I was watching the local news this morning, and they had a news ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It looked pretty cool except that they didn’t capitalize any proper nouns. Just the first letter of the sentence was capitalized. I think this is going too far. I’m not usually a stickler for proper grammar, but we’re taught in elementary school to capitalize certain words. It just looked wrong to see “thursday”, “february”, “barack obama”,"america", and “texas” displayed like that. It didn’t look cool, but more like they wanted to be cool. Lame.

This is mind-blowing. An ant city is excavated.

One of the things I like about my G1 phone is that it makes a great alarm clock. I have such a difficult time setting the alarms on regular digital alarm clocks. There have been several times when the alarm on these clocks would go off and I can’t figure out how to silence them so I just unplug the whole thing. My GE clock is particularly awful. I swear I want to smash that thing with a sledgehammer!

But back to my G1, which is kept next to my bed every night. I set the alarm (excellent UI, btw) to go off each weekday morning at 5:50am. But the really cool thing is that you can choose among many ringtones and alarm sounds, or even your own songs that are loaded on the SD card. I have found the perfect wake-up alarm for me, and that is the Animal Crossing tune that comes on at 5pm during the games. It’s totally soothing and eases me out of my dream-state and immediately puts me in a good mood. In fact, there are a lot of great Animal Crossing tunes that would work perfectly for this, like the main title theme. Just do a search for Animal Crossing midi files and you will find them. And speaking of Animal Crossing, if you have the Wii version and want to trade friend codes, send me a message!

Last weekend Mariko and I took a cooking class at Central Market. She has been to a few before, but this was my first one, and it was great! I love oysters, so Mariko signed us up for “The World’s Your Oyster” with Chef Scot Loranc. The class was a hands-on type, as opposed to the others where you just sit and watch (and then eat), and therefore the class size was limited to 16 students. We were separated into four groups and each group had a chance to learn how to shuck oysters. When our group’s turn came, we were pleasantly surprised to find out that our oysters were the Kumamoto variety. They were smaller and actually easier to open than the larger types such as the gulf oysters. One of the other students and I actually sneaked a couple while the chef wasn’t looking. It was just too tempting!

Chef Scot Loranc is a great teacher and everyone enjoyed his style and depth of knowledge. He was funny and nice, and generous with the food too! We had so much to eat, everyone was stuffed! During his shucking instructions, he was handing out oysters on the half-shell with a variety of different sauces. They were all really good, but I actually preferred to have the raw oysters without any sauce. Besides the oysters on a half shell, Chef Loranc showed us how to cook four oyster dishes, including Oysters Rockefeller, which were amazing!! Definitely my favorite of the four. The others were oyster po’boys, deep fried oysters with corn and tomato relish, and smoked oysters with jalapeno cream sauce. It’s funny, but when the oysters went on the smoker, the smell reminded me of a memory that was buried for years. When I was maybe nine years old, my family went camping up the coast of California for a couple weeks. At Drake’s Bay, my dad bought a bunch of oysters and grilled them on the campfire. That smell of oysters cooking at the campsite was the same as the oysters on the smoking rack at class. Back then, I didn’t like oysters, but now I love them. Funny how the sense of smell can evoke memories from long ago.

Anyways, all the different oysters tasted great, and we also got to enjoy some Turbo Dog beer and wine. My favorite oysters were the Kumamoto and also the Blue Point varieties. I definitely recommend the cooking classes at Central Market, and especially Chef Scot Loranc’s classes.

This year we celebrated Chinese New Years at the Hsiang Yun Buddhist Temple. Koa performed with his Kung Fu class, and there was an amazing Lion Dance. In the evening we ate a great vegetarian Chinese dinner, then went to the Lantern Dharma service. It was a long day, but lots of fun!

This looks so good! Trace Memory for the DS is one of the only games I ever finished (it was short), and I loved it. The music and overall feel of the Wii version looks perfectly aligned with the DS version. I am really looking forward to the Wii sequel!

While at the excellent local library, I stumbled across The Pink Panther on DVD and picked it up thinking it would be a great movie to watch with the family. I have fond childhood memories of watching the bumbling Inspector Clouseau as he “solved” the mysteries on the big screen. So with this in mind, we popped in the original 1963 film and started watching. About 20 minutes into the story, I looked at my family and said, “Sorry, I thought this would have been a fun movie to watch, but I guess this one was not the same as I remembered.” So, I promised to look for a better Pink Panther movie, and we all went up to bed.

This original of the series is a great movie, but just not in the same vein as what you’d generally think of as a Pink Panther movie. There’s lots of romantic and witty dialog, smoking, drinking, and hanky-panky. But not so much slapstick physical comedy that the kids would enjoy. The early 60’s fashions are really cool, though, especially the skiing outfits. The Pink Panther movies that I think would be better for kids are The Return of the Pink Panther and The Pink Panther Strikes Again. I remember seeing the latter film in the theater and it was so much fun. There are a lot of really cheesy and silly jokes which are sure to please the kiddos. But the first film, and 1964’s A Shot in the Dark, are probably best enjoyed by adults.

I find this so funny. From the original site: “Witness a young man’s epic journey of trying to walk 100 feet.” Thanks, Tony, for sending me this.