Hot seat

Here in Korea they take toilet technology dead serious. This particular model has three water holes for flushing, including a very tiny one whose purpose is mysterious, and an electric panel offering all sorts of options for flushing and rinsing. The best part is that the toilet seat is warmed by hot water from the inside, so it feels all warm and comfortable to sit on.

Falling in the Shower

Great commercial

Volkwagen

Tongue Twister

Pat made a bad bet to put a bat in his pad's bed.

Flesh wound update

Fluorine

I had always heard that fluorine was a brownish-yellow gas, but I always wondered how anyone knew. You cannot keep fluorine in a glass container since the glass would burn. If you keep it in a copper cask, you can't see it. And if you tried to see it outside a container, you would die from inhalation. But today I was browsing the internet and found the first picture of fluorine gas I have ever seen, shown left. For the story of how this sample was prepared, see here

Shameless promotion

For some pretty pictures of insects and stuff, and some nice Slovak poetry click here

Tak yo, brotha

One thing you can say about Czechs is that they sure like saying "Yo." But they can't quite say it with the same macho musicality as our brothers from the 'hood. In fact, they sound downright whiteboy when they say it. I suggest they could benefit from some tutoring lessons or exchange program with the Eastside.

Update: Sveti correctly reminds me that Czechs say "jo", not "yo."

Flesh wound

Recently I was putting together some furniture and I made a mistake, installing the wrong type of screw fasteners. Since they were now bored into the wood, they were very difficult to remove and the only thing that seemed to work was prying with a knife. The knife slipped and I stabbed my left hand. It hurt.

Thank u, Yahoo

A great story from Yahoo news

Update: AP has since updated the story to make it more family friendly. While the hijacker was trying to escape bystanders after the crash, he crawled under the bus and apparently lost his pants. The landscape guy dragged him out by his foot to reveal a special surprise: the only garment our neighborhood hijacker was wearing was a condom. The hijacker was not completely naked as the AP reports, but was wearing some protection.

Ford Lookalike

Recently on my way to the office I've been encountering this guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to our former dear leader Gerald R. Ford. He looks kind of like the picture shown left.

Power Outage

There was a power outage in my girl's apartment, so I went outside to play with some wires, to see if I could help.

At the moment this picture was taken, I experienced a little electric shock. Maybe you can tell. But everything is fine now, my heart started beating again a little later with the help of another little electrical zap.

Bio essen

Me and my girl were recently discussing the German penchant for biological food stuffs---what we call "organic food" in my country. The terminology strikes me as a little strange, since it suggests that if we weren't eating bio-food we would normally be eating inorganic substances. According to Wikipedia, an inorganic substance is any compound not involving carbon---except certain carbonates, simple oxides of carbon and cyanides, as well as the allotropes of carbon. I am trying to think of how many inorganic materials out there that we humans can really ingest. My list so far is: water, salt (sodium chloride), and potassium chloride. In addition there are some substances which are probably OK to swallow but indigestable: elemental carbon, glass, various pure metals and semimetals. This list is probably longer. Do any of my loyal readers have any other substances to add to the list?

Update: The list should include MgSO_4 according to Sveti. I wonder how it tastes? Other comments were not as helpful.

Least favorite things...

Putting on socks when my feet are wet!

Taco Hell

A funny story from Taco Bell

Tamal vs. Tamale

I was at the airport in LAX and I needed something to eat. There was a Mexican restaurant so I ate there, since I don't get Mexican food that often. I looked at their menu and decided to order their "tamale and enchilada" combo, when I realized that tamale is not the correct Spanish word. It should be spelled "tamal." Of course, I knew the Mexican servers at the counter knew this. So when ordering the food, I couldn't decide whether to say "tamale" or "tamal." On the one hand, tamal is correct, but on the other hand maybe I shouldn't be pretending to speak Spanish, and recognize the correct English translation as "tamale." In the end I asked for tamale, since I didn't want to act like a know-it-all. What do u think, my loyal readers, did I do the right thing?

Bulgarian Toilet

Originality

Last night I was outside my condo in Aspen when a lady walked by and asked my the name of the street we were on. I had no idea, so I shrugged my shoulders and she immediately shot back, "oh, that's original!" She walked away and left me a little puzzled. I wondered what sort of people she hangs out with, that so frequently shrug their shoulders when asked a street name. Or maybe not knowing street names has been a big fad in the US recently. Anyway, this morning when leaving my apartment I noticed that there was a street sign standing right behind the spot where I met the lady. The name on the sign is "Original."

