Happy Fall

Being a Christian is like being a pumpkin.
God lifts you up, takes you in
and washes all the dirt off you.
He opens you up,touches you deep inside
and scoops out all the yucky stuff --
including the seeds of doubt, hate, greed, etc.
Then He carves you a new face
and puts His light inside you
to shine for all the world to see.
This was passed on to me from another pumpkin.
I liked this enough to send it to the pumpkins in my patch.
Now it is your turn to pass it to another fellow pumpkin.
Happy Fall!

"tranmorgrified"?

Happy Birthday, You Bastard

Under no circumstances will I be attending your stupid birthday dinner.

By John Swansburg
Posted Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2008, at 2:26 PM ET

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What has become of the birthday party? I used to love a good birthday get-together. Some other kid's parents are picking up the tab for an afternoon of bumper bowling? There might be a Cookie Puss from Carvel? Fire up the Datsun, Mom, we're going to be late!

I'm told that when you're a legitimate grown-up—with a spouse and kids of your own—birthday parties are once again events you look forward to. You leave the munchkins with a sitter and go to the Johnsons' for an evening of cocktails and casserole. Maybe an animated game of Taboo breaks out. Sounds delightful. But in the moment between earning your college degree and signing your first mortgage, the birthday party transmogrifies into something else. It becomes the birthday dinner.

For me, it happened in my late 20s. As my friends moved from graduate programs and entry-level positions into decent-paying jobs, a birthday meet-up at a dive bar to pound SoCo-and-lime shots started to feel a shade déclassé. Yet everyone was still living in small studio or one-bedroom apartments—no place for a proper cocktail party. The compromise: People started celebrating their birthdays by inviting friends out to dinner, typically at a moderately fancy restaurant. The kind of place that frowns on bringing your own candles and Cookie Puss but isn't averse to sticking a sparkler in a crème brûlée.

Seems like a nice idea, the birthday dinner. It is not. It is a tedious, wretched affair. It is also an extravagantly expensive one. In these wintry economic times, we need to scale back. I hereby propose that the birthday dinner go the way of the $4 cup of coffee, the liar's mortgage, and the midsize banking institution.

Consider, for example, the birthday dinner I attended not long ago in honor of my friend Simon. In the past, Simon's birthday parties have been rollicking good times. His 25^th, celebrated at a Manhattan club, ended memorably, if abruptly, when Simon was ejected from his own party by a bouncer who'd discovered him taking an indiscreet catnap on the bar. For his 30^th, Simon, now a brain surgeon, organized a more civilized affair: dinner for 10 of his closest friends at an upscale Tribeca steakhouse.

Everything that can go wrong at such a dinner did. A maitre d' led us to a giant oval table, where I was seated a country mile from the man of the hour. Could I have hit him with a strenuous toss of a French roll? Yes. But polite conversation was out of the question.

Instead, I found myself wedged between Simon's high-school friends and his college friends. Feeling more of a ken for the high-school side of the table, I tried to orient myself in that direction, but the effort required a socially and anatomically awkward craning of the neck. I was left in a no man's land—on the fringe of two conversations, an active player in neither. Had we been at a bar, I could have maneuvered my way out of such a quagmire by excusing myself to order another round of sweet, sweet SoCo and lime. Thus escaping, I could have muscled my way over to the guest of honor and given him a good birthday noogie. But mired in the middle of this dinner table, the only way I was going to get Simon's attention was by faking an aneurysm, and I just wasn't feeling up to it.

I busied myself by studying the menu, looking up in time to catch a nefarious glint in the eye of our white-smocked waiter. I understand from friends who've waited tables that serving a large party can have its annoyances: It's hard to get anyone's attention; you've got to extol the virtues of the soup du jour four times over. But a seasoned server knows how to work the situation to his advantage, and this guy proved to be positively au poivre.

Given the built-in gratuity for a party of our size, our waiter clearly realized there was nothing to lose by making the hard sell. He was getting 18 percent of whatever he could push on us, so he might as well give it a healthy shove. For an appetizer, he vigorously recommended the frutti di mare platter—an item accompanied on the menu by the dreaded "market price" designation. Working each flyleaf of the table separately, he managed to sell us three of these massive, adjustable-rate heaps of shrimp and lobster tail. One would have sufficed.

I can't lay all the blame at the feet of our conniving server, however. As is often the case at birthday dinners, several different tax brackets were represented at the table, with humble grad students and servants of the Fourth Estate alongside deep-pocketed bankers and lawyers. Members of the latter group, accustomed to large, expense-account-financed lunches and dinners, were not going to let a few uneaten crustaceans slow them down. When our waiter returned to take our entrée orders, one of their number reached for the wine list—round of bubbly for the birthday boy! Ouch. It was time to think strategy.

