Enigma

Let me introduce you to The Enigma Puzzle. It is fun and challenging. And addictive. When I should be working, I can sit there for hours just staring at the screen trying to figure out what the hell this is supposed to be about. I am up to level 28. [Update: Returned to the puzzle and pushed on to level 31.] I don't know how long I can keep it up, it's exhausting. And very clever. Anyway, these are the "problems" I've been having. And solving.

This week's Lost was like an episode of Alfred Hitchcock or Ray Bradbury. It had nothing to do with the island at all, nor was it in the style of the show. Just took some characters that were recently introduced apparently solely for the purpose of killing them off, as is common on much cheesier shows. Maybe the don't have enough material to keep the actual story going...

Rights news

Backed up with material after that strike. Have to start with animal rights news:

• Burger King's decision to start buying cage-free eggs, pigs not kept in crates, and to prefer gas-killed birds. They're only buying a tiny amount of such less cruel products now, but it should cause more farms to start making these improvements and push the industry in a better direction. An amazing amazing thing, with animals spending their whole lives in spaces too small to stretch a limb or take a step, and often being drowned in tanks of scalding water. Still, don't think it's humane to eat at Burger King. Even if they got 100% of their products in this way, the animals are still horribly abused, just less so.
• This comes on the heels of Wolfgang Puck's announcement that they are entirely foregoing factory farmed animal products! Way better than Burger King, but obviously Burger King affects a far larger segment of the market.
  
• The sons of women who eat meat while pregnant have 25% lower sperm counts. [Source] They're not sure why, they suspect it's the hormones. So, for Cody and Jake: watch out ladies!
• For the ladies: Eating meat causes endometrial cancer. (Fyi, that's the uterus.) [Source]
  

What about the rights of Americans? NY Times on the FBI:

Two weeks ago, a blistering inspector general's report revealed widespread violations of the use of "national security" and "exigent circumstances" letters, which allow FBI agents to collect phone, e-mail, and internet records from telecommunications companies without review by a judge. The problems included failing to document relevant evidence, claiming emergencies that did not exist, and failing to show that phone records requests were connected to authorized investigations.

Now they acknowledge a separate matter, that FBI agents repeatedly provided inaccurate information to win secret court approval of surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases. The errors ranged from innocuous lapses, such as the wrong description of family relationships, to more serious problems, such as citing information from informants who were no longer active, officials said.

If you want the material, you've gotta give feedback. At least when I beg for it, ignoring me even then is just mean.

Puzzles (with strawberries)

I decided to be in a strawberry mood, so I cooked. I made strawberry chicken and strawberry pancakes, both new vegan recipes from VegCooking.com. Both were yummy! I was wondering about strawberries and chicken, which struck me as a strange combination, but it works. I always figured you need egg for pancakes, but now I wonder what the egg is for.
I didn't use any kind of egg replacer and they came out great, no different from regular pancakes. My personal lesson is: you can never have too many strawberries! Next time, more...

Alright, I'm a comment-whore, so here's another puzzle that any of you could try: A genie promises to grant you one wish, but only one, and gives you a day to think it over. Now, you are so content that you don't want anything, so you see what your family members want. Your wife is infertile, and tells you to wish for a child. Your mother is blind, and tells you to wish for her to be able to see again. Your father is poor, and tells you to wish for great wealth. What a sticky situation, if you ask for one of these the rest of your family will hate you. What should you wish for that will give everyone what they want? [Warning: the answer is posted in the comments.]

If you're more mathematically minded, you might consider the concert in which the ticket seller was asking for people's birthday, promising that the first person who's birthday is a repeat of someone earlier in line will get their tickets free. Where in line should you stand to maximize your chance of free tickets? I calculated the probabilities for each spot, but had to use a computer to do that. You can figure it out without number-crunching the actual probabilities (and without computer assitance), so don't wimp out like I did.

For those who don't want to think, look at this spiral. No, wait, they're concentric circles! Follow one circle all the way around and you'll see it's a circle. Cool...

Demetri Martin, who I've praised before, was hilarious on The Daily Show the other night (click on "Viacom vs. YouTube").

Hamsters

No one commented on my blog all week. Hmph! What do you want from me, more puzzles? I'm telling you, you guys better watch out when you go to sleep...

