Posts about commented on - Ars Lounge Feedjack

*

and you call that food? (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

new for 2008: a spaminal, caught in the wild!

since the alcosandraholic posts periodically about her liquid vice, and since i said i would profess my love for the nectar of the gods online, i figured this could be considered occasion to start a semiregular (which means this will probably be the only one) entry on the food i eat. the title of this post derives from the fact that what i call lunch is shunned by most of western civilization, starving wolves, and flesh eating bacteria. in fact, the term OMGWTFBBQ!?! was coined after my discovery of new pizza sauce substitutes.

topping out my list of culinary contributions to the world is the spamburger with cheese. it may surprise some to learn that a spamburger with cheese is in reality a food and not a 4th grade insult. originally, i would put cheese in my spam sandwiches, so imagine my delight when i discovered that the animal (i call him the spaminal) from which spam originates, has now been genetically combined with cheese!

the spaminal in the wild: artist's depiction

the original spaminal was originally 50% hoof and 50% snout, however this new genetic combination entails a 20% dairy imitation (which means it's hoof + snout + udder). surprisingly, spam with cheese does not look that appealing out of the can. there are little yellow chunks in the pink imeatation (or imutation if you prefer). i thought that it would tastier after frying (melted cheese does that), however it just got angry at me when i tried to stick it in the frying pan.

next on my list of typical lunches is vienna sausage. i like vienna sausage, because they require even less preparation than spam. on the days that my roommate cooks rice, i'll just scoop some rice into a bowl, grab a can of vienna sausage, then just pop it in the microwave at work. so if you're looking for a diet to help produce the muscular physique i have, consider increasing your discarded-meat-product intake. actually i think the primary reason i eat vienna sausage is because i tend to eat it with:

MY BELOVED BANANA SAUCE!!

under my pillow is a list of inanimate objects that i would propose marriage to if such actions weren't precluded by established social convention, religion, and the law. jufran's banana sauce constitutes 86% of that list. discussing the other 14% would invite ridicule and scorn. ok, now back to the love of my life. if you haven't tried it, it's like a sweet sweet ketchup. it's good with rice, chicken, hamburgers, bread, beef, milk, chocolate, ice cream, straight from the bottle, just about anything. in fact, i have to be careful not to get any on my cheek or lips, because if that were to happen, i would probably eat my own face. considered THE BEST CONDIMENT EVAR by some and an act of god by most, truly banana sauce is a must try.

back on the topic of and you call that food, is something i've heard legends about and i'd like to try, but actually haven't the opportunity myself: chòu dòufu, which apprently translates to stinky tofu. i wet myself laughing every time i read that. here is a food which by definition is an olfactory assault (raw sewage anyone?) for which it makes no attempt at amends. at times, i've called my cafeteria's menu: dirt flavored shit, but i doubt that's what the chefs called it. stinky tofu *wetness* has the appeal of "fatty corpuscle". like michael jackson's bad, it has the capability to entirely reverse a word's connotations! if banana sauce can work for spam and vienna sausage though, i'm sure it could cure even the stinkiest of tofus.

to summarize, above i've outlined several dishes: spam with cheese, vienna sausage, stinky tofu, all of which are arguably edible. the moral of the story is that banana sauce will make them all better! (as long as you don't end up eating your own face)

Posted in: commented on , food , pictures

*

before pictures (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

i'm not gadget conscious. i don't own an ipod or a GPS or an iphone nor do i particularly want one. up until a few months ago, i would get calls from zack morris asking for his cell phone back. oddly enough, i could probably be considered an anti-gadgtite. neat packaging and slick marketing campaigns aren't very compelling to me.

i am however a big sucker for infomercials. lets face it, those bastards are pretty convincing. take something i would ordinarily never do (aren't you tired of ironing your clothes?), add the guise of scientific value (engineered using space age materials!), and set me up for a huge prive overestimation (why john, i would pay $599.95 for that set of knives) and i'm sold. for a few days one year, i wanted to tell people in the work kitchen that instead of microwaving that chicken, they could have just set it and forget it! i mean, who else wants to spend all of their day chopping vegetables and dry cleaning (excluding koreans). it's really only my extreme laziness that prevents me from buying these things.

over the winter break though, i could not turn away from the P90X infomercial. just 90 days? i only need a way to do pullups and a set of dumbbells? all i have to do is work out for 6 days a week? well then, I'M SOLD!

