Input cost to cheescake:
$1.50 crust
$1.30/2 milk
$2.40/2 sourcream
$6.00/6 vanilla extract
$1.79 cream cheese
$1.50/3 eggs
Total = $6.65
Not including time 1/2 hour for making the product and 1/4 hour of washing dishes. (What is the cost per hour of a cheap grad student?)
utility from a successful product: infinite.
An Eli cheese cake is sold for $12.00
I should still make my own cheesecake.
I request the Merriam-Webster dictionary add the following words to the dictionary, given the phenomenal rise of the reference to the word “Obama” in many popular situations:
1. Obamaly (adverb). This word is used in a situation to describe the merit of working hard and not giving up. The origin of this word comes from the part of President Elect Obama’s life when he tried to run for office the first time and failed miserably. Then the next time he ran, luck struck and his opponent dropped out due to some sexual scandal. An example of a mundane situation where the word applied: Having failed her driver license examination again after 3 tries, Mary told her mother that she is going to quit. Mary’s mother then said, “You got to look at this obamaly – he didn’t give up when he failed his first run for office in Illinois, then the next time he tried he succeeded due to luck!”
2. Oba-Man (slang). Proper pronounciation requires a strong emphasis on the “ba”. This slang can be used as an outburst (similar to when one says, “Oh Man!”) to express camaraderie to our “brothers” and “sisters”. (by “brothers” and “sisters”, I mean black dudes and chicks.) This word should be used in similar spirit and tone as “Way to go GIRL!”. Here is an example of a fitting situation for the use of this slang: Your car was impounded by the police and you found yourself be serviced by a grumpy black lady at the car pound window, who wants to charge you an outrageous amount of fines. So you say, “Oba-Man! I should have paid for my parking tickets long ago. But President Obama didn’t pay his either so I thought I didn’t need to.” Hopefully the use of this word will lead to a special treatment of you by the black lady.
Another situation where this slang could be used is when you found yourself walking in a shady black neighborhood at night, and a couple black dudes were walking shadily toward you. As they tried to rob you, you say, “Hey, Oba-Man!” Hopefully the use of this word will lead to a shared sense of camaraderie with your to-be muggers.
3. baracke (verb). Conjugation of this words are: baracking, baracked. This word describes the action where one suddenly experience an overnight meteoric rise to fame. An example of the use of this verb is: That high school student used to be a loser in his high school, until he baracked after giving an amazing speech at the student council election.
4. obamy (adj). This word describes the feeling that you can do ANY thing in the world as long as you work hard. It originates from after the historical election of Barack Obama, when all across the United States, mothers begin to tell their children (especially mothers in South Chicago) that, “Look, if Obama can become the US president, then you can be anything you want to.” A situation where this adjective applies is: I was feeling obamy about my 2nd year research paper yesterday night, but now I am feeling Paliny. endnote: Paliny is also a new adjective introduced by the 2008 US election. It describes a situation when people have low expectations on you.
Here is another word suggested by a friend:
Palin (noun). A seemingly right and good choice but turning out poor and devastating result. Peter gave me a Palin when he suggested me to buy the Yugo at a big discount.
While Obama faces historically high expectations, Wendy here is facing historically low expectations on her performance ( Wendy now = Sarah Palin entering the debate).
Where was I on November 4? Grant Park. The park was packed and there was a palpable sense of festivity everywhere I look. It felt more like a New Year’s Eve celebration than a night of election. I arrived at 6:30pm, and stayed until it was over, which was about 11:30pm. They put up screens of CNN everywhere. In the beginning, everytime a new projection came out that Obama leads a state, everybody cheered. In fact, cheers just eruped randomly everywhere. I kept looking toward where the cheers from, kinda glueless as to what was happening.
The cheers was loudest when Pennslyvania was projected to be Obama’s. When North Carolina and Florida came out, the cheers were even louder.
Towards the end (I wasn’t aware at that time that it was the end), when Virginia’s final results came out, and it had turned blue, everybody was just going nuts. Within seconds after that, the CNN anchor said that within seconds, the west coast states would close, and they had this timer that counting down. All of a sudden, everybody was counting down — 10, 9, 8, 7…….I had no idea why they were counting down — then, 3, 2, 1 — then suddenly everybody was hugging each other and was going majorly nuts — I looked up to the CNN screen and saw that Obama’ s electoral counts had increased to 287 from 232 (due to California) and in large bold letters — OBAMA ELECTED! The CNN screen showed Oprah at the frontline. Everybody cheered.
