God Hates Signs

westboro baptist church and me
Originally uploaded by Burstein!

Mmm, absurdist goodness. Way to get in there and shake things up.

noodle bar yums

In spite of my new austerity plan, I ate out last night. I am pleased to report I've found a new (to me) gem: Viet Noodle Bar. The friend of a friend picked it. Lovely minimalist interior, simple excellent menu. We got a selection of appetizers, all of which were delicious. For an entree, I got Vegetarian Soyskin noodle, which was terrific. We brought our own wine. Here's their minimalist website: vietnoodlebar.com

Promoting insight

This article suggests, among other things, that insight requires focus
followed by relaxation. Many of my fellow graduate students have
trouble falling asleep, a potential time for new insights. We use
various drugs and distractions to get to sleep. It seems that this is
yet another case of our desire for progress actually impeding it.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/28/080728fa_fact_lehrer

---
Sent from a teeny keyboard; please excuse typos.

Black kids @ the Mayan

Pop quiz: Name three Harlequin romance book categories

Harlequin Medical Romance
Harlequin NASCAR
Harlequin Superromance

(see here for more answers)

Luckily Harlequin has guidelines for each of its lines, so the writer can tune her/his prose. For example:

In Harlequin Historical UNDONE we are looking for a high level of sensuality that flows naturally out of the plotline. There should be a strong emotional basis to the heightened attraction—it's vital the reader can believe in the intense emotion driving the characters as their relationship develops. These stories should be hot, sexy and subtly explicit without the lovemaking being vulgar or gratuitous.

Whether you choose a dark and devilishly sexy Regency rake caught in a compromising situation with a headstrong miss, or a courageous Saxon lady held captive by a powerful Norman warrior, your characters should be fully fleshed out and should be the main focus of the story.

The wikipedia entry on "Romance novel" is also quite interesting.

Frontier Baroque

As Alistair Cooke observed, “Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax and because, when they attempt eloquence, they do tend to spout a kind of Frontier Baroque.”

As quoted by Maureen Dowd, 10/5/08

Don't ask

Get flight status notification, unless late or delayed

Apparently, on the Southwest Airlines website, you can't get flight information notifications unless you sign up well before the flight is scheduled to leave. If you find out the flight is delayed, and then decide you want to be notified, you get this piece of broken logic:

The flight information that you entered is for a flight that has either already arrived or departed, or the notification time that you selected is too close to the arrival or departure time.

Any programmer would advise against the ambiguity introduced by those "OR" statements.

Does it mean you can't request notification of arrival time after the plane has departed?

New Nantucket Nectar bottle shape

New Nantucket Nectar bottle shape
Originally uploaded by manducasexta

I'm so sad to see this - I loved the big fat Nantucket Nectar bottle shape (left) and the printed letters on it, the old-fashioned shape and the non-rectangular label. Now it's the same smooth bottle you see everywhere.

Carhenge

Carhenge
Originally uploaded by yarnzombie

This is on my "places to go" list.

Dinosaur eats/humps dog?

Dinner

Pork cutlets (from tenderloin, dredged in flour, egg, and fresh white bread crumbs)
Mashed potatoes (toasted 30 cloves of garlic on the stove top, used 2 cups 1/2 & 1/2; 2 sticks butter, 5 oz alouette cheese)
Salad (spinach, dried cranberries, candied pecans, goat cheese, some vinaigrette dressing)

Outcome: one guest, AS, said she liked the food so much she was "feeling romantic about it."

Yay.

Paddling the Long Beach canals

Kayaking in the canals of the Naples neighborhood of Long Beach (actually quite lovely in spite of Long Beach being the second busiest port in the United States), kc and I saw something I haven't seen before: people paddling while standing up on big floaty surfboards. Apparently it's a surfing thing, but these folks were just leisurely kicking around the canals. I didn't really get it - it seems like fun for waves, but very un-ergonomic for calm water.

Photos (admittedly not of stand-up paddlers) clockwise from top right by flickr users kris247, Mr Babyman, kris247 and Binary LA.

Gingergrass

In more food news, I went to Gingergrass on Sunday night. I've heard mixed things about it, but I was totally sold. Great company helped. I had the special shrimp and coconut, partially split with kc who had the clay pot curry vegetables with tofu. We also got a steamed noodle veggie dumpling, and our food pals got their favorite, the wok-tossed noodles. Yum.

Scoops: wonder-gelato

I finally got to Scoops tonight, after going to a live session of The Moth. The Moth was fun, but the gelato was fantastic. Scoops apparently avoids publicity, so I'll avoid linking to it. I had two flavors: salty caramel and orange chocolate. AR had two flavors too: brown bread and strawberry with poppy seed. Apparently, sometimes they have salt chocolate. Wonderful. The folks behind the counter were very friendly. We chatted a bit with our server, who had some good suggestions. While we were sitting inside eating, they closed up, but not before giving us a big to-go container full of coffee and green tea gelato. We briefly chatted up the guy who comes up with the flavors and makes them all every night (Tai Kim). I felt like I was in the presence of greatness. The flavors were all quite strong, an very fresh. Wonderful.

bacon-chocolate crunch bar: Jonathan Gold says yes

Photo by Ringo H.W. Chiu / For The [LA]Times

J. Gold article

Electronic innards, artistically arranged

Lovely, by brittnybadger

"Sortation:" what's wrong with a gerund?

This is what FedEx calls their sorting centers for their SmartPost service. If it's good enough for William Safire (here), it should be good enough for me. Unfortunately, it isn't.

Olympic-level idiocy

Three gripes about the Olympic opening ceremonies: firstly, the kid scheduled to sing a patriotic Chinese song while the Chinese olympic team entered the stadium was switched out at last minute. The new girl's voice was overdubbed by the earlier singer's. The switch was revealed days later by a musical director of the opening ceremonies. Why the switch? Because:

"The child on camera should be flawless in image, internal feeling and expression."
(from MTV.com, Olympic Lip-Synching Singer Outed Following Opening-Ceremonies Switch)

"The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen."
(from WaPo, Pretty Face and Voice Didn't Belong to Same Girl)

My second gripe concerns the fireworks that were set off in the shape of footsteps advancing toward the ceremony. They were represented on television by computer-generated graphics. The graphics were produced by "a team of hundreds of Chinese visual effects specialists who worked for nearly a year to pull it off." This wasn't revealed until later, neither in China or the US. Until then the clearest indication of what we were watching was Matt Lauer's inarticulate and ridiculous: "This is actually almost animation."
(from NPR, Computer-Enhanced Fireworks)

Lastly, there was a group of kids dressed in traditional clothing from ethnic minority groups were actually from the majority Han group, even though "the official Olympic guide said the children were from the ethnic groups they represented."
(from WSJ, Chinese children in ethnic costume come from Han majority)

On the subject of actual Olympic athletic competition, it turns out that "Live" does not mean what one might expect. On the west coast, NBC is broadcasting the actual events with a "live" graphic, although they took place three hours earlier. NBC's response to questions about this disparity? Two or maybe four times per hour, they add a time stamp to indicate when the event actually was live.
(from Reuters, Olympics, NBC dogged by fakery accusations)

A Prius kind of day

This convertible Prius surprised me this morning. A little web-searching suggests it's made by Newport Convertible Engineering.

Later I was walking in a parking lot, choking on cigarette smoke coming out of a Prius. Hilarious.