Baby Got Back

Notice my latest blog innovation: I added Google talk to the sidebar, so even if you don't have Gmail or MSN Messenger you can still IM me. Hurrah.

Even though no one commented on the Jonathan Coulton songs I linked to, I've been listening to a lot of his stuff, and it seems like every day a different one is stuck in my head. Today, it's his folk cover of "Baby Got Back", which is so strange because the words, well, these base and explicit lines are not the kinds of things I would ever say or think, but the Coulton version is just so catchy, which I guess is why it's funny. If you want to hear it, go ahead, because I'm showing off more blog technology by embedding it. I'm curious to hear his a cappella version with the Whiffenpoofs, that prestigious Yale singing group. Ah, I miss good a cappella (for example: http://tinyurl.com/26p2na). And yes, apparently we went to Yale at the same time. And he's good friends with John Hodgman since his days back at Yale -- you know, the PC guy in the Mac/PC ads as well as regularly appearing on the Daily Show. I think I made friends with the wrong people back then...

On-the-job humor

Waldorf=Astoria

Today is the first day of spring, the vernal equinox, when the sun is over the equator, and day and night are equal length. In Venezuela, it is traditional for people to wear pumpkins on their heads, and poke each other with long 7-foot sticks. In Myanmar, people make offerings to the gods by writing down all the bad jokes they can think of and burning them in clay pots, and afterwards the ashes are placed in rivers to wash away the bad luck. Among the Zulu-speaking peoples of South Africa, it is tradition to wear squeaky shoes to symbolize spring's walking in, but today many people wear those shoes that light up or the iPod shoe. It's all quite fascinating, really, how much tradition is built around the changing seasons. Now, I know I made up all of these fake foreign traditions, but that's my own tradition for the vernal equinox, to be utterly ridiculous. Actually, it's my tradition on many other days too. So feel free to write this paragraph down and burn it Myanmar-style.

Yesterday I went to visit the Waldorf=Astoria. Yes, it looks like "Waldorf equals Astoria", but in fact it's so upscale that they have to use a double hyphen. You can tell it's fancy by the pretentious music. The Waldorf=Astoria featured prominently in the movie Serendipity, and since it was a New York landmark I'd never been to, I figured I'd check it out. It was very nice. Certainly hotel style, but extremely art deco, which made it very cool. If there was ever a New York architectural style, art deco is it. (Yeah, you heard me Miami!) The hotel was full of cool art deco details. I went up to the Starlight Roof, very fancy with an engraved art-deco ceiling.

Josh is Lord

Did you know that Jesus' name was "Joshua"? Exact same spelling in the Hebrew/Aramaic (יהושוע), but it got changed to "Jesus" as it was transliterated into Greek (Ίησους), then Latin (Iesus), then English. So, just remember, Josh loves you. Praise Josh! What would Josh do?

Sounds so funny, knowing that. But it was a common name back then, and still is now (it's the 3rd most common baby name for boys--the #1 name, by the way, is Jacob and has been since 1999; props to my neph as trend-setter).

Really, I'm not joshing!

Serendipity

After writing yesterday's post I went and saw the movie Serendipity on YouTube. It was good. And you may remember from my previous posting on romantic movies, I couldn't think of any good romances -- the best ones I could come up with were odd or atypical ones. So, admittedly the competition is almost non-existent, but this is the best one I've seen, for whatever that's worth. And not just because it has John Cusack -- you may be familliar with my theory that everyone likes John Cusack -- but also for the unfortunate reason that it is all based on the idea that there is some soulmate out there for you and the universe will bring you together, if you let it, an extremely romantic idea that everyone so wishes were true but, of course, is complete fantasy. Still, like all good fantasies, it is an escapist joy to watch.

The movie had serious downsides, though, in addition to being very light and simple. First, the two people hardly know each other -- they spent just a couple of hours together -- and that is supposed to be love? I can't buy it, this is an illusion of love. When you get to know a person, they are never the same thing as you originally thought, the illusion is always shattered. This is a serious complaint I have about most romantic movies, but I can suspend that disbelief in this movie world where the universe is telling them they are right for each other, that it is destiny, so ok, trust the universe.

