My friend Dave has been entertaining his Facebook contacts with a NCAA style elimination tournament of the most essential food in the vegetable kingdom. Upstart Kitchen has put together a great blog post about the tournament.
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Tag: food
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Addicted to Oil
Good Magazine produced this politically charged, entertaining, and interesting youtube video about the state of the world, our demands for oil, and the dramatic increases to the cost of living in a world thirsty for energy.
If we’re addicted to oil, our twelve-step program should begin with admitting that we have a problem. As the price of oil creeps higher, finding new energy sources is more important than ever. But the search for alternatives, combined with environmental disruptions, is putting new pressures on other essentials like food. There are some things that are going well in the world. Right now, the economy is not one of them.
[Oil Addiction – YouTube]
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Malaysia – Day 25
I’ve been working on a few different projects here at GXM. Today they had me record my voice for a small Channel V identification ad they are putting together. I don’t know if they will use my voice, but if they do – that’ll be kind of cool.
This evening I just took it easy and had a good old western style meal. It was a chicken sandwich and fries from Nando’s. It was a great meal.
The thing that I find most different about the Western meals here vs. what I’m used to back home is that here they kind of skimp on the fries. I ordered a second Chicken burger (I probably wouldn’t back home but I figure I need to eat as much as I can while the food is so inexpensive) and to my surprise the second plate had even less fries than the first. Also they were slightly undercooked.
Even at McDonald’s, famous world-wide for its french fries, they seem to skimp on the deep fried side order. I have begun upsizing my orders and still only get about the same amount of fries that I would if I ordered a regular sized fries back home.
I guess it’s obvious but the fact that back in North America they serve more fries on the side must be one of the reasons why there are so many overweight people there.
Not exactly an earth-shattering observation, but anyway that was my day.
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Malaysia – Day 24
Usual stuff happening today. In the evening I went out with Jon to a Chinese food place. I got full mostly on rice but I enjoyed having a little bit of everything. I’m still not completely used to some of the flavours but I’m only here for awhile so I’m trying to get in as much as I can. The strangest thing we had to eat—at least from my point of view—was frog toad. I only had the smallest bit; it wasn’t nearly as scary as you might expect. I’m not sure if I had a very good piece or not, I was offered a “better piece” but I declined. It seemed like a lot of skin and bones and as they say, “tasted like chicken”. Actually to me it tasted more like fish.
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Malaysia – Day 10
I never had supper last night. I had agreed to wait for a couple of the other students to get home from work and then we’d go out to eat. Well I should have just gone on my own because they thought they’d be home by 8 but I think it was around 9:30 when they finally came knocking on my door. I had already fallen asleep and was too tired to go. So this morning I was extremely hungry and ordered 3 of my favourite, the banana roti.
Here the cook has already stretched and folded the bread and is now adding the banana inside it. Next he cooks it on a small griddle to the side. It’s served with a “gravy” of curry or dahl sauce.
It’s really good stuff, but if I had my choice I’d probably drown it in maple syrup, honey butter, or icing sugar. They are very much like scones and so that’s my natural desire.
The rest of the work day I spent improving my storyboard for Kick-Ray. It’s coming along nicely.
This evening we had some guest speakers come to our residence. Their names are Kesh Singh and Jamison Masse. They talked to our group about life in Malaysia and about their work at a company called Profitera.
The best part of the evening was when we went out with Jamie for a great cold treat. The conversation was light and fun and the treat was absolutely wonderful. I can’t remember what it’s called, but the one we all ordered has fresh mango, shaved ice, some kind of sugar based syrup, topped with tapioca pudding. It’s so good my mouth is watering just thinking about it. WOW.
Jamie is also a Canadian — about my age — and has been living in Asia for the last 4 or 5 years. He’s a programmer / manager at his company and it sounds like he really loves his job.
I asked him about tax laws with regard to importing and exporting software from Malaysia to Canada. He figures that the laws are having a hard time keeping up with technology and that a lot of laws don’t treat software development the same way they would a tangible object. I supposed Canadian customs would have the answers and he agreed. I was curious about this because it seems very closely related to importing and exporting New Media content.