popplers

Friday quickies!

• I would very much like to spend 36 hours in Honolulu right now. It is dreary and grey today.
• I am a sucker for cute food. Via Boing Boing: appallingly cute fast food mini-meal. Surprisingly, it still contains 46 g of fat and 114% of the U.S. RDA for sodium.
• This seems like something that Nathan Pooley would do: Wolverine costume for Hallowe'en, complete with retractable metal claws. (Coincidentally, the costumer is also named Nate.)
• I want my Chimfex Fire Suppressor.

Hodgmania!

Our adventure this evening begins in Brookline, a non-fictional town in Massachusetts where John Hodgman grew up. Brookline Booksmith hosts a nifty writers & readers series, featuring authors such as David Rakoff, Annie Liebovitz, Erik Larson, Andy Summers, and, today, the wonderful Mr. Hodgman. It is a beautiful autumn day in New England, and we arrive early. Our punctuality is rewarded with exceedingly good seats. We are in the second row; the first row is reserved for guests of John Hodgman, including his wife, children, and father.

As the multitalented Jonathan Coulton performs what passes for a sound check in these parts, I reach for my camera. The battery is fully charged; I took care of that last night. I check the settings and am about to disable the flash, when I notice (to my horror) that the camera screen is displaying this blinking message: Insert CF card. Nooooo! So, I have no pictures of the event, due to my own stupidity. But rest assured, if I had taken photographs, they would have been fantastic. Through the magic of teh intarw3b, I offer you someone else's photos of the same event. (And also that person's blog posting.)

It was a thoroughly enlightening evening. I learned many things that I never knew before, including the following:

• Before John Hodgman found him and tamed him (and taught him to play the guitar and speak English), Jonathan Coulton was a feral mountain man prowling the wilderness of southern Connecticut.
  
• John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton were going to produce a Ken Burns-style documentary on Hobo Matters. JoCo would provide the music; the video portion would consist of an extremely slow pan back and forth over a single photograph of a hobo, with Hodgman narrating.
  
• The song Big Rock Candy Mountain was used by hoboes to recruit children into the hobo life for their own nefarious purposes. Also, hobo signs don't always mean what you think they might.
  
• A damp towel can be used as a prism for the purposes of burning holes in paper; or, how silhouettes were created.
  
• Jonathan Coulton has written a song entitled Skullcrusher Mountain, which tells the story of an evil mastermind and his lady love, and genetic experiments gone horribly wrong. I couldn't stop thinking of The Monarch and Dr. Girlfriend.
  
• There are so many people in Brookline who want to own a signed copy of The Areas of My Expertise that you will have sufficient time to go out to dinner and return to the bookstore afterward, and John Hodgman will still be signing books.
  
• All joking aside, John Hodgman was patient and personable, and extremely kind. He stayed for a very long time and signed everyone's books, and took the time to pose for photos (for those who were smart enough to bring all of the necessary parts for their cameras). He shook hands and smiled genuinely, and was an all-around nice guy.
  
• The Finale in Brookline is just as decadent and wonderful (and expensive!) as the Finale near the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. (I forgot to name-drop network: fellow alum Paul Conforti ('92) is co-founder. The Rensselaer alumni rag had a nice article in the summer 2006 issue, entitled More Than Just Desserts.)

That is all.

Monday night food blogging

Inspired by the recent Peachy Keen episode of Good Eats, we tried our hand at preparing Alton Brown's Individual Peach Upside-Down Cakes.

Somehow, we both missed the part of the recipe that read: "Cut each peach into 12 to 14 pieces." I blanched and peeled the peaches, and plunked half a peach (cut side down) into each ramekin. We also had two minor substitutions: milk with a little lemon juice (instead of buttermilk), and dark brown sugar (instead of light).

Chris mixed up a tasty muffin batter and poured it over the top. The end result was delicious.

Note to self: buy more peaches. There's always the Grilled Peach Melba.

OCD quickies!

• I feel like Zippy the Pinhead: Germ Free Wireless Laser Mouse. Germ Free Wireless Laser Mouse. Germ Free Wireless Laser Mouse.
• Well-written Freakonomics column on hygiene and hand-washing, and the results of a hospital's attempts to increase compliance.
• Via Boing Boing: Squid Soap!

I lost on Jeopardy, baby

September is a great month for Jeopardy! fans. Bob Harris' Prisoner of Trebekistan debuted on the 5th. The Palm ebooks site has an excerpt from chapter 1 of Trebekistan.

I'm standing at the centermost of the three contestant podiums, which are wider and deeper than they look on TV. My feet are teetering on a wooden box, creating the illusion of height for the camera. To a viewer at home, the game board is as near as the screen. But here, it's a faraway wall, the opposite side of a river-blue stage.

Though glowing with color from remote-controlled spotlights, the room is remarkably quiet and still. The black plastic buzzer feels cold in my hand.

I can't see my opponents while we're playing the game, but I can feel their movements, the bodily cues of who's winning and losing: the small changes in posture, the shuffling of feet, the tensing of shoulders. With every response, our voices betray our excitement or calm, confusion or certainty, eagerness or dread. Choices of category and clue reveal personal strengths and confidence. Sometimes, I can even sense someone's breath being held very slightly when they realize—faster than me, far too often—that they know the next response.

Ken Jennings' Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs just came out on Tuesday. (You can read the first chapter of Brainiac on Ken's web site.)

Earl is my old college roommate, and though he's a remarkable six-foot-nine in height, he's one of those giants who hope that by holding their head and shoulders at just the right dejected angle, they may somehow—if not disappear completely—at least give the appearance of being only six-foot-four or six-foot-five. He blinks into the setting sun through the shock of floppy brown hair hanging over his face, a face that bears the perpetually disappointed look of an English foxhound or a Cubs fan.

As I pump gas, we re-enact the ritual of all road-trippers since the days of Jack Kerouac, and try to figure out how we're going to divvy up the trip's costs. Unlike our beatnik freeway forefathers, however, Earl and I are both computer programmers, and we're driving down to Los Angeles not to hear jazz or harvest lettuce or watch the sun set over the Pacific, but to try to land spots on Jeopardy!, America's most popular and most difficult quiz show. Appropriately, geekily, we are squabbling about the most elegant algorithm to calculate and divide up our expenses.

"How about this?" I offer. "There's two of us, so that vastly improves our chances that one of us will make it on the show, right? And, as we know, that person is guaranteed at least a thousand dollars, even if he finishes in third place. So here's what we do: we split all expenses when we get back, but if one of us makes it on the show, that person pays for the other's share of gas and other expenses from this trip."

Earl's brow furrows, suspicious he's being conned.

Ken's doing a book tour and making the rounds on the talk shows to flog his book, but it looks like he's not hitting the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (NYC is as close as he gets).

When knitting goes horribly wrong

Thanks to this Globe article about Stitchy McYarnpants, I stumbled upon her monument to unfortunate crafting: the Museum of Kitschy Stitches. If these designs don't fill you with embarrassment and loathing, the 70s have eaten your soul. Quoth Chris: "It's the Gallery of Regrettable Knitting."

Bonus: she's coming soon to a store near us to flog her new book: The Museum of Kitschy Stitches: A Gallery of Notorious Knits.

Celebrate (Inter)National Thylacine Day

Boing Boing calls our attention to Thylacine Day. Sadly, the last captive Tasmanian Tiger died 70 years ago today. It's been a year since the Australian Museum restarted their cloning project; I wonder how they're faring.