today i learned of vin scully's dodgers tenure.

i found out today, that today is the 60th anniversary of vin scully's first broadcast with the dodgers! how awesome is that? it's mind-blowing to me that he's been the voice of the dodgers for so long. and that when you watch games from way back when, like koufax's perfect game in 1965, the voice you hear is vin's. he's seen so much! i love that man, and his voice.

today i learned to make pasta from scratch!

per my current obsession with learning to make all kinds of dough-based products (starting with pasta and noodles), i skipped out of work an hour early to take a pasta-making class! we learned to make and roll the dough, and then four ways of filling it. it all came out quite tasty. and it was a lot easier than i though it would be. i want to do some experimenting with different ratios of tipo 00 flour and semolina flour, as well as using water vs. eggs vs. egg yolks. then maybe i'll move onto chinese hand drawn noodles.. or japanese ramen.

also, after two and half months of not eating meat, i've started meating meat again as of today.

today i learned about she&him.

turns out she&him is a little twosome band and the female/singing half is none other than zooey deschanel of (500) days of summer fame, who i adore! this is their first single off their second album..


She & Him - In The Sun from Merge Records on Vimeo.

today i learned about new "polaroid" film.

it was a sad day when polaroid stopped making instant film back in 2008. something called the impossible project formed to revive the film, but had to figure out a new way of making it, and today i found out that they've figured it out! currently they will only have b+w, but color is supposed to become available this summer. yay!

today i learned more hipster terms.

i had found some of these previously in the hipster handbook online, but they don't actually list all of them as they want you to buy the actual book. luckily, i found someone who actually posted all of them online so here you go! LOVES it.

beacon - one's best outfit
Mary is really stylish, she is always dressed to the beacon.

bennie - hat
It's cold out today, let me grab my bennie.

berries - dollars
Can I borrow a couple of berries? I want to go to Diesel.

bleeker - tourist
Every time I'm in the city some bleeker asks me for directions.

boggle - vomit
If I have another shot of whiskey, I'm gonna boggle.

bronson - beer
Want to go to the Brooklyn Ale House for a bronson?

brumby - bar
There is a new brumby on the Northside, but it is totally midtown.

bust a moby - to dance
Lets go to the Tunnel and bust a moby.

catching the G - sour luck, to be put in a bad position.
Ever since Todd got laid off, he has been broke - he's really catching the G.

chipper - woman of easy virtue
She will peach anyone after one bronson - she's a real chipper.

chowder - alcoholic beverage
Enids has half price chowder until 7pm. Let's get shellacked!

CK1 - bisexual
I saw him looking at my ass, he's a CK1.

clothesline - local gossip
Yo, I heard on the clothesline that she is sleeping with Billy

cronkite - boy
Have you seen Sally's new cronkite? He is a such a frado.

daisy - a gay male.
I feel like a daisy for admitting it, but I think it is totally deck.

deck - a key word for most hipsters, similar to the antiquated "fresh."
That cronkite looks deck in those cowboy boots.

flame - to urinate
I have to take a flame.

flavorless - straight and/or heterosexual
He kinks his hair and wears tight pants, but he's definitely flavorless.

flogger - coat
I bought this wool flogger at the Antique Boutique. It was only 80 berries!

frado - an ugly guy who thinks he's good-looking
Bill thinks all the girls love him, but they all know he's frado.

to frigidaire - to treat coldy
I don't know what her problem is, but she gives me the frigidaire every time I see her.

gluten - to eat
I'm starving, let's gluten.

greaser: An individual who comes from or resides in New Jersey
Frank has a mullet and acts like a greaser when he is shellacked.

hilfiger - some who has no fashion sense
You'd think he had no kale, he dresses so hilfiger.

hog - a taxi, car service
Do you have your piece? I want to call a hog since its raining.

hypo - a coke head
Mike 's such a hypo, I saw him boggle on North 6th after getting really shellacked.

ishtar - bad
Yo, that shit was ishtar.

jerry - a stoner, hippie
My pits smell totally ishtar. I feel like a jerry.

juicer - a lady's man; individual who has undeniable sex appeal.
I wish he would ask me out, he's such a juicer.

jug - a 40 ounce bottle of domestic beer.
Tassles respect me. I can drink a whole jug and still bust a mean moby.

kale - money
Yo Kim, can you slide me some kale? I'm still waiting for my mom to send rent.

midtown - uncultured
He's never heard of Hal Hartley. He's so midtown.

nancy - buttocks
Have you seen her Nancy?

peaching - to have sex
She's got such a tight bod. I'd love to peach her.

piece - cell phone
John is such a nerd. He doesn't even have a piece.

raphaels - glasses
Do these raphaels go with my flogger? I don't know if I like the new frames or not.

shellacked - drunk
I was so shellacked last night that I lost count of how many chowders I had drunk!

tassle - girl
Jim is definitely a frado, but somehow he gets a new tassle every night.

uni - university
Jane is nice but I just can't be friends with someone who went to a public uni.

vejjo - vegetarian
As if I would ever go to Peter Lugers. Nothing there is vejjo.

wally - well-dressed man, a ladie's man
That blonde haired guy we saw at Enids is so Wally.

today i learned about the nautica malibu triathalon.

dreamworks has a triathalon team that does it every year, and today was the info meeting for this year's. it a half mile swim, eighteen mile bike and four mile run in malibu on september 12. i'm super interested, and it seems very doable, but the whole swimming-in-the-ocean thing scares me.. plus i'll be traveling for decent chunk of the summer, attending liz's wedding in september and want to be training for a half marathon during the same time. so i probably won't do it this year, but maybe next?

