North Korea Town

When I was looking for an apartment, one of the neighborhoods I was looking in (because it was close to work and really cheap) was called Koreatown. However, in my haste to describe the particular region I was looking in, I referred to it as North Korea Town¹.

This was a mistake. Things that the north part of Koreatown has that North Korea does not include:
-Restaurants where you can actually buy food
-The occasional sign written in English
-A store called HI PUPPIES!
-Traffic (okay, you win this round North Korea)

Still, after looking at this gallery of photos of life in North Korea, I will say this much: there are definitely neighborhoods in LA that look a lot worse. Click through the gallery and you will agree that that is a sweet backhoe.

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1. Incidentally, it should unironically be called 'Best Koreatown' - prices are still low, but the buildings are nicer.

And now, another medical science report

According to a study published in the American Journal of Roentgenology,¹ whole milk might be as effective as barium shakes for people who have to take Gastrointestinal CT scans.

Two ways to interpret this one:
1. We've found a new way to improve a really unpleasant part of medicine, making treatment easier.
2. What the FUCK are we putting in whole milk?


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1. I have diverse reading tastes, ok?

Another great mystery of life

The house I currently live in is only semi-occupied. Instead of 5 of us and a dog, there's only 2 full-time residents, one guy here on weekends and I'm only here to sleep and eat dinner.

And yet, the dishes pile up at the exact same rate as when there was a full house. Either I'm imagining things, or we have a Bad Ronald situation on our hands.

No animals were hurt, but my nose was.

I burn incense, so that my room smells good and not like I really need to vacuum. Today I noticed that the incense says it's not tested on animals. That's a damn shame, really. Have you ever smelled pet cages up close? If there's anything I wished smelled like jasmine and roses, it's a hamster cage.

The Star Wars Christmas Special

For those of you not in the know about geeky subjects, before Star Wars was a trilogy, there was a made-for-tv special that only aired once and everybody decided that it never needed to be seen or heard from again.

Well, it's on Google Video. And I watched it today. Well, I tried. I got 24 minutes in before I couldn't take it anymore. This is exactly the point when a bizarrely dressed chef comes on.

coming soon to haunting your dreams

And the thing is, I didn't even watch it as is: I had the rifftrax going. Even the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 couldn't make it tolerable. That's like being unable to finish a marathon even if you get to ride on a moped the entire way.

victory over inanimate objects

I come from a long line of guys. As a result, I'm stubborn when it comes to minor repairs. I *could* hand it off to the professionals, but that's wasteful when I'm perfectly capable of doing it myself. Of course "doing it myself" has to contain either the word eventually or the phrase "without injuring myself too badly"

Today, I tackled one such project. The office shredder was jammed. efforts to unstick it proved fruitless. So I took it upon myself to finish this task, despite the pleas of my co-workers that "we can take it to staples", "come on, staples is only like 3 blocks away", and "I mean, really, you DON'T have to do this". But those quotes were from a time when I was not repeatedly jamming a pair of scissors into a shredder.

Long story short, I fixed it. The shredder runs like a dream, but looks like somebody took a pair of scissors to it. I'm calling this a victory.

This explains so much

Driving home from work, I saw a homeless person with headphones. Now, I'm a charitable guy, but I don't really think that the worst part of homelessness is boredom.

Of course, it would make more sense if these weren't actually plugged in to anything.

Smartphone blues

I'm in the market for a smartphone. The phone I currently have is not up to the tasks of modern society. It's barely up to the tasks of Amish society.

I have two choices. I'm ignoring the blackberry out of principle because if I get one of those, I'd have to work in a real office and wear a tie. I'm ignoring a lot of other funkier phones because if I'm getting a smartphone, I'm going to get the best darn phone I can.

Option one? the iPhone. It's got style points, but people warn about how the contract is limiting and how Apple basically will watch everything I do and sell it to the Chinese. Okay, I'm paraphrasing a little bit but a lot of my friends are vouching against it. Apparently, owning an iPhone is tantamount to saying that you know nothing about computers and buy things based on how pretty they are. Well I do, so that's not like it's a big secret.

The other option is the Samsung Galaxy variants. These all have magic and are run on something called Android, which sounds made up. Apparently, you can customize them to make them whatever you want. However, I'm told there are limitations in the number of apps and that often the apps won't close properly, so I have to get software that does that for me. Which sounds like an elegant way to say 'it doesn't work'.

