daybee’s posterous

made some very hard life decisions this weekend. very hard - the kind you can only make rationally by stripping away emotions as a factor... maybe i'm having a bit of buyer's remorse, but i'm wondering... should emotions be stripped from decision making?... i think i still made the right decision.

watched 7 lbs: low expections, great movie.

watched rachel getting married: higher expectations, horrible movie.

picnic and easter sunday at the hollywood bowl was great. perfect weather made service outside a great experience.

oh, also, stephen and i booked a trip to australia for the summer! if you've been there, leave some suggestions on what to do... though, i don't think i know anyone who's been, haha. oh wells.

post i enjoyed so much it deserves a link: good dose of truth for monday morning

i defragged my laptop yesterday for the first time in 3 years. i am now infinitely more productive. who would've thunk!

oops... can't believe i let a week slip between posts. apologies to all my readers *ahem* paulie bleeker.

so anyway, according to gladwell, humans can store digits in a memory loop that last only about two seconds. in chinese languages, numbers are shorter, allowing chinese to both speak and remember that string of numbers in two seconds -- a fraction of the time it takes to remember those numbers in english.

my addition to that theory is that those who count in chinese can also remember numbers better because the chinese languages are also tonal languages. it turns a plain list of numbers into a ditty. think back to how they had use memorize the ABC's... or school house rock... conjunction junction, what's your function? haha. so much easier to remember words AND numbers when they're put to a tune.

from outliers, by malcolm gladwell.

8, 4, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6.

take 20 seconds to try and memorize those numbers. according to gladwell, this task is incredibly easy for chinese speakers while only 50% of english speakers can do it. i believe it... it's much easier for me to remember numbers in chinese than in english, but why? he gives a pretty interesting answer, which i'll reveal tomorrow, but why do you think that is the case? i have a theory of my own to add to his as well.

In Tecate, on the morning of Saturday, March 28, 2009 with 40 friends from Bel-Air Presbyterian.

http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/swf/mvp.swf?8%3A152716%3A1&v=65276131454&ev=0

34 mini cupcakes and all-you-can-drink milk and coffee for $40 at the cupcake challenge

once again, i wanted to avoid this AIG article, i saw on nytimes, but andrew wanted to "engage in a discussion" so i ended up reading it anyway. it's a resignation letter from one of their execs and it's actually quite a good read, but suspend judgment until reading some of the editor-selected comments from readers.

i'd say this man has a strong capacity to live and endure

excellent find from stephen, provider of many ridiculous you tube-esque video marathons, haha.

inspired by iheng's tokyo adventure pictures on facebook, stephen, abe, and i decided to play a little sushi roulette at asakuma in brentwood. wow! it takes sushi-eating to a whole other level. for those who are new to the concept, the sushi chef places an inordinate amount of wasabi under some of the sushi we ordered, the rest are made regular. in rounds, each person chooses a piece and hopes for the best.

so we did a few rounds with 3x the regular amount as the bullets, then decided to take it up a notch and finish off with one round that was 5x the regular amount. i ended up having to "bite the bullet" and whoo... it was painful even for someone like me who loves wasabi (see v-day post, haha). the manager, who we originally thought was unfriendly, was so impressed that she said she had a "gift" for me... green tea ice cream on the house! haha, except it was actually a pretty realistic looking ball of wasabi! haha. i thought it looked suspicious though and she was good enough to stop us before we actually dug into it.

i like it because it really forces you taste your food as you're trying to figure out whether or not you got the piece with killer wasabi. it also made for a pretty amusing meal and helped us make friends with the manager, sunny (i think that's her name? feel bad because they tried really hard to remember our names), and the sushi chef, kohei. his english was a little harder to understand, but he had a good sense of humor too and great knowledge of baseball, which makes up for everything, haha.

so, in conclusion. game rating: A++.

pic 1: the tears in my eyes from the 5x bullet

pic 2: green tea vs. wasabi. can you tell the diff?

   

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sushi_roulette.zip (2408 KB)