Rant 452 / Eggs

Devilled eggs, a dish anyone can make. Just boil eggs, cut into halves, squeeze yolks into a zip-lock bag, mash yolks with mayo and mustard, cut hole in bag, squeeze contents back into egg whites.

In this photo, I added 1 heaped tablespoon of mayo and 1 teaspoon of mustard and a few drops of Tabasco sauce with 3 yolks. Can't taste the Tabasco, mustard flavour rather mild, need more of both next time, and less mayo.

For the inexperienced, here's how to make hard-boiled eggs:

Add eggs into pot, fill pot with water till they're covered, heat to boil, turn off heat and leave for 15mins. Guaranteed hard-boiled without bursting, which happens if you add eggs directly into boiling water.

The only difficult part was peeling the egg without breaking the egg white because you need to keep the semi-spherical hole unbroken to be able to fill it with the processed yolk, and the white near the yolk is usually much thinner than the rest.

Also, recommended additions include pepper flakes and chopped onions. I was too lazy to chop onions.











I wonder what will happen after I'm gone. Will I be remembered? Or will I be just like one of the innumerable nameless farmers in the Ming Dynasty - gone and forgotten?

I don't expect to have any children, though it still wouldn't do any good if all I want is to have someone to remember me. Just look at, say, the innumerable nameless farmers in the Ming Dynasty... again. I bet all of them have huge families with 9-20 children per set of parents, yet they are now among the billions of bits we have only a common noun for - dust.

Logically speaking, I will be forgotten unless I accomplish something great. Even then, I still run the risk of having memories of me blurred into unbelievable tales. Take Xuanzang for example. He risked his life for years and travelled by foot to India to bring genuine Buddhist scriptures back to China, but now most people remember him as the guy who fought demons with the Monkey God.

An even closer example can be your own family. Some of us may still know the names of our grandparents, but definitely not our great-grandparents! How many years ago were they born?

One of my great-grandfathers was a minor official in the Qing government who escaped to the countryside when news spread of a major revolution happening. The Qing Dynasty ended in 1912. From this it can be deduced that he was born somewhere around the 1880s, with an error of plus/minus a decade. That would be a mere 130 years ago - less than 1.5 centuries. Therefore I can conclude to some degree of certainty that I will be almost completely forgotten within 150 years of my birth.

That's only 120+ years away.

Or if we're counting from death, he died when the Japanese lost the war. Drunk Japanese soldiers used him as a punching bag when they learnt of their Emperor's decision to surrender. That must have been pretty sad, you know, like, just when they thought they had survived. The Japanese surrendered in 1945, 64 years ago.

The thing about human nature is that everyone wants to be remembered after the end. That's why we strive to create a legacy for ourselves, something that will stand after we're gone. Hence the scientists who name stuff after themselves, which makes remembering theories and equations annoyingly confusing.

Perhaps this blog will be my legacy. After all, this is just about the only thing I can do that can possibly last centuries that a great career or a dozen children won't achieve. That is, unless I build a giant commercial empire or my fertility breaks the current world record of 888 kids to a single father. I dread the thought of having to have sex with an average of 1.2 women every night for 60 years. Monetary costs and physical exertion are just two of the many reasons why this is not a good thing.

Maybe my bro's descendants would read this and know what it was like to live during the transition period at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Wonder what they would think of it. And if they read this particular rant, maybe they would understand better the effects of WWII, not to mention how "great" a cook I am.

I'm curious about what it will be like to live at the end of the 21st century compared to the end of the 20th. Will the clothes be even skimpier than those of today? I can hardly imagine how that can be achieved, other than by walking around in your birthday suits. Maybe nipple stickers will be the normal top. "Wow! Look at those glossy nipple stickers! Going clubbing later?"

Just like there is a huge difference between photos of the past and the videos of today, how will people remember each other in the near future? My bet is on 3D videos, possibly played in a holographic form. Cameras will be categorised in Gigapixels or even Terapixels. How close am I going to be to the truth? I can't be too far from it. Look at it this way: when your parents were young, they wouldn't have believed that an object the size of roughly three fingers that is able to record thousands of songs can exist, not at affordable prices anyway.

I wish my ancestors wrote diaries. Even one would be a huge treasure trove of first-hand accounts about seemingly mundane stuff of those times. I wonder what my grandfathers thought about my grandmothers before and after they met. I mean, they were having arranged marriages in those days, so all they could have known about each other was from the matchmakers and maybe a photo or two.

It is entirely possible that when they first saw each other they had thought, "Oh shit! I got scammed! That pic must have been photoshopped!" Other than the Photoshop bit, it might really have happened, but now I'll never know. Only my maternal grandmother is still alive today, and I haven't spoken to/met her in years. Maternal grandfather died of pneumonia before I was born. Paternal grandfather, leukemia when I was young (pri school age, I believe). Paternal grandmother, some years ago, years after my father's passing, unknown causes, don't know, don't care.

If I had a diary belonging to one of my ancestors, I'd probably translate and record the interesting bits in my computer. First-hand information is always the best, just because it came directly from a person who had personally experienced what was described. At the very least, it beats any sort of record written in third person.

There are so many interesting stories about the pre-war and post-war days. I've only heard a few, so I'm sure there must be many more. In one (very short) story, there was this porridge shop near where my maternal grandfather used to live. For some reason, this shop never stopped selling pork porridge even during the war (WWII). Another strange thing was how starving orphans who slept at the door (very likely because of the aroma) sometimes seemed to disappear overnight.

My grandfather frequented this shop for their pork porridge, probably because it was one of the few that still offered it in those times. He never thought it tasted unusual. This may be nothing but a rumour, or he may have been eating long pork instead of real pork all along. Who knows?

This story wouldn't have been interesting if not for the fact that my granddad used to visit it often.

I guess I'm a sentimental person.













How will the videos on Youtube end? They cannot possibly store all the videos forever, can they? Will my blog someday have patches of bad links because the videos were taken down? What about my pics? Will Google hold my pics for centuries? My blog too? Or will I have to resort to spamming Ctrl-S for an entire day to archive this?












Right now, "RIP Kanye West" is the top trending topic on Twitter. I found out about it on 4chan where they were spamming threads telling everyone to log on to Twitter and say that phrase. 4chan is making itself more infamous. I bet moot must be happy about the rising ad revenue.














Reading the Watchmen comic. The fans were right, the movie was very very similar to the comic. Even the more memorable phrases were quoted word for word from the original book. There are some differences but only minor ones, nothing that makes the plot any different.

The comic may be less dramatic due to its format (moving pictures are always superior to stills), but it is much more detailed, even containing excerpts from fictional books like the memoirs of the first Night Owl.












My router is acting up again. Now it's giving everyone bad signals (3-4 bars out of 5 usually, 2 for most of today) for some reason. I get really bad pings and even time out from my connections. I just hope it's not dying, though I can't think of a more likely reason for the symptoms.











The US economy is pretty bad. China isn't very happy about it. Why? Because as the USD is dropping, their consumers have increasing difficulty in buying Chinese products. Indeed, the RMB has risen against the USD so much that China is effectively pegging it to roughly 6.8RMB to a dollar by maintaining its value near that number, ie forcing it to stay low. According to the IMF, the actual rate should have been 3.798RMB per USD in 2008. That means the Chinese basically halved the value of their own currency.

On the other hand, certain experts are mentioning the possibility of an economic bubble forming right now in China.

Who's going to be the winner?