So I'm stuck. Apple, Google, if you give me a phone to try for free for a month or seven, I'll let you know which one I like better. Never hurts to ask, right?

In which I didn't get stabbed

Open mics are a lot of things; some bad but also some good. One good thing is that I guess you could say they're egalitarian. Anyone can show up. You never know if the next person to walk through the door is going to be Adam Sandler, or if it's going to be some guy fresh out of prison. As it turns out, the second option is a lot more likely.

Halfway through the show, a man came in with a burrito in a bag. Immediately, the part of me that had just been watching Sherlock Holmes right before the show kicked in to gear and thought that that was not only a burrito, but a suspicious burrito. The other clues were that this was at 10:30 at night and the guy looked like he was either drunk or on heroin.

The first problem with this fine upstanding audience member wasn't so much that he was eating a burrito, it was that he'd flick things off the table onto the floor. I tried to be nice and offer some of them back, as though he truly wanted his slice of lemon which had been on the floor. He flicked it off the table immediately. Now, he might have been a devotee of the five second rule, so I didn't take offense. But this pattern of flicking things off the table lead to a group consensus: he was an asshole.

But this gentleman (and I use that term so ironically it is in fact a pair of 1980s eyeglasses) was not content to being an asshole in one dimension. He was a many-faceted and complex asshole. The remnants of burrito were spread around the table. He kept re-arranging the mess he'd made, seemingly not content with the layout. Maybe it was a statement on the transcendent nature of art. Then again, maybe it wasn't.

And then he discovered the butter knife. Having never been murdered myself, I can't say whether that implement is considered a deadly weapon, or just an annoying one. But he was wielding it as though he meant business. I didn't want to find out. It was at that time when I noticed that he had a neck tattoo. Much like forehead tattoos, neck tattoos aren't found on gentle, kind souls. I've never seen a neck tattoo that said 'I love puppies'. I didn't really bother to read the tattoo, because it probably said 'If you can read this, I'm already shanking you.'

So, now that you have a picture of this guy, you can see the predicament I was in. He was causing a mild ruckus, and I was on stage and had the chance to take him down a peg and make the audience laugh. As the old adage goes, an adage I learned when it was written in my yearbook by a dear friend, "Don't die". I took this adage to heart instead of taking a butter knife to that same delicate area. So, I suppose we could call this a victory.

But to maintain the universe's karmic balance, next week Adam Sandler damn well better show up.

Click n Cook modular cooking system: absolutely useless

Quirky, a store full of designy solutions to problems you didn't know you had offers a modular spatula system.

I'll save you a lot of time: it's utterly useless.
I've never been in a kitchen where I've thought 'Gosh, there's not enough space here and it's all because of those damned spatulas.' Too-large fridges, absolutely. But if you're looking to save space, start with making the huge stuff smaller. I mean, travel chopsticks might exist too, but they won't really save you THAT much space either. Not only does it not save a meaningful amount of space, it makes cooking harder.

These tools are only useful if you have the handle. If that handle breaks (which it will because Murphy's Law mandates it come to pass) you're left with 5 not very useful tools and a deep sense of shame. Worse, if you try and cook using more than one thing at a time, like if you're making really outlandish and fancy like a soup that has sauteed things¹ in it, you're going to be changing that handle out a ridiculous amount of times.

If somehow you find yourself needing five different sized spatulas, buy five spatulas you crazy crazy pancake-flipping chef you.

1. Mmm. Nothing like good ol' cream of things soup.

blah blah rapture

The Bible apparently says that the world is going to end today. Now, you'd think that a guy who scoured the Bible for clues would have at least read this passage:

"Therefore keep watch because you do not know the day nor the hour [that the Lord will return]" (Matthew 25:13)
That's right. We're not even supposed to know when the world is going to end. And we don't. Now, I'm no deity, but if I wanted to end the world at a time when nobody would expect it, I'd avoid scheduling it 7000 years to the day of some other major biblical event. I mean, people might totally see that coming.

So if the world does end, I'm pulling out that passage. Maybe I can save the world on a technicality.

two great mysteries of life

There is a mouse (or more likely a rat) in my house. I know because I hear the scurrying in the walls at night. Yet this rodent never eats our food which we sometimes leave out. Am I really so bad a cook that rodents think to themselves that they'd rather eat fiberglass insulation than my dinner leftovers?

