Zombie Lapdance

So I brought a lot of the junk from the inside of projection TV home with me a while back. The other day I finally got around to turning some of that into a telescope.

The body is a used cardboard tube from an industrial-sized roll of plastic wrap. The big lens at the end is from the projection part of the projection TV. That’s what’s technically called the light-gathering lens. The "magnification" lens at the eye-end of the telescope is from a plastic 35mm camera that I’m never going to use again because it’s the digital age.

It works fairly well. It’s three or four times magnification I’m guessing. I can put my digital camera up to the end and actually photograph what your eye sees through the telescope. This is the front door of my neighbors across the street.

And here’s their mailbox. The image is how you would see it through the telescope, upside-down and backward.

This is the same view with my tragically unmagnified eyeballs.

The moon isn’t going to be in the sky any time I want to be awake for the next couple of weeks, but here’s the view of jupiter, the next brightest object in the night sky these days. (this is digitally zoomed)

As you can see, the color aberrations on this telescope are totally heinous.

I would have to build a much more complex and precision calibrated machine to reduce the aberrations. Basically it would mean extra lenses to correct the prismatic effect of the light-gathering lens bending the light.

I’m fairly certain that I saw a couple of the Galilean moons of Jupiter with my naked eye, but they didn’t show up on the pictures, not even under contrast manipulation of the image.

It’s a little disappointing. I was hoping to use those images to prove to some people that the earth isn’t the center of the solar system. Or at least that they themselves aren’t.

Did you guys just fly some sort of top-secret experimental aircraft over Austin? Like fifteen minutes ago?

I think you would recognize it if you did. It was running without lights, but I could see its shadowy outline against the light pollution. It looked sort of like a boomerang, with four dimly glowing points down each wing.

Kinda like this:

It seemed to be flying silently, but then it’s not like I could have heard anything over 183 anyways.

Is it one of yours? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?

Oh, and let me know if you’re also aliens.

I watch way too many movies. To give you an idea of how many movies I watch, if I were to blog every single movie I watched, the entries would far out-number the entries about me eating weird food.

I know. Hard to comprehend.

Here’s a movie that was recommended by Spacebeer, Withnail and I.

I think that if I had seen this when I was in high school it would have been my favorite movie. As it was, I actually thought it was mildly irritating. It’s about a pair of obnoxious and ineffectual London actors who take a vacation in the country. Notably, it stars two future Dr. Whos. There’s Richard E. Grant, who was a very serviceable non-doctrinal doctor in Scream of the Shalka and the Dr. Who comic relief special. And of course, Paul McGann, the very much doctrinal eighth doctor that no one really wants to talk about.

A little more my speed, is the blatant Blade Runner rip-off from South Korea, Natural City. This following production still fairly summarizes the movie.

Pretty much every major plot point and image is cribbed from Blade Runner. Except that Natural City has all the post-Matrix wire-work and gore that Ridley Scott would have put in if he had only known it were possible. It’s amazingly long and the plot meanders and frequently makes no sense, but it has the most amazing head shot I’ve ever seen. All the flesh on the head vibrates and flutters in slow-motion. Absolutely amazing. Worth watching just for that.

I’ve seen Dhoom2 of course, but it’s actually kinda hard to find Dhoom, the movie that started it all. From what I’ve seen on the web, the word ‘dhoom’ doesn’t translate well to English. "Dhoom machale" the title song, means something like "rock on" or "have fun." And Dhoom is indeed fun.

It’s essentially The Fast and the Furious, but with John Abraham instead of Vin Diesel. Which could be an improvement, depending on your perspective. Now, let’s close out this Dhoom with another motorcycle shot:

I had heard of Solarbabies, but I had not known how awesome it is. It’s a post-apocalyptic future, where orphans rollerskate through the desert. It has Ubalstecha’s boyfriend Peter DeLuise, a glowing magical orb, and this awesome robot.

I will fight anyone who claims this movie is not awesome.

In the category of horror movies that were much better than they had any right to be, falls Splinter.

The Netflix summary for this movie is horrible. But it was the highest-ranked horror movie on instant view that I hadn’t already watched, so Julia and I gave it a shot. This is very low budget, it has it’s flaws, but it’s in the same category as Dogsoldiers or Shallow Ground, in the sense that it takes an outlandish premise and lets it unfold organically with some damn good acting, directing, and writing. And some creative manipulation of the human form.

On a side note, I would like to give a shout-out to Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath, a blog about horror movies. The entries are entertaining, thoughtful, and well researched. Exactly what horror has been missing all this time.

With a characteristic suddenness, Austin has entered the rainy season. We have actually had a couple of days that were cooler than 90 degrees.

There’s a life-giving release of nature when the rains return. Here’s a Hyde Park lawn with a blossoming of several perfect mushroom rings.

These could be members of the delicious and nutritious agaricus family, or they could be the aptly named destroying angel. Either way, I’m not hungry enough to find out for certain.

The autumn rains also bring about the fruiting of the mourning dove trees.

In another week we’ll be surrounded by a fresh crop of these delightful and vocal birds.

