If you live in Japan and like mangoes, be prepared to pay ¥8,400 (AU$84) for one: between that and the $80 bunch of grapes, it makes our $13/kg bananas from 2006 look like a real bargain.
Sunday Recipe: French Toast
Here’s an easy one for you :) I have no idea if my style of French Toast has any resembelence to the so-called real thing or not, but this is what I love to make of a Sunday morning.
Straightforward ingredients:
- Eggs: my rule is 2 eggs for 3 slices of bread
- Bread: 3 slices is plenty for brunch; 2 slices for breakfast. White bread absorbs the egg best, but some sort of grain bread adds texture.
- Milk: 1/4 cup
- Salt
- Pepper, and other spices to taste: as per Indian tastes, you gotta have spices.
The Method to this Madness:
- Break yourself some eggs and sprinkle in some salt. No more than a pinch or two should be necessary.
- Mix ’em up with whatever whipping mechanism you choose – I prefer a fork, keeping it simple
- Add milk to make things a little more creamy & smooth. Also add pepper and spices, and ensure it mixes well.
- Cut your bread to make more manageable slices – halves usually works, though you can make quarters if you want to be cute.
- Start your non-stick fry pan, but don’t make it too hot – eggs need to cook slowly to maintain smoothness.
- Soak the bread in the egg mix for a few seconds
- Add oil to the frypan and drop the bread on. Repeat for as many slices as you can manage at once (build yourself up).
- Depending on the heat of your pan, flip over in 30 seconds to a minute, as the eggs cook to a deep golden brown. Only flip once.
- Repeat for all remaining slices, and finish up by putting any excess egg onto the final slice to give it a thick, almost omlette cover.
- Serve with your favourite sauce. Garnish if wanting to impress.
Et voila, french toast! (sorry.)
Movie Review: The Forbidden Kingdom
The Forbidden Kingdom: So get this. You’ve got a kid from Boston magically transported to middle-ages alt-China. Kung fu and the whole deal. You’ve got Jackie Chan and Jet Li on board (for the first time in a Hollywood film), and you make this movie? Good lord, someone make sure this scriptwriter isn’t let near a movie studio again (though IMDB suggests he’s about to murder a classic). Stunning visuals and good fight coreography entirely let down by a plot that takes itself much, much too seriously and doesn’t bother to explain its oddities (like 14th Century Chinese emperors speaking English) along the way. ★★★
SSBB
Zero Punctuation reviews Super Smash Brothers Brawl (and the mailbag follow-up). Zero Punctuation is exactly why the net is awesome – potentially offensive to everyone and yet still out there.
What is wrong with Lotus Notes?
To all GUI designers and those who aspire to such lofty heights:
What is wrong with this dialog box?
The Lady’s Murder
The Lady’s Murder – A short story by Eliza Frye: a new webcomicy thing. Uber stylish.
Frustration
I’ve got a new thought: instead of sending off that email flame to the intended recipient, send it to yourself first.
Read it an hour later, and try to figure out whether it’s just that they are a pompus ass, just don’t get it, and have ended up winding you up; or whether you’ve actually got a point that your multitude of thinly vieled swearwords actually conveys.
How do you deal with frustration over email? I have a much abused stress toy that’s going to get thrown out the (perma-closed) window one day.
Movie Review: 21
For me, it started with a glaring continuity error.
Let’s back up for a minute here. The most important thing a movie needs to do is keep your disbelief suspended. It’s what lets you watch James Bond movies and think of a car with missles under the engine as integral to the plot (Die Another Day is another matter). Three hours of The Lord of the rings would scarcely work if you couldn’t for that time believe the story.
So it’s an inauspicious start when there’s a simple and glaring continuity error. Not very long into the film, we see Kevin Spacey’s too-clever-by-half MIT lecturer deal out the first round of a Blackjack game. Cards are dealt face up to the the four players, and that’s part of the key to 21‘s premise, that you can beat the system by counting which cards have been dealt and so concluding which cards are left.
The camera then switches to a shot of our nominal protagonist, Ben (Jim Sturgess). He’s making excuses for not joining the team. You know it’s a weak excuse because the premise of the movie, what you’ve seen in the trailer, is that he’s going to go to Vegas-Baby-Vegas. The shot switches back to Spacey, and bam – continuity. There are now 6 cards on the table, face down.
If you’re not looking for it, you might not see it (though after reading this, you certainly will be). I wanted to see the cards out of curiosity at the hands dealt, expecting the first lesson in card counting to come then. But the sudden jolt of continuity threw me back into the fact that I’m in a theatre, and the elementary rules you expect to be followed have just been thrown out. It’s the same as why programmers can’t stand to watch movies about “hackers” – knowing what you know, the pretensions to reality are implausible.
And here, it’s something as simple as cards being upside down. It throws you off the dialogue, and makes you walk back through the plot you’ve seen already, thinking about whether you’ve missed any other goofs.
The second most important thing for a movie is to not be entirely predictable, and on that count, 21 fails utterly, and miserably. Continue reading “Movie Review: 21“
Elsewhere
Elsewhere on the internet, I am actually updating more often then here. You just probably haven’t seen it yet.
Tumblr initially started as a mini-blog engine, kinda like an insta-blog that put no emphasis on lengthy posts. I used it mostly as a dumping ground for quotes I found funny and videos I wanted to watch but was at work and so couldn’t.
What I discovered recently however is that they’ve added functionality to pick up twitter, del.icio.us, and other random RSS feeds, and that’s very useful, because I do actually do stuff elsewhere on the net. It just doesn’t tend to get noticed much :) Tumblr allows me to collect all this random stuff very nicely and turn it into a random stream. I’m personally much in love with this as it’s zero-fuss and just works.
Not Goddamn Happy, Jan
Today… today was just about the worst day I’ve had at work, ever. It’s the kind of day where you genuinely think of throwing in the towel, and wonder what it will achieve. Getting out while the going is good is no longer an option because the going is no longer good.
Mondays are never the best of days, but today was a particularly malicious one. When you start off the day with your work being questioned and undermined despite your best efforts, you’re not much inclined to respond kindly, and so it was bright and early.
The rest of the day then preceeded in terms best espoused by Murphy’s Law. You may not believe, but it will goddamn get you, and it will all come at the wrong time, and it will come in a clusterfuck.
And then I get a call, at 7:30, me on my way home hoping to wind down, asking if it would be reasonable for me to work Hong Kong hours. Of fucking course it’s not reasonable, but if I say No point-blank, that’s not exactly going to make me popular, is it?
My phone will now remain off outside of work hours. I’ve had enough.