I've had a continual low grade sunburn the last 3 weeks. I haven't been outside for more than 20 minutes at a time. Either there's something else afoot, OR I'm able to get sunburn while inside.

Masterchef Australia, the drinking game

While in Australia, I fell in love with their cooking challenge show. Thanks to the joys of the internet and the website http://www.realitytvfan.org, I can watch in in the good ol' US of A.

For those of you who want to experience it on another level, watch an episode and drink a small amount of your favorite beverage (alcoholic or not) when any of the following happen:

- Fire appears on screen, two if something catches fire that shouldn't.
- A contestant worries about being sent home
- A judge refers to some element of a dish as the hero or a cracker.
- Pasta dough or Mayo is made

Two drinks for the following:
- Contestant breaks down in tears
- George or Gary hug a contestant

Drink the whole damn bottle when:
-Matt Preston breaks down in tears. Hey, it could happen.

Anything I'm missing?

What to do when you find your doppelganger

I did it. I've seen my doppelganger. Not even as a face in a crowd, but on a billboard.
This guy on the right:

Compare with me:





















Uncanny, no?
In any event. I'm told that when I see my doppelganger, I'm supposed to kill him because he's trying to take over my life. I'm unsure why a guy who's on radio wants to pretend to be a young guy with crippling amounts of student loans.

Then it dawned on me:
I'm the doppelganger

Photoshop fonts leave something to be desired

I graduated last Friday. To celebrate my last days as a student, I picked up Photoshop before I had to pay full retail price on it. Yay student discounts. Now I'm photoshopping everything. I even whipped up a new header for the ol' blog.

But what I don't get is the font selection in photoshop. Photoshop is made for design-y people, yet it still comes with Papyrus and Comic Sans, and a bunch of other fonts I can't use in good conscience. I feel like a feature in Photoshop 6 will be that when you try to use a shit font, up pops a dialog box that warns you about why what you're doing is wrong.

Klaus' lessons in manners

Dear Mr Klaus,
Is it ever wrong to point out when people forget to say please or thank you? - Confused in Kentucky

Dear Confused.
Yes. It's very wrong. Allow me to provide an example:
According to WSB-TV Atlanta, a gentleman was holding the door open for a stranger. This stranger did not say thanks, so the gentleman told the stranger to say thank you. The stranger took offense at this, and shot the gentleman.

Don't let this be you. Some people don't like being reminded to say thanks. However, this stranger is a special case. Ask him to do something nice and he'll do something mean. This probably means that when the news interviewed the gentleman, and the gentleman told the stranger to turn himself in, this stranger is probably going to go out and burn down an orphanage.

Self-driving Google Cars in California

Google is lobbying Nevada to allow self-driving cars for its street view.
Personally, I like the idea. The Google cars have been doing well in California. I even saw one today. (Coincidentally, I'm probably going to be on the street corner of Hoover and 26th forever. The idiot waving at the google car? that's me!)

I like the idea of self-driving cars. These cars couldn't be any worse than most California drivers. There are certain stretches of freeway (*cough* 405 *cough*) where you wonder if it's possible for EVERYONE to be dumber than average. At least the google cars aren't going to slow down and gawk when some car's pulled over on the side of the road. Heck, they can take pictures of it and share them with everyone.

What worries me is that Google has decided to take matters into their own hands regarding self-driving cars. That's a bit scary. What other secret projects are they working on?

Taking finals, in style

Today was my last college final ever. It was a little intense, because there is a part of my brain that keeps telling me that "if you fail this, you won't graduate on time. And then you'll feel dumb because your parents came all the way out here to see you, and they'll never come visit again if you don't actually graduate" Parental love only goes so far when plane tickets are expensive and you know I could have studied a lot closer to home for a lot less money.

The worst feeling is the fear that you have of taking a test in your pyjamas, or worse than that even - naked. Thankfully, that's only happened a couple times. Not the fear; the actual taking of a test in my bathrobe.
This is why I don't like 8am finals. And why I'm amazed they let me graduate.

How to open .docx files without microsoft office and how to hate yourself for drinking whiskey

I don't have microsoft office, one of the most popular pieces of software in the world. This makes me a rebel. I was going to buy a copy of Microsoft office, but two things happened.
1. I was taken to a whiskey and cigar bar, and given the chance to be manly for an evening
2. I discovered that in the middle of whiskey, cigars and me is violent nausea and cab rides. (not simultaneous, thankfully)

So the money I was going to apply towards legitimate software instead went towards a night peppered with shame, financial inadequacy and almost winning at pool.

