GTI!!!

I am about to replace my 9-year-old VW Jetta with a 2008 VW GTI!! I always want to own a VW Golf, but I couldn't afford one when I was looking for a car 4 years ago. Yesterday I was test-driving a VW Rabbit (they re-badge Golf to Rabbit in the US for nostalgic reasons), but it was sluggish. I told the dealer about that, and he threw me a GTI.

Wow.. this is what I want. The sprint from stop, linear acceleration, smooth shifting and the seamless kicking-in of turbo charge. Geez.. This shit took only 5 seconds to go from 80 to 150 km/h, and it was still pushing my back!

It also delivers decent ride quality and gas mileage for day-to-day drive. The turbo charge will only be summoned when my adrenalin goes off the roof once in a while.

Well.. it won't fall into my budget if the dealer is not offering no-interest financing on all GTIs, plus cutting almost $1400 from the price. It seems they are purging their stock for the 2009 model. In a few days I will be getting a 4-door black with heated seats and 18" wheels. I can't wait to spin it!

Gotta keep a closer eye on the speedometer though. Speeding tickets are expensive.

Newport

A yacht in Newport, RI, Aug 13, 2006

Berlins vs Berlin

While Barack Obama was giving a speech in Tiergarten of Berlin to thousands of Berliners, John McCain aired radio ads in every town called Berlin in the US. They were 60s ads accusing Obama's voting against allocating money for the army. I have not heard the any of the ads, but it sounds more like a joke than real. BBC news takes a very neutral ground on this:

The McCain campaign's recent decision to air radio adverts in the towns of Berlin, Pennsylvania, Berlin, New Hampshire and Berlin, Wisconsin was also thought to be a pointed reference to Mr Obama's foreign travels.

This may seem making fun at the Obama campaign, but this childish move may backfire the McCain campaign at some point.

_____________________________

From Yahoo! News:

The reference (of the radio ads) is to Obama's vote on May 24, 2007, against a $120 billion appropriation, most of it for troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama had voted for a similar bill weeks earlier that required the administration to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq by Oct. 1, 2007. That bill passed, but President Bush vetoed it. The legislation that replaced it contained no withdrawal language and it passed 80-14 with Obama among the dissenters.

At the time of that vote, Obama issued a statement: "After he vetoed a plan that would have funded the troops and begun to bring them home, this bill represents more of his stubborn refusal to address his failed policy. We should not give the President a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path."

So Obama does support the troop financially, but with a plan to pull them out from Iraq.

Play like KG

My brother is a Lakers fan. We shot each other with scorns over MSN throughout the NBA Finals - I was watching the games on TV and he was checking the score on the web. He didn't bother to look at the score after the first quarter of the 6th game when Lakers was trashed.

Then I ran into a bunch of team boxers at the NBA store at New York. It took me no time to decide whether I should get my brother a Lakers or Celtics boxer. The only question was whether I should get him the one in white or the one in green.

I told him to wear the boxer next time he played basketball, and he would play like Kevin Garnett.

Seafood at home

We picked up some seafood from a seafood wholesaler at Gloucester this morning. It was damn cheap there. Oysters, not big, were $0.75 each, scallops for $1.2 each, all sashimi grade. There were a few kinds of scallops and the guy showed me the one tasted best when eaten raw. They really did. They were also so big that I could cook the gonads and the ligaments separately in sake for appetizers. They tasted terrific.

We've got a couple dozen of cherrystones. I originally planned to open them and serve them with half-shells, but turned out a pain in the ass to open. I gave up opening the rest on the 7th one boiled the rest, then cooked them over butter and sake. But they tasted better when raw.

We also had haddock and lobsters cooked, and some veggie and mushrooms and bread. Sophie opened a nice Sauvignon Blanc her mom bought her from France. And Jenna loved to sit on my laps when she was tired.

It was Priscilla's idea to have seafood for today. I did all the opening and cooking, but it was good to have a bunch of friends coming around. Everything was good.

I bought a dozen of oysters. Because it was a shame not to eat them as fresh as possible, I ate one when I was opening them. I did the same for the scallops, of course.

Ice can burn

I was watching National Geography's Earth: The Biography - Atmosphere on TV.

At one point the host goes to a lake frozen for hundreds of years in Siberian. Being a permafrost, the ice in the lake traps millions of air bubbles, most of which contain methane. If permafrost melts as global temperature rises, the world will get even warmer because methane is a green house gas 34 times stronger than CO2.

Here the host demonstrates how much methane permafrost contains: he digs a small hole into the ice and lights a match above the hole. Wow.. a blaze comes out of the ice! Then he digs the hole again and a flame blows right at him!!

Goooooooooooal!!