i like to entertain the notion that i'm in good shape. the food is a lot better and it saves me from having to go to the gym when i could be watching infomercials. the first dvd on P90X certainly proved me wrong though. at the end of the dvd, i could barely eek out a single closed grip overhand pull-up.

anyway, among the preparation steps are the prepation of 6 before pictures, for comparison with the post 90 days/i do 100 pullups a day photos. here's a before picture of me:

the first thing to notice is that, i'm quite the stylish fellow. but if you already knew me, then you already knew that. and as a special gift for the ladies, here's a picture of me with my shirt off:

as another treat, you get to see me with all my horsepower beneath me. that's a fine machine i tell you.

Posted in: commented on , on noel , pictures

*

the future of engineering (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

i've seen this photo a million times, but it still manages to crack me up every damn time...

Posted in: commented on , pictures

*

blast from the past (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

noel: hey jackie, come check out this picture of me from ~20 years ago. my cousins had it up in a frame at their house.
jackie: woah. your head was all big as a kid.

Posted in: commented on , on noel , pictures

*

multimedia overload (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

ramesh's video of me getting dressed:

flickr slideshow of kaori and chris' wedding:
Posted in: commented on , pictures , video

*

it might be a tumor (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

have you ever woken up in the morning and found that your tongue hurts?

it hurts to the point where i sometimes have difficulty eating and sometimes i have difficulty speaking properly. and it's not like a one day deal, it's been like this for a couple weeks now. i haven't the foggiest what causes the pain. i mean, if my tongue were off having fun at night without me, i'd at least like to be informed, maybe even participate.

all i know is that i wake up on my saliva soaked sponge which most people call a pillow and i feel like i've been chewing on my tongue all night. with my oversized canines, this may very well be the case, but i'd have thought that i would have woken up upon digesting my own body parts.

Posted in: commented on , on noel

*

daylight saving time (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

jackie and i thought it was a little odd getting a knock on our apartment door today. jackie usually goes out and i don't have any friends, so we hadn't expected anyone. despite its melrose place-like appearance, the only people our age residing in our apartment complex are the older kids of my neighbors. and since they're all armenian, it's rare that they spend time away from their mercedes and bmws. so it was with a curious trepidation that i answered the door...

...standing proudly before me were a pair of clean shaven youths, dressed in black slacks, white shirts, and black ties. completing the uniform were black nameplates. that's right, they were mormon missionaries. they also looked like they were sporting camel packs. understandable i guess, since bringing door to door savings tends to cause dehydration.

there are a bunch of mormon guys at work and they're pretty chill, but when they tell me that they only have 1 wife, i can't help but think they're underachievers. in fact, i think i may have tipped off the LDS network to my whereabouts since at work, i had asked them to hear the sales proposal. i didn't want to buy the car per se, i just wanted to watch the commercial.

the smalltalk that ensued was akward, because i was trying to think of an excuse to get out of there and i'm sure they could tell that i was trying to come up with an excuse to get rid of them too. luckily, jackie, with her uncanny spiderman-like proselytization sense called over to me with a:

hey noel, can you come back here to help me out with this!

i reached for the door and told them that i had something to do. in unholy unison, they replied with:

can we help?

at that point, i started devising elaborate schemes resulting in them washing my car, but then i realized that their persuasive abilities were likely far superior to my own. jackie credits herself with the save on this one, but i contend that i saved her. i mean, consider the prospect of converting a hybrid-driving, 420 celebrating, vegetarian eating lesbian¹. that's got to be extra credit.

¹^{transpositional errors may be present in this sentence}

Posted in: clever titles , commented on , on noel

*

cursive (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

¹shelly volante
²oh, and while i'm fontificating: plug. Posted in: commented on , on noel

*

six dirty bloodsucking whores never let me go: the original trilogy (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

time for some quick reviews:

children of men - hated it. that may be a poor choice of words. perhaps a better selection would be 'i hold an active dislike for this movie, to the extent that i feel as if my money could have been more enjoyably utilized if i had the $10 ticket converted quarters and subsequently stuffed up my nose."

casino royale - aka bond begins. as it turns out, before bond knew how to drive his aston martin, before he got cool toys from Q, before james knew what 'hit it and quit it' was, he was a white jackie chan (meaning: before he had hairy arms). it's difficult to avoid the overt product placement and the shameless self promotion of richard branson being screened at the airport. in summary: entertaining movie.

