I know I said I'd never start a *$@&%! LiveJournal, but...

 

 

www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

... alexiarnps  !

 (meme-sheeping after domichan...)

Chocolate
1. What tastes best covered in chocolate?
The correct answer: more chocolate. Ganache, meet couverture. 

2. Why do you eat chocolate the way you do (or don't)?
A) Because trying to eat chocolate by methods other than the conventional 'food goes into the mouth end of the mammal' process, while perhaps amusing to onlookers, does not achieve satisfactory results. B) Because I've been ruined for 'naive' enjoyment and think of things like 'top notes', 'mouth feel', 'finish', etc. (see no. 3). C) Because milk chocolate is for wimps, and 'white chocolate' is an oxymoron, as it has no cocoa solids in it, and is just sweetened cocoa butter, with up to 90% fairy droppings, elf mucus, and pixie vomit; hearing somebody say the words 'white chocolate mocha' makes my brain, and teeth, hurt.

3. Do you know how chocolate is made?
Once upon a time I worked at Dilettante Chocolates. Not at the Cafe, but down in Seattle's excuse for a 'hood, at 23rd and Cherry, wearing a hair-net and toque, and making threatening gestures at truffles, caramels, toffees, nougats, &c. with giant wooden paddles, copper kettles, and floor-stand Hobart mixers. I gained a good ten pounds while working there. Years later, I can now actually eat chocolate again. However, 'how chocolate is made', with the pods and the crushing and the fermenting and the grading and the roasting and the light crushing and the milling and the liquefaction and the pressing and the blending back together of the press-cake and the liquor and the cocoa butter and the powder, did not actually take place there - 'making chocolates' versus 'making chocolate'.

4. If you knew you would live 5 years longer if you never ate any chocolate again, would you give it up?
Yes, but thankfully, the opposite is probably closer to the truth, with moderation.

5. Have you ever had carob?
Yes, however, since you asked that question, I am no longer speaking to you. 

"Attempting to copy the success that rival Apple Inc. has enjoyed with its chain of retail stores, Microsoft Corp. said it too will open a chain of stores featuring its products."

Dude. So I was all up in the Microsoft Store, and I was standing next to the eight-foot-tall talking replica of that "What are you trying to do?" googly-eyed paper clip from Excel, and I couldn't decide whether to pick up a multi-user license of the new version of Access, or a brown Zune. I know, like, a total dilemma, right? So I bought BOTH! I'm gonna go stick the "Use Genuine Microsoft Software" stickers on the back window of my car now, 'cause my Windows Experience Index is, like, totally at a 3.3 right now. Peace, brah! See ya at the Songsmith party tomorrow!

Fate and/or evolution takes its sweet, sweet revenge on those horribly vapid, hoochie-skank, fake-bling-chicken-head, paris-hilton-idolizing, consumer-whore-sheep 'beige bimbos' parading around in their filthy "Ugg Boots":  

Ugg boots may cause serious foot problems that may require corrective surgery if you don't get corrective orthotics, like, two years ago when they were 'cool' to stupid people.

Next, the adverse health effects of 'muffin tops', thong straps visible above the waistline of ill-fitting white jeans, those giant overinflated "Michelin Man" poofy white ho-bag jackets with fur hood linings, and oversized "Paris" sunglasses.

Natural selection, baby. Natural selection.

1. Dice
2. Shuffled playing cards
3. Flipping a coin
4. I Ching yarrow stalks
5. Roulette wheels
6. Thermal noise in Zener diodes
7. Running a hash function against a frame of a video stream from an unpredictable source, such as footage of a lava lamp
8. Numbers derived from the photoelectric effect
9. The drawing of lots, such as pottery shards or straws
10. In the early 1950s the RAND Corporation built an "electronic roulette wheel" that generated random numbers using a random frequency pulse source of about 100,000 pulses per second gated once per second with a constant frequency pulse and fed into a 5-bit binary counter. Twenty of the 32 possible counter values were mapped onto the 10 decimal digits and the other 12 counter values were discarded.This pioneering machine was one of the first electronic hardware random number generators. 
11. Observing atomic decay using a radiation counter
12. Shot noise, a quantom mechanical noise source in electronic circuits
13. Photons traveling through a semi-transparent mirror
14. Atmospheric noise, detected through a radio receiver connected to a PC
15. Some forms of clock drift
16. The output of the hardware random number generator (noise source) built into the SID chip on the original Commodore 64
17. A gravity pick machine
18. A manually-operated 'bingo cage'
19. "Air mix" machines, such as those used in Lotto drawings
20. Drawing numbered raffle tickets from a hat
21. A random number table
22. ERNIE, the machine that picks the winners of the UK "Premium Bond" lottery
23. A simple random sample to be used in a statistical sampling of a population.
24. A lack of order, purpose, cause, or probability.
25. "Monte Carlo Methods" used by nuclear weapons researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s. 

So I'm Googling for a bit of non sequitur trivia about David Bowie (pretend you're surprised), and at the very moment I hit 'return', Modern Love comes on KEXP, which typically doesn't play things like Modern Love. Many miles away, there's a shadow on a door of a cottage by the shore of a dark Scottish lake. Or...we just notice and remember such random coincidences, and ignore the non-coincidences, and to pretend otherwise is pretentiousness and self-importance on a level only Sting singing about Jung could appreciate. I suspect the latter.

who purrs while you're flight-testing the new baby sling carrier.

