Archive for January, 2007
This is version two of the blog, which currently contains 133 published posts. To some extent, this blog represents the creative excesses of a design enthusiast who is somewhere in the process of applying to grad school, working at a law firm and resides in the Financial District of New York City.
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So, at the Wheel we have this area in our offices that’s an anti-Shrine to everyone’s favorite Chinese communist, Chairman Mao! It started off as a single item and as a place to vent anger and direct it at Mao (instead of at each other), but it’s grown into a rather interesting collection of items. To outsiders, it could – quite fairly – seem odd.
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The Painted Veil, by Somerset Maugham, isn’t quite what I expected. According to the forward, it was based on a line in Dante’s Inferno about a man who takes his adulteress wife to a noxious castle in a place called Maremma in hopes that it will cause her to die.
Intriguing premise, but the story felt flat to me. The story seemed pretty predictable and packaged. The characters were interesting and thinking of Walter Fane as Edward Norton was a plus, but beyond a lesson on altruism, I didn’t think there was much to the novel. It kept me interested, but I suppose I was hoping for something else.
I don’t have much to say about it. I’ll update this post (maybe) after I watch the movie.
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The most frustrating thing about being sick is that the world keeps going. I’m running a bit of a fever right now, which is unfortunate.
I, of course, am keeping my priorities straight and am updating this blog. This weekend was pretty hectic with Wheel stuff. I trained some new reps this morning and am really happy with how it went. Wrote a paper, blah blah blah.
Beyond that, I also got a chance to have some fun. Tracy’s 22nd was on Friday and I got breakfast the next day with a friend at the Flying Biscuit, which is a wonderful restaurant. It’s a pretty idiosyncratic place with lots of character, as you can see from the pictures. The food’s solid as well. I got a smoked salmon omelet and he got the Meggican Omelet (like Mexican, but with EGG inserted – get it? get it!?). EDIT Those two people in the picture aren’t us, by the way. I’m Chinese and uh…not forty.
Anyway, book reviews will be keeping me busy in the next two weeks. I’m reviewing Anatomy of a Boyfriend by Daria Snadowsky, an Emory alumni, for the Arts & Living section of the Wheel. Furthermore, I promised I’d finished my review of You Suck: A Love Story by Christopher Moore for Emory’s Hub magazine in the next two weeks.
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The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon (who won a Pulitzer in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), is like Encyclopedia Brown on crack. A novelette – it’s a brisk 144 pages – starring a famous unnamed detective (the book hints at his identity being Sherlock Holmes), The Final Solution is a story of one case, one murder, one answer, and one boy and his parrot.
Like Encyclopedia Brown who runs his business (remember? NO case too small, 25 cents per day) from his garage, the detective gets asked by city investigators to assist in a case involving a murder and a stolen parrot – a bird with a curious habit of rattling off streams of seemingly insignificant numbers. Set at end of World War II in England, our retired detective reluctantly sets off to help a mute Jewish boy find his pet.
It’s a whodunit (was it the jealous husband? the irascible son? the stranger?) mixed in with a bit of military and political intrigue that has all the elements of a solid mystery novel. Though it’s a bit longer than Encyclopedia’s average case, Chabon’s novel still retains the gratifying “reveal” at the end of the book that makes it all worth the while. Short, sweet, and altogether satisfying.
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My roommates and I planned a fancy girls’ night out for the beginning of this semester, just to kick off the new year. Unfortunately, my car was still being fixed, so we needed rides. Anyway, our fancy girls’ night out morphed into a fancy not-just-girls’ night out, but it was still fun.
The main thing was that we wanted to get dressed up and go out to a nice place to eat. We decided to hit up ONE.midtown kitchen which seemed like a chic enough restaurant to fit the bill. They had complementary valet, and when we got out they opened the doors for us, which took us to a tiny, dark atrium lined with small lights on the walls. We pulled back the black velvet curtain to enter the restaurant. (I’ve included shots of the outside and one of the inside. My apologies for the blurry pictures, as I am still learning to use this camera.)
 
When we got in, they were really friendly though, which is great. The decor was quite nice and the bread! I usually don’t get excited about the free bread, but damn — you can kind of see the bread basket in the picture above – basically they had a wooden box with three types of bread. One type was the generic French bread, another was some sort of flat crispy bread, and the last was long stick-like bread. Anyway, A+ for presentation. Plus, the hummus, yum.
The food was good too. We ordered quite a bit since there were five of us (us three plus the two boys) and we each got a dessert. The entres were really good except everything had a hint of sweetness to it, which perhaps was a bit much for every single dish. However, I love that everything was a little surprising. My pork dumplings are pictured there. I assure you, I have had many a dumpling in my day, but never like that.
One of the dishes that was especially surprising was Dan’s dessert – he ordered the kit kat bar which was a chocolate confection of some sort with two ice creams on either end. The first was a peanut butter ice cream and the other was a curry ice cream. I guess I really hadn’t considered the many possible variations or uses of curry before. However, I remembered that I once had gone with a friend of mine and ordered a popcorn dish that was surprisingly good. Long story short, I decided to try combining the two and ended up with pretty yummy results. Hence, my very own Curried Popcorn recipe!
