Gorgonzola Cheese

So I was cooking juicy steaks today and enjoying my day off by remembering what Independence Day is all about: to commemorate the day that Will Smith saved the world from aliens back in ‘96.  Remember when he punched one in the head?  That was outstanding.  He even saved us again from zombie/vampire things in December last year, which I think is probably the reason why people celebrate Christmas.

Well I offer a 4th of Julyish tip that may improve your life as it has exponentially changed mine forever and even made me want to post about it.

My tip is how to get those coals on fire in your grill without lighter fluid.  If you are a manly man, you know that the only way to start a fire is by polishing the bottom of a Coke can with a chocolate bar to reflect the sun into highly focused beam of light to ignite your coals (this method is actually doable as shown in episode 45 of the Mythbusters). But I’m really lazy and want to light things as fast as possible.  Usually I just pile the coals into a pyramid and then give them a healthy Homer Simpson dousing of lighter fluid and toss a match at it and hope my eyebrows don’t get burned off.  This usually takes a couple tries to get it going, doesn’t light all the coals evenly, and makes my food taste sorta funny.  So the secret tip of the day is to use a Charcoal Chimney instead.

I picked one up at Target for about 7 bucks today and filled the bottom of it with about 4 sheets of wrinkled newspaper.  Then I filled the rest of it to the top with charcoal, lit the newspaper from the bottom, walked away and played some Katamari Damacy (which was on sale last week on Amazon for $9.99).  When I came back 15 minutes later, the coals were bright red and I was just amazed how quick and simple it was.  I owe this tip to my bro-in-law after seeing him miraculously make a fire in mere minutes using a charcoal chimney to start a fire to cook delicious Korean galbi.

I apologize if I might be the last person on Earth to know about using charcoal chimneys so bear with me if you already know this and pretend you just read something new and interesting and act surprised.

As a personal note, I know I haven’t updated this site in over 2 months.  So I think I owe all of you an explanation.  I’m sorry but it’s sorta a long story but my life recently got flipped upside down.  So if you have a minute, just sit right there and I’ll tell you how I became the Prince of Bel Air.  In West Philadelphia born and raised, on the playground is where I spent most of my days.  Chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’, all cool.  And all shootin’ some b-ball outside of the school.  When a couple of guys, who were up to no good.  Started makin’ trouble in my neighborhood.  I got in one little fight and my mom got scared.  And said, “You’re movin’ with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air.”

Chocolate is new Thai movie that came out in Thailand in February. It tells the story of a girl afflicted with Autism, who has somehow learned martial arts from watching Kung Fu movies and needs to get revenge for some reason or other… Ah Phuket (har har), I don’t need to describe this, just watch the trailer! It’s freakin amazing and brought to you by the makers of Ong-Bak!

Chocolate stars Yaneen Vismistananda in her first movie and was specifically written for her in mind. She originally had a background in Taekwondo and had to undergo stunt training for the movie and just like Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak, she does all her own stunts. No word when this’ll be hitting the states, but I’ll keep you posted.

The Meat Bun blog has just opened its online store to the public. These video game influenced t-shirts will run you around $29.99 each. I just can’t get enough of these designs like the one with the 4 Nintendo Gods Presidents, a Polo parody shirt that turns out to be Wander and Agro from Shadow of the Colossus, the 4th generation of gaming systems (Super Nintendo, Neo Geo, Mega Drive, and TurboGrafx-16), and a Street Fighter II fight poster shirt.

These designs and more are available at the Meat Bun website now!

If you like these shirts, I also recommend taking a look at The King of Games store. They have some fucking amazing Nintendo shirt designs but are a bit pricey since they’re all imported from Japan.

Damn, why didn’t I think of this? Hmm… perhaps we’ll see some Gorgonzola Cheese t-shirts in the future?

(photos via Meat Bun blog)

What ever happened to good old fashioned riddles? As a gamer, I see an occasional puzzle or riddle here and there in between killing zombies or saving princesses in my green tunic. What about a game that was so full of riddles, you couldn’t walk anywhere or progress at all unless you solved each one? And how about throwing in some of the best animation ever seen on the Nintendo DS? And a Detective Conan-esque subplot? Mix that all up and stir it around and you’ve got yourself Professor Layton and the Curious Village.

Professor Layton is a new game for Nintendo DS, created by Level-5, that requires you to solve puzzles and riddles along the way to unveil bits and pieces to help you solve a greater mystery going on. It was one of the best selling games in Japan last year especially due to the older casual gamers and just recently got translated for folks in the US.

You follow Professor Layton and his assistant around St. Mystere talking to the townfolk, which all have riddles or puzzles that need to be solved. It is all done in an adventure game style (a la 90s Lucas Arts games) and utilizes the touch screen perfectly to navigate and search for secrets like coins. These coins are hidden in random locations like barrels or paintings and can be used to give you hints in case you stumble upon a riddle that is just impossible to solve.

EXAMPLE: One riddle gives you 8 weights. They all look identical except 1 weight is lighter than the rest while the rest weigh the same. There is an old fashioned balance scale nearby that you may only use twice. How can you determine which one is the lighter one? I’ll let you guys answer in the comments section.