We had the friendly match with CST today after having postponed it 3 times because of weather. They turned out not as fit as we were and needed to take breaks every 10 minutes. I thought we were having picnic rather than playing soccer. But because of that, I had my first goal of the season! I had also saved a few close shots when I played keeper. After about 50 minutes into the game, one of the the CST guys said, "one more goal and we are done." Fine. And I made the second and closing goal... haha.

Banksy

News comes in today having uncovered the identity of the elusive Bristol graffiti master Banksy. I was curious and found his webpage showcasing some of his great works.

From his work, you understand that you need to provoke people's examination of current society to become an admirable master of art.

Bastille Day

I was cleaning up my freezer at work and rinsing out some microfuge tube holders. I was drying them over a piece of paper towel and I saw a French Flag!! Maybe someone is trying to remind me tomorrow is Bastille Day.

No point to get an iPhone

Today I drove down to Boston to have an hair cut and buy some Nissan noodles. I was driving on Memorial Drive on my way back where I spotted some funny clouds over Boston.

I took this picture using my new cell phone SE W890i. I got it from an online shop, and it turned out the phone was sent out from Tsuen Wan, where I had lived for over 20 years. This phone was not designed to take good pictures, but sometimes I like to take pictures with less than decent camera of cell phones because it can create the effect Lomo cameras make.

This phone can actually take some decent scenery and night shots. You just need to know the limit of your tools. I choose this phone over the rest because it plays good music and, most important of all, it is very thin and looks cool. I don't need to be online all the time, and AT&T's 3G network does not reach places I hang out most the time. I only need a thin and cool looking cell phone that can play music and take pictures with the Lomo feel. No point to get an iPhone.

Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song

A colleague of mine has bought this Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song and put it in the lunch room for us to play with. The book has brief descriptions of commonly seen birds in North America, and comes with sound tracks of the their songs! The drawings and the sound tracks are from the Macaulay Library at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. I have been spending a lot of my lunch time playing the songs these days.

I hear this bird song at home all the time. It turns out to be the song of Pileated Woodpeckers.

The puzzle of Mirror Images

I ran into the puzzle of why images in the mirror are reversed left-right but not up-down. Then I found this blog, which seems to have been discontinued since 2003.

The host appears to be a grade school science teacher and was gathering puzzles and researching for the answers for his students.

So about mirror images, mirrors do not actually reverse image sideways. It is our perception of left and right that leads us ask the wrong question. He describes a simple solution:

Stand in front of a mirror facing north yourself. Raise your right arm to point east, your mirror image is also pointing east. Raise your left arm to point west, and your mirror image is pointing west. The same thing happens when you point up or down. But if you point your finger to the north (into the mirror), your image will points out of the mirror and to the south!

So the fact is, mirrors only reverse the direction of the object by the axis perpendicular to the mirror surface, just as the physical law depicts what happens to light when it hits a mirror - light traveling into a mirror travels backward (got reflected).

The host also suggests a few websites and books to read. This The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition seems very interesting. The books includes the original stories of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lowell Carroll and original illustrations, and very detail annotations by Martin Gardner on the historical context of the jokes and logical, topological and mathematical paradox.

Apples and Pears under Synchrotron

A group of scientists in Belgium is crazy enough to put apples and pears under synchrotron, trying to see inside the fruits and understand why pears rot faster than apples.

They found that pears have a micro-channel structure between cells, whereas apples have irregular cavities. After the fruits are picked, the cells rely on respiration to keep themselves healthy, and that needs oxygen. With highly structured and watery micro-channels, pears have less oxygen supply into the core and thus rot faster.

So the verdict is, a higher oxygen pressure in pear storage can keep pears fresh. But most of the pears in supermarkets in this country are as hard as rocks. They always need to be "matured" for as long as a week at home before a knife can cut them.

The torch passes on

A friend of mine's mother suddenly passed away. She had a stroke and was sent off to the hospital. The doctors said she'd got intracerebral hemorrhage, a deadly kind of stroke.

Being the only child of the family, my friend was very close to her mother. She couldn't stop crying the first 3 days after her mother's death.

My friend is due to deliver her first daughter in a few weeks. I genuinely hope that she can get over it and be a good mom.

Wall-E

I was not impressed by the poster of Wall-E, thinking Pixar had run out of idea and to re-create another Robots. But after seeing critics from New York Times and Boston Globe giving it an A, and reading the critics themselves, I decided it is a shame not to see the movie. Critics from Boston Globe puts it as "a toy story that dares to say things our grown-up movies don't," and "by a substantial margin, the best American film of the year to date."

