My family and I made a trip to L.A. last weekend. It was the first time in a few years I got a chance to go down. We stayed at my sister-in-law's friend's apartment in Playa Vista. He took us to Venice Beach, which was fun and interesting. I also got a chance to hang out with my friend Ben. I told Ben I wanted to eat at the strangest, most unique Chinese restaurant he could find. So we went to the Monterey Park neighborhood, and ate at a Yunnan-style restaurant. Yunnan is a region of China close to Sichuan and Guangzhou. It is renown for it's tea implements, if I remember correctly. The food at this restaurant was very spicy. Ben and I got these dishes:
We could only finish the pork, the rest we took home. We were so stuffed we didn't need to eat dinner that night.
Meanwhile, Greta and everyone else went on a quick tour of Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and other places, including Mann's Chinese Theater and the Walk of Fame.
It was a nice trip. My only regret is that I wasn't able to visit my friend Farhang when I was in town.
I don't think 20/20 has been entirely honest. I happened to catch about 10 minutes of 20/20 yesterday, where they were exposing the dangers of Teflon. It was a good report, except for one part, where they fried bacon to show that just by frying bacon a Teflon-coated pan will get up to more than 500 degrees. Perhaps this is true, but I doubt it. From the short video segment I saw of them frying bacon, I think what is more likely is that they just put the pan on high and put bacon in. The pan overheated before the bacon is cooked, which is unsurprising. 20/20 made it sound like this was normal for cooking bacon, however I believe the normal way of cooking bacon is not to put it on high heat, but on medium heat. The pan would not reach 500 degrees with normal cooking. Putting a teflon pan on high heat for minutes on end is not recommended by anyone, and I think 20/20 was fairly dishonest with this test.
Not that I'm trying to defend the Teflon industry. I think they are guilty as hell. But misleading demonstrations by 20/20 should be pointed out.
Today I had a wonderful moment of schadenfreude. But to explain it, I have to give some background.
Occasionally, I would take my car to the gym, and go at around 9am rather then my usual time of 7am. When I did this, there was always this guy parked up in a van, who had this incredbly massive poster (something like 10 feet by 10 feet) of an aborted, mutilated fetus. The van also has written on the front "Disobey God and GO TO HELL". He loves to park it so that everyone who goes into the gym has to see the mutilated baby. Needless to say, I hated this guy. I am not the only one. I once called the people who manage the parking lot to see why he's allowed to park there. They said it was freedom of speech, but I think it is actually advertising, which is a restricted form of speech. There wasn't anything I could do about him, evidently. But everyone already hates the guy. I learned that his giant poster had been vandalized once, but he just went out and got another one.
So today, I happen to pick up a San Mateo Daily Journal and read their headline 'Pro-life' activist jailed. When I read about his arrest, I had one of the great schadenfreude experience of my life. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.
As I finished Lord of the Rings this week, I remembered an interesting thread on the Straight Dope Message Board about what the Elves going into the West was all about. It's an interesting topic, since I merely assumed, as many did, that it was a metaphor for them dying. Evidently not. It turns out there's a very complicated story behind it all, and if I had only read the Silmarillion (or the LOTR appendices) I would understand. Also, there's a FAQ of the Rings that answers almost every imaginable question about the rings of power. Want to know what would happen if you took a ring given to a Dwarf lord and give it to an Elf lord? It's all there. Tolkein geekery at it's finest.
I have been reading a bunch in the past few weeks. I'm almost done with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's going well, still interesting, and I've read all of the songs. Lately, though, I've become annoyed at all the "lo!" and "behold!"s that litter the pages of The Return of the King. Everything is "lo!" this or "behold!" that. Alas, I am stricken with annoyance.
I also managed to borrow A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius from the library. It was quite good. Very funny, very sad, and the writing was excellent. The best thing about it is that it is a great statement of sort of Generation X attitudes. The writing is self-aware, and self-aware of it's self-awareness, etc, etc, and it's all very modern and hip.