Puzzle

Can you find a solution to the equation 2+1=0? If you can I will be very impressed!

Very surprised to find you reading my blog!

Anniversary

Today is the anniversary of my blog. Many thanks to my devoted readers!

Lots of Wax

My girl and I were recently in California, sleeping peacefully in the office. My sister was very nice and gave me some beautiful homemade candles, filled with flammable paper with all sorts of pretty colors. So naturally I decided to light the candle before we went to bed. I woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of my bookshelf on fire. I got up quickly, but sadly the fire was too big for me to blow out. So I had to put it out using a cup of water I got from the bathroom. One of my black pens was incinerated, and the burnt ink left a permanent black mark on top of my bookshelf. Luckily, none of my other precious toys were burned, but there were gobs of wax everywhere, including on my old class notes and my girl's backpack. The candle itself was very big before it melted. The end.

Pastry lady is back!

The pastry lady came back this morning. She seemed tan, she must have gone to the beach. She was not in a very good mood. I guess vacation didn't help.

Czech Men

Czech men don't look very good. Yesterday on our way back to Prague we stopped in the Aggip gasoline restaurant. I ordered a toasted sandwich. Just as we were about to sit down one of the ugliest guys I'd ever seen walked in to the restaurant. He had a square face and a round belly and the most hideous frock of hair---it was brown and super curly, the mess extended outwards about a half a foot from his skull and cascaded down below his shoulders. To make matters worse, he wore a red wife-beater showing his pudgy, sweaty arms and Bermuda shorts with a bright floral pattern. It was awful looking at him and I almost instantly lost my appetite. He seemed like a happy guy though---he enjoyed eating his pork and dumplings and gulping down his beer. Then came a surprise: my girl told me that he spoke Slovak. Usually Slovak guys are super cute. Anyway, eventually I did finish my sandwich. The end.

Pastry Lady

Every morning my girl and I like to get pastries in the subway on the way to work. I let her choose, cause she knows how to name the pastries in Czech. But I'm learning the names too, I can say vishnovi and menunkovi, but I'm not sure what pastries I'd get. Anyway, there's this mean lady who always serves us the pastries. We look forward to her refreshing style every morning. Last time I was paying for the pastries in change---I placed the coins on the counter so I could count them. This got her very annoyed, because I didn't place the change on the special dish who's purpose is to have change placed in it. She slammed her hand on the dish and said something in Czech, so I moved my money to the dish. I thought I was supposed to finish counting it first, but I guess not. Anyway, since this incident we haven't seen her at the pastry shop... there is a new girl, she is quite well-fed and pleasant looking. I wonder what happened to the mean pastry lady. The end.

Poor lamp

I broke my poor girl's lamp last night. I was lying on the couch when she told me to move. My feet were too long and they caught the spindly neck of the lamp. It fell and the glass lamp shade broke in half. I tried to catch the lamp with my foot before it fell, but it didn't help. There were a few very tiny shards of glass on the floor---I didn't believe it at first, so I touched one and it hurt my finger. So then I swept the rest up with a broom. The end.

4 week 5 day anniversary, correction

The last post was actually the 4 week 4 day anniversary of the blog, according to the local time in Palo Alto. So I have no choice but to retract the many thanks to my devoted readers communicated in my previous post. It should be the 4 week 5 day anniversary now, for real this time. Many thanks to my devoted readers!

4 week and 5 day anniversary

This post is to celebrate the 4 week and 5 day anniversary of my blog. Many thanks to my devoted readers!

Burnt menu

The other night my girl and I went out to eat. They gave us a menu, as usual. The menu was in Czech and I couldn't read it very well, so I was looking at it carefully. Then all the sudden the top of the menu burst into flames. I blew it out and ash got all over the table. We cleaned things up and thankfully the service did not notice. It turns out that the problem was a candle underneath the menu. These candles can be a real fire hazard, in my opinion. Anyway, we were able to fold up the menu in such a way that the fire damage could not be seen from the outside. We gave it back to the nice waitress---no harm done. I wonder who ended up getting the menu next. The end.

Smelly office

Today I came to the office and it smelled funny. It is strange, because the funny smell is not in the hallway. And there are no rotten foods in the office that I can discern. My office mate and I spent some time looking through the drawers of the office to try to figure out what it was. BTW, he smelled it too, it wasn't just me. But we still haven't figured out what the smell is. Instead we opened the window, and now we don't smell it so much. The end.