memories of my melancholy whores - gotta admit, didn't think this book was all that memorable. you wonder if gabriel garcia marquez is projecting his own pedophilic tendencies onto his protagonists. also, $20 for 115 pages is way overpriced. you'd just be buying the name. if you must read it, you can finish it in the bookstore.

never let me go - i liked ishiguro's style. i don't want to ruin it (but i will), but there's a twist which is hinted at early in the book. it eventually becomes clearer as the book progresses, but the way it's slowly revealed makes this book worth it.

spook - picked this up after enjoying stiff. an interesting (from a variety of perspectives) paragraph:

Ford, a moral philosopher and a Salesian Catholic priest, makes the clean and quite elegant argument that personhood - to use the more secular term for ensoulment - cannot begin until after the point where idential twinning is no longer possible: about fourteen days after conception. ... Up until that point, the zygote - with its potential to become two distrinct and separate human beings - cannot rationally be referred to as a person. "I contend that the cell cluster can be best be understood as human biological material but not a unified living human organism," he writes.

the best american magazine writing 2006 - i thought this was the most interesting article. it's about the head marketer for the war in iraq.

the boy who loved windows - as recommended by sandy. this was a great read. like at work, we find that great insight about complicated systems can be had by observing those systems while not operating properly. also, from reading this, i think i see why i (as first observed by leigh) sometimes (unconsciously) open my mouth while playing video games. a treatment protocol for desensitization involves rubbing the child's gums and pressing on his lower teeth. apparently a major nerve runs directly to the brain from the mouth. the book suggests that's why some children suck their thumbs/bite their nails. i'm curious to see my mouth when i'm concentrating on other things.

a dirty job - probably my favorite read of the month. angela had recommended christopher moore as an author i'd like. (i think she heard about him through jin?) if separately, you find the words 'supernatural' and 'farce' appealing, then you'd find this book twice as attractive.

bloodsucking fiends - just started on this, my second christopher moore book, but i figured i should include a paragraph to sell people on this author. Jody walks into a Gap with a stack of $100 bills:

Ten salespeople, all young, all dressed in generic cotton casual, looked up from their conversations, spotted the money in her hand, and simultaneously stopped breathing - their brains shutting down bodily functions and rerouting the needed energy to calculate the projected commissions contained in Jody's cash. One by one they resumed breathing and marched toward her, a look of dazed hunger in their eyes: a pack of zombies from the perky, youthful version of The Night of the Living Dead.

"I wear a size four and I've got a date in fifteen minutes," Jody said. "Dress me."

They descended on her like an evil khaki wave.

gears of war - i used to be a PC fan boy, one who thought they could never do a FPS right on a console. well, i've been reformed. probably the best executed FPS i've played since half life. whereas half life took effort to keep you in the third person for a more immersive experience, gears of war plays from a third person perspective with several in game rendered cut scenes from floating cameras. after playing through the coop with juan on realistic and half of the coop on insane with ryan, i think they sold me on the 3d person.

guitar hero - yeah yeah, i know, welcome to 2005. i picked it up in early december after having played a single song at bob's house. i got the 'with all this time you've wasted, you could have learned to play the real guitar by now' message. lol, stuck on bark at the moon on hard difficulty. i don't bother strumming up and i don't do hammer ons/pull offs. so i may be here for a while...

rainbow six vegas - the other 360 game i own. this is a fun system link game. ryan and i tried to get more than 2 player via two splitscreens and two system links, but apparently that's not supported.

lego star wars: the original trilogy - rented this from blockbuster. been having fun with this game, because coop is also well supported. juan and i can't stop killing each other over lego pieces even though they're dumped into one shared bin. and what's not to love about lego obi-wan slicing the lego head off of lego luke?

