A Lesson in Kinder Eggs

Pinknest and I were doing a little shopping in the city today and I happened to purchase a Kinder egg. I've mentioned them before in my blog but only in relation to a Turkish knockoff called Toto. Pinknest had never had the pleasure of a Kinder egg and wanted me to open it so she could see it. I was still full from lunch so I wasn't ready to open it just yet, plus the toys contain small parts and are not easily assembled on an NYC sidewalk. However, as a public service announcement for Pinknest and anyone else to enjoy, here's the anatomy of a Kinder egg.




Ps. For those of you enjoying the mini-tour of Scotland already in progress, it will resume shortly. Thanks for your patience.

The joy that is a fresh Kinder egg.

Behold the naked Kinder egg.

The chocolate egg opened revealing plastic capsule.

The opened capsule with toy parts and instructions.

The assembly instructions. This one was really easy.

The completed toy. I have to say it was pretty disappointing compared to the Turkish ones I've purchased. See them here and here.

Land of the Scots pt. 2

The mini-tour of Scotland continues below. Most of this set were shot in Edinburgh except the first few which were at Stirling Castle.

The Royal Bank of Scotland

I'm not sure where my neck went but I'd like to find it again. Anyone need a workout partner?

Train station in Edinburgh

Estyn knit that cute hat in like two days. I supplied the scarf.

Old town Edinburgh on a gorgeous day

Greyfriars Bobby's grave. He's like the Elvis of dogs.

Pretty rocket

Who's a cute astronaut? Estyn is!!

Well hello, Dolly. Yes that's right, this is that Dolly, the world's first cloned mammal. She is now stuffed and residing in a well lit glass box in the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The best part, the box rotates. Awesome!

Edinburgh Castle

This tree is to the left at the top of the staircase below

One of many staircases that I climbed in Edinburgh

Crossing from new town to old town in Edinburgh

Awesome monument. Unfortunately I don't know for what.

Scotland has great road signs

The cathedral at Dunblane

Estyn and Aly. Very cute!!

A top contender for favorite photo. Taken with camera sitting on wall at Stirling.

The weavers at Stirling Castle are reproducing the Unicorn Tapestries and you can watch them work in the Tapestry Studio. Here's the story of the reproductions.

Tree with big knobbly warts

Looking out from the chapel

The Unicorn in Captivity tapestry reproduction at Stirling Castle. You can learn about the original one here.

Great hall at Stirling Castle. The ceiling was amazing, looked like the interior of an upside down boat.

Land of the Scots pt. 1

Here's a sampling of photos from my trip to Scotland. Jet lag has caught up with me so I'll be posting more after a good night's sleep. If you can't wait till then, you can check out the rest of the pix over here.

I don't know why but I was obsessed with the little trolleys the cannons rest on. They're very appealing to me from a design perspective.

The tree in the image below reveals itself to actually be two trees. I think the little smidgen of pink at the bottom of this photo is Estyn's hat. :)

Quite possibly my most favorite photo from the whole trip. This tree sits at the end of a lawn in Stirling Castle.

Cool plant

The chance you take when purchasing your monument at Gravestones-R-Us

The CLOSED sign seals the deal

Estyn and Aly ignoring the warning above the window "Quarrelling is taboo"

They went thataway

I want these two guys outside my window keeping an eye on things

Woods aflame in the setting sun.

Secret rendezvous

The setting sun on the strange tree

Estyn and Zoe in a sea of leaves

Beautiful Scottish countryside nay but steps from where we were staying

A Wee Post

In case you've been wondering where I've been, I was in Scotland all last week. You can take a sneak peek at my photos here but I'll be posting the highlights with captions on Blogger later today.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Today is Pinknest's birthday so go over there and wish her a happy birthday.

The Wonders of Search

My blog is the first result if you Google "scantly clad hipsters". I think that's pretty cool in a silly and meaningless sort of way. I was having trouble spelling scantily when I wrote the post so I looked it up in a dictionary and came across scantly first. Both mean the same thing but I think scantily is the more popular word. The funny thing is if I had used scantily instead of scantly then my blog may not have been first in the search results.

Blizzard Blah Blah

The NYT has a fun article about the blizzard today. Here are the highlights.

1. Snowfall in Central Park set a record of 26.9", Brooklyn got less than 20".
2. The security guards at the Central Park zoo measure the snowfall
3. Best quote describing the snow itself "Very, very fluffy. Like a Persian cat in a roomful of hair dryers"

Blizzard Blogging Ver. 2.0

The blizzard slowed down a little bit around 1:30pm so I decided to head out and snap some more shots. These are the highlights but there are many more over here. It's my first time to try a photo hosting site and I'd like to know what you think. Please let me know with a comment if you found it easy to use.