No Tornado

Today my girl and I were driving out to Bratislava. It was hot, but sometime after Brno we encountered a thunderstorm. The clouds were big, and I saw giant sheets of rain descending from the clouds in the distance. Then I saw something---a giant grey tube descending from the clouds. Needless to say, I was excited. But then I realized it was just a ray of sunshine shooting through the clouds. I was sad. The end.

Still Here

... still here.

Bon Mots

My sister thinks that I should drop a bon mot on my blog. So I chose a particularly big one---100 megatons of yeild---that I bought from the Russians. So now I'm droping it... we'll see what's left of the blog when its over.

Tornado in Prague

Recently I've been hoping to see a tornado in Prague. A few weeks ago there was a springtime storm and the wind was really fast, must've been 50 mph. I was in my office---the widows were shaking and there was all sorts of detritus flying in the air. It was rainy too. I ran between windows in hopes of spotting a vicious, cycling funnel. It would have been cool to see it tear through the panelaky. But I didn't see any. Last night there was another storm and it was a little windy and rainy. But no tornado there either. The end.

11 day anniversary

This post is to celebrate the 11th day anniversary of my blog. Many thanks to my devoted readers!

High Blood Pressure in Moscow

I was recently at a conference in Moscow. There was some Russian guy there giving a talk about noncommutative field theory. I could tell he was a mathematician, since he became very tense about precisely answering my questions. I got confused, and at one point I asked about the relation between his version of noncommutative field theory and the one most us physicists are familiar with. He said he was using the Hamiltonian formalism and couldn't comment on its relation to the Lagrangian. When he saw that this answer left me unsatisfied, he became more upset and at one point had to sit down and stop talking. He then collapsed and started shaking, looked like a seizure. The conference organizers tried to help him out, but eventually he had to be taken to the hospital. He never finished giving his talk, and I felt upset and guilty. The end.

Flaming trash in Moscow

I was walking down the Arbat street with my girl when we found a trashcan in flames. It was nice, because it was pretty cold outside and I could warm my hands. The melting plastic bottles made a bad smell though. I threw in one of my receipts so that the fire would have a more natural burning paper smell. But it didn't help much. The end.

No more Hindi

Sorry for the Hindi interruption. I enabled Hindi transliteration for my Indian readers, but then I realized I couldn't read my own posts.

हिन्दी नहीं जनता हूँ

इ दोन'टी स्पेअक हिन्दी

फॉर सम रासों ब्लॉगर इस व्रितिंग माय पोस्ट इन हिन्दी। दोन'टी ask me why !

Finger

My finger feels better now. Thank you for your concern.

Flaming Decorative Shrubbery

My girl and I like to go out to breakfast on weekends, because we never get a chance to enjoy a meal in the morning during the week. The other day we went to this French cafe. It is really expensive, but they have good bread. They also have two big decorative shrubs adorning the entrance. After breakfast I was waiting outside when---I'm not sure how---one of these shrubs went up in flames. It happened very fast and the fire was big. I realized that the fire could easily spread to the rest of the building, and in a moment of heroism I grabbed the flaming pot and pulled it out onto the sidewalk. There we could really watch it burn, without worrying about some larger disaster. Unfortunately the restaurant employees got word of the incident and came out with big buckets of water. The shrub was quickly extinguished. The end.

Flaming Candle

We also had another candle incident the other night. We bought this really pretty painted glass candle holder. I like to put candles in it because the candlelight glows through the painted glass and makes pretty colors. But I wanted to be careful with this one, because it is extra delicate... no exploding glass this time. So when I put a candle inside, I wanted to first make sure it had its own protective casing, so the hot wax wouldn't melt onto the glass and cause explosions. We found a votive candle with plastic casing, big enough to last through the night. But then I woke up in the middle of the night to a strange sound. The whole candle---plus its plastic casing---had gone up into huge, very smelly flames. I put the fire out, but it was a mess. The glass candle holder didn't explode, though I had to clean out the inside. The end.

Exploding glass

This reminds me of another incident that happened the other night. I like to burn candles while we sleep so it won't be too dark. We had these nice glass candle holders... they were thick and small, they had nice colors. But one night while we were asleep the candle holder got so hot that it exploded. There were colorful shards of glass everywhere. I heard it explode too---it woke me up. The end

Burning glass

It's hot here so we tried to make iced tea. My girl poured boiling water into a glass and it broke. It was the only glass we had. She put it to rest in the sink and I wanted to see how broken the glass was. So I picked it up and burned my finger on the boiling water. I immediately dropped the glass into the sink and it really broke this time. My finger still hurts. The end.

You'll never remember this blog name, I bet!