It's a "Can I eat this?" Double header!

One of the... um, advantages of being away from home for two weeks is that there's all sorts of molding, fermenting food in the house!

Add to the pot-pourri a lack of actual edible food, general unenthusiasm for leaving home, and a lack of funds for buying actual non-moldy food if we were to leave home, and the result are several new entries for the latest blog-wave: "Can I eat this?"

Today we have a double header, as Briana respectfully pulled from the back of the fridge a jar of plums that I semi-processed back in September.

("Semi-processing" is going through the hassle of pitting and boiling fruit without adding sugar to make jam and/or alcohol, or doing anything else with the concoction other than let it sit in the fridge).

From a distance, it could be art.

Maybe that's an idea: instead of blogging, I should go down to the farmer's market and peddle my wares as inedible food-art, like gourds and sour plums.

I especially like the texture! If it hadn't been sitting my fridge for three months, I'd mistake it for a fancy variation of French mousse.

ANYway, upon further inspection, it's not so enticing.

Funny, that mold wasn't there before I left for Hawaii.

(Mold is kinda cool, especially if you're a small child and still learning about things in the world and what's safe to eat and what's not. What's wrong with that sentence vis-a-vis the theme of the blog?)

Wanna see something really cool? Of course you do! The inner mold -which is only on the top of the plum stuff, meaning if I take it off it's safe to eat, right?- has shaped itself to the top of the jar.

It's kinda cool if you look at it closely. Here, I'll add another photo:

It's at this point when I realize that I'm still recovering from the slight buzz that resulted in the previous installation of CIET.  And if there's one thing I remember from chemistry class, it's something about... like... um... not mixing experiments.

I should hold off on experimenting with the plum stuff after I'm absolutely 100% recovered from the pineapple stuff.

I'll just sneak this jar back into the fridge. Don't tell my girlfriend.

Can I eat this? 2013 edition

In this week's addition of "can I eat this?", we look at more than slightly fermented pineapple brought over from Hawaii.

I don't know what's more embarrassing, that I'm wondering if we should eat it, or that we let fresh pineapple go uneaten and ferment, bringing it all the way back from Hawaii.

But we just got back from Hawaii so there's not much food in the house, and I'm pretty hungry.

(I think that's the jist of the blog: I'm poor and hungry, and will probably be only poorer and hungrier in the future, so I should test the limits of edibility now while I... still... have my health?)

ANYway, the pineapple has a high BAC, something akin to old-fashioned American macro-brew.
So after eating about half a container (roughly half a whole diced pineapple), I started feeling queasy.

Was it the intoxicants, or deadly bacteria? That question is precisely why I don't do shrooms.

So I stopped eating, cause I feel like I just gulped down a couple cans of Budweiser at one in the afternoon on an empty stomach.

Luckily, googling "deadly pineapple bacteria" yielded no relevant results.

VERDICT: SAFE, BEST AT PARTIES.

Movie Review: Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Put seven aging Brits in India on screen and what do you get? Utterly predictable down to Judi Dench's milk in her tea. Still, it'll probably win Best Picture. I can't wait until Dev Patel gets to play something other than an "Indian" character, being he'd never been to India before filming Slumdog Millionaire.

Dear Diary

Today was a good day.

Lonely, lonely rat trap

We walked out to a rocky point at the end of the road. They had made a fence that stretched from the sea at one side of the point, across the point and into the sea on the other side of the point. The fence was high and solid and had a double gated entry on it, I guess to keep out rats, mongoose (mongeese?) and dogs. I don't know how well it worked cause there were rat traps all over the point.

The point was made a sanctuary for birds and monk seals and that's why the big fence -rats, mongoose (or mongeese?) and dogs eat birds and their eggs. So we walked around and saw some albatrosses, which we concluded the plural form should be "albatri", but is actually "albado". (Let me know if you get that joke).

We also saw Monk seals, but I wish the people who maintained the sanctuary did a better job of saying how far you should be from the Monk seals -of which there are only 1,200 left in the world. I didn't see any signage saying "stay at least 150 feet away" until I had already been within 20 feet of them, and that was only cause there was a kid near me who was 15 feet away from them. I hope my actions today don't contribute to the further decline of the Monk seal.

I swear there's a Monk seal in this picture.

We also saw some whales, but there were little more than tiny puffs of mist on the horizon, sometimes followed by a dark hump-like object breaking the surface. Tiny whales breached, though I didn't see the breaching part, only the post-breaching splash. If I had taken a photo, it would've just looked like a photo of the sea.

Then we went swimming and watched the sunset and stuff like that.

Some locals shared with us their homemade pickled mango.
It was good.
They were friendly and played Hawaiian pop music very loudly. I like Hawaiian pop music and am really touched at how prolific it is. I haven't heard a mainland top-40 (or bottom 40 for that matter) song since we arrives.

Watching the sunset.

I also took lots of photos of my feet. I think I'll start another blog of photos of my fingershoes. Maybe they'll pay me for it.

My feet.

Thanks diary, I hope you had a nice day too.

No trip to Hawaii is complete...

...without a visit to the world's busiest Costco on the day before the day before Christmas!

Batman Flawed

The Dark Knight Rises inspires some haikus

Girl dies. Eight years ago.
Emotional basket case.
Some superhero.

Mr. Gotham City.
Doesn't realize he's right
below own building.

Eight year hiatus.
Maybe you should train before
Fighting real bad guy?.

Main laws of physics
Modelesque kungfu killer
With no muscle tone

To Gotham City
from rural Turkish prison
Two scenes? Penniless?

Revenge slain father.
Nuking twelve million, though he
was kind of a jerk.

Heartless, mouthless thug
killing all these people cause
he's really in love?

flat screen monitors, or flesh eating zombies in disguise?

Hi Umbra,

Question for you: what's up with flat-screen TVs popping up all over the place? I'm not talking about home entertainment, but they seem to be popping up everywhere. Coffee shops were understandable (but still annoying), but I was at a small non-profit recently and they had a monitor used as a digital bulletin board. Also, the extremely cash-strapped public university from where I recently graduated had them all over the place as electronic billboards.

My questions:
-What's wrong with good old fashioned billboards? Don't tell me a box filled with cheap plastic and chemicals emitting whatever flatscreen emit and constantly sucking electricity is 'better for the environment' cause it's using less paper!

-And since I mentioned it, what's in these monitors? I can only image their components, not to mention the factories in China where they're made so cheaply (though I did hear about the growing assembly industry in Mexico).

-And energy suck? What's the electrical usage?

Can you figure out how places -especially non-profits and universities- can economically justify buying one (or more) of these, plugging it in and running it 24/7?

(If you want specifics, I went to the University of Washington, which I'm sure you know is desperate for money. Two years ago Governor Gregoire and president of UW announced draconian cuts, and it made me wonder what 'comforts' UW forego, like the dozen TVs that fill the cafeteria blaring garbage. I know it's a drop in the bucket, but I'm wondering what the true financial costs and carbon footprint of these things are.)

I know I sound like a grumpy curmudgeon, I know it veers on petty, I know I personally hate TVs and monitors and think they're distracting at the very least, but I do think it's a rising trend in consumerism, something that harks back to the main message of 'Story of Stuff'.

What do you think?

Thanks!

I.C.