Looks like we just added a new weapon to our arsenal to make Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer movies more bearable.

It's not the knife, it's the network.

This is intolerable, I’ll sue you! Well I won’t sue you…but you’ve not heard the last of me. You know what, I LOVE that idea. I’m totally into this, big time.

Such are the wild mood swings of Verizon. Like a depraved unstable 300 pound linebacker with a switchblade it takes turns threatening everyone in the room: the government, other carriers, its customers and anyone who happens to draw its attention. However it looks like the terrible fog that has long clouded its judgment might finally be lifting.

Was it just this last September that Verizon was threatening to sue the government over open access rules to the 700 MHz spectrum auction? Wow, how time flies. Since then Verizon has pulled its law suit, and then yesterday, Verizon goes ahead and announces that they are adopting an open access policy. A skeptic might conclude that they are only converting over to open access because they realized that their hand was being forced. However, an unenthusiastic carrier wouldn’t have to allow open access until around 2011 and even then only on devices operating on the 700 MHz spectrum. Verizon announced that it would open its entire network to any device in 2008.

The nitty-gritty details won’t be announced until early next year when Verizon releases the technical standards for connecting to their network. On its face, it appears that a would-be developer only needs to meet the proper network connectivity procedures (whatever they may be). Verizon claims it won’t care who makes the device, what it’s for, or what software it runs. Devices will have to be sent to a Verizon Certification Lab which will verify that the device connects to the network correctly, but Verizon is vowing that the Certification Lab won’t be an obstacle to access. According to this article:

“One Verizon exec went so far as to say that if someone builds a device in their basement on a breadboard, Verizon will test it and activate it.”

That sounds pretty awesome to me. I use VerizonWireless because I’ve been very happy with their coverage, but I’ve been less than impressed with their choice of devices. Does this mean that phones with sim cards might finally come to Verizon? I certainly hope so. I’ve never understood why Verizon makes it such a pain to migrate phone numbers and contact information from one device to another. (I’m sure it has nothing to do with the $25 charge to do it for you).

This also opens the way for devices that sport Google’s new Android platform to come to Verizon. Actually this opens the way for devices that aren’t even phones but still need wireless connectivity to come to Verizon….and who knows what cool things those gadgets will do! (Even though I don’t know what they are I still feel a powerful desire to possess them).

It’s a nice change of pace to actually be able to praise my wireless carrier for doing something that seems to serve my best interest. Perhaps Verizon will respond well to the positive attention and keep up the good work.

The Hungry and the Fed

Rock Band aside, Thanksgiving the Feast, was a huge success. Dawn’s meticulous planning of the event and ample preparation paid off. How many people do you know who have their feast inputted and organized in Excel? We’re those kinds of people. A quick rundown of what was on the table: a ham, a turkey, scalloped corn, mash potatoes (pure and uncut), chipotle mashed sweet potato, roasted fennel, corn bread stuffing, port cranberry sauce, gravy for the turkey, a dipping sauce for the ham, bourbon pecan pie, pumpkin tiramisu, chocolate cranberry tart (minus the chocolate crust), wassail, red wine, port, and of course, water. It was a feast indeed. We ate all we could and after completely gorging ourselves we hardly made a dent in the offering.

One of the (many) things I found enjoyable about the holiday is getting the chance to actually do some cooking. Grad school has reduced that amount of recreational cooking I’ve been able to do. Truth be told, I was a bit tired of cooking towards the end of the Thanksgiving proper, but I quickly recovered. With ample leftovers there wasn’t much need for cooking the following couple of days… however Saturday morning breakfast stands out vividly in my memory.

It started with a bait and switch. I had made promises of meat-muffin French toast to our guest….but due to a shortage of eggs I was unable to deliver. The egg shortage is an interesting digression in its own right. It’s not that we didn’t plan for the dish and failed to buy the appropriate number of eggs. Our planning was impeccable. Our crime was exactly planning out the number of eggs that we would need…down to the egg. What we had not foreseen is my development of superhuman eggs cracking strength on Thanksgiving Day. For some unknown reason on Thanksgiving I would go to crack an egg on the counter……and smash the egg on the counter instead. Shells everywhere, palm covered in exploded yolk, smashed. Up until Thanksgiving Day I’ve never done this before in my life. I did it multiple times that day.

So on Saturday morning we were down to just two eggs. Not enough for meat-muffin French toast. I made an offer of grits, sausage, and a fried egg (one for Dawn and one for our guest) in its place. This is where I got to see Dawn magnificent brain leap into action. I’ve long suspected what Dawn spends her idle time thinking about….suspicious confirmed. Dawn immediately responded “Can I have a fried egg on top of my grits with sausage poking out?” I asked “what, like Stonehenge?” Her face lights up. “YES.”