There was a group trip down to Quality Seafood, and I was told that I had to have the oysters.

They were cold, limp, covered in dirt, vaguely mucusy, and over-grown with secondary aquatic organisms. I dunno, I guess it was okay.

I continue to be fascinated by hushpuppies. They’re like corndogs without the dog. And they taste good dipped in a cocktail sauce.

I can’t believe I never had one until I came to the south.

Now, I like to think of myself as an adventurous eater, but there were people at this restaurant who insisted on eating these giant red beetles.

Now that’s just disgusting.

There’s a new roach coach on North Loop called Counter Culture.

I had been reading the menu for a minute and a half before I realized that they only served vegan food. That’s because they named everything on the menu after something that is generally made from meat. For instance, I ordered the "Jackfruit BBQ."

It’s served with a side of sliced carrots just to add insult to the injury. What did it taste like? It tasted like somebody smeared barbecue sauce over something that was clearly not meat.

Now, for about half the price of the vegan sandwich, I got one of the best looking tortas in town at Los Altos.

It’s a crying shame that Los Altos doesn’t have more of a following. The food is good, the service prompt, and it has some of the best prices in town. The above torta was a barbacoa cubana. The "cubana" part means that it has a thick slice of ham. Compare it to the torta al pastor that my colleague ordered.

Pretty damn delicious. Mexican food is yet another reason to hate vegans and everything they stand for.

Speaking of hating vegans, let’s end this entry with a meat quiz. In the following photo there are three different meats in the tacos: lengua, barbacoa, and suadero. Can you identify which is which?

My MP3 player stopped charging its own battery. In the past this would have been a tragic event, but luckily my co-workers have their own MP3 devices now, so I wasn’t forced to listen to John Aielli, or anything as horrible as that.

The first thing I tried was replacing the battery.

The MP3 player has a metal case, and once you unscrew a few carefully hidden fasteners, the electronic guts of the player slide right out the top. But the battery still wouldn’t charge, so I bypassed the internal battery entirely, entering the MP3 player into my appliance-wide system of rechargeable NiMH AAs.

I’m guessing that there is smutz on the contacts of the USB recharge cord and that’s why it’s not recharging. This is a little less compact, but perfectly serviceable.

I also had some problems with the power supply cord for my laptop. There was a period of a month or so when I had to fuss with the cord for a few minutes, jiggling the cord and setting it at different angles, until it actually conveyed electricity. It finally got bad enough that I opened it up and spliced out the break in the wires.

There’s a theme of intermittent wire fatigue breaks in my life that I think has its roots in the way I wad up cords and stuff them in my shoulder bag.

The laser printer I’ve been using, a freecycle find from editor D, has been printing funny. So I opened up the cartidge, managing to totally break it and cover everything in my house with a fine layer of printer toner.


So I ordered a new cartridge. Which is just as well. I’m fairly certain that this cartridge was having troubles due to a pervasive mat of cat hair within the toner receptacle.

By the time you read this, I will probably have eaten a perfectly ordinary, deliciously normal meal with my food frakking deputy Julia. It will be nothing that I can blog about. But go ahead and enjoy all the other oddities I have put in my mouth recently.

While passing by a carniceria I bought a single flap of thinly sliced and pre-breaded milanesa.

I also got a couple of sweets. The one on the left is a roll of hawthorn gum wrapped around a salted plum and doused with plenty of chili powder. The other is a watermelon hard candy lollipop with more salt and chili than you can really imagine easily.

Julia asked me, "Do you actually like this stuff?" Which was a very interesting question that I hadn’t really thought about. The best answer is that I like the vivid experience of this food.

From La Casita, a breakfast dish with plenty of fried tortilla strips floating in a sea of salsa verde and topped with fried eggs.

Let’s talk Asian meat products. Here’s a salted herring fillet that tasted exactly like canned kipper snacks.

Here’s a spread featuring pork and cucumber dumplings. The directions recommended dunking the dumplings in ice water to bring out their crisp and unique flavor. But here I served them with oyster sauce and ramen.

Here is some kamaboko. It’s essentially the same thing as fake crab meat, a rubbery fish-smelling protein tube. Only it’s packaged with its own wood cutting board, which seems pretty classy to me.

Here’s a serving suggestion:

This pork loaf is pretty similar to the kamaboko above. It comes wrapped in banana leaves, aluminum foil, and twine to give the impression that it’s rustic, instead of the Thai version of Oscar Mayer bologna.

A little farther down the Asian processed meat ladder are these fried fish cakes. They fried up crisp on the outside and lightly spongy on the inside.

At the very bottom of the processed meat pile is this cream style pickled gouramy (or gourami). You may remember a previous gourami experience that was pretty successful. The pickled gourami bears no resemblance to that.

Basically, it looks and smells like something you would scrape off the bottom of a fishmonger’s dumpster. Which is similar to how it’s made. Typically pickled gourami is gourami fillets packed in rice flour and salt and buried until it ferments into a nasty sludge. The result is then pureed. But for all it’s disgusting smell and texture, you boil it into some hot water and it becomes a subtly nuanced and flavorful broth.