And when Obama finally came out to give the speech, all the people in front of me and behind me were weeping. The whole crowd was silent. And people were putting the hands up high — as if in church, saying hyms. It was a sight to behold.
At the end, the crowd dispersed orderly. I read in another blog of an attendent at the rally that he felt this crowd was different from any other crowds he had seen—that this crowd was reverential. I couldn’t agree more with this adjective to describe the crowd. Keep in mind that this is a huge crowd in tight space, and many of them are African Americans. However, there was no fighting, no commotion, nothing chaotic from beginning to the end. When there was victory, the crowd cheered, but they did not go out to unleash their wild joy by destruction (like in some post-victory sport games). This crowd has a sense of groundedness to it, even after the victory. While the joy in the air is like a New Year’s Eve party, it was also nothing like New Year’s Eve party. People were not drunk, and they don’t jumped on tables. People just came, wept, cheered, and went back home. Just like that. Very orderly. Phenomenal.
Here are some pictures from the scene.
Yep, that was us that the CNN screen is showing….
A sea of people stretching into the horizon.
Filed under: Personal
I dreamed about my little brother yesterday night, but in that dream he walked into a house in his current physical height but walked out having shrank to the size when he was 10. So I asked him, “You seemed to have become shorter,” with my hand on his back, speaking like an older sister.
It’s interesting to witness the progress of my brother’s maturity overtime. You watch him begin to walk, then talk, had the first girlfriend. Then one day, you realized that he actually know more than I do in some area of life.
More recently, I realized that he has been changing to become more like his father. I spoke to him on the phone yesterday. I asked him if we should still stop by Japan and hang around, he said, “I want to get to HK ASAP because I want to fish with Dad.”
Fish with Dad? When did he like to fish? My dad loves to fish, but none of us ever share his hobby. So apparently my little brother has become an avid fisherman, going fishing several days in the week to a creek in Davis.
This is really odd. Going fishing on a regular basis? In Davis? That is really odd.
But it is also quite funny.
Filed under: Random
I just found out that R.I.P means Rest In Peace.
Two deaths completely unrelated to me for unknown reasons moved me quite a lot today:
1. A 26-year old girl in Hong Kong committed suicide by jumping in front of the train. This girl is the same age as me, and is Maple’s grade school friend and classmate.
2. Obama’s grandmother died — a day before seeing his grandson win the US presidency. NY times has the photo of this grandmother throwing herself into Obama’s embrace at his high school graduation. Here is what Obama said of her grandma during his acceptance speech at DNC:
“She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life,….she poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.”
The sacrifice people who love us made.
R.I.P.
Three nice things happened to me today:
1. I recovered the keys I lost at the Halloween party (otherwise, the replacement car key costs $120, due to the fancy microchip component of the key), and I would have need to take the car to a Honda dealership to get the key programmed.
2. I went to a hardware store to get the adhesive remover and razor to remove the waxed serial number and gigantic “car impounded” sign on every car window. I didn’t tell the service rep exactly what I need the tools for, but I described to him the dimension of adhesive marks I need to remove, and the kind of sticker I need the razor on. And he said–not without a twinkle in his eyes and a lop-sided smile–”I know EXACTLY what you are looking for.”
3. The third nice thing happened after I got out of the hardware store happily with the Goo-Gone and razor in my hand. There at the parking lot, I began to raze off the waxed numbers. They fell off almost effortlessly! But after the wax are gone, there are still marks of numbers on the window, which I tried to scrub off manually with some paper towels. According to the instruction on Goo-Gone, I am supposed to use soaped, clear, white towels to wipe the surface after applying that chemical. But I only have white towels. At this time, I noticed that a woman had been looking at me for sometime in her car across from mine. Suddenly, she got out of her car, and shoved me a couple lemon-soap wet white towels (you know those smell good soap towels with lemon fragrance?), and said, “Here, use this!” I gave her a grateful look. Those towels were EXACTLY what I needed.
What are the odds that a car next to you just happened to have those lemon soaped towels?
Note: something good does come out of bad experiences. For example, due to the shock and fear of a downward spiral in my life, I started going back to a normal sleeping schedule and waking up early. Second, I discovered this magical thing call GOO-GONE — I am not afraid of adhesive stickers anymore! Because of this convenient substance and the wonderful razor, I also removed some old windshied sticker adhesive marks, which I had deemed impossible to remove for a long time.
