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I've finally moved from Kirkland to Seattle and one of many things I found when packing boxes was an old web cam. It has a remote monitoring mode where it takes a picture every n seconds and I've temporarily put it on my balcony.

Another feature is creating time lapse videos - I've uploaded a few "traffic", "night riders" and "24h"

Bodies in Seattle
The controversial Bodies exhibition is currently on display in Seattle. It's controversial because the bodies used were bought from a Chinese medical school and the arrangers, Premier Exhibitions, are not sharing evidence of consent for using the bodies this way. Seattle Times' has an interesting article that gives more details.

Contriversial or not, I found the exhibition interesting and educational. Seeing a full human neural system laid out on a table, arteries and veins, and knee joints with muscles attached makes you want to sign up for a classs in anatomy.

A couple of facts interesting things I learned:
- When removing the part of a lung that contains a tumor the remaining part can still function.
- Smoking a packet of cigarettes on average shortens your life 2 hours and 20 minutes.
- Eyes don't grow after birth.

The exhibition is open until end of December and the ticket is $24.50. There's also a youtube commercial that gives some idea of what it's like.

Another great coke+menthos video: Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments II - The Domino Effect

Stevens got 18"
(webcam)
Can't wait for the ski season to start - already booked trips to Jackson and Whistler in Jan...

Look, the orkuteers are talking!

Borat is conquering the world!

...and some people are pissed off! Borat (Sacha) previously received criticism after his "utterly unacceptable" behavior at the '05 MTV Europe Music Awards. Shortly after, he posted his response on the "official" Borat site (www.borat.tv - Kazakh authorities shut down www.borat.kz).

I'm now looking forward to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry's reaction on this "xenophobic" movie. And while waiting I've started to go through the long list of
video clips that are available online - many of which were not shown in the movie or on the Ali G show.

Oh, and does anyone need more proof that video clips spreading online doesn't need to hurt the film industry? The smart marketing people behind Borat recognized the opportunity and that's one of the reasons they sold for $26.5M the first weekend in the US. Now if only the Kazakh officials were as clever they'd use this movie to their advantage. Lonely Planet is already featuring the Real Kazakhstan on their website and I bet their Central Asia edition is selling better and better for each day.

Remember the old 90s movie Rocketeer? I had almost forgotten about it until I recently stumbled over this 1966 clip of the real thing. Somehow the idea of strapping a rocket on your back is just so incredibly fascinating, although the pilots comment about getting down with the help of gravity after the 21.5s burn of fuel sounded a bit worrying... For now I'll stick to the good ol' Cessna 172, but as soon the break-through of commercial rocket backpacks come...

On Popular Demand: The Swedish Pancake Recipe

• 2.5 dl flour


• 1 tea spoon salt


• 3-4 eggs


• 6 dl milk

Mix flour, salt and eggs. If you're using an iron casket pan you might want to add some fat too. Add a little bit of milk (~1dl) and mix until smooth. Once you've gotten rid of all chunks of flour, add the rest of the milk. Warm up the pan, add fat if necessairy. Put some of the mix in the hot pan and tilt it so that all of the pans bottom if covered by a thin layer. Once the pancake becomes solid enough you flip it and wait another minute or so until it looks good.

Serve with ice cream, cream, butter, sugar, jam (cloudberry is excellent!), blue berries, strawberries, apples or whatever you like.

If you don't have the patience to make pancakes this way you can pour the same pancake mix into an owen form and bake it for 45 min on 225C. For extra credit add some apple slices in there and some cinamon on top.

Weekend @ Villa Vista


Villa Vista is a nice old fasion wooden cabin a stone throw from the entrance to the Hurricane Ridge in the Olympic Peninsula. There are two minimalistic bedrooms, a small bath room, kitchen with iron cascet frypans - perfect for making Swedish pancaces - and a living room with a great view over the lake. The living room is heated by a pellet eating fireplace which produces more that enough heat as long as it doesn't run out of pellets.


The cabin is very well maintained by the friendly owners, Mary and John, who lives next door. When we arrived, the fireplace was lit and Mary had stocked up some cookies and coffee for us. We unloaded the car and drove up to the top of the Hurricane ridge and walked around on various paths for some hours. The walk was very easy - a man on crutches passed us - and the view amazing, we saw both remote glaciers and Victoria island.


We returned to the cabin as the sun was setting behind the mountains and spent the night cooking food (fettucino alfredo, mmm!), drinking flaggpunsch, and playing hold 'em and dize while listening through my collection of gangsta rap. Back to nature, ey? The next day we had pancakes with cloudberry jam for breakfast and went for a short row on the lake before we checked out.

For more information on the cabin, check out http://www.olympicgetaways.com/villavista/index.html.