dose 5: naga fireballs, salt ponds, mexican wedding cakes/russian teacakes

Naga fireballs: The first of a set of seven "awesome acts of nature". Every October the Mekong river (a major river that runs through China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) burps up thousands of egg-sized balls of red light that shoot up hundreds of feet into the sky.Explanation - fermented sediment releases bubbles of gas that rise up to the surface of the river and combust; the river farts balls of light annually from the decomposing animals and animal waste (it hasn't been figured why this occurs at the same time every year)
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San Francisco's Salt Ponds: The San Francisco Bay boasts a beautiful bird's eyeview of multicolored patches of land. The areas are wetlands dedicated to salt production. The colors are of the different microorganisms that inhabit the salt ponds. The colors are green to orange to red that correspond to the low to mid to high salinity of the ponds.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mexican Wedding Cakes:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter
1/4 cup confectionary sugar
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup and 2 tbsp flour
1/2 cup crushed pecans
2 tbsp and 2 tsp confectionary sugar

Directions:
Cream the butter with the 1/4 cup of sugar until light and fluffy. Mix in the vanilla.
Mix in the flour, nuts, and salt. Roll 1 tbsp balls of dough out onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
Bake for 15 minutes and roll in sugar. Let cool and then roll in sugar again.

Makes 30 cakes.

UPDATE: THE MEXICAN WEDDING CAKES ARE NASTY. DO NOT MAKE.
DO NOT PURCHASE. DO NOT EAT. DO NOT LOOK.

credits: cracked.com, killerdirectory.com, epicurious.com

happy camping jens,
doris spektor

delightful

space reserved for pictures

lonely in bangkok

went to a shady spa owned by this norwegian giant and got hives
ate at a top notch restaurant though, but i really couldn't be sure

walked back to the motel through heavy rain and was then locked out of my room
directed to another building for help
wet and itchy

i feel quite strange and in a different fold

i want to stay here and never see anyone ever again
i miss my dog


credits: minawasserman.blogspot.com

dose 4: board game variations, crepes, old food

3D Chess!Repeat wikipedia: Not to be confused with chess software with a 3D rendering.

Three-dimensional chess are chess variants. The most popular variants are: Raumschach, Tri-Dimensional Chess, and Asimovian Hyperchess.

Raumscach - German for "Space Chess". invented by Ferdinand Maack and played on a 5 x 5 x 5 board
Tri-Dimensional Chess - featured on Star Trek. rules here on Jens Meder's site.
Asimovian Hyperchess - eight chessboards stacked on top of each other. only a few recorded instances of the game actually being played

I think these are much nicer than the "versions" of Monopoly.
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It turns out that you cannot make crepes simply by mixing flour and water and eggs in amounts and ratios that seem nice. So here is a recipe for you:

Ingredients:
2 eggs
1 c milk
2/3 c flour
1 pinch of salt
1.5 tsp vegetable oil

Instructions:
Mix everything and refrigerate covered for 1 hr. Heat a skillet over med heat and brush w/oil. Pour .25 c of mix in, tilting to coat surface of pan. Cook 2-5 minutes, turning once, until golden. Repeat with remaining mix.
Makes 8 crepes. Fill the crepes with jam, chocolate, fruits, Nutella, etc.
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Things to do with old food:

tough bread: makes for good french toast
overripe bananas: easier to mush for banana bread
stale/too soft cookies: tastes good if crumbled and sprinkled on cupcakes, also I made some really tasty muffins with crushed old graham crackers mixed into the batter
overripe blueberries: make for the best blueberry muffins

There really isn't much to do with old food, actually. Most foods can be used for compost (post on home-grown foods to come). Surprisingly, cheese, meat, and fish cannot be composted.

credits: chess-theory.com, allrecipes.com, sam and muffins

happy camping jens,
doris spektor

dose 3: comics

I would like to begin by apologizing for the terrible size and formatting of everything on my blog. You'll have to click on the comics to see them in their entirety. Once again, my apologies.

We start off with qwantz, the dinosaur comic series. This is pretty cute stuff and in a way reminds me of that television show, Chuck. I will occasionally post some comics from this website and most likely other ones. I'll sort through them and find the good ones for you!

And then we move on to xkcd, a comic series that fails to constantly entertain me but does occasionally produce comics such as the two below that I am quite fond of:


And last of all, here are the Brown Sharpie comics. I find a lot of them difficult to understand with my limited knowledge of mathematics (thus far I have only reached the level of Calculus BC, but I would like you to know that today I received my AP score sheet in the mail and have a lovely 5 on both the regular test and the AB subscore. Yes, I am bragging about possibly excelling in lower level mathematics. Um). Here are a few that I understood and enjoyed:


(One note -- a bicycle traces out a cycloid, one of the few things I remember from class this year)


credits: qwantz.com, xkcd.com, brownsharpie.courtneygibbons.org

happy camping jens,
doris spektor

dose 2: fernando vicente, how do you do, grand unification theory

Found this and thought it was rather nice. This is one of Fernando Vicente's Atlas works in which he creates images from maps of the world. He has a few blogs including this one for his anatomia works.
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Greeting: How do you do?
Question: How are you?

The proper response to how do you do is "pleased to meet you" or "hello". How do you do is said usually on introduction rather than as a daily greeting.

Also I find myself more and more frustrated with the answer "I'm fine, and you?" (for both how do you do and how are you). But I'll get back to tolerating the empty small talk of life soon, hopefully.
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"Grand unification theory, GUT, refers to any of several very similar unified field theories or models in physics that predicts that at extremely high energies (above 10¹⁴ GeV), the electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear forces are fused into a single unified field. Thus far, physicists have been able to merge electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force, and work is being done to merge electroweak and quantum chromodynamics."

Cutlery has advanced
in ways physics has not.





credits: fernando vicente, learnenglish.com, dennisdemori.tumblr.com

happy camping jens,
doris spektor

dose 1: demon core, baklava

1945, Los Alamos laboratory: The Demon Core was a 6.2 kg (I find the metric system more respectable. Still-this means 14 lbs) spherical mass of plutonium. There were two incidents in which the subcritical substance went critical and each of them occured on the 21st of a month and each of the physicists involved died in the same room of the same hospital.
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Though I disapprove of box mixes and store bought pie crusts, I have this recipe for baklava using pre-made phyllo dough to share. My previous attempts at creating phyllo dough produced greasy and crumbly goops of flour (I know, I know); however, I do encourage you to make the dough from scratch.

Ingredients:
1 lb chopped almonds (or walnuts, pistachios...)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1 (16 oz) package phyllo dough
1 c butter, melted
1 c sugar
1 c water
1/2 c honey
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tsp grated lemon zest

Oven and Pan Requirements:
350 degrees. 9x13 baking pan or cut before baking and place on cupcake sheets

Instructions:
Mix cinnamon and nuts. Cut phyllo stack to fit dish.
Place two sheets phyllo on bottom of dish and brush with butter.
Sprinkle 2-3 tbsp of cin-nut mix. Repeat until all ingredients used.
Cut baklava into desired shape. Bake for around 50 min until golden and crisp.
Combine sugar and water in small saucepan over med heat and bring to boil.
Stir in honey, vanilla, and lemon. Reduce heat and simmer 20 min.
Once baklava is removed from oven, spoon syrup over it.

As usual, butter the pan before placing anything in.

credits: wiki demon core thanks to kevlu, and allrecipes

happy camping jens,
doris spektor