So the story starts at in the future when humans have abandoned Earth and orbiting in space for 700 years. While these humans live a sedated and meaningless lives in an all-too-comfy spaceship, Wall-E is the lone robot left on Earth still carrying out its directive as a "Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth Class", compacting and piling up garbage in a Earth city fill with trash and apparently no life but a cockroach. A.O. Scott of NY Times puts it "The first 40 minutes or so of “Wall-E” — in which barely any dialogue is spoken, and almost no human figures appear on screen — is a cinematic poem of such wit and beauty that its darker implications may take a while to sink in." The trashed Earth and the little sanctuary of Wall-E's are also rendered as real as it can ever be.

The story goes on with a high-tech robot sent from the spaceship to survey the Earth for any sign of revival. Wall-E falls in love with her, after "learning" to love from watching the worn-out video tape of Hello, Dolly! everyday after work. It is a sweet love story, and also a tribute to some great sci-fi movies, especially 2001: Space Odyssey. It goes from the red light core of Autopilot that is reminiscent of HAL-9000 to the standing-up act of the human pilot against Autopilot, imitating the stand-up act of the apes down to the dramatic music playing in the background.

I was listening to the radio on the way to my dentist today. Terry Gross's Fresh Air of NPR was interviewing Andrew Stanton, the director and writer of Wall-E, who also directed Finding Nemo. He said he didn't commission a music for Wall-E as most other big animates did because he wanted to get the feeling of remembering the good old things that Wall-E himself so keen on doing: collecting artifacts of the then lost civilization, such as rubber ducks, Zippo lighters, boots and the Rubik's cube. So he chooses Put on your Sunday Coat from Hello, Dolly! as the opening music played by the recorder of Wall-E himself while strolling down the trashed city, and Louis Armstrong's La Vie en rose.

If you are going to watch Wall-E, do not leave the theater when the credit rolls in. The half-motion pictures are part of the story.

Pixar has surely breaks new ground for both animation and story telling with Wall-E. It is also an declaration of Pixar identity after being acquired by Disney two years ago.

p.s. The sound designer who creates the robotic voices of the movie is Benjamin Burtt, who also created the sound of light sabers, R2D2 and the ominous breath of Darth Vader. He himself plays the voice of Wall-E.

AmeriCone Dream

This AmeriCone Dream from Ben & Jerry's is so far the best ice-cream I have tried. Vanilla ice-cream with chocolate fudges and waffle cone pieces and caramel swirls. The waffle pieces are surprisingly better than cookies with ice-cream! And it is named after the political comedian Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report, Comedy Central's highest-rated show.

I am not so fond of The Colbert Report myself, as it is a too right-winged to me. But as I read the wikipedia entry of Stephen Colbert, he is actually playing a fictional persona in the show. Colbert describes himself a democrat, and he has "no problem with the Republicans, just the Republican policies."

Maybe the right-wingedness of his show-persona wins him the honored of being invited as the entertainer at the White House Correspondent Dinner on April 29, 2006. In front of an audience from the Associated Press and only a few feet from George W. Bush, he said,

"I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world."

Wow. That's why his speech got little media coverage but the video of his performance became an internet and media sensation, and ratings for The Colbert Report rose 37% in the week following the speech.

Politics aside, Stephen Colbert's AmeriCone Dream is delicious.

Ben &Jerry’s describes AmeriCone Dream as “a decadent melting pot of vanilla ice cream with fudge-covered waffle cone pieces and a caramel swirl. It’s the sweet taste of liberty in your mouth.”

As a bonus, Stephen Colbert is donating his proceeds from the sale of AmeriCone Dream to charity through The Stephen Colbert AmeriCone Dream Fund. It is only $3.69 a pint from Market Basket after all.

Ben & Jerry's factory is only about 4 hours' drive from me, and they have regular factory tours. I should go with some good company in the fall when the foliage is at its height.

Peacock and turkey - 2

Corrections to the post about the peacock. It should be a peahen, a female peacock, from her brown feathers. It was strolling down the front yard of my neighbor with a turkey just yesterday. Someone at work saw her hanging out with 4 wild turkeys the other day.

4th July Boston Fireworks

This year's Boston Fireworks on 4th July was definitely the best in recent years.

Someone has filmed the whole event and uploaded onto youtube. The fireworks in the beginning of Part Two are most fascinating: they linger in the sky like jellyfishes swimming in the sea.

Part One:



Part Two:

Peacock and turkey

For some reasons unknown to us, a peacock loves to hang out on our porch lately. We are not sure whether he is the one our company keeps, but we know he can FLY. Yes, I didn't know peacock could fly until a few days ago when I saw him flew over our house to the front yard. But most the time he stays on the porch, especially on the handrail.

He would look at us through the glass door. But if we walk out and approach her, he would walk away slowly. There used to be a wild turkey hanging out on the porch last summer. We called it Freddie. It has showed up a few times this year, once side-by-side with the peacock.