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February 23, 2008
Multicultural Breakfast
Clearly I haven't been grocery shopping in a while, because this morning I had to whip together a breakfast from whatever was handy. I wound up making tofu seasoned with red curry powder and scrambled with onions, red peppers, jalapenos and fried kielbasa.
I know. It sounds terrible. But it actually turned out to be a big plate of spicy deliciousness.
As I sat down to eat, I wondered if I could have found a way to represent at least one more culture's cuisine in the same plate. I almost went back for the bottle of sriracha hot sauce to throw a little Thai into the mix . . . but in the end thought better of it. :-)
Posted February 23, 2008 01:12 PMPosted February 23, 2008 01:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 06, 2008
Everything Old is New Again
Yeah, so I spent a couple hours wrangling around with Movable Type last night. I don't know why. I'd had a lousy day of wrangling with other various bits of software, projects, and people at the office, plus I skipped lunch, so i don't know what made me think that coming home and before eating dinner deciding to entirely redesign a site I hadn't touched in two years.
Glutton. For. Punishment.
It could have gone horrifically wrong. I could have gotten in way over my head, what with the HTML and the CSS and the templates and the MT settings and the repeated clicking of the rebuild button. I could have totally lost it and left the job halfway done, and you could be reading this in 12-point Times Roman on a gray background just like 1996. And it did look dicey there for about 30 minutes when I couldn't figure out why every time I rebuilt the site Movable Type insisted on not rebuilding all the archives. (Answer: set some more radio button preferences and a drop-down or two plus checking the Movable Type documentation. I hate it when I have to RTFM.)
In the end, though, I pulled it off and ordered pad thai to celebrate. The site looks . . . well, it looks like about 2003 instead of 1996. Literally. Those of you who somehow still have me in your feed reader since the days back when I was posting regularly may recognize the same green color scheme and the banner image from a previous design. Stick with what I know how to do.
A couple of years ago, I attempted a much more ambitious site re-design that did go horrifically wrong, and I wound up just slapping up some goofy black-and-orange Movable Type template that I pulled off a free template site. And there it stayed for years, sorta like the stack of boxes sitting next to my desk that I put there when I moved into my condo several years ago. (There's probably something really important and life-changing in those boxes, but it's been so long I no longer have any clue what's in there. It's like a personal time capsule. One day I'll get around to opening them up, and then it'll be all like "Ohhhh, that's where i left that coffee can full of diamonds!")
There's still some hinky stuff. One bit of hinkiness being that if you've subbed to my RSS feed, you probably got a full feed of old posts from me when you woke up this morning. Sorry 'bout that. And I'm not gonna be winning any design awards. I expect I'll want to screw around with colors and line spacing and font sizes . . . or maybe just not touch it for another two years. And, oh yeah, I haven't even looked at it in Internet Explorer yet, so it may look like ass in IE. But, really, if you're using IE, just frickin' switch to Firefox or Safari already. I'm so over you IE users and your quirks.
Anyway. There you have it: Ten Reasons Why slightly updated for the tail end of the decade, but still kicking it with the old school charm. :-)
Now all I have to do is write.
Posted February 6, 2008 06:47 AMPosted February 6, 2008 06:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 05, 2008
My Theory on "Lost"
I'm not a huge Lost fan, especially since it employs such a painfully slow and opaque storytelling technique. But I'm enough of a fan (and, apparently, enough of a geek) that I've got a theory on why the castaways are on the Island. This theory came together watching the final episode of last season, titled "Through the Looking Glass," which was re-broadcast last week. I twittered about it right before the season premiere so as to cement a public record of my interpretive and prognostication abilities.
So here's the clues I picked up on.
First clue: Jack mentions his father twice in the episode: once at a pharmacist when he tries to fill a prescription ostensibly written by his father, and a second time when, after the new chief of surgery asks Jack how much he's had to drink, Jack tells him to get his father down here to see who's more drunk.
We know Jack's father to be dead; picking up his body from Australia was the whole reason he was on the plane that crashed. Both references could be explained away by of Jack's decline into drinking and drugs.
Or . . . Jack's father is alive when he shouldn't be.
Second clue: Several episodes back in last season, in the episode titled "The Brig," Naomi falls from a crashing helicopter with a parachute. When it's explained to her that the island's inhabitants are the survivors of the crashed Oceanic flight, she says that's not possible because the crash site was found and submersible robots confirmed all the bodies were on the plane.
Again, you can explain that in various ways. Maybe it's a cover up, maybe Naomi has a reason to lie, etc.
Or . . . our crew on the island appears to be alive when they shouldn't be.
Two instances last season that reference people who shouldn't being alive as alive.
Third clue: The last episode of last season was called "Through the Looking Glass," a reference to the Lewis Carroll's indentically titled sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In Looking Glass, Alice passes through a mirror into an alternate world where everything is backwards or at least off-kilter. At least so far, the "Through the Looking Glass" episode marks a turning point in the Lost narrative structure, specifically the replacement of flashbacks of the castaways life before the island with flashforwards of some of the castaways life after the island.
Fourth clue: At the end of the "Through the Looking Glass" episode, Jack meets with Kate. Both have been rescued, and Jack is apparently not dealing with it well. He tells Kate they weren't supposed to leave and that he's looking for a way back to the island.
Conclusion: the island is some sort of nexus between parallel worlds. In the castaway's world, their plane got caught up in . . . well, whatever the event was that Desmond triggred, and that caused their plane to crash on the nexus/island. In Naomi's world, Oceanic 815 crashed into a trench and all the bodies were identified. In the world that Jack, Kate, and Hurley escape to Jack's father is still alive. And so forth and so on.
It doesn't wrap up everything in a neat little bow. Like it doesn't explain the wacky smoke clouds, the polar bears, Jacob, Locke's healing abilities, the original inhabitants, etc etc etc. But it is an operating theory. I'm now interested in going back and watching some of the old episodes to see if I can pick up on other clues.
Ah, good old, narrative analysis. It's like being an English major again. ;-)
Posted February 5, 2008 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)