Ghostly snow church

Oreo eyes+banana beret+carrot nose+banana peel smile=awesome!!

Neither rain nor snow.......

This tree had red berries all over it. It looked amazing in a sea of white.

Fire hydrant snow cone

This was in McCarren Park, who knows why?

Red house with snow. Lorimer at Norman.

Symmetry sorta

Dogs love snow

The buildings look great

Truckus Clearsnowicus

Early French Cinema Meets the Fridge

Disorder in my environment causes my thoughts to get screwy so I like to keep things neat. My refrigerator door had gotten way out of hand. There were menus, postcards, iron-ons, and magnets from all over the place. I suppose I could have organized them but a christmas present gave me a better idea.

Estyn's brother Garth gave me a flipbook with a scene from early french cinema. It's a great scene of two little dogs doing backflips. I didn't want to just leave the book on a shelf where I'd rarely enjoy it so I hatched a plan. I decided to cut the book apart into individual pages and arrange all the pages on my fridge using magnets. It came out much better than I hoped and now I can enjoy the images everyday.

In case you're a french cinema buff, the scene is from Onésima et le coeur by Jean Durand produced in 1913 by Gaumont.

The beginning

Order but with crazy backflipping pooch

Go dog go

Too busy

What a mess

Blizzard Blogging

The blizzard of '06 coming at you live.

The window screen makes a nice filter

Rear window with cable and snow

Into the wind

Marshmallow cars, mmmmm

View from the kitchen

View from front porch

Chevy truck with snow

She must really need to go somewhere

BQE Deconstruction

The Brooklyn Queens Expressway or BQE is elevated along Park Ave. in Brooklyn. The NYSDOT is completely reconstructing this part of the freeway known as the Park Avenue and Nassau Concord Viaducts. To do so, they have to disassemble the current bridge. This is a freeway used by 160,000 cars a day so they can't just shut it down. They're doing it lane by lane. Where you see sky in the pix below used to be the rightmost lane and shoulder of the westbound side. It's a little disconcerting to look up through the BQE. There used to be solid concrete between those girders.

Grand Ave. at Park looking west

Grand Ave. at Park looking east

I'm No Fashion Plate But....

Old Navy still carries cargo pants and shorts. At this point, I'm not sure if they're way behind or far ahead of the fashion curve. The saddest part is they wouldn't carry them if men weren't buying them. Hey fellas, can we move on?

Subjectivity

This sticker was on an envelope at work. NYCATA is the New York City Art Teachers Association. My view on this is they're feeding the artist to the birds but a co-worker viewed it as beauty being fed to children. It's all in how you view it. My friend who discovered the sticker added the thought balloon. Now it's twisted AND funny.

What's a Blog?

Sissy and Madre, a couple of regular readers, were wondering about the origins of blogs. I knew that the term blog was a shortened form of weblog but I didn't know much about how they came to be so I did a little research, very little.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia, comes to the rescue with this entry . Blogs are basically the next evolutionary step from online forums. Initially, the ability to blog was limited to those who had a technical knowledge of the internet. Blogging exploded in popularity when free services like Blogger and LiveJournal came along and allowed anyone with the skills to fill out an online form to become a publisher.

Blogs come in many flavors. There are blogs devoted to specific topics such as gadgets, cities, real estate, and the media. Those examples are ad-supported commercial blogs with a paid staff to write and edit them. However, the vast majority of blogs are merely online journals where people post whatever's on their mind.

Blogging and the internet in general raises a pretty important question that I'd like to discuss later and that is "What is lost by the loss of privacy?" We're giving away a large portion of our privacy as we surf, shop, and pontificate on the web. Privacy advocates think this is a bad thing. Is it? What do we gain in return? Stay tuned to find out.

On the Decks and In the Library

Spinning

Beastie Boys - Ill Communication
The Editors - The Back Room
Supersystem - Always Never Again
White Rose Movement - Kick
Laurie Anderson - Big Science
Kasabian - Kasabian
Devo - New Traditionalists
Casiotones for the Painfully Alone - Etiquettte

Reading

A. J. Jacobs "The Know-It-All"
Temple Grandin "Animals in Translation"
NYT Online

Up Next

Trevor Corson "The Secret Life of Lobsters"
Malcolm Gladwell "Blink"
Stephen Hawking "A Briefer History of Time"
Khaled Hosseini "The Kite Runner"
Simon Singh "Big Bang"

Austin meet Brooklyn

My friend Kevin from Austin visited our fair city this week. He's been to NYC quite a few times but about all he's seen of Brooklyn is my house. I thought it was about time to show him what the city looks like from the good side of the East River so we hopped on a bus in Williamsburg and headed to downtown Brooklyn. After wandering around Brooklyn Heights for a while, I finally managed to navigate us to the promenade. This is one of my favorite places to go in Brooklyn and it didn't disappoint. It was nearing sunset and the views were spectacular. We wandered up and down the promenade snapping pics along the way. It was fairly cold that day so we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

It's a little hard to see but the Staten Island Ferry is on the lower left.

Fellow photog.

The Seaport at sunset.

The view from the south end of the promenade overlooking the northbound lanes of the BQE. The southbound lanes are underneath the northbound.

This house was used in a classic movie. My cousin knows which one but I don't.

Kev says Hi!

Tug boat looking for something to tug.

Two icons digitally joined.

The perils of vanity.

Have a seat, there's plenty of room.

Warehouse with clouds. Oh yeah, and the city.

The downside of having the promenade in your back yard. Watcha wanna bet these rules don't get followed so much?

Wouldn't mind having their address.

Who watches the watcher? I do.

Big sky in Brooklyn

Enough is Enough

The razor market has to be one of biggest rackets in the drugstore. You can't buy a pack of refills or disposables for less than $8 or so. I managed to avoid this scam for years by shaving with a double-edge single blade. A pack of 10 Wilkinson Swords cost about $2 and would last me well over a year. I was a shaving luddite and my wallet appreciated it. However, I recently bought a pack of Schick Xtremes which is a triple blade razor and, to my dismay, I really liked them. I rarely get nicks or razor burn anymore and that's a good thing. I'm still bitter about the cost of refills though.

Now the geniuses at Gillette have come out with a razor that has five blades on the face and a single blade along the top edge. That's six blades total. Better yet, it comes in a powered and non-powered version. I'm sorry but that is just the most ridiculous thing that I've ever seen. It's so ridiculous that The Onion ironically foretold this insanity two years ago. Four replacement cartridges for this monstrosity are in the neighborhood of $15. Four!! Gillette calls this new beast the Fusion. I guess the name represents the fusion of your money with their pocket if you're foolish enough to buy into their marketing.

How many blades do you use?
	1
	2
	3
	4
	5
	Electric
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Ps. I hate leaving on a sour note so here's a helpful shaving product. I've been using it for over a year and it works extremely well.

Hello Kitty

Logo for a Japanese moving company. Could it be any cuter? I know who's doing my next move.

The van was parked by McCarren Park and I was a little concerned about taking pictures of it because the driver was still in it. However, on closer inspection, it looked like he was napping.

The Specimen Remix Update

A while back, I told you about a remix competition that my good friend Matt aka The Specimen had entered. The results of the contest were announced today and Matt won!! Congrats to him and thanks to those of you who may have voted for him. Shame on the rest of you for not voting for him. You can make it up to him by buying a CD from his website. You'll be glad you did.

Jeff's Opening Friday Jan. 27th

It only took me a week plus to post them but here's the pix from Jeff's opening.

Jeff's wall piece greets you as you enter the gallery

Jeff entertains Estyn and to a lesser extent Anita with his witty repartee

Say cheese

Don't forget the instructions

Regular or Decaf?

Birds rule, especially black ones

Jason, obviously proud to know the artist

Can you say flash?

Anita and Matt discuss the relevance of art in a wartime economy. Anita's for it but Matt's suspicious.

Estyn and Katherine catch up

Jeff's latest in situ

People enjoying the opening

Jeff's Dad wonders why is that goofball Michael snapping his photo.

Had I Been Born in Japan

My japanese name would be
石丸 Ishimaru (round stone) 雄大 Masahiro (big hero).
Discover what your Japanese name would be.

Enter your family name first, cause that's how they do it in Japan.

While I'm on the subject of Japan, I recently read this interview with Mark Tilden, a robotics engineer, that had a great quote. He said, "Personally I like the Japanese. They invented Pocky. Obvious genius." I agree with him, Pocky is delicious and we should thank the Japanese for it.

Lately I've been trying to get into a puzzle game that's very popular in Japan right now called Sudoku. It's a deceptively simple logic puzzle that's totally kicking my butt. I downloaded a version of it for my PDA and so far my best time on a very easy puzzle is 15 minutes. That's a vast improvement over my earlier times of 45 minutes but still not very good.

Uhh....

...hi. I didn't expect to see you here. I've been good, and you? Well, I have been very busy. And by very, I mean not at all. I know I should have written sooner but it got harder and harder to get started as the days slipped by. Anyway, I'm back now and I'll try to do better. But just to be safe, you should set your expectations low.