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Trebuchet's Journal  Got in a car accident on 101 today. I'm fine, by the way, before I go into the details and freak anyone out. So is my dad. He didn't feel anything at all. :) My dad and I were going up to SFO to pick up my sister. We were in his car, me in passenger seat, in the left lane of 101 up around Belmont. There was a slowdown in front of us, ripple effect, everyone breaking hard, and he slammed on the breaks and came to a stop about 5 feet from a Jeep Cherokee in front of us. There was a Sears van a good hundred yards or so behind us when this all happened... and the driver was apparently not paying attention. He slammed on his breaks 10-15 feet from us, going something like 50mph... real nice set of skid marks. The paramedics that showed up estimated that he was still traveling 25mph or so when he hit us. The rear of my dads car (a Chevy Malibu) crumpled in about 2 feet, rear window shattered. When I heard the screeching behind us, the corner of my eye caught something in the passenger side mirror: waaaaaay too much motion. And there was a split second of real-time that lasted a little while in my brain, where I knew we were gonna get hit. And as soon as the impact came, there was another split second that seemed like about 20 seconds in my brain where there was this moment of complete mental clarity and total silence... "Oh shit, we're not far enough from the Jeep," I thought... and then we slammed into it. Front bumper crumpled about 12 inches in. The Jeep had a little damage to it's bumper, which was bent in a few inches, and it hit a VW (a Passat or something) in front of it. Everyone got out of the cars and was fine. The VW guy was pretty funny. He's the one who called 911. He looked at his bumper which had a couple scrapes in the paint a little ding in the fiberglass and said, "You know, if it was any normal person that hit me, I'd just forget about it and beon my way... but since it was a Sears van that caused this... yeah, I'll file a claim." Heh heh... When the paramedics showed up and asked me if I was ok, I said I felt fine, but my neck was just a bit sore... 10-15 minutes later I was strapped to a gurney and my spine was immobilized. Eheh. "We always take every precaution with possible spinal injuries." Fine by me, ma'am... she was cute, too. So was the driver. They took me to Stanford, x-rayed my spine, everything was ok. The accident happened a little before 5pm. I was x-rayed at about 6:30, and didn't get out of the hospital until after 8. I'm gonna take a digital camera with me tomorrow when we go to where the car got towed, and I'll post some pics. The damage to the car was pretty impressive. More impressive that no one got seriously injured given how bad the car looked. Those crumple zones really do absorb most of the kenetic energy imparted from a collision. Mr. Farmer would be proud. Current mood: amused, but a little sore. One more little tidbit from my trip to DC: When I went back to New Hampshire for a cousins wedding last year, they confiscated the finger nail clippers I used to keep on my keychain at the Manchester airport. I was more amused than annoyed at the time. After all, if you look real carefully on the signs they have up now, they actually do list nail clippers as prohibited objects. So why is it, if they aren't allowed past security, there is a store in the A/B terminal (well beyond the security checkpoint) at Dulles International that sells them? I'm confused. If I can buy them at a shop next to my gate, why where they taken away before, and why are they on the prohibited list? I don't mind silly security so much (I mean, come on... finger nail clippers? "Take this plane to Cuba... or... I'll give you a manicure!!")... but at least enforce them equally across the board. Current mood:  amused.
