continental breakfast

After Ever After

the maker

pigeon

Me vs. Pigeon Take II: This time I won.

supercell

A supercell near Booker, Texas from Mike Olbinski on Vimeo.

honeypot ants

shampoo

baby walrus pakak

falling penguins

leopard seal

more from the iss

iss view

lights

Celestial Lights from Ole C. Salomonsen on Vimeo.

leather forever

fur

pearlfish

awesome milky way

really needs to be enjoyed in fullscreen:

real housewives of disney

twitter

since i seem to be no good at writing long blog posts these days, and especially since i have a smartphone now, i've decided to give tweeting a shot. i can be followed at @ppprmntmonkey

manning

santa venn

peanut butter

i guess there is such thing as eating too much peanut butter.

neti pot, part iii

the neti pot is useless. a few swigs of dayquil is still better.

cuttlefish

super awesome flamboyant cuttlefish. too bad it's poisonous.

nautilus

chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilious) looks like it might be quite delicious

snots

pandas

my gummy pandas look just like regular bears. what a gyp.

food

sometimes i like to go check out the lunchroom fridge, hoping i have food in there i forgot about. sadly, that has never been the case.

Istanbul

Within an hour of arriving in Istanbul someone already offered me tea so he can show me carpets in his family's big store. I felt so welcomed as I had been forewarned of this tradition. However, he thought I was Japanese, which everyone has been thinking since I started grad school. I think because my face got fat. i.e. the Turkish man welcomed me then called me fat. Does that sound like the beginning of a healthy relationship? I don't think so.

Also, my directions told me to walk next to the Blue Mosque and it wasn't blue. After white-balancing in my mind to make it blue, the Hagia Sophia looked blue as well. Needless to say, I took a very roundabout way to the hostel.

Anyway, we're going to try some street food today. Time to put that HepA immunoglobulin shot to use.

bbc - penguins

magic

"it's magic. and like science, you don't actually have to understand it. you just have to believe it."
-Amanda from Ugly Betty

kung fu baby

the fart propellant is the best part

fruit cups

i'm missing 6 mandarin orange fruit cups. where did they go?

i am so jealous of this guy

LEARN from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

EAT from Rick Mereki on Vimeo.

funny baby

neti pot, part ii

over-salting a neti pot is much, much worse than not adding enough. instead of feeling like i was drowning, the entire front of my head burned in pain. i thought my eyeballs were going to fall out.

subsequently, my boogers were really salty for a couple of hours.

Echinacea

my brother (after i told him i'm getting sick): "Are you taking echinacea? I find it's a very effective placebo. Zinc & vitamin D, too."

happy koala

koala bears

oh, linnaeus. so judgemental...

“Reptiles are abhorrent because of their cold body, pale color, cartilaginous skeleton, filthy skin, fierce aspect, calculating eye, offensive smell, harsh voice, squalid habitation, and terrible venom; wherefore their Creator has not exerted his powers to make many of them.” - Linnaeus, 1797

art

anderson cooper on romance

peacock spider

bach

pendulum

boeuf

i noticed today, while i was heat styling my hair, that it smelled like boeuf. i must've inadvertently dunked it in french onion soup last night.

Switzerland

my sous vide experience

i've been curious about sous vide cooking, and when i saw some vacuum sealed, pre-seasoned turbot at trader joe's last week, i decided to buy some and make good use of the lab water baths. since it looked to be 15mm thick, i cooked it at 61 degrees for 40 minutes. i was happy/excited until the smell of yumminess started wafting throughout the lab and i thought the bag had exploded or melted. i couldn't smell it in the water bath though, and nothing seemed to have leaked. the juices in the pack was turbid but the bath water was still clear. meh.

the fish turned out quite delicious, despite having cooled during my trek home. my stomach hurt right after i ate it and at first i thought i had accidentally poisoned myself, but it turned out to just be gas. if i were to try again, i might use a lower temp with a longer cooking time.

milk

back in march, shaw's/star market did a promotion where if you bought 6 gallons of milk within a month, you can get one gallon free. since i have a secret love for garelick farms' chocolate milk, i decided to partake. i barely managed to eke by when the promotion ended, and i was so garelicked out by then that i held off on redeeming my free gallon. plus, there was no apparent expiration date on the vouchers, or so i thought. i recently decided to come out of my milk coma and was about to redeem my vouchers when i noticed in the blurry 0.5pt font print that they had expired a week after the promotion ended. what!! i guess that's what i get for drinking 6 gallons of milk and not reading the fine print...

