Five Different Kinds of Brothers

1. Male siblings.
2. Black guys.
3. Anyone to whom Hulk Hogan is speaking.
4. Frat boys.
5. A devoted Christian man.

We hate it when our friends become successful.

My crazy friend Jason Rohrer, about whom I have written and told many stories (testicle dipping, roulette cheating, UFO watching, natural meadow cultivating, etc), is in the December issue of Esquire magazine, one of their 28 geniuses of 2008. The article is here: http://www.esquire.com/features/best-and-brightest-2008/future-of-video-game-design-1208.
You should probably first play Jason's five-minute art/video game Passage.

I'm not surprised because Jason's smart and naturally curious; but more than that, he is a man who executes, and follows through on his ideas. I remember once thinking if I just followed him around, I'd have great stories for life.

Brian Hurley, I think you're next.

Writing and stuff.

Wow. I was just reading Arts, Briefly (I only have time for brief things these days), and noticed that my first creative writing teacher at Cornell had won a Writing Prize. I should write him and congratulate him. I wonder if he remembers me. If not, I recall that he took a picture of the class in order to have a memento, as he said he'd done with all the classes he taught, so I can tell him I'm that short Asian kid in his Fall 1998 Creative Writing class. I was the only one.

Note: Holy crap, that class was ten years ago.

Pizzas

If you notice up there, the subheader of this blog says "reading, writing, and pizza-making." Admittedly, this is a bit of an exaggeration. I don't write nearly enough, and read even less. But I do make pizza. The best pizza in Seattle, as I like to say. I really need to open a pizzeria...

I made four pizzas last night. There were only three of us: me, Erin, and my roommate Kris. But we were able to finish it all mostly because my roommate is the most voracious person I know. (He routinely eats two Chipotle burritos for lunch!)

First up was a margherita:



Next a potato pizza:



The main event was the Obama (Victory) Pie (Arugula, gruyere, caramelized onions, prosciutto, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, parmesan):





And finally, another basic margherita, except with ricotta and tomatoes this time.



Yep. I'm hungry again...

Cookie #1.

I saw the The King Arthur Flour Cookie Companionon sale last week and picked it up because The King Arthur Flour Baker's Companionis one of my favorite cookbooks.

This weekend, I got started on my plan to make every cookie in the book. My roommate was going to Costco, so I tagged along and bought a really large sack of flour. I think you cross some sort of threshold when you buy a "sack" of flour rather than a bag or a box or a cup or a teaspoon, because I felt like a real baker, not a wussie fake one.

We got home and I could barely lift the 50 pound thing, so I let my roommate carry it into the kitchen for me. I rolled up my sleeve and made: Magic-in-the-Middle Cookies, or chocolate cookies with peanut butter in the middle. They look like this:




And everyone likes them. Tada.


Which reminds me, I really need a nice cookie jar. Also a cake stand. I feel like my sad cake-baking rate is undoubtedly due to my lack of a cake stand.

A kind of great possibility.

I thought of a kind of great jersey recently. Here's a mockup I spent the last hour doing instead of working:



Both McCain and Obama supporters can enjoy it alike: McCain fans are all, Yeah! He is a Maverick! and Obama supporters can snicker. Everybody wins!

taking city hall

Apparently, "town hall" meetings are really popular everywhere in the country except the places I've lived. I mean, this is how to really speak with the people; the town hall style is the preferred format of the masses. I don't think I've ever even been to a town hall. It is no wonder I am so out of touch with America.

Also, I have an ant problem in my home. What to do?

law enforcement

You may not register to vote if you are:

* Presently denied your civil rights due to a felony conviction.
* Judicially declared mentally incompetent and ineligible to vote.

---

It sure seems like a large number of people slip right past that second rule...

They're creepy and they're crawly

I went to see the last Mariners game of the season today, and they played all the usual baseball tunes: the CHARGE ditty, take me out to the ball game, the star spangled banner, call to post, the Addams Family theme...

And it made me wonder, how'd the Addams family theme become such a baseball staple? Who thought, let's change the snaps into claps and it'd be perfect?

I don't like evangelicals.

I think we should start calling Islamic terrorists Islamic evangelicals. Osama Bin Laden is their chief (tape-delayed) televangelist and suicide bombers are aerovangelists.