Let’s round this off with some Asian sweets. I took this rice cake desert to a party and it was devoured by the guests, who compared it favorably with a Little Debbie Zebra Cake.

Curiously, they didn’t mention the bean paste filling.

These custard dumplings are filled with pudding. Imagine a pudding cup with a bun instead of plastic.

Pure brilliance.

I got this idea in my head that I wanted to do a scale model of the solar system. It probably came from listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy podcast, a collaboration project celebrating the international year of astronomy. One of the podcasts was a woman talking about how she tried to make a model of the solar system as a kid, using string.

So late Thursday night, I insisted that Julia and I take an hour and a half out of our lives and replicate the astronomical system that gives us life. Julia was very understanding and patient, and she helped by making these drawings of the planets.

This is what Saturn looked like when we pinned it in position at midnight.

I need more projects that can be taken from conception to conclusion in the time between supper and going to bed.

I used the stopsign at 53rd and Clarkson as the scaled version of the sun, because you could still see it while standing four blocks away. By that scale, Jupiter and Saturn were roughly the size of baseballs, Earth was the size of a lima bean, and Mercury was pea-sized.

The scaled ratio was pretty stupendous. The fraction of size between the stopsign and the Sun was a number with a decimal followed by nine zeroes.

The terrestrial planets were close enough together that we could measure their relative position with a retractable tape measure. Here’s the view from Mars, about a block away from the stopsign or "sun."

It was a pretty cozy setup. I could feel like I understood how these billiard ball planets tucked into the warm envelope of the close solar neighborhood.

At this solar distance the scales are pretty easy to visualize. The Earth is visible, the Sun is visible, and you get a feeling for how difficult it would be to send a spacecraft the vast distances between planets.

Jupiter and Saturn were too far away to measure by hand, so we estimated their position using google maps. Here’s the view from Saturn.

Beneath the red arrow is a tiny, white car. The "Sun" is another two blocks behind that. You can only barely see it with the naked eye.

I spent some time standing by the scale drawing of Saturn, thinking about what it must be like to be that far from anything warm. The sun would be just a distant ember in the sky, the nearest planet a bare glimmer in the distance, and invisible for most of the orbital interaction.

Saturn was as far as we actually assembled our mock solar system, because that’s as far as Clarkson went.

But I continued to do some of the math. Pluto, which used to be a planet would fall somewhere in the Manor Rd neighborhood.

Julia and I speculated where we would have to place the nearest star on this scale. We thought it would be somewhere around Elgin or San Antonio.

This was totally wrong. Alpha centauri, the nearest star at 4.37 lightyears, by the "stopsign scale" would still be 22,000km away. That’s essentially on the exact opposite side of the world.

No wonder the mundane S/F people think that interstellar travel is so unlikely. I can hardly imagine the distance to Pluto, but the distance to the closest star, let alone the distance to all the other stars, dwarfs that.

It actually made me pretty depressed. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a concept that was literally terrifyingly beyond human conception.

So of course I had to do the math to get an idea of how far the nearest galaxy was by this scale. Andomeda, which is 2.5 million light years away, by the "stopsign scale" would have to be placed out beyond the orbit of Pluto.

To put that in context, imagine that a microscopic version of me and Julia lived on the lima-bean sized Earth model. We would be 5.45×10-10 times smaller than the real us. The microscopic me decides to make a model of the solar system on a microscopic Clarkson Rd. At 5.45×10-10 scale, the entire solar system is too small to see, but you might be able to see a tiny glimmer of light on the other side of the lima-bean sized planet that is Alpha Centauri. The micro-me would then trek out to Manor Rd (using his spaceship presumably), and lay out a model of the Andromeda galaxy that would be roughly a third of a kilometer across in our world.

I try not to think too hard about that.

If you are a frequent reader of this blog (and really, who isn’t?), then you are familiar with my previous failed attempt to make a SPAM dip.

Let me assure you, dear reader, that I have turned that failure into a success. A fluffy, meaty success.

The first step of the SPAM dip research process, was to go to the store and buy all the raw ingredients that I figured a SPAM dip would need.

Then I had to prepare the SPAM for its short and violent trip to the blender.

Here I am adding half a bulb of garlic, to give the dip that extra tangy zip.

You can find other recipes for SPAM dip on the internet (tragically I’m not the first to realize that you don’t necessarily have to chew SPAM), but this is the only real SPAM dip recipe.

2 cans of SPAM (low sodium if you know what’s good for you)

8 oz. sour cream

Garlic and spices to taste.

Blend until it becomes creamy and delicious.

I set up the SPAM dip with some other pork products to make a little pork party platter.

Let’s get a couple more glamour shots of that:

Here’s my food frakking deputy Julia in a SPAM dip action shot.

And this is me, in SPAM heaven.

In case anyone doubts that I actually live in Austin, I went to see Woozy Helmet at the Hole in the Wall last week.

They’re the only band I ever really go out to see anymore. Because all other music is beneath me.