Capricious Me

I finally got around to watching the season finale of Desperate Housewives… and Bree, who is my favorite of the housewives, had this awesome line, “The man put CHIVES in my Parisian salad! He should be in a strait-jacket!”

I was watching a documentary on the Franks (part of a Barbarians! series) and they describe how Childeric had to flee for his own safety. He split a gold coin in two, kept one piece, and gave the other to someone he trusted. The point was that when it was safe for Childeric to return, the trusted party would send him a message with half of that coin.

My first thought: primitive public key crypto applied towards signatures! It’s smart, because the cut was done by hand and unlikely to be replicated with great accuracy (esp. if the coins produced in the casting process aren’t identical) with the technology of that time. However, assuming that the half piece of coin cannot be forged (which is a rather big assumption), this scheme is still very much susceptible to the man in the middle attack… in which a 3rd untrusted party intercepts the coin and uses it to pass along whatever message he chooses. Hmm… but there’s no actual distinction between the two coin pieces, so perhaps it’s more comparable to a one time pad?

Shape shifting and all that aside, the Odo-Quark relationship has some of the best moments for Odo. For example, in The Ascent, Odo’s eating soup and of course Quark’s overly sensitive ears can hear everything he complains about Odo’s lip smacking. Later, when Quark’s frantically trying to pinpoint the source of a suspicious noise, Odo practically giggles after saying, “How can I hear anything over all the lip smacking?” and loudly smacks his lips together.

Instead of packing like mad… I’m watching Lego versions of songs. :)

In no particular order, I present:
Les Mis Preview
One Day More (From Les Mis)

The Les Mis series song by song (chars are usually blurred and not pure lego stop-motion animation): Look Down, Valjean Arrested/Valjean Forgiven, At the End of the Day, I Dreamed a Dream, Come to Me (Fantine’s Death), The Confrontation, Master of the House, The Thenardier’s Waltz of Treachery, Look Down (Reprise)/Stars, Red and Black, Do You Hear the People Sing, A Heart Full of Love, Attack on Rue Plumet, One Day More, and I’m looking forward to more…

On to Phantom of the Opera:
Phantom of the Opera

All I Ask of You
Lego of the Opera 1(Sounds like it’s from the movie version)
Lego of Opera 2
Lego of the Opera 3
Another prologue
A preview of what I hope will lead to more clips…

And enough linking… after one last tidbit of Lego Sweeney Todd. There’s a ton of awesome stop-motion animation done with legos. Including Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Monty Python… and the list goes on. :)

China’s victories in team gymnastics makes me soooo happy. I always root for China. :) What can I say? I may be an American citizen, but I’m still Chinese.

The men’s gymnastics is always amazing to watch… but the Chinese men were so much better than anyone else that I wasn’t too surprised when they won. The women’s results were much more exciting, especially since it was such a tug of war all the way through. I’m looking forward to the all-around and individual event competitions.

The synchronized diving is pretty amazing to see too, but I only got to see the women’s 3m. Of course China got the gold there.

Go China!! Jia you!

Tonight, I shall be watching the opening ceremonies and making crepes. :)

Earlier this week, I made quite a few using prosciutto, serrano ham, cheese, lemon juice, nutella, bananas (not all at the same time). Tonight, I add mozzarella, basil, and tomato. I’ve been planning the basil, tomato, prosciutto, mozzarella for a while… I hope it does not disappoint.

24! Season 5!! AMAZING start. AMAZING. I’m disappointed to see that sniveling, pathetic and pompous ***** still in ******, but OOF that was a great start. I’m starting to like platypus a whole lot more. As for Jack Bauer… I still don’t like him as much. Season one was SO good… season two was really good too (esp. with the reappearance of **** ******, not so great with the Kim stuff) but season 3 was so disappointing and season 4 was even worse, with the exception of the platypus moments and one incident. But season 5… ooooh that was best episode so far in three seasons. Ok. I’m going back to watch the 2nd episode, but one of these days I will get a rant out. (e.g. Convenient character with CS degree saying that she figured out a file’s encrypted by taking its checksum.)

Saw Sweeney Todd last night… a gory, macabre Tim Burton remake of a Sondheim musical. I really liked it. The lighting and sets were dark and gloomy for the most part and absolutely perfect and grimy. While the singing from Johnny Depp & Helena Bonham Carter was less than stellar, they really got the madness across. Their makeup helped a lot. They looked so much like gaunt corpses! Alan Rickman, in his gold leather pants (hahah), as a corrupt and lascivious judge was well played.

Most of the movie’s sung, but you wouldn’t know it from the trailers. I guess they’re trying to sell it as a gory slasher movie. Hmm and while we were waiting for the movie to start, we saw a trailer for 21, the movie based on Bringing Down the House. It’s about the group of MIT students who successfully gamed the Vegas casinos. Hehe Mike was so excited he kept whispering “I wanna see it! I wanna see that!!”

Last night’s CSI Miami was utterly RIDICULOUS. Ok. so CSI Miami has been bugging me all season with their super awesome interface of a computer, but I can deal with that because they’ve always been a wee bit over-imaginative with the computer side of things.

When Horatio Caine’s hummer got shot with enough ammo to make the car go BOOM and flame, what did he do? He calmly opened the car door and strolled out to shoot a guy and then proceed to shoot the other two bad guys with nary a scratch.

No. Really.

It’s not enough that sideways staring and magical powers to elicit confessions while mouthing off platitudes and cheesy one-liners has turned him into a caricature of man… nooo, he is now impervious to explosions. It’s hard to believe that the same people who make CSI Vegas, which remains a top-notch show with plenty of wit and quirk, make this drivel. Why does CSI Miami suck so much now??

So CSI’s been running for quite a few years now… As far as tv series go, CSI’s been pretty good w/the stories and side stories and characters… but oh man, on CSI Miami Horatio Caine’s really bugging me w/his little one liners and his holier-than-thou way of delivering lines and then putting on his sunglasses and repeating things twice and calling everyone his son ARRRGH!!! We get it, ok? We get that he’s supposed to be this magical creepy guy that kids miraculously talk to and noble and uber-awesome and cares about everyone and always gets the bad guys! And maybe we get that he’s supposed to be Jesus. Whatever. Doesn’t change the fact that he’s a smug, patronizing caricature of a leader rather than the scientist/head CSI that he’s supposed to be. (I do like some of the supporting cast… Delko, Calleigh, and Alexx the ME… yay! they’re good.. very good.) Here. watch this to see how stupid his one liners are and why he needs to be eaten by an alligator or maybe have one of his victims turn out to be a crazy serial killer stalk him.

CSI Vegas is still awesome. They have one liners but they don’t take themselves so seriously so the lines are FUNNY, not stupid.

And Desperate Housewives… I hate hate hate Teri Hatcher’s character, Susan, who’s possibly the most self-absorbed bitch in the show. How is she likeable? How?? I want to see her character end up in a ditch somewhere. She should have been mauled by a bear last season while she was off in the woods.