Pigeons might be better with the Monty Hall problem. I first read the Monty Hall problem in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Here’s a summary of the problem from Amazon:

Imagine that you face three doors, behind one of which is a prize. You choose one but do not open it. The host–call him Monty Hall–opens a different door, always choosing one he knows to be empty. Left with two doors, will you do better by sticking with your first choice, or by switching to the other remaining door?

I understand the math behind it, but I still have a hard time believing it, because it’s so much easier to think that “switch or stay” is 50/50. It’s easier to visualize it with charts and to believe it after viewing simulations. The pigeons in the article essentially do the problem over and over and learn to switch every time:

Pigeons likely use empirical probability to solve the Monty Hall problem and appear to do so quite successfully.

“Different species often find very different solutions to the same problems,” Herbranson said. “We humans have ways of tackling probability-based problems that generally work pretty well for us, the Monty Hall dilemma being one notable exception. Pigeons apparently have a different approach, one that just happens to be better suited to the Monty Hall dilemma.”

Empirical probability is a slower, less elegant, brute-force method that can be tricked by the kind of random fluctuations seen in real data, Herbranson said, but it doesn’t employ any mental rules of thumb that can lead to traps such as the Monty Hall problem. In a similar way, the visual systems we depend on to quickly make sense of the world around us can lead to our susceptibility to visual illusions, he added.

Orlando Magic pre-game dunking. Eboy with some hangtime for a nice windmill (just ignore Rashard lifting him up), Carter with a nice two-handed 360, JJ getting up and double-pumping, and Gortat going between the legs (actually prety nice).

Actually, this Chicago Now post is a better look into the Handome Men’s Club skit: How Jimmy Kimmel pulled off “Handsome Men’s Club”.

It’s funny, several of them were a little uncomfortable, like, “Just so you know, I don’t think I’m this handsome guy.” Don’t worry. First of all, you are. And secondly, no one is going to think you’re a jerk in this piece. We’ve made Jimmy the ahole in this one, don’t worry about it.

New York Times Arts Beat: Secrets of the Handsome Men’s Club.

Ms. McNearney said the skit, directed by Andy Fisher, was shot over seven or eight days, during which club members were mostly filmed one at a time. (Three handsome men had to briefly put up with the glare from one another’s halos when Taye Diggs, John Krasinski and Tony Romo shot their scenes together.)

The skit itself is embedded in the NY Times post, but here’s a link to the YouTube page.

Eric Bischoff posted this on Facebook:

“For what it is..yes. Allegedly WWE found out about a Lloyds of London policy that Bret had in effect AFTER setting up this match, and as a result Lloyds of London has to approve of the physical structure of the match. Can’t confirm this, and perhaps WWE has “bought out” the problem, but if not..could be disappointing. Either way, I am looking forward to it and am happy for Bret. Going back to WWE in any capacity was the right thing for him to do at this stage of his life.”

There’s rumors about changing the match to a tag match. I’d like to see McMahon put Bret in a Sharpshooter then have Bret reverse it like he was supposed to do to Shawn Michaels years and years ago. Lloyds of London is the agency that paid Mr. Perfect millions of dollars to not wrestle.

BS Report: Bill Simmons and Adam Carolla break down Fast and Furious. This is from April 20, 2009. I enjoyed listening this specific podcast three or four times when it was first released and I hadn’t even watched Fast and Furious. Last weekend I watched Fast and Furious and the podcast and movie have a relationship where both become much much funnier together. Some topics discussed: Vin Diesel’s response to his sister’s worries regarding him showing up at her house that’s being staked out by the FBI, cigarette lighter timing, and the groundbreaking plot where the good guy needs to infiltrate the bad guy’s organization.

Biggie performing at the 1995 Source awards. P. Diddy opens the performance. I’ve been wanting to say something about him. A couple weeks ago I heard on the radio that P. Diddy said some things about being the first to do it big with the private jets and the clothing lines and that others should be thankful that he paved the way. True, but he should be more humble considering his career in its current form was launched because his best friend died. (Via Nah Right.)

Wired Reread. Theis Søndergaard scans pages from old Wired issues and provides some great commentry. Someone needs to do this with old video game magazines. In high school, I loved grabbing one of the old EGMs in the house and reading SNES reviews and PS1 previews. We threw them away one day, which made sense for getting rid of clutter, but I wish we kept at least a few. (Via Daring Fireball.)

The (Oscar-winning) Logorama guys are doing a Ghost Recon short. I look forward to it. (Via Kotaku.)

I was trying to watch Always Sunny in Philadelphia on Hulu last night and then a bunch of ripped dudes started asking if I wanted to see their d**k. The middle was bleeped out but I have a sneaking suspicious I know what it was. I hate Calvin Klein X ads and I hate whoever thought it’d be good to target Always Sunny viewers.

One of the best Saturdays I’ve had in a long time: great Seattle weather, a whole lot of my friends, football, steaks, and ice cream.

Roger Ebert gets his voice back. Here’s a description of what the company is doing, from that Esquire profile:

Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert’s TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won’t sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.

Technology at its best.

