Work and Workings of a Nerd

In case you haven’t heard the latest frenzy, KFC has just added the “Double Down” to its menu. My understanding of it is that they took a bacon and cheese sandwich and replaced the bread with fried chicken. For the health-conscious, KFC has also added an option for grilled chicken instead. There are a couple reasons why this particular item is so interesting to me.

First, the nutritional facts, as usual, are completely surprising to me. According to their website, it has 540 calories, 32 grams of fat, and 1380 mg of sodium. For comparison, the Big Mac has 590 calories, 34 grams of fat, and 1070 mg of sodium. Granted, KFC is likely only revealing the most favorable nutritional facts, and the measurements are likely contestable as well, but who would’ve thought you’d come away so clean on something so utterly devoid of healthy appearances?

Second, this seems to continue America’s fascination with an improved sandwich, mostly by playing around with the sandwiching material. Tracy Jordan similarly came up with the idea of replacing bread with meat.

Finally, I really want to try it. Sure, it sounds pretty disgusting. Sure, it’s probably a gimmick. Sure, my body would probably appreciate getting punched in the gut instead. It’s a lot like rubbernecking, I think.

I’d like to say that I’m generally better than this, but in truth, my attempts to develop a refined palate are mostly held back by what I’ll call the “Paula Deen School of Thought” in that the best thing for me to eat is what tastes good. In light of this realization, I’ve put together a list of what I consider a few major players in this field, roughly categorized as well.

Gotta Go Get It Now

I admittedly don’t eat out very much. Thanks to the hard work of my mom, I grew up mostly on tasty home-cooked meals. Even so, fast food restaurants and shops have some great offerings that you have to hate to love, including:

KFC’s Mashed Potato Bowl – this one I credit to my good friend Austin. Take it one step further and get macaroni and cheese on the side, and mix that in too. You can’t beat the convenience of everything in one bowl

Krispy Kreme Original Glazed Donuts – you will never, ever find that taste just like these ones. Crunchy on the outside, fluffy on the inside, toxic and addictive at the same time. They come mainly in dozens, and frankly, a dozen of them sounds like way too much. Even 6 sounds like a lot. But after you eat 5, the 6th one is still just as good.

But There’s A Better Alternative!

Most of the best food is made out of the best ingredients. Frankly, that’s the definition of what a good ingredient is. The items in this list, however, are clearly not the best of their category, and maybe that’s why they’re so good.

Kraft Mac & Cheese – when I think of macaroni & cheese, this is what I think of. It’s just good. I can’t imagine how real cheese could taste better than the cheese powder mixed in with margarine and milk. This particular one has actually been highly controversial among my friends, but the tipping point for me is that this was an important part in my childhood. Growing up, I ate sandwiches for lunch at school probably 90% of the time. That means that I have an obsession with sandwiches, but even that only goes so far. It was the rare day when my mom would change things up, and my sisters and I might get mac & cheese for lunch instead. I guess the glory days live on.

Chef Boyardee Ravioli – you know when you go to an Italian restaurant, you’re always disappointed when you get just 5 ravioli. And in the end, they usually don’t taste that special anyways. There’s something magical about the pasta and tomato sauce substitute they use in canned ravioli.

Twinkies – I don’t think there’s anything else that Hostess could possibly do to make twinkies less of a food. They just replaced every real ingredient with something else that happens to have the essence of tastiness. My occasional desire for twinkies is actually more from its cultural status than actually liking it, but I think that’s okay, too.

Chips Ahoy Candy Blasts – homemade cookies are great. There are few domestic joys as great as being offered a freshly-baked cookie, and appreciation knows no bounds when you take the cookie off the plate. Even so, Chips Ahoy has managed to capture an important sector of cookie desire, mainly being the convenient and guiltless variety.

Best of the Brandless

So far, all of the tasty, awful foods mentioned have been specific creations, but here are a few generics

Onion Rings – I have tried on twice to make onion rings, and I don’t think I quite have the art down. What it has shown me, though, is that disgustingly-good is an emergent property. Oil? Pretty gross. Onions? Okay, but not notable. Pancake batter? Maybe with syrup. Frying onions coated in pancake batter? Pure magic.

Soft Serve Ice Cream – Ice cream is an obsession in my family, and the dining halls on-campus dangerously all have soft-serve machines. I think I’ve built up some willpower, but some days, I just know it’s going to be a soft-serve day.