A lot of places these days have automatic flushing toilets and/or automatic faucets in the sinks in public restrooms. The D concourse of the Salt Lake City International Airport has automatic soap dispensers. Which would be cool except that they dispense about 1/3 of the soap needed to actually wash your hands. I guess most new technologies have growing pains. Haha. Current mood: amused.Current music: Randy Hahn and Drew Ramenda. So I'm in Virginia, visiting my best friend Doodlebug, and her boyfriend, and her cats. It's real nice out here, warmer than it's been back in California, actually. They keep threatening to keep me out here cos I bring such good weather with me. Saw two movies, one good, one... coulda been good. "In the Bedroom" is an indie film, put out by Good Machine, I believe. Very well done piece of film-making. Well acted, well directed. Good emotional acting. I highly recommend it. "A Beautiful Mind" would have been a wonderful movie, if it was remotely factual. There was actually a Dr. Nash, and he did win a Nobel Prize for his theories on equilibrium and governing dynamics... but that's about how far the film and reality mesh. To put in another way: There are about as many facts about the life of John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind" as there were facts about the Pacific theater of World War II in "Pearl Harbor". Not a good sign in a movie "based on a true story". Now, about the something... if you are ever in Arlington, VA, and find yourself feeling a little peckish, or even down right famished... whatever you do, no matter how bad your hunger, do not, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, ever go to a restaurant that I will not name, but who's name, when translated from Spanish into English, means, "The Tuna". I cannot stress this enough. It's the kind of place you don't expect to see many stray animals around, if you get my drift. There seems to be a lack of good Mexican food in the DC area. According to Em it is pretty much a lost cause trying to find a place that will measure up with just about anything the Bay Area can offer. It's a sad state of affairs when you ask for "fine mexican cuisine" and the locals are as likely to point you towards Taco Bell as anywhere else. There is, however, a fine Indian Restaurant called Haandi. It's in Falls Church, Virginia. Not sure exactly where it is since I don't usually do much driving out there when I'm visiting, but it should be easy enough to find in the phone book. Current mood: cheerful.Current music: Grand Buffet.
If I was not Mario, I would be:
 </a> Which drink are you? Wendy's Founder Dave Thomas Dead I don't know quite why, but I always found his commercials vaguely comforting. I mean... it's not like they were always good commercials, and it's not like he was a particularly gifted actor... although being a "straight man" is a lot harder than it seems, so maybe he was actually pretty good after all. But there was something about seeing him on TV that just sorta felt... somehow... right. Even amidst crisis, economic recession, and a brooding, possibly endless "war on terrorism"... you always knew, somewhere, in the back of your head that, gosh darn it, Dave Thomas was an O.K. guy. It's not even like I ate at Wendy's more than, oh... probably 2 or 3 times my entire life. But I was always sure Dave was hard at work, somewhere, providing the public at large with food that was almost certainly better than McDonalds at reasonable prices. Perhaps I should give my custom to one of his establishments out of some kind of respect...  July 2, 1932 - January 8, 2002 Current mood:  groggy.
Some friends and I played a few games of pool while waiting to see a movie last night. My pool game, of late, has been seriously sucking it up. I know I'm pretty in-consistant anyway, but I'm not usually consistantly bad. My Aikido Sensei used to say that every so often, a student would tend to go through a hard stage in training. Their technique would seem to be back-sliding. Rather than becoming more fluid, their motions would become more awkward. Rather than becoming more stable, their balance would tend to falter more often. He always said that periods like that didn't mean that you were actually getting worse at Aikido, but that your technique was poised to make a great leap forward. I'm sorta hoping that's what up with my pool game... but somehow I don't think so. I think I just need to play more regularly. The fact that I've been mostly playing on bar tables and last night was on a full size table probably didn't help much, either. Ok, now on to the movie. If you were, by any chance, thinking about seeing "Behind Enemy Lines", don't. It is fucking horrible. It's story is as well thought out as a fresh pile of horse droppings, it's action sequences are so absurd it makes baby Jesus cry, and even Gene Hackmen and Owen Wilson, who I normally like even in bad movies, deliver a lackluster performances. I guess there's only so much you can do when working with a director who has a larger shoe size than IQ, and the festering, pus-filled sore that was the script. It had seemed to me that recently, action films have been getting smarter... more believeable. Maybe not believable in plot and suchlike, but in how the gunfights and whatnot took place. People tend to take cover when being shot at in movies these days. Soldiers tend to fire short bursts rather than "rock and roll" on