Country Style Sausage

I was out grocery shopping the other day, as I sometimes do, and I stumbled across this when I was in the meat section. It’s a little unsettling to see minced pork shaped into the head of a pig, complete with cherry tomato eyes, as the minced pork were snow being shaped into a snowman with coal eyes or something!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Every girl wants to be seen as beautiful, no matter how small this desire may be. Perhaps it has been hardwired into a girl’s brain, or it has been drilled into a girl’s mind by society and the media. There are images of “beautiful” girls everywhere that are tall, thin, clear-skinned, and are so beautiful and so perfect that it seems as though they are too beautiful and too perfect to be true. And most of the time, they are, for the images the media projects to us of beautiful girls aren’t entirely real.

The beauty company Dove launched a campaign for real beauty to emphasize the fact that today’s standards of beauty set by media and society are not realistic standards at all. These standards are based off of images that are airbrushed and Photoshopped to the point where the final image bears few or no similarities to the model in the photo. The accompanying video for Dove’s campaign makes a powerful statement, and it really shows you how the image of beauty has been distorted by society today.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

The other day when I was at work, I was walking past the receptionist’s desk when someone said to me, “Oh hey! I didn’t know you worked here! What’s up?” And me, being the clever person that I am, stared blankly at her and responded with, “Uh, hi! Yeah, I work here. How are you?” I managed to make a quick escape by excusing myself to make some photocopies¹, but I couldn’t figure out how I knew this girl.

Half an hour later, I finally solved the mystery. I shared one of my classes with her, but as she sits behind me every single class, I only hear her voice during the class discussions, and I never see her face. I felt bad for not recognizing her at once when I saw her, but it took me a while to figure out how I knew her. Still, I hope that I managed to act like I knew her immediately, and that I recovered from my initial “Wait, who is this girl and how do I know her?!” reaction and covered it with the assumption that sooner or later, I’d figure out how I knew her, so I may as well pretend that I remembered how I knew her when talking. I hate it when I am caught off guard whenever I bump into people I know, I always feel really awkward for not knowing who they are and am unsure of what to say when talking to them!

Question of the Week: When you see someone that knows you but you don’t recognize them, how do you react?

1. I work as an office assistant, so the photocopier and I are the best of friends. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

The Inebriated Scientist

In June 2007, I did an exchange trip to France. Part of my stay was with a host family in Strasbourg, and one of the many events the host school in Strasbourg organized for us American exchange students was a tour of Colmar, a neighboring town in the Alsace region of France. Colmar was very picturesque, particularly Little Venice, as well as the old town section that was full of quaint little stores¹.

It was on our visit to Colmar that we saw this statue of Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, a famous French scientist, sculpted by Frédéric Bartholdi, who was the same man that did the Statue of Liberty in New York City. Obviously this statue of Hirn was meant to pay tribute to Hirn’s significant contributions in his chosen field of science, yet if you look at the Wikipedia image of Hirn, you’ll see that in my photo, someone decided to supply Hirn with a bottle of vodka. It seems as though even the most brilliant of scientists² enjoy partaking in drinking hard liquor from time to time!

1. One of my friends found a store that sold tea and jam, and proceeded to buy nearly twenty euros worth of tea and jam. I’m not sure what she was planning to do with all that tea and jam. [↩]
2. According to Wikipedia, Hirn was a “physicist, astronomer. mathematician and engineer who made important measurements of the mechanical equivalent of heat and contributions to the early development of thermodynamics. He further applied his science in the practical development of steam engines.” If that’s not a description of someone who’s brilliant at science, I don’t know what is. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Pandas and Ears of Corn

In July 2008 when I was in Hong Kong, I went to Ocean Park amusement park to spend the day there with my cousins. Much fun was had by all, from the rollercoasters, the water rides, the dolphin show, and the other various attractions Ocean Park has to offer. I’ve always loved Ocean Park, and my favorite attraction there is the giant panda exhibit. Pandas are my most favorite animal, and I love visiting Le Le, Ying Ying, An An, and Jia Jia (the four pandas in the exhibit).

It was as I was entering the exhibit that I noticed there were a line of plastic pandas decorating the side of the queue and the entrance of the exhibit. These plastic pandas had their heads sticking out of ears of corn. I’m not quite sure what the meaning/symbolism behind it is, if there is any. There were also panda heads sticking out of bamboo sticks, which made more sense, since pandas and bamboo are related, but all of the plastic pandas, whether it had a corn or bamboo body, were just weird. Why were their heads sticking out of the corn/bamboo? Are pandas cuter when their head is attached to the top of a vegetable rather than a panda body? Or am I just having a really thick moment (well, thick eight months or so, seeing as this was taken last July!) and missing something completely obvious?

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.