Tater Tots – Arguably a Ore-Ida creation, but the Safeway freezer aisle should be enough proof that it’s a pretty easy market to get into. Tater tots are interesting to me, because I actually don’t particularly like potato chips, home fries, or french fries. When I think about what tater tots taste like, that’s a hard question, too. I think it’s just the perfect balance of the crunchy outside and soft inside that gets me.

Killer Combos

Some things are best eaten in pairs.

Doritos + Mountain Dew – I stereotype this combination as the classic computer geek food. Whether it’s playing video games in a basement, coding with the green text on black background, or surfing the web late at night, it works.

Wendy’s Chocolate Frosty + French Fries – I don’t know who I first heard this from, but when I did, I knew I had to try it. I’m certain I’ve had it no more than 2 times in my life, but I would rate them as solid culinary experiences. Clearly, the next step should be to combine the chocolate frosty with tater tots.

Looking over that list, most of those sound pretty gross right now. That’s probably for the best.

The return to campus for spring quarter also brings along great expectations of beautiful weather. As PhD Comics notes, it isn’t all radiant warmth and blooming flowers, though I can’t complain too much about the allergies. The primary culprit is the rain and chilliness, just barely enough to keep reactions tepid.

I thought about it last night, and I think we tend to overstate Stanford’s case for perfect weather. I find that I often make excuses to visitors for the weather, from the rainy season during the winter to some hot days in the summer. On the whole, the weather certainly is nice, and it beats just about everywhere else I can think of. I’m just impressed by how well we’ve managed to average weather conditions in our minds into a perfect, constant climate.

Not to say that we don’t react to the weather changes. Campus never necessarily feels down about the weather, but spirit picks up when the sun comes out after the rain. It took 2 days at the end of last quarter to trade all of their hoodies and rain boots for sundresses and denim shorts. One day, only the most die-hard graduate students would head out for soccer, yet the next, the Oval was filled with toddlers running wild, ultimate frisbee, and sunbathing.

Among my friends, the new quarter and new season has brought about sand volleyball, a triumphant statement that we’re going to take any chance to enjoy the outdoors, regardless of how wet the sand is, how windy it is, and how untalented we are. We spend just as much time retrieving the ball when it lands outside of the court, but we’re slowly improving. I’m looking forward to being able to set up a bump-set-spike.

So until problem sets give us an excuse to find other ways to procrastinate, we’ll be trying to stay active for as long as possible. By then, hopefully the beautiful Stanford weather we know will shame us into heading back outside.

I’m fresh off Spring Break and back to school after a good week relaxing back at home in Texas. Having lived in Texas from 4th grade, I think I’m pretty familiar with the Texan lifestyle. In some ways, Texas became my characterization of the US as a whole. Although I figured that the rest of the country didn’t drive as many SUVs and pickup trucks or have as good Mexican food, there are some parts of Texas that I just didn’t realize weren’t normal until I moved away.

First, apparently most people didn’t face the same discipline in school. Here are a few things that I’ve learned from college friends about how other schools work:

• they WERE allowed to leave campus for lunch
• they did NOT have a pay a fine to get back cell phones that were visible at any point during the day
• they were NOT subject to random drug tests
• they WERE allowed to have facial hair
• they were NOT patted down at graduation to make sure that no unapproved items were brought in

Second is the one that’s only become apparent to me very recently: Texas has way too much space. Everything has a parking lot. Every mall has a huge parking lot. Gas stations on every corner, and I have never had to parallel park. Anywhere. I’m positive because I’m pretty sure I can’t parallel park.

That was a big shock for me when I went to Boston a few weeks ago. At first, things seem the same. Pull out of the driveway, get on the road, go somewhere, park, get out, do your thing, go back. The first thing that seemed a little strange were the tunnels. When I asked about them, it was pointed out that there were real buildings and roads on top, and it wasn’t just a convenience. And we didn’t pull into parking lots; we either parked on the street, or parked along the street and went along until we found what we were looking for.

It made me think about how inefficient the sprawl design of Texas is. Sure, we in Texas complain about the heat, but to be honest, I’ve had to deal with the heat more here in the Bay Area than in Texas. In most cases, we really don’t go outside in Houston. When we leave home, we hop in an air conditioned car, drive 15 minutes to another air conditioned location, and rush in. A very car-oriented society is convenient in that sense as no one wants to stand out in the sun waiting for a bus.

