Chatter Of The Squirrel

A Mystery Solved!

I’ve always wondered how century eggs are made. And finally there’s a good wikipedia entry of it here. I’ve even heard from multiple sources, that the process uses horse urine. But that’s a myth. And now I know!

Incidentally, researching this cos for the first time in my life, I peeled a century egg. To cook porridge, also for the first time

Doing it by experimentation… I soaked the rice first, and popped it into a blender to chop the rice into smaller pieces, as I thought (correctly) that this would reduce cooking time. Well, incidentally, the blending also released a lot of starch, and the porridge cooked too rapidly and became very sticky. Not the effect I was going for, so I had to add water repeatedly.

For meat, I marinated minced pork in sesame oil and soy sauce. Simple, and fragrant. Tossed that into the boiling porridge, with the century egg. And toss in an egg at the end.

Result:

Not too bad eating. But I mean to experiment until I get the texture I really desire… ie the watery/soupy porridge from that stall at Jln Silang or behind Jln Petaling.

Incidentally, had been having a bit of time to jazz up my meals.

Fried rice with a piece of chicken carcass. It only looks good, but rather tasteless. Cos of my reluctance to use salt. If I wanted to eat salty food, I might as well buy it outside…

My attempt to make sizzling hotplate Jap tofu. I got the tofu right. But the gravy came out wrong. Too much improvising from the online recipe. I just refuse to understand why you need to cook one ingredient, remove from pan, cook next ingredient, remove from pan etc… I was intent on doing everything in one go. Thus the result.

Still edible though.

Oscar the Cat

This should be standard equipment for every hospital ward, especially geriatric and terminal cases wards. A cat that can know ahead of time when a patient will breath his/her last.

Read his story here, from the New England Journal of Medicine.

le Tour de Frack

Was feeling a little disgusted at the 2007 Tour de France, so I went out to the nearby Borders, and flipped through a photo history of the Tour 1903-2006…

Looking back from where we are, the early days of the tour seems so full of character, and filled with so much more spirit (sometimes, literally). There’s a picture of a truck from a vineyard sharing their bottles with the cyclists, most of whom are all too eager to refresh themselves.

The early black & white photos show bulky men wearing tight cotton apparels, and sporting amusing Hercule Poirot moustaches, long since out of fashion. Such a contrast to the modern muscular spiders wearing (sometimes) neon pink Lycra, with no facial hair and sissy-smooth hairless legs, for the sake of avoiding wind drag, and making it easier to clean wounds.

There used to be steel bikes with steel handlebar baskets holding a pair metal water cans, and you see pictures of bikers gathering around village pumps to fill up, cooling themselves off at the town fountains or convenient lakes etc. This has been replaced by carbon bikes, and water now comes from talented butlers hired at great expense by the team sponsor. When you’re the big star, your team-mates pick up and carry your water for you.

Corporate sponsorships have changed the nature of the Tour de France from its humble beginnings. But there’s everything to be grateful for. The media exposure gives us incredible camera shots from the road and from the air. Certainly, a sight like THIS was IMpossible in the previous millennium. (You must click to see the most recognisable face from Kazakhstan!) And also, riders don’t get punched so much anymore.

I bought a bike a couple of years ago for commuting to work, and to shed some pounds. Unavoidably, I became interested in some of the news related to the sport. Everyone knows Lance Armstrong. Everyone loves him. Everyone knows his story. And I never had any doubts that he could achieve what he set out to do.

Which kinda made the last few years of his career rather boring. He provided the inspiration, and his teammates shielded him to the finish line. In 2005, his team played it safe, he wore the yellow almost the entire way, despite not winning any stage at all until the end.

Who caught my eye instead, was Tyler Hamilton (his personal blog here) in 2003. This masochist cracked his collarbone in a crash on the 1st stage, but powered on and still came up 4th overall. That was insane. It boggles the mind thinking what he might have achieved if fortune wasn’t against him! He took a gold in the next year’s Olympics, but there was some blood doping scandal. His second sample was accidentally frozen, so they couldn’t redo the test to be sure.

I was all set to cheer Tyler Hamilton on in 2004, but again, another crash that injured his back. He tried to persevere, but without a stable back support, he just couldn’t muscle up the slopes. Then 2005 came around, and this will be the last chance everyone has to prove themselves against Lance. I checked the standings, and Tyler’s name was glaringly absent. Found his blog, and discovered that he had been banned for 2 years.

The tests being used to detect blood doping (blood transfusions to boost performance) was quite unreliable, according to several experts. It is quite impossible to detect with an acceptable level of accuracy. There’s no DNA in red-blood cells, so who’s to say that there’s someone else’s blood in there? Worst yet, how do you detect autologous transfusions? That’s when an athlete takes out some of his blood months before, freeze it, and pumps it back in before the big race. This of course, leads to awkward questions when someone finds your blood in a freezer.