Olympic athletes to rally in Seattle on Thursday. Apolo Ohno won’t be there since he’s appearing on the Tonight Show. I fondly remember logging onto Battle.net in 2002 for a few leisurely games of Starcraft. It was the day after Ohno got his gold after the South Korean that finished ahead of him was disqualified. And the Battle.net channel was filled with a lot of “HATE USA” “DIE OHNO” messages and users spamming URLs pointing to images of Ohno falling in the other final and grabbing a South Korean to make sure he fell too.

I like Apolo Ohno, but has there ever been an athlete appearing happier and being celebrated by the media for bronze medals? On the other side there’s Michael Phelps, who I’m not fond of as a person, but a single bronze a couple years ago would have been a failure. Michelle Kwan, AKA me and Dan’s Olympic hero, is essentially Dan Marino on ice because of her bronze and silver medals. In Olympic finals, Apolo Ohno has been the first to cross the finish line only once. But I guess that goes with the laid back nature that people (including me) enjoy.

Filipino Food: Off the Menu. Filipino chefs working at upscale restaurants in the L.A. area give their takes on why Filipino food hasn’t gone mainstream at all. Los Angeles Times:

“It’s probably one of the least understood cuisines,” says Rodelio Aglibot, a Filipino chef who was the executive chef at Koi before opening the now-shuttered Yi Cuisine, perhaps the only upscale Filipino restaurant Los Angeles has had. “Are we Pacific Islanders? Are we Asians? There isn’t, like, a defined identity,” says Aglibot, who is now chef-partner of Sunda in Chicago.

I eat at restaurants typically to eat food that tastes better than I can get at home. It’d be kind of cool to have that option with Filipino food. Though I admit I don’t get cravings for Filipino dishes the way I get cravings for, say, teriyaki or tacos.

I started reading The Hunger Games today. First book in a trilogy. So far it’s good. I imagine it’s on the Teen Novels shelves, but and after finishing Green Mars I’m really really happy to have an easier read. I saw its sequel on some top 2009 ten fiction list in Time Magazine, and I was sold on the short blurb—post-apocalyptic, children, arena were key words. Here are a few lines straight from The Hunger Games that could act as an extended blurb:

Just as the town clock strikes two, the mayor steps up to the podium and begins to read. It’s the same story every year. He tells of the history of Panem, the country that rose up out of the ashes of a place that was once called North America. He lists the disasters, the droughts, the storms, the fires, the encroaching seas that swallowed up so much of the land, the brutal war for what little sustenance remained. The result was Panem, a shining Capitol ringed by thirteen districts, which brought peace and prosperity to its citizens. Then came the Dark Days, the uprising of the districts against the Capitol. Twelve were defeated, the thirteenth obliterated. The Treaty of Treason gave us the new laws to guarantee peace and,as our yearly reminder that the Dark Days must never be repeated, it gave us the Hunger Games.

The rules of the Hunger Games are simple. In punishment for the uprising, each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks,the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins.

IGN: 5 Ways to Improve Modern Warfare 2’s Multiplayer. Of the five complaints, the map frequency resonates with me the most. I’ve grown to hate a lot of maps. There needs to be a preference system or a way to search for a certain map. It might lead to a situation similar to Counter-Strike servers that were dedicated to Dust or Dust 2, but guess what, Terminal’s fun and I’d like to be able to play a public game on Terminal if I feel like it.

Quick notes on the other things. Team scoring experience can change but I couldn’t care less about experience points. Grenade launchers can get annoying but I’ve never felt it was to the point of unfairness. Bigotry, racism, and general anger don’t bother me. I don’t think most people actually believe the things they say—that’s just dumb people saying dumb things. If I’m wrong about that, we’ve got a lot of kids with true hate in their hearts. But again, I don’ think I’m wrong. It’s really easy to mute people anyway. And dropping out of a game without a dedicated server is expected once in a while. Drops that aren’t related to the host leaving can be annoying, but that seems to happen only about once a week.

I’d like to be able to create a public lobby with friends so that we could be on opposing teams. Yes, teamwork is fun. But yes, going against your friends is also fun. It’s one of the reasons I loved Counter-Strike and Starcraft. And if we have, say, 7 people in a group, I’d much rather separate into a group of 4 and a group of 3 and have strangers fill in the other 5 spots in a 12-player match instead of playing ground war.

(Thanks for the link Junior.)

Deadspin’s been running a weekly post called Dead Wrestler of the Week, remembering wrestlers that have died. Most to overdoses or heart failures or a combination of both. This week: Miss Elizabeth.

There began not just one love story for the ages but two: Savage and Liz’s, of course, but also the love between Elizabeth and the WWF audience, as every male between the ages of 5 and 75 fell head over heels for this woman — or, at least, for the idea of her. We had been talked into it.

Me included! Bill Simmons, in a podcast I think, mentioned something I could completely relate to: as a dumb kid he thought Miss Elizabeth was the pinnacle of elegance with Princess Di and Jackie Kennedy tied for second. We owned the Summer Slam ‘91 tape which had the Match Made in Heaven—the Randy Savage & Miss Elizabeth wedding—and of course the Match Made in Hell—Hulk Hogan & Ultimate Warrior vs. Sgt. Slaughter and some Iranians. Two things stick out from that tape: Hogan in a Camel Clutch and the recap before the wedding of Randy Savage proposing. “Eliza-bett. Eliza-bett.” Crowd cheers. “Will youuu marry ME?”

And she replies, “Oooooooooh yyyyeaaaaah!”