The car-dependency, however, seems to be a huge liability. I can’t imagine not having a car in Houston. As a student here in the Bay Area, I can travel far and wide on a variety of trains, subways, and buses because the area is built to handle it. Most of the time, though, I don’t need to travel far because everything is close. I can even feel smug about having a smaller carbon footprint for all of it. That, however, would never work in Texas. Things are far and decentralized. I don’t even know where I would go from my home to get to public transit. Thank goodness for cars.

Today was a day of watching heated contents with slim margins. Of the two, I’m vaguely familiar with one, and completely clueless but strong opinionated about the other. Let’s start with the one I”m more familiar with.

The NCAA tournaments for basketball are going on right now. Indeed, if you aren’t swept up in March Madness, you’re probably pretty normal. There’s a lot of hubbub about the tournament with many drawing up brackets and participating in big pools, but I haven’t met anyone so familiar with all of the match-ups to have put together a completely well-reasoned and researched bracket. Once past the top 30 teams or so, who really knows how Cornell or UNT did this season and what they’ll look like matched up a Kentucky? I can’t even imagine having followed all of the 64 teams up until now, which is likely why I haven’t participated enough to even get brackets put together.

That of course doesn’t keep fans from being entertained by watching the games. I didn’t know a one of the players I saw play yesterday, but by the end of each game, I was pulling for someone to win. You kind of have to have stakes in the game for watching to be any fun. In the end, you just kind of do some satisficing to figure out which team winning benefits you more and start screaming at the TV.

Perhaps one of the best parts of the tournament, though, is the underdog story. The charm of Northern Iowa beating Kansas (the #1 ranked team in the nation) was the fact that no one was paying attention. You can look at all the statistics and listen to all of the analysts, and no one is going to call that upset. But as they say, “That’s why they play the games.” At some point, all that discussion has to ground out in something happening. Besides, there’s just nothing like watching the lead change twice in the last 10 seconds to be capped off by a buzzer beater.

And on that note, I want to move on to the other great television spectacle: the House and health care. Now don’t run off in fear of this blog turning political: I’m too ignorant to offer anything substantial. I want to talk about its portrayal and why I was so entertained.

My mom, my sister, and I turned on the TV just before dinner to watch MSNBC when I got wind that the health care bill was going to the floor for debate. Frankly, I find a lot of the coverage not particularly interesting, but I came back in the middle of Nancy Pelosi’s speech to what was going on.

When they started counting votes, I was gripped. I mean, I knew nothing about the process,s the deals, the formalities, the motions, but the guy on MSNBC told me that exciting things would happen when that number got to 216, and I kept looking back at the NV column to guess how far away the House was from doing or not doing something. I certainly didn’t stand up and scream when they hit the magic number, but I could believe that someone on the planet did (likely a nerd wearing pajama pants, no less), and that’s a big deal.

I honestly didn’t wake up a happier person today because of the health care bill (though according to some, maybe I should have). For me, it was just a series of 3 15-minute contests where both sides were trying to have a higher total count on their side after months of work. And sure, the commentator can talk all he wants, but I can’t become an expert after watching for an hour or two. There’s just too much going on to understand, and I’m not nearly dedicated enough to follow all of the details and numbers for this to be a momentous occasion for me. I’m just as happy as anyone else to have watched a good show.

Thursday morning, I woke up, bumbled my way down the ladder, popped out my retainer, threw some water in my face, and sat down at my desk to check my email. One of the something silly my mom forwarded along. The other was from my drawmate George, and when he knocked on my door literally 2 minutes later, I was pretty excited. It might look like the email just had some instructions and a meaningless string of characters, but that’s a beta key for Starcraft 2. Allow me to explain for the uninitiated.

Starcraft was a real-time strategy (RTS) game released by Blizzard in 1998 for PCs. The premise of the game is that you pick one of three races, and you start out with a base. You have some basic resource gathering units, and you use those to build buildings, which build units that you use to destroy your opponent’s base. There are lots of RTS games out there, but Starcraft is particularly notable for being very well balanced. The interactions between different units are complex, and all of the different races play very differently, but end up being roughly equal in power.

Since then, Starcraft has gotten kind of big, beyond just a game. It’s a very popular and fun game to play, but it’s almost become way bigger than just a couple teenagers sitting in a basement all night: it’s basically the national sport of South Korea. Evidence?

