Adventures of a Discoverer

Since moving pictures have been invented, a lot of people have put a lot of strange stuff on the screen. Then, fifteen years ago, two guys from Seattle had an idea: what if we comb through all kinds of moving pictures, find the strangest stuff possible, put it all in a blender and present the resulting mishmash in a two hour show? To their surprise, people liked it very much, even though the people who watched it needed a detox after the show. In fact, it was such a success, that they did another one with new material and similar results, and another one, and another one... And so it goes, all the way to today. Currently, they present their show, named Collide-O-Scope , once a month at the theater in the famous Crocodile in Seattle. And this week I was finally able to check them out. To say that their mishmash of video is crazy is the understatement of the century. Not only the two curators find stuff that you can't believe people actually did (and recorded in video!) but they mix...

I like to drink Coca-Cola (especially if it is Cherry Coke). And I like to eat Oreos, both original and its many varieties. So I thought that a "Coke Oreo" would be really good! But... no. To give some context, there is now a new flavor of Oreo named Coke Oreo, with the official blessing of the Coca Cola company. It is, supposedly, an Oreo with a taste of Coke: you can see the package and some of the cookies in the pictures below (next to a couple of regular Oreos for comparison). I ate the regular Oreos, and they were great, as they always are. And then I tried the Coke Oreos. They were not great. It's the flavor of the regular Oreo but with this strong smell of Coke and a hint of Coke flavor in them. But (at least in my opinion) chocolate flavor and Coke flavor are not a good match. So they just tasted... weird, and not in a good way. I tried more to see if perhaps with some more of them it would eventually taste better but, if anything, it got worse. Feel free to try y...

Waymo is a company owned by Google that is developing self driving taxis for some years now. It currently has driverless cars taking paying passengers in a few cities in the US, including San Francisco, where I spent a week for a conference. Given that I was there, I took advantage of the opportunity and took a ride in one of their robot taxis, and it was quite an impressive experience! This was not my first time in a robot taxi: back in 2023, on a previous trip to San Francisco, I took advantage of an invite from Cruise, a company that was also developing robot taxis and had some of them available in limited areas of San Francisco, and rode in one of their driverless cars . Since then, unfortunately, Cruise ceased its activities, like other companies that were trying to develop a fully self driving car. However, Waymo is still going well, and in fact it seems to be way ahead of the competition, which I could figure out by myself when I rode in one of their veicules. The basics are st...

This was quite strange but... very interesting! We had heard of  miracle berries , these little berries from Africa that supposedly make sour things taste sweet, which seems hard to believe. But, we found some for sale on Amazon (you can find pretty much anything at Amazon, it seems) so we decided to buy some and try it out ourselves. Once we got a small package of freeze dried miracle berries, we bought some lemons, limes and grapefruits to really test the berries. We licked a slice of lemon, lime and grapefruit, and then we ate a berry. According to what we read, you're supposed to slowly chew the berry in your mouth, and let its liquid really spread around your tongue. Then, after that, I licked the lime and... it was indeed sweet! It was a striking difference compared to what I had tasted just before. The same thing happened with the lemon and, in the case of the grapefruit, I felt like I was licking a sweet orange. After half an hour, the effect was gone and licking the fruits...

Short films can be defined differently depending on who you ask: but in general any movie that is less than half an hour is classified as a short film, or "short" for short. In the old days short films sometimes would be shown before the main feature at a movie theater and on rare occasions you could see them by themselves, typically at a non-commercial theater. Interestingly enough, these days they are easier to see because of the Internet: you can see a number of them on streaming, YouTube or Vimeo. At the same time, it's not so easy to see them anymore at a movie theater. Today I had the opportunity to do just that and watch a short film at an actual movie theater (and a pretty good one at that). The SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) was showing all five of the short films that have been nominated for this year's Oscar at their theater in Queen Anne, the SIFF Cinema Uptown . All five movies were shown back to back, so with one ticket you could see them a...

Last week I listened to a live concert that I wasn't so sure it would be that good, but it turned out to be in fact very good: Gangstagrass . It's a band that brought together three Bluegrass musicians with two rappers, and the combination of the sounds and lyrics from both Bluegrass and Hip Hop is surprisingly quite good - it made for a very fun live concert. The band is on tour and they played at the Vashon Center for the Arts , a small but really lovely performance venue in Vashon Island that I had never been at before. The Center is relatively new and its facilities are in great shape, and it's nice that the Center is bringing various forms of art to the community of the island. The show was sold out, especially because for this specific event some rows of seats were removed, so that people could dance during the presentation. The MCs in fact invited people to go to the front and dance with them, and they would interact with the crowd.  Their songs combine some social c...