Adventures of a Discoverer

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...