today i learned a little about the boxing world.

dan's friend brian is working on a documentary about an ex-boxer. he and liam, the actual guy in charge of the project, were in LA to interview freddie roach and others in the boxing world. i had dinner with them and chatted quite a bit with liam about what he's doing, how he got started on this project in the first place. really interesting stuff, though i am quite hazy on all the actual details. they supposedly met manny pacquiao too!

today i learned about rocky canyon farm.

rocky canyon farm is owned and run by greg nauta and his family up in atascadero, california. they have a stand at the sunday santa monica farmers market where i learned they have 40-50 animals (cows and pigs) on their 30 acre farm. i gave up eating meat three weeks ago after learning of the horrific and pervasive nature of factory farming, but with access to this form of sustainable animal husbandry, it might be a good alternative. plus, i miss pork.

today i learned to ice skate backwards.

well, kinda. dan had attempted to teach me once a year earlier, and i wasn't very good at it at all. in fact, if he weren't pushing, i couldn't move more than a few inches backwards. we decided to go skating tonight and i was much better this time! i'm still not great, and my feet get out of synch pretty easily, but i was able to pull him around the rink a couple times (a very slow couple of times). i did manage to take one pretty nasty fall, though that was while skating forwards - and now i have some lovely bruised knees to show for it.

today i learned some PHP & CSS.

dan and i are looking into wordpress for a potential blog, which also means looking into PHP and CSS. today i started going through an online tutorial for creating a wordpress theme. all very interesting stuff.

today i learned "steampunk".

the word steampunk can refer to many things, mainly a subgenre of fiction that "denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used—usually the 19th century, and often Victorian era England—but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy." however, i learned of the term with regards to fashion and design, which is related in the sense that it would fit into that world. it involves incorporating lots of vintage things into high fashion or futuristic pieces, a sort of retro-futurism. i especially like the prominent use of interesting metallic objects like skeleton keys and the gears inside old-fashioned watches and clocks. it's worth a google image search if you ask me.

today i learned "bokeh".

i've seen and heard that word tossed about a bunch when on flickr and other photog sites, but for some reason never looked it up. it comes from the japanese word boke which means blur, and it refers to the out-of-focus parts (or the quality of those parts) in an image. this was a particular fun word to learn especially since there is a lot of bokeh in the photos i take.

today i learned about the "carpet cloak".

as annoying as i find the daily loh down on science on NPR, it does provide me with interesting new findings and happenings in science. today's was about an invisibility carpet that works in the infrared.

The carpet is composed of a unique silicon material. The material's structure allows it to actually steer light in a two-dimensional plane around any object it encounters.

So, when light shines on an object swept under this particular rug, it goes around the bulge. No shadow is left. Result - a completely flat appearance.

So far, Zhang's invisibility cloak only operates at near-infrared frequencies. But the team says it's only a matter of time before the carpet works with visible light as well. Meaning true invisibility to the naked eye.

today i found out that wolf is leaving.

randy wolf, one of the dodgers most solid and consistent pitchers this past season, has signed a three-year contract with the brewers. i am quite sad. no more wolfpack in LA.

today i learned "eschatology".

it's the study of the end of the world. seems like people of all creeds have been pretty obsessed with this stuff, long before that 2012 movie came out. neat stuff.

today i learned "petrichor".

the word came up at dinner tonight and it's the word for that post-rain smell - who knew there was a word for it? from wikipedia:

from Greek petros "stone" + ichor "the fluid that is supposed to flow in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology") is the name of the scent of rain on dry earth.

although, the word was created specifically for a scent that involves oil from plants and dry earth - so i doubt it's truly the smell most of us know from living in cities and suburbs. perhaps a new word should be created for that - cementichor? asphaltichor? hmm...

today i learned about some new york eats.

dan is in long island for thanksgiving and a cousin's wedding, but will be in manhattan tomorrow for a hockey game at madison square garden. he asked me to look up some nearby places him and the fam could go eat at beforehand. so, i started by looking at eaterNY's eater38, and used google and yelp from there. in the end, i sent him 3 places: co. (a pizza place), txikito (a basque tapas place) and rickshaw dumpling bar (a dumpling place). 3 different styles of cuisine, 3 different price points, all very interesting. now i'm just jealous i don't get to go.

today i learned how to surface fur.

i've been doing a little bit of surfacing at work for the past month - just an asset here and there. it's been great because it's helped me better understand the workflow of my artists and how their shader networks are set up. plus, it's also just fun for me. today, my supervisor taught me how to use fur to put a bit of fuzz on some fabric. very exciting.

today i learned about eponyms.

while listening to NPR on the drive to work this morning, they did a segment on john marciano and his new book Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words. here's an excerpt from the book:

As a word, eponymous is a bit anonymous itself. Its moment in the sun came with the release of REM's album Eponymous, a subtle dig at musicians who name records after themselves, such as Peter Gabriel, whose first four albums are all entitled Peter Gabriel. In short, an eponym is anything that's ever been named after anybody. The title of an autobiography, the name of a legal fi rm, Mercedes-Benz, Washington State—anything.


But eponymy doesn't necessarily involve the conscious act of naming. An eponym can also be a word that explodes into the language because of who a person is or what he or she did, often to that person's dismay.

some example eponyms from what i heard this morning: silhouette, frisbee, leotard, galvanize, tantalize.

today i learned about yakuza.

jake adelstein was on NPR's fresh air, talking about his book tokyo vice. in the short segment i was listening to, he spoke about the yakuza, "members of tradional organized crime syndicates in japan." it was absolutely fascinating, and now i want to read the book!