So I go about making a new breakfast concoction, Grits and Sausage Stonehenge. In the next room I hear some discussion on whether the egg is a sacrifice in the center of the ring of sausage or whether it is an altar. Because the breakfast sounded a bit too healthy after our previous days of gorging I offered to level up the grits to cheesy grits. This offer was enthusiastically accepted. In the end my creation didn’t look much like Stonehenge. Due to number of sausages used and the slope of the sides of the bowl it looked more like a sausage hand reaching skyward. It was speculated that a sausage man had drowned in a pile of “quick-grits.” Still it was warmly received and consequently devoured.

Rocking Out on Tryptophan

Real life bruises, blisters and mangled joints? Man this is an awesome video game. Naturally I’m talking about Rock Band. The juggernaut of rhythm based games was released just before Thanksgiving and Dawn and I procured a copy to try it out over the holiday. Verdict: awesome.

Rock Band supports up to four simultaneous players: lead guitar, bass guitar, drummer, and singer. Since the two guitar positions are essentially the same (skill wise) the game has three unique stations. The guitar station will be super familiar to anyone who has played any of the Guitar Hero games.

The singer station is essentially a karaoke station. The game has a pitch meter that tells you if you’re singing the correct note, but it doesn’t care what octave the note is in or if you’re even singing the correct word. This is a very good thing. For a serious player it means if they do not possess the vocal range a song was originally sung in they can just move the notes up or down an octave and still sing along. For the poor singer (i.e. me) who habitually doesn’t know the words to songs and only possess a monotone voice…..it means you can repeat “roo roo roo” over and over again while you struggle to produce some tonal variety that may please the game.

The drumming station was implemented way more successfully than I expected. It consists of four drums and a kick drum. The game comes with real wooden drum sticks and you’re actually able to wail away on the drums in a forceful and satisfying manner. I’ve read that on expert mode you’re essentially executing the drum lines from the various songs; meaning that the game is actually teaching you how to be a real life drummer. I wouldn’t know anything about that because I can’t handle anything past easy on the drums. Evidently maintaining steady rhythm and dealing with a variety of inputs is not something I’m well equipped to handle.

Apart from the individual stations, where the game really succeeds is fostering a sense of camaraderie between the players. Everyone needs to play their part and work together in order to finish the song. If one band member is struggling other members who are performing stronger can help the struggling player reestablish their part through the familiar “star power” mechanic.

The other amazing thing about the game is it’s able to entertain for hours and hours on end. I logged way more hours than I’m comfortable admitting to over the holiday. But since the game is social in nature, Dawn and my friends are also guilty of logging hours and hours in.

Finally, if you do end up playing the game for a 6-10 hour stretch you should probably expect some real-world wear and tear. Dawn, who is an awesome little drummer-monkey, started to develop drummer blisters and a sore knee from her constant percussion onslaught. Evidently when I play fake guitar I find it imperative to lock my right leg and put all the weight on my right hip. By Saturday night my right hip was very sore…. I was sore from playing a video game. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that old before. Fortunately the cure was fairly simple. It involved simply putting the fake-guitar down and going for a walk to exercise out the hip.

That explains why your show is crap...

I found this interesting tidbit of an article while I was doing some Project Runway research yesterday. It’s a synopsis of an appearance that Tim Gunn made for his book ‘Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style’ at the Baltimore Book Festival.

One of the things Tim mentions is the fact that Bravo wanted to give him a TV Show….but had no idea what that show would be. When Bravo found out that he was working on a book they pounced on the project as a catalyst for his show. So surprise, surprise, his show wasn’t conceived as an idea for interesting and captivating television but was a book idea twisted into a TV show just to make a TV show happen. Who would have thunk?

Actually the most recent episode of his show wasn’t as awful as some of the earlier ones. I suppose there is still hope that the show may evolve into an interesting format over time. They ditched the cheap and contrived “it’s a surprise” element…. Now they just need to ditch the “here’s a twenty minute interaction with a pseudo-celebrity that will be a life transforming experience” element.

At the appearance Tim also went on to talk about this season of Project Runway, namely the judges. I’ll let Tim take it away. Don’t worry there are no spoilers…unless you consider the fact that a male designer wins one of the challenges to be a serious spoiler.

"If I'm correct, I think you're going to get angry every time you see the show. You're going to get angry at the judges because... I don't know what they were smoking this season."

