I had a wonderful week in Singapore. While there, I explored the China Town area and found Buddhist and Hindu temples, as well as a very cool fish market.

I then flew across the Indian Ocean to Chennai (formerly known as Madras), India.

Chennai is in Southern India and is the 4th largest city there with a population of over 8 million people. I had read to expect poverty and filth, but nothing could prepare me for what I saw. It was amazing, overwhelming, and sad.

Being there gave me an immense appreciation for what I’ve been blessed with. While shopping at the T. Nagar Market one day, we were surrounded by pressing beggars. It was so difficult to see. We gave them some small bills – enough to buy a meal.

The Indian people generally seemed quite content, though. They were very friendly, polite, and happy – even among the most insane traffic I’ve ever experienced.

It was quite common to see a family of four on a small moped in rush hour traffic.

In the Tamil Nadu state, it is quite acceptable for people to stare, especially if they are curious. As you can imagine, I kinda stuck out (outside the hotel I saw only 3 or 4 white people all week) and attracted a lot of stares. I loved staring back for a few moments and then smiling, to which the people would immediately grin and bob their head.

This girl, about the age of my daughter, was begging on the street. Her smile was infectious.

I put together this video of just a few of my experiences and a handful of the more than 500 photos I took while there.

While on lunch break at the place I was working, a big cricket match concluded with a win for India. I happened to capture the moment on video. I have no idea how cricket is played and am generally confused by the entire game, but I learned that they take cricket quite seriously in India.

It was quite an adventure filled with memories I will never forget.

View from my hotel room

My Fairy Princess and the Deranged Easter Bunny

If for some reason you have not watched the best part of the best holiday movie of all time, or perhaps if you simply want to watch it again, here it is…

The Lid

The foil seal requires a small handtool, teeth, and/or ultra-tiny fingers to remove. And it always spurts just a bit of yogurt on you when you open it. This was clearly only tested by midget mechanic vampires at sea level.

(NOTE: For your own mental well-being, do not for the love of all that is good and holy perform a Google image search for “midget mechanic vampires”. What has been seen cannot be unseen.)

The lid contains the expiration date. It is also the first item discarded. This makes it particularly difficult to determine until after the fact that the odd-tasting yogurt you found at the back of your grandmother’s refrigerator was in fact 6 years old, rather than just fat free.

The Inside Design

The inside flange under the human-proof foil seal traps approximately 1/3 of the yogurt contents. Attempts to remove this with your tongue result in you looking and feeling like a fat idiot – something yogurt eaters are naturally trying to avoid.

Unless you eat with a Q-tip, this design sucks!

Another 1/3 of the contents is trapped in the deep ridges at the convex bottom of the container.

The advantage to this design is that you expend all 100 calories you’ve consumed trying to extricate the remaining yogurt from its furrowed safety grooves.

The Fake Bottom

Ain’t that a rip in the shorts? They call it Yoplait Light because the container is in fact 31% air.

The Container Shape

As are many people that eat yogurt, the container is wider at the bottom than at the top. Several minutes of intensive research involving an oddly-worded Google search resulted in the lyrics to a Sir Mix-a-Lot song, a J-Lo photo album, and several interesting facts about this design.

First, the shape masks the false bottom. If you look into an empty container, it appears much deeper than it is. I’ve concluded that the engineers at Yoplait have found a way to distort both time and space. The thing appears to go on forever as if you were peering into an eternal worm-hole of cultured pasteurized grade A nonfat milk and high fructose corn syrup goodness – in other words, heaven. And when you eat from it, you’d think there is an unending supply, when in fact nearly 2/3 of every spoonful is actually scraped off by the narrow opening at the lid, thus magnifying the deception.

Second, the containers are impossible to stack. Jeffrey Howard of Wilson Elementary School won the Yoplait cup stacking competition last year by getting three of them stacked on end. Amazing!

Third, the container kills skunks.

Apparently health conscious skunks everywhere are getting their heads stuck in the container after futilely attempting, like you, to get all that remaining yogurt out of the bottom. There are several entertaining YouTube videos of this phenomena. I have summarily scattered several more-or-less empty containers about the yard and have the video camera ready.

PETA has protested and boycotted Yoplait and there are several damning posts on environmental forums such as treehugger.com – for which I have declared myself a lifetime Yoplait customer.

There’s even a Facebook group titled “Guys Against Yoplait” or G.A.Y. as they appropriately call it. The 9 male and (inexplicably) 1 female members (ironically all members of the Olfactory Dysfunction Support Group) describe this situation as “an epidemic sweeping our nation” caused by “cup ‘o death”. Their mantra is (exclamation marks maintained for impact) “Skunks are our friends!! We must protect them at all costs!!!”

This article describes how “between 2 and 14 skunks were reported killed” in 1997, which is approximately the number of skunks I kill per year with my truck, though I’ve yet to have a hippie chain himself to it (the hippies I’ve chained to it do not count, naturally). The article explains how General Mills spent “10 months of intensive research” to primarily add a warning label to their containers which reads:
PROTECT WILDLIFE CRUSH
CUP BEFORE DISPOSAL
which if you read just right is kinda funny and nonsensical, though not nearly as much so as spending 10 months to come up with that.

Yoplait Will Kill You

The label on Yoplait yogurt is like Kate Gosselin’s reverse mullet – party in the front, business in the back. There are more warning labels than a barrel of plutonium. It contains warnings for things like Phenylalanine, which the internets says causes brain damage. It contains kosher gelatin, which I have no idea what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s made of Jewish horses.

