The rules:
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J Sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - cognac while people around me smoked fat cigars...
37. Clotted Cream Tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried Goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin -- don't know what this is other than a type of clay
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini - just had this on our honeymoon, in fact
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom Yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft Shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican blue mountain coffee
100. Snake

from Milkbreath and Me

Thursday was a fairly relaxed day for us; we got up late, splashed around in the pool at the Mandalay Bay (the lazy river was the best, we just went around and around), and headed to lunch.  It turns out that going during the week--and during the slow season--was a good idea; the crowd at the hotel must have doubled between Wednesday and Thursday, and doubled again on Friday.  We also lucked out that the room upgrade we were given was to the upper floors of THEHotel... the lower floors actually had a wait at the elevator banks on Thursday.

Another thing that surprised us was how early the restaurants closed, at least during the week.  When we came back from Penn & Teller the night before it was just past 11 and the only thing still open in the hotel and concourse was the Raffles Cafe...the Cafe puzzled me, because there was always a line, but the place was huge and always more than half empty.  I can understand that it just might not be worth the extra staff to fill it closer to capacity for rare surges past 11 on weeknights--but why the hell wouldn't you want to fill your restaurant at lunch time or dinner time Thursday and Friday?  If the marginal cost of additional staff is more than the marginal profit from additional diners, then why are you paying for so much space in the first place?  Unless something was going on like this was vacation week for most of the staff or something...

Anyway, we basically just hung out until it was time to go see Cirque du Soleil: Ka.

I don't think there's anything like Ka in the world, or in the history of the world.  And I doubt that anyone will build anything like it ever again.

Take a look at the wall in this video.

What they don't tell you in the video is that whole huge wall they're going up and down--that's the stage.  It is mobile.  It can rotate anywhere from horizontal to vertical, spin a full 360 degrees and move towards and away from the audience.  The shafts and gears that move it around look like something from the Hoover Dam tour.  It is awesome.

The whole show is incredible...much more of a single story than a set of pieces around a theme than the usual Cirque show, but it's the stage/wall that really moves it into the realm of astonishing.  I couldn't find a clip of the human pachinko game the acrobats play in the archery/chase sequence, but it has to be seen to be believed.

Elyssa's one word take on it: "Indescribable"

I think everyone reading this should make plans to go see Ka.  You don't have to drop what you're doing and book a flight to Vegas, but you should add it to your list of "Things I must see."  I'm totally serious about this.  We had a wonderful, wonderful time in Vegas, and we didn't do more than about half the things we wanted to, but the trip would have been worth it if we had flown in, gone to Ka, and flown home.

Since people are saying that they can't see the previous entries about our honeymoon (maybe because I used the backdate feature to post them the day prior to when I wrote them?  I don't know...) here are the links to the specific entries:

Wednesday

Tuesday

Monday

Here they are
They're not organized into any sort of album, because my "Pro" account has expired and I haven't decided whether to renew it, but it's all there anyway.

On Wednesday, we did another activity suggested by Matt (though this one we might have stumbled onto on our own): The Star Trek Experience, at the Hilton.  Yes, we went from the Star Trek convention in Baltimore last Saturday all the way out to Las Vegas to see some more Star Trek on Wednesday.  Elyssa is just that geeky.  And I love her for it.

We had a fabulous time, and actually spent pretty much the whole day there, after a somewhat late start in the morning.  We did both rides: The Klingon Experience and the Borg Experience, and we got the backstage tour.  Plus we got our pictures taken in the Captain's chair on the bridge, and the Borg chamber.  We'll be showing you those later.  Both rides were entertaining, though I preferred the Klingon Experience...I have some trouble resolving the 3D stereoscopic effect in the Borg ride, so most of the time when they thrust things towards my face I get double vision instead.  The real treat was the backstage tour.  Not only was all the stuff about how they built everything (and had to update it as new shows and movies came out) interesting, but you had time to actually look at some of the details that they hurry you past in the ride.  And to top it all off, you got to see the Klingon attack on the shuttle again... this time from the room that the simulators are in, standing below them and watching the film projected on the huge IMAX-like domed screen while the shuttle simulator over your head pitches, yaws, rolls, and whatever they call the other three degrees of motion it has.  It really is a NASA/Air Force simulator, with the interior done up to look like a Star Fleet shuttle instead of the Space Shuttle or whatever... There are two of them, side- by-side (there were four, before they changed the second Klingon ride to be the Borg ride) and when things get busy they run both of them simultaneously so the passengers see the same screen, just at a slightly different angle.  It's a pity that the whole thing is shutting down on September 1st--the lease with the Hilton expired and they're apparently not renewing, so the whole 70 million dollar thing is going to get dismantled.  There are apparently rumors that they might relocate it somewhere else, but the staff say if that actually happens they'll be the last to know.