P.S. You’d think that clip would be on YouTube with a label containing some form of the word “proposal” but it’s not. I found it though: Randy Savage Pops the Question . And my memory served me correctly for once. There are two other things I love, the first is Bobby Hennan yelling “Get down on your knee!” then Gorilla Monsoon screaming “YES!”. The second thing I love is that Macho Man and Miss Elizabeth look genuinely nervous during her reply.

Piroshky Piroshky showed up on Serious Eats. A lot of my friends are big fans. As with most great food spots in Seattle, I’ve still never tried the place. But I’ve heard very, very good things.

New Zealand’s rugby team does the Haka before international matches. (Here’s the Haka of the All Blacks Wikipedia entry.)

When Munster hosted the All Blacks at Thomond Park in November 2008, the four New Zealand players in the Munster team performed their own haka prior to the All Blacks.

Watch the video of the Munster Haka. Listen to how loud the stadium is. Remember that Munster is hosting, then pay attention to the silence as the All Blacks step forward and do theirs. And after all that, just search for “All Blacks Haka” and watch a bunch of them—the best are when the other teams challenge them and stand their ground a few feet away from the chanting All Blacks while the crowd goes nuts.

Female wolf spider with babies on board. Exactly what the title says. Instant top fiver for things I don’t want to see in a shower.

I got Jon and Janice in this one! But I don’t have any of Gee, or the dozen other people there. Great times.

Speaking of Sesame Street guests, here’s Will Arnett on Sesame Street. Better if you imagine it as Gob on Sesame Street.

Roger Ebert blogged about his profile in Esquire. If you haven’t, make sure to read the Esquire profile. Cliches to describe it: heartbreaking and uplifting. But it’s interesting to read about Roger Ebert’s thoughts on the magazine article:

I knew going in that a lot of the article would be about my surgeries and their aftermath. Let’s face it. Esquire wouldn’t have assigned an article if I were still in good health. Their cover line was the hook: Roger Ebert’s Last Words. A good head. Whoever wrote that knew what they were doing. I was a little surprised at the detail the article went into about the nature and extent of my wounds and the realities of my appearance, but what the hell. It was true. I didn’t need polite fictions.

Now that I think about it, Roger Ebert is one of the first writers whose name I was familiar with as a kid, and of course it was from hearing the two thumbs up line so often. But as I got older, his movie reviews always held extra weight for me.

Oatmeal Brulee.

Then the magic happens—Bona sprinkles a layer of brown sugar on top and whips out the flame saber. The smell of the just-charred crackly top is just as satisfying as the tap-tap-tap ritual (performed with their compostable corn-based spoons, naturally). Then you dig down and get the perfectly-cooked grains.

I love oatmeal and I love creme brulee. I really really need to try this.

MarsEdit 2. Mac blogging application. I tried MarsEdit and a few other blogging applications around Christmas 2008 when I first got my MacBook (best present ever, can’t say that enough), and for whatever reason I decided WordPress’s improved interface was good enough or better. And when I say “for whatever reason”, I really have no idea what I was thinking, because posting in MarsEdit is a breeze. Composing long posts, putting up quick links, and just navigating old posts is a breeze. And there’s Flickr integration so photo posts take less than half the time they used to, but I admit my old workflow for those posts was pretty awful. I highly recommend MarsEdit.

Chris Brown and Elmo. Mostly just wanted to re-post this video because I just watched it again a couple weeks ago and it’s as good as it ever was. On a side note, it looks like Chris Brown might sign to Young Money. I was looking up Drake’s age the other day to see if he was younger than me (because I’m a groupie), and yeah he is. Kind of similar to new athletes you like end up younger than you. But I also looked up Chris Brown’s age and completely forgot that he’s not even 21 yet.

Answer: YES

Anthony Bourdain on Yo Gabba Gabba. Plenty of odd guests on this show. Oh yeah, he plays a doctor and not a chef in the segment.

Ant lifting 100 times its weight. Great picture. (Via Gizmodo.)

Justin Bieber ft. Ludacris “Baby”. So very very catchy. Plus the video has a Drake cameo at 1:14. Once they do a song together, that’s a guaranteed #1 on iTunes/Billboard/my-heart and a retired video on TRL ten years ago. (Thanks, Laura.)

Usher “Nice & Slow” video. Watched this earlier and thought I remembered it. All I remember was the camera angle and him dancing with a shirt that fluttered around. I don’t remember the following great things:

0:27 – Definitely didn’t remember this girl!
0:31 – Usher looking directly the camera and doing an eyebrow raise.
0:50 – Fabulous hip extensions.
1:36 – This outfit killed me.
1:46 – Usher’s girlfriend gets kidnapped by thugs. At this point I start to think I’ve never actually seen the video, because I don’t remember it being like one of the old R. Kelly videos with an action movie storyline.
2:18 – Usher walking down the hallway with an eyepatch. Not really sure why he has an eyepatch, because it seemed OK in the police station scene.
2:52 – Oops pow surprise! This is when I started thinking about writing about the video.
3:12 – This is when I knew it’d be worth writing about.
3:47 – CRT Monitors make a 1997 videos look like it’s from the 80s.

