Fabulous tea find

While on the train I was introduced to a new brand/variety of tea that rocks on several levels.  They are Northern Delight Teas, fine Inuit herbal teas.  This rocks a) as they are great tasty teas, b) as they are herbal teas for when you want an herbal tea, c) as they are Inuit artisanal teas, d) it is supporting the Nunavik region and e) the website can be seen in Inuktitut.  I found a package in a store in Quebec City and grabbed myself a smattering of their varieties.  Goooood stuff.   Now to drink the mug of it I have in front of me…

Amusing and Interesting

I had an interesting learning experience today.  I went to work to do some architecting (ooooooo…) and oddly my car wouldn’t lock using the remote.  So I locked via key and thought little of it, figuring the battery in the remote was dead.  Turns out not so much… for the car itself wouldn’t start when I returned.  All the lights would come on, but the engine wouldn’t even pretend to turn over.  As I awaited my housemate to pick me up I checked the fuses and lo and behold a fuse was burned out.  What I therefore learned was that the fuse that regulates the key beeper alarm thingee also controls/interrupts the whole ignition.

Thankfully a new fuse bought and installed and I was off.

The whole of the Robotech series is now available for viewing in its entirety, legally and for free on Hulu and Youtube.  Woo!  Alas it seems to be some version that was remastered or something, and as part of that they chose to dub in new sound effects, such that now there are a whack tonne of sound effects for every.single.little.thing, often loudly (plus they removed some of what I considered ‘classic’ sound effects).  I’m not thrilled with the result of that dubbing, cool as it remains to have the episodes available as they are.

Picture if you will… Kannik, kitchen towel over his shoulder, pot rack overhead, pound iron wok on the gas stove, cutting away with fresh produce… yea, tonight was the night to initiate my long-unused wok on the gas stove.  It’s been ages since I made a stir fry, and the first I’ve made on a gas stove.  It went pretty swimmingly, I learned pretty quickly how much ingredient wise I can put in the wok before it cools down too much (our stove doesn’t get uber hot).  I’m hooked again though, I’ll definitively be woking more often once again.

Nifty dinner

I went to dinner tonight to a place that has kombucha on tap.  Now that’s pretty frikkin cool.

Roofs and more

It’s about architecture and food!

Now this is what I’m talking about, an example of a house typology I’ve been envisioning for a while. Simple, passive design for a place, not divorced from its milieu:

To paraphrase an article I read on it: “The steel shading and concrete foundation help keep the home’s temperature a comfortable 23~C, even with outside temperatures hitting in the 40s; the air conditioning unit required by county codes still hasn’t been turned on.”

This is more of what we need.

Food wise, I caught a lecture by Michael Pollan on “It’s your World” (on NPR), great little lecture with those again simple three rules he’s researched:

• Eat Food (and have them be whole foods)
• Not too much (the 80% full rule seems to work well)
• Mostly Plants (85%+ of daily intake)

He also says much other interesting stuff to sum up his research and writing.

That the “western diet” is proving disastrous to health is one of those things that seems to fall in the “We don’t want to believe what we know” category. His illumination of the focus on nutritionism is spot-on, and interesting how it has not only altered eating and allowed huge profits and marketing, but also provided a cover for not confronting our actual food choices and consumption and their impact.

Good stuff.

Here be cool stuff!

I’m not much of a car fan. If you’re wanting me to get excited about a SAAB, you’d best be talking about the JAS 39 Gripen multirole fighter (which is indeed VERY sexy) rather than something an two wheels. But the new Tesla Model S sedan has me very excited indeed. A totally EV vehicle with a 300 mile range? 45 min recharge time or a five minute battery swap? Seats five adults plus two children AND is a of a hatchback design for large loads? Two trunks? And hits 100kph in about 5.5 seconds? I’m SOLD. The looks are pretty great too… though the bullet point list above classifies the car, looks or no, as sexxxy. 2011, please come quickly.

On a different front, GT’s Kombucha has released 3 new flavours, labelled No 3, No 7 and No 9. And they are all great!   Just the Kombucha with hints of things like elderberry, red clover and orange peel.  No 3 is very tasty, and No 9 has an interesting twist of flavours that make it very fun. Plus, you know, it’s Kombucha which is just awesome.

I got to this Ronald Jenkees vid through a roundabout way and it is way fun. The song itself is pretty funky and cool, and what I really love is the fun this guy has, he’s just into the music and even cooler than that is his HANDS. Watch those things, he just uses whatever works, they move fast, switch shape, play with the keys and just go wild and wildly unconventional. Nice.

