Enjablog

I took this cooking class once. It was one part Iron Chef, two parts regular cooking class. Basically, they give you a menu, teach you how to cook it, and then as the final, you can prepare that dish however you want. Somehow, partway through the semester I lost interest in the class. The final snuck up on me before I knew it and I had no clue how to prepare these dishes. I headed over to this Wegman’s-like mecca, that was a cross between Borders and a grocery store. I found the recipes that I needed, including instructions on where to find these ingredients, but I had never heard of half these things. Anyway, the timers during the final cook-off went off and the entire hour had elapsed before I figured out that it was my alarm clock that was beeping and not an oven timer.

One of my cousins keeps a blog, but never responds directly to the comments I leave. Sure, he probably doesn’t appreciate my comments, but what kind of “good” Christian would he be if he didn’t allow me to ask provocative questions? (Please note the sarcasm.)

In any case, I need to start pasting his original post somewhere before I leave a comment because for almost every comment I have left (just a handful… around 5 or so), he changes whatever it is I am referring to without acknowledging my comment. I guess that’s indirectly addressing my comment, but it looks more like he’s changing his entry so my comment is rendered irrelevent.

Original was something along the lines of “I am taught about non-Christian views, so I know more about other worldviews than students who go to secular colleges.”

I left a comment saying, “And considering yourself more knowledgeable than others of world views is a mistake often made by those who do not understand how much there is to know about differing perspectives.” A la “Only the wise man truly understands how much there is that he does not understand.” Or “Who is the bigger idiot? The idiot or the one who follows him?” Or “Why did Daddy Moron fall down the hill, while his infant did not? Because he was a little more on.”

Checking back later that same day, the previous line was gone and in its place:
“While I am taught the Christian worldview, I am not unexposed to the other worldviews. I am taught about other worldviews, such as secularism, humanism, existentialism, and nihilism. In many secular universities, only what the teacher believes is taught.”

How are those “other worldviews?” Sure, they are other views, but the views defined solely by his religion or some amorphous world of “not his religion” or a limited number of philosophies does not really reach a wide scope of perspectives.

Another memorable one was posted last summer when he was on the metro one day. He took a pamphlet that someone had just received about Christian Science so he could give the person one of his flyers on Christianity in return (and so he could take away the pamphlet from the guy before he read too much of that blasphemy).

He concluded his entry by saying that he hopes the guy will read his pamphlet and he thinks he’ll throw away the one he received. I left a comment saying that maybe the guy gave him the pamphlet for the same reason. The entry was soon edited to read, “I think I will throw away his pamphlet soon. Or maybe I should look at it briefly just to see what they believe and how they distort scripture.”

And now that I’ve written all that, I found out that, apparently, he thinks I am my mother. He sent a reply to her letting her know that he edited his entry. Since I sign my comments enjanerd and my mother signs lil1der, I can see where the confusion may lie. This also means that I can leave more confrontational observations in the future and get much more entertainment value out of it. I’m excited! :) -J.

LOTD: P-mate– “In Glastonbury they call the female urinal from P-Company ‘She-pee’.
Related: Aussie girls can stand to pee

QOTD: “What a joyous occasion, celebrating me.” -W

A woman, while at the funeral of her mother, met this guy whom she did not know. She thought the guy was amazing, her dream man! She fell in love with him instantly, but never asked for his phone number and could not find him after the funeral. A few days later she killed her sister.

Question: What is her motive in killing her sister?

Check back Friday for the answer and explanation. Email me your answer if you want to find out before then.

Hey all,

Haven’t been to the Improv in a while and Roy mentioned that one of the guys we saw last year is back in town. Let me know if anyone’s interested in seeing him (Gabriel Iglesias) or any of the other shows in the near future. This one is scheduled 3 weekends from now, Feb 16-20. Would need to know, preferably, by next week if you want to go. :) -J.