Previously:
2006 1
2006 2
2007 1
2007 2
2008 1
2008 2
2009 1
2009 2
2009 3

I read Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Ilium, and Olympos and decided I needed to read more Dan Simmons. So I bought The Terror a couple years ago. Instead of getting the next book in the Hyperion series set on a different planet in a different time like the four other books I enjoyed, I decided to pick up a novel set on Earth involving arctic travel in the 1800s. Pretty risky for a boring person!!!

About halfway through it I was thinking that a lot of the story seemed sort of real and then looked it up and found out that it’s based on a real expedition that was sort of a big deal in the 1800s. I didn’t want to spoil it for myself so I stopped reading things online about it. But after I finished I consumed a bunch of book reviews and then browsed some historical articles. Anyway, I stumbled upon a forum of apparently sophisticated people (think: the exact opposite of YouTube commenters) sharing actual coherent thoughts online. And none of them shared the experience of not knowing it was based on a true story. I’m basically that guy that was surprised by the ending of The Perfect Storm. Never going back to that message board.

But as I said, I bought the book a couple years ago and never read more than a paragraph of it until a couple of months ago if I remember correctly. My brother Dan said it was one of the best books he’s read and I remember him staying up pretty late to finish it months ago. And he’s right, it’s really really good. It’s only based on a true story, so like Steven Conrad taking The Pursuit of Happyness and making the slight change of Chris Gardner’s son from a toddler to a five-year-old, Dan Simmons took similar liberty and threw in a hyperintelligent monster polar bear.

And it all works. Eventually you realize the terror isn’t any one thing, it’s everything involved in the expedition that’s trying to kill the sailors: bears, cold, starvation, Eskimos, scurvy, etc. And the most interesting parts are the descriptions of day to day life. Dreary. And cold. For instance, don’t take your gloves off and touch your gun barrel or it’s goodbye skin and chunks of flesh.

My favorite thing about the four Dan Simmons novels I read previously was that he was able to create intricate worlds and tie timelines and different perspectives together. It really blew my mind that one person could think of it all and make anything cohesive out of it. This book has the multiple timelines and character perspectives. But the difference, as mentioned earlier, is that it’s set on Earth and based on reality. You can literally take any sailor’s name out of the book and find it on a real list from the actual expedition, with things matching like age and rank. And the major characters bring up a whole lot of results on Google. Even better, you can do a Google image search and find images of some of their mummified bodies. Dan Simmons weaves it all together and fills the seams in creatively. Great read.

Ray J’s Wikipedia page. The default image slayed me.

NFL Network is on Hulu. Lots and lots and lots of content. Not just highlights. NFL Films season recaps. All the Hard Knocks episodes are on there I think. And a whole bunch of Greatest Games, with about one for each year in the 80s and 90s. I’m sure Dan loves this one:

Crazy to see Favre out there and realize that he got farther in the playoffs more than a decade later. Also, if you thought T.O. was acting during the “That’s my quarterback.” thing, then watch him cry for real after the catch.

Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme on Hulu. Would’ve been way more into this in 10th grade. Freestyling died when memorizing written verses and reciting them over beats at radio stations became freestyles. Couldn’t they just use a different term for that? Still, plenty of good clips in the movie. But the movie is like the guys at UW I used to see practicing Parkour—taking itself way too serious for something that should be at least a little bit lighthearted.

Update: I posted this before I watched it all. But if you check it out, make sure to skip to 53:00 and prepare for your mind to be blown. If I saw this in person at a club or something, I’d cheer and high five my friends for approximately an hour afterward. Actually, I’ll just embed it here.

From basically the end of summer.

Some pictures from my friend Ireneo’s birthday party and some pictures from Dick’s.

Colts vs. Saints

I pretty much liked all the teams that played today, probably in this order: Colts, Vikings, Saints, Jets. I’m happy with the Super Bowl matchup. I’ll be rooting for the Colts but I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing New Orleans the city celebrating a Super Bowl win. I’m such a fence sitter—don’t worry, it sickens me too.

Dan is in Japan

My brother is working in Japan for a couple months. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him much, so I have no idea where the hell he took this picture, but it cracks me up. Mostly because it’s ridiculous, but also because it reminds me of one of the best Arrested Development episodes.

Bob reminds Michael to make sure that his family do not deceive the Japanese investors, or else they can all end up in prison. But Michael does not get there in time. G.O.B. has already lined up the investors and opens the curtains to reveal his “tiny town”. Surprisingly, it looks pretty good, and the investors are pleased. Michael wants Gob to close the curtains and not accept any money from the investors. But before G.O.B. can, Tobias, dressed in a mole costume, walks over the hill and begins smashing the tiny houses. Within seconds, George Michael, strapped into the jet pack, swoops out of the sky and knocks Tobias over.

Hardest I can remember laughing watching a show by myself.

I love this dunk

I love this video

Done by the same guy that did the great ‘Home’ video.

Not sure if this is real or fake and I’m still deciding if it’s awesome or awful

Bill Simmons often says it’s amazing that these days you can watch Piper smash a coconut over Jimmy Snuka’s head at your leisure. Anyway, it blows my mind that the above video even exists. Update: I’m leaning towards ‘awful’.

We were playing MW2 today…

and Jason said he had to leave to go to sleep and the rest of us of course gave him the usual “come on just one more” and “you can’t be that tired”. Usually this gets one more game out of whoever, but his response this time was “I ran a marathon today”. Jason, congratulations on your second marathon.

Went through my old pictures last night. Found a few more to post.