Lastly, here’s a vid of my kung fu brother Jaime being pwned repeatedly by Sifu Lam, from many many many years ago. Jaime put it together and showed it at Sifu’s 60th birthday party. Besides the beauty of it, Sifu’s smirk at 1:42 is just priceless.

Panoply

When I went down to SoCal a couple of weekends ago, our first evening there I found this fantastic restaurant, the Native Foods Café.  One look at their menu and I was excited.  When I got to the counter, the first words out of my mouth were, “What would it take to have you guys open a location in the Bay Area?”  They are, alas, heading to San Diego first, but their food was extra tasty.  And they have the BEST chai I have ever had, bar none.  Just the most perfect balance of tea, spices and sweetness.  My second question to them was “Could you please run a pipeline north full of your chai?”  It wasn’t as serious a question as my first… I ate their twice during my stay down south and it was great both times.  Highly recommended!

A friend linked me this article today and I really like what it espouses and what it scratches the surface of.  It really begins to look at what’s often missed, and what is actually the key, and that is the base assumptions and the base conditions in which everything is arising.  We all know the quote “Plus que ca change, plus que ca reste le meme,”  (The more things change, the more they stay the same) and, well, here’s an indication what’s up with that.  Alter the context, and suddenly what’s available and what can be done opens up, and new openings for action are suddenly available.

Shameless self-plug:  Aurora:  The Silhouette Magazine issue number 2.6 is now available!  Catch it here.

And to close this off… The American AKIRA.  A great parody and semi-biting illustration.  Bookies will enjoy this one (be sure to check out parts one and two, linked at the top of the article).

For those in temperate areas, are the days nice and crisp yet?  Mmmmm…

Shorter yet again?

First the CN Tower, now this! Toronto is losing all of its “tallest” monikers… (still, I can’t help but admire the tower that usurped the LEGO throne, that’s pretty amusing, and still x2, I’ll point out that this tower isn’t freestanding, so nieh!)

Forgot to mention in my last post that I took the seeds from the squash, roasted them up quick-like in the toaster oven and munched very happily on them, nice and tasty.

Patch 3.0.2 is out for WoW, got it all installed on Tuesday and logged in for the first time tonight… to find Ajathka falling underneath the world. Down, down, down until he hit the death plane. Hmm, odd. Found out later why. I ‘adopted’ a house in Ironforge for Ajathka and Khyborr (cousins, they share it). A great little place, near the bank, with great décor and accoutrements, very adventurer-esque. Whenever I’d log them off in Ironforge, that’s where they’d be, at home. Imagine my shock and surprise when I run Ajathka to his home only to find out… he’d been evicted for the new barbershop! Agaah!

That would explain the world falling, I guess. In altering the geometry there, the server/code gacked on his saved location and pushed him into the netherworld of falling. Now I need to look at the other houses in Ironforge for a new place to hang my… axes.

To wrap up this post, here is a bunneh!

The bounty continues…

Even as I roasted my way to tomato bliss this week I cooked up some more deliciousness.  It began with a sizable chunk of a huge butternut squash shared by a co-worker from her neighbour’s garden, followed up by some apples from a different co-worker’s friends’ orchard.  Add vegetable stock, some spiced cider, garlic, fresh ground pepper, a smattering of other spices, bay leaves and some gentle cooking.  After cooling, and a bit of blender action, one very nice soup was had.  Simple, but it’s got good depth and just the right amount of bite to it.  Mmmmmmmmm.

Fresh locavore organic provisions FTW!

to-MAY-toes!

It’s tomato time here, and friends and acquaintances have been generous in sharing their garden bounty with me.  Into the toaster oven, roast them up a bit ’till they split, and enjoy!

MMmmMMMmaarrhghghgharghghglrlrlllll… er, achem.  Very tasty!

Foodiness

Today, I am yoinking some links from WendyL’s blog for my own:

An excellent article by Michael Pollan with an overview of food as food, the history of food vs nutrients, and going beyond. Mentioned in the article the very well researched and written book The China Study that I highly reccomend as another amazing foray into the whole realm of food.

This article here, Human digestion of meat and milk: Neu5Ac, nicely follows up with new research that could supplement the above.

Speaking of food, I went out to lunch with WendyL today and had a very nice bowl of ramen from a japanese restaurant (most certainly not from one of those little packets!) that had a fantastic broth, similar to that in Tom Kha Gai, but lighter. Very nice!