hand-made musical instruments

This site is cool.

Here is a cigar box guitar. This is what it sounds like. Pretty decent for $55.



And it turns out that these have already been invented: the almighty earmuff headphones!



Not as cool as the ones I was envisioning, which I found at gadget reviews.



Anyway, back to work!

"there is no exit strategy!"

An oldie, but a goodie :D.

i read very nice

I had some reading to do this afternoon, so I went to the public market for some bubble tea and sat outside on one of the benches surrounding the water feature. There were a bunch of asian families around and their kids were chasing pigeons and being all sorts of annoying to the pigeon population. Other than that, I noticed there was this guy who looked like Sam Roberts minus access to a razor, whose attire and aloofness suggested hobo, starving artist, or professional backpacker, sitting diagonal to me. Probably in his late 20's, but it was hard to tell because of his unkempt facial hair situation. He would get up and leave periodically, returning to his bench to roll a cigarette and listen to his discman, sometimes chatting with some other folks of a comparable AGI class (hmm, guess what I was reading about).

Anyway, for an hour I was totally immersed in some papers for my literature review and was furiously scribbling things down. Then I noticed that he was walking towards me. Thinking I knew what was going to happen next, I mentally flipped a coin (Harvey Two-Face style, baby) to decide whether or not I will give him any change. See, I don't really have a problem with sparing some change, but I just hate taking out my wallet to do it. It was a gift, a really pretty thing suggestive of more money than it possesses (thanks for making me look rich, Colleen), not to mention ownership of a tiny dog.

I didn't look up until his shadow was in my way, and when I did, he placed a sealed strawberry "bubble tea" (more like a smoothy from a bbt place) next to me on the bench (narrowly missing a pair of copulating flies, no less) and said, in a thick eastern european accent: "If I need excuse to give you this, it is because you read very nice." I was confused as to what he meant by "read very nice," but like that time I thought Irfan bought a real helicopter for $100, I pretended I wasn't shocked and thanked him (..twice), like I get bubble tea from vagrant celebrity look-alikes all the time. He walked away after that and didn't come back.

mmm..... dream omelet

Just a little something to tie you over until the next real blog post.

Chef Cooks 'Dream Omelet' From Recipe That Came To Him In A Dream

a meditation on bananas

-----Email Message-----
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 11:10 AM

I'm the kind of person who can't separate a bunch of bananas in the store because they'll miss each other. I have to buy the whole bunch, or none at all.

-----Email Messge-----
Sent: Sunday, July 13, 2008 12:41 AM

i buy the saddest "charlie brown" christmas tree i can find every year because i feel sorry for it, knowing no one else would ever choose it.

i love that part of me

Taken from http://postsecret.blogspot.com/, week of July 13th, 2008.
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Me, too.

Even though I can't stand the taste of bruised bananas, I sometimes would take pity on a poor, bruised banana from the fruitbasket at home and eat it first so that it would not be subject to the cruel neglect of my more discriminating family members. It's an underdog-preference complex; many of us suffer from some (though not always fruity) form of it. I would pry the injured banana from its more fortunate brethren with their clear complexions, all survivors of an unfortunate grocery bag mishap, and deem it worthy of consumption. By me. ME. Because I'm awesome.

Admittedly, beneath the sense of justice and potassium rushing through my veins lurked some doubt as to how much good I was doing for bananakind in the end. To be chosen is to be eaten, after all. Do bananas prefer to be chosen and chomped to bits, or would they rather be neglected and decompose more or less intact? Am I the god of the bananas? Are they honoured to be chosen by me regardless of what being chosen might entail? Is it the lifelong goal of the humble banana to be crushed between mighty human molars, forced into a pool of acid, and ultimately to facilitate the formation of healthy stools?

How we flatter ourselves into thinking that the objects of our desire, desire to be desired by us.

So much for rational consumers. Some of us are not even sane.

366 days later

This song came on while I was trying to write your card.

i’m never gonna give you up
what do you got if you ain’t got love
if you ain’t got love
what do you got if you ain’t got love