ET

I lost a slice of pizza today because of the wind. Just blew it right off my plate.

Cerulean blue boogers. Must've accidentally inhaled some xylene cyanol...

Fat

Either my socks got tighter or my ankles got fat. Sympathy swelling?

neti pot

So, as people have said online, using a Neti pot was definitely weird at first. It didn't help that I didn't put in enough salt. I imagine that's what it feels like if you were trying to waterboard yourself. What was most disappointing though, was that I was hoping to flush out boogers of all sorts of colors and the best I got was a lot of clear slime and a little bit of yellow stuff. I was sick! I should've had lots of boogers! In varying hues of green and yellow!

cough-ccyx

I think I'm coming down with something because I'm really tired all the time and getting all mucusy and phlegmy and my throat is starting to hurt. It makes me want to cough all the time. But whenever I cough my tailbone hurts because I slipped on a patch of ice last week whilst scoping out some snacks in a shop window and fell on my ass. Argh, so sucks.

Hmmm...my half eaten turkey-on-rye (with mayo) has been sitting at the perfect bacteria-friendly temperature for the past few hours thanks to my computer AC adapter. It's still quite good though; I just hope I don't get sick. So many things to watch out for when one needs to hide a sandwich behind one's computer at work...

they discontinued the tampons i like! what the wha??

Peter Thomas Roth anti-aging cleansing gel tastes terrible.

ducks

the voice on the T

curry

i thought i was experiencing sympathy pains, but it turned out to just be gas.

baby fire alarm

there is a teensy weensy fire alarm in the bathroom at lab. it is a cute little baby version of the ones outside in the lab area. my guess is the reason is two-fold: the acoustics in the bathroom is FANTASTIC and also, no one is likely to be sleeping in there.

http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml

Sometimes when I'm walking, I know I'm about to converge on the same point on the sidewalk as someone else. Usually, at the last moment, one person gets there a split second before the other. Very occasionally, both get there at the exact same time, and there's some footwork required to avoid a minor collision.

Today, my opponent was a pigeon. I could tell we're about to converge on the same point at an approximate 45 degree angle from each other. This is just an average -looking pigeon, not obviously on any sort of enhancement drugs, and even though it was pumping its bird feet at a good pace, I was still going faster. Unexpectedly, in the last couple of seconds, it put its little bird head down and started booking it. That's right. Today, I lost to a pigeon. A competitive, inner-city pigeon with a "kill or be killed" attitude. It was a very humbling experience.

I just had my eyes dilated for the first time in 5 years, and now I can't see anything. This must be what "old" feels like.

walking in snow is similar to walking on sand, but with the possibility of frostbite.

i was walking down a street around my building the other day and what do i see?? a popeye's about to open! yay! fried chicken is to me as donut is to policeman.

there's so much snow/ice/slush outside. it's like god pooed all over boston last night.

so i'm sitting here trying to write my intro when i hear tires screeching outside and the sound of a car hitting the curb. i thought "drunk people out driving at 3 in the morning...tsk tsk" and look out my window. well, there's a van sitting there and the driver is moving a lot. i can't tell if s/he's really happy or mad or whatever, but whoever it is is doing some heavy duty emoting.
then after a short while, the driver moves over to the passenger seat. so at this point i'm thinking either they're really frisky or someone's getting strangled.
well, it turns out to be anger and not horniness that drives this van to be rocking next to the curb at 3am: driver moves back to driver's seat, sniffles into tissue and passenger gets kicked out of van. screaming match ensues. i can't make anything out except "shut up."
eventually things calm down and passenger is allowed back into van, except i guess he can't close the door. big dude gets out of back of van and helps passenger close door. then driver moves to the back and big dude takes the driver's seat.
as big dude tries to close his door, the inside of it falls off. he tries to put it back on but alas, it is not to be. he then holds on to the inside while closing the exterior. he starts engine a couple of times and they drive off.
moral of story: someone needs to get a new van.

