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* By poking a snail with a TINY stick when it is in the four->eight-cell transition stage, this researcher was able to change the way it spiraled. If a left-spiral snail was made right-spiral, it still produced left-spiral babies. Link to the article here.

* By placing plants that just sprouted in water full of a chemical called stomagen, a researcher succeeded in increasing the number of pores that suck up CO2. The optimum level of increase is two to threefold. The link to the article here.

* A researcher maintained fly colonies in darkness for over 50 years and discovered that they evolve to have longer antennas for detecting smells. No paper yet but will present at a conference in Japan. Perhaps, I should start growing something in an extreme condition now, so that I can make my point in 50 years. A news article here.

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Have you seen this lucha?

Have you seen this man with a Gnu?

Have you seen these pies?

If yes, then we all know where you were last night.

You need another shot of Wild Turkey to fix your hangover problem.

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This morning, we both woke up with strange dreams. I was trying to save Mako from a big grizzly bear. I ended up being chased by it and had to cling onto a string hanging from a sky and swing. I called for help but Mako was busy reading. I fell from the string and the bear’s paw became something that resembled a garlic crusher. I woke up with a really hot head.

Mako’s dream involved Bernie sleeping in the hallway.

***
I made stuffing. Making stuffing is like making bread pudding — it’s just a salty version of bread pudding.

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I often discover left-over rice in our rice cooker days after we make it — I open the cooker to make new rice, *suprise!*, smell, and usually somehow try to rescue it.

Yesterday was one of these days. I decided to make some fried rice with bok choy, napa, mango, carrots, onions, and garlic, sour and spicy egg drop soup, and tofu/TVP dumplings.

I didn’t have the dumpling wrappers, so I made it from scratch for the first time. It’s pretty easy but I should get a different kind of flour next time as the wrappers were pretty sweet when I made them with 1/2 all purpose and 1/2 bread flour, 1% salt, 42% water.

This is what my counter looked like in the middle of cooking:

I tend to like thicker dumpling wrappers, so I made them much thicker than the normal wrappers I get at a Japanese supermarket. Mako makes great sour and spicy egg drop soup, so he made that dish. At the end, this is what our food looked like:

Cooking is fun!

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I found a recipe for soaking tofu in miso. I wrapped a block of tofu in cheese cloth and covered it in half red and half white miso paste for 3 days in a fridge. My mother said that I should mix miso with sugar, sake, and mirin, so I’ll try that next time.

People in Japan seem to eat it as a snack while drinking sake/beer but eating it alone is a bit hard as it is super salty. I prefer to eat it by spreading it on a piece of bread.

It does become very creamy and I think it makes a nice vegan “cheese” option.

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I made vegetarian meat pie. I looked up 3-4 normal and vegetarian meat pie recipes and combined them. It was pretty good.

P.S. I can’t remember exactly what I put in but this is what I remember:

1. Soak 2-3 cups of Textured Vegetable Protein in tomato juice from canned tomatoes and shiitake juice from reconstituting shiitake mushrooms.

2. Sauté 1 onion, 3 garlic cloves, 1 carrot, and 1 zucchini for 5-10 minutes.

3. Add TVP from 1 to the mixture in 2 and sauté more.

4. Add 2 TBSP each of Bulldog Vegetable and Fruit Sauce and of ketchup. Add salt and pepper.

5. (Optional) Add 2 TBSP heavy cream or sour cream.

6. Fill the pie crust with the mixture and cover with another pie crust. (Optional) Add cheese before covering.

7. Bake at 350-400F until the top becomes light brown.

I had it with salad and buttercup squash soup.

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Are there enough monitors for two of us?

Nay.

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Before diving into NetHack, I’m revisiting my childhood by playing Dragon Quest I. It is as awesome as I remembered.

The game is simple. I’m supposed to rescue the princess and beat the dragon. I don’t even get to have company like most of the other RPGs do. My face doesn’t turn to the direction I’m walking to either; whichever direction I’m moving to, my face is always pointing towards the player (me). Every time I want to save my game, I have to go back to the castle and ask the king to give me a spell. The spell is a random collection of about 20 hiraganas, which seems to act as a pointer to the game status (level, HP, MP etc).

However, there are some things that bother me, now that I am 20 years older than when I first played the game. For example, why doesn’t the king let me sleep in his castle to gain my HP/MP back for free or give me some funding to buy better swords and armors? Also, every time I die, I wake up in the castle and the king yells at me for dying. That’s mean. AND half of my money is gone when I wake up from the death! The king seems to be really stingy.

Nevertheless, I’m really enjoying DQ1. One thing that I like to do now but not when I was little is that I like to save a lot of money and go on a shopping spree. In order to save money faster, I go back to the first town every time I get tired because the inn is so much cheaper there than any other towns. If the king didn’t steal my money when I died, I could have bought a better sword by now. Does he really want his princess back?

I love it.

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(He and his wife were living on a Greek island called Spetses. One day, they decide to go to a movie theater to watch a Bruce Lee movie. Here’s part of the conversation he had with the theater owner. Ojisan is a term used to describe a middle-age man)

***

“Where did you guy come from?” said the “it’s alright” ojisan.
“i-masute apo tin yaponia (we came from Japan)” I said exactly as written in the example sentence on page 22 of the Hakusensya’s Express Modern Greek by Araki Hideyo.
Then, with no facial expressions, the ojisan stated “Yokohama Muroran Sendai Kobe” and stared at me as if to say ‘now what comes next.’
I managed to respond by saying “hahaha, you know very well.” In general, many of the things Greek people know about Japan are just the names of ports and companies. Therefore, if I were to continue with the ojisan’s poem, it should go “Sony and Casio, Yamaha Seiko Datsun.”

***

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