Which brings up a cool trick. If your computer can't open .docx or .pptx files, google docs can. Just hit 'upload' and it'll open it for you. For free. This means I don't have to buy microsoft office!

Which in a sense means that I'm not being punished that much for the whiskey incident.

A measure of adulthood/ explaining men

Doing the laundry, I realized another sign that I was in fact becoming an adult. I don't actually need to buy t-shirts anymore. I already have loads of them, and I can't wear them to work. So from now on, the bulk of my clothing purchases are going to be shirts with collars and pants. The office I'm interning at has some pretty laid-back policies about dress code, but polo shirts and nice jeans are going to be 'it' for a while.

I'm going to have these tshirts for a while now. I'll have to keep buying new collared shirts all the time to replace my old, worn-out work shirts, but all of my tshirts will remain pretty pristine. So if you've ever wondered why men still hold on to tshirts from college, that's why.

Klaus presents: The stories of the saints

Aight, ladies and gentlemen, we turn now to the bizarre chapters of religious tradition known as "the Stories of the Saints". One way to become a Saint in the Catholic tradition is to have miracles ascribed to you. People have to invoke your name, and if something truly astonishing happens, it looks good on your permanent record.

Tonight: Saint Henry.
Eleven miracles are ascribed to Henry. Two children raised from the dead and four sick people healed. Those sorts of things are regarded as solid, blue chip miracle makers. If you can get those on your record, you've got a really good chance of sainthood. Some fishermen survived a storm by invoking his name. I've seen A Perfect Storm and I hate the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" so I'm all for saving the lives of fishermen. A solid resume-builder if you're applying to be a saint.

However, the record doesn't end there. We turn now to the lesser miracles:
-A Franciscan called Erlend had his headache healed.
I have had many a bad headache. It took me a while to realize these were migraines. I had just thought that I was a wimp. However, I prefer to invoke Saint vicodin.

-The Bishop's finger was found the next Spring
Yuck. I'm not sure if this is a miracle, the result of really bad cleaning, or just another finger. For those not in the know, Henry was killed trying to punish a murderer. This was the time before police records existed, so I'm not sure where the finger was at time of death. This actually leads to another miracle:

-The murderer lost his scalp when he put the bishop's hat on his head
Double yuck. Again, out of context this is just bizarre, and I can't stomach knowing what "in context" looks like. Speaking of stomach, here's the last miracle!

-A priest in Skara had gotten a stomach ache after mocking Henry
Um... I'm feeling a bit ill actually, and I don't think it's the Chipotle burrito.

Next time on "The Stories of the Saints", I'll either avoid blasphemy or stock up on pepto bismol.

More domestic terrorists

I've warned already about people who open their car doors into oncoming traffic. I want to propose an amendment about car parking rules

You see, Los Angeles has a problem with lots of cars needing to take lots of city streets at certain times; namely, to get to and from work. During these times, it is essential that there be three lanes of traffic operating in a single direction. However, around the noon hour and after 7, the volume of traffic is reduced enough that it makes sense for there to be one lane of parking and only two lanes of traffic. This is seen as a fair and reasonable compromise.

So, to all of you who decide to park your car in that third lane during rush hour, a loud and mighty I HATE YOU be unto you. You are making thing worse, for now that middle lane has to not only slow down, but stop to accommodate me moving over. You are throwing a monkey wrench into the essential workings of society and I would send out teams of stealth helicopters to bomb your car into atoms, if I had that power.

Yet another reason why I will not be president.

I'm glad we're not going into space

XKCD posted a comic lamenting the shutdown of the space program in the US.
The text says it all: "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

There's a lot of space out there. There's not that much "the earth". If we mess the earth up, there are actually no other places we can go. Space travel might be one of humankind's greatest feats if only because we're relative noobs at being an advanced species. 1000 years ago we thought that birds gave birth to trees. Think how much more we'll know in another 1000 years. Space is still going to be there 1000 years from now. Nothing's going to change, really. It'll still be an inhospitable vacuum full of radiation and cosmic dust and Major Tom.

Think of space travel as something which we were capable of doing, but which we weren't ready for just yet. Just like things like radioactivity, electric cars or manners. When these things first came out, they were awesome to behold, but we couldn't use them in the right ways. So we either forgot about them or used them in the wrong ways. They will have their rebirth, but not until we're ready.