There are three approaches to ordering at a birthday dinner. I actually didn't know that the first approach was possible until this particular outing. Early in the evening, I noticed Simon's friend Justin, a legendarily frugal graduate student, engage our waiter in an extended colloquy. After dinner, I sidled up to Justin to complain about the exorbitant bill, knowing my outrage would fall on sympathetic ears. Instead, he flashed a wicked grin and revealed that he had "seceded from the check, Jefferson Davis-style." That is, having realized things were getting out of hand, he had worked out an understanding with the waiter whereby he would order on a separate tab that would include only his appetizer, entrée, and beverages. It was a brilliant stroke, though it required Justin's unabashed cheapskatedness, which, like his taste in metaphor, is rare indeed.

On to the more subtle approaches. The first is to order as inexpensively as possible, in an attempt to foster a norm of fiscal conservatism at the table. This strategy is rarely successful. You order a house salad and the chicken and roll the dice that the guy next to you will feel too embarrassed to order an entrée called "steak for two." Such restraint cannot be counted on in a large, salary-diverse group.

The other approach, the one I favor, is to order offensively. Your typical birthday dinner is around 10 guests strong. Given a group of this size, you can safely assume there will not be an itemized accounting of who ordered what come bill-paying time—it requires too much math and is usually adjudged to be not in keeping with the celebratory nature of the event. Armed with this knowledge, the only way to order is with abandon. If I'm going to be subsidizing the sybaritic corporate lawyer at the end of the table (who, I happen to know, wouldn't think of ordering a beer unless it was brewed by a Trappist monk), you'd better believe he's going to be paying for a tract of my baked Alaska.

I developed this system after too many birthday dinners where I went home poor and hungry. This way, at least, you get the food you want. But the victory is pyrrhic. Tradition holds that the birthday boy make a perfunctory swipe at the check before it's whisked from his grasp. In the case of Simon's party, not only was the man of honor off the hook for his portion of the bill, but at the suggestion of a chivalrous spendthrift who I'd have kicked in the shin had the table not been so vast, the group exempted Simon's girlfriend as well, since she'd undertaken the arduous task of sending out the Evite. A check that would have been a hardship split 12 ways now was to be split by 10.

Simon is one of my oldest and dearest friends; I like to think I'd do just about anything for him. But sitting here looking at a charge for $168.51, I find myself wondering how good a friend he really is. $168.51! Do you know how many Uno's individual deep-dish Spinoccolis that would buy? Seventeen. That's two-plus weeks of dinner.

In a way, though, it is I who owe Simon. The piles of jumbo shrimp floating on seas of melted ice; the untouched beds of creamed spinach; the endless rounds of marked-up Beck's Dark—they flash before me now whenever a birthday dinner invitation comes my way, and I can't bring myself to RSVP yes. The excesses of Simon's dinner were what I needed to find the social gumption to swear off such affairs entirely. Throwing a party for your birthday? I'll gladly attend the festivities. Point me to the bowling shoes and buy me a few frames. Cook me dinner—I'll bring the Taboo. Otherwise, see you next year, pal.

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In addition to paying for his own dinner, Justin did cover a tranche of Simon's meal as well. It should also be noted that he did not eat any of the seafood platters or other communally ordered food. He may be a secessionist, but he is a principled one.

John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor. You can email him at dvdextras@gmail.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2202646/

Seinfeld Muffin Top episode

Woman: I can't believe somebody pulled the top off of this muffin.

Elaine: That was me. I'm sorry. I don't like the stumps.

Mr Lippman: So you just eat the tops.

Elaine: Oh yeah. It's the best part. It's crunchy, it's explosive,
it's where the muffin breaks free of the pan and sort of (makes hand
motions) does it's own thing. I'll tell you. That's a million dollor
idea right there. Just sell the tops.
---
Elaine walks into a muffin shop.

Elaine: "Top of the Muffin to you!"?

Mr. Lippman: Top of the muffin to you. Elaine!

Elaine: Mr Lippman?

---
Elaine at the muffin shop.

Elaine: This was my idea you stole my idea.

Mr. Lippman: Elaine these ideas are all in the air. They're in the air.

Elaine: Well if that air is comming out of this face then it is my air
and my idea.

Mr. Lippman: You want a muffin or not?

Elaine: Peach.
---
Elaine and Mr. Lippman at Monk's.

Mr. Lippman: Elaine. I'm in over my head. Nobody likes my muffin tops.

Elaine: So? What do you want me to do about it?

Mr. Lippman: You're the muffin top expert, tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Elaine: Mr. Lippman, when I worked for you at Pendent Publishing, I
believed in you, you know as a man of integrity. But, I saw you in
that paper hat and that aprin...

Mr. Lippman: What if I cut you in for 30% of the profits?

Elaine: Deal. Here's your problem. You're making just the muffin tops.
You've gotta make the *whole* muffin. Then you... Pop the top, toss
the stump. Taste.

Mr. Lippman: Ah. (takes a bite of the top.) Mmmmm. Ah hah?

Elaine: Yeah.

Mr. Lippman: So what do we with the bottoms?

Elaine: I don't know, give em to a soup kitchen.

Mr. Lippman: That's a good idea.

Elaine: And one more thing, you really think we need the exclamation
point? Because, it's not "Top of the Muffin *TO YOU!!!*"

Mr. Lippman: No. No. It is.
---
Elain at the muffin shop.

