So apparently the Internet is saturated with jokes about Avogadro’s number and the unit Guaca-mole. I had never heard these jokes before. My family didn’t grow up eating Mexican food.
Analogies that compare cooking and chemistry are good for two things. They show how the person making the analogy knows about:
- cooking and
- chemistry
But the one thing that the two do share is the well defined relationship between the elementary unit and the sum of an arbitrary number of elementary units. In cooking, we call this Avocado’s Number which is defined as the number of avocados in a single Guacamole.
In the early days of cooking, Avocado’s number approximated at 6.022 x 10^23. However, because of trends started by Louis Pasteur’s discovery of germ theory, elucidating the world on the grossness of communal guacamole troughs, Avocado’s number is currently 2.
Today, in guacamole seasoning factories around the world, guacamole seasoning packets are made for exactly one serving of guacamole, requiring exactly two avocados.
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The five of you that read this blog are probably wondering what happened to it since I haven’t updated in quite some time. Well, long story still somewhat long:
Unlike most blogs, I hand-write my blog entries and mail them to Korea to get them transcribed. Unfortunately, while my last blog post was on its way to Korea, the shipping service I used fell victim to the economic downturn, and all of their packages were held in the Korean customs office, 40 miles south of Seoul.
The only way to claim items seized by customs is to go to the actual office where it’s being held and bring 1 form of category A ID, 2 forms of category B ID, and 3 different forms of bodily fluid with mitochondrial DNA, messenger RNA, and DNO. (DNO has not yet been discovered by American scientists).
Unfortunately, I suffered the same fate as my blog post, and when I was on the plane to Seoul, the airline went out of business, and we were forced to emergency-land at Kansai Airport in Japan. Because I had a deadline (all international packages seized by customs in South Korea are to be burned after 48 hours), I traveled light, thinking that this would let me get through the airport faster. What I neglected to realize was that I hadn’t declared my airplane peanuts, which is considered food imported to Japan.
Since Japan doesn’t actually have crime or jails and had no idea how to handle my case, my processing was outsourced to a Vietnamese company called Pho-Justice, an international noodle soup and penal consulting agency. Fortunately for me, Pho-Justice had just been subject to international scrutiny for their interrogation techniques, which had since undergone big changes. The new process included two sessions of boarding (essentially water boarding without any water) and three sessions of Nerf caning (in which little kids beat the subject with padded Nerf canes).
After all of that, I was able to keep my story straight, and I was sent back to the US. However, in the time that I was gone, my blog post had been incinerated, and I found out that my friend Matt got AIDS as the topic of his paper which he was stressed out about. Now he’ll be on a cocktail of medication for the rest of his days in that class to keep him awake and researching his topic.
But I think he’ll be fine as long as he stops going to those bath houses and spends more time writing his paper. On my side, I’ve found another company to transcribe my posts, and now the posting will continue.
Posted in Al Observes Things | 2 Comments »
Jet Li’s action thriller The One is a film about the classic struggle with ones self, interpreted literally, spanned across multiple universes, and the struggle is fought with martial arts. If you remember seeing the trailer, you’ve probably just about seen the entire movie.
What did I learn from watching The One? I’d say that on the off chance that I become really powerful and end up fighting a version of myself from another universe that’s only good at kung fu, I should learn some Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to counter his kung fu.
But one thing bothered me about this movie: the characters in the movie were unsure what happens when there’s only one version of Jet Li’s character left. They speculated that he may become a God…
But given that there are 125 universes
…and in each of the universes, every human is mortal
…and that the same person in different universes will lead different lives
…which make it unlikely that every person in the universe will die at the same time
doesn’t this mean that there’s always going to be a point for every person where there’s only one version of him left?
I just decided based on rereading this post that this movie was terrible.
Posted in Cut to the Chase, Movies | 1 Comment »
Recently, Netflix added a bunch of content from Starz Play to its selection of instantly available movies, and now my Netflix queue is filled with a lot of great movies. Included is Enchanted.
Now, don’t get me wrong — I absolutely loved Enchanted. I gave it 5 stars — and not only because it was filmed two blocks away from where I lived in my senior year of college. It was thoroughly enjoyable and reminded the world that fiction can make the world seem like it sucks less.
However, I found an issue with the premise of the film. What made the evil Queen Narissa think that Edward’s marriage with Giselle would result in her losing her thrown? Since when did the marriage between a prince and princess elevate them to King/Queen status? Or was she afraid that Giselle’s forces, combined with Edward’s, would create an unstoppable alliance?
Additionally, when it was obvious that Robert was Giselle’s one true love, why was she still insistent upon killing them? The threat (as dubious as it was) that Giselle posed no longer existed.
So that’s all I’ve got. Stay tuned for my comparison of Princess Diaries and What a Girl Wants. And potentially for my analysis of parallelisms between Enchanted and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Posted in Cut to the Chase, Movies | 1 Comment »
Sorry about not writing for a while. I’ve been busy and relatively uninspired… that is, until I saw One Last Thing.
Featuring an all-star cast of the greatest actors in Hollywood left over after Stephen Soderbergh chose his cast for Ocean’s Thirteen, One Last Thing (2006) is a film that combines The Girl Next Door and the ironically macabre to make terminal illness look both terrible and amazing.