The more serious problem, that really disturbs me, is that both characters are attached. When they first meet, they both are in relationships. How can they so betray their significant others by entertaining the pursuit of an attractive stranger? That just seems a bit evil. And of course, when they're both *engaged* to other people, how can they keep chasing this... so many movies do this, where a person is about to marry the "wrong" person until the right person comes along and saves them, it's really so ridiculously frequent that it's a cliché and I really wonder what allure such a storyline has, are there a lot of people engaged but unsatisfied and wishing that their true match would come? ...These are not happy endings. Another person is left utterly crushed, broken-hearted -- and off screen. The movies don't show that, because it would be so inconvenient. It is the glorification of infidelity. That eats at me when I see such movies, including this one.

I haven't given anything away that you don't learn in the first 15 minutes, don't worry.

That said, it's a good movie, with the feeling of the magic of watching the snow gently fall around you, surrounded by the rising grandeur of New York City, as you lay down face-up and watch the world slowly drift and flutter lightly in the gentle wind.

World's most expensive ice cream

I just got a raise. And a rent increase. So it all balances out. Sigh.

Speaking of which, I don't know if you've seen the news about the NYC pizza place that is offering a $1000 pizza topped with lobster and caviar, but there's also "Golden Opulence", the $1000 ice cream sundae at New York's Serendipity 3 (the place made famous in the John Cusack movie Serendipity and best known for their Frrrozen Hot Chocolate):

Made with "5 scoops of the richest Tahitian vanilla bean ice cream infused with Madagascar vanilla and covered in 23K edible gold leaf, the sundae is drizzled with the world's most expensive chocolate, Amedei Porceleana, and covered with chunks of rare Chuao chocolate, which is from cocoa beans harvested by the Caribbean Sea on Venezuela's coast. The masterpiece is suffused with exotic candied fruits from Paris, gold dragets [Note: what's a draget?!], truffles and Marzipan Cherries. It is topped with a tiny glass bowl of Grand Passion Caviar, an exclusive dessert caviar, made of salt-free American Golden caviar, known for its sparkling golden color. It's sweetened and infused with fresh passion fruit, orange and Armagnac. The sundae is served in a baccarat Harcourt crystal goblet with an 18K gold spoon to partake in the indulgence served with a petite mother of pearl spoon and topped with a gilded sugar flower by Ron Ben-Israel."

Anyone want to share one?

Password puzzle

Yes, that chandelier is made of gummy bears. Click on it if you want a closer look.

I continue to post here every day, all for your (very mild, I admit) entertainment and edification. And while I remain locked in my room grinding through animal welfare standards (and doing taxes, that was painful, at least most people get a refund for positive reinforcement!), I have little news from my own world but keep churning away here anyway.

This Al Gore vegetarian thing continues to be all over the news. My supervisor, Matt Prescott (no, he's not Tobey Maguire), was on Headline Prime being interviewed about it, talking about the environmental footprint numbers that I calculated for him.

Here's a little puzzle for you:

An employee worked for a high-security institution, and one day she went in to work only to find that she could not log in to her computer terminal. Her password wouldn't work. Then she remembered that the passwords are reset every month for security purposes. So she went to her boss and they had this conversation:
Employee: "Hey boss, my password is out of date."
Boss: "Yes, that's right. The password is different, but if you listen carefully you should be able to figure out the new one: It has the same amount of letters as your old password, but only four of the letters are the same."
Employee: "Thanks boss."
With that, she went and correctly logged into her station.
What was the new password?
BONUS: What was her old password?

Just be warned, the answer is in the comments, so if you want to try your hand at it, don't look!

Re: Your Brains

PETA's letter to Al Gore about global warming and meat has been all over the news. Who'd have thunk it back was I was a lone voice writing my report in my free time in Taiwan? Now Jay Leno is joking about it.

More animal rights news: Two horse slaughter plants in Texas are being shut down. Horse slaughter has been banned for years and years there, but only finally is it being enforced after law suits wound their way through the courts. Only one horse slaughter plant remains in the US, in Illinois.

A friend introduced me to the songs of Jonathan Coulton, an ex-Whiffenpoof who has some pretty good stuff, and whose lyrics are extremely inventive. Check out "All we want to do is eat your brains":

If you like that, you can try "Code Monkey":

I'll give free MP3s for these and other good Coulton songs to anyone who asks nicely.