• A picture of people watching an important game. Yes, that screen has the game projected onto it
• Income for professional Starcraft players.
• Professionals are actually talented.

I want to discuss that last point a little more. One common metric for Starcraft players is “actions per minute” or APM, which is a count of how many times you click or press a key in a minute. Professional players have APMs above 200. I myself have played Starcraft on and off for years now and play okay among my group of friends, and just looking at a recent replay, my APM is about 60. So yes, most people are capable of clicking and hitting buttons very fast, but the most impressive part about what pros do is that they do everything intentionally. There’s a huge cognitive load in keeping track of everything that’s going on, and it takes a lot of practice to get that good.

In any case, Starcraft 2 has been highly anticipated for a very long time. Blizzard is known for making very good games, but they’re also known for missing a lot of deadlines and not releasing a game until it is perfect. When Blizzard announced in 2007 that they had been working on it, no one was surprised, but everyone (read: South Korea) was very excited. Since then, people have been guessing about release dates and been constantly proven wrong.

About a month ago, Blizzard began closed beta testing, releasing the game to a select number of people to test out the game for bugs and balance. Prices for invites have dropped, but people were paying up to $400 to get into beta testing and try out Starcraft 2. I don’t know if I’d pay $400 for it, but I can tell you that this game is a lot of fun.

For all of you original Starcraft players, Starcraft 2 is at least as good. The races all have the same general principles, though the unit mixes are definitely fresh and something fun to try to figure out. The improvements, however, do a lot to make the game a lot more fun.

First, the graphics look great, and the game runs smoothly on my 2007 Macbook Pro. If your gripe with Starcraft was the 640×480 resolution and 256 colors, I think you’ll be impressed, especially with the detail in making buildings explode.

Second, the matchmaking system and friends bit for battle.net is also much improved. The matchmaking service also pairs you with players of about the same talent so that you aren’t getting crushed by insane Korean players on the US servers. The process of getting everyone together to play in a closed game also isn’t nearly as convoluted.

Third, the game is generally less annoying. Depending on how much time you put into Starcraft, you might know about a lot of the micromanaging you need to do to optimize the game. For example, trying to control groups of zerglings to surround a unit, or clicking each worker to a different mineral patch so that they gather faster. In Starcraft 2, much of that is simplified. Workers automatically spread, you can set workers to automatically mine when created, pathfinding for units is much better, and perhaps the biggest news, control groups can be of any size. No longer limited to only 12 units selected at a time, you can gather up all of your marine and just go for it.

The strategies for the game are still being developed, and I don’t think people even necessarily know the right build orders for the races. The moral of the story is that the game is wide open, and it’ll be more fun in general for any player, from casual players to pros, to sit down and knock down a couple games.

I’m not really sure who my audience is, but let me know if you’re more interested in details, and I’ll write more about specifics of the units and such.

I wasn’t planning on writing about this, but I ended up writing it for an oral report for my Chinese class. Characters first, Pinyin second, English last, hilariously disjointed and contrived language all around.

上个周末，我父母(parents)来斯坦福大学看我。因为他们来，我舅父(uncle)和他家也来了。星期六，我们打算在旧金山(San Francisco)玩儿。

我们觉得天气会下雨，所以我们要在房子里面开始。十一点，我们去 Golden Gate Park 的 De Young 博物馆(museum)。现在，博物馆有 Tut 国王的陈列(exhibit)，可是我听说不太好。因为票很贵，我们没有去看 Tut 国王的陈列。我们只看了被子(quilt)和画。

在博物馆，我差不多跟着我表弟(male cousin) Owen 看。他九岁，有活力(energetic)。他妈妈 Berkeley 毕业，可是他真聪明。我表妹(female cousin) Maddy 十三岁，也很开朗。他们都是戏迷，也表演(act)，所以他们唱歌唱得很好。

然后，我们去唐人街(San Francisco Chinatown)看春节游行(Chinese New Year Parade)。五点半游行开始。我们在 Union Square 看很多孩子跳舞，有名人，和漂亮的车，可是我最喜欢的东西是龙。别的人对龙投爆竹(firecrackers)，龙在爆竹上走。