Growing up in an Asian household, we had rice pretty much every day. It didn’t matter if we were eating pizza or stir fry: there was always rice. This rice was bought in 50-pound bags. Anything less was just uneconomical. The rice we ate was prepared in a rice cooker and took about 20-30 minutes to cook. This was a simple task that even the youngest member of a family could assist with (that would be me):

Step 1) Pour rice into rice cooker pot.
Step 2) Rinse and add water to cover my hand resting palm-flat on the rice.

Somehow over the years, even though I have grown, those instructions have never changed (You could even say they are permanently ingrained in me).

This weekend, Ian and I made a casserole that called for Minute Rice(TM), which cooks in 5 minutes, by the way. This was a completely new experience for me. I have probably heard of Minute Rice before, but it never occurred to me to wonder how this magical rice could possibly cook in minutes, while the rice I grew up on took up to 6 times as long. Measuring some out for the recipe, the rice looked familiar, but unlike the rice that I grew up with.

I pulled out my stash of raw rice and compared it to this new “Minute” Rice. The raw rice was smooth, while the new rice was rough and brittle. Then, I figured out what the new rice looked like.

When I was growing up, my siblings and I would take turns doing all the post-dinner chores. We even had a chore chart/calendar thing. Anyway, whenever we swept the floor, there would be rice remnants that may have gotten away from the broom on a previous night. These few grains of rice, having been left out, had become dehydrated and looked just like Minute Rice.

The magical Minute Rice cooks in a much shorter time because it is dehydrated rice. The “cooking” time is merely how long it needs to rehydrate and get hot. This is the magic behind Minute Rice.

In any case, the casserole turned out well. I don’t really recall ever having casserole before, but it was good. I would compare it to fried rice. Casserole, being a mixture of all the components of a meal baked together in a dish, while fried rice is a mixture of leftovers tossed together in a wok. Hm… well, it seems similar in my head. I feel cultured today. :) -J.

Snow!! Will write more later. :) -J.

Movies watched this weekend:
Death to Smoochy
One Hour Photo
From Hell
Stuck on You

Meals cooked this weekend:
Scrambled Eggs
BBQ Pork Sandwiches
Fried Eggs and Bacon
Chicken Casserole

LOTD: Free Movies (for people who already bought movies)

QOTD: “When my brothers and I played cowboys and Indians, I was always the Chinese railroad worker.” -Sheldon Mopes, Death to Smoochy

A byte walks into a bar and orders a pint.
Bartender asks him, “What’s wrong?”
Byte says, “Parity error.”
Bartender nods and says, “Yeah, I thought you looked a bit off.”

There is a ship docked with a ladder down the side. There are 18 rungs above water spaced one foot between each rung. The tide comes in and the water rises one foot every half-hour. How many rungs will be above the waterline in 2 hours? (Assume tide is constant for the time in question.)

Send me your answers. :) -j.

An update on the radio thing: Radio station pulls show over tsunami slur

Thanks to VHMPrincess for bringing it to my attention.

In other news, I was in this training/informational thing all day today. And while it was a partially classified meeting, I don’t think I’ll get in trouble for repeating these two things:

Question from the audience: Is this patch paralyzed?
I know she meant parallelized, but all I could think was, “What? Like code that can’t run?”

Presenter: You can model anything: cottage cheese… non-homogeneous substances…
Person in the audience: Like a human head!
That’s not exactly how that exchange went, but he said that completely seriously. I don’t know about him, but I don’t have any cottage cheese in my head.

I kept joking a few weeks ago, saying to my sister, “I can’t believe you hate tsunami victims[/orphans].” Well, I was just saying it. She doesn’t hate tsunami victims. In other news, Miss Jones of NY’s Hot 97 Radio station does hate tsunami victims:

Stolen from my cousin (to the tune of We are the World): “WARNING: CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE

There was a time when the sun was shining bright
So I went down to the beach to catch me a tan
Then the next thing I knew, a wave twenty feet high
Came and washed your country away
And all at once you could hear the screaming ch*nks
And no one was safe from the wave
There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away
You could hear God laughing, ‘Swim, you b*tches, swim!’
So now you’re screwed, it’s the tsunami
You better run or kiss your ass away, go find your mommy
I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head
and now your children will be sold to child slavery (2X)”

So, go complain, write to the station or their sponsors, get her fired… Do what ya gotta do.

