Whalers of the moon

"one of these days, Alice, one of these days- bang, zoom, straight to the moon!"
"wow, I never realized the early astronauts were so fat."
"he wasn't an astronaut! He was a comedian who used space travel as a metaphor for beating his wife!"
"nobody know what it was like when man first landed on the moon-"
"I do!"
"but our fungineers believe it looked something like this..."
"we're whalers of the moon..."

Ah futurama. You bring such comfort to me in my times of extreme boredom. And yes, I wrote that all from memory. I am that pathetic.

Halloween has come and gone and with it another horror movie fest where Tavie and I remained the only two left to watch the really good stuff. Met some nice new people and ordered a LOT of pizza. A good time was had by most if not all.

I am in a hell of a lot of pain. For whatever reason, my dentist did a half of a root canal saturday (scraping out the nerve then giving it a temporary filling) and it won't be finished until wednesday. Meanwhile for the last few days, forget about eating anything on that side of my mouth, even just existing is a misery. I have trouble sleeping at night because the pain wakes me up and even popping painkillers like M&Ms only works so much. Trying to work is a nightmare- And on top of that I have my class today so I need to stand around watching people to make sure they don't kill themselves for several hours. Not a good time to be distracted.

Ungh, phew, blech. This sucks.

In other news- well, things are busy here. I'd rather not talk about my work life too much, if it's all the same to you folks.

Personal life? Good. Living at home very happily. Watching Stargate SG-1. Writing up essays and the like. Never a dull moment. Come to think of it, I don't remember the last time I had a dull moment.

Manos, the Hands of Fate.

Over the years, I've developed a number of excellent recipes. However, over the course, I discovered one or two that have proven to be very, very bad. Bad as in it tastes good when you eat it, but you regret eating it later. Last night was one such dish. I made hamburger helper, which is normally fine. It was chedder ranch. I decided to make it a little nicer by shredding in just a little bit of some cheese I had on hand. What kind of cheese? It was a sharp white chedder imbued with habenero peppers. I had eaten the cheese by itself earlier to no ill effect, and it wasn't terribly spicy. Melting just a tiny bit in made the whole dish surprisingly hot. But as the evening went on, Joanna and I began to get warnings from our stomachs and- well, to make a long story short, it wasn't a pleasant night.

The only other recipe I have which will guarentee such gastronomic suffering is one I invented for a beef stroganoff. It tastes very good, but you will suffer suffer suffer. I suppose it could be useful to know should you wish to provably get out of something, but I don't reccomend it.

So Starbucks has their new instant coffee. Their advertising campaign? That it tastes just as good as their regular coffee, and until today, you were invited to give it a free taste test.

So I had a little time to kill today I decided for the hell of it to go for it. It's a funny advertisement, you know? Everyone knows how awful instant coffee it. Saying it's just like your regular coffee, it is meant as a compliment for their instant, whereas I see it as insulting the quality of their regular coffee. Well, insulting if I thought it was any good. You know what I mean.

Anyway, I went in and requested the test. I wanted to be fair, so I turned away until they were ready. Two small cups greeted me. On the left was smooth, dark brown, no bubbles. There were one or two brown flecks I noticed. Aha, says I. Undissolved powder. On the right was slight froth, as if quickly poured into the cup with a couple of bubbles formed. These bubbles wouldn't be formed from stirring. So on the right must be the regular coffee.

But what the hell, let's try a taste. And this is where things took a turn for the strange. The cup in my left hand, which I had supposed was the fake, was...awful. So far so good. The cup on my right? Searingly awful. It made my face clench and my gag reflex began to make itself known. Clearly, this must be the instant...

Could those brown flecks be bean grains from a sloppy cup? What if they made the bubbles on purpose by vigorous stirring? Both were the same temperature, so that meant nothing. My eyes told me one thing, my tongue a completely different story. Which to choose, which to choose?

I went with my tongue. "This one" I said, holding up the right cup.

Nope. Turns out that the soul-tarnishingly awful one was the REAL coffee and the just plain awful one was the instant. Let this be a lesson to you. Starbucks makes coffee so terrible that their instant tastes better.

FYI Starbucks, I brought a friend of mine in later and he had the same reaction. The reason why everyone picks wrong isn't because they both taste so good. It's because people are so used to instant coffee being so bad, nobody dreamed that the really putrid one could be anything else. Congradulationsm your coffee is actually worse than instant. I hope you're proud.

It is exceedingly rare that I get so hooked on a T.V. series. Hooked to the point that the microwave beeps and I don't want to pause the episode.

I joked about Fringe when it came out, calling it a recreation of the classic 80's sci-if/horror tv-shows with the monster of the week. Think Friday the 13th the series. Or, really, think X-Files too. I never really got into the latter, but I wish I had.

The truth is that it is one of those old shows. But the writing is excellent. The science is surprisingly accurate although mostly nonsense, of course. On the other hand, there are times when the explaination is simply "We can guess about how it works, but we really don't know," which seems a tad more honest to me.

But the great thing about the show isn't the story of every episode, but rather the larger, more complicated story slowly revealed through the course of the series. No, I won't give it away.

Normally, any show which includes a Watcher character immediately sets off alarms in my mind. This show actually used him well, I'll give them that.

The writing is very good. The mysteries are intriguing. The acting is excellent. There's only one small flaw.

The main actress. There's something in her acting which is just a touch off, though I can't put my finger on it. I think it's that her accent seems to keep changing, and it's just enough that it keeps ruining my suspension of disbelief, because it is mostly fairly subtle.

Everyone else is superb. There is some very funny stuff. The archetypal Absent Minded Professor, his Genius Son who is the only one who can translate most of what he says to everyone else, the Strong Female Lead along with various and sundry assistants (one of whom is named the same as my sister).

I just finished watching the first season. The third episode of season two just came out and I am having a harsh debate with myself about whether I should wait to watch the entire second season together or wait week by week while the new episodes come out. It's a tough call.

Okay, I'm not describing this well. The best I can say is this. The basis of every show is a scientific mystery. They had some real science on call for these, although some of the science is rubbish but cool. I watched the first few episodes and enjoyed them. But around episode 5 was when I found myself sucked in. Last night I went to bed at midnight with two episodes to go and I felt like a junkie arguing whether or not to take another hit. It combines science, science fiction, mystery, and a good cop show all rolled in one.

I'm surprised FOX hasn't cancelled it yet. Oh yea. And the opening credits are astonishingly short.

Anyway, I've got a copy I'll be happy to loan anyone as soon as I get my stuff up and running again. Check it out, I would really love to bounce some chatter about it off of someone, but nobody I know watches it.

I almost pissed in my pants laughing about this on sunday when it was broadcast. Some things are just done perfectly, and this is that. Enjoy: