Guess and Check

I shot the moon today. Tiger Woods wasn’t happy.

Photos from my trip to Dallas and Monday’s Yankees/Rangers game are in an album. It was a great trip.

Today we’ve got some chocolate cupcakes made with Cupcake Project’s recipe for the cake and just a general confectioners’ sugar/butter/vanilla extract/salt/milk combination for the vanilla icing.

Amblyopia (aka lazy eye) came up as a topic of conversation yesterday, and I was able to input that the eye-patch treatment of amblyopia is one of the most rewarding in medicine. This is because without medication or surgery or hospitalization a child can be given eyesight in an eye which otherwise might have no sight.

Where did I learn this? From this Peanuts comic:

Thank you Charles Schulz, Linus van Pelt, and Sally Brown.

My quick trip to Kansas City went well, select pictures are in an album.

Here is today’s Chocolate Layer Cake, made via Gale Gand’s recipe.

Hey, you know that AT&T commercial where the two partners are trying to sell beer? The one guy that came up with the beer and seems to be in charge of infostructure and planning keeps receiving phone calls from the guy that’s out on the road pitching the beer to bar owners and getting them to agree to stock and order his beer. During all this, the voiceover guy (Stanley Tucci) is telling you how great the blah blah and blah blah is, and then he mentions AT&T’s marketing slogan:

“More bars in more places”

Yeah, I just got that it’s also a play on words for the situation the two guys are in, since AT&T is helping them get their beer into more bars in more places.

Census Tract 143 in New York County, New York has a population of eighteen people.

That’s Central Park!

Too bad the Met doesn’t have its own census tract.

Via the U.S. Census Bureau.

I got started on Firefly and Serenity and I’m through with both; now on to all the commentaries and comic books.

Here is today’s glazed chocolate-pumpkin bundt cake, via this recipe.

I made this one for Andrew’s first birthday.

It’s the old man with the wooden sword from The Legend of Zelda. I wrote on the back, “Andrew, It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this. –Uncle Tom”

I can check “wear an Elmo costume and take pictures with kids and families at a Halloween event at the zoo” off my list.

I made this one for Ben’s birthday.

He’s the Ninja from Final Fantasy.

I finally found the receipt that I scribbled these on the back of:

• Total distance driven: 1213 miles
• Total time driven: 18 hours 8 minutes
• (giving us an average speed of about 66.89 miles/hour)
• Average fuel economy: 31.0 miles/gallon
• (giving us about 39.13 gallons consumed)
• Total times Dr. Horrible soundtrack listened to: At least six

Replacing an egg with milk will promote spreading, resulting in a thinner cookie.

See The Thin recipe via season three episode six (”Three Chips For Sister Marsha”) of Good Eats (video) (transcript) for details.

103-year-old Ed Rondthaler gives his ol’ English spelling reform lesson over at House Industries. It’s an interesting video to watch, just because he’s so animated about it.

It’s also available for download: ronthalerv4-type-desktop.m4v (18.6 MB)

Via Boing Boing.

On my way home Saturday evening on the 1 train, there was an old man sitting on the right side of the car sketching a man sitting across from him. This isn’t the first time I’d seen someone doing this, and while we watched him, my friend Kenny commented that he’d seen it before too. I also noticed that the entire half of the car in view of the man was watching him sketch, almost like a tennis match, looking at his sketch, looking at the man, back and forth, back and forth. For a while I debated whether or not the drawee was aware of the drawer, but later on it became apparent he was. The drawee eventually arrived at his stop and hurried off, quickly pausing to let the man rip off the drawing and hand it to him.

At this point, due to people exiting the train and seat shuffling, the seat three to the left of the man was vacant and I took it, so now it was left to right: woman, me, Aimée (another friend), vacant seat, and then the drawing man. I was talking to (still-standing) Kenny, trying not to draw obvious attention to myself, but also knowing it would be cool to be chosen as a subject of the man’s next drawing. I soon became aware that I was in fact chosen and tried to act normal, failing only every so often as the man would catch me glancing at him and both of us would grin sheepishly.

Eventually, the man finished and handed me the very nice drawing. I was prepared and gave him ten bucks in return. He then gave me a blank sheet of paper to cover it so it didn’t get messed up on the rest of the way home. He then drew Aimée before she got off. Then he packed up his things and got off at Houston St.

I’ve included appropriate photos below, including a reference photo I took when I got home so you’d know what he was trying to capture in the sketch. And there’s nothing I could have done about it, but I’m a little bit angry that I got my hair cut that very morning, otherwise we’d be looking at a bit cooler and poofier sketch.

I recently finished my latest cross-stitch project. It was a gift for my old boss Patrick (you may remember him having a sense of humor) regarding a joke a comedian once made regarding what we did (work in a university housing office).

I made the pattern myself using KXStitch. It’s inspired by patterns from Julie Jackson’s amazing Subversive Cross Stitch. The font is Jason Kottke’s always useful Silkscreen.

See? I’m cool.

I made some cookies yesterday using the Original Nestlé Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe (without the nuts) and with the slight modification of refrigerating the dough for forty-eight hours before baking per the recent New York Times article that suggested as much.

They were very well received.