“"There was one case in particular where I said to the producers [...] 'It's really too bad that so-and-so's design is so terrible, because the audience will know right away. The minute they see this, they're going to know that he's going home. And I'm just sorry that something else isn't almost as bad, almost as challenged. Everything else looks really good!... He wins the challenge. He wins! It's inconceivable. So I went backstage to tell the designer who was out that he or she had to go home, and I turned to him and I said, 'And you know, I'm stunned and shocked that you won this challenge' and he said, 'Well, no one's more surprised than I am.'"

Project Nap-a-way

I’m still having trouble making up my mind about Project Runway. None of the contestants seem to resonate with me the way Daniel V did in season two (Daniel you were robbed). Part of the problem might be that none of the contestant were able to leave any impression what-so-ever because I was semi-conscious at best during the first show. Last week was a brutal week, and I fell asleep during the Project Runway premier. I woke up right after the show ended and we rewound the PVR so I could watch the runway judging…but once you’ve started nodding off there is not a lot of clarity left in the subsequent memories.

To make up for my sleepy indiscretion I’ve looked at the outfit photos on the Bravo website… going by the finished product of the first challenge I’m leaning towards either Kevin or Carmen. I like the idea of Kevin’s dress. I really like the top half of it. I like the choice in fabrics and the fit. I’m not as fond of the skirt though. It’s a bit short. I think he was going for fun….but I wish he had gone for sophisticated. A little more length and a little less flare out would have made this outfit. The dress seems to be very finished and well constructed; no unhemmed or fraying edges.

To be honest, I don’t particularly care for Carmen’s outfit. It’s a little too modern-day genie in a bottle for me…but I like a lot of elements about the outfit. I like that she made a top, a vest, and pants. That’s three pieces. I think that shows good time management and an ability to produce a lot of work in a little time. I like that the outfit is fitted. (I hate baby-doll dresses and sacks of fabrics- you hear me Sweet P and Victorya?) I also think Carmen did the best job with hair and accessories. The model looks like she’s wearing a finished look.

If I were blind and just listening to the show (and I probably did more listening than focusing my vision on the TV) then I would probably be trying to decide between Christian and Rami. That’s because of the comments that judges gave both of them. There were singled out for “really thinking about the outfit” having “attention to detail” and “good construction.” Those are the sorts of compliments that final three contests get.

I think it will take another episode until I’m really ready to select my pony and secret pony. At least now I have a short list of people to keep an eye on.

A More Intelligent Design

I saw this article yesterday and thought it was an interesting read. It deals with the Intelligent Design movement and their future efforts.

One of the things that I hadn’t really thought about until I read the article is how quiet the ID movement has been lately. A year or so ago the movement was front and center with stories coming out of Kansas and Pennsylvania public school systems. Eventually (and fortunately) ID lost its foothold in both Kansas and Pennsylvania and I haven’t heard much about it since.

I guess I should just come out and explicitly admit that I think the Intelligent Design is not science. Personally I have no problem with the concept; I just have a problem with it being passed off as science. I think you could probably find a place for it to be mentioned in public school, but if you have to change the definition of science in order to include it (I’m looking at you Kansas) it definitely does not belong in a science class. I’m intentionally avoiding writing a blog railing on ID, it would be all too easy and serve no real purpose (not that my blog really serve any purpose anyways). What interests me here is the reported change in strategy of the ID movement.

With the initial attempt to cloak itself in scientific jargon and pass itself off as science failed; ID has taken a step back and rethought its efforts. According to the Ars Technica article, ID has learned from its failings and constructed a strategy to avoid its previous obstacles. Supposedly they are working on a two prong attacked.

The first prong, once again, deals with public schools. Instead of introducing ID as a competing theory to evolution they are now just going to focus strictly on evolution. Namely they want to highlight how shaky the theory of evolution is (or failing that just invent crazy ass stuff and attribute it to evolution and claim it’s shaky….sorry I couldn’t resist). The primary force behind this prong is a new textbook produced by the Discovery Institute that is specially designed to reveal weaknesses in the theory of evolution. I’ve read a bit about evolution (I know my creeps and jerks) but to be honest it’s not my branch of science so I’m relying on the analysis of the Ars Techinica author who says what there are actual holes in the theory of evolution that scientist are still trying to fill in….but the book doesn’t focus on those. According to Ars Technica:

“There is clearly controversy within evolutionary studies—I've covered a number of them at Nobel Intent in the past—but these have nothing to do with the supposed issues brought up in this text[book], such as whether natural selection is important and the supposed existence of "molecular machines." Neither of these topics are the least bit controversial within the scientific community, and the book's promotional material can only be described as stretching the truth past its breaking point when it claims, "Explore Evolution brings to the classroom data and debates that already are raised regularly by scientists in their science journals."”

