The Observer's Blog

Is This the Home of the Free or What?

Thanksgiving Day Take 1

- Roll out of bed and check on my roommate who's preparing the turkey. Make several suggestions, forgetting to remind my roommate to cover the pan with foil to keep in moisture. Head to mass.

- Suprise priest with presence at a 10:00 am mass. Meet woman from Homer, LA (with the appropriate accent) whose daughter has a bizarre European-sounding accent. Woman recounts trips to Cobb's BBQ in nearby Bossier City. Develop craving for Cobb's BBQ.

- Talk to parents, grandmother, and uncle. My father has gotten a refurbished reel-to-reel player and has just finished playing the first reel for everyone (including never-before-seen footage of Villeplatte, LA family).

- Get home and try to schedule a baking session in one of the ovens. Looks like I'll have to wait an hour at least. I can conquer some more of the Italian penninsula while I wait.

- Greek Cities are victorious! The candied sweet potatoes look good until I have to combine the candied part with the sweet potato part. It's like a sweet potato soup. Hopefully putting it in the oven for 25 minutes will solve everything.

- The slightly thicker sweet potato soup comes out of the oven and joins the rest of the food downstairs. Much of the turkey is gone, but I still have plenty to eat now that I have joined the rest of "the house".

- Sit around. Play Lord of the Rings Risk for a bit and lose interest; the guy who takes over for me wins. Play BS and win. Go over to a friend's apartment and learn some disturbing secrets of the female mind.

- Capture the rest of the Italian penninsula.

Thanksgiving Day Take 2

- Look up new recipes online after sweet potato debacle.

- Retrieve laptop power cord from my part-time office. Go to the wrong wine shop; this place only sells wine by the barrel and you have to wait 2 months before it's ready. A guy with braces tells me which place I meant to go and how to get there.

- Finally found the pecans at Safeway! This is pretty much the most extensive produce section excursion I've ever made in Hawaii.

- Cooking to avenge yesterday's debacle: Construct a makeshift steaming device out of kitchen sundries. How in the world are you supposed to grate ginger anyway? Make last minute modifications to garlic mashed potatoes: the recipe should have called for about 10 times as much milk as it did.

- Make it to Naomi Watts' place with minutes to spare. Wine is good. All three of my dishes are great. Everyone else's food is equally good. Conversation with bible study peeps (+ 2) is good. Success.

Profundity

I'm not trying to toot my own horn or anything, but I have to admit that I tend to say a lot more profound things per unit time than most people. I accomplish this simply by outproducing others in sheer volume of significant statements made. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these statements are only profoundly stupid. This can sometimes be a problem for me, and often infuriating to others who are more proficient with Google than I apparently give them credit for. I would just like to say for the record, that I have come to realize over the course of the last ten months that the name Rita Mann is totally excellent.

In other news (almost deserving of a separate post), I see a revolution unfolding on the scale of the Fight Club phenomenon. This uprising differs however in that it is not fictional, and instead of slowly taking hold amongst bored twenty-somethings it will spread from playground to playground faster than you can say "slap bracelet". You'll know if your neighbors' kids are part of this movement primarily by an increase in horn honking occurring near your place of residence. I caught our direct-across-the-street-neighbors' kids having one of their secret hush-hush meetings right out in the open this Saturday around 13:00. The meeting generally proceeds like this:
1) Convene members of the organization in your driveway.
2) Ensure a high volume of automobile traffic. If this is not the case, you should probably adjourn the meeting until a driveway with a suitable level of street traffic can be found.
3) One member of the group should hold out a fist, arm extended, forearm bent at a ninety degree angle upward. This member should then yank with his fist as if on an imaginary chain. This motion is commonly called "getting truckers to blow their horns at you" or simply the trucker motion.
4) Many cars may not honk for you. Do not show signs of weakness. Continue the trucker motion. When an automobile does respond, make sure to show them your appreciation: shout, dance, or even give a thumbs up with your free arm (note: this is one reason why the other members of the organization are not performing the trucker motion; they are essential for the response since the leader has pretty much wasted one of his/her arms).
5) Which brings me to my next point. The leader may need to be relieved if the meeting lasts very long due to the condition known as "tired arm". Your organization should arrange a hierarchy placing members with the highest stamina and performing ability at the top, and those who can barely keep their arm up for more than 30 seconds without supporting it with their other arm should be placed at the bottom of organization.

The group near my house was out for about 15 to 30 minutes, and met with much success. The last point (5) is mostly speculation/advice on my part. Their leader was definitely the largest, physically, but I didn't really watch carefully enough to see if he was ever relieved from his function. I see this movement as being very dangerous because it challenges two pillars of civilized life: first, the trucker motion should only be performed by someone within a vehicle on the highway; second, the trucker motion should only be directed at actual truckers. To do otherwise is madness, and madness is one of the key ingredients of anarchy. Remember, all seditious behavior should be reported directly to the CIA.

Steady Progress, Uncertain Future

First of all, I don't recommend the Safeway panini. Somehow the bread they use for the panini is super-greasy, which makes for an unpleasant eating experience. I do however recommend the "Safeway Signature Sandwich" Plymouth Rock, which by peering over the deli counter at their sandwich-making cheat sheet I learned today is supposed to be made with 4 ounces of turkey and 2.5 ounces of cranberry sauce. Wow. High turkey to cran ratio.

