Sci-Fi no more

How on earth do people even come up with this stuff?
Laser vision
DNA computer

Contemplating Cuisine (or Food for Thought)

I've come to realize over the past few days (and this might come as a surprise, given that I've been cooking for quite a while now) that less is more when it comes to spices. I used to sprinkle red chili powder and cumin seeds and other exotic spices with gay abandon until now - naively assuming that the more spices I add, the more flavour they will impart. Having recently been exposed to two consecutive nights of savoury cooking where that wasn't the case, I have been forced to come to the conclusion that that is not true.

Now my parents might contend that I have been exposed to it from a much earlier age, and they would be right, but there is a subtle difference. When one's own or someone else's parents do it, one just nods sagely and accepts it as that holy grail of the culinary arts: home cooking - something that you can seek for the rest of your life, but can only truly be achieved by your elders "at home." It is only when your own clumsy inept contemporaries start to do it and do it well that you are filled with self-doubt and, paradoxically, excitement (if they can do it, so can I!) and begin to wonder if indeed you might possess the same hitherto dormant skills.

And thus begins a new, and hopefully delicious, chapter in my on-going culinary saga. Will he try a real recipe? Will he actually measure out quantities? Will he (gasp) go easy on the cooking oil??? Tune in next week to find out these and other more tantalising details.

Now why am I in this crazy mood today? I have no idea but I choose conveniently to blame it on the beautiful weather outside.

Anyway, in other news, I seem to have some sort of a slight crick in my neck today - must have slept funny last night. What's really upsetting about that is now I can't play tennis this evening like I had planned. Ah well....c'est la vie.

Spoke to Luvshack this morning and he's flying out at 11.30 pm tonight. Have a safe trip man and get your ass back here in the Fall so we can party some more. BTW Jeamish, if you want to bid him bon voyage, and here's my lame attempt at a puzzle a la Dan Brown, you can call him at FDFXETDI.

I should probably get some work done now :(, but before I leave, here's some "food for thought" as it were (man, that phrase works on so many levels):
Q: What is a hooker's least favourite spice?
A: Cumin!

And on that terrible terrible note...

Code? What Code?

Finished "The Da Vinci Code" and I have to say, it's not as good as people seem to claim. The story is extremely contrived, the research is sketchy in parts (I found a couple of possible discrepancies in his research in half an hour of surfing the Internet) and are often a thinly-veiled attempt at "showing off" his so-called knowledge. Some of his "riddles" and "codes" are laughably amateurish and juvenile and can be cracked in a matter of seconds. I will say that the second half of the book is fairly racy and readable, and some of his revelations are interesting, specifically his main claim about Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." However, as a "master storyteller" Dan Brown cannot hold a candle to Frederick Forsyth.

"The Da Vinci Code" is not so much a mere book as it is a marketing phenomenon. Dan Brown has exploited both the reach of the Internet and his readers' curiosity to their fullest and supplemented the novel with photographic tours of various locations and artefacts used in his books, puzzles based on them, and an introduction to the amazing world of ambigrams, courtesy John Langdon. These peripheral attractions are far more interesting than the book itself.

For those who are interested, there are five codes that can be broken fairly easily scattered on the dust jacket of the book. You can play the game (and a couple of others) on the book's official website. For further reading on one of the codes, visit this site. The speech claims a historical connection between Prophet Joseph Smith's Mormon faith and the ancient Masonic cult. The subject of another code is described here in pretty interesting detail.

The original Quest is another series of puzzles that took a little more effort and was more fun.

Grrrrr....

I was down at the Chicago campus of Northwestern this morning helping law and medical students with their tax returns. Now I was only supposed to be there for two hours, but since the clock in the room hadn't been adjusted for Daylight Saving Time, I ended up staying an extra hour!

While that was kind of annoying, what's really frustrating is that most people are either unaware or just don't care about maintaining their visa status and being responsible enough to keep their tax stuff in order. You'd think that graduate law students would be aware of the consequences and know better but noooooo!

