Best Pulp Fiction audio mashup, ever.
Just brilliant.
On my way home from the gym about an hour ago, I spotted a familiar silhouette on the side of the road... I saw it after my headlights had passed over, but some primal part of my brain recognized the dark shape and screamed POSSIBLE FOOD SOURCE. I stopped and backed up a bit, and got out of the car.
The rear running lights on my car shine through 38 year old lenses, so they aren't that bright. But they were bright enough to show that I had found a pretty big turtle with pretty yellow stripes running up and down his legs and neck; his shell was about 9 inches long and he weighed around four pounds. When I picked him up, he tried to pee on me but my daddy reflexes are too well-tuned to get caught with such clumsy reptilian attempts (in contrast, Max has successfully barfed, peed, and crapped on me all in one day).
I decided to take him home instead of leaving him to get run over so far from a water source. I wondered how he had gotten there... Was he an escaped pet? On a walkabout? Or was he the ghost of my dead pink chicken, Pinky, come to say goodbye to daddy once again? (I miss that chicken, godammit!)
I put him on the hood of the Kuj (and he of course peed all over it), then drove home. I showed him to Max, who was kind of impressed, and Nam said I should let it go in the pond in front of our house. So we walked it down to the water's edge, mumbled some quasi-religious well wishes common to those who don't really care about religion but sometimes like to acknowledge there are greater forces than ourselves out there somewhere, and I tossed it into the water.
Then I washed off my hood with a half-empty bottle of water from my gym bag.
If that turtle makes it through the winter, avoids being eaten by the workers who net fish in our pond, and doesn't get run over anytime soon, I'll be really happy.
Just to be clear about what that quote refers to:
...and here's the proof.
Note: The photo gallery above is pretty hardcore piercing/mutilation stuff.
If it seems some of your friends recently stopped posting on Facebook, it might be due to a recent Facebook "upgrade." Here's the fix:
- Go to FB Home Page
- Choose "Live Feed."
- Scroll to the bottom & click " Edit Options."
- You will then see your "News Feed Settings." Change the 250 to 5000, which is Facebook's friend limit, and your feed will work correctly again.
We took Mr. Max out to a friend's birthday party at a nearby restaurant/fishing park (we ate but did not fish), but he got weepy so we came back, took showers, and for daddy it's back to the grind now.
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I hate when I accidentally hit the Insert key when editing in Word.
That is all.
Cosmic Buddha was born in a Mahayana country...
But now lives in a Theravada one.
The differences between the two are apparent in the way they affect the curry: Curries in Mahayana countries are more refined, and curries in Theravada countries have deeper flavor; all are delicious.
Of course, karma can crush you regardless of the flavor you choose.
Presenting the young prince with adorable pre-unko face.
Here is an amusing photo series depicting the kind of houses you can buy around the world for fifty million yen (which is a whopping 547,106 USD at today's rate - endaka is such a fickle bitch!): 5000万円で買える家シリーズ
The locations represented, in order, are:
- Thai
- Bali
- Chicago
- Costa Rica
- Brazil
- Spain
- Tokyo
The problem, of course, is that land value skews the representations far too much. For instance, if you paid half a mil for the Thai house in anywhere but a few select locations, you paid 3 or 4 times more than you should have. Also, Brazil and Indonesia sure have similar architecture and beaches... Still, it's a pretty funny idea until you over-analyze it!
Also:
That is all.
Over at WIRED: YouTube's Bandwidth Bill Is Zero. Welcome to the New Net
What does this mean? It basically means that YouTube as we know and love it wouldn't have been a sustainable business for anybody except Google. Cool.
Last week, while tripping balls on cold medicine and mourning the loss of our pink chicken, I mentioned going on a scouting trip for our upcoming International Camp. Here are some photos which are neither international nor even educational, but I like them anyway. If you're lucky I may even throw in the odd caption.
Khao Yai National Park. Entrance fees for Thais: 20 Baht. For foreigners: 200 Baht. Yet somehow, I got in for the Thai rate (because my coworkers told me to shut up so I could pass as Thai. Thanks, girls!)
The dormitories we were supposed to stay at, but will no longer be able to because our financial dept. didn't make the transfer on time...
This totally reminds me of Full Metal Jacket.. PRIVATE PYLE WHERE R U!!