full auto. The hero tends to be a in bad shape after taking on the bad guys, rather than the old-school hero who wouldn't even have mussed hair after single-handedly blowing up the enemy stronghold. But apparently the director of behind enemy lines never watched one of those 80's action sequences and thought, "Gee, I bet if 80 guys with assault rifles and vehicle mounted machine guns were all firing at someone running away from them in a straight line, HE'D GET FUCKING TURNED INTO HAMBURGER IN A COUPLE OF SECONDS!!!". So, allow me, as a free sample of how I could help Hollywood if movie executives would hire me on as a "reality consultant", could help clear a few things up (in all fairness, the last two don't really apply to "Behind Enemy Lines"): People caught standing (or even running) in the open when shot at by automatic weapons tend to die. Quickly. Granted, a single person with an assault rifle firing fully automatic probably won't hit much. Assault rifles held by a human are actually quite un-stable, and hence, are not very accurate after the first couple shots. 10 or more people shooting on full-auto, however, are gonna tear a lot of stuff up just based on sheer volume of flying lead. Likewise, heavy mounted, belt-fed machine guns are remarkably good at killing people who aren't behind ample cover. We, as a species, have known this since World War I. The worlds professional soldiers have never forgotten that lesson, learned rather painfully at a cost of millions of young mens lives. Why, then, do Hollywood film-makers seem to forget it so often? You cannot eject from a jet-fighter at Mach-3. You will become a thick red paste and be scattered over miles and miles of countryside if you try. The fastest you can safely eject from a plane is at a few hundred miles per hour. Helicopters are not a stable platform to shoot a gun from. Neither are moving cars. A helicopter doing anything but sitting on the ground with it's engines completely off, is constantly in motion. If you are constantly in motion, you are not going to be accurate with a gun. There is a reason the worlds militaries only use weapons with very high rates of fire on helicopter gunships. When shooting a sniper rifle from a helicopter in flight, even if you are a U.S. Marine, Special Forces operative, or Navy SEAL, you are not going to hit a damn thing you aim at. Volume of fire is your only hope. Cars, unless they are actually carrying bombs, do not explode when they crash into things, Most of the time they don't even catch fire. If a car becomes engulfed in flames from a ruptured gas tank, much less actually explodes after being in an accident, the company that made the car usually gets sued for a couple billion dollars or something... gas tanks have been engineered to not explode, and not even rupture in most cases, even in a really nasty crash, since the 1940's or 50's. Same thing goes for big trucks. You can put matches out in diesel fuel. It's actually quite hard to make diesel burn, even when you are trying to. C-4 does not explode unless you detonate it on purpose C-4 is actually quite stable chemically. It requires either an electrical discharge or some kind of electro-chemical reaction to make it explode, I can't remember which. You can take a pinch off a brick of C-4 and light it on fire. It will burn slowly and steadily. It will not explode. Ground-pounders in Viet Nam used to cook meals with the stuff, on occasion. Current mood:  annoyed.
So, in an moment of reletively rare self-reflection, a couple of things occured to me about this upcoming year: 1) I will turn 29 years old 2) My 10 year High School reunion will happen These led me to consider where I am right now, and what I have to show for my life, in general, since graduating from High School (or, indeed, since being born). Now, this is probably not exactly the best time for me to be having these kinds of thoughts... being currently un-employed, reletively out of shape, and lacking a girlfriend (no doubt evidence of causality, there...). But what the hell... it's the new year, right? Time for resolutions and a new start on life. Now, I've already kept one resolution this year, which was to quit smoking. Since I've never actually been a smoker, this was not too hard (people always say you should set "achievable" goals, right? Far be it from me to ignore sound advice). I can't say as I actually made any others... I don't usually make resolutions... normally I change my life when I see that it needs changing, rather than try and modify it due to any particular time of year. But uh, getting back on track... it occurs to me that I do have a number of things to be thankful for, and in some ways, proud of: Ok... time to end that particular list... I think I'm going to have problems sleeping from the imagery of that last one... But uh... I guess I do have a few things I can look back on and say, "Yeah, I'm not a complete waste of oxygen." And really, what more can you ask for? Current mood: reflective. For about, oh... 15 or 16 years now (ever since I was 12 or 13, I think), I've been cooking Christmas breakfast for my family and any relatives that happen to be present. I like cooking when I have the right tools and environment to work with... which is to say, generally speaking, when I'm not cooking at my house. Though, to be fair, the house kitchen is getting better these days. We have a never ending problem involving dirty dishes, and