After dinner at Quark's, we went back to the hotel and got ready for Penn & Teller.

If you book three months in advance, you can easily get front-row center seats.

And if you're sitting front row center, and are small, cute, female, and wear glasses, you can get pulled up on stage to assist in their first trick.

So that's how Elyssa ended up standing in the spotlight in front of thousands of people in Las Vegas, with Penn Jillette looming over her, and Teller standing nearby wearing a big cement block over his head.  After borrowing and examining her glasses, then pocketing them, Penn had her examine a billiard ball and pronounce it real.  (He had to hold it really close for her to see it at this point) He proceeded to pretend to vanish the ball, while actually "vanishing" the wand he was using--by sticking it behind his ear.  This fooled Elyssa for, oh, about two seconds by his estimation, so he offered to do something more impressive.  He picked up a big hammer, and smashed it into the cement block Teller had been wearing all along until it broke open enough to reveal Teller's smiling face beneath a safety visor.   And on that smiling face, beneath the visor, there were Elyssa's glasses.  He graciously returned them, along with a little glasses wipe packet, which Elyssa is keeping as a souvenir.

The rest of the show was fantastic, as usual, and kept Elyssa boggled, but nothing to top that.  Afterwards, getting the program autographed, both of them told her she was great.  And she was...she was adorable, reacted really strongly, was the perfect foil for Penn's banter, and neither of us is ever going to forget that moment.

Tuesday morning we got up bright and early to hop on the tour bus to go see Hoover Dam.  It was the deluxe tour package, so it included a buffet lunch at the Hacienda in Boulder City, and a tour of the Ethel M chocolate factory and the botanical gardens just outside.  The driver was an entertaining old fellow, though perhaps not quite as funny as he thought he was, who gave us the history of the Las Vegas area and Boulder City in between corny old jokes.  Elyssa was struck by how being a tour guide was in a sense a theatrical profession, remembering also the National Park Service guide at Alcatraz, who was (or had been) an actor part-time before settling in a career as a guide.

The Lake Meade area was spectacular, and the Dam even more so.  We have a lot of pictures, which I'll upload when we get home.  The whole dam tour was fascinating--our tour included the power plant, as well.  Elyssa would like to come back some time and do the rafting thing on the river below the dam.  It was really great, and we never would have thought to do it if it weren't for Doug, so yay Doug.

One of the highlights of the experience for her, though, was a brush with celebrity.  As we were standing in line for the start of the tour, she looked up and started squeeing.  RIght behind us in line was the actor who plays Bubbles on The Wire, with some of his family.  They had a nice chat about the series, and the big shocker at the end of Season Three, which Elyssa had just watched on the flight to Vegas.  That really was the cherry on top of the experience for her.

The buffet afterwards was nothing fancy, but tasty enough.  The tour of Ethel M's (a high end chocolate factory founded by the guy who founded Mars and sold it) was a bit of a disappointment, since they weren't actually making chocolate that day, but the botanical gardens, with cacti from all over the world, made up for it.  We've got lots of nice pictures of those.  I'd like to come back some time in the Spring, when they're all in bloom.

That night we walked to the Hard Rock to eat at Nobu.  It was good, but unfortunately I think it revealed that Elyssa wouldn't enjoy Morimoto's very much--or at least not the omikase dinner.  After that we hiked to The Wynn and sat down at the Parasol Up, where we stayed long enough to see three of the light shows (every half-hour).  That was just mind-boggling.  The bar is on an artificial lake surrounded by artificial mountains (something like 140 feet high) and real pine trees, with a huge curtain waterfall, onto which they project colored lights.  The shows use that waterfall as a projector for really trippy music videos--the ones we saw were Lady Marmalade, some techno thing that I think was called Fiesta, and Low Rider.  There are additional props that come up through the lake or from behind the waterfall--things like a sheet of swirling red silk to look like fire during the Fiesta number, or a big silhouette of a woman's head that the singer's face is projected onto, or, our favorite, a gigantic inflatable chameleon puppet that sings Low Rider.  The service was lackadaisical--we could have been enticed to spend a lot more on drinks if the waitress had come by more than about twice in that hour we spent there--but it's still a must-see.  Big props to my co-worker Matt, who suggested it.