Animal Rights Victories

I should post victories in animal rights here, since there are a lot of them lately, maybe you're interested. Here are two announcements today:

• Tommy Hilfiger bans fur from his collections (joining Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Kenneth Cole, etc.)
• New Mexico becomes the 49th state to ban cockfighting. (The holdout is Louisiana, though it's also basically legal in Virginia.)

Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk (pronounced Paula-nick), author of Fight Club, used to be a tech journalist until he went to that cultish thing people keep telling me about, the Landmark Forum (which I previously talked about). It got him to quit his job and eventually became a writer.

'I was 26 when I did the seminar, convinced the world was out to burn me at every turn. If it wasn't for that seminar, I wouldn't be a writer. They taught me to see how closed down I was, to face my fears.'

Armed with 'est' awareness, Chuck quit his job in journalism and set about confronting his fears big time. He was so worried about becoming poor and homeless, he went to work as a volunteer in a homeless shelter. 'You get to see how the homeless live, and you think, "Hey, it's not so bad. I could be a homeless person if I had to."' Then he confronted his fear of dying by working in a hospice for the terminally ill. 'By going to hospices, you get to see how people die. You see death unpacked into schedules and details and doctors' visits, and you suddenly think, "Hey, I could do this! This is easy!"'

So I actually found someone who can point to a positive difference it made. Now I'm beginning to wonder...

Palahniuk had quite the family history, perhaps reflected in his dark writing:

When he was 18, Chuck's parents took him aside and told him the truth about his grandparents. 'My father was four in 1943 when he hid under the bed as his parents fought and his 12 brothers and sisters ran into the woods. Then his mother was dead, and his father stomped around the house looking for him, calling for him, still carrying the shotgun.'

In the summer of 1999, when Fight Club was turned into a critically acclaimed film starring Brad Pitt, Chuck learnt that the ex-husband of a woman his father had just begun dating murdered them both and burned their bodies.

Craziness. Honestly, my life is a blissful bubble of peace and rainbows compared to what other people have.

What do you think of me as a pharmaceuticals salesman?

Wheelbarrow

I tried boiling the nopal before stir-frying it, as Ms. Magnolia suggested, and which apparently is the common way to do it. They came out tasting very much like boiled string beans. There was still a hint of the tangy-sweet, but it was no longer bold.

I've been learning to play Happy Phantom on the piano. It is really hard, lots of chords jumping about quickly, and the rhythms are so fast and complex that I could not figure them out from the score, I resorted to listening to Tori and trying to imitate. Unfortunately, she bangs the entire piano, including notes higher than my keyboard goes and notes lower than my keyboard goes.

I'm trying to think of a way in which this post isn't oppressively boring. But I've been really oppressed by work lately, hadn't left home in a week(!) until this evening, when I resolved to go work in a Starbucks. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. I am that wheelbarrow.

Hoffnungslos :(

Я siento 有一點 déprimé. למה 私は tiel defective? Hoffnungslos.

Andy Richter

What ever happened to that short-lived show "Andy Richter Controls the Universe"? It was really funny, but apparently not enough people thought so. I'm reminded of it because he has a new show, "Andy Barker, PI", which barely even registers as a comedy. Yawn.

Yesterday I did a half-hour interview on KAFM in Colorado. It went well enough.

粽子

Today I steamed zongzi (粽子, pronounced DZONG-dzuh). I've tried them on a number of occasions, and they were always terrible, simply inedible. But this one, after steaming it, untying it, removing the huge leaves wrapping the rice and filling, well, it was so yummy! Delicious! Zongzi get a thumbs-up from me -- and as the traditional food of the Dragon Boat Festival, they now give boatless people like me a way to celebrate.

Comfort Women

You may have heard about Japan's PM Abe denying that Japan forced women into prostitution for soldiers during World War II. I can't tell you how furious this makes me. I hate Japan.

Stock market still crashing. It hurts to lose so much money...

Nopal

Someone told me my title font was weird, so I made it more cute, now that the Spring Festival is over.

One of my New Year's resolutions was to cook a new vegetable, and I chose the nopal, because it is a cactus, and how cool is that? The first serious downside was quickly apparent. Getting rid of those needles was a real pain. I tried to do it with a peeler, but that cactus just didn't take to a peeler well. I finally got them all cut out, but it took forever. After doing one nopal, I'd had enough.