if you eat tacos sitting on the curb in the taco bell parking lot (because their air-conditioning is too high), and you're sweaty and tired from moving and furniture shopping, passerbys will give you dirty looks like you snuck into their country illegally and are now overstepping your rights by eating their all-american tacos.

can't believe i never saw this before:

well i can't upload photos cuz my computer's on crack.

2 cases of bird flu reported in florida

case #1
case #2

the hallway of my dorm tends to take on a variety of pungent odors depending on the day. in the past it's smelled like b.o., dirty feet, pee, and barf. today it smells like fart.

well, last class came and went. now i just have to turn in the final draft for my proposal. i think one of my discussion leaders got bored reading my 2nd draft. he filled in some of my letters with red ink...example on right:
i wanted to unwind a little by watching some marmalade boy, but i fell asleep while watching it and woke up with a crick in my neck and a drool stain on my shirt.

i got a monthly subway pass today and it feels soooooooooooo liberating to not have to make sure i always have at least 2 tokens with me.
in other subway news... there's this smoothie stand in the t-station and since everything's made from fresh fruits, i thought i'd try one. not only did the smoothie suck (perhaps it was just what i chose, or perhaps it was the peach that ruined it cuz that peach didn't look too happy cuz the girl behind me couldn't stop talking about the one she had last time), the guy is seriously psychotic. he gives you this really intense look like he's shooting laser beams into your head, and when he was about to toss the papaya into the blender, he held it out to me, flourished his hand over it and was all "look at this, full of anti-oxidants" and waited for a response. that's great and all, but really, what do you say to that... i wasn't sure what to say, so i just said "uh, great." i think he was disappointed with my lack of enthusiasm...

a random sighting at the law school.

according to the doc, when i twisted my foot, my peroneus brevis pulled really hard, causing a comminuted, non-displaced avulsion at the back of my right 5th matatarsal. i.e. a chunk of bone got pulled out. so now i have to wear a really ugly shoe for a couple of weeks until it heals. bah.

i have a "sports injury" from standing. i was waiting outside au bon pain today and when i shifted i stepped on the handicap ramp and twisted my foot. now it looks like it's pregnant and about to spawn something blue. that and it _hurts_ and i have to hobble around like a gimp. i blame this on my sis since i would not have been standing there had she not decided to come into town tonight.

this is for heather, because it's got her 3 favorite things: kitten, hen, crazy japanese narration.

i like it when i sit in a hard chair that doesn't have any give and i lean back and slouch down so all my weight is on my shoulder blades and tail bone and my spine pops. it makes my back fall down just a teensy weensy bit. i like that.

today's boston is tropical

it's surprisingly warm today. a balmy 44 degrees F. such a nice change from the usual below freezing temps. i can definitely feel the cold, but i'm not in pain and/or numb. sweetness! unfortunately this also means the snow/ice is melting into muddy puddles all over the place, but whatever...

rumbly noises

last night as i was trying to sleep the heater kept making rumbly noises. i thought "jesus christ the heater is annoying. living in this dorm frickin' sucks." but then later i realized it was my stomach.

the end is near...

as i was walking outside today i noticed the puddles have frozen over. and as i looked in the mirror today i noticed i'm now vampire-white. all vestiges of the tan i had accumulated over summer are now but a distant memory. it's the beginning of end.