晚上八点，我们去唐人街吃晚饭。来斯坦福大学以来，我不常吃中餐，所以去旧金山的时候，我一定吃中餐。我觉得 Sam Wo 饭馆是最好吃的饭馆之一。这个饭馆在 Washington 路，很小，可是菜不贵。如果你要炒面(fried noodles)，你应该去那儿。如果你知道在唐人街有很好的点心，你应该告诉我因为我正在找。

吃晚饭以后，我父母，姐姐去 Oakland 飞机场，可是我舅父来 Peninsula，所以我跟他回来。十一点我回校园，很高兴我跟我家人过了一天。

问题

1）为什么我们不看 Tut 国王的陈列？

2）为什么我喜欢 Sam Wo 饭馆？

shànggè zhōumò, wǒ fùmǔ (parents) lái sītǎnfú dàxué kàn wǒ. yīnwèi tāmen lái, wǒ jiùfù hé tā jiā yě lái le. xīngqīliù, wǒmen dǎsuàn zài jiùjīnshān (San Francisco) wánr.

wǒmen juéde tiānqì huì xiàyǔ, suǒyǐ wǒmen yào zài fángzi lǐmiàn kāishǐ. shí yīdiǎn, wǒmen qù Golden Gate Park de De Young bówùguǎn (museum). xiànzài, bówùguǎn yǒu Tut guówáng de chénliè (exhibit), kěshì wǒ tīngshuō bútài hǎo. yīnwèi piào hěn guì, wǒmen méiyǒu qù kàn Tut guówáng de chénliè . wǒmen zhǐ kàn le bèizi (quilt) hé huà.

zài bówùguǎn, wǒ chàbuduō gēn zhe wǒ biǎodì (male cousin) Owen kàn. tā jiǔ suì, yǒu huólì (energetic). tā māma Berkeley bìyè, kěshì tā zhēn cōngming. wǒ biǎomèi (female cousin) Maddy shísān suì, yě hěn kāilǎng. tāmen dōu shì xìmí, yě biǎoyǎn (act), suǒyǐ tāmen chànggē chàng de hěn hǎo.

rán hòu, wǒmen qù tángrénjiē (San Francisco Chinatown) kàn chūnjié yóuxíng (Chinese New Year Parade). wúdiǎn bàn yóuxíng kāishǐ. wǒmen zài Union Square kàn hěn duō háizi tiàowǔ, yǒumíngrén, hé piàoliang de chē, kěshì wǒ zuì xǐhuan de dōngxi shì lóng. biéde rén duì Lóng Tóu bàozhú (firecracker), lóng zài bàozhú shàng zǒu.

wǎnshang bā diǎn, wǒmen qù tángrénjiē chī wǎnfàn. lái sītǎnfú dàxué yǐlái, wǒ bù cháng chī zhōngcān, suǒyǐ qù jiùjīnshān de shíhou, wǒ yídìng chī zhōngcān. wǒ juéde Sam Wo fànguǎn shì zuì hǎochī de fànguǎn zhīyī. zhège fànguǎn zài Washington lù, hěn xiǎo, kěshì cài bú guì. rúguǒ nǐ yào chǎomiàn (fried noodles), nǐ yīnggāi qù nàr. rúguǒ nǐ zhīdào zài tángrénjiē yǒu hěn hǎo de diǎnxīn, nǐ yīnggāi gàosu wǒ yīnwèi wǒ zhèngzài zhǎo.

chī wǎnfàn yǐhòu, wǒ fùmǔ, jiějie qù Oakland fēijīchǎng, kěshì wǒ jiùfù lái Peninsula, suǒyǐ wǒ gēn tā huí lái. shí yīdiǎn wǒ huí xiàoyuán, hěn gāoxìng wǒ gēn wǒ jiārén guò le yì tiān.

wèntí

1)    wèishénme wǒmen bù kàn Tut guówáng de chénliè?

2)    wèishénme wǒ xǐhuān Sam Wo fànguǎn?

This past weekend, my parents came to Stanford to visit me. Because they came, my uncle and his family also came to the Bay Area. On Saturday, we met in San Francisco to see what to do.

We were worried that it would rain, so we decided to start indoors. At 11:00AM, we met at the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. Right now, they have an exhibit on King Tut, but I heard that it wasn’t very good. Because the tickets were also expensive, we didn’t look at the King Tut museum. We just looked at the quilts and paintings instead.

