from the desk of stinkpot

This week, Mommy bought Benig an Easter Bunny costume.  He tried it on as soon she brought it home.  He could hardly contain his excitement to be the holiday bearer of cheer and presents again.  He looks like he’s ready for the big day next week.

christina and i took an old flexible flyer out to a staten island park during last night’s blizzard:

Our paper on ancient genome evolution was published online yesterday.  It’s been remarkable watching news stories about the work spread online; as a scientist and geek, it’s thrilling to see my work on sites like Wired or Slashdot.  There’s also been some press coverage from less techie sources, like MSNBC and US News.

To which Christina remarked in the car, “Great.  Your nerdiness made the papers.“

Christina and I threw our last study break as GRTs (RAs) last month.  We hoped to end on a high note with a memorable food theme.  In the end, we went with a long-promised and ill-conceived idea: gross foods of the world.  (Actually, due to a combination of our cultural expertise and the Philippines’ seemingly inexhaustible appetite for all things pork, the study break was in practice the “gross foods of the Philippines.)  Christina and I dug up some dinuguan (pork stewed in its own blood), sisig (fried pork snout), and chicharron (fried pork skins).  The real highlight of the evening though was the balut, or fertilized duck egg, which proved horrifying to some and delicious to most.

Overall, the study break was bittersweet.  I’ll be defending my thesis later this month, meaning Christina and I will have to leave the undergrads we’ve been living with for the past 2 years. We’re both can’t help but feel malungkot to be leaving.

it’s been a long past week,  as i’ve been gearing up for handing in my thesis in T-14 days.

part of the headache has been due to catching a bug in some old code and having to rerun 3 years of work over the weekend.

i told our computer cluster sysadmin my sob story,  who then helped expedite redoing my analyses with fixed up code.

i thanked him today for his help with my thesis.  our sysadmin’s response made me laugh out loud for the second time today*:

ps. sleep 14d && echo congratulations !

*the first time was hearing lady gaga on the radio promise to give away a backstage makeover to the next Nth caller.  i pictured christina winning and coming back looking like a deranged circus clown.

at the seder we attended this evening, our host asked the bespeckled, pony-tailed graduate student sitting across from me to chime in with whatever he knew about the story of exodus. his perfect response:

i was born a muslim and shortly thereafter became a communist.  i can’t contribute to this story.

a hilarious exchange took place today with one of the folks processing my gut microbiome samples:

lab member: uh, lawrence, i’m not quite sure how to tell you this … we’re having some issues filtering particulate matter out of your samples. have you been eating a lot of seeds lately?

me: well, i’ve been eating at the asian food truck and having sesame chicken this past week.

lab member: sesame seeds! so that’s what’s been clogging our filters! can you please stop eating chinese food?!

view from a restaurant we ate at last night.

bangkok is like the dollar store for dinner: pad thai, pad see yu, noodle soup, or duck and rice — a plate of it will invariably run you about $1 on the street. food carts are shipwrecked all over the sidewalks in our neighborhood and each has its own set of dishes. it’s like the entire city is an enormous outdoor dim-sum. if you like asian food, this place is heaven.

last friday, i thought i’d try and reach food nirvana with some thai friends chris and i made at (where else?) a local restaurant.

oil, mei and me

we took a cab to chinatown, the delicious love-child of las vegas and a chinese restaurant.

chinatown cab

bangkok chinatown

i ate some weird things that night:

1. pig tongue
2. chicken lung
3. pig blood patties
4. pig gut
5. grasshopper
6. fish intestine
7. gingko and mushroom ice sou

mushroom and ginkgo dessert

durian carver

fried cockroach, mealworms, and grasshoppers

street squid

oddly enough, it wasn’t this night that gave me a case of the bangkok bathroom blues. instead, chris and i both fell ill after eating some accursed thai yogurt from a local supermarket. that’s what we get for eating indoors!

just grabbed my first meal of street food in bangkok. i made sure to take ice in my glass and pour myself some water from the table jug of green tea.

your move gut microbes.