Can we infer that there's a 500 Baht penalty for leaving food outside the Room?
Snail shoe rack? I forgot to ask what's written in Thai.. but maybe it's better kept as a mystery.
If you haven't watched it yet, do it now! DO IT TODAY! DO IT FOR MOTHER EARTH!!
Yes, I am staying up too late doing a proofreading job.
Best video, ever!
Nujabes FTW!!
I wish I knew who took this photo because I'd ask him to buy me one - that's right, this is the original "run over kitty cat" toy from Japan.
(thx vtran)
It is very possible that no game will ever captivate me like the original Counter-Strike.
(thx vtran for the pic)
So much PE!
I gotta see this!
In a sense, I've been employing a Zatoichi of my own here. The baby in Nam's belly is a week bigger than normal, and Nam feels very heavy, so she goes to get massages 2 or 3 times a week now. I also went last week after my fever, because my shoulders were all bunched up and I couldn't sleep.
The masseuse is a blind man named Moh Ken ("Moh" is an honorific for doctors and other health practitioners). Moh Ken is a funny sorta guy; he doesn't carry a cane sword, but he's strong as hell from massaging people all day. When he massaged my shoulders, I was very aware that he could have snapped my collarbone like a twig any time he felt like it (and yes, this is a funny thing to be thinking during a relaxing massage if you're not at least a little bit strange yourself). Moh Ken carries around this talking pocket watch that tells him time at the press of a button. His senses are fine-tuned enough to tell when people are moving around huim in the confined space of the massage shop.
I watched him change the sheets on the massage table this last time, and it was just fascinating. On one hand, I wanted to offer help (I mean, he was double-sheeting the table with fitted sheets so that he only had to change them after every two customers - pretty cool!), but on the other hand, I knew he would just swat me away with his rough blind samurai hands...
This is really cool; I forgot who sent it to me. Sorry.
Daddy took Max to work today and Max tripped on the marble steps to the main building because there are 1" overhangs on each one... there is no apparent reason to have overhangs on steps, other than to make people (especially children) trip on them. Max hit the lip of the next step with his face and his canine tooth cut the inside of his mouth... Tears! Pain! Much sadness and shock!
Luckily, daddy had milk ready in the car. Milk makes everything better.
Max is gonna love this!
How very, very strange. We've never heard of a child liking this stuff. Bitter melon is called mara in Thai, and nigauri in Japanese (goya in Okinawan). It's much the same in both countries, although we've found the Japanese variant (the one used in famous Okinawan dishes such as chanpuru) to be more bitter and astringent. The Thai version is a paler green than the Japanese ones.
Basically, in all three cultures it is recognized as having beneficial medicinal properties (hypogycemic effect and antioxidant activities). To be quite honest, the Japanese variety was too astringent for my taste; the ones we are getting here in Thailand (about 16 inches long and almost as thick as a baseball bat) are just bitter enough to be interesting but not overpowering. Nam likes the full smack-you-in-the-face flavor of the Japanese version. I've noticed that more girls than guys seem to like bitter melon, in Japan at least.
Nam made a nice soup with pressure-cooked pork short ribs and bitter melon tonight, and Max couldn't stop eating it! We're very happy and amazed that he often chooses sour/bitter foods over sweet ones. Sometimes it's just mimicking behaviour, but other times he's chosen, say, to lick a lemon multiple times even though it makes his face pucker up like an imploded fugu!
P.S. Only the darker outer ring of the melon is eaten, the pale inner flesh and seeds are thrown away.
The Doraemon snare is a $5 cheapie we bought at the bicycle/toy store in Kalasin where we went to buy a baby seat for the nanny's bicycle a month ago. The wooden xylophone is called a ranat (or more specifically, a ranat ek) which was donated to the Yoshida Instrument Collection by Tanaka-sensei, a close friend who is leaving Sarakham at the end of the month. The ranat is tuned by placing wax lumps along the underside of each wooden slab; all of these have fallen off and we need to find somebody who knows how to tune it. Hopefully there will be someone at Nam's university since they have a big music department.
His majesty's wooden throne was obtained separately but it's like the coolest chair I've ever seen. I really want a bigger one since my big ass won't fit in this one.
