| Wolverine, POETAYTOES, and the Voynich Manuscript |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|11:52 am]
jaybee_bug
|
| [ | Tags | | | cooking | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  anxious | ] |
Saw the Wolverine movie yesterday. I thought it was very good. I'm not a comic-book person, and I don't usually find movies based off comic books to be particularly compelling, but for some odd reason I've always really liked the X-Men movies. They're just . . . cool. :oD
I think the best part of the whole thing, though, was the people sitting a few rows in front of us. It was a matinee, so there was only a few people there besides us -- mainly what looked to be a mother and daughter, the mother ~60 years old or so, with fluffy, snow-white hair, that, I swear I am not making this up, was brushed and shaped to look rather suspiciously a lot like Wolverine's hair in previous movies.
It was freakin' hilarious. (They were clearly fans, and even clapped when the credits rolled.) You go, lady. XD
They were way more into it than the person sitting behind us, who entered the theatre 25 minutes into the movie, kept yawning very audibly and, at one point, snored a little. But, y'know, maybe they were just ducking into the theatre for a nap. :oP
I also lately have dared to attempt some actual cooking. Normally the extent of my culinary abilities are along the lines of "boil water for Ramen meal" or "scramble an egg." (If I get particularly crazy I might even cut those pre-marked Pilsbury cookie dough stick things and put those in the oven . . .) But I have been trying to learn about my 'roots', which includes Celtic ancestry, including Irish . . . so I tried to make a traditional Irish dish, leek and potato soup. This required first determining exactly what the f*** a leek is so that I might acquire this strange thing from the store that sells food. Yes.
Seriously, though, it actually turned out very nicely, a pleasant surprise. (It did require a lot of Googling on how to wash and prepare these weird leek-things, and what part you actually, y'know, ate.) Despite involving a whole lot of peeling and chopping and cutting, I didn't lose any fingers or any blood (ok, I knicked myself once), nor did I scald myself on boiling-hot soup (. . . much). Also, the soup tasted good. And we didn't eat at 10:00 at night because I was actually able to finish in a reasonable (if somewhat late) amount of time.
Yaaay.
Next up, maybe I'll try butterscotch, for some traditional Scottish cuisine. I . . . don't think I'm quite ready for haggis. Urf.
A webcomic from xkcd has called to my attention the existence of a curious thing called the Voynich manuscript. This is a mysterious and old illustrated text that experts still cannot read and have no idea what it says. I downloaded the .pdf of the book this morning (God bless the Internet) to look at the originals. My favorite part of the book, I think, is this picture, in the 'astronomical' section. The diagram on the left, specifically, is what captivates me so much. There's various circular pictures with stars and suns and moons and text in them, but this particular picture has the uncanny resemblance to a spiral galaxy. It looks like most folks are saying this book is ~15th century, before telescopes were in use, so . . . yeah! That's pretty weird.
There's also a real big fold-out portion containing nine circular diagrams that are connected, that's actually perhaps the coolest part of the book. When I was staring at the middle of the thing (at 400% magnification for the .pdf file), I swear, some of the other circles started to move slightly in an optical illusion, akin to something like the rotating snake illusion. It was very slight, though. Still, enough to make me wonder if, the original book, held at the proper distance, would invoke a motion optical illusion in the circle-diagrams, and if it was intentionally drawn to do so. Or maybe I'm just crazy. At any rate, you folks can see for yourself if you want, Wiki links to a site where you can download the .pdf file. |
|
|
happy
groggy