cleaning up after a party is always a serious pain in the buttocks, even when we use paper plates and plastic utensils for almost everything... but oh well. <Insert sound of the "Tangent Gong" being rung> But back to the Christmas breakfast thing. I'm not sure just how the tradition started, but it's definitely a tradition now. The menu hasn't even changed really since I can remember it starting. Some elements differ a little year-to-year, but the main selections are always the same: Cheesy Eggs - scrambled eggs with cheese... lots of cheese Bacon - multiple local markets have butcher-cut bacon, about 3/8 of an inch thick or more before ya cook it... good stuff, unless you don't like bacon Standard DGP's - I think an Aunt or Cousin first called them DGP's (Damn Good Potatoes)... and I'm not entirely certain why they are called "standard" since they tend to be a little different each year... but they're generally pretty good. Oh yeah, they're basically what some restaurants would call "Country-style" hash-browns... sliced rather than shredded, cooked with a little salt, pepper, and a couple spices, and browned. Usually there is some kind of coffee-cake or something as well, but I usually just buy that. This year, however, my moms boyfriend may actually make a coffee-cake... which would rule. He's a damn fine cook. Another common element is fresh-squeezed orange juice or something close to it, but I think we're gonna have Tangerine Mimosa's this year... nothin like being good and sloshed when you start opening presents. Odwalla makes a really nice Tangerine juice blend during the winter. Add in some decent Champaigne, and... yum! The only problem with cooking breakfast every Christmas is that I have to wake up early to do it. The potatoes have to be boiled before they get sliced and browned (makes it so all you have to do is brown 'em, not actually cook them all the way through in the frying pan... much much easier). So to serve breakfast in the 9:30-10am area, I hafta start in around 8-ish, which means waking up at something like 7:30. Which is earlier than I tend to wake up even when I'm working, generally. So yeah... I cook breakfast. I'm good with breakfast. I'm also a pretty fair hand with beef and chicken. And pastas. And most sauces. And anything on a grill. Fish... not sure about fish. I don't like fish unless it's really GOOD fish... and fish is tricky. WIth most other kinds of meat, if it's not done perfect, it's still usually pretty good... fish tends to be a lot less forgiving. So I've never really tried to cook much fish. I need to learn deserts, though. Cakes and suchlike are easy enough if you have a decent recipie and follow directions, but there's no way in hell I can improvise when it comes to baking. Improvising with chicken and cow is pretty simple... improvising a cake is asking for disaster unless you really know what yer doing. And I don't think improvised baking is in my genes. I can remember my mothers attempts at bread during my child-hood. A lot of them could be used to put down a foundation for a large building... or for personal and home defense. Bread is easily concealable and you are unlikely to be detained for having bread on your person. I'm sure someone in congress thinks bread should be carried on a permit-only basis, but thankfully they've been shouted down whenever they bring it up... so far. Write your congressional representative today and tell them to PROTECT YOUR RIGHT TO OWN AND CARRY BAKED GOODS! <Gong!> But uh... I need to learn deserts... other than Kheer (Indian rice pudding, spelled multiple ways in our roman alphabet, so send your corrections to bgates@microsoft.com, I'll spell it how I want to. Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Anna Eschoo, and good old George W. "Dubya" Bush are making sure that I can spell Kheer any damn way I want! Except "Dubya" probably thinks Kheer is some kind of terrorist code-word, and not a tasty treat from our friends half-way around the world... the same people that brought us curry and Tandoori chicken, among other fine dishes, so please DON'T BOMB THEM EVEN THOUGH THEY AREN'T WHITE! <GONG!> Yeah, I can make Kheer easy enough. I need to learn chocolate Mousse from Peaches though... I'm a sucker for chocolate Mousse. If anyone reading this ever wants to seduce me, chocolate mousse is a real easy way to do it. And mushrooms. Mushrooms are good. Roasted portabello mushrooms = win. So does a really good steak. Yeah, a good steak with mushrooms somewhere nearby, and chocolate mousse, and you've pretty much got me. No need for getting just the right wine (I wouldn't know it if you did - "Hey... this wine is red, isn't it?! Yep! Sure is! Red!") or setting the mood with candles or anything like that. A slice of dead cow, mushrooms, and fluffy chocolate... that's all ya need. So uh... yeah... all you attractive single women in Silicon Valley reading this (no doubt millions of you by now) take notes... cos I've just given you one hell of an edge over the millions of attractive single women in Silicon Valley who haven't read this and are fighting tooth and nail this very minute for my affections. Or something like that. A guy can always hope, right? I'm even house-broken. Ok, g'night folks... I think this has been long enough... 's what I get for letting my mind wander when I write these things... Current mood: mellow.
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