In the museum, I mostly followed my younger cousin Owen around. He’s 9 years old and has a lot of energy. Even though his mom, my aunt, went to Cal, he’s smart. My other cousin Maddy is 13 years old, and she’s also outgoing. They both act and are musical fans, so they both sing well.

After that, we went to Chinatown for the parade and dinner. The parade started at 5:30, and we stood at Union Square to watch. I saw many dancing elementary school kids, famous people, and nice cars, but my favorite were the dragons. Peopole threw firecrackers at the dragons, and the dragons walked over them.

At 8:00, we went into Chinatown to eat. Since coming to Stanford, I rarely eat Chinese food, so when I go to San Francisco, I have to eat Chinese food. I think Sam Wo Restaurant is one of the best restaurants. It’s on Washington, and it’s small, but it’s cheap. If you want good fried noodles, you should go there. If you know of a good Dim Sum restaurant in Chinatown, please tell me because I have been looking for one.

After that, my sister and parents had to go to Oakland airport, but my uncle was driving back to the Peninsula, so I got a ride with him. I came back to campus at 11:30PM. I was very happy to spend the day with my family.

(Note: if you actually want a tournament report and specifics about what I played, head over to my other blog)

Last weekend, my roommate Tom and I woke up early, hoped in a rickety white van, and drove across the bay to Oakland to participate in Grand Prix: Oakland, one of the competitive, open, official Magic: the Gathering tournaments. Allow me to provide some background on many important topics here.

Magic: the Gathering is a card game where you put together decks of creatures, sorceries, artifacts, and more to play against someone else’s deck in an effort to reduce them from 20 to 0 life. With over 10,000 unique cards and a couple hundred new ones printed each year, Magic is a potentially costly hobby that involves a lot of thought and strategy to be successful at. I myself have been playing on and off since high school and now play mostly with my drawmates in my dorm. Most recently, I had the opportunity to teach a student-initiated course on Magic here (for credit) where we actually applied real academic topics to Magic. Pretty nifty.

So Magic is just a game, but players take it very seriously. There are professional Magic players today, and Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic, run many tournaments, from weekly tournaments in stores with as few at 8 people to National and Worlds tournaments with 5 digit payouts. Needless to say, the community has invested a lot in this game, and it’s a big deal. This particular type of tournament, a Grand Prix, is an open event, meaning that you don’t need to win any tournaments to qualify to go, but also qualifies you for more exclusive tournaments. With only 20 a year, both local players and international players will attend, either to move up in ranking or just for chuckles.

Tom and I happen to fall in the latter group. In the wake of teaching the class and the convenience of Oakland, I figured this would be something we should do for the experience and convinced Tom to come along. Neither of us were willing to invest the time or money to play seriously, but we put some thought into the decks and headed out.

The event was held at the Oakland Mariott City Center, and we arrived arrived 8:30. After paying our registration fee, we headed over to the Burger King for their hearty food, then went back to the exhibit hall. On the way in, I noticed and laughed at a sign, “Open to the public.” I don’t imagine that a room full of people battling with cards is a very hospitable setting.

To be honest, I was expecting a lot more spectacle surrounding the event, but other than a few stores who had set up shop as sellers along one wall, there wasn’t much to look at. The room was filled with tables to play Magic games, which is probably where the most exciting things would happen. A stage at the front had a table set up for “feature matches” between well-known players, but other than that, you can imagine what a room of tables looks like.

The players meeting started just after 10, when everyone took a seat to listen to the necessary announcements. Blessed by my last name, I ended up sitting across from Raphael Levy, a French hall of fame Magic player, which I only confirmed by sneaking a look at his deck list. In fact, over the course of the day, I saw several other well-known Magic players, which just goes to show you what news I pay attention to.

I was pretty shocked that someone would come overseas for this tournament. I knew that players traveled for tournaments, but flights are very expensive just to play Magic. Even beyond the pro players, regular people came from far away just to play Magic. The people I ended up playing against came from LA, Utah, and Las Vegas, and I talked to a German man while I wrote up my decklist. Tom and I complained about the $30 in gas and other costs for parking and tolls, but in the end, we didn’t sacrifice much at all to be there.

I’m not sure how many of the 700 people there traveled to come, but they were certainly geared up to play. Instead of being ecstatic and joyous, people were generally pretty quiet and focused on doing well. A few clusters of people were chatting, but it was certainly not a lively party. Once the actual tournaments started, the biggest excitement was running to the places around the room where matchups were paired.