I'd rather we turned the earth into a place that aliens would want to visit and not conquer. An intergalactic Switzerland. We need to focus on the planet we've got and not the one that's seven million light years away. By the time we get that far out, that planet might be gone. Let's focus on what we've got here instead and let those lucky lucky aliens judge us when they show up.

Hopefully, we'll have manners again when they do.

Quick Hits

May 5 is Cinco de Mayo. May 6 is I HATE TEQUILA day.

Megan's List is the sex offender registry. But let us not forget Craig, who apparently was killed by ugly couches.

It was 90 degrees in Los Angeles today. Why did I feel the need to wear a sweater to work?

The US Department of Peace? Really?

I spent the weekend at the California Democrats convention. One of the highlights was seeing a group lobbying for a "US Department of Peace"

I'm not sure what this entails. At least with all the other major departments, you know what they do. The Department of Defense is in charge of defending the country. The Department of Agriculture is in charge of all of the plants. The Department of the Interior is in charge of decorations for all the white house parties. And so on...

But what exactly is the department of peace supposed to do? Peace really just means that nobody's punching anybody. It's about NOT doing things more than it is about doing things. The US Department of Blowing Things Up becomes the Department of Peace when they decide nothing's going to be blown up anytime soon.

This is why I'm introducing Nick Klaus Bill #1: Formation of the Departments of Barbecue, Funk and Naps. All of these are essential to our nations happiness. Think how much pulled pork, blankets and Bootsy Collins LPs you could buy with 500 million dollars. Money well spent, I'd say. Or what about mandating half hour nap breaks after lunch when it gets hot out and you're going to be falling asleep anyways?

This is an idea whose time has come.

I didn't fight the law

The law won. I understand that the general gist of the system is that you're supposed to fight it to actually count as 'fighting the system'. Things that don't actually count as fighting the system:

Thinking about fighting the system (despite what 1984 would have you believe)
Doing nothing
Doing exactly what they want you to do. This is what I did. I'm about as badass as getting a job in insurance and moving to Boise from someplace exciting. I think I lost any street cred I might have had.

What follows is my impotent rage.
I was WRONGED! The City of Pasadena falsely accused me of the most heinous of crimes that don't actually get you arrested or banned from ever attending children's parties. I'll be back with ludicrous amounts of documentation the next time I'm over there.

I was at an In-n-Out

I was at an In-n-Out when I heard the news.

"Osama Bin Laden is dead". I think it was Fritz who told me. We were in the process of driving back from Sacremento, flush with excitement and listening to 90s grunge jams. Then the moment was transformed from a trip to being aware of the sudden course of history.
At the time we'd heard a bomb was dropped on him. The story, flipping between the news channels on the AM spectrum of the car later was a bit muddled. Osama Bin Laden was either on a convoy, in a mansion or in a cave and had a drone attack or a ground team come in.

Almost 10 years ago, I experienced a similar sense of confusion. I was in German class, sitting next to a very good friend, whose "German name" was also Fritz. That detail isn't important, but there's always an interesting parallel. The words were easy to understand, but I interpreted it as a Cessna had collided with the World Trade Center building in Minneapolis. That was the first thing my brain went to. After all, there was no way possible for a full-size airliner to crash into the heart of finance. Things like that just didn't happen.

September 11, 2001 is really when the decade I call 'The Naughts' actually starts. After that, there's a massive mindset change. The world is suddenly capable of seeing the boogeyman, and we all could think like terrorists. We'd entered a world where there was suddenly so much more to fear. We grew to accept the idea that bombs could be held in shoes, in water and in our underwear. We saw those actual bombs on subways and busses. IED now means something to most of us.

I think of Nirvana as one of those defining symbols which also showed the end of another decade. The 80s didn't end in 1990, because in a lot of ways, the early 90s felt a lot like the 80s. The 80s didn't end when the cold war ended because that war existed beyond the span of a single decade. I think the success of Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit" has to be when the 80s end. It's about as arbitrary as any other marker, but it was when a great cynicism began and everything became corporate, but the idea of a marketable "alternative" has caused a lot more good than harm.

I don't know if the death of the most-wanted man in the world means that the decade of 2000s is actually over. I don't know what's going to happen next. I hope it's good. And I hope I'm at another in-n-out when it happens