Posted in: commented on , gaming , literature

*

phood (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

noel: hey fuki, check out these pictures from the motherland
fuki: is that your dad in this picture?
noel: yup, that's him eating balut.
fuki: he looks so young
noel: he's 62
fuki: oh, it must be from eating all the unborn duck fetus

balut is the name of a filipino delicacy. it's a boiled duck egg with a duck embryo inside. one of my uncles actually ~~has a~~ ~~balut farm~~ ~~balut nursery~~ ~~duck morgue~~ ~~duck matrix~~ ~~baby duck killing camp~~ sells balut. my dad loves it. i've never seen him happier than he is when eating balut. my mom is afraid to eat it now though. my sister and i, while we haven't tried it, aren't morally opposed to it.

there are often times, when for fun, i'll try to challenge my uber catholic parents on some of their views. usually i'll try to find fault with their argument by citing some biblical precedent. my mom is usually obsessed with me getting a haircut. so when she starts going on and on about how long my hair is (it never is), i'll usually say "well you know who had long hair...Jesus!" and then my mom usually concedes. with my dad, i said "how can you be pro-life, but continue to abort unborn duck. you can't be against abortion, but for balut." in response, i think he bit off the unborn duck's head.

any discussion of food in the philippines warrants the obligatory inclusion of lechon. i'm not too big a fan of pork, but i do heartily approve of it's use for decorative purposes. in the mega malls, we found another filipino favorite: tsitsaron (pork rinds). due to the pronunciation of tsitsaron, (chi-cha-ron), apparently they decided to give (as flips are so wont to do) the snack a nickname:

FLIPS EAT CHINKS FOR BREAKFAST!!!
taken alone, the text above would seem to suggest that all the food we ate still had all of its organs and appendages intact (where they had properly formed). that would be all the westernized meals (i <3 filipino spaghetti) that we ate at home and in the mega malls. all the fast food chains you'd recognize in the states are in the philippines, but they often have a filipino twist. the 7-11s in the philippines have a sio-down (cha siu bao) and the food packaging tends to be more colorful.

filipino mcdonald's (mcdo) has the usual american menu, but non american-sized. for example, you can actually order a small drink and a small fries in the philippines. the american fatass sized meals, such as the double quarter pounder with cheese and even "super-sizing" is not available in the philippines. those are regional meals unique to the states. unique to the phillippines are the taro pie and the McRice burger. i've got to say, i like the international mcdonald's pies (as recommended by angela) better than the american ones. abroad, they're fried, which makes them crispier. i liked the taro pie, but not McRice burger not so much. basically the bun was just made of rice. maybe if they used banana sauce instead of ketchup...

one thing that surprised me about filipinos in the philippines was how often they ate. there were two breakfasts, lunch, merienda, dinner, and some more snacks during the day. i suppose i had a different idea growing up. my mom used to tell us stories of how often times when they were young, they'd only have a bowl of rice to eat for a day. now that i think about it, there's been days when i've only had a bowl of rice to eat. but that's usually with banana sauce. oh and i suppose that's just because i'm lazy.

fruit at a filipino market

the food i'll miss the most though will definitely have to be the fruits (and fruit products). the bananas, the pineapple, the chico, the list goes on and on. there are these dwarf bananas that are really sweet. but the mother of them all has got to be the filipino mango. i've tried buying mangos in the states, but they're never near the quality of the ones that come from the philippines. my mom said that often, the mangos labeled "manila mangos" are actually from mexico. the mangos in the motherland are super sweet, not fibrous, and are so soft, that the way we usually eat them is with a spoon. cutting up mangos into small slices means you have an inferior mango. we had all things mango in the philippines, including mango ice cream. i really wish i could have smuggled some back. Posted in: commented on , food , philippines

*

snuggles (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

being friends with someone for almost a decade lets you accumulate some pretty stupid stories about that person. over dinner, kaori reminded me about a couple of them:

sophmore year, sick of our housing, ramesh, kaori, and i decided that we would move out of our dorms the next semester. the idea was that we would move into an apartment. very little else was decided, but a standing prerequisite was that we have a pool table in the living room. and that we would get a puppy, which would be named snuggles. it was also decided that snuggles would live under the pool table.
we once walked to central park from NYU in the middle of the night. it started out as a routine trip to the grocery store, when apparently i decided that the first person to turn around was a girl and that it was only acceptable to stop when we saw water. we had to turn north from east when we were in alphabet city and kagin got spit on by some random people sitting on their stoop. we somehow ended up watching the sun rise on a boulder in central park while singing random songs.
freshmen year, we watched the exorcist on my computer. kaori was deathly afraid of the tubular bells, so we rigged her computer to play the mp3 on startup as well as every other computer in her room.
another time (also in the middle of the night), we walked from the world trade center to columbia in search of broadway shakes. in the roundabout way that we walked (~10 miles), we somehow arrived there at 4 in the morning, at which point tom's restaurant was closed.
on that trip, we decided to try out this whole smoking thing. we went into a deli and bought a pack of cigarettes, feeling quite rebellious. we spent quite some time outside the deli admiring ourselves with our lit cigarettes, posing in different ways. when finally, i decided to take the first puff, i somehow put the lit end into my mouth. i spent the next five minutes spitting burning ashes out of my mouth.

