Bertholt Brecht was quite the character. I won’t bore you with his whole history, but I can tell you that he lived quite a wild life. If you want a great philosophical short read, check out Gallileo, a book I had read a few years ago and recently re-read in German. It’s an excellent play. If you’re a history buff, go download his smartass testimony against the House of Un-American Activities Commitee (HUAC).

Anyways, along with being a novelist, political activist, spy, playwrite, librettist, exile, and traitor, Brecht was a poet, and a damn good one at that. One of my favorite poems of his is seemingly nonexistent on the internet in translated form, so I decided to translate it for you to the best of my ability. For the original German text, you can go here.

Against Seduction

Don’t allow yourself to be seduced,
There will be no return!
The day stands in the doorway
You can already sense the night winds
Mornings will come no more.

Don’t let yourselves be tricked,
Life is rare!
Sip it to the fullest,
It will not please you
when you have to leave it.

Don’t let yourselves be delayed,
You don’t have much time!
Let the released decompose.
Life is the most important thing,
It won’t stand still anymore.

Don’t allow yourselves to be seduced
by drudgery and emaciation!
What can you do to quiet fear?
Live with all the animals
and it never comes back.

• I have been spending FAR too much time on WebCreme.
• Applying for high-profile, life-changing internships is very intimidating. It’s already late in the game but I’ve been so paranoid since getting back to the states about everything being perfect..
• Having my Google Calendar sync with iCal is great.
• It’s rough to juggle designing pages and going through my schedule.
• It’s actually exciting to find a bug in my photoblog. It’s the logical type. I’m having fun in class trying to fix it up :3
• Note: I have fixed it. It was tiny. I was huge.
• I updated flickr finally but it only shows the latest 200 posts which kind of sucks since I tried really hard to narrow down everything I saw in europe to 200…

UPDATE: Steve thinks that changing his site (which was wonderful, by the way) is going to deter this post. Not true. I’ve updated the links to more/better ways to acquaint yourself with him. If he changes those, I’ll just start taking pictures and hosting them myself

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O Glorious competition! I would like to take this opportunity to thank my great friend and roommate, STEVEY G for his seventh-place victory in the HPTi PROBLEM SOLVING COMPETITION. Steve and I had competed, and he bested me in the ranking by three places.

Our apartment is known for many things. One such thing is that every weekend, there must be a baked-good. One of the three roommates will bake something for the weekend, and we go in a rotation. Last night, as per our previous agreement, I baked brownies in place of Steve “I’M A RESPONSIBLE INDIVIDUAL” G. having to bake something, because he placed higher than me in the HPTi PROBLEM SOLVING COMPETITION.

The competition, geared towards students of information science & technology (IST), computer science, and computer engineering majors, was held yesterday. It was designed by HPTi, High Performance Technologies Inc. YET it actually had no high-performance-technological requirements whatsoever. It was about emergency management, and let me tell you, nobody manages better than Steve, which is why his team placed 7th out of the 15. Regrettably my (extremely skilled) team of a project manager, a security expert, and a systems developer simply did not have the skills that FRIEND STEVE has, and I simply have to accept the fact that he is, overall, a better person.

Ah yes, but there’s more! Steve “NINETEEN-SIXTY-FIVE, WHO CAN SAY THAT?!” G., is a compassionate individual. Steve took time out of his busy schedule of stealing inflatable dolphins from student centers to decorate my room. Below are the photos.

I tip my hat to you, Steve.

This has been floating around the net for awhile, I take no credit in writing it, but it made me chuckle. I’ve been catching Alton’s shows on Youtube for awhile now, the man’s brilliant and his show is actually really educational/GQ (yes I use that as an adjective, sue me).