Curried Popcorn
Ingredients
- One bag, white popcorn (e.g. little/no butter)
- Curry Powder
- Chili Powder
- Cinnamon
- Garlic Powder
- Black Pepper
- Nutmeg
- Marjoram
Instructions
Basically, just pop the popcorn and add whatever spices and seasonings you’d like. I’ve listed the ingredients in terms of what I think is the most crucial to the recipe. My recommendation would be to add the most curry and a good amount of chili powder, garlic powder, cinnamon, and black pepper. Then, add a hint of nutmeg and marjoram. Enjoy! Here’s what mine looked like if you want to get an idea of how heavily I seasoned mine.
Anyway, first day of classes were today, but I’m a bit too wiped to write about it. I think I’ll just crash for tonight, despite having a million things to do. Gute nacht.
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My parents aren’t big fans of turning on the heater because they think it wastes electricity. Nonetheless, when it finally hit 27 degrees (which is very cold for Texas), they finally, finally deigned to turn on the heat. I’m now back in Atlanta, but not before experiencing some of the “Winter Blitz” – as the media seems to be calling it – that Texas is enjoying. Everything was iced over yesterday morning so the roads were dangerous. On the way to the airport, we saw nine different cars that had either been in an accident or had simply spun off the road.
I took this chance to mess with my camera (though it seems mean to blithely take pictures when someone’s already having a bad day), though I was taking pictures from inside the car and the windshield was dirty so the color’s a bit muddy. At one point there were three stranded cars (two in foreground and the white truck in the background) that were visible at once, so that’s what that is.
My flight was cancelled due to the ice, so I had to catch a later budget flight with AirTran but I still got back in time to have dinner with Wheel people. :D One of their friends brought back a bottle of absinthe (tastes like licorice) from when he was studying abroad last semester, so we tried some of that while playing Gears of War (xbox). Random, I know. I quite like the color of absinthe, but beyond that it’s pretty much like normal alcohol. There’s mostly just myths associated with the drink.
I also saw Jane, my ex-roomie, who’s back from Freiberg! Yay! Finally! And I’ll be going out properly tomorrow so expect many more picture while I learn to use this thing.
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The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, was longer than I thought it would be (the pages are thin). Luckily, it was also very enjoyable. I finished it a couple days ago, but I finally have time to come up with a quick review now.
The primary thread through the story is a young girl who discovers her father’s research into Vlad Tepes, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler or by others as Dracula. Part historical fiction, the novel takes the reader though temples, old archives, Cold War Europe, and copious amounts of Byzantine and Ottoman history. It pulls the reader along with little cliffhangers and an understated romance. It’s a pretty rapid read, given it’s length, but anyone who lacks patience for historical topics should shy away. Otherwise, it’s a trek into an – albeit romanticized – hunt for Dracula that’s satisfying, entertaining, and even suspenseful at times.
Kostova writes passably in the male voice but I suspect for most guys it would be even less convincing than it was for me. I know that most wold say that The Historian is no literary feat, but I think it’s definitely worth a read for historical fiction buffs or Dracula enthusiasts.
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I remember when I was little, I used to really like barbies and trolls. Remember those trolls by Dam? They were so weird. Anyway, the trolls were pretty easy to come by, but it was the barbies I really cherished cause I only got barbies for birthdays, holidays and the like. I’ve given away all of those old toys now, save for one barbie doll, just for old times’ sake.
Instead, I now have newer, better, more expensive toys. Which brings me to my most recent acquisition – the Samsung NV10 digital camera!
The LCD screen on my old camera has been broken for a while, so I finally went to Fry’s and picked up this new toy to play with. I’m pretty thrilled by it. Anyway, I’ve included an image taken with my new, beautiful camera of the ugliest toy known to man after the jump. It’s a stuffed version of a Dam troll – pretty terrible, huh?
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I recently finished Lisa Grunwald’s Whatever Makes You Happy. It’s a rumination on the concept of happiness wrapped in a novel about a woman writing a book called “The History of Happiness.” The woman has a mid-life crisis of sorts and begins an affair with a famous artist and spends a lot of time thinking about what she’s doing based on her research, etc. It’s a very enjoyable book to read – Grunwald writes in simple prose, but does it well enough – but the book lacks substance.
For a novel dealing with a very Big Question and the topic of adultry, it’s still a light read. It touches upon different methods of measuring happiness and what various philosophers have said regarding the topic, but doesn’t delve deep enough to make you think. The storyline of the novel is nothing spectacular, but again, it’s not bad. This would be a good beach-type novel for people who don’t want to be caught reading chick lit.
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I’ve never had a visitor-geared content on any of my pages. I tried doing it with the 7th version of the collective (before I closed down the whole thing), but I ended up making a very pretty layout for it that was obnoxious to edit so I never ended up doing much. Anyway, my point is, I finally added some content! There’s a new item on the navigation menu to the left, VISITOR.
Available for download is the script to implement a bookshelf of your very own. It’s not a very advanced script as it is my first, but I thought I’d make it available in case anyone was interested. I’m also working on a tutorial on how to make wordpress plugins. I’ve only got the first paragraph right now, but I need to first find a plug-in that will let me display programming code on wordpress pages, and then I’ll be able to keep working on it. Wish me luck!
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