I didn't have the right ingredients for any of the southwestern-style recipes I was looking at, so I decided to just wing it, always a dangerous thing for me. And, the flavors didn't match right. However, the nopal was good! It was sweet and tangy, if you'd told me it was a fruit I would have believed you. The flavor is rather too strong to just eat it straight, but in a dish it was the best part. Yummy bursts of flavor.

You can't really cook them much, or they slime up like okra. But I need to find some good nopal recipes, because this veggie needs to be part of my repertoire. Plus, serving cactus is just intrinsically fun.

Fast Car

Happy Lantern Festival. Finally, you can sweep your house. It's been getting dusty.

I've been playing a lot of guitar lately. I tried playing Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, and the strange thing was, whenever I tried singing the lyrics, my voice started wavering and cracking so that I could hardly sing, and my eyes welled up with tears. This was strange because I wasn't feeling anything sad, or anything emotional. It was a bizarre response my body had that was completely disconnected from my mind. I would just try singing through it, but it would keep happening whenever, and only when, I was singing the verses. It was almost as if some other person was getting completely broken up and crying but they were channeling my body at the time. An utterly strange experience.

At first my reaction was: "What's going on? Kind of cool that things like this can happen!" Then it started becoming: "Enough already, I'm trying to get through the song. What the hell?" At no point did I feel I was empathizing with the plight of the poor.

I'll go off and do other things, hours later think to myself, let me practice that one chord change again, and like on cue... actually I guess it's kind of a neat trick. If you visit, let me try to play it for you to see if it will happen.

Does it mean that my subconsciousness was feeling choked up but I wasn't? Or, on some subconscious level the song was resonating with something emotional to me that is somehow repressed -- my fear of violating speed limit laws perhaps? Honestly, I never cry, even when truly sad things happen, so this is just mystifying.

Don't block it out

Tonight is Purim! Happy Purim!

What do you think of this ad? Effective?

Stock market fell. Lost $2000. Damn.

Here's a coupon for a free veggie burger at Johnny Rockets. This is the best veggie burger in all existence.

Google maps has been improved. I've noticed the maps fill the screen, they include traffic info, subway stops, and at least in downtown NYC they have each building individually outlined. But MSN's local.live.com still lets you zoom in way close for a bird's eye view, and look at those objects from all sides. For example, here's where I live, with the Georgian columns in front of the door:
Here's where my family lives:

Here's where my sister lives (the townhouse in the middle):

Here's PETA headquarters, with lots of windows and right on the water, a pretty view:

And here's the statue of liberty:

3D

I remember when I went to Disney world two years back and saw the 3D movies and thought... wow! This is just what all the science fiction books predict we'll be watching in the future, and here it is. And, if they can make movies in 3D, then why are we still watching movies on a flat screen? Why why why?

(And I don't mean that silly red-blue glasses stuff they had in the 80s, these Disney movies looked like it was really there in front of you!)

Well, it's good to know that someone is working on it. James Cameron, who hasn't made a feature film since Titanic, is working on a movie called Avatar -- no relation to the airbender cartoon which is separately being made into a live-action movie by Paramount. Cameron's Avatar, coming out in 2009, will not only be in 3D, but will also be 60% computer generated, so much that you shouldn't be able to tell what's real and what's special effect. Now, I know that something so incredibly awesome couldn't possibly live up to expectation. In fact, Cameron is in the news right now for his documentary about the supposed finding of the tomb of Jesus with wife and son, so I knew this guy is good at hype. Still, it's about time that we have real 3D movies. In fact, thanks to Cameron, Gwen Stefani is making a 3D video for her song "Wind it Up". I'm not a big fan of hers, but this is surely just the beginning...

Awesome, dude.

Purimshiaojie

Of all the various things I post about, it's the high-calorie food blurb that spurred people's comments. I just don't understand, what is it you people want?!

This weekend is Purim! Yay, hamantaschen! And the Lantern Festival! Yay, tangyuan! Challenge to you: triangular poppy-seed-filled balls of glutinous rice. The gauntlet is thrown. And by gauntlet, I mean the glove, not the obstacle course of death.

My global warming report lives on, now printed in an Australian publication called the Vegan Voice. Also, I will be interviewed on a Colorado radio station about the subject next week.

Sorry for the boring posts of late, I can't be "on" 100% of the time.