rantlust

Posted by jcaldera on October 16th 2007 in Food & Wine, Humor, Random, Rants, Society
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We discovered not so long ago that our daughter Natalia is lactose intolerant. This has been an inconvenience because she seemed to develop this intolerance recently, and she loved dairy products. Since we figure out that she was lactose intolerant we’ve been buying soy based products for her. Tonite we bought soy ice cream. And I can’t be any more sorry for her that I am tonite. Soy based ice cream is likely the worse product I’ve ever tasted in my life. Maybe it is the brand or the actual flavor, but it was so terrible that it make me thinks it is just the way it is. The worst part is that Natalia ate it all and she seemed to like it. I didn’t have the heart to put it where it belongs: the trash can.

Thinking about it, at least I can understand why lactose intolerant people would eat it. Now, what in the world is going through the people that makes it a choice. I know likes and dislikes are subjective and sure, somebody must like it for there to be a product, but this is beyond any comprehension. This is an actual aberration. If there is any Vegan reader that can explain to me why they would turn down actual ice cream for soy based ice cream, I hope the answer is like: we don’t eat ice cream for that reason, that would make me respect them at least. But trying to justify that they actually eat it because they like it would be beyond any comprehension.

Since we are in the subject, I’ll give you another piece of information on modified ice cream. The writer of this blog has actually been on and off the south beach diet. As you may know this diet precludes eating ice cream both because of the sugar and because of the fat. So, my love for ice cream is so deep that I am forced to buy the sugar free versions of the ice cream. Agreed that at least this ice cream is eatable. The availability of splenda and the like have make it possible to create a version of ice cream that though doesn’t get to the actual full fat/sugar ice cream is ok. But don’t be fooled ice cream was meant to be tasty not healthy, and it should remain as such.

For those of us that have access to San Francisco and those that come to visit I must suggest Mitchell’s ice creams. Incredible ice creams - no sugar free or soy available… … Go and expect to be in line for about 30 minutes even in the middle of the winter.

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Posted by jcaldera on February 06th 2007 in Rants
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Hello fellow rantlust bloggers…

I have been silent for a while because I’ve been working with rantlust’s creator anup in getting a rantlust sibling blog: medialust.net. We have been working on and off for about six months on it and I think we finally reached a point where we can expose it to a larger community and audience.

medialust.net (unfortunately .com was already taken) is a space to rant about media. We have started with music, movies, video games and comics. There are few active bloggers this far, you’ll see that most of the entries are either anup or myself, so yes we are looking for active bloggers. As you know by now, if there are no writers it is very hard to maintain the site.

The idea of this space is to not only talk about media but also share media with the rest of the people. If we are blogging about music, we want to be able to share the music we are talking about. If we are talking about comics, we want to be able to see a piece of it, enough that might get the curiosity of the reader.

Certain features are still missing, but we’ll add them as they become necessary. There are a lot of cool stuff out there to share media, but not everything works well in the blog environment. We’ve chosen a hosting facility with lots of storage so we don’t forsee we’ll be running out of space any time soon.

Hope you’ll join us in expanding the lust family.

If you are interested in blogging let me know at josercaldera@medialust.net, or medialust@googlegroups.com

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Posted by jcaldera on September 15th 2006 in Auto, Cars, Humor, Life, Nature, Politics, Random, Rants, Roads, Society, War
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A couple of days ago, in my daily commute to work, in the usual company of fellow San Francisco commuters, with the usual boredom, one of the favorite topics came to the plate: dumb people (which of course is everybody that drives except whomever is in the car at that moment - no pun intended to my fellow bloggers and (some) acquaintances).

Bear with me in this line of thought and (un)reasoning. While talking about bad drivers, we sort of link it to the Darwinian mechanisms of survival of the fittest. So bad driving is really a natural mechanism for getting rid of certain number of people, which is, we suppose, one of nature’s problems: how to keep these annoying humans for growing larger and more powerful than nature. So we tied that to the fact that nature was very clever and was savy enough to embed human kind with some “stupidity” property, which comes small or large depending on the subject, and the geographical location (don’t ask me why but I suspect it is very true). Then nature decided that is not good enough because stupidity by itself won’t get rid of many people. So nature kept trying and decided to embed the “power” property in these human subjects (or objects for the OOP geeks). And then nature came with the master plan and based on probabilities, IT thought that eventually you could have one subject with enough desire for power that would take advantage of the stupid people. Chi chin! big win for nature, mathematically speaking, and we all know nature is about zeros and ones, this would guarantee the possibility of yielding enough stupidity together to raise to power somebody stupid enough, managed by people that desire power, that would cause the destruction of a lot of people.

Of course I am not referring to anybody in particular, or any sbject in particular.

Ahh! the wonders of commuting.

