I’m a big fan of birthdays.
Jay’s not.
His point is that it’s just another day.
My point is that if there was no birthday, there would be no Jay.
Now wrap your mind around that philosophical conundrum.
Here is his first present (yes, there will be more!) from Dot. It’s a shirt designed by our friend Alfie Lee, a creative super-genius who lives in New York City with his equally talented wife Ginnie.
Jay turns 30 on Thursday.
And he’s my No. 1 Banana. No pun intended.
Don’t ask how I got to be surfing the Internet for Rubik’s Cube.
Click on the photo to watch one Chris Hardwick solve the puzzle at the Caltech Dallas Summer Tournament 2005. It’s a 4x4x4, known as Rubik’s Revenge. Regular Rubiks have three tiles on each side. The Revenge has four.
This guy is burly. He’s solving my all-time favorite puzzle in seconds. And under competition pressure. Watch him do it blindfolded. (For the record, he took 1 hour 54 minutes prior to this video to memorize the cube and plan his moves.)
I never managed to solve the Rubik.
Want to feel more inept? Check out Strange Puzzle and click on any of the names and download. Dudes (and these are mainly guys) are doing it one-handed (and on a Rubik’s Revenge), blindfolded, and in record time.
Why are geeks so cool?
Is the Trim, ladies and gentlemen.
Tada!
[For the Singaporeans reading this, I had no idea what a trim was, too. I couldn't fathom how floor and wall didn't necessarily connect. Thus, you get a technique known as the "Trim". We have been living with No Trim, and still are, in some parts of the house. You can't tell from the picture, but I spent Sunday on my knees filling holes in the Trim with a plasticine-like substance. All Hail, The Mighty Trim!]
And the winner of the Painting Internship is Dot, because she lives here.
Look carefully.
Take your time.
Examine every detail.
No hurry.
Now, tell me, what is new in this picture?
Send your entries to Jay’s Construction, c/o House in Spitting Distance of Noisy Club, Seattle, WA. Top prize is a painting internship. Brushes not included.
Madison Park beach after dinner. A toro sushi and sake combination gives Jay wings. Notice Dot did not attempt to climb structure.
Bet you can’t tell I love cupcake.
This is the actual, step-by-step process of How Dot Devours A Cupcake, or as Jay likes to put it, the Cupcake Massacre.
Start with half a dozen of the city’s finest cupcakes, in a variety of frostings. No prizes for guessing that I picked the pink one. I know, I know. I’m so predictable I bore myself.
Take one tentative bite, because, as you know, all that build-up to that first bite can lead to disappointment if you take too big of a bite.
I like to slowly nibble at the cake portion of the cupcake, as I prefer to save my frosting for the end.
This makes for an unstable, top-heavy cupcake.
Accidents resulting in loss of cake material is common. See Picture 5.
In the end, the cupcake collapses on itself. The frosting is too heavy for the cake to hold up.
I love frosting.
Do not attempt this at home.
I love reading the news because it allows me to forget for a moment I live in a twilight zone of inconsiderate club owners, illegal noise, incompetent city officials and to give me a little perspective that my pain is relative to a lot of the crap that’s going on out there.
It also allows me to find out factoids like this: Former heavyweight George Foreman sold the rights to his name and was paid $146.5 million (mee-llion!) by kitchen appliance maker Salton to put his name on a fat-reducing grill.
Old news, you say. But Muhammad Ali just sold his name for $50 million to the same company who controls the rights to Elvis Presley’s image. Do you see a trend?
There is value in your name.
Maybe I’m looking for work in the wrong places. Maybe I should be making a deal to put my name on a machine yet to be inventedâ€â€a machine that will create a word for you when you are at a loss to express yourself. I give you, the Wordarizer!
Yummy char kuay teow? Greasilicious.
Cute guy on the street? Dudesome.
A girl? Dudettiful.
Noisy club in the neighborhood? Illegal. (You don’t need no fancy words for this kind of $**#.)
Dear Police Officer,
Do not motion me to your car at 1 am in the morning like I’m a car-hop at a burger stand. I already feel like I’m begging for your help when I am forced to call 911 because of the noise. Oh sure, stay in the car. Don’t bother getting out. I’m perfectly fine freezing out in the cold by myself.
Do not lecture me on where to live in the city. So it is my fault that there is a noisy club next to my home? You sound just like the club owner, who blamed us for living in the city. This is smear tactic at its best. Don’t blame the offender, attack the victim. I have lived and flourished in vibrant cities from San Francisco to New York City. In these places, noise ordinances were upheld by the LAW.
Do not lie to me about the club having an “amplified sound permit”. I believed you last night, but I understand this morning that the club has no such thing.
Do not condescend to me like I’m out of my mind. If you can hear the noise from your patrol car, as you admit you can, and the distance to your car is way more than 75 feet from the offending property, then it is your job to do something about it. Don’t I pay taxes too?
Do not tell me, “This state is victim unfriendly.” (REAL QUOTE) I feel helpless enough without law enforcement telling me I have no more rights.
Do you know what it feels like to hate your home? Feel unsafe in your home? I doubt you do.
Sincerely,
Sleepless In Seattle
P/S Department of Planning & Development, City Council, and the Mayor: Your letters are in the mail.
You know how in Singapore you never think about where trash goes after you throw it into your personalized chute in your HDB flat?
Well, goodbye ignorance, hello education.
With home renovations, trash just multiplies like a bad rash. However, when said trash reaches a critical point (of overwhelming your path into the house), you have to get rid of it. You need to take it to a “Transfer Station”. In your Subura Stationwagon.
Therefore, you get Dot, Riding in the Car, with Trash.
This is what blogs are made of.
Firstly, the name Transfer Station is a misnomer. It’s more like “Deep Open-Air Hole You Throw Trash Into”.
Secondly, it is an art to load up a passenger car with construction trash consisting rotting wood and bags of unknown substances. Passenger and Driver must also be careful not to allow any living organisms breeding on rotting wood to crawl onto Body.
Thirdly, I think the guy who works in the bulldozer pushing all the random trash into a GIANT HOLE should make more money than Bill Gates.
Lastly, I’d like to note for the record: There are no air fresheners at Transfer Stations.
I really, really, feel like I’m in some sort of cop movie these days. Court appearances, late night police calls, small claims suit aside, I wake up Saturday morning to see not one, two, but three police cars at the neighborhood porto-potty.
It was pretty exciting to see them all pull up, one after another, very purposefully, but then, nothing.
No action, no sirens, nothing. At least give me a foot chase or something! Whoever it was, the sight of Seattle’s Finest pulling up in three cars was enough to stop whatever illegal goings-on was going on.
Unless, of course, all three patrols needed relief from too much morning coffee. At the same time.
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