I've basically dropped off the edge of the world trying to get over this cold. I think I'll be back full swing tomorrow.
In the meantime, I caught this article at the Nation's website about a graduate of our uni who's stirring up some things in education over in Buri Ram: The school that sets its own course
But I felt strangely drawn to reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez as strongly as I usually feel like watching TV after popping heavy duty cold medicine. I realized that reading 100 Years of Solitude in Spanish is quite manageable after having read it in English before (at university), even not having spoken more than a couple lines of Spanish since high school. But maybe I was just fever-hallucinating, who knows?
A kind of trippy thing happened though. After the fever passed this afternoon I went shopping and bought ingredients for chicken soup, including a whole chicken. I bought it at the supermarket so it was cleaned and gutted, but when I tore off the package wrap and took it out of its styrofoam coffin I saw that the head was still attached and tucked under the body. It was Pinky, come to visit Daddy from the grave!
Believe me, it was quite hard to cut off the neck from the body and then the head from the neck with a pair of kitchen scissors. I kept expecting a Pet Sematary scene with dead eyes suddenly popping open and pale beak pecking at my hand... It was soon all done, however, and the soup is delicious.
I was away on a scouting trip for our upcoming International Camp all today and seem to have come down with something nasty, hopefully not the piggy flu.
The worst news today, though, is that a stray dog came into our yard, snapped Pinky's neck, and carried him off. Nam saw the carrying off part and knows which dog it is. Vengeance will be mine...
The Family Guy officially approves of this video.
Quick! Type "why won't" into Google and look at the drop-down suggestions...
I'm not even sure if I ever really felt Max kick or not when holding my hand up to Nam's belly. I thought I did, but I can't be sure. No such thing with the next baby, though - she's in there jumping up and down every day and night. It seems as though specific poses or actions set her off; when Nam lays on one side, the baby gets really active for some reason. Even Max has felt her kick now, which brings me to my second point: It seems that Max now thinks that all even slightly plump women are PREGNANT. This has turned into something of an inside joke, usually ending when the girl asks, "why are you kissing my belly, Max?"
Well, he thinks there's a baby in there!
The view from our front porch.
Give it a try here: http://www.pingtest.net
This is especially useful for people in Thailand trying to stream data or play multi-player games on servers overseas. Try testing your latency to Bangkok, then to a foreign destination. The traffic bottlenecks at the undersea data cables after being squeezed through government filters and ISP proxies, which explains the pitiful latency. It's not quite as bad as DSL being beat by carrier pigeon, but it does explain why Skype and internet radio reception can be so crappy a lot of the time.
This is really interesting: Dark Stalking on Facebook
"But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they've completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you're a friend. They don't show up in search results. They don't show up on friends' lists. You can't send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find.However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can't directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends."
So, even if you think you're cloaked safely in the thermocline like a lurking nuclear sub (by using "safe" Facebook practices), the very act of trying to be invisible can give you away. You cannot be detected directly, but you invariably leave clues just by being there. I keep wondering what form the Great Facebook Meltdown will take, but it's definitely building up to that definitive moment.
When a cluster of bananas appears on a tree, you wait a while and lop off the flower (which grows upside-down from the bottom of the cluster's stalk). This is from the biggest tree in our backyard, of which there are always 5 to 10 in various stages of growth (I cut them down after we harvest the bananas, and new ones sprout up next to the stumps).
A banana flower is a beautiful thing. It looks like something out of a Giger sketch.
This is an awesome song in a Gandalf/Runemaster/Operatic Celt kinda way. This is Kokia.
Well, I'd heard of it before (wpedia link), but never seen it. Didn't see it happen this time, either, but Nam said this glass pot lid (which was thankfully placed inverted on the pot for storage under the sink - this kept glass from flying around) suddenly exploded when I was in the shower half an hour ago.
The most common theories are installation damage (N/A here), thermal expansion or manufacturing impurities. However, another theory states that it might be caused by an "ultrasonic sound wave at a harmonic of the glass' resonant frequency."
Oh.
Robbed by Facebook's enemy in the camp
The more info you give to Facebook, the easier it is for malicious people and apps to exploit you. For your own sake, stop providing info that can be used against you! Facebook has no stake in protecting you because they are not liable, and using that very info makes them money.
