Cover boy

A few months ago, I represented one of the students that benefits from the donation to UBC in a photoshoot arranged by the Development Office. I had pretty much forgotten about the photos until I was doing some remembering about how short my hair was when it was freshly cut with my all-short haircut. (Some looking at how long my hair is after being cut today with my current short-on-the-sides/long-at-the-back style prompted me to think about my hair evolution.)

I was told during the shoot that the photo would potentially be used for the annual publication by the Development Office and that it would be sent to all donors in May. A quick web search brought me to the Development Office website and their current publication. Was I ever surprised to see that I had made the front cover AND page 8!

Here's the photo. I am amused by the "Wow, this is a really interesting piece of blank paper" pose in the super purple-coloured lab.

Home design ideas from visits to showhomes

I can't remember what the following signs read in full, but it was something along the lines of "Inspired Floorplans" and "Thoughtful Design." I took only what I liked, which was "Inspire Thought."

I'm tired of checking out hot models

Here's what I see after checking out hot models for two weeks in my back alley.The chart is boring, and I think that the data is bogus. I do not believe that Autotrader.ca follows what appears to be a near-perfect linear rate of increase in number of hot models. After week 1, I was hoping to observe some interesting trends of increasing supply at mid-week and it falling off approaching and during the weekend (when I would expect an increase in car sales); however, this did not hold true.

I'm bored with these data and don't think that I will be watching hot models from my apartment window any longer.

Bye Bye, Boobies

Photo Set 1: The Boobies
Photo 1b: Other Boobies

Photo Set 2: The Bye Bye'rs

Photo Set 3: Bye Bye, Boobies

I'm loving that we were able to celebrate together tonight. Sending all my best wishes to you for a speedy recovery, MA.

Additional photos here and here.

PS. More photos to come as soon as they are scanned and sent. Remote possibility of being available by 8 am; slight possibility of being available by 10 am; most probably being available by 5 pm.

Being half-baked is a very good thing

This is another post about food.

On Tuesday, I attended an all-day seminar by Waters on Granville Island. When it wrapped up and before I headed home, I stopped by the Market, knowing that there was too much good, fresh food to leave behind. My dinner ended up being a filet of Pacific snapper, simply baked with some shallots, lemon, and black pepper; some steamed vegetables; and baked bread fresh from the oven.

Now, I don't bake (much). I found at La Baguette that they sell half-baked breads. You bring home the bread or buns at room temperature, but you can also freeze them. You toss them into your oven to finish their bake. It took about 15-20 minutes and they came out with crispy crusts; and warm, soft, and chewy insides. Little ball of full-baked deliciousness.

Rain, rain, go away.

With all the rain today, it is hard to think that summer is here or that it is time to plan what to do with the sunny months. Alyssa and I brainstormed a list of summer activities two months ago, in anticipation of another Summer of Fun. I just found the list, which was so appropriately written on sunny Hawaiian note paper.

• Drinks at the Sylvia Hotel
• Bard on the Beach
• Illuminares
• Fraser Valley wineries & cheese farms tour
• Deep Cove
• Steveston Days
• Bosa Foods - the "Italian Costco"
• Hiking - inc. Grouse Grind, Garibaldi
  
• Trip to the Okanagan
• Trip to Seattle
• Blueberry picking
• Deer Lake concert
• Parkside patio
• West Van/Ambleside dining
• Folk Festival

It's an ambitious list, and so far there are only a couple of items that we've managed to do. One excuse we can use: we're waiting for the summer weather to arrive.

The first barbecue for the summer!

Fantastic new dark wood floors (0 photos), great friends (1 photo), delicious food (lotsa photos), and bottles of white were all part of a very enjoyable barbecue to kick off the summer. Thanks, Muffin!

I've been watching models from my apartment window for one week

For the past week (May 13-19, inclusive) I have taken a minute out of the evening to count the hot models. The data aren't that interesting, but I have high hopes that the second week will hold some exciting information about AutoTrader trends.

Landlords

At Chiming's housewarming, the conversation developed from rats in cages to tortoises being scavengers to crazed turtles to crazy landlords. A natural and easy progression?

Like so many conversations of today, it required finding this video online. Crazy funny!


The non-YouTube video is available here.

Like a moth, I'm attracted to the light

little BIG Ryan

I sighed when I watched this video. Sighed! Weird reaction, right?

Well, I've been living in Vancouver for just over ten years now. Came here for school. I turned 28 last November. I am expecting some changes over the next year. I live by myself while a lot of friends (as I'm finding out via Facebook) are married and/or with children, and a lot of my colleagues at school are living with roommates or solo for the first time. Thirty is just around the corner for me too, but right now, I just look at the fact that I am 28.