We could dwell on the scientific merit of ‘Explore Evolution’… but let’s not. I mainly wanted to highlight the fact that instead of introducing ID in high school the strategy has changed to undermining evolution.

The second prong of the attack is at the college level. This prong focuses on getting ID included as an academic freedom issue. ID proponents are trying to build a case that ID not being included in university curriculums is an issue of censorship (instead of an issue of it’s not science). This is a clever approach. Setting the argument up so that if you don’t agree with them you are pro-censorship is sneaky. It creates morasses of trying to separate “we don’t teach bad science” from censorship. The flagship tool for this effort is a video hosted by Ben Stein (say it ain’t so Ben). Supposedly the video “presents those who seek to mix the supernatural with science as being viciously suppressed by the scientific community, rather than simply rejected for not practicing science. By presenting these radically different situations as essentially equivalent, the promotional material feels justified in concluding that academic liberty and freedom of inquiry have been curtailed by the academic science community.”

It will be interesting to see if any of the predictions that the article makes comes to pass. The approach is clever because it essentially removes the religious component from the high school prong…which is what got them in trouble the last time around. Now I get to play the fun game of checking to see if any rumblings from the ID front fall into one of the two predicted strategies. Not that I’m looking forward to the game. Listening to people get upset because I won’t take their faith as science always ends up making my head hurt.

Wednesday Ramblings

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. I’ve been slammed packed busy. I feel like I’ve been assailed from every side. Fortunately the crescendo was reached yesterday and now things should start to subside as we head towards Thanksgiving. Boy-howdy, I can’t wait for Thanksgiving.

If I could have one Thanksgiving wish, it’s that I receive Rock Band before Thanksgiving. I currently have the game pre-ordered and its street date is next Tuesday. With luck I’ll have my copy Wednesday in time to rock out over Thanksgiving. If you’re unfamiliar with the video game Rock Band, but you are familiar with the game Guitar Hero, let me do you a service by giving you the long and short of it. Rock Band is the evolution of the music/rhythm game genre. All previous forays with music based games will seem cheap and superficial in comparison. That’s the story if any of the pre-release press about that game can be trusted.

If I could have one sartorial wish, it would be that all Crocs would transition from a solid to a liquid, scald their owners, and then disappear. I hate those ugly “shoes” and I feel their owners should be physically punished for purchasing them. Sloshing around in a puddle of garish napalm seems like a punishment that fits the crime. Speaking of things sartorial (nice transition huh) Project Runway AND America’s Next Top Model are both on tonight. It's a powerhouse of a fashion TV.

My ponies (Jenah and Heather) are doing very well in ANTM, which seems so strange. Usually the girls I pick are cut within the first 4 episodes. I’ve never backed a potential winner before. I guess the season is only half over so there is no cause for celebration yet.

Dawn caught a television show that looked pretty interesting on VH-1 this weekend. It was called The Shot or something like that. It was basically ANTM for photographers. It was kind of interesting for the discussion to be centered around how best to compose a photograph instead of how to best stretch out your neck. In the credits I noticed that the show was produced by Ken Mok, which the same producer as ANTM. (I assume everyone feels compelled to repeat “Mok Mok Mok Mok Mok” whenever they see his name at the end of ANTM like I do).

That’s all I have for today. Maybe tomorrow I’ll have an actual coherent theme to blog about.

Freaking dreams

I assume everyone suffers from a suspension of logical consequences when they dream. It really bothers me. I hate it that I am subjected to some strange set of rules that seems correct when I am dreaming…only to wake up and reflect on the dream and be at a loss. Why don’t real life rules apply to dreamland?

For instance, last night I dreamt that our next door neighbors put their house up for sale. [This is likely to happen in the next year.] They sold their house….but in dreamland that meant that Dawn and I had to move into their house and the people that bought their house had to move into ours… what the frick!?! In dreamland the buy-and-swap real estate market seemed to make perfect sense. It was normal and natural. Reflecting back on the dream while conscious I can only conclude that I’m a complete moron in my subconscious.

The dream wasn’t a good dream. Dawn and I weren’t happy in our neighbor’s house and were upset that we were forced to move there by virtue of their sell. Damn you crazy dreamland real estate social conventions. The plumbing was all messed up in the house and the shower was crappy. I distinctly remember be very unsatisfied with their wonky shower. In the dream the shower was operated with a giant lever that got stuck…it could only have been constructed by the Rube Goldberg school of plumbers.

What’s worse was what the new people were doing to the house that Dawn and I currently have. We’ve worked pretty hard fixing up our house in the last two years and the new people were systematically undoing all our hard work. They tore down the fence, put in garish wallpaper, and threw trash in the yard. The height of terror in my dream was when Dawn and I looked out the back window and saw that the new neighbors had constructed this horrendous playset for their kids. It was made out of all sorts of timber and metal and looked like a small building had collapsed….at the top was a red vinyl tent. I remember the red vinyl tent being the last straw…that was the point when social conventions couldn’t make me tolerate the house swap any longer. I was about to go into action.