Live-blogging our honeymoon....  ok, maybe not (particularly because internet connection is $14 a day here... what's with that?  Even the crappy HoJo we stay at in Harrisburg is free now...) but I figured I'd at least give an update on the first day.

Easy plane flight, if you don't count getting bumped from our seats to ones right next to the restroom by the family with the screaming baby that screamed for five hours.  Friends, don't be that family.

As cosmic compensation, when we arrived at the Mandalay Bay we found we'd been bumped again...but this time to a suite in the fancier tower: THEHotel at Mandalay Bay.  And yes, that is how they spell it.  I don't know why, but everything associated with it is "the": The Shop, The Coffee Bar, The Spa, The Restroom (ok, I made that last one up).  Anyway, very swank, with a big screen tv and DVD player in the living room, another TV in the bedroom, and another in the bathroom.  We have a magnificent view of the mountains out of our window on the 32nd floor.

When we got in we were starved, so we hit the House of Blues for a late lunch; it was decent...the pulled pork was recognizably pork and not meet shreds drowned in bbq sauce, and the blackened chicken sandwich was almost too spicy.  The beer selection was weak, though, but it was satisfying.

Most of the rest of the day was wandering around the hotel and the connected hotels (the Luxor and the Excalibur) and getting oriented.  Elyssa hit the pool while I took a nap, then we went out for dinner, which was basically just drinks and appetizers at the Red Square, the faux-Russian vodka bar in the hotel.  That was fantastic:  we ate blinis with caviar and steak tartare, and Elyssa had some kind of froofy pomegranite cosmo, while I had the "flight" of USSR Vodkas.  Hers was better actually; not that the vodkas were bad, but I'm not a big vodka drinker.  But when you go to a vodka bar and sit at the ice bar designed o keep your shots of vodka cold, I felt you had darn well better give the vodka a shot.  As it were.  The best of the four was an Estonian vodka called The Tall Blonde, very smooth, almost tasteless.  The second best was a somewhat citrusy Ukrainian vodka.  The other two were just too medicinal for me, with the Russian Ice Goddess vodka being particularly brutal.  The bartender told us that Russians actually drink that stuff at room temperature, which is a bit hard to imagine; it would be like doing shots of turpentine.

Then it was more wandering around the casinos, where Elyssa played a couple of slots ("Is that it?" she asked, after putting her money in, pressing a button, and losing) and watched some roulette.  Then it was bed-time, to get up early in the morning for the Hoover Dam excursion.

Fairly accurate, though my Hawaiian shirts don't really fit any of the questions; apparently they are outside the ken of the fashionista who made the quiz.


Your result for The Fashion Style Test...

Librarian

37% Flamboyance, 45% Originality, 42% Deliberateness, 30% Sexiness

Take The Fashion Style Test at HelloQuizzy

via badgerbag  

• 
  

  Who are the aggressive drivers?

  
  
  
  
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    Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

    
    

    That's the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

I think this is interesting on several levels, particularly (if you click through and read the excerpt) that it doesn't seem to matter at all what the substance of the personalization is merely the fact that it is personalized, and the more stickers the more aggressive.  Also that it's not whether you get angry behind the wheel, but whether you act it out.  So stay the hell away from that car plastered with "Visualize World Peace", "You Can't Hug a Child With Nuclear Arms", "Let's Not Elect W in 2004, Either!", "My Other Car is The Millenium Falcon" and such over every inch of the back.



It's not clear whether removing stickers and other territorial markers from your car will make you a less aggressive driver...it could, after all, be that the type of person who is prone to territorially marking a car is the type of person who is aggressive behind the wheel (correlation doesn't imply causation, and all that), but I can certainly envision a psychologically plausible mechanism by which choosing to treat your vehicle as an extension of your personal territory influences you to take "threats" to that territory more personally and be more likely to act on your anger.  In which case, you might be able to influence your future behavior and moods by deliberately choosing to downplay the personalization and emphasize the simple utility aspect: a car is just a box on wheels that takes you where you want to go.