Medieval Times pictures are in this post. They look a few thousand times more serious than the show actually is. Even better is the idea that the location is so close to Hollywood that more than a few cast members are probably aspiring actors.

I shot the last picture earlier today. It’s my first picture with the 35mm lens I ordered a month ago. (AAFES 20% off coupon made the lens $30 cheaper but ordering from AAFES increased shipping by three weeks.) My quick verdict about the 35mm: feels like a 50mm, except it’s a 35mm. I knew that when I ordered it though. Still, I’m planning to keep the 35mm on for a while and hope that it’s a step forward in taking my camera around more.

Here are some stray pictures from December. The events include the Secret Santa gift exchange dinner with my friends, the Christmas Eve party with my family and our family friends, and Christmas Day with my family. I edited these a few weeks ago and can’t really remember why I wanted to do them in black and white. My guess is I liked how it looked.

I felt like writing something. I realized I had a bunch of pictures from my New Year’s trip to San Diego. Done deal!

Dan dropped me and Jason off at the airport. But before the airport, we dropped by Elliot’s for happy hour. $0.50 per oyster starting at 3PM and going up $0.25 every half hour. “Dropped by” is accurate, because we left when we saw the line. Apparently their happy hour isn’t a secret. So we went to the Met. Fantastic fantastic happy hour. (I’ve been to Elliot’s and actually ate and their happy hour is great too.) We got our oyster fix. I’m sure oysters in the shooters came from a jar, but it hit the spot. The steak sandwiches were good for $3, even though they were allegedly free before. But the burger was the star. I didn’t order one. Huge mistake. I had some of Jason’s and it was the best I’ve had since Lunchbox Laboratory. Great patty.

Here’s me and Jason waiting to board. Google provided free WiFi at a bunch of airports during the holidays. Very thankful for this. Me and Jason were able to play Scrabble on Facebook on our laptops. We were waiting for 90 minutes and barely finished one game. Jason takes forever on each move. It’s painful.

Here’s where I try to take a picture of a cute girl. Then I showed my friends and they said she looks cute as in way too young. That’s when I started justifying it in my head with thoughts like, “Oh, you know, you can’t tell these days.”

My first breakfast! I did in fact visit friends in San Diego and not an elementary school cafeteria. This is what I wanted to eat though. I love oatmeal (sugary instant packets even better) and I love Flaming Hot Cheetos.

I went with Curt’s fiance Dyane to pick some things up at her classroom. She teaches troubled youth—lots of gang members.

Here’s me in front of the whiteboard where I wrote “Mr. Cortez” and thought it’d be hilarious for some reason.

Here’s the In-N-Out picture obligatory for trips to California that feels more and more like an obligation—it’s less exciting every time. Having a Double-Double for the first time in five years tastes a lot better than for the first time in five months. Maybe I was still thinking of the burger from the Met.

I waited for Jason to come home before heading to Medieval Times. Here he is, ready to hide in a pixelated ocean. You can’t shoot what you can’t see.

Medieval Times was really fun. Jason loves the place and has been frustrated on my past visits when we weren’t able to make the trip. I wish I had a bigger appetite. Chicken and the ribs were good. Tomato soup to start, not so much. There are six knights and they’re each assigned to sections of the crowd. You get really attached to your knight and ours made it to the final two. Then he died and the rest of the show died with him.

Disneyland fireworks go off every night as far as I know. It was kind of cool to drive by them outside of the park.

Sometimes Wally just likes to come to the Disneyland McDonald’s and think.

The day of New Year’s Eve we went to a driving range. There were these baskets probably 60-80 yards out. We had a contest to be the first one to get it into one. I thought speed was the key. Hit at a rapid pace and one of them will go in. Makes sense—unless your short game sucks dick. I went 0-for-a lot and ran out of balls . Wally got one in and ruined 2009 for me. Good thing a new year was only a few hours away.

We ate at a Mexican place by Jason, Curt, and Dyane’s apartment. Didn’t end in -berto’s but it hit the spot. Dan would be frustrated that I didn’t hit eat at a Mexican joint multiple times a day. Actually, I kind of regret not going to at least one other Mexican place during the trip.

Me and Wally, looking tight!

Me and Wally, looking tight!

We met up with two other couples that are friends with Curt and Dyane for a pre-function at a hotel. Really nice room. Really nice people. They made a bunch of surprisingly great food. Surprising because when you think hotel before amateur night, things like instant oatmeal and Flaming Hot Cheetos come to mind instead of lumpia and baked salmon.

And I say “really nice” because they really didn’t mind Curt bringing five other dudes who beasted on the food.

We went to Onyx for New Year’s Eve. Cool place. A lotta dudes. For whatever reason, we set up about six feet from the main speakers on the main floor and destroyed our ears. They played “Sandstorm” before the countdown and did what every other Jersey Shore fan did that night—beat that beat. First song I heard in 2010 was “I Got A Feeling”. Probably the first time I really enjoyed the song.

Sometime after that we realized it was really hot in the place and tried to get water. They were charging for water so we left to find some. We stopped by Hooters for water. Seems kind of weird writing it but it was actually one of the only options because we couldn’t find a convenience store and even the small bars we tried to go to were at capacity. On our walk to Hooters we got VIP passes to Deja Vu: “It’s only ten minutes away!” Would anyone really go there on New Year’s Eve?*

We went to Wally’s house the next day for dinner. Pop quiz: Is the following picture A.) Wally’s nightstand or B.) The Dork section at Barnes and Noble?