I have no idea what I was going to do about the situation, thankfully I woke up. Looking back, the dream makes angry. How could I fall for such a stupid premise? Why didn’t I just reject it and move onto the next random dream thought. What can’t my dreams make more sense? That pisses me off even further. It was a dumb dream, but the fact that it angers me while awake seems to make it more powerful than any stupid nightmare. Those only affect you while you’re sleeping; they have no relevance while awake. I was angry in my dream and now I’m angry while I’m awake…. Stupid dream.

Good Evening

Part clown. Part Hobo. Part Millionaire. Totally awesome. I believe that is the only way to describe a 1941 superhero who is a millionaire disguised as a hobo who appears to be a clown.

I never cared for comic books. I considered them a bit….what’s the word…stupid. I’m always at a loss whenever a comic book themed movie and/or video game is released. Dawn and all my friends begin speaking a lexicon that is completely lost on me. Strange characters with byzantine stories are like old friends to them. It smells of soap opera to me.

Perhaps I would have seen the appeal of comic books if I had known there was a character as cool as the Chauncey Throttlebottom III. That’s not his millionaire name. That’s his made up hobo secret identity name. How cool is that. He has a monocle. A freaking monocle!

I’d like to highlight the first sentence in the image below…because it is awesome. “The Vagabond, better known to himself as Chauncey Throttlebottom III…” I wish I had a name I was better known to myself by.

Not sure where to go from here. I guess I didn’t have a plan. There was a super hero who was a clown and a hobo and I thought you should know about it.

That is all.

The sushi that keeps on giving

After Saturday night you’d think we’d be too stuffed to eat anything on Sunday. You’d be wrong. Once everyone was awake and stirring the topic of breakfast came up. Dawn and Yvonne sprung into action figuring out how to fabricate a tasty breakfast from the previous feast’s leftovers.

The leftovers in question were a couple of rolls of the fried sushi Dawn and I had made the night before. We ended up making 4 burrito rolls and 4 duck rolls. We only used two and a half rolls of each for supper club. That’s a lot of leftover fried sushi.

Dawn and Yvonne came up with a plan; the reasoning was explained to me thusly. Normally sushi is considered healthy food. We’d already violated that preconception by stuffing it full of sausage and duck fat, then deep frying it. Where can you go from there? Answer: Go for broke baby! You can pan fry the leftover sushi in butter, top it with a fried egg, and serve it with a side of bacon. This is how double-fried sushi, with fried eggs and bacon was born.

Be they angles or enemies of the American Heart Association? I can’t decide. But I know one thing…Oh, how decadent are their wares. Why not wrap your sushi in bacon and dip it in a runny yolk? For a particular type of person, this is the stuff of fantasy. We called it breakfast.

And to think the night before we begged and pleaded for some of the leftover sushi to be delivered to David and Karen. We were told that our pleas were the mutterings of an ignoramus, that there was no way leftover fried sushi could hold sway over the appetite. It should be discarded and forgotten.

But oh how it rises and it soars.

Stuff until you’re gorged

Talk about an amazing weekend for the culinary arts; this last weekend was stupendous. Evan and Yvonne came up early on Friday night and we started the weekend out right with a trip to the local wine bar for snacks and wine. Saturday morning we started our eating tour-du-force in earnest with huevos rancheros (Bill style, naturally). Then we began prep work for Supper Club.

Dawn and I hosted Supper Club this month. For this month’s theme each couple drew a method of cooking out of a bag filled with cooking methods. The drawn cooking method had to be used to prepare a certain type of dish. The assignments ended up thusly: appetizers (Atlee and Amanda) drew searing, side dish (Evan and Yvonne) drew baking, main Dish (Dawn and I) drew frying, and dessert (Stacy and Jamey) drew microwave. Drinks (David and Karen) were drunk, well at least one of them, and didn’t make it. But Yvonne and Carolyn stepped up to the plate to fill the gap. Drinks were supposed to use the boiled cooking method so Yvonne prepared Thai iced teas for before/during dinner. Carolyn prepared apple-tini’s to go with dessert. Oh, but I’m a bit ahead of myself with listing the actual food courses.

For the appetizers Atlee and Amanda prepared sesame encrusted seared tuna paired with a spicy dipping sauce. I’d had all but given up on seared tuna after receiving several poor preparations in restaurants lately. Atlee and Amanda’s preparation was executed so perfectly that it has re-kindled my desire for seared tuna. The amount of sear and the texture of the tuna were superb. The spicy dipping sauce was an excellent accompaniment (for more than just tuna).

