If you are having to cook on your own this summer, and A) Can't cook and Don't want to spend 3 hours trying to. Check this out now:
http://thestonesoup.com/blog/images/free_stonesoup_ecookbook.pdf

Have a great weekend!

People with SLR cameras
There are sort of two categories in this topic:
1) People who have an SLR because they think it's a "Better camera"
2) People who have more expensive cameras than me, but don't really know how to use them.

1) Let's address the first point...the DSLR market has expanded dramatically, and perhaps that's just something I have to get used to. I believe entry level DSLRs are around $400 these days, which isn't a ton more than the $300 a high end point-and-shoot costs. It irks me though, everytime I see tourists walking around with a Canon T2i ($800) and taking pictures of the sights.

Perhaps the most egregious errors I spotted were in the many churches I visited. People were constantly trying to take pictures with the pop-up flash. *Face palm*. This is a dead give away that people have no idea what they are doing. Because every single church I was in could be photographed without the use of a flash, but one would have to know what shutter speed, aperture, and ISO are to be able to do it, because the auto-mode will generally not let you push the ISO past 800.

Really, a pop-up flash is almost always useless unless you are using it to illuminate people directly in front of the camera. Almost any other situation would produce a weird fall-off line. To the point: People with DSLRs should learn what their camera can do, and how to do it. It's like using a gun, you should have to have a permit. Otherwise, "Point-and-Shoot" cameras are called that for a reason. They are optimized to take pictures without knowledge of technical settings.

2) On a related note, there is a second group of people who I see running around with Canon 5D Mark II's. First off, I can't help but drool a little bit everytime I see one. They are very nice cameras, although they cost twice as much as mine did (Which was a lot I think!).

That being said, like part 1), the differences between those cameras and the mid-range cameras is very small, and really only tangible to good photographers. I basically figure that if you don't do wedding or portrait photography, you shouldn't have one.

Yet there are people who seem to think that this expensive camera will kick out magic. I asked someone with one to take my picture by the arc-de-triumph, and this is what I got...it's not terrible, but:

FML.

People who ride one stop on the bus
I unfortunately have to take the absolute most pointless bus in the world to work every day. It runs every 40 minutes, all day. Yet the entire bus route is < 10 minutes long. To add insult to injury, 80% of the people who ride the bus on the entire line get off at my stop. So I take very careful note of people's riding habits.

Anyways, the other day, someone waiting at a stop (Which was not mine or the train station) decided to get on the bus. "Woah!" I thought to myself, as it's rare that people ever get on the bus outside of the two aforementioned stops. Then she proceeded to get off the bus on the next stop...

Why? I'll never know.

Can Openers
Back in my day, we had can openers...you know, the ones you put on a can and took the top off with and then your mom always told you to be careful with the top because you'd cut yourself.

Skip forward a few years, and find me in my apartment having to lookup a youtube video on how to use an Ikea can-opener. Yeah, laugh all you want, but it was really hard. Apparently, these new contraptions no longer open the can, but rather decapitate it. I've seen something like this once in a movie before, but boy does the future sneak up on you fast.

I guess sometime between the time I ate a can of Spaghetti O's everyday after class and the time I actually needed to feed myself for dinner, I got left behind technologically...god I miss Spaghetti O's...with meatballs.

-------------------------

Well glad I got all that out. Time to go enjoy my luxury dinner of Brats and canned beans...ugh, it looks like someone messed with the hue slider in photoshop on my "green" beans...needless to say I will be buying frozen vegetables from now on.

This one's a reader. My improv group enjoys profuse abuse of our panlist (email group list). Over tour, there were a few songs that caught our attention. One was "Cooking by the Book, Lil bigger remix", you can look that one up on your own. The other was an old song by LFO (Lyte Funky Ones, yeah the people who sang "Every Other Time)...singing "Summer Girls". First, the video:

Now without further adue, I present the email which set off this unfortunate chain of critiques, and critiques of critiques and so forth.

The Grammatical Essentialization of the Other:

ya'll,

shouldn't it be "I like girls WHO wear Abercrombie & Fitch" instead of "I like girls THAT wear Abercrombie & Fitch"?

Surely objectification of women abounds on the lyrical level in "Summer Girls", but far more insidious is the grammatical objectification of the girls in question. A seemingly harmless song is, in fact, a nuanced assault not only on the personhood of young girls but also the English language itself.

-S

See the followup after the jump, sure to get anyone in academia excited about the VQ's next show:

Read more »

So I'm still sick, which is going to ruin my Thanksgiving break. The Health services people have ruled out basically everything except mono. So I went and got blood drawn for that. Unfortunately, I failed my Strep Tests worse than my Philosophy tests....downer. Anyways, to prove that I'm not letting whatever I have get the best of me, I decided to write a little song called "Ode to Acetaminophen" (the active ingredient in Tylenol). In reality, I'm alternating Ibuprofen and that, but it's just such a cool name. Anyways, this is sung to the tune of some song, maybe "Ode to a Superhero" by Wierd Al, or just make up a tune, or read it as beat poetry. Anything should convey the message, song after the hop...

Read more »

First and foremost, there's a new picture on the photoblog. A nice portrait shot of one of the VQ cuties.

Moving on, I have created my first theorem of my college career. Through it, Croom's constant is derived. Of course theorems don't make constants, but it sounded cool. This constant promises to revolutionize the way we view modern society and architecture for generations to come. Interested? Good...Read on...

Read more »