Me and Wally, looking tight!

We went to the gym the next day to pump up at the gym Wally described as small. If this gym is small, I want to see what he thinks is a big gym. Chargers practice facility? Olympic training campus?

We ate at Lucille’s BBQ. It was good. For a BBQ place attached to a mall, it was great. Biscuits are the table bread and they give some kind of sweet apple cinnamon butter to spread. Not that there’s a lot of competition (Claim Jumper comes to mind), but it’s the best butter for spreading that I’ve had.

Then we went to LA to hang out with a friend and her friend. We ate at Kuishimbo, which has 4.5 stars on Yelp. And I assumed LA was third to New York and San Francisco for food snobs so 4.5 seemed really good. It was good enough but nobody would notice if you dropped it in the middle of Seattle. Maybe I’m hating. Here’s Wally expressing our feelings about hanging out with girls instead of, you know, enough dudes to run small pick up games of various sports.

Here’s a picture I took for Jason to see if he’d remember something. Seeing as how I took this picture and stared at it for a good minute to try and remember what it was, I doubt he’d remember what that something was. Anyway, I was trying to see if he remembered this strip mall, because Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles is around the corner, where we ate the last time we were in LA.

On my last night, we watched Avatar and ate curry. Pork katsu and beef curry. That was really good. I’m sure there’s somewhere in Seattle to get a similar meal, and I’m gonna try and find it. Also, Avatar was really good.

Before bed that night we all watched a chicken wing episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay. So before my flight I wanted to get wings. I asked Wally what he thought of Wings and Things. “It’s pretty generic.” It was one of those times where I shouldn’t have even asked because it was our only option and my mind was already set to go. They only serve three sauces: mild, medium, and hot. If you essentially only do wings, you should have more options than that. Basically, it’s pretty generic.

The trip was pretty fun and writing a few sentences about a few pictures took a lot longer than I expected.

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*YEEEEEUP

Avatar screenplay (PDF). I really liked Avatar.

Looks like Pete Carroll’s going to coach the Seahawks. I read this 2007 Los Angeles Magazine article about a month back. It’s long, but it’s really, really good: 23 Reasons Why a Profile of Pete Carroll Does Not Appear in this Space

Carroll gave up fear long ago. He gave it up the way people give up carbs. Fear now has no part in his daily life. Fear is like an old, distant friend. They know each other well, talk once in a while, but they’re not close like they used to be.

In meetings, practices, pregame talks, fear is Carroll’s theme. “That’s what we’re all about,” he says, lying back on the leather sofa in his office one night. “Our entire approach is to come to the point where we have the knowing that we’re going to win. There’s nothing to stop us but ourselves. To do that is to operate in the absence of fear.”

Let’s hope this theme works on millionaires the same way it worked for college kids.

A City’s Specialty, Japanese in Name Only:

“Seattle likes to talk about local foods, about ridiculous things like fiddlehead coulis,” Mr. Berger said. “Seattle yuppies love the idea of going to some obscure Chinese place for dim sum but won’t dare tell you that they eat chicken teriyaki. Those places are so much a part of the streetscape that we can’t even see them.”

New York Times article about teriyaki in Seattle. Most people notice that there are a ton of teriyaki places in Seattle. But I always thought that other cities were similar.

Some of my friends blogs are on the come up and mine fell off. I gotta drop in with at least one more solid post before 2010 starts, so here it is!

January

We went to Ibiza’s for New Year’s Eve. Jay set us up with VIP at Ibiza’s. (THANKS!) Then I threw up everywhere. (SORRY.) Amateur night.

February

I remember very little about February. So I checked my calendar to see what I did. Last summer I recorded mundane things I did during the day since it takes less than a minute to enter everything in Google Calendar. So there are a lot of “Starcraft with Jason” entries. Anyway, it’s totally worth doing because it’s the stupid things like where you ate for lunch and who you ate with that help you remember what that time was like day-to-day. Plus you can record things like when you hung out with so and so and what you did that ruined your life for a few weeks.

But I stopped doing that after the summer ended. However, I have a ‘Tentative’ label for important upcoming events. And obviously I don’t go back and delete those events after they’re over, so they’re still there marking the things I deemed important in my life. And February only has one: Street Fighter IV. I’ve mentioned how excited I was for Modern Warfare 2, but I was also pretty excited for SFIV. Those first two weeks were great. I guess the most memorable thing about the game is when I beat Dan a few dozen times in a row then he smashed the controller on the floor. After that I always told him I won’t play if he’s gonna get mad like that. February was awesome.

March

March really isn’t ringing any bells. Probably because my capstone project for Electrical Engineering consumed the entire month. I’ll try not to exaggerate but we put in 8 hour days at least three days a week in the lab and 4 hours for the other days. For some reason people take that class and basically get reamed for the entire quarter but then they look back on it fondly. Myself included. That project to me is like the P90X Ab Ripper X video to Tony Horton—I hate it… but I love it.

April

We went to Vegas for Harvey’s bachelor party. I get the sense that the trip caused me to peak early for the following things: Vegas, bachelor parties, and nightlife. Meaning it was a great trip. I wouldn’t want to be the guy trying to top that bachelor party. Luckily, I’m halfway to a decade without a girlfriend so I won’t be that guy! Phew. Probably the funnest weekend of the year and maybe of the last few years for me.