Now I'm laughing at the fact that I sighed. That makes it alright, right?

Ryan's new music

Rufus Wainwright - Release the Stars. Big brassy horns, soaring strings, and vocal gymnastics that compete with Judy Garland's grand 'some-WHAAAAre...' leap in Over the Rainbow. If you love hearing this stuff on a full-length album, you're going to love Release. I find it an easier listen than Want Two, but still laugh when I read any of the reviews that suggest it is a mainstream album.

Feist - The Reminder. I didn't think that I like Feist. I was wrong. I must have been thinking of someone that is not Feist when I complained that she was too boring and depressing for my musical tastes.

Melinda Doolittle - American Idol. I was getting really bored of Melinda and thought that she had fallen into a rut that she couldn't reverse out of. Big talent, but too predictable - no excitement or shivers of any sort from her performances. Me wrong again. I only half-watched tonight's final three showdown, but what I did see showed me that Melinda has talent that stands head and shoulders above the mighty-good youngster, Jordan, and the slick and cool, but less vocally-gifted, Blake. After she wins the Idol crown, she may grab some dance waves if she does some showy Tina Turner-esque stuff. I may grab some of those remixes, but don't think that her full album will be a fanastic spin for me. Maybe a must-listen in the adult contemporary genre.

Release released!

I just bought Rufus's new album, Release the Stars, via iTunes.

And now, I just found out that Rufus will be in town on July 28, playing the Vancouver Centre for Performing Arts with Sarah Slean opening the show. Great venue - I'll be there.

You can read an article about Rufus in the Guardian here. Thanks, Alyssa.

I'm watching models from my apartment window

I noticed that this billboard went up a few days ago, and I've wanted to take a photo of it ever since. This afternoon I finally took the photo.

Right now (this afternoon) 235046 hot models are online waiting to meet you.

I have a morbid curiosity to find out what a plot of hot model count versus date will look like. Maybe Autotrader trends will prove to be very interesting.

Typewriter

I took a picture tonight in the bathroom stall at the Irish Heather.

It reads:

Want some info all over a bathroom wall? Here's some: 'Typewriter' is the longest word you can write on a keyboard only using one line of letters.

Happy birthday, Pam.

I like Mink

I like the dark brown and white walls, the exposed raw concrete, and open space at Mink. These are definitely some of the colours and finishes that I want to bring into my apartment when (if?) I get around to fixing up the place.

I also really like the blended ice dark chocolate drink at Mink.

Addendum to the previous post

Another workout for your tongue from my Saturday:

Tartine tarts taste terrific

Saturday tongue twisters

I am spending the weekend with my parents, who are visiting from Revelstoke. From yesterday, two new tongue twisters. Say them five times fast:

Local spot prawns are sustainable

At Fisherman's Wharf by Granville Island, the Chef's Table Society held their 1st Annual Spot Prawn Festival. Calling this a festival is a bit overboard (heheh... get it, overboard - like overboard off the boats) because it consisted of an information booth for sustainable seafood choices, some local chefs demonstrating how to prepare the spot prawns, and awaiting the arrival of the boats with their catch of the local prawns.

The message that the festival was trying to promote local and sustainable alternatives in food choices. Tiger prawns caught off the coast of the SE Asian countries - not local, not sustainable; spot prawns are caught just off of Howe Sound - local and sustainable.

We received a taster dish from the pans of Neil Wyles from Hamilton Street Grill: Spot prawn on top of grits. The grits were cooked with heavy cream and butter, so was similar to a risotto - rich and taking on the flavours of all the seasonings. The service was on biodegradable plates and forks made from potato. Afterwards, we popped into Granville Island to pick up some bread for dinner.


African Violets in Floral Hall at Van Dusen

A show and sale of African Violets consisted of three tables of show flowers and by mid-to-late afternoon, a few bagged leaves and small cuttings in plastic pill cups for propogating your own plants at home.

I got a kick out of the scoring sheets. With criteria like "Very floriferous," "Well clothed with foliage," and "Needs grooming," it's obvious that there is a lot to know to be a legitimate violet critic. The highest score I saw was 99.5 out of a possible 100, and the lowest score was still in the 90s. Also, it seemed like every plant had a ribbon beside it, so it seems that Vancouver has some very good floriferizers, clothiers, and groomers.

