Tag: reflections

I was in Italy for much of the last two years but I was always in and out and usually stayed for between a couple weeks and a couple months. It was usually long enough that I didn’t want to eat out every day but not long enough that I wanted to invest in a lot of "core ingredients" for cooking.

As a result, I was frustrated that I couldn’t find olive oil in bottles less than one liter. In the US, it is usually difficult to find bottles larger than half a liter so I couldn’t imagine why there was nothing smaller than what was, for me, extra, extra large.

I asked Enrico Zini (who is from Bologna) if you could find smaller bottles of olive oil in Italy. He paused and then asked in return, "why would anyone want less than 1 liter of olive oil."

I guess that was my answer.

When coke orgies come up in conversation, people usually use the term "coke" to refer to "cocaine." Imagine, for a moment, a "Coca-Cola Orgy."

That sounds like one sticky misunderstanding.

OMGWTFAFK

When I was in 8th grade, I was suspended from school for public displays of affection. Basically, I was kissing at school in a way that the school administration thought was "over the top."

Two years later, I entered an audience-judged kissing competition. Basically, an exercise in over-the-top, exhibitionist kissing. I took first place.

Make your weaknesses your strengths.

I think the full-bodied, full-on-lisp voice urging players to "just relax" each time they lose a level in the arcade game Pipe Dream, may be the single least relaxing sound in any video game ever. Except maybe crazy balloon.

The Strand is the largest book used book store in New York City. They have several locations around Manhattan. If they choose to open a location in Brooklyn, I suggest they open shop at Nostrand Avenue. It’s the last place people will suspect.

I spent some time last night with a room full of Australians going through a list of differences between US and Aussie English. They seemed to get a kick out of the fact that USians refer to "bum bags" as "fanny packs." The real winner for me is the fact that Aussies refer to potted plants as "pot plants."

I keep imagining the poor people who innocently ask US Consular or Customs officials if they are allowed to bring "pot plants" into the US.

I asked the Aussies what one would call a potted "pot" plant. They seemed to be struggling for an answer.

I don’t have a full list but I can say with confidence that finding and switching to offlineimap has been one of top ten most important life changes I’ve experienced in the last two years.

People laugh when I say this but I’m pretty sure its true.

Barcelona! What a tourist friendly city. Without useful signs like this, I would have, in all likelihood, confused the icon in this picture with a bus!

I saw this article (and many others on the same subject) about how laptops can reduce men’s sperm count. I’m at the Ubuntu Conference in Mataró: a virtual sperm apocalypse.

Many geeks who are at no risk of impregnating anyone — or who are paranoid at the idea that they might — seem very concerned by the negative effects on potency of laptops that raise their "scrotal temperature." I’ve never understood this.

At some point in your life, you might have the opportunity to try out the NES-based game Bad News Baseball. I can save you the trouble.

Bad News Baseball is bad news.

I saw someone on the subway wearing a red hat with a picture of Ernesto "Che" Guevara on it. He was reading Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard — a sort of motivational popular psychology book that is self-described as "An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life."

I couldn’t help but think of the ways that Che, perhaps the most famous communist revolutionary ever and author of a book called Guerrilla Warfare, might disagree with Spencer Johnson’s advice on "dealing with change" and, in all likelihood, have a very different idea of what "dealing with change" meant.

Today I tried to read an article titled, The Morphogen Sonic Hedgehog Collaborates With Netrin-1 To Guide Axons in the Spinal Cord written by Patricia C. Salinas.

Apparently Sonic Hedgehog, morphogen or otherwise, is a pretty important gene. That may be, but I still find the gene’s namesake, Sonic the Hedgehog, to be a lot easier to understand.

I may not understand what Netrin-1 is but I’ll bet I can score higher on Sonic than Ms. Salinas. It’s nice to see that such different skill-sets can find common ground in a single term.

Many people from outside of the US and Western Europe receive a vaccine for tuberculosis called Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG). It often leaves a pattern of scars on the arm of person who was vaccinated. They look similar (but less distinct in adults) to this:

I’ve suggested to Mika that she should tell people that hers is from a street fight involving bike chains or the time she had to push a child out of the way of a speeding motorcycle and was grazed by the spinning gears.

Thinking about the possibilities makes me wish I had such a scar.

Presumably, the women (and the few men) who wear make-up apply it so that they will look more beautiful in public. What makes me wonder is the fact that these same people often see no problem with applying or touching up their make-up — in public — making faces similar to these:

(Dramatization)

I think that publicly showing these sorts of faces undoes much of the positive effect that the make-up might subsequently have.