For the side dish Evan and Yvonne prepared a savory bread pudding containing roasted vegetables (red bell peppers and artichokes). Just because vegetables were involved doesn’t mean this bread pudding was healthy and boring, this dish was anything but. The bread pudding took on a soufflé like consistency and was fun to eat with chopsticks.

Dawn and I had the main course and needed to fry it. After dismissing a lot of obvious fried main courses we settled upon fried sushi. Our fried sushi main dish consisted of three items. The first item was a roll of Dawn’s invention which was dubbed burrito-roll. This roll contained chorizo sausage, re-fried beans, chipotle mayo, and fried onion flakes. It was rolled inside-out so that the rice was on the outside of the nori (seaweed wrapper). The roll was dipped in tempura batter and coated with panko flakes then deep fried.

The second item was a roll of my invention dubbed duck roll. It contained chipotle-grilled duck breast, cooked sweet potato, ginger preserves, and wasabi mayo. It was rolled with the nori on the outside, dipped in tempura batter, coated in panko flakes and deep fried. The finished sushi pieces had a bead of pomegranate juice reduction squirted across them.

The third item was another one of Dawn’s inventions; it was a shrimp tempura hand roll. A piece of shrimp tempura was combined with mango and avocado in an easy to eat hand roll. Soy sauce was provided to dip the sushi in, but it turns out Atlee and Amanda’s spicy tuna dipping sauce was the preferred accompaniment. To complement our Asian theme a small glass of Japanese whiskey was paired with the main course.

Stacy and Jamey finished off the meal with a microwave dessert. They prepared a “baked” apple using the microwave instead of the traditional oven. Instead of taking 40-60 minutes to bake an apple it took a mere 5-7 minutes. Alton Brown should hand his head in shame for not figuring that out himself. To accompany the baked apple they also made mixed-nut peanut brittle…. using a microwave! I didn’t even know you could manage melting sugar for peanut brittle in the microwave, but the results were pretty darn convincing. People who spend time slaving over pots of molten sugar are suckers.

Carolyn and Don made an apple-tini to pair with the dessert course. It featured rum, apples juice, and a healthy helping of whole cloves which I heartily approved of. It was served with in a sugar rimmed aperitif glass with a stick of cinnamon in the center.

Phew, that’s quite a supper club recap. I’m sure I missed some details. Dawn and I had a wonderful time hosting supper club; I hope everyone else enjoyed it. I feel it bears mentioning that most of our guests were sipping scotch during the evening….I think it’s safe to say that on Saturday night our house was effectively the hippest, most happening, scotch bar in Huntsville.

I don’t trust the weather.

Earlier this week it felt chilly in my office, which was exactly the problem. I suspected that it only felt chilly. I suspected that it was not in fact really chilly, but my fallible human form was reading a false positive. I wished I had an objective way to determine if it was truly chilly in my office. I’m sure some of you might have been satisfied with your illusion of being cold, but I refuse to live the lie. It’s obvious that my office needs a thermometer.
I could have simply bought a thermometer to measure the temperature in my office….but why stop there when I can have a full fledge weather station in my office? This thing measures the inside temperature, the outside temperature, tracks inside/outside humidity, shows the phase of the moon, and has WWVB radio controlled time. I think it’s obviously why this is the superior solution.

Earlier this week I endeavored to set up my new weather station with visions of being superiorly informed about the state of the weather dancing in my head. Part of the weather station is a little sensor that sits outside and wireless transmits data back to the home station. The building outside my office is all concrete and metal…not exactly the easiest thing to mount the sensor to. There aren’t any protruding appendages to cable tie the sensor to either. Fortunately the sensor came with an adhesive sticky pad, so I stick the sensor to the metal frame of my window. A few minutes later I’m back in my office experiencing weather information bliss (so this is why the Weather Channel won an Ace award).

I knew my outdoor sensor would get some direct sun in the afternoon, so my afternoon readings would probably be skewed….I didn’t expect to look at the weather station and see that the outdoor temperature was 105 degrees…. Evidently it gets kind of toasty on the metal and concrete in the direct sun. After a day and a half of being broiled in the sun the adhesive pad called it quits and my outdoor senor fell to earth. I considered this a momentary set back and brought the sensor back inside while I considered secondary mounting options….that’s when my problems started.