LOTD from Ian: Implicit Association Test

Find out how you really feel. Highlights from the quizzes I took:
- Your data suggest a moderate association between science and Male relative to Female
- Your data suggest a slight automatic association between European American and American relative to Asian American
- Your data suggest a moderate association between Male and Career
- Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for Straight People relative to Gay People

Mostly as expected. I wanted to overcome the Male-Career thing, but I could tell as I was going through that I was really biased. I did suspect that when I filled out the survey that went along with it, but I thought I could outsmart the test or something. I dunno. I was actually kind of crappy going through the Asian/European one too. I know I can tell them apart. I just kept hitting the wrong key when I tried to go through too quickly.

Edit: More results…
- Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for White American relative to African American
- Your data suggest little or no automatic preference for Fat People relative to Thin People
- Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Judaism relative to Other Religions
(I’m not sure if that was accurate… I was discussing with BFF last night. I don’t think I’m anti-religion, so much as I associate extremist Christians with religion and am anti-holier-than-thou-must-convert-everyone-Christians.)
- Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Young relative to Old

I feel like I’m getting better at this game. I kind of want to see if I can use this to untrain my biases… Or would I just get better at tricking the game, while maintaining my biases?

Had a pretty good weekend. Snow wasn’t as heavy as anticipated, but it was still a pretty nice snowfall.

Ian came over Friday so we wouldn’t have to spend the weekend stranded at our respective houses. Hung out at the HOY Friday night and played TV Scene-It. Turns out I don’t remember as much about old TV shows as I thought. Although, part of it is due to the fact that I never learned actor names. Before, because I had the good excuse of not knowing that TV was fake. Now, because I’m lazy and everyone is just some other character they’ve played in another tv show or movie.

Saturday, went to Giant to get supplies for my place and for the HOY. Stocked up on stuff and then headed over and spent the day watching movies, eating, drinking, and playing games. Had some interesting lies made up while playing Balderdash. Squidgey and her cute little koala bears in the forest hospital and the little koala IVs. I don’t know why I fell for that.

Sunday… went to the castle and found out my parents don’t remember me. And, alas, Johnny Carson died. Sure, I’m too young to have ever seen him, but I’ve been hearing a lot of clips of him in remembrance. So, he will be missed by many people.

That’s about it. I’m off! :) -j.

First, more on SpongeBob… A Bunch of Krabby Patties Maureen Dowd:

“SpongeBush SquarePants!

We can only hope that Dr. Dobson doesn’t pick up on the resemblance. SpongeBob, as his song goes, “lives in a pineapple under the sea/absorbent and yellow and porous is he!” SpongeBush lives in a bubble in D.C./absorbent and shallow and porous is he!

Dick Cheney is a gruff Mr. Krabs taskmaster to SpongeBush, but SpongeBush is crazy about him anyhow. W. trustingly let his vice president make the worst-case scenario about Iraq a first-case scenario.

Mr. Bush might have thought he was just blowing pretty bubbles full of lofty ideals about freedom and liberty in his speech, but Mr. Cheney and the neocons seem intent on filleting Iran and Syria. (Doesn’t Richard Perle remind you of the snarky and pretentious next-door neighbor to SpongeBob, Squidward Tentacles?)”

Next, President on vacation again:

“Pro-Life supporters Ann Marie Cosgrove of Minneapolis, Minnesota, left, and Barbara Gough of Boise, Idaho, walk towards the Supreme Court in Washington, during the 32nd annual March For Life protest against the Supreme Court’s decision in the Roe vs. Wade abortion rights decision.”