It’s like the governing bodies are under pressure to clean up the sport, and just pulling something out their asses. Sometimes you’re under suspicion just for having a higher than normal hematocrit, unless you can prove that your body has consistently elevated hematocrit levels. That’s like calling in the coroners when Lance is sitting down, cos he has a lower than normal heart rate. In fact, they even made a fuss about steroids in Lance’s blood, which came from a cream he used on his ass.

There’s a whole ’science’ here, and I don’t have all the facts. But I’m just angry at how the governing bodies are conducting it. “A woman doing Math!! She’s a WITCH! A WITCH!!!”

But I still saw something new in the 2005 Tour. I came to know the name Michael Rasmussen, the King of the Mountains. He gained so much time on the climbs, that he moved to 3rd, minutes ahead of Jan Ullrich, and might even knock Armstrong’s long time rival off the podium in Paris. But in the penultimate stage, a time trial, I saw him skid around a corner, change his bike twice, changed his rear wheel twice, and face planted himself into a ditch. It was so unreal it looked like a circus act. Jan stole back the time, and made it to the podium behind Lance Armstrong and Ivan Basso.

Jan Ullrich won the Tour in 97 at age 23. But since Lance’s comeback in 99, he couldn’t catch a break. He was the boy Lance took most seriously. But it was a gentlemanly fight. He crashed in 2001, but Armstrong waited for him to pick himself up. When Armstrong’s handlebar got caught by a spectator’s bag in 2003, Jan also did the gentlemanly thing and waited. It seemed like after Lance’s retirement, Jan had a good chance to bag his second win.

But in 2006, someone found Jan’s blood in a freezer. Later one of the bloods in Dr Fuentes‘ freezer was also determined to be belonging to Ivan Basso.

I didn’t even bother with the 2006 Tour. But Rasmussen won King of the Mountains again. He was in the Rabobank team, supporting Denis Menchov who couldn’t get his fat butt over a mountain in the later stages.

2006 was won by Floyd Landis. But after the podium, scandals of wrong doings popped up almost immediately. Look at the official 2006 highlights video. It ends with a shot of Landis in yellow, on the podium, and the image shatters.

2007, the only name familiar to me was Michael Rasmussen, in a team led by Denis Menchov again. But Michael left his leader eating dust and took the yellow and held it strongly.

Another favourite of the year was Alexandre Vinokourov. He did brilliantly in 2005 despite not having teammates who could back him up. Was all set up to lead a team in 2006, but more than half his teammates fell to doping scandals and there weren’t enough numbers to compete. This year he took bad crashes early in the beginning that left him with stiches in both knees and an elbow. Despite being nearly half an hour behind in the general classification, he still fought courageously to win two stages, and the hearts of spectators of all nationalities.

But right after his Stage 15 victory, he was kicked out cos the blood from his stage 13 victory came back positive. He vanished before the media frenzy, and his team withdrew.

Feeling betrayed, and for want of a target to vent that anger, the fans turned on the race leader, boo-ing Michael Rasmussen on the podium of Stage 16. Rasmussen has tested negative in EVERY test. But the scandal comes from him missing two random out-of-competition blood tests in March & June LAST YEAR. Three missed tests, and you’re out. Further rumours, someone SAID he SAW Rasmussen in Italy when he was supposed to be training in Mexico. And on the basis of this hear-say, and a trial by media, Rabobank fired Rasmussen. He was wearing yellow, more than 3 minutes lead, with some more good mountains for him to build a further lead. He was looking all set to win the tour.

It’s a climate of paranoia and shit now.

With Rasmussen’s removal, Alberto Contador takes the lead. But almost immediately, accusations are flying again. Cos he’s hitting those slopes faster than Lance Armstrong EVER did! So he MUST be cheating!

Paranoia and shit!

Strange Music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3atvcI0oS-w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHEbk0BQq5A

The 4400

The 4th season of the series just started.

The premise is that 4400 people throughout history had been abducted, and then suddenly returned to the present day with special abilities.

Another X-Men type sci-fi. But with more of an X-files angle. Scully and Mulder going around rounding up or fighting a new 4400 every episode.

Story was great up to season 2. It’s different from Heroes, in that the 4400’s don’t operate from the shadows. They are out in the open, under constant scrutiny and fear. Darker. More X-Men vs the paranoid xenophobes.

In the first two seasons, we see the characters and the anxiety of the world grow. Of great interest

Season 3, the whole thing escalates into government conspiracies and a secret war.

Season 4 starts with more and more people injecting themselves with Promycin to gain 4400 abilities. The conflict rolls over into the political battlefield when Sean wants to run for councilman, and a Hitler wannabe character is introduced. The clairvoyant starts having nightmares of a 4400 concentration camp. And the mother, who gave up a life of love and bliss to return to Seattle cos this is where she can make a difference, is paradoxically against the idea of subjecting her daughter to more bad dreams to gain further clues on how to avert the concentration camp scenario. The characters just don’t make sense.

Losing interest in the series now…