Multilingual spam
June 9th, 2006
Spam transcends all language barriers.
Easter 2006
May 29th, 2006We had a party on the Easter weekend this year and, as always, it was great fun.
I know, I know. It’s already Memorial Day. Easter was more than a month ago! It took me a while to get all the pysanky photos I wanted together. Thanks to Chris for providing additional photos, as well as the egg-blowing video.
The pysanky was a hit — I underestimated the attraction. I’d had a card table set aside for the dye bowls, candles, beeswax, and kistkas, separate from the main table where the food and the kids’ egg coloring was to be had. I thought only I and a couple of friends who’d tried it last year would be doing it, but other guests were fascinated and wanted to try, too. I ran out of the raw eggs I’d set aside and had to raid the fridge for more. Counting myself, six people tried their hands at it.
Over the years, I’ve improved my egg-handling techniques. This year, with so many people doing pysanky eggs, it felt like I’d gone into full-scale production mode. Here are this year’s how-to notes. (Warning: lots of photos ahead!)
Delicious Fishballs & Lobster Balls
May 15th, 2006
And special sauce. Don’t forget the special sauce.
Twenty years ago
April 26th, 2006Twenty years ago I was an environmental sciences major at UC Berkeley. In the spring of 1986, I was taking Energy & Resources 102 from John Holdren and Mark Christensen. I loved that class. We used John Harte’s Consider a Spherical Cow: A Course in Environmental Problem Solving, which was all about doing order-of-magnitude calculations to quantify environmental questions. It turned out to be one of my favorite textbooks. Although I don’t often have a need these days to do Spherical Cow’s kind of back-of-the-envelope figuring, I still keep it on my shelf at work as a reminder that I can if I have to.
April 26, 1986, was a Saturday. The next class meeting was the following Tuesday. Professor Holdren strode into the lecture hall with a gleam in his eye. “I was going to put off covering pollution dispersion and atmospheric plume modeling for a few more weeks,” he said. “But considering current events, I decided to move it up a bit in the schedule. This is too good an opportunity to pass up.”
There had been a big release of radioactives at a nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, at a place called Chernobyl. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but it sounded bad.
Parallel parking
April 19th, 2006I’m good at parallel parking. This is probably a pretty stupid thing to be proud of, but I can’t help it. Whenever I squeeze into a space that everybody else has passed over as too small, I grin like a fool.
Just wrong
April 19th, 2006One of the funny things about Hawaiʻi is the slow-motion collision between Asia and America that’s been going on here for more than 100 years, with the Hawaiian culture getting squashed between the two. Well, I guess that’s not funny-ha-ha, is it. But it can get funny-weird at times.
The manapua is the Hawaiianized version of the Chinese char siu bao. It’s bigger and breadier than the bao I’ve had in California. In Hawaiʻi, manapua have become such a common local food item that even 7-Eleven carries them. Except that rather than keeping track of the different fillings by little red dots on the top, like a real Chinese bakery would do, 7-Eleven color-codes their manapua. I mean, the dough is actually colored.
Easter turkey
April 18th, 2006So there I am, driving through Kaimukī on an Easter weekend, and there’s a flash of white at the side of the road. Is it a big pigeon? Nope… too big. A chicken? Could be, although who keeps chickens in Kaimukī these days? I slow down for a better look and do a double-take.
It’s not a pigeon. It’s not a chicken. It’s a young white turkey.
The Wizard Hunters
April 10th, 2006
The Wizard Hunters, by Martha Wells
This one follows up on her earlier Death of the Necromancer and another I can’t recall, and is also the first of a new series, The Fall of Ile-Rien. Pseudo-Victorian fantasy, I guess? Fun. I’ll be looking for the next book.
The friendly neighborhood ʻaukuʻu
March 31st, 2006On Friday I had left my car at Sears to get some work done. It poured at lunch, but by pau hana time the skies had cleared enough that I didn’t get wet as I walked through Ala Moana Park on the way back from my office. The drainage canal inside the park was chocolate-brown with silty runoff.