This should fix that.  A Firefox add-on that lets you play about 2500 NES games online, from Kirby's Adventure, to Double-Dragon, to Battle Toads, Castlevania, Galaga, and just about every other game I've ever heard of and plenty that I haven't.  It's all online, so no legally dubious downloading of ROMs or emulator software. (Whether the site maintainers are doing something legally dubious is another question.)

One caveat: it appears that if you use No-Script you have to temporarily Allow Scripts Globally.  At least, it doesn't pop up the usual notice to let you know what it's blocking but it does block the java plugin that the add-on is using.  If I can figure out a specific site to white-list, I'll update this post.  Otherwise just turn the No-Script blocking off while you play and back on afterwards.

Alphabet songs, courtesy of  woodwindy who assigned me D...

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

Day-O (Banana Boat Song) - Harry Belafonte
Do I Love You, Do I? - Ella Fitzgerald
Do You Want To - Franz Ferdinand
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood - The Animals
Drift Away - Uncle Kracker

Originally I had a couple of different ones (Dinah, by Louis Prima, and the Darkwing Duck theme) but I couldn't find them on Napster so I figured I'd go with ones that you could actually listen to if you liked.

I've set up a new version of the Tales of the Rambling Bumblers blog, using WordPress, because MovableType seems to be getting flakier and flakier on my site, despite a version upgrade.  I'm going to see how WP goes for a while before trying to move the other blogs... particularly Rachel's, since it's by far the biggest and most active.

I've posted the recap for the Sunday Night massacree, if you want to check it out.

Iron Man!  Does whatever an iron can....


Saw it last night with Russell, Elyssa and Kim, and it was good.  Worthy of the trailer.  And Elyssa liked it, even without getting a single one of the in-jokes or fan-service moments.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU on Vimeo

Bizarre, but fascinating.

shiny_bauble and I went to see Speed Racer at the IMAX Saturday night, and I had way more fun than I could have reasonably expected.  If you regard yourself as part of the target audience, then I think you can safely ignore the critics.

Since
woodwindy
 did this, I figured I would too:

1. My username is ______ because ______.
jamused, because my name starts with J and I'm usually amused; also, long ago and far away on Compuserve Comics and Animation forum I wrote a column every week called Amused in Review (a play on Muse in Review)

2. My name is _____ because ______.
jamused, because I never realized you could have different names and usernames?

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.
J'amuse, because it sounds a bit like j'accuse

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.
Amusing People, because they are.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.
A piece of clip-art that looks very much like me, in my natural habitat, with books piled all around me.  I don't usually have any balanced on my head, but at the rate I acquire new ones, it's probably only a matter of time.

6. My LJ subtitle is _____ because _____.
j'amuse, et encore j'amuse, et toujours j'amuse because I'm amused by the phrase attributed to Frederick the Great: "de l'audace, encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace" and feel that with the suitable modification it suits my blogging philosophy perfectly.

TiddlyWiki - a reusable non-linear personal web notebook

TiddlyWiki is a neat little single-file, stand-alone wiki. That's right, it's nothing more than an HTML page with a bunch of javascript and css that lets it self-update as a wiki. Download it to your desktop, store it on a thumb-drive, carry one wherever you go. You don't need anything more than a browser to use it. Make as many as you like just by copying the page. Very nifty for taking notes on various little projects.

I  promised her I'd post this to my blog, so the whole internet could see it, since her mom won't let her have a blog until she's older:

I have a friend who deceied not to be friends with Leonardo DiCaprio, but,
her daughter is going to be his friend.  I guess she doesn't like (Titanic) because
handsome people "die" (realy they're acting) so they are not realy dead
the people they playing did though because of bad life boat decises) She
is silly about movie star friends, her daughter is going to
make her a T-shirt that says (I turned down a moviestar
who wanted  to be my friend) Anyway
the point is you can be friends with a movie star.

(Some charity organization sent her mother a form-letter signed by Leonardo, addressed "Dear Friend", which my cousin pretended to find deeply significant.)