The thing that gets me is the picture of the two women holding up signs saying, “I Regret My Abortion.” You know what? It’s your right to regret your decision. You decided on your own to have an abortion. It was your right to take your freedom in your own hands and decide what to do with your body. The current ruling allowed you to do that. And now, because you regret your own actions, you want to take that right away from others? Who are you to decide? Who are you to say that someone else would also regret theirs? Would you rather people walk around holding signs saying, “I regret my child.” “I waited until after I gave birth to kill my child.” “I killed myself instead of having an abortion.” Oh wait… you can’t really walk around with that sign. It’s like the people suing fast food places for making food that tastes good. You made that decision to eat that second Whopper. That doesn’t mean junk food should be illegal for the rest of us.

I’m glad this country has the freedom of speech. You can say what you want, and then I get to tell you how you’re wrong. Granted, neither of us are going to listen to the other, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, sure, I’d like it if people didn’t want to get abortions. I’d like it if people made good decisions, accidents didn’t happen, there were no bad people in the world, and no one ever ended up in a situation where they would choose abortion as their best alternative. But the fact of the matter is that the world doesn’t work that way. Kids are having sex. There are sexual predators out there. Married people accidentally get pregnant. Yeah, it happens. Maybe not to you. Maybe not your kids. (Would you know if they were?) Maybe you’d never think of your kids as “accidents.” But it happens.

Despite all the preaching on abstinence, not all kids listen or learn. So what are you going to do with the rest of those kids? They have to live with their decisions. Right. They have to live with themselves after they get an abortion. They have to live with the fact that they could have prevented a pregnancy if they had just been properly educated about birth control and other ways besides abstinence to prevent pregnancy.

And now, you think these people who were not old enough to have sex, were too irresponsible to use birth control, or too stupid to know otherwise are fit to be parents? Yeah, sure. Expect them to raise well-educated children who will contribute to society. I’m not saying they can’t. But they’re going to need help somewhere along the way. Are you going to help? Do you look down on single parents? Teenage parents? People who have pre-marital sex? People who have more children than they can financially support? Are you friends with anyone who is a single parent? Do you judge? No one’s looking; you can be honest.

Now, say this person continues and doesn’t have that abortion. They either get shunned for killing an unborn child or they get shunned for having a child out of wedlock. Why should anyone care what you think? “If you can’t trust me to make a choice, how can you trust me to raise a child?” I’m Not Sorry.net -J.

My alarm clock continues to mess with my head. Wake up to the sound of my alarm clock. I roll over to look at it. There are little mushrooms on this level. How do I beat them? Well, you have to wait until Ian learns German. I don’t think he knows German. I better take a nap while I wait. After all, it takes a while to learn a language. Zzzz…

I was reading a blog recently and the guy complained about disliking walmart and then proceeded to detail an encounter with the horrible people who shop there. One of the comments pretty much sums up my opinion on this:

My feeling on Wal-mart: I have lots of friends who go to Wal-mart. They hate it. They find the business practices immoral, and they don’t like standing in the long lines, but they do like saving 17 cents on a can of cat food, so they put up with it. Now, this always reminds me of that movie Indecent Proposal. In that movie, we find out that Demi Moore’s “price” is a million dollars. And we see what it does to her. And I always feel like saying to my friends “Your price is SEVENTEEN CENTS!!!”

It was different when Sam was alive, for the reason in the previous comment, but also because Sam was ALL about helping Americans by supporting American businesses and products. Now Wal-Mart is ALL about seeing how much they can milk cheap chinese labor for, and how many communities they can put a store in and push everyone else out.

So, you don’t like walmart. They bankrupt small businesses. They threaten larger businesses by buying their products at a loss or just not carrying them at all. They’re crowded. Red-necks shop there.

Hey, look! If you’re shopping there too, you can add yourself to that list of complaints you have. Sure, you saved yourself $6 on stuff that you would have to buy somewhere else for a higher price, but while you’re there, do you still buy other groceries/miscellaneous items that you might have bought somewhere else for a comparable price? So, either suck it up and accept that walmart sucks and you support that corporation, or just don’t shop there. It’s not that hard a decision. If you dislike it that much, you’ll spend the extra money to not have your soul sucked out every time you walk into that place.