sanrio eraser tea

the local cvs carries 2 types of tea: celestial seasonings sleepytime (ick) and standard liptons (double ick.) luckily i found cardullo's (which in addition to a wide variety of teas also carries a wide variety of chocolates. score!) i made my selection of celestial seasonings perfectly pear white tea based on the following: 1. it was a white tea, which is supposed to be higher in antioxidants, 2. it didn't cost $20/pack like the republic of tea's white tea, and 3. it sounded kind of yummy. so i tried it for the first time today and while it smelled quite good, the smell was exactly that of the pink little twin stars eraser i had when i was 9 years old. it brought back some happy memories, but i don't think i'll be buying this again.

an o.c. moment

i had an o.c. moment this saturday when i went to the joint grad school geekfest they called a "dance" (so high school.) not because there were pretty people there. but rather, they hired a band (for free, i later discovered. so i guess it wasn't so much "hired" as "the band volunteered") that sounded like the crappy bands the o.c. always manages to feature via the bait shop.
in other news, i just ate a whole pouch of milano cookies and now am feeling quite ill. ugh.

the leaves scared me today

since it's autumn, there're giant leaves from giant trees all over the ground. as i neared my dorm today, this enormous gust of wind whooshed in my direction and the seemingly innocuous leaves on the path in front of me flew up, forming a formidable leaf wall. as this wall rushed toward me, i wasn't sure what to do. i briefly considered protecting my face with my arms but ditched the idea since that would make me look lame-ass to the other pedestrians. thankfully, the need for a decision suddenly died as the leaf wall leveled out before it hit me. i was left trembling and considering the what-if''s. i'm still unsure how to interpret this experience. is this a warning from above?....

candy corn strangeness

i bought some candy corn on impulse yesterday and ate some/a lot. when i was flossing and brushing last night, i discovered that my teeth and tongue had bright, almost fluorescent, pink all over them. i'm assuming it's from the candy corn since that was the only artificial thing i ate yesterday (i think,) but that's weird isn't it? should they stain, shouldn't it be orange? i mean, i bought the classic candy corn, yellow/orange/white... how strange. i'm going to eat some more tonight to see if this strange phenomenon is consistently linked to candy corn consumption. and just as a side note, everytime i eat candy corn i think about making a giant candy corn on the cob by sticking them together with frosting. but due to my innate laziness, i've not accomplished that yet. it's been on my to-do list forever.

i have a nice arm muscle

i got my tb and one of my hepatitis b shots today. and when the nurse was shooting the poison into my upper arm she was like "you have a nice muscle." that's right! i know! i kept trying to tell my brother i had a nice upper arm muscle but he always just laughs. but now a NURSE said I have a NICE ARM MUSCLE.

want a bigger nose?

those inventive japanese peeps have come up with something new to help the masses attain better features in the comfort of their own homes! check this: the new "hanahana." hehe. a wee bit funny tis. i don't think the problem (if you can call it such) is simply a small nose. it's also the nose bridge, or lack thereof. supposing this works *eye roll* i'd think one's face would look quite comical with a giant schnaz sans bridge. i guess at least this one doesn't look quite as painful/painstaking as the pitchfork you stick in your eye to make a double-lid...

hateful people

i hate it when people force their way into an elevator before i have a chance to get out. especially when the doors haven't even opened all the way and i have to either stand aside and let them let them pass or get body-slammed. i mean, jesus christ, does it save them anytime? no! but is it a testament as to how rude they are? yes!

funny (weird, not ha ha) convo at the doughnut shop

ppprmntmonkey walks into doughnut shop
doughnut man: hello; ni hao
ppprmntmonkey: ni hao
doughnut man: (in chinese) do you speak chinese?
ppprmntmonkey: (in chinese) i don't speak it well.
doughnut man: (in chinese) i don't know how to speak it; i'm from thailand.
ppprmntmonkey picks out doughnut in english and proceeds to pay for it
doughnut man: (in chinese) i'm from thailand. have you ever been there?
ppprmntmonkey: (in chinese) once, when i was little.
doughnut man: (in chinese) i don't understand what you said.
doughnut man gives ppprmntmonkey change; ppprmntmonkey thanks him and walks out of shop