Elaine: Wow. Look at this. We're cleaning up.

Lippman Oh, Rubin, get me another tray of lowfat cranberry.

Rebecca: Excuse me, I'm Rebecca Demore from the homeless shelter.

Elaine: Oh, hi.

Rebecca: Are you the ones leaveing the muffing pieces behind our shelter?

Elaine: You been enjoying them?

Rebecca: They're just stumps.

Elaine: Well they're perfectly edible.

Rebecca: Oh, so you just assume that the homeless will eat them,
they'll eat anything?

Mr. Lippman: No no, we just thought...

Rebecca: I know what you thought. They don't have homes, they don't
have jobs, what do they need the top of a muffin for? They're lucky to
get the stumps.

Elaine: If the homeless don't like them the homeless don't have to eat them.

Rebecca: The homeless don't like them.

Elaine: Fine.

Rebecca: We've never gotten so many complaints. Every two minutes,
"Where is the top of this muffin? Who ate the rest of this?"

Elaine: We were just trying to help.

Rebecca: Why don't you just drop off some chicken skins and lobster shells.

Elaine: I think I might.
---
Elaine enters

Jerry: Hey, how's business?

Elaine: Ooh, I've got stump troubles. The Sanitation Department won't
get rid of them all, I can't get a truck to haul this stuff until next
week. Meanwhile, I'm sitting on a mountain of stumps.

Kramer: All right, I've got to hose the puke off the floor of the bus.

Elaine: Bus? Wait a minute, wait a minute, bus? You've got a bus?

Kramer: Yeah.

Elaine: You got any room on that thing?

Kramer: Yeah there are a few seats still available.

Elaine: Do you think you could transport some stumps for me? I'll make
it worth your while.

Kramer: Well, if they don't mind sitting in the back.

Elaine: No they don't.

Kramer: Are they war veterans?

Elaine looks at him confused.
---
At the muffin shop.

Mr. Lippman: What is this guy again?

Elaine: They call him a Cleaner. He makes problems go away.

Newman enters.

Newman: Hello Elaine. Where are they?

Elaine: In the back.

Newman: All right, I'm going to need a clean 8 ounce glass.

Mr. Lippman: What is going on here?

Newman: If I'm curt, then I appologize. But as I understand it, we
have a situation here and time is of the essence.

Newman goes to the back room with the muffin stumps and sets down a
cooler and an empty glass. From the cooler he takes out 4 bottles of
milk and sets them down.

He bites into a stump, then takes a drink of milk from the glass.
(continuity error: he never actually poured the glass of milk.) He
swishes the muffin and the milk together and swollows. He takes
another stump.
--- THE END ---

2006 CSI quote

I found this while cleaning up my Inbox, thought I'd post it here for your amusement..

==============
Grissom: a brown hair, with a follicular tag... a person's entire
identity, balled up in a few nanograms of matter.

Assistant: Assuming one's identity can be wholely qualified by our DNA.

Grissom: Oh, genetically it can. we are completely programmed as soon
as the sperm hits the egg.

Assitant: so we are defined at a cellular level?

Grissom: more or less.

Assistant: no, identity is the totality of our life experiences, how
our brain neurons process, how our relationship to the world and each
other.

Grissom: I stand corrected. DNA is what we are, not who we are.

Assistant: What we are never changes, who we are never stops changing.

Grissom: Yeah, whether we like it or not..

Holding the Sun

Please enjoy these beautiful pictures: Holding the Sun!

3D view with WII remote

this is SOoooo Cool! check out his other projects @ http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/

I went to his presentation @ Intel which my friend organized, this is amazing!

Rubik's 7x7x7 ???

have you guys seen this?! this is amazing!

I was searching for a Rubik's 5x5x5 image when I came across this. I broke my old "Professor Cube" and new BF replaced it as a surprise present (how sweet! =)

Now WHERE can I get my hands on one of these?!

Ramune

Ramune is this lightly flavoured Japanese carbonated soft drink. The most interesting part of it is not in the taste, but rather in the revolutionary method of package (for that time).

(Disclaimer: I was told this info, so please don't fault me for its accuracy.)

Apparently, before they invented the pull-ring way of aluminum can, the way to package and seal carbonated drinks is via this glass ball method. I regularly buy Ramune to drink from Asian supermarkets just for the simple pleasure of celebrating this engineering marvel. The glass ball is stuck very hard at the top of the bottle (presumably some vacuum method) so it forms an air tight seal for the bottle. When opening it, one simply push hard on the glass ball and it will tear away from the plastic/wax seal edge and fall back into the bottle. Then there is a specially designed curved part on the bottle "neck", which when held in a certain orientation, it will get "stuck" in that cavity, allowing the rest of the liquid to pass through when the bottle is tilted by the drinker...

Okey, enough on geeky details... one word: Ingenius!!!

Sand Art

sweet SONY commercial

this is a super sweet commercial in Chinese, both Jerry Yen 言承旭 and 桂綸鎂 are excellent choices in this type of "pure luv" setting.... Enjoy!