Star Power
Monday, July 06, 2009
Before leaving for Japan, I made a trip to Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, to attend "friends and family day" with my old coworker Martin. The new fusion machine, NIF, had just opened the day before, and people gathered there to see it amongst other attractions, including nuclear bomb shells and a couple supercomputers.I learned about NIF in my college fusion class, so I was excited to see it in person -- the 500TW laser beam used to create fusion consumes 100 times more energy than the rest of the world combined during the nanosecond that it runs. The 192 individual beams focus on a 1mm ball of solid hydrogen, taking the fusion material from near-absolute zero to 100million degrees Celsius in a few nanoseconds.
Also, Martin's mom was a blast. My favorite conversation clip:
Sean: If I were Buddhist, I would be bad so I could get reincarnated as a bird.
Me: Why?
Sean: I want to know how if feels to fly.
Martin's Mom: [looks at Sean, puzzled.] Take some acid.
konichiwa
Monday, June 22, 2009
the keyboards in japan are really hard to type on. so far, i have noticed that everything in japan is cute and efficient (which i love) but that the girls here all wear high heels... even when they are site seeing... in the RAIN (which i do not like). fortunately, the food is delicious, the subways are impressively clean, and overall, japan has been pretty great so far. also, the trains go 180 miles per hour. omg, why don't they have that in california?today, a four year old girl japanese girl who speaks perfect english taught me to count to ten in japanese. it was exciting to learn some words, especially since people keep trying to talk to my asian self in japanese before they realize i'm a dumb tourist and start the how-do-i-get-to-the-train charades, but it was also a low point to learn numbers from a bilingual four year old who can read (read!) in multiple languages. I like to think she'll suffer from some psychological malady for being overly cute and efficient, and that being a dumb mono-lingual american has some unknown benefit. (a big ego?)
The planet is thanking me
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
It is Nothing Week. My recognition of this important (albeit self-invented) seven-day-long holiday includes:Not leaving the apartment
Lots of pajama wearing
(or at least, no bras)
Discount pizza coupons
Swishing teabags violently around tea mugs, to mix in the honey w/o requiring a spoon
Before you call me a slob, think of how many glaciers are murdered each day by teaspoons, and all the precious oxygen that gets used up by exercise. That's right. While you're out there selfishly fending off cancer/heart disease and generally contributing to society -- I'm being lazy, not for my benefit, but for the benefit of the polar bears. You (and those thankless polar bears) should be more grateful.
Losing my race
Wednesday, May 06, 2009
Sometimes when I hang out with Shannon, she'll ask me if I'm familiar with some Chinese phrase. It's not because she's testing me -- some phrases are hard to translate from one language to another, so in retelling conversations she's had in Chinese, she'll ask if I know a phrase to save her the trouble of translating it.What Shannon hasn't realized after several years of knowing me, is that I have never passed the Chinese phrase quiz.
Shannon: Do you know shou-ling hua?
Me: No
Shannon: Oh, it's like a type of disapproval...
(repeat conversation like, 40 times over several years.)
Recently, however, I've been getting in touch with my asian side. Not because I'm suddenly yearning for my own culture, but because Sean is such a white boy and I'm too stubborn to accommodate him. Asian-ness isa good excuse for stuff, like a mean sense of humor, stinginess, inability to see through the little slits in my face, unwillingness to eat tuna casserole/meatloaf, etc.
So last week when Shannon busted out a Chinese phrase quiz in the car with Sean present, I desperately wanted to understand the phrase and legitimize my excuses.
Shannon: Do you know liu chien-wu?
Me: Uhh... what was it?
Shannon: Liu chien-wu.
Me: Oh... of course I do!
Shannon: (waits)
Me: Uhh... He was that guy. In the martial arts movie.
Shannon: It's a special kind of respect for ancestors.
Dammit.
Any day now, there's going to be a casserole for dinner, and I'm going to have to participate.
Bear ate my lunch.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
No really, it ate my dinner too.According to the Yosemite park ranger, bears in April have just come out of hibernation but their food isn't in season for a few weeks. This means a lot of bears are roaming the campsites for food, and if your locker isn't properly latched, you might wake up at 4am to the sound of a hungry bear scarfing your dinner down about 2ft from you head. With only a piece of flimsy nylon tent to protect you from becoming dessert, you wonder if the seemingly innocuous pineapple-scented sunblock you used would ultimately bring your demise.
Food eaten by bear:
- Loaf of sourdough bread
- 1lb salame
- 1lb cheese
- 8 Cliff bars
- 2lbs trail mix
- Full box of oatmeal
- 2lbs chocolate
- 2 packages dried mangoes, 1 pack cherries, 1 cranberries
- Beef jerky
- 16oz tub hummus
(It left 1 piece of chocolate and some cherry tomatoes. I guess it got full -- it had broken into our neighbor's bear box too.)
Sean and I went out to view the remains once the bear was finished. We put the the saliva-covered plastic wrappers and ripped-open coolers back into the bear box, and went off to the bathroom to pee our fears out. We didn't sleep very well after that.
On the other hand, Shannon (who slept with earplugs) awoke bright and early to discover a properly-sealed bear box with shredded food containers inside. Confused, she approached a park ranger who said that a squirrel might have gotten locked inside the box overnight and consumed the food. Back at the campsite, she tried to scare the squirrel out of the box, but after some thought she started to wonder how many squirrels it would take to consume 20 lbs of food, and if we could possibly have locked an entire army of rodents into our storage box. Amusing.
In the end, Shannon woke us up, and we all had a nice conversation with the park ranger, who said bear boxes get broken into pretty often. Before leaving, he advised us not to eat any leftover food, since bears carry the bubonic plague. Right. Not only was I hungry and had no food, but the expert thought I was going to get Black Death.
(1) Hetch Hetchy (2) Campsite.
So what if it's broken
Sunday, April 12, 2009
My computer, that is. It died about a month ago -- just in time to completely forget about Pi Day (no electronic calendar) and miss my chance to make an April Fool's day post. Altogether a major bummer. With no job and no intention of finding one (current fear: being offered a job that's hard to turn down) I am having a hard time getting back online. Given, Obama did hand us laid-off folks a raise and add medical benefits to our 12pm wake up times, but scrounging up hundreds of laptop dollars is hard after the money has been earmarked Hawaii, Japan, and New York City.
This has resulted in a number of get-rich-quick day dreams (which also occupy time now that I can't surf CL):
- A website that sells ads. The first ad is $1, the second $2, the third $4, then $8, $16, and so on until the numbers get big. Mmmm, $BIG.
- Why aren't there any beer delivery services?!
- I'm jealous of the guy who came up with selling stars. What a brilliant idea. (no pun intended)
Anyway, sounds like beer delivery might have some liability issues, so it's back to the drawing board. For now, I'm lying on the living room floor waiting for my ingenius Pet Rock equivalent idea, and drinking sangria. So even if I never make a penny, at least the sangria is yummy in my tummy.