In this film, Dylan Jameison, played by Michael Angarano who also played young William in Almost Famous, is a terminally ill high school foundation that requests a date with an alcoholic fashion model as his last wish. The hour and a half length of this film is largely focused on Dylan being not on a date with her but wishing he were. That is, until the very end, in which the model spontaneously drives down to Philadelphia, picks Dylan up from his death bed, drives him to the beach, fishes with him, falls in love with him, and then falls asleep with him on the beach.
In the morning, the model wakes up to find a corpse laying next to her.
Also in this film are Cynthia Nixon, Wyclef Jean, Gina Gershon, and Matt Bush, the guy on that AT&T commercial that doesn’t appreciate roll-over minutes.
The end.
Posted in Cut to the Chase, Movies | 1 Comment »
What were my first thoughts after watching Shanghai Kiss? I believe it was, “finally, a Chinese Garden State!”
Shanghai Kiss is about a guy who doesn’t really get along with his dad and is living in Los Angeles, trying to start a career as an actor, when he finds out that a member of his family dies.
He also meets a quirky girl that he pushes away and eventually realizes that he loves.
Oh, and about two-thirds of the way through the film, you realize the tragic story of how his mom died.
Sound pretty good? It was. I enjoyed both Shanghai Kiss and Garden State Handshake. It’s just unfortunate that it went straight to DVD because, you know, lead actor Ken Leung is neither Zach Braff nor not-Asian.
My only real issue was listening to Kelly Hu’s broken English. Why? Because in reality, her English is fine. I’d know. I watched her in Martial Law. To me, listening to Hu’s accent was like listening to a white guy playing a Japanese guy named Kobayashi, speaking with a fake Japanese accent (The Usual Suspects, anyone?)
So that’s it for today’s Cut to the Chase. For those of you that enjoy my cuts to the chases, you’re all in for a treat. I was a saucier ordered the Netflix player for my TV, meaning that I’ll probably be watching even more straight-to-DVD movies.
Posted in Cut to the Chase, Movies | 1 Comment »
What can I say? I’m a sucker for relatively new-looking movies available for streaming via NetFlix that I haven’t heard of but also have an all star cast. When I saw that Meet Bill (2008), starring Elizabeth Banks, Jessica Alba, and Aaron Eckhart was available for streaming, I knew I was in for a treat. It was after finishing the movie that I realized that the formula I was using for picking movies to watch intersects the formula for movies that go straight to video.
Meet Bill is about a man that, after marrying into a wealthy family, finds himself in a job that he doesn’t like with a wife that’s cheating on him. He then decides to leave his job and his wife for a new life. And then what happens? I don’t know. The movie ends there.
Yes, one would think that the starting of a new life, albeit probably a trite theme for writers, would be where the movie begins. Nope, not in Meet Bill. The 90 minute film focuses instead on Aaron Eckhart’s character not liking his boring job, which he states in the first minute of the movie, and not liking that his wife was cheating on him, which we find out shortly thereafter.
I will give this movie a three-star rating though only because Aaron Eckhart’s character cuts his hair at the end of the movie, which was a relief for me, because Eckhart with long hair really bothers me. And on a straight note, Elizabeth Banks is stunning as usual.
Posted in Cut to the Chase, Movies | No Comments »
“No mooom, it’s a gallimeeeeemus.”
Yeah, you remember saying that back in the day. Because back in 4th grade, we were all experts at 4th grade science. We knew all about how dinosaurs were believed to be more closely related to birds than they were to reptiles, and we knew the order of the planets in our solar system by heart.
Fast forward about 14 years, and it’s pretty clear that we don’t know anything anymore. I realized this while watching PBS. All of a sudden, Pluto’s not a planet anymore because of the Kuiper Belt, and as for the extinction of the dinosaurs that nobody really understood? Well, it’s pretty much consensus among the scientific community that it was a combination of a meteor strike, volcanic activity, and exorbitant gas prices.
10 years in the future, when your kids are 7, they’re going to tell you something that you didn’t know about something that you used to think was cool, and you’ll feel blind sided. They may even correct your pronunciation of “gallimimus” (which will, by that time, be galli-my-mus). But rest assured, being the adult and allowed to curse, you can always say, “f*** you kid, I invented the gallimeemus.”
Posted in Al Observes Things, Arguing with 5 year olds | No Comments »
It costs the same amount as other stamps, but unlike other stamps, it will always be valid first class postage for envelopes. It is the forever stamp. And it makes little sense.
Or does it? Why would anyone pay $0.42 for a stamp when the price has been raised 6 times since 2001? Personally, I’d be willing to pay $0.50 for a stamp if it meant that I wouldn’t have to go out and by a coil of $0.01 stamps every time the rate increased.
I did a little investigative reporting, and by that, I mean that I went to the United States Postal Service web site and thought about it for a minute, and I came to the conclusion that there really is no reason to buy anything but the Forever Stamp.
Really, unless you’re expecting UPS, FedEx, and the Internet going out of business and oil producing countries to start distributing free gas at least once a week, you should just get the Forever stamp.
The only exception is if you’re like me, and you’ve got a sheet full of $0.41 Gerald Ford stamps. I’ll get a roll of $0.01 stamps until my Gerald Fords are gone, and then I’ll invest in the Forever Stamp.
Thanks for letting me waste a few minutes of your life.
Posted in Al Observes Things | 4 Comments »