I played 3 rounds of the tournament before deciding to drop out of the main event. As fun as playing is, I figured I should take in more of the general experience of being at a big tournament and took a second look at the sellers and watched some of the other matches.

Although not my usual crowd, being a part of the Magic community kind of made me realize how far into it I’ve gotten. The community is just a small part of the nerd community, and of course it has its own jargon and common ground. Just walking around, I would hear snippets of conversations about how “getting thoughtseized turn 1 allows dark depths to wreck zoo” and such, and it reminded me that even if I wasn’t nearly as serious as many of the other players, I was very familiar with the game.

In psychology the week before, we discussed how expert knowledge can enhance working memory. For example, given a very short presentation of a real chess board, a chess expert can remember the positions of all the pieces, whereas a novice might only remember a few details. At the tournament, I realized I had developed the same knowledge for Magic as well. Looking at a game position for maybe 4 seconds, I could quickly absorb the entire situation: what decks both players were playing, about how far they were into the game, and, given life totals, who was more likely to win at that point.

Tom and I left just before 5 with the intention of not showing up to one of these events again. It was a good experience to actually see how the pro scene works to relate to students if we decide to teach the class again, and I did get to meet Gavin Verhey, a Magic writer who helped us design the class. Since we don’t play competitive, though, we’re not in it for the main event.

So it’s back to playing in the dorm room, also open to the public, though perhaps with slightly fewer cards to be swarmed by. But it’s okay. We make up for it in Tom’s diet soda and N64 Super Smash Bros.

If my cooking blog hasn’t made it apparent, you should know that I really like food. I’m not much into truly fine-dining, and I don’t think I have any in-depth knowledge of particular cuisines or cooking techniques, but thanks to 2 sisters and a mom, I really enjoy being in the kitchen and watching The Food Network.

On truly American holidays, though, one must return to truly American cuisine. This past weekend was the Super Bowl, and I had the privilege of determining the menu to serve ~25 people. Here’s what I came up with:

• 10 2-liters of assorted beverage
• 6 bags of chips
• 1 jar salsa, 1 jar queso
• 6 Pizzas
• 40 Pizza rolls
• 60 Chicken wings
• 2 bags of cookies
• 1 Veggie Platter

When I was initially creating the list, I considered trying to find classier stuff to eat, but I quickly realized that a Super Bowl party with cauliflower quiche and sparkling apple cider simply would be as good as a bag of Doritos and a can of diet soda. When we left the grocery store with our cart-full, I realized that it was difficult to believe that anything we had bought could actually be called food. Anyways, for the most part, it went pretty well, I think, though there are some lessons in this. Let’s take an item-by-item breakdown:

Drinks

This I was particularly worried about. I found 2 answers about portions, which said about 2 2-liters per 5 people. I discovered that 1 2-liter is apparently equal to about 5.6 cans of soda, which was taken into account in buying. The breakdown went 2 bottles of coke, 2 bottles of sprite, 2 bottles of diet coke, 2 bottles of lemonade, 1 bottle of fanta, and 1 bottle of mountain dew. The coke ran out, but we had leftovers of the sprite, diet coke, and lemonade, meaning that we probably roughly had enough to drink.

Chips

6 was definitely low-balling. 2 bags of tortilla chips and 2 jars of dip was definitely the wrong ratio, but moreover, the chips went quick. The ratio I found was I think around 1 bag per 4 people. Instead, I’m going to vote that 1 bag per 3 people is the correct way to go. Besides, that gives more variety.

Pizzas

As far as dinner plans go, people only seemed interested in either a) burritos or b) pizza. Because we didn’t put in our pizza order a week before, it seemed better to not worry about delivery issues and breaking the bank, so we got frozen pizzas instead, which were extra-cheap for the Super Bowl sales. I found a few recommendations for how much to get, but ended up buying a little less since I figured that people would be full of other snacks. In retrospect, I probably should have stayed at the recommendation, being roughly 1 pizza for every 3 people.

The bigger difficulty I had, however, was that our dorm oven isn’t particularly big. It also only has 1 rack. A little overlap on the corner allowed 2 pizzas onto the 1 rack, but that’s still pretty slow. So if you’re not well-equipped, I think delivery pizza might be a better option in any case.