Secondly, I've been wondering what exactly makes humans different from animals. I had a long conversation with a friend last night about this, and here are some of the key thoughts that arose from this discussion:

- Humans have affected the planet more than any other single species. Our impact has not been simply to create long-lived artificial structures and materials (roads, buildings, plastic), but on "biodiversity." Creating new habitats and destroying living ones on large scales. Dinosaurs (who don't even comprise a single species) were the dominant form of life on Earth for many thousands of times longer than we and they had only a fraction of the impact we've had.

- There are genetically similar species to humans; the most obvious example being chimpanzees. What distinguishes us from our genetically-speaking closest relatives? Were other hominids like Neanderthals, Indonesian hobbits, and other extinct species animals or humans? Things we might initially consider unique to humans (e.g., using tools) are probably represented in some species we consider animal. Are there any specific individual-level traits that belong to humans and not animals (maybe suicide?)?

- On an individual level, I don't feel much different from an animal, but on a civilizational level I think humans are very distinct from animals. Is this true, or am I missing some clear difference on an individual level?

- If we accept that humans are unique among animals on Earth, are we unique among all animals in the universe. If life develops on other planets, will it eventually acquire human-ness through some natural process? Sci-fi geek moment: maybe it will acquire some other-ness that's neither human nor animal.

- It's not really useful to try to come at these questions from a spiritual perspective (e.g., answering how humans and animals are different by citing the lack of a soul), but the questions are useful to spiritual discussion. Trying to understand humans as part of creation of God.

Today's Secret Word Is . . .

Millions of words are mispronounced every day. One of the things I've noticed is that people who speak English as a first language are no where near as creative as the rest of the people in the world at mispronouncing English words. Occasionally, a mispronunciation is repeated so often and vigorously that it becomes ingrained in my head. This is sort of like when you get a song stuck in your head, but it's a word. Repeated over and over. Here is a very brief list of some of such mispronunciations. I'm tempted to put names next to these, but they're all pretty famous astronomers, so I'll restrain myself and stick to initials.

distribution - "diss-tro-BOO-shun" - A. M.
It's important to do a sort of Continental 'r' here, as in tres (Spanish three).

percent - "PEAR/PUR-cent" - G. C.
I can't quite figure out how the guy is saying the first syllable, but it's maddeningly somewhere between pear and pur, and it's the one currently on repeat in my head.

all that - "all what" - R. K.
Admittedly, not a mispronunciation, but a confusion of the German phrase "alle was" with the English phrase "all that". Or so I think; my German is pretty rusty.

whatever - "what zoe ev ah" - T. S.
Again a German mistranslation, more than a mispronunciation, but still annoying.

I'll add more as I think of them . . .

You Can't Take It With You

The Killers were on Austin City Limits, what's up with that? This leads me to a question I've wondered before: Are The Killers good?

There's been an inexplicable rash of birthdays lately, and this Friday two converged with a going away party to make a nightmare out of planning my evening. I only really did one of the events justice; the rest languished with my meager presence.

Somehow the Manoa Safeway doesn't carry the pint-plus size of Guinness, but they do have a single 1 pt. 9 oz. beer that costs $10.99.

With all the stalkers and Dupuy's out there now, I should also mention that my 3rd cousin Jodie D. is now working at the Cold Stone Creamery in Waikiki. Stop by and tell her Trent sent you. Their flavor of the month is espresso, so hurry up before it's all gone.

Some Mugs Are Bigger Than Others

I carelessly knocked my B5 mug off my desk onto the soft office carpet the other day, and the handle shattered. This is only the latest in a rash of beverage container breakages I've caused from relatively gentle handling. The other two instances over the last month or so were a wine glass whose base broke off at the stem and a glass tumbler at the Old(e?) Spaghetti Factory that shattered into at least 20 pieces, both the result of setting the glasses down on a table.

I've been able to fall back on the sturdier, hot pink freezer mug for a while, but it's socially awkward to use in public. While shopping at Goodwill for my amazing Pee-Wee Herman costume, I decided to drop the $0.75 for a new mug. I typically drink bag tea, and I find that the average size coffee mug is much too small to make effective use of an entire bag of tea. Given my mug size needs, I found myself tempted to buy a Christmas mug. I'm pretty sure this conclusion isn't anecdotal because faced with an assortment of a few hundred mugs, it was quite clear that Christmas mugs are typically larger than an average mug. This doesn't make much sense to me, except that maybe people consume more in all areas around the holidays. Maybe it's because a bigger mugful of liquid gets colder more slowly, and so it preferable to use in the wintertime. Or maybe it's for the same reason that I wanted it, because people are more likely to use it for non-coffee beverages, and people generally want a larger quantity of non-coffee than they do of coffee. The only other thing I can think of is that Christmas mugs are larger so that they can be decorated more elaborately with Christmas type stuff, and normal mugs are not typically very ornate.

In the end, I got one of those flared mugs that I believe are supposed to resist tipping over. I also got an abnormally large secular mug that is tapered at the top for some reason. Just when I thought I was starting to get a handle on mug design, the taper is thrown at me. This website on mug design was no help.