Dream hairstyles

Every once in a while I fall in love with a hairstyle I see in a movie or book. I really liked Amelie's hairstyle (in Amelie), and I kind of liked Trixie's hair (in Speed Racer). But they have black hair, which I would undoubtedly look sickly and ugly in (not to mention it's straight). So it wasn't until I watched Wild Strawberries that I really liked a hair style that I could actually have one day: Sara's hairstyle. It's short, yet girly, but not annoyingly so. I'd like to just walk into a salon and give them these screenshots and say, "cut my hair like that!" Does anyone know if it has a name ("poodle cut"? that sounds horrible! The sides are a little different I think)? I'm not sure I could pull if off, though. The movie itself was great, by the way. It's about a professor who realizes he's been mean to people, but only at an advanced age.

Found it

For years I have been looking for this Russian movie I saw when I was in high school. I could only remember vague details about the plot - there was a boy, and he was in the snow a lot, and there was an older woman who worked at a printing press, and it was really artsy and all. I finally found out what it was today! The Mirror, directed by Tarkovsky. Yes, I'm feeling very satisfied at the moment.

Another departure, another road

A professor of mine died recently - earlier this month in fact - but I didn't find out about it until yesterday. I was thinking about Dr. Inouye, and how he sincerely believed in all of his students, but he managed not to be too serious all the time (he would start telling a joke in the middle of a lecture, and for the longest time I had trouble telling when he was joking and when he was lecturing). He loved making horrible puns, which of course reminded me of my family and my high school band teacher (seriously, what band teacher doesn't like bad puns?). It was for his class that I made this other blog, which as I look back on it, seems horribly dramatic and over-philosophized. I'll probably think the same thing reading back on this entry in two years.

He was a strong supporter of learning as an eternal principle, which, upon examining my own beliefs, is one I've adopted myself. I am beginning to think of my learning as part of my religion, as strange as that sounds. I think that explains why I get so annoyed at students who don't appreciate that they have a great opportunity to learn, students who don't milk their classes for all their worth. I'll admit I'm guilty of it sometimes, but most of the time I'd do the assigned reading, ask tons of questions in class, and seek out professors who I felt had more to offer than the small share of information imparted in class. I'm also getting increasingly frustrated with how stagnant most professors are in their way of teaching. So all this contemplation about education made me think that I should look into graduate school in education, not just literature or psychology. But I think in some ways it would make me more unhappy to study education...

Confession:

I've always wanted to take my manual typewriter to the library or a coffeeshop and start typing, ala improv everywhere's mobile desktop mission. I don't have the guts to do it though.

Russian DOS games

If you're a Russian student and you want to play a Russian game, I recommend Heli. Basically you're a little helicopter that matches an English word to a Russian one. Some of the vocabulary seems simple, and it's a little frustrating that it doesn't tell you the correct answer right afterwards, but it might beat actually making flashcards (you'll need winrar to decompress it and DOSbox to play it). I'm still looking for some Russian adventure game, let me know if you find one that works.

Hidden cost of happiness

Happiness in children may impair attention to detail. (I have the PDF if you want it)

I'm not too worried about this, because what child is happy every single minute of his life? But it brings up a good point - different moods are useful and we shouldn't say one is better than another just because it's more pleasant.

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Now playing: We Are Scientists - The Great Escape

FREE EDUCATION

Ahhh! I'm so excited! Podcasts of an entire course on existentialism in literature and film, from UC Berkeley (via free online courses; scroll down for behavioral neurobiology, awesome)! I can keep pretending to be a student, oh, I am so happy.

Internet Adventures

Okay, recently I joined pmog.com after my brother mentioned it to me. I'm not very interested in the role-playing part, but I am interested in how I'm learning about internet sites I had never heard of before but are still interesting to me. The "missions" you can go on are basically guided tours of different sites, and some are very informative. I recently took one about Last.fm applets, and was introduced to the recommended artists generator (although lots of things can recommend artists to you), as well as the music "openness" test (I scored 121, the graph is to the left; "fractured disco" was the least listened to at .09%, haha). I also revisited the great freeware database of games in some retro-gaming mission I went on (and have been happily playing an adventure game from it).

Food Experiments: Chili

So, perhaps you recall my experiment with chili last year: I combined it with rice and ate it in a tortilla. This was a good combination as it lengthened out my chili and made it more digestible (a good trait for foods I eat). Tonight I decided to combine chili with spaghetti and tomato sauce (apparently chili spaghetti isn't that weird of a dish).

The spaghetti didn't stick to the chili+sauce as well as it does to the sauce alone, and the chili beans had this habit of falling off my spaghetti-laden fork, so I ended up eating them seperately most of the time (but when I got the right combination it tasted almost identical to the rice and chili). I think rice is a superior partner here, as it combines more evenly.