the letter opener

we went to a handcrafted wood gallery while in australia, and some of the pieces were gorgeous. there were a lot of possibilities to take home, but as i remembered back to my best purchases from recent travel, i kept coming back to the things that made me fondly remember the trip... objects that to an uninterested viewer just appear to be what they are: for instance, a jacket, or a doorstop. but of course objects are links back into our memory. i've read that some scientists believe that our memory doesn't actually really forget very much at all -- rather, we lose the links to get to the memories. stranded memories.

of course, we've all had those aha moments when something random brings back a memory from the distant past. so then i thought it'd be great if i could surround myself with everyday objects that would bring back memories. and that's what i did in australia, with the purchase of a huon letter opener. check it out below:

huon is this wonderful wood that has such a distinctive smell. the smell is sort of like that of gasoline as you pump it into your car. i love that smell.

random thoughts

i walk a lot. in berkeley, in san francisco, i'm often on my feet. so it's been a bit hard going lately since i got back from australia, where my big toe was slightly crushed. a small bridge spanned the distance between the pontoon we were diving from, and the boat we took to the pontoon. this bridge would rock as the ocean moved, and it unfortunately rocked onto my big toe, and smothered it. what pain. one of the workers at the pontoon came by, told me to be careful, and said it'd be alright.

well, there's no doubt in my mind that it will be ok, but i've been walking a bit funny to adjust for the still dull pain in that toe. sigh.

anyway, as i was walking back to my home today, my mind, for some odd reason, wandered to yoda (yes, the little green alien) and star wars episode three (the final movie). i was thinking that things would've been so much better had yoda taken ewen mcgregor to fight the emperor. stupid yoda. what random thoughts... but i just wondered about the misery that could've been avoided. :)

finally, i've read the recent new yorker article about parkour. for those of you that don't know, parkour is .. well, if you see this video you'll understand what it is:



anyway, it's so amazing to see this man move. in the article, david belle (the man behind parkour) says that he wanted to move like monkeys, and he certainly achieves that.

australia pics

seema, jeff, neha and i went to australia at the end of march. we had a fantastic time. sydney is certainly in my top 5 list of wonderful cities. check out some of our pictures. hilights include koala holding, didjereedoo playing, hot full-body suits, man-eating spiders, and more!

Best of Australia

imagemakers

i haven't posted in a while, and there's no excuse. i just feel i haven't had much to say, and so i didn't want to waste time.

but now i have something to say. i have found a tv show on public television that i absolutely must tell everyone about (especially since many of my readers are in the bay area). the show is called imagemakers, and it's on kqed. the producers get short films from around the world and show them. imagemakers is only 30 minutes, so sometimes there is just one movie, but other times there are multiple very short films.

and they are great! ok, well, many of them. here's a very short one called consent that i saw the other day. a blurb about it first: "From Jason Reitman (the director of In God We Trust, one of ImageMakers' most popular films) comes a clever take on urban love. Two young adults with the hots for each other find themselves alone in bed for the first time. What's to stop them from doing it? As they soon find out, in this litigious society, nothing is as easy as it once was." (note: to preview button will show a preview on this page, but if you want to watch the whole thing you'll be taken to another website)



actually, it turns out that a lot of these short films are available online. i found the site atomfilms which seems to host a bunch of good short films.