 

What I imagine stroppy_baggage is doing right now:



What I imagine attictroll, krautboy, and morthael are working on at the same time:



Favorite 2008 Movies that I actually saw in the theater:

Slumdog Millionaire
The Band's Visit
Burn After Reading
Kung-Fu Panda
Wall-E

Movies I didn't make it to in 2008 but suspect would have made the list if I had:

Synecdoche, New York
Let the Right One In

Absolute worst of the worst:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Raping A Childhood Cinematic Memory and the Audience Simultaneously

Albums of the year:

Did I actually buy any CDs or full albums on iTunes this year? I can't remember. That's not a good sign. I think everything "new" I've been listening to was from 2007. I've been meaning to pick up, but still haven't gotten around to picking up, the most recent (which is not very recent) Faint, Portishead, and Niyaz albums, for example. Favorite 2008 song at the moment is the MIA "Paper Planes" remix on the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.

Culinary Tip-of-the-Hats of the year:

Making things out of stuff that grew in the back yard. Leeks, potatoes, kale, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, spherical 'persian' zucchinis, carrots, two kinds of snap peas / pea pods, currants, a good dozen or more different herbs, and some other stuff I'm probably forgetting.
Boxing Day clearance sale on Le Creuset in which we replaced the last of the non-Le Creuset pots 'n pans in the kitchen.
Le Creuset now has a line of nonstick omelette pans, and one of them is now mine.
The wonder of Kitchen Aid, Cuisinart, and immersion blenders to make my arms less tired.
"Having" to do most of the cooking for most of this year (including doing much of it outside to keep cooking smells out of the house during Morningsicknesspocalypse 2008) and learning stuff along the way.
The 7-11 on the corner carries, for some reason, a variety of organic dairy products including milk and eggs, as well as emergency produce like potatoes, onions, avocados, and mangoes (!)
The giant roasting pan containing a whole 24 pound turkey fits in the new fridge.

Culinary Wags-of-the-Finger of the year:

Still working on that whole "it really does keep cooking after you take it off of / out of the heat, so you need to trust that it will get "done" and pull it out of the oven / off the stove NOW" thing, resulting in, for example, a very "done" pizza last night.
Weird cold temperature / rain / aborted midsummer weather lameness this year meant that the pollen got rained off of my first corn-growing attempt and wind pollinating didn't happen (I'm very good at making cornstalks, though!), grape vines never got around to making any actual grapes, etc., and some late-season things (spinach and a couple beans) never really did anything.
All those fancy Le Creuset cast iron and stoneware goodies are freakin' heavy.
I really need to get around to that whole "installing a range hood" thing. Oy! It's not so much the heat, as it is the humidity!
The giant roasting pan containing a whole 24 pound turkey fits in the new fridge.

Out-of-towns of the year:

Tokyo, Kyoto, and some other places in Japan
San Fran in the springtime
occasional Portland road trips
occasional in-Washington road trips, like going to the pumpkin patch with young Miss P or going to the Gorge for Sasquatch (but $200 speeding ticket going from The Gorge to the nearest convenience store? Boo!)

Life Events of the year:

Having a small one on the way (two weeks!) and having newfound appreciations of how lucky I am to be with Alexia and how much I adore her, what's really really important, and what's really not (material clutter/stuff, little things that used to annoy me but aren't worth the attention lately).
We have really awesome friends.
Way too many people Alexia and I knew died in their prime this year and last.

"News" events of the year:

Obama winning, McCain and Rossi losing. (yay!)
The nastiness and dishonesty of the national elections (McCain, Palin, Clinton) and a level of nastiness and dishonesty we haven't seen in local elections (Rossi, Reichert). (boo!)
Continued nastiness in the Middle East. (boo!)
The economy, the bailout, the other bailout, the other-other bailout, requests for other-other-other bailouts, the housing market, the job market, the oil market, financial scandals (boo!)
Political scandals and near-scandals (boo!)
Joe Lieberman (boo!)
Tim Eyeman (boo!)
Bush, Cheney, et al, continuing to f*#% up the war(s), the economy, the Constitution, etc., etc., (boo!) and lie about it (double boo!)
...but he'll be gone soon (yay!)
Seattle's non-handling (it didn't even qualify as "mishandling", because that would have implied an attempt at doing something) of Snowpocalypse '08, including roads, and the three or four weeks of garbage, recycling, and yard waste that still hadn't been picked up as of this morning. (boo!)
Still having to hear about "Alaskan Way Viaduct Options". Just pick something, already! Aren't we in exactly the same place as we were a year ago? Jeez! Idiots! (we're deliberating on proposals for eight different kinds of above-ground, below-ground, and hybrid "boo"!)
Light rail is finally supposed to be running next year (yay! We're so "world class city" that in six months, we'll be where Portland was circa 1986! Woohoo!)
The Sonics leave Seattle (not that I follow sports or ever went to a game, but come on! Another "wannabe world class city" FAIL. boo!)
Newspapers on the verge of succumbing to Death's sweet embrace (yay? boo?) and the Seattle Times laying off music, book, art, and theatre critics (boo!). Woohoo, you're going to review ONE book a week now?
People voting their ignorance(s) and fears (Prop 8 and other anti-gay measures around the country, the whipped-into-a-lather racism in the crowds at Sarah Palin rallies, etc.) (boo!)

Least Welcome Wake-Up Call of the Year:

Being awoken by a "SSSSSSSSSS!!!" sound and Alexia prodding me with a "WTF is that noise" to wade into a kitchen puddle cluster#$%* of epic proportions the morning after "installing" the water line to the icemaker, followed by consulting The Interwebs (Interwebs: "install the compression fitting according to the instructions that came with the kit". Instructions That Came With The Kit: "C) Here is a blurry line drawing of a compression fitting. We will not tell you anything about how to put it together, what properties of physics are supposed to keep it put together, or mention anything about shoving the tube into the end as far as it will go being the most important part of not waking you up at four in the morning to an inch of water on the floor of your kitchen working its way towards the hardwood in the living room".) This would have been hilarious if it had been A) on a sitcom B) happening to someone else, and C) not happening at four in the morning.