I remember reading some story from some guy that spent his summer giving tours of the Grand Canyon and sleeping under the stars with nature and how he felt sick when he went to Vegas and saw all the superficial people and extreme materialism. What a loser.

May

This was my last full month of college. I’d say I checked out in my final quarter, but I don’t know if I ever actually checked back in after my internship. Most of my friends had graduated already, I felt old, and I only had graduation requirements which meant zero flexibility choosing classes. Throughout college, whenever something seemed overwhelming I would just ask if it would matter in five years. Basically nothing did. Looking back less than a year out, no single assignment really meant anything. I have a pretty good grasp of the idea that it’s the cumulative success that counts, but I’m just glad I kept a cool head through my projects even with graduation looming. A few members of teams I was on were on the verge of tears and I remember thinking at the time, and even now, whoa calm down.

This was also the month when my classmate said he was thinking of applying to MIT for grad school and asked me if it was private or public. So I said I think it’s private then I looked it up on Wikipedia and said Wikipedia says it’s private. And then he says, wow Wikipedia also says aliens are real, it’s probably public.

Don’t ask me a question if you really don’t care about my answer, especially if it’s a question that can be answered with facts and not opinions. And if you really think Wikipedia is the wild west and anyone can change anything and that it would be incorrect about whether MIT, one of the most famous colleges in the world, is private or public, you’re dumb. And I say that because chances are you use Wikipedia all the time but whenever someone mentions it you denounce it to seem smarter.

June

Graduation was hot. A lot of people say it’s worth it since it might be long but it’s just a day. If I finished in four years and graduated with the people I started with I think it would’ve meant a lot more to me. I definitely enjoyed the departmental graduations though. My advice: do it for your parents.

We also went to Canada for a weekend in June. Potentially really fun, but kind of a bust. Mostly because we went out to try and check out clubs, but we left too late and didn’t get in. And it looked like people were having an awesome time inside. It was an eye opener, though. Vancouver B.C. is about the same trip-length as Oregon and it’s one of the nicest cities I’ve been to. It’s also weird that it’s right there and it seems less like a different country and more like some kind of pseudo world. Driving around seems the same but what the hell does the flashing green light mean? This resembles SportsCenter but there’s so much hockey and NBA Playoffs are covered for two minutes every hour. There’s still a 7- 11, but it’s filled with candy bars I haven’t heard of and ketchup Lays.

[Update: I guess Canada was in May. I really don't remember it being before graduation.]

July

My birthday was ridiculously hot. Like literally the hottest day ever in Seattle hot. (Now that we’re starting to get a grasp of the subtleties of the usage of the word ‘irony’—basically, nothing I think is ironic actually is—can we move on to ‘literally’?) Uncomfortable. I was glad everyone made it to happy hour that night. But what I’ll remember is how hard it was to sleep that night. I soaked some towels that day in water and froze them in one of those giant ziplocs that fishermen use to store whole fish. At the time, I was picturing all-cold-side-of-the-pillow-everything, but they just froze together in a big block. So I put the block next to my head hoping it’d work like an air conditioner. It did next to nothing. And I stayed awake long enough for the block to melt enough to peel a towel off. And I just put it on my forehead and slept for an hour, then tossed it back in the ziploc and peeled another towel off, and repeated that. It was a mess. But at least it wasn’t a hot mess!

August

I went to San Francisco with a few friends—my first time back in the bay area since my San Jose internship last year. Lots of eating and lots of homeless people. And a couple of crazy taxi drivers stick out. One drove us to the club from our hotel and floored it through Chinatown. And the only time I remember really stopping is when the driver said “It ain’t that hot.” when he saw a guy walking wearing a black wife beater. I call the second crazy taxi driver The Transporter, because he showed zero emotion as he sped and cut through multiple lanes at odd angles.

September

Camping sticks out the most for me in September. Actually, preparing for camping might be the most memorable part of it. Me, Jerry, and Russ bought 80 pounds of meat for the weekend. I’ll always remember asking for 17 two-pound rib-eyes. We really didn’t do anything except eat meat and sleep.

October

Jay-Z came to Seattle for the first time in something like a decade. Favorite concert ever for me. He puts on a good show and it was a great crowd that was probably happy to pack Key Arena again. I was singing lyrics I didn’t realize I knew and yelling made up lyrics for the rest. The only downside was missing J. Cole because he came out at 7:40 for a concert scheduled for 8:00. A rap concert. But he came out to do his verse for A Star is Born, which helped make up for it.

That week also included the annual live fantasy basketball draft. We did it bigger this year and got a place with a projector that we couldn’t hook anything up to.

After booking the Jay-Z tickets, me and some friends were calling this The Greatest Week Ever. But Jay-Z and the draft took second place behind a trip to Hawaii. I wrote about part of the trip and never finished. One of the funnest trips of my life. It’s hard for me to choose between the Vegas trip and the Hawaii trip. I asked myself if I could only go on one which would it be, and I decided it’d be the Vegas trip mostly because of the bigger group. But it’s hard to beat relaxing in the water under the Hawaiian sun knowing it was pouring rain in Seattle. I’m glad I was lucky enough to go to both.