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Posted by jcaldera on August 20th 2006 in Music
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There is this show called “Saved” that airs on TNT. Not quite my kinda show, but it does have an amazing soundtrack. You can find the soundtrack song list here. In the one episode I watched I remember hearing a cool remix of one of my favorite Doors songs: “Break on Through”. So next stop itunes. $0.99 later got it playing. Really good remix for those open to it. Not BT’s finest if you ask me, but quite nice beat. I wouldn’t have blogged about if it weren’t for the mix of reviews in ITunes. Nothing in the middle, either people that liked it (contemporary people if I am to guess that probably weren’t born when Jim was around - me included) and on the other hand the hardcore Doors fans that can’t take a version. Well neither great nor garbage, it’s just a fun tune and that’s that.

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Posted by jcaldera on August 03rd 2006 in Dance, Music, Raves
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Nothing to do with the japanese samurai code. Actually this is the name of a Spanish band, which I didn’t know anything about. I came across them for the first time through a friend that quoted lyrics from one of their main songs in their first album called the same: bushido. I first listened to it and didn’t like it, as it usually happens with albums that I later fall in love with. I gave it a second and third chance and I started paying attention to the lyrics more and more. I actually found out that their lyrics are quite rich and most of them quite poetic. Some gave more sense to the music, which is as eclectic as you can get. Ranging from pop, to rap, to blues, to folk, all in one very well synch’d album.

If you are in the mood for something different and in spanish, take a look at their bushido album. They have one more I believe, which I haven’t gotten yet. I am still digesting this one.

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Posted by jcaldera on July 10th 2006 in Art, Literature
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On a recent trip to Washington, Vanessa’s aunt gave me a whole bunch of comic titles that she thought I might like. I started reading 100 Bullets, which seemed just about the right story for the format and the right story for me. 9 books later, and still more to come, I can tell you it is probably one of the most fun reads I have had in a long time. I am utterly hooked to this story, to the point that I had to go to the comic store and buy the individual issues, cuz I couldn’t wait for the next book to come in December.

If you are a fan of film noir type, I am pretty sure you are going to like it. The story is fascinating, the writing is superb and the art is very compelling. I have shared the books with some of my friends, that are versed in the comic world, and they love it as much as we do.

The story starts with this guy (Agent Graves) that gives a suitcase to a (not-so) random character containing 100 Bullets, a gun, and a bunch of documentation of a person that is behind this character disgraces. The bullets, the gun, and the actions are untrackable by the police or any other law enforcement agency. It seems simple, but that is just the introduction to a really convoluted series of nicely tied subplots to the overarching big story that whenever you think you’ve gotten it down, the next page will make sure you are wrong, and start guessing again.

You can find more info about the series here

Happy read!

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Posted by jcaldera on April 12th 2006 in Games, Life, Rants, Sex
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I consider myself a casual gamer. I mean there are times when I can spend a lot of time (note that lot has a different meaning for a parent of an infant) playing a game, and then I can go about months without touching the PS2 controls. I certainly know people that spend many more hours than I do attached to their preferred gaming environment.

If you by any chance are a reader of Wired magazine, you might have read this month’s set of articles about gaming, latest trends, and where is it going. Or as it has been in the news lately over and over, I am sure you’ve heard about the many cases, especially in Korea, where people die in real life over marathon games and such. NPR issued as story not so long ago about how much money the virtual worlds are generating in real life. A search in EBay can give you an idea how much a weapon in World of Warcraft can cost you in actual US$. One of the articles in Wired tells the story about this person that paid $100K for a virtual space in a virtual moon in a virtual world. Stupid?, well, this person *made* in revenue about $250K the first year, and it is expecting to gain about $2.5 million next year.
And I wish this was the weirdest of the stories, it gets more bizarre. Issues are starting to rise about child pornography, as in these games you could impersonate a child and have virtual sex with an adult. Some of these games have extremely realistic rendering of actual child characters. It goes on and on.
(Read more…)

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Posted by jcaldera on April 11th 2006 in Movies, Rants
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Have you ever seen a movie a while ago you remembered it as being great and suddenly you see it again, and it is like “huh!… I guess it wasn’t that great after all” ?… it certainly has happened to me a few times. After waiting for I’d say almost a decade I got to see again an argentinian movie called: “El Lado Oscuro del Corazon” (or “The Dark Side of the Heart”). I went into watching it with the expectations that this was going to be one of these cases. Luckily, though it wasn’t as great as I remembered it, it still was pretty entertaining.

The story is about a very proud poet that is looking for the right woman. A woman that makes him believe that is worth loving, and by consequence that is worth living. As he comes to describe at the very beginning of the movie he is looking for a woman that can fly, and he wouldn’t accept anything else. Though one would think it is not quite a very innovative theme, the movie works because the script works, the characters albeit in its own sometime surreal and extreme representation are believable, and we learn to care about them, with their virtues and their defects. The metaphores are rather cliche but then again it is akin to the story, which I believe it is on purpose. His dialogues are mostly in verse, citing really good poems from latin americans poets like Benedetti. I am afraid it’d work better for latin americans as there are many references to our social and political chaos and it is a nice juxtaposition to his own search for love.

Unfortunately the DVD can’t be any worse. The quality of the copy is worse than the old betamax copies in the initial rental days. There are no extras either. Subtitles in english are non optional, which is really annoying for spanish speakers.

All in all it is still a movie that worth watching, and I am happy that it didn’t turn out to be one of those terrible “watch again experiences”.

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