I'm losing my edge.

I dislike people who decry gentrification. People who say this would never live in a place that wasn't at least partially gentrified. It is exactly the same as people who don't like it when their favorite indie band has gotten too famous. A friend was complaining about condos recently, and I have no sympathy. People complain about the lack of neighborhood, and I have no sympathy for that either, because these people walk around with their cellphones glued to their face. But even disregarding that, I don't see anything wrong with it. When I lived in Central Square (which was great because it was like this gentrification process that got stuck and you have homeless people hanging out harmlessly outside the Gap) there were "locals" who sat around on their stoop all day chatting with each other, whom I walked past when I left for class, and were still there five hours later when I got back, and if this was what the kids like to pretend is now missing in their gentrified neighborhoods, then they are crazy because all I could think was why can't they do something productive with their time.


But I was there!

Phrases I enjoy.

I really hope I get to say "Unhand me!" at some point in my life. I like to envision scenarios in which I may get to say this, say, when I accidentally stumble into a whore house and am mistaken for a regular patron.

The PAT.

When Democrats talk about how Sarah Palin is unqualified to be vice-president (and therefore president) because she's only been mayor of a small town and governor of Alaska for a couple years, Republicans correctly point out that Barack Obama has been a senator for only a short period of time.

What the Democrats really want to say is that Palin isn't educated, or learned, enough to be president. (Though I don't doubt she's a pretty smart lady.)

I think what we need is the PAT, the Presidential Aptitude Test, administered by the Educational Testing Service, with an array of multiple choice questions, and a high score of 1600. (Or should it go to 2400? I'm old, I don't know how standardized testing scoring works anymore.)

Just as Harvard wouldn't accept* a student who scores 500 on the SAT, nor should the American people accept a president who scores a 500 on the PAT.

Here is a sample page of such a test:


These are really easy questions. These should be the giveaways at the very beginning of the test, with questions becoming increasingly difficult. Frankly, most Americans who give a shit should be able to answer at least these eight questions. Still, if you had to bet against one of the four presidential/vice-presidential candidates...

* Harvard sometimes makes nepotistic exceptions for, say, the son of the institution's former president. The American people, on the other hand, are far more uncompromising.

Canada, with pictures

I went to Canada with my parents:


We saw mountains, lakes, and glaciers:




Then I came home and the economy was dead.

glaciers and shit

I am going to Canadia for a week. Be back with pictures.

On the move..

I am moving again for the seventh time in five years, but only six blocks away. This time I am running away from a crazy roommate. It is possible that I am flighty.

My father is a poet

date Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 11:46 AM
subject Happy Birthday

Hi! Andy,

This morning, I whispered my greeting in my head, hoping that the electronic field, the light, the wind and any other super-natural power will deliver instantly to you my best wishes and sincere thoughtfulness.

Happy Birthday to You. All the Best.

Love,
Dad

I have become very lax in my blogging. Alas.

Yesterday I was thinking that working 9-5 should really mean leaving the house at 9 and getting back at 5. I should attempt to convince my employers of this new definition.

In the past few months, I spent a lot of money trying to buy happiness. I purposely did this to test the old adage. Turns out you really can't buy happiness. Or at least I didn't. Photography equipment, video cameras, scooters, clothing, and expensive food didn't work. But maybe I was just buying the wrong things and should have been spending my money on prostitutes.

But I guess almost all my happiness and depressions have nothing to do with money. The only purchased thing in my life that really made me happy was my car. And crashing it was the only really truly depressing thing that was caused by a material good. (I am still in mourning, and in year eight of my self-imposed vow to not have a car for ten years.) But then I guess the car had nothing to do with it. The car just represented the only time in my life I got what I wanted.

Big, Bigger, Biggest

At the corner coffeeshop, coffee drinks come in three sizes: Short, Tall, and Grande, in increasing size.

Short is smaller than Tall. This makes perfect sense. But why is Tall smaller than Grande? Tall means big. Grande means big. Is an Italian big bigger than an English one? I think they should take the idea further, and just use the word for "large" in all different languages, and distinguish between them based on the average size of that country's people. So Okii (Japanese) would be smaller than Big (British accent) would be smaller than Big (American southern accent).

Bad business strategies

"Hey, we've got extra-large!"