Things That Go Bump In The Night

Everyone's home now. The house gets so quiet when people who are supposed to be here leave. By which I mean one or more of the family members. Everyone's back now, which is nice.

I saw something really funny on the Rachel Maddow show today. She was doing a recap of her favorite moments of geek from 2009, and her #1 favorite clip was of a BBC documentary shooter getting humped by a parrot. The other guy making the film says, "You're being shagged by a very rare parrot!" This clip is so funny, its totally worth the effort of scouring the internet for a glimpse of it.

I still have no New Year's Eve plans, but mainly for lack of trying. I have a couple options, but I just haven't felt like committing to any of them as of yet. Deep down inside I kind of want to stay home, build a fire, study a bit, maybe watch a movie, maybe drink a manhattan or two...a quiet night alone could be just what I need right now. But who knows, maybe tomorrow I'll want to go out and go crazy.

Oh speaking of movies, tonight we watched Doubt. It was great. Not in the happy sense, but good none the less. I like the way a lot of the scenes were shot at a tilted angle instead of straight on. It kind of coincides with when things start to get really out of wack. In the scene where Maryl Streep's character is accusing the priest of being improper with kids there's a shot where he's on one side of the frame and the two nuns are on the other, and as he weighs their accusations it looks like his side of the frame becomes heavier. The movie was done really well. If you haven't seen it you really should.

Tomorrow I need to return exchange the movies I have now for new ones (I'm hoping to be able to snag a copy of 500 Days of Summer), and update my movie queue online. I also need to wrap/deliver/mail out the last of my holiday gifts. Somewhere in there I need to study, but I really don't want to. I think I'll get some coffee instead. That would be good...

I need to flip my sleep schedule, so I'm off to bed. Nite nite!

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist: Oh to Be Young Again!

Tonight Mom and I watched our first blu-ray movie. It made such a big difference! I really want to see a gory action movie in blu-ray, but I think that's more of a me & Dad kind of night. Anyway, tonight's choice was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. It was actually really super adorable and reminded me of being in highschool and undergrad. Those random nights of madness are permanently etched in my mind.

The story is a classic teenage love affair, full of the kind of awkardness that Michael Cera makes. Oh, add him to my list of young cuties. He's legal, unlike Taylor Lautner. The weird part is that the character Norah had a lot of the same mannerisms as a girl I knew in highschool by the same name.

I can't resize this picture appropriately, so hopefully it will look ok when it posts...

The Penis Painting

Today my brother and sister IMed me from their vacation destination. You can always tell when my brother gets on..here's a tidbit from the conversation:

11:24 PM D: hey it's me and V

11:25 PM and the penis painting

me: hii

the what??

D: you know what we are talking about

me: no idea

apparently they found some obscure old chat between me and my sister. neither of us remember what its about...i think it might be in reference to some link in her gchat status message or something because i often comment on those, but i can't say for sure... the conversation is dated Tuesday, March 24, 2009, and reproduced below:

10:42 PM me: the sad part is i've already seen that :)

10:45 PM D: ?

me: the penis painting

D: oh haha

me: why were you never that innovative?

10:46 PM hehe

mom was worried that people would see your drawings from the road...

I think the last line refers to how my sister would sometimes crawl out of her bedroom window and draw on the roof with chalk. But that's a story for another day.

Funniest Tweet I've Seen Today

I tried to retweet this, but it's too long. Andy Jenks is a local news anchor for NBC12.

"It's hard to log onto the station's web site, see a picture of yourself, and not wonder if you just got busted for something."

Body of Lies, or Why The Kid That Works In My Lab Would Make a Great Terrorist

(There's this kid that works in my lab. He'll probably kill me if I mention his real name, so we'll just call him The Kid.)

Today I saw Body of Lies with the fam. Despite some of graphic violence I actually enjoyed the movie. The part that really stuck with me is the idea of just how easy it is for terrorists to evade us. Clearly technologically there's no way a terrorist organization could really compete with US, but we're working under the false assumption they would want to. Ok so fine, technology makes communicating significantly easier. But that only holds in places where technology is easy accessible. I mean can Osama really Skype from his cave? I doubt it. I bet he gets no wifi. How or why he continues to live in a place that doesn't offer the basic technological amenities I'll never understand. Oh wait, yeah I do. That's the whole point of this: Osama (like other terrorists) evade our intelligence gathering attempts by staying off the grid.

Basically, we created the grid to keep track of people and things. One of the primary purposes of the grid is to make it easier to find people, so to remain hidden all someone has to do is stay off the grid. Deliver messages in person or written down on actual paper in some basic form of encryption. Don't touch the phone or a computer, don't ever let one near you, and you can probably avoid our CIA's prying eyes. True, this is probably an over simplification, but you get my point.

The real fear-inducing aspect of terrorism is the fact that anything could happen at any time. Its that sense of uncertainty that makes people really pee their pants, that feeling that there's a possibility the world as you know it can change in an instant.

This brings me to The Kid. The Kid is the only American I've met who really would be perfectly happy existing in the middle of nowhere with very few of the customary comforts most of us take for advantage. The Kid really likes playing with electronics, but be thrilled to give up his cell phone. He might miss his laptop and internet access, but just the fact that The Kid can detach himself from his cell phone is simultaneously impressive and disconcerting. (Disconcerting only because of the uniqueness of his situation: I don't know anyone else quite as willing to detach themselves from their cell phone.)

So this movie got me thinking...The Kid, in theory, would make a great terrorist. The only problem is his idealism and disdain for all things evil, like Google, but that's post for another day.

The REAL Avatar Movie

I can't wait to see Aasif Maandvi in The Last Airbender. He's such a great actor.