So many of the international students treat this whole thing as if it were an optional burden. Now while the rules can be confusing sometimes, it's hard to be patient with people who don't even make the effort to do it on their own and expect you to basically do their tax returns for them.

Unfortunately, asking them to do it on their own is not always the best alternative because many of them take their friends' advice or try their own creative interpretations without getting the information verified by anyone and then end up having to re-file or pay fines if their returns are audited by the IRS.

And it's not like they have to make too much of an effort to figure their stuff out properly - there's a tax presentation covering the basics that we prepared last year up on the International Office website, we've already had two tax presentations specifically for people who have no idea where to begin, and the IRS website itself has a wealth of information that you can use.

In my experience it's the know-it-all Law and Kellogg types that are the most annoying. I'm always tempted to tell such people, who come in without doing their groundwork, if they've heard of the RTFM directive (RTFM = Read The Fucking Manual!) but I end up phrasing it a little less abrasively. I honestly don't know how the International Office deals so patiently with these retards. GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

Whew! Now that I've got that off my chest I feel a lot better. :) So then what happened?

Eternal Sunshine

Of The Spotless Mind." Quite a mouthful, but quite an extraordinary movie. Charlie Kaufman is a mad genius - I saw his "Adaptation" and was suitably impressed, but this one just blew me away. Excellent story, excellent script, some fantastic acting. Kate Winslet is absolutely superlative as Clementine as is Mark Ruffalo as Stan. In fact, based on this and "In The Cut" I'd have to say he's quite versatile. Jim Carrey, Kirsten Dunst and Tom Wilkinson are extremely good too.

All in all, well worth the extra $5.75 I had to spend today. Why "extra" you ask? Because (and this seems to be happening more and more often these days) I wasn't able to watch it right after "The Ladykillers" two days ago. The reason? "ESOTSM" was playing in the other section of the multiplex. Dammit!

And apropos, don't waste your time on "TL." Sorriest excuse for a Coen brothers movie I've seen. Tom Hanks is good as usual, but completely wasted in a puerile story with insipid stereotyped acting.

A Tale of Two Books

So I just got done reading Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient." And all I can say is, "Wow!"

I don't think I've read a more absorbing and well-composed work of fiction. The peculiar style of the book takes a little getting used to, and doesn't make for easy reading, but completely engrossed me from start to finish. I'm usually a fairly rapid reader and get easily turned off by books that slow me down, but this is one book that, despite my having to re-read paragraphs and, on occasion, whole pages, actually made me thoroughly enjoy the effort I had to put in.

Rules of writing and grammar are often ignored, the writer jumping without warning between different times and juggling present, past continuous, present continuous and past perfect tenses with gay abandon until the result is just that - perfect. Superbly researched yet effortless, languid and measured yet maintaining its thread of intensity throughout, second only to Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things" in its gorgeously descriptive narrative style, its characters rich three-dimensional entities, it is no wonder that "The English Patient" won its author the Booker Prize in 1992.

A hard act to follow indeed, and Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" is probably more of an anticlimax as a consequence.

I never was a big fan of hers, and couldn't really understand how she won the Pulitzer for her first work, a compilation of short stories called "Interpreter of Maladies," but her second attempt is, in my blinkered opinion, even poorer. Her hurried, one-dimensional writing style is best suited for the short story where one has neither the time nor the mandate to build characters or do much other than relate events. Which is probably why her deficiencies went largely unnoticed in her first book, but are glaring in this second work.

The only appeal this book can have is for the Bengali and larger Indian immigrant population in the US, who will relate to the experiences of first and second generation expats she deals with. But at the end of the day, it is a juvenile, strained, slightly supercilious novel that definitely doesn't deserve the reviews it so arrogantly displays on the cover.

Idol Chatter

Here's an article that seems to have gotten American Idol figured out very well indeed.

I'm not a big reality TV fan, but the glimpses of the show I've caught in passing allow me to agree wholeheartedly with this author's comments on the judges, the contestants and the show in general.

And How Stuff Works has excellent April Fools' Day articles on Hydro-Ordnance and a revolutionary automobile called the N-Car. Had me going for quite a while.