Sore throat

Today for lunch I cooked a pizza. I topped it with pasta sauce (because I didn't have any tomato paste or pizza sauce), spinach, salami, shrunken onions, and cheese. It tasted good and I have leftovers to heat up for a quick meal tomorrow.

Only weirdos ride transit: Is that a pickle in your pill bottle?!

"Wtf is this pickle in a pill bottle rating," you may have asked. Here's the story:

Date: Last year sometime, at the end of the day
Transit line: #99 traveling east from UBC
Description of weirdo: Woman
Weirdo behaviour: I was seated across from the weirdo at the front of the B-Line bus. It was a full bus, but not quite a sardine-packed can, unlike most busrides during the school year. I noticed the woman was removing a pill bottle from her bag or purse. I thought that she would remove a pill from the bottle and swallow it; however, instead she brought the bottle up to her mouth and tipped the contents to her mouth. She had bitten down on what the bottle held, and it was there for me to see. I didn't recognize it immediately, but then it became clear - it was a pickle. It was small, like a gerkin or something, but it was a pickle. She had packed a pickle in a pill bottle!
Conclusion: The weirdo has created a pickle guard! From a pill bottle! It protects her pickles from being damaged in transit, makes pickle-carrying easy, and avoids vinegar/brine-staining your bag.

Nothing will ever be weirder on transit than a pickle in a pill bottle... or will it?

Thank you for taking your meds

A Google search of 'evil pharmaceutical industry' returns 789,000 results in 0.15 seconds. This doesn't surprise me all that much. I know from speaking to many people that the industry has a reputation of greediness and unethical behaviour. I've been often asked to question whether I really do want to be associated with and working for the evil. I can usually quite easily say that yes, I do.

Last Friday, I was thrown onto a soapbox for a rant in favour of the pharmaceutical industry. Being put on the spot at a party to question my career aspirations usually results in me thinking about my choice and opinion for several additional days. I am happy to be put in the uncomfortable position of having to make these considerations, and even more happy that I always come out undeterred to continue pursuing an industry position.

So, I say that I've been thinking about it over the past few days. Here are some of the thoughts and wonderings that occurred to me in those thinkings:

• Statistics can be powerful in arguing a side and I wish I had more. A drug costs about $1 billion dollars to be brought to market. The majority of useful drugs are brought to market by the big pharma companies - what percentage? The money spent by industry for research is huge compared to the amount available by academia and government - how many leagues difference?
  
• All industries push products (many that we don't need and catering to our whims that are so carefully researched and identified). I guess it isn't nice to pin-point cosmetics as a profitable place to place your products, but all of the clothing, jewellery, and make-up designers do it. Pharmaceuticals are viewed as something that the industry owes the public, but the industry is responsible to their shareholders, so they need to be profitable.
• The industry is not even in the same ballpark of profitability as it was a decade or two ago.
  
• Is advertising drugs a bad thing? I can side with both answers to this question. Advertising should be seen as an education tool, leading to discussions with physicans or to further research about a particular drug.
  
• I've never been (and probably never will be) on the sales end. I want to contribute to the research and development of new medicines that may relieve a person's ailments or cure or prevent their disease. I hope that physicians (or other audiences) demand honesty and hard facts from salespeople.
  
• Nobody is ever going to know everything about a drug. The clinical trial requirements attempt to identify safety concerns before a drug makes it to market, but these trials will never be able to reach every person (with their unique genetic, environmental, lifestyle conditions) to find out if they may not respond well. Thousands may receive a drug when it is in trials; hundreds of thousands may receive a drug when it hits markets.
  
• Drugs are rushed to market. Every day it isn't on the market is a day that it is not making money, and the less of the research costs will be recouped. Every day it isn't on the market is a day that someone is not receiving that treatment.
• The industry is a machine that knows how to bring a drug to market. It has streamlined the process to squeeze as much knowledge and prediction out of the fewest experiments and trials. Universities and small companies are fantastic breeding grounds for novel ideas and inventions, but they lack the resources to bring it through all of the trials and ultimately be available to the public. The big companies are the ones that have to do this.

Maybe I'm just looking at it all through rose-coloured glasses.

Where's the meat?

The tournedos that I shared with Joe tonight at Bin 941 consisted of two prawns neatly circling a meaty scallop, skewered to tie the meats together. Crispy fried leek and roe topped the pile.

There was no beef in the tournedos, which makes me wonder whether if I can legitimately say that I've eaten a tournedo.

Despite this questionably named dish, all three dishes that we had to our table were solid. The tournedos, the duck, and the baked brie were all delivered to the table looking great, tasting yummy, and making for a nice dinner out.