Pizza Rolls and Chicken Wings

I was trying to think of good, somewhat substantive junk food to eat, and that’s what I came up with. Both are very easy to pop in the oven frozen to cook, and they both went fairly quickly. The wings I got were actually of the boneless variety, but were still fine. As far as pizza rolls go, I don’t think you can get much further from real food than pizza bites. Let’s go down the ladder of foods that it evolved from:

• Real food. Real food has a recipe.
• Pizza. This might be an urban legend, but I believe that pizza was originally just something made at the end of the day to use up extra ingredients, which is believable.
• American Pizza. In the land of convenience, we took the art out of it and reduced it to the key ingredients: dough, tomato sauce, cheese, and toppings (mostly meat). A friend once mentioned seeing someone use ketchup instead of tomato sauce. That doesn’t sound tasty.
• Frozen Pizza. It’s too difficult to make real pizza, so we have them package up all the bits, and we just throw it in the oven.
• Chicken tenders. Too difficult to prepare the chicken. Just bread it and deep fry.
• Chicken nuggets. Mix the chicken in with something starchy and bread it, and freeze it. Comes in nice bite-size chunks that can be eaten with fingers.

And so frozen pizza + chicken nuggets = pizza rolls. So probably not real food, but it’s okay: they’re still delicious.

2 bags of cookies

I figured we should have something sweet to balance out all of the salty. These ran out fairly early as well, so I think I would double the amount of sweet to bring along.

1 Veggie Platter

This was my token attempt to ensure that not everything we were eating would shorten our lives. I think it failed, because the ranch dip it came with was pretty good as well.

So that was that. It was educational in terms of figuring out how much people eat and will certainly help with future party-planning. I think the #1 lesson, though, is that in these things, don’t lowball. Real food is expensive. Fortunately, nothing we bought was expensive. I don’t think anyone would’ve complained about an extra bag or two of chips to stash away for a later snack, so here’s the rule I’ll be running with from now on:

Determine how much food to get. Get 25% more than that.

Classic culture constantly updates itself to remain relevant to popular culture. From Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to “PLAY!“, a symphony that plays video game music, all types of entertainment are bridging that gap between classy and cool. One might wonder how to take the analytical, perceptive, cerebral detective Sherlock Holmes and make him successful again in today’s culture. Well, quite simply, take the parts of people that haven’t changed much and play them up. Holmes can use his acuity to setup an attack on a foe as vicious as that in Batman Begins or The Bourne Identity. And I think our love of Superbad and Napoleon Dynamite shows that we love awkwardness and bromances more than ever.

The general plot follows a classic detective setup: Holmes and Dr. John Watson apprehend Lord Blackwood at the beginning of the movie in the midst of a occult ceremony and have him hanged 3 months later. Soon after, however, Blackwood apparently rises from the grave, and Holmes must investigate Blackwood’s resurrection and stop a plan in action. Along the way, he meets Irene Adler, an American thief working for a third-party and odd love interest.

Though the movie is just over 2 hours long, you won’t get bored watching Holmes jump from scene to scene. Like many crime dramas today, the movie runs through a series of scenes played out in live-action, only to have Holmes come by later and put together more parts of the scene from details around the room. The action involves all the fisticuffs and explosions you could want and keep the movie moving through potentially slow points. Although somewhat formulaic, the setup stays fresh through moody scenery and Holmes’s insights.

We, of course, crave deep characters on top of an engaging plot, and the cast delivers. Having once been a House watcher, I’m familiar with the portrayal of Holmes-inspired characters, but Robert Downey Jr. plays the original with perfect strangeness. He fights scrappy, exhibits hilarious antipathy and scorn for others, and ribs and toys with his assistant Watson at every turn. Jude Law, playing Watson, plays the foil against Holmes. For his own development, Watson is engaged and planning to move out, beginning a tug-of-war between his desire to move on with his life and his knowledge that Holmes very much needs him. Mark Strong as Lord Blackwood is suitably sinister, though his character isn’t particularly interesting. Similarly, Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler isn’t prominent enough to make her relationship with Holmes anything more than an amusing side note.

Just like many of the series reboots we’ve seen recently, Sherlock Holmes isn’t quite your classic Sherlock Holmes, but what you remember probably isn’t the best part of it. Maybe the action is rawer, and maybe subtlety gives way to cinematic epicness, but the essential cleverness and methods are all there. It won’t make you think very hard, but I give it the slow head nod for having been a lot of fun.