At first it was all fun and games. I just stuck the sensor in my fridge (did I mention my office has its own fridge?)…. I got my jollies as I watched the weather station report the new much colder temperature. The weather station has a happy or sad face that it displays. The manual is silent as to how the weather station decides if it is happy or sad. I’m left to my own devices to guess at what makes it displays one or the other. It changes pretty often so I’ve decided my weather station suffers from mood swings. Having its sensor placed in the fridge definitely made it sad though.

After I got my fridge kicks I took the sensor out of the fridge and placed it right next to the weather station…..that’s when I noticed it. The inside and the outside temperatures didn’t agree. The two sensors were sitting right next to each other and yet there was a 5 degree disparity between the two readings. What sort of rouge climate could exist in such a small area? Which was correct? Could I believe anything the weather station told me? Now I am left doubting. Is my weather station really sad right now (it claims to be). Perhaps my weather station suffers from indecision as well as mood swings.

Halloween night means pumpkin carving!

This year’s pumpkin carving threw us a couple of curve balls. First off, Dawn’s pumpkin was not so good. It looked alright…the top was good….but once we got the top off and Dawn started to scoop out the innards we discovered something was rotten…the bottom half of her pumpkin. I’m glad I didn’t thrust my hand into that nasty gook…and the smell…. The smell was horrendous. Over all it was a very nasty Halloween trick. Pumpkin number one was a no go.

I offered Dawn one of the other two pumpkins…but after her reaching in to the fetid chamber of one pumpkin her enthusiasm for carving was diminished…if you had smelled what she smelled you wouldn’t blame her. The plan for my two pumpkins, or rather my pumpkin and gourd, was a zombie and a victim. The green gourd was to be the evil zombie and I wanted him to be actively eating the brains of my pumpkin victim.

I started to cut the top off my gourd and quickly realized that carving a gourd was not going to be as easy as carving a pumpkin. I had expected a bit of a difference…but the gourd skin was considerably tougher to cut than a pumpkin. Delicate cutting was out of the question, I was going to be lucky if I could make straight lines. This was a big disappointment for me. The plans for my zombie were way more intricate than I was going to be able to execute…instead I ended up with a pretty standard (ie bland) gourd-o-lantern. I’m actually pretty lucky I didn’t break any tools are cut myself during the course of trying to make the mediocre zombie. While attempting to carve it I said something along the lines of “egads this is one tough zombie, I hadn’t counted on the zombie’s skin being so tough.” Dawn replied that my random zombie comment was said with such conviction that Karen was probably smiling somewhere and not entirely sure why she was so happy.

After my disappointing zombie I started on the victim….the switch from gourd to pumpkin was astounding. Carving the pumpkin was like carving hot butter. I got carried away with the nostrils and they ended up being too large. I was very happy with my teeth. The photos don’t do a good job capturing it but they are more sculpted in 3D than just carved. I left the flesh really thick around the mouth so I could whittle away and create a set of teeth that ended up looking a bit like dentures (in person).

The innards of the victim pumpkin were a bit of a surprise too. The seeds were sprouting. I’d never seen that before. It was a bit of a bummer because normally Dawn and I like to roast the pumpkin seeds and sprinkle salt, cinnamon, chili powder, and cayenne pepper on them. This year the seeds were either rotten, or sprouting, or not pumpkin at all. Bah.

I was especially happy with the bite wound I carved into the side of the victim. I used a wood carving tool to create the wound. I wanted it to look like something with a lot of teeth and gnawed at the head. Next year I might even do a whole pumpkin with that tool…

I arranged some of the non-rotten pumpkin innards so that they were cascading out of the victim into a pile and then into the mouth of the zombie. The tableau was a bit grander in my head, but over all I was content with it. We moved the whole thing outside just about the time trick-or-treaters started to arrive.

It was interesting to hear some of the comments before they knocked on the door. Probably 50% of the people thought the green pumpkin had thrown up. The other half figured out that one pumpkin was suppose to be eating the other pumpkin.
It was especially rewarding to hear the small kids gasp when they figured it out. I wonder if any kids grasped the concept of cannibalism for the first time last night? My highest compliment was from a parent who was explaining it to someone else on the other side of the door. “That right thar is a murder’n pumpkin! That’s what’s going on.”

A murdering pumpkin. High praise indeed. That’ll do pumpkins, that’ll do.

(Clicky for larger)

Trick or Treat?

Happy Halloween! I’ve made a few small concessions to the holiday. One, I’m wearing my Edward Gorey tie. Two, after my afternoon class I’m taking an hour or so of vacation time to go home and carve a couple of pumpkins. Well actually a pumpkin and a gourd. It was a tough year for pumpkins. Hopefully, I’ll have some pumpkin photos to post tomorrow.