Today he did a little clip for the Daily Show as the show's Indian correspondent that really needs to be saved forever. He approached the issue of the guy from Chicago that was found to have played an integral role in the 2008 Mumbai bombings the same way Americans would approach it if we found someone in a random country that helped orchestrate a domestic terrorist attack. It was interesting to be on the other side as Americans. Then of course he made some obligatory joke about how India knows everything about us anyway through all the random "confirmation" questions we get asked by call center workers. Very funny.

Julie & Julia

Last night my mom and I stayed up late watching Julie & Julia on the new big screen tv. Its one of those feel good movies (read chick flick) about a woman named Julie who cooked all of the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking: Volume 1. As the beginning of the movie states, its based on two true stories...the story of Julia Child and the story of Julie-some-random-girl-from-nyc. It was a great way to end the day after attempting to make a buche de noel, and definitely inspired me to write my last entry. In fact, the movie was just inspiring in general.

I love quest movies. There's just something that resonates deep within me when the main character is on a quest for Mordor, or figuring out what it is that they were meant to do. I have come to realize that pretty much anyone can do just about anything. I mean there are certain limitations, but generally speaking anyone can cook, anyone can write, anyone can paint, anyone can be an engineer, etc. Its just about finding what makes you really tick. What floats your boat. Or any of those other cliched metaphors.

Personally, I'm still on that quest. So far, I've been a secretary, a personal assistant, a lab tech, a grad student, a photo shoot production assistant, a stylist, a social media consultant, a web developer, and a technical assistant. Maybe one of theses days one of those things will stick.

Buche de Noel

First of all, a note of caution: when your adorable baby brother asks you for help with a project for his French class, say no. Even when he gives you that cute little puppy dog face, say no. Otherwise you’ll end up like me: 25, running home early from work school, worrying about whether it really matters if you can’t sift your cake flour. (And for those of you wondering, the answer is yes, kind of, probably.)

So after doing more than my fair share of research into the culinary art known as baking, here’s what I learned about the buche de noel we needed to make. Its a traditional French dessert served during the holidays, and is known in English as a “yule log”. Its a thin, genoise cake, rolled with frosting (jelly roll style) and garnished to resemble a real tree log. Interestingly enough, genoise cakes are actually Italian (and really not that straight forward to bake).

We started off with three eggs and three egg yolks. If you have never seen two teenagers (my brother and his project partner) try and separate an egg yolk from the white, I highly recommend it. Its hilarious. To the eggs we added a pinch of salt and a fair amount of sugar. Then came the whisking. We don’t have a fancy stand mixer so this was all hand done, old school. The bowl with the sugary egg mixture was then placed on top of a pot of simmering water and there was more whisking. My mom did most of this step, mainly because she actually knew how this was supposed to go. She even brought out the big guns: the hand-held mixer. This is where the recipe broke down, though. It said to whisk until the mixture was room temperature or about 100 degrees. Now call me crazy, but 100 degrees is not room temperature. So we kind of ignored the temperature requirements and just whisked until the mixture had nearly tripled in size.

Genoise cakes have no leavening agents, so their ability to rise depends entirely on the air trapped within the batter. This is why it’s so important to fold in the dry ingredients, rather than stir them in, so we folded in the sifted cocoa powder, cornstarch, and cake flour. After all of that we poured the batter into a paper-lined, buttered baking sheet, smoothed it out as much as possible and popped it into the oven.

Fast forward 12 minutes and out popped a dark, chocolatey genoise cake that looked perfect. We pulled it off the baking sheet and set it up on some wire racks to cool. It didn’t take too long because the cake is so thin. This is where things started to fall apart (literally). When it came time to separate the cake from its beloved wax paper, the two refused to part. Actually most of the cake came off pretty well, but one part refused to leave the paper. We ended up with a little hole that was later patched with icing.

The kids spread one coat of icing (store bought…I would have seriously preferred to make our own, but in the interest of getting homework and stuff done I was overruled by both parental units) and tried to roll the cake. I tried to help them. This is where we realized that the edges of our cake were a bit dry, and thus prone to cracking. We got it into a roughly cylindrical form, which is more than I can say for Tyler Florence on last night’s Iron Chef (although I’m sure his cake was far superior), and then off it went into the freezer to firm up a bit.

I mentioned that the icing was store-bought, but I didn’t mention that it was super chocolatey…not dark or bittersweet chocolate, but that kind of sugary milk chocolate that soothes the soul in a primal way that we’ll never be able to truly understand. When the cake came out of the freezer, the kids coated it with another layer of icing, and then on top of that they added chocolate chips (luckily these were semisweet).

They were so proud of their creation, and who could blame them? The final product was this uber chocolate monstrosity that was so sweet that I think you have to be under the age of 15 to be able to truly appreciate it. The rest of us are just so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of chocolate and sugar. It actually turned out ok, which is more than I can say for our kitchen. There are egg whites (from one of the yolk extraction blunders) and chocolate everywhere, not to mention the millions of bowls, pans, and utensils.

I think next time I’ll try a homemade butter cream frosting and some espresso to keep it from being overwhelmingly chocolatey. Also, maybe I’ll consider getting a real jelly roll pan, instead of using an oversized cookie sheet.

Walk On

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Vertigo

Stuck In A Moment

Only To Be With You

New Year's Day

Elevation

Beatiful Day

Mysterious Ways

Massive Update

So I'm finally getting around to posting all of my U2 Concert videos. Keep in mind that they were "filmed" using my old LG Fusic...so you can't really see a whole lot, but you can hear some of the songs. It was definitely an amazing experience, and if you've never seen U2 I strongly urge you to. This was the concert they had in Charlottesville, VA in October.