Remember the three-faced frog

RAYTRACE: fearsome
BRAIN: grotesque
RAYTRACE: i wonder which brain controls which leg
RAYTRACE: does it eat through all htree heads?
RAYTRACE: it’d make neurophysiology so much easier
RAYTRACE: three brains in one animal!
DY: it is kind of cute in a star trek way
BRAIN: yuck!
BRAIN: does it have 3 brains? makes you thinkg
BRAIN: “let’s go get coffee”
BRAIN: “ok”
BRAIN: “no”
BRAIN: “dammit we never can agree on anything!”
BRAIN: Tom insists it’s an elaborate hoax
DY: i think it is cute
BRAIN: like a real-life pokemon
BRAIN: TriFrog! I choose you!
BRAIN: Trifrog is a water-type pokemon

Fruits of Brazil

I found this note which I never transcribed – it’s a bunch of notes about fruit I was tasting in Brazil.

Fruit notes

Green things- bitter, never got “Ripe”- very sour! Soft flesh and skin like a plum

yellow things- very sour, vaguely apple flavored, soft flesh, harder skin that is not edible

sapote? not jenipapo! – potato–like mottled brown papery skin- inside looks like a overripe plum (brown and yellow), with a consistency of a firm plum. Tastes slightly figgy.

Mangosteen – a hard dark purple rind, similar on the outside to a pomagranite. Very thick rind- almost like a thing particle board. On the inside, a white segemented fruit, slimy like the inside of a loquat. Most segments have no seeds, but some have a single seed which fills >50% of the segment. Very sweet and slightly tart.

Net melon – tastes like a milder honeydew. Extremely juicy.

Passion fruit “maracujua” – larger than little purple passionfruit, hard yellow outside, like a huge old lemon- inside, past a lemony white pith, is a gelatinous mass of seeds with pulp. Very sour!

jenipapo – grey. smells like a pu-erh- earthy. pulp is the hard consistency of a walnut fruit, or a soft leather. Inedible.

cuja “cashew apple” – astringent.

I dreamt of Martin Scorsese

I had a funny dream last night –

I dreamt that my wife discovered she was distantly related to Martin Scorsese – so some of her younger cousins and I got invited to “Cousin Marty’s” place.

Scorsese in person was fun but sort of a control freak… he met us at his place but then put us on a bus he had rented with a driver, just three of us on a full-sized bus.

The bus took us to a place up the coast where there was sort of an abandoned water temple… the washed-out trail was full of backpacking hippies making some kind of pilgrimage

So we get there, and the place is a ruin. I realize I’ve seen it in a clip from one of “Marty’s” more famous movies, which I’m embarrassed to not have seen.

When we return he shows us a list of house rules. One of them is essentially not to use text messages from inside the house without him reading the messages. When I am back with my family I work out an elaborate cipher to use when I’m back at his place. I teach my mom to use web-based WWI-era codes.

I also quiz the younger cousins to make sure they aren’t going to be a pain on the trip back; I’m unconvinced and refuse to bring them back.

That is about all I can remember!

SAMIR: sounds like easy rider
BRAIN: I HAVE seen Easy Rider real recently

Things not to say in an interview

When Jack Sarfatti was 13 years old, he began receiving phone calls from a strange metallic voice that told him he would someday become part of an elite group of scientists exploring uncharted territory. Those calls, which he believes may have come from a computer on a spacecraft, proved a seminal influence on his life and led him to pursue a career that combined mainstream physics with an enduring interest in UFOs and the far-out reaches of science.

Tide thefts and consensus reality

BRAIN: Tide thefts
BRAIN: what I love about this is how non-drug trade people have no idea
what the deal is… we can only speculate!
STEPHEN: I could be mistaken, but I don’t think the site with the Tide
article is being entirely truthful.
STEPHEN: (as in, I think it’s a little more The Onion than The BBC)
BRAIN: Thieves rolling Tide detergent out of US stores
STEPHEN: !
BRAIN: tide thefts – Google Search
BRAIN: truth is stranger than fiction
BRAIN: snopes hasn’t determined if it’s a widespread hoax or not
STEPHEN: It’s not unheard of for mainstream media to mistakenly pick up humour/hoaxes … but it does sound like maybe I was mistaken and, as you say … truth is stranger than fiction,
STEPHEN: You cannot make this shit up. Or, if someone did … damn, they’re good.
BRAIN: the Orbo guys are still around I think
STEPHEN: The bit where it said “… where Tide is known as “liquid gold” among officers.” was where I really started to think “Onion!”
BRAIN: I had a similar reaction to the passion gap thing
CLU: man, this explains those dirty looks I would get when I went to get detergent before I switched to All….

ACH: Police say reports of nationwide spike in Tide thefts doesn’t wash (Fox News)
ACH: How many anectdotes does it take to make data?

PIRATEQUEEN: I found several news articles that are months old that support the Tide story
MATT: Maybe this is some sort of weird viral ad campaign for Tide.
BRAIN: genius