November

Modern Warfare 2 came out this month and so did the BlackBerry 9700. I love Modern Warfare 2. For a few weeks before it came out, a few of us played Modern Warfare 1. Here’s the thing, I never played MW1 before and it was basically awesome. They could have released MW1 labeled as MW2 and I would’ve been happy. It was all new to me. Then it made me think of the two years that I could’ve been playing it. Last year I could have been playing it in San Jose instead of whatever the hell I was doing. Luckily they released MW2 as MW2 and it was even better. My friend Paul always says he’s jealous of people that haven’t seen Friends since they can still watch them and it’s new to them. Well, I still haven’t beat the single player campaign for MW2 so I’m lucky in the same way.

December

Will 2009’s biggest news story be Michael Jackson’s death or Tiger’s fall from grace? Who cares, this post is about me! According to my calendar, December so far consists of MW2 during the week and going out on the weekends. Pretty fun month so far and there’s still a lot to look forward to: pre-Christmas party, Secret Santa lunch at a brazilian BBQ, Christmas-eve party, Christmas, and then a trip to San Diego to end the month. December is also the month I made an awful analogy about Friends and MW2’s single player campaign.

After reminiscing about the year and thinking about all the great times in each month and all the friends I spent time and bonded with, I realized something: I need to hang out with girls.

See you in 2010!

Special Ops is a great addition. I was kind of surprised that they didn’t do a co-op campaign. But it makes sense if only to keep the story sensible (since there wouldn’t always be a reason for two characters to be doing something during a sequence). People don’t want co-op campaigns for the story, they want it so that they can yell orders at each other and eventually be rewarded for success. Special Ops lets you do that. It’s frustrating to fail a mission over and over, but it’s all worth it once you finally succeed. For some reason the missions where one player is on the ground and the other character is in the air make me think, “Wow this is pretty amazing,” even though multiplayer is way more sophisticated from a technical standpoint.

My favorite moment so far took place on the first AC-130 mission. I was in the plane and Wally just needed to survive and reach a checkpoint to complete the mission. After a bunch of trial and error, we get a pretty good routine going to get through most of the stage. So on this try we get near completion. I hear him say, “I can see the end from here.” He’s about 60 yards away and I can see the path he’s planning to take. Except it’s lined by red squares indicating enemies. I know what he’s thinking, and I get a flashback of Harry Connick Jr. telling Will Smith he’s gonna try something. Right on cue, Wally says, “I’m going for it,” and starts booking it. And a few blinks later Will Smith and I both yell “Noooooooooo” as our wingman gets lit up.

These moments happen often. Then we yell at each other, restart, and do it all over again. So much fun.

I mislabeled my previous Hawaii post as Friday. Anyway, here’s the actual Friday post.

Woke up at 6:30AM and wasn’t even close to being the first one up. Junior was up already and Dan had enough time to blog more than he has in all of 2009. Around 7:00AM we decided to pump up for the day in the fitness center. We showered, lathered up, and pulled the board shorts on. At 9:00AM I took a phone interview.

Zippy’s

Not too much to say about Zippy’s. If you’ve eaten there, you know what it’s like. If you haven’t, it’s a fast food version of some of Hawaii’s local fare. When you’re on vacation, you tend to pay less attention to how much food costs from meal to meal. I like Zippy’s, but it’s actually kind of expensive for the portions.

Foodland

It’s a supermarket. But it’s in Hawaii. You can grab spam masubi at the ready-made hot food section. And we did. Sort of the go-to food choice between meals. The reallly great thing is the ready-made cold food they have. All kinds of poke, and I’m sure locals take it for granted the same way I took dungeness crab for granted in Oak Harbor. RJ got the octopus poke the first day and I was hooked. Eight bucks a pound and a pound is a lot of raw seafood.

Hanauma Bay

If I could only keep one memory of Hawaii it’d be snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. But before you can go in you’re required to watch an introduction to snorkeling video less about your safety and more about not destroying the reef or grabbing the turtles. When more than one of my friends jokingly said the video was making them horny I started to wonder about the “jokingly” part.

We SPF’d our bods and lathered each other up. We finally got into the water for the first time on the trip and it was glorious. After splashing each other for a while we got around to renting gear and strapping up. That was my first time snorkeling, and it’s ridiculously fun. Basically I would swim around for a while, point a fish out to someone, stand up, rip my mouthpiece off, wait for them to stand up, ask them if they saw the fish I pointed at, put my mouthpiece back on, and do it over and over.

One type of fish—black and white stripes—kept showing up. I compare it to those 3-lb fish in Ocarina of Time that you get mad when you catch. I was tired of seeing those things. Me and Jon saw a flounder and were getting excited to tell the other guys but when we caught up to them they were doing various endzone celebrations (read: vigorously high fiviing) because they saw some sea turtles. Missing the turtles bummed me out.

We were there for four hours and spent $7.50 to enter and $11 for gear. By far the most fun I’ve had for under $20.

Big Kahuna, Banzai, Oceans, The Living Room

Big Kahuna—I really enjoyed the pork loco moco. Banzai—Cool bar, probably better if more people were there. Oceans—Cool club, definitely better if more people were there. The Living Room—Probably the least safe I felt during the trip. So dark in there. So hood. Then a local rapper performed upstairs. So we went downstairs.