Based on Alton’s recommendations, this past weekend I made a soy-marinated, sesame-encrusted tuna steak, still nice and pink in the middle, with wasabi and soy, and jasmine rice. Probably one of the best meals I’ve ever cooked for myself and now I know what to shop for when it comes to Tuna (my favorite). So, thanks Alton, until proven otherwise, I think all these facts are true:

1. Alton Brown grinds his own peppercorns. With his teeth.
2. Alton Brown’s chili cheese fries are healthier than raw carrots. Even after he adds the bacon and lard.
3. Alton Brown brushes his teeth with wasabi and gargles with pickle brine. But still his breath smells like lemon merengue.
4. Alton Brown can boil a three-minute egg in thirty-seven seconds.
5. When Alton Brown was born, he collected the hospital slop they’d left for his mother and made it into an zesty, appetizing goulash. The dish fed the entire maternity ward for a week.
6. In the first, as-yet-unaired episode of Iron Chef America, Alton Brown single-handedly defeated an all-star team of Bobby Flay, Cat Cora, and Hiroyuki Sakai. The secret ingredient was ‘whimsy’.
7. Alton Brown doesn’t reduce sauces. He demoralizes sauces.
8. Alton Brown prepares his fugu blindfolded, with one chopstick and a plastic spork. Alton Brown ain’t afraid of no chump neurotoxin.
9. Alton Brown’s blender has four speeds: ’stir’, ‘mix’, ‘frappe’, and ‘plasmify’.
10. Alton Brown can split a pineapple in half using only his pinkies. For coconuts, though, he has to use his thumbs.
11. Alton Brown knows where capers come from. And he grows his own, on a Chia pet in the pantry.
12. On Rachel Ray’s show, she shows people where to eat for less than forty dollars a day. When Alton Brown eats, people pay him.
13. Alton Brown slices ham so thin, it can only be seen using an electron microscope.
14. Some knives can slice through a tin can and still cut a tomato. Alton Brown’s knives can slice through a Pontiac, and still cut a tin can.
15. Grown men have been known to weep for joy in the mere presence of Alton Brown’s vinagrette. His hollandaise sauce can kill a man from sheer ecstacy at forty paces.
16. Alton Brown can eat just one Lay’s potato chip. If he ever bothered to eat food he didn’t make himself, that is.
17. Alton Brown once got carried away slicing carrots, and julienned his cutting board. Undaunted, he sauteed the splinters in olive oil and spices — and they were delicious.
18. Every Burger King Alton Brown has walked into has immediately closed forever — try as they might, they simply can’t ‘do it his way’.
19. Alton Brown can pair a wine with any food — including hot dogs, ice cream, raw eggs, Alpo, sawdust, and soylent green. It’s people!
20. Alton Brown’s cakes don’t rise. They ascend.
21. Some meats are so tender, they seem to melt in your mouth. Alton Brown’s meats are so tender, he’s had entire turkeys vanish into thin air.
22. Alton Brown’s no saint. But if his chicken Kiev cures one more kid’s leprosy, the church will reconsider the evidence.
23. Alton Brown doesn’t whip potatoes. Alton Brown’s potatoes whip themselves, if they know what’s good for them.
24. Alton Brown’s other car is the Wienermobile.
25. Alton Brown’s show is called ‘Good Eats’, because ‘Multiple Shuddering Mouthgasms’ didn’t play with the network’s target demographic.
26. Alton Brown’s freezer operates at minus-twenty-seven degrees. Kelvin.
27. Alton Brown once prepared shrimp gumbo for a cooking competition, using only salt, water, canned Spam, and a packet of Arby’s ‘Horsey Sauce’. He took second place. He would have won, but one of the judges was allergic to shellfish.
28. Alton Brown can fit three hundred and forty-two cookies on a standard-sized baking sheet. Without any touching.
29. When Alton Brown slices onions, the onions cry.
30. Alton Brown was once asked to participate in a blind orange juice taste test. He was the only person able to successfully identify the brand, style, vintage, temperature, pH level, distance to the orchard, age of the grove trees, and the names of the workers picking the fruit. Including the one who needs to start washing after bathroom breaks.