No matter how much you play the Brain Age games, the most they’ll do is train you to excel at the same activities through repetition. If you really want to wrack your brains with logical and analytical skills, I definitely recommend giving Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village a try. You can ever try an online demo of the game here (click on Game Demo on the top right).

Last Saturday, I attended the Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy concert in Chicago. I was impressed by the turnout since the crowd was made up of all kinds of people young and old. I saw a couple dressed as a Red Mage/White Mage combo, an Advent Children Cloud cosplayer, as well as a young woman dressed up as Edea from Final Fantasy VIII. Besides that, I saw mostly normal people who looked like they were dressed up to go see the opera. And boy did we did get to see opera that night.

As we all sat at our seats waiting for the show to begin, a man surrounded by a Japanese entourage walked into the room to sit about 20 seats away in the same row as us. The entire room stood up in respect and started applauding furiously. This man was none other than Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for all the music from the Final Fantasy series.

It started off with some music from Final Fantasy VIII. 3 large projector screens were hung above the symphony displaying FMV and in-game footage from the games. They proceeded to play music from every Final Fantasy game from the series, even FFXI. One of my favorites was a jazzy swing interpretation of the Chocobo theme called “Swing de Chocobo.” Here’s YouTube footage of it from another Final Fantasy concert:

For another song, “Maria and Draco,” they brought out 3 opera singers to do the opera scene from Final Fantasy VI.

The opera song from FFVI was supposed to be the last song for the night, but they came out for an encore, which happened to be my favorite song from all the Final Fantasy games, “Terra’s Theme” from Final Fantasy VI.

The crowd went nuts and yelled for another encore. That’s when the conductor came back out and played everyone’s favorite, “One Winged Angel,” from Final Fantasy VII with Advent Children scenes playing in the background and a full choir singing along.

It was an excellent show and definitely worth watching, especially since Uematsu-san was the special guest of the night. I have never seen young people get so excited to go see a symphony. During “One-Winged Angel,” one attendee stood up and started pumping his fist in the air to the music like it was punk concert. For those that are interested, you can check out the CD of Distant Worlds when they performed in Stokholm, Sweden here. If it ever comes back to Chicago, I’ll definitely go see it again and next time I’m putting on my robe and wizard hat.

“Hey, Doctor Jones, no time for love. We’ve got company!”

-Short Round

What better way to celebrate Singles Awareness Day than to geek out with the new trailer for the fourth Indiana Jones movie: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?

Is Harrison Ford too old to eat solid foods? Will Shia Leboeuf pull off a convincing 50s greaser? Will this movie be more patriotic than Spider-Man 3? We’ll find out May 22nd.

Facebook used to be the simple and clean alternative to MySpace, but after Facebook opened up it’s platform to third-party developers, it’s gotten so bad that I’m spending most of my time on there clicking “ignore” for multiple application requests. Well now there’s a solution that makes Facebook bearable again. You can now block applications and never have to see them again. This video from 5min.com user, brandon90, shows you how below.

All you need to do is search for the application, click on its main page and click on the new Block Application button. Simple and clean once again.

As you wish, my unusually sized rodent friend!

We rang in the Chinese New Year by making some noodles, which oddly enough is how we celebrate Thanksgiving too. Noodles are supposed to symbolize a long life on Chinese New Year and on Thanksgiving it means that your parents don’t know how to celebrate American holidays. It is also the year of the Rat in the Chinese Zodiac, which comes around every 12 years, and signifies luck for everyone born on this year.

Also on Chinese New Year, CCTV has a huge variety show event that includes singing, dancing, comedy skits, and a lil thing called Wushu, which is more popularly known around the world as Kung Fu. Here’s the best clip I could find of yesterday’s performance:

UPDATED WITH BETTER QUALITY VIDEO 2/9/2008

The performers in the middle are some of China’s top competitors from the 2007 All China Games.

If you’ve ever seen some commercials that feature people jumping off rooftops and stairs in urban areas or watched the opening scene of Casino Royale, you’ve probably seen Parkour or Free Running before.

Usually these terms can be used interchangeably, but purists differentiate the two with the distinction of Parkour going from one point to another as efficiently as possible, while Free Running is a sort of philosophy where more freedom of movement is involved. I I have always been amazed at what these athletes could do but this video (via Digg) takes the cake - combining Parkour/Free Running and Soccer:

It seems to be viral marketing for the game, FIFA Street 3. Is this just extremely convincing CG or amazingly precise acrobats?

The Apple store was down this morning and came back up with new doubled capacity iPhones and iPods Touch (passersby? tacos surpreme? Why not iPods Touch) at 16 gigs and 32 gigs respectively (via Apple). This is what most people wanting an iPod Touch were waiting for since 16 gigs just is not enough when you’re carrying your music collection and DVD rips. This comes at a cost though… of $499.99 each for both the 16 gig iPhone and 32 gig iPod Touch. Ouch.

Maybe once they perfect the PSX and GBA emulators for it with faster frame rates than this:

UPDATE 2/7/2008
Yes to be fair to the author, Zoddtd’s GBA emulator is quite up to speed with a playable frame rate. Here’s a video of it in action: