Shack Attack

Tsukemen Love

Tsukemen is like ramen, except that you dip cold noodles in broth, rather than get the noodles and soup together and steaming. Alia and I grabbed these spicy dishes of delicious (yeah, those are peppers floating in there) before the 10th monthly exchange student drinking party:

My food posts seem to be more popular than others- it's the kind of thing anybody can relate to, maybe the closest thing mankind has to a universal hobby.

Making "Super Senior" Mean Something

Wunderkind (seriously) Ben Casnocha is a pretty consistent source of high quality insight, wisdom, and wonder, and one of my favorite college-age bloggers. His "Assorted Musings" post today had a pretty good nugget in there:

It seems like we need some intermediate step after you graduate from a liberal arts college. There's college, in which you learn little about the real world, then right away the real world. Maybe four year colleges should offer a fifth year that is a super charged internship period / life skills bootcamp.

Damn straight, man. If you look at the kids that come into college after doing a gap year, the vast majority are less fazed and more capable than the straight-from-high-school freshmen that have to adapt to independent living, a college workload, and academic self-direction all at once. A gap year gives you time to try out and drop hobbies, sort out how to socialize like an adult, and find your passions, and the ability to defer college for a year and/or live off parents provides a little structure and stability to guide you through the journey.

A fifth year at college to sort some real-life skills out sounds nice, but on the other hand, is it worth the extra tens of thousands of dollars to have academics try to educate and support you in wholly non-academic pursuits? Dunno. I think there's a good seed of an idea there- students need a bridge between the academic and professional worlds- but we need a way to keep that bridge affordable and practical in this down economy.

Other quality thoughts that ring true:

The key characteristics of people who make good travel partners: flexibility, open-mindedness, low-keyness. When deciding whether to travel with someone emphasize these characteristics over your overall closeness with the friend.

Single men and women tend to be more self-absorbed and arrogant than their married or in-a-serious-relationship counterparts. This is for two reasons: married life means focusing a lot on someone else’s life (almost as intensely as on your own) and second, a spouse will ground you when your conception of self becomes a bit grandiose. When another person has seen your dirty laundry and seen you in your lowest lows, she sees you as a fallible human and can call bullshit when you forget this fact. It is extremely difficult to get this type of honest feedback from anyone else.

Even more over at Ben Casnocha: The Blog.

Don't Copy That Floppy

This just cracks me up:

(via Switched On Media

Did people laugh when this was made? What current staples of our information diet will be nothing but joke fodder in ten years?

"In The Loop": The Most Cynical Movie in Recent Memory

Nonstop dry hilarity and pointed allusions to 2001-2003 politics make for a movie that twists you up inside as you realize that you've been suspending your disbelief of a plot that's not actually too far from reality. This is probably one of those pieces of culture that's going to be a litmus test for future relationships- I'm not sure I could go long-term with someone that didn't like it.

NPR has a spot-on take on this film.

On a side note, if you have an iPod but don't know how to put movies on it, iSquint is the answer. Open it up, drag a movie in, and it converts it to an iPod-friendly format with no fussing. The developer shut the project down, but you can find it available for download here. I've been watching a lot of Stewart/Colbert on the trains, just to stay up-to-date on what's going on in the rest of the world, and iSquint makes getting the videos on the 'pod super easy.

Checking Off Life Goal #342: Get BoingBoinged

BoingBoing Gadgets just picked up a digital wrench I wrote up for Japan Trend Shop. Granted, my name's not publicly on it, but it's my copy, and probably as close as I'll get to an actual Boing unless I go crocheting a replica of a subway map to crack DRM on old video games. Feels good.

The Digital Ratchet Monkey Type is one of those things you don’t know you need until the first time you use it. Whether you’re working with autos, bikes, or anything else mechanical, too little torque risks a nut or bolt loosening inadvertently, and too much may damage your threads. This digital monkey wrench gives you a precise torque reading, allowing easy adjustment and peace of mind on mechanical projects. High-tech and heavy-duty, there’s no better present for the man (or woman) in your life.

You can check it out, along with a bunch of other nifty Japanese stuff, at Japan Trend Shop. There are several people writing for the site, but I do a pretty good number of the descriptions up there.

(JapanTrendShop via RandomGoodStuff via BoingBoing)