The place of cool waters...

Black soybean pasta

In an attempt to cut down on my gluten intake (long story) I got some organic black-soybean pasta from Alishan and cooked it up with a tomato-garlic sauce and a dash of Parmesan. The taste is so mild as to be undetectable... but the texture is fantastically like cheese! Nothing like the coarse whole-wheat pasta I'm used to (which is good too btw).

refresh!

After the bible pr0n I thought we might need to look at something nice. These are the flowers Shinichi gave me for my birthday last July. Lovely to have on this unusually cloudy and blustery morning.

Bible pr0n

In every bedside table drawer in every hotel room in Japan there is a bible and a guide to the pay-per-porn on TV. Judging by frayed corners and greasy fingerprints all over the latter, it isn't too difficult to guess just how much prayin' is going on.

Redemption???

Hopefully this makes up for last night's dinner disaster. A crunchy-crusted honey oat sunflower seed bread made from buckwheat flour. How does it taste? Dunno... still cooling on the rack.

Math and science are hard

Last night I made seared cod nestled on a bed of sauteed spinach and red pepper with spelt penne. It was covered in a light honey-mustard sauce with capers. Looks good, hunh? Well, it was crap.
What happened? I followed the recipe, but was dividing everything by four and I think that's where I got confused. I probably forgot to do the math somewhere and it screwed up the chemical balance or something.

"Relishing Life... and Death"

Genius sculptures made from wire and random stuff...
(via BoingBoing)

The Gap

The World Economic Forum released its findings concerning the gender gap in 128 countries covering 90% of the world's population. They determined the results by looking at women's economic participation and opportunity, educational attainmenet, political empowerment, and health/survival.

Interesting to see the Philippines and Sri Lanka ranked so high (even Lesotho and Namibia are more gender equal than the USA!) and shocking that Italy and Japan are so low. As Japanese Habitat volunteers go to Kyrgyzstan to build houses, I suppose Kyrgyz NGOs will be sending groups to Tokyo to introduce them to the concept of gender equality. I wonder why "development" always seems to be based on GDP...