Posted in: commented on

*

best-blogger-release-evar (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

i suppose blogger gamma is one level of maturity after blogger beta. the new blogger engine is mighty attractive. it took me a little while to port my template over to the new scheme and now i get all these handy new features for free! a list of features that i had manually implemented that now comes for free:

search feature on the top blogger bar now works. try searching for yourself! my old google search embedded in my navigation bar was broken.
labels! no more stupid half ass del.ico.us or manual listing of labels.
a handy dandy dynamic archive list.
drag and drop templates. i already had most of the things i liked in my navbar, but for newer users, this would be handy for setting up a new blog.
random picture script now being done by flickr.
instead of sending automatic updates through bloglet, i now use live bookmarks in firefox, or bloglines/google reader for daily blog reading.

overall i'm pretty happy with blogger. integrated with flickr, i can't really think of any other features i'd like from a blog. it's pretty handy for n00bs that don't want to mess around too much with design stuff too.

oh in addition to manually updating 457 labels on my blog, i also updated all the sets and tags on my flickr.

Posted in: blog , commented on

*

WHO'S YOUR DADDY (eccentric squares (Kuya)) by noel

i've noted previously how i discover new relatives every few months. this is to be expected, as i have a significant number of aunts and uncles, who have spawned a ridiculous number of first cousins and second cousins. since visiting the philippines, i've met for the first time

first cousins
second cousins
aunts
uncles
great aunts
great uncles

so nothing out of the ordinary. but on these trips, never before had i met...MY OWN DAUGHTER?!?!

luckily, she looks nothing like me

anastasia has my eyes. and my chin. and my nose. actually she's got my entire face in a 7" x 11" picture frame (for $29.99 + shipping and handling, you could too). to top it off, she has a badass laugh. what more could a father want? don't worry loren, i'll learn you some great parenting skillz.

now some of you may be wondering where babies come from. well here is the answer to that question, but seriously, this isn't the time or the place. the relevant question is:

how is anastasia my daughter?

many flips temporarily leave their families while they go abroad on contract jobs in other countries. this is done to provide monetary support for their families back in the motherland. noel is one of those flips.

as it turns out, i have a kuya noel. as we've seen, while flips are very creative with their nomenclature, after the first 100 kids, you just start running out of names. anyway, he has a couple daughters: laika and anastasia. when we visited, anastasia didn't like calling me 'kuya noel'. she knew her dad's name was noel, and the title didn't fit in her mind. so she decided to call me 'papa noel' instead. since her parents weren't with her, she effectively her adopted me as her father.

now i can tell that you are asking yourself:

through what miracle of God has an undeserving child been conferred the honor of holding this singular vision of beauty, this beacon of light, this quintessence of aesthetic perfection, in a 7x11 glass frame?

every holiday season, my mother will choose new and exciting ways of torturing her children and nephews/nieces. this time around, my mom decided to take some of my college graduation pictures and distribute them to my little cousins. actually, she asked me to sign them first. so now, in the philippines, there is a generation of children running around with my picture, idolizing it.

seriously mom, i can barely take care of all my fans here in the united states.

for some reason, i get along well with kids. it could be due to any number of reasons. maybe it's because i think like a kid. or i buy them ice cream. or maybe it's because i'm like a foot taller than most filipinos. this enables the kids to swing from my arms and jump on my shoulders. i'm basically a walking jungle gym. or maybe because of my exaggerated height, i'm like barney the dinosaur without the purple skin color. but maybe if i start drinking...

3 days ago, i hear word from the motherland. my mom sends me an e-mail:

Your Tita Marilou just called. She called Tita Lilia last night …. Little Anastacia is sad …. Kissing your picture. She asked, “where is my Papa Noel”, “why did he leave me?” “Where does he live?”

a father for only 10 days and now i'm already a deadbeat dad! i do feel bad for her though. i mean, if i left me, i don't know what i would do.

Posted in: actually worth reading , commented on , on noel , philippines , pictures , video

*