Ramblings
Yesterday I ate dinner at a buffet for the first time in a long time. Buffets are awesome, but only once in a while because you are guaranteed to leave the place feeling bloated and cursing yourself for being greedy. By the way, if anyone knows whether or not there was an Old Country Buffet (OCB) down in Champaign please let me know so I can settle an argument.
This was followed by a trip to Barnes & Noble in Deer Park. The area there was one of the nicer places I've seen, surrounded by a outdoor mall which reminded me of Danada in the Wheaton area. Besides picking up a cookbook on the "Asian Kitchen", I also did some leisurely reading for an hour or two.
One book I picked up was on war planes throughout history. It had some good background on how bombers and fighters evolved between the various wars of the past 100 years. I especially enjoyed the material on the Northrop B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber and the Grumman F-14 Tomcat. A lot of the stuff on Russian MiGs and French Dassault fighters was interesting too. The bad thing was that they didn't even mention Taiwan's Ching-Kuo I.D.F. It's supposed to stand for "Indigenous Defense Fighter", but according to my dad, it's actually short for "I Don't Fly". Maybe that's why it wasn't included in the book.
Interesting note: In his younger days, the legendary airplane designer Jack Northrop worked in a place run by the Loughead brothers. Later on, he would create the company that became the giant which is Northrop Grumman today. Meanwhile, the Loughead brothers eventually changed the spelling of their name to better fit its pronunciation, and they went on to found the company that has become NG's top competitor in the defense industry, "Lockheed" Martin. Okay, maybe that fact is only cool to me, and a select few others. Moving on...
Another interesting note: Besides humans, the only animal in the world to have a fingerprint that is different for every individual is not the chimpanzee, not any sort of monkey, but the koala. Not only this, but if you took a fingerprint from a koala and compared it to a human fingerprint, they would be indistinguishable. I learned this from Mancow's Morning Madhouse.
Other than the book on war planes, I checked out this book that had the first 10 editions of the original X-men comic book from the 1960's. Man, were these awful or what. The concept was always cool, but the writing in these episodes was so bad it had me laughing out loud. I couldn't make it past the second issue because it was so terrible. Good thing the quality of X-men has increased throughout the years.
Anyways, these are exciting times in the life of Joseph Y. Chen. I now have a cookbook sitting on my desk, a e755 PPC on its way, and this morning before leaving for work I noticed that the Orion Telescope catalog arrived in the mail yesterday. I'm proud of myself for setting goals, and now slowly but steadily executing them.