NPR’s Morning Edition had its fun with Halloween this morning too. They featured a predictable piece where they listed off how much money Americans are supposed to spend on the holiday. I guess they wanted to do something scary in honor of the holiday so they added on a sensational craptastic stinger to the piece. They said you might want to avoid Peeps marshmallow candies this year because this was the first year they were manufactured in China. Evidently a country of origin is enough to guarantee the candy is chocked full of poison. Are they made by a company that’s had safety issues in the past? Is it the only candy manufactured in China? Is it fear mongering for sensational effect? NPR didn’t bother to tell me. Take a listen, it truly awful “reporting.”

Final thought for the morning (I’m almost done with my cup of coffee). I saw this article yesterday that I find intriguing. Basically a college professor got tired of students using Wikipedia as a source for term papers and instead decided to make her students research and write a Wikipedia entry. The students had to write entries on globalization and sustainable development. Most of what the students submitted got edited out of Wikipedia. There has been some grumbling that forcing students to contribute will just serve to water down Wikipedia and writing a Wiki entry should not be substituted for the experience of writing and honest-to-god research paper. I believe the criticism is valid and mostly correct. I don’t see the benefit of Wikipedia defending itself from a couple of thousand entries rehashing Shakespeare ever few months. However, there is another dimension to the Wikipedia assignment.

As an undergraduate I hated course work. Not because it was hard or it was boring. What often bothered me was the effort I put into the project was only rewarded with a grade. Basically it’s a hoop you’re jumping through. After the professor took a cursory glance at the project it would be discarded and never looked at again. That’s hardly a motivational scenario. I like the aspect of creating something that might serve a purpose past the immediate need to secure a grade. I would like to think that a few of the students might have worked on their Wikipedia entries harder because they liked the idea that their contribution could endure. I also think it’s instructive that their work was edited out of Wikipedia if it didn’t meet that scholarly body of work’s lofty standards (sarcasm). It’s important to learn that effort does not necessarily equal quality.

Whoops, time to leave the building. It’s fire drill time.

Scotland Or Bust

As those of you who read Dawn’s blog may know, we’re finally going on the Scottish vacation we’ve been talking about for the last few years. Or rather, late next year we’ll be going on our Scottish vacation. Dawn surprised me a couple of weeks ago by coming down to my office and informing me that she’d bought tickets to see Hamlet. I was thrilled, I love Hamlet. Then she informed me that it would be performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon which is freaking amazing. Add in the fact that David Tennant (the current Dr. Who or Barty Crouch Jr for those of you who track your British actors via Harry Potter movies) is playing Hamlet and Patrick Stewart is Claudius and it just keeps getting better. I’m super excited.

Another nice feature of the play is we finally have a date to plan our vacation around, it no longer is this nebulous event that we’d like to do someday. Since we’ll already be in England we might as well hop over to Scotland. Once in Scotland we might as well visit Islay, the home of our favorite scotch distilleries. We both want to visit Iceland so why not tag that island on the way home? If you fly Icelandair to/from Europe you can arrange for a layover for a day or two in Iceland as part of the trip. This far out from the actual trip our plans are pretty ambitious. We’ve roughed out the amount of time we’d want to spend at each destination and the trip will be a bit longer than two weeks. Vacation time isn’t a problem for us, but we’ll have to see how many of the financial and logistical hurdles we can clear.

Trust me, logistical hurdles abound. I’m glad we’re starting to plan a year in advance because this trip is going to be complicated. Since we’re essentially island hopping; getting around isn’t going to be easy. It will probably involve plane, train, bus, and/or ferry in addition to a rent-a-car. I know I don’t like travel by boat so I’ve been pushing to limit the amount of ferry travel. Dawn says that she’s read that the ferry ride from Edinburgh to Islay is two hours long. That sounds like two hours of hell to me. The fact that it’s traditional to eat fish whist on the ferry is of little comfort…but the prospect seems to excite Dawn.

We found out that you can take a puddle jumper plane over to Islay. It’s a bit more expensive and your travel times are more limited…but that’s what I’m opting for. I’m not a big fan of heights and I have a feeling that riding in a puddle jumper may be a terrifying experience, but the trip will be completed in half-an-hour. That’s a 75% reduction in suffering the way I see it. Dawn insists that we take the ferry back though…so it’s really only a 37.5% reduction to suffering over the round trip.

Still, all the boats and puddle jumpers will be worth it to stay a couple of days on Islay. There are eight active (soon to be nine) scotch distilleries on the island and they’re all pretty close together. The islands industry is whisky making followed by tourism for bird watching. It sounds like a beautiful place to drink. Our plan it to stay at little B&B’s and fill our days with distillery tours, pubs, and sightseeing. I get relaxed just thinking about how relaxing it’s going to be.