And that’s just the beginning, or so claims this post on a conspiracy theory forum, obviously written by some loser that has nothing better to do than write a long blog post about yogurt.

• We went on a handcart trek. It was fun, exhausting, and uplifting. My 4 X great grandfather died at Martin’s Cove. Sad. It was in the middle of Wyoming – a very long drive. In 150 years, my ancestors will probably honor me by riding on a bus for 7 hours.
• The Supreme Court ruled that white AND black men in Chicago can own guns and Senator Robert Byrd kicked the bucket on the same day. Coincidence?
• I just got back from my 7th trip to Oklahoma. They really like all-you-can-eat buffets there.
• Abbie and I have earned 220 of the 241 stars in Super Mario Galaxy 2. I haz mad Nintendo skillz.
• I might go to India and Singapore later this year. Cool, except for the 52 hours it takes to get there and back part.
• If you fly from Japan to Utah, you arrive an hour before you leave.
• My travel agent forgot to pay for my Oklahoma plane ticket. I learned this at the airport. The lady at the ticket counter wanted $1420 to fly there that night. I replied, “I said Oklahoma, not Okinawa.” She didn’t find it funny. I stayed in West Valley City that night.
• The La Quinta Inn in West Valley City reeks of marijuana smoke. At first this totally bugged me, but after a while I was cool with it.
• A bunch of hoodlums made a mess of Toronto while protesting the G20 summit. Good thing us ‘right wing nut jobs’ don’t protest it or we’d have taken over Canada.
• My sister found a spot between her toes. It was cancer. They cut it all out. I found a spot too. I got to wear sexy paper underwear at the doctor’s office. They cut the spot off. I find out soon if it’s cancer too. Stupid toes!
• iPhone 4. I have one.
• Mary spent a week at girls camp. I watched the kids. They really missed their mother even though we ate at McDonalds.
• My son just said, “I want nunchuk skills.” We’ll work on him not peeing on the bathroom floor first.

I’m not much of a pet person, but when Mary showed up with a 20 gallon fish tank about 18 months ago, I relented (and by relented, I mean I didn’t have the energy to take it back to the store). So we set it up, threw a bunch of fish, snails, and frogs in there, and then watched them slowly die over the course of the next year. That’s not all we did – we also bought new ones to replace the ones that were dead. And then they died. We had mini funerals for them after fishing their rotting corpses out of the tank and before flushing them – at least for the ones that weren’t cannibalized by other fish. Not really my idea of fun. I was starting to wonder if they were suicidal.

So after losing almost all our fish a few months ago, I’d had enough. I was running out of things to say at fish funerals. I was going to make this fish tank work, or it was going to storage. I spent countless hours reading about aquariums and ‘the cycle’ (fancy term for letting nature keep the tank chemicals in balance). We’d been doing everything wrong.

Several months and the equivalent of the GDP of a small country later, we have a healthy, happy fish tank stocked with 5 Long Fin Black Skirt Tetras, 5 Rasboras, 1 Dwarf Gourami, 4 small Otocinclus, and 2 Mystery Snails.

Last week, on a whim, I purchased 6 Ghost Shrimp. These are tiny, almost transparent shrimp. They were $.33 each – what did I have to lose? They are all doing well and are fun to watch. They eat fish poop. To our surprise, we found that one of the shrimp was full of little green… things. We checked the internets and it said that our shrimp have been bumping uglies behind our backs! A shrimp with the preggers! She had around 25 tiny shrimp inside her.

I read further that the mother will eventually push out the tiny shrimp balls which pop out into gangly, slimy things with a massive head, dangling tentacles, and an inability to do anything but eat and poop, and then they’ll immediately be eaten by other fish. This sounded exactly like the birth of my children, minus the eaten by fish part. Having witnessed enough tank carnage, I decided to see if I could spare them this barbaric death.

I moved mother shrimp to a small fish bowl with lots of fish poop and a cool thing which makes bubbles. I read that baby shrimp like to eat something called “Green Water”. This is exactly what it sounds like – water that is so infested with algae and lots of microorganisms that it is green. The baby shrimp eat the little organisms. Of course shrimp eating tiny swimming things is much less barbaric than fish eating tiny swimming shrimp.

My plan was to start a fetid bowl of Green Water this weekend, but today, tiny baby shrimp started popping out of their mother.

(to give an idea of scale, that tube is 1/4″ wide)

A new one is arriving every 20 minutes or so. And the ones that are still attached to mom are active and anxious to find freedom.

Notice the tiny, pleading eyes. How could I not try to save that???

So I have a jar full of the nastiest stuff imaginable under a bright light in my living room hoping that it somehow turns into shrimp food before the microscopic baby shrimp starve to death or are eaten by their post-partum depressed mother. I’ve spend hours on this project. I cheer each time a new, almost invisible shrimpette pops out and swims to freedom.

I am starting to wonder about me. All this for the offspring of a $.33 shrimp?

Assuming this all works and by some miracle these little fellas make it, I’ll soon be the proud owner of a crapload of shrimpies. And if it doesn’t turn out? Well, there’s always a nice scampi…

Stay tuned…

Update 1

Mom is almost done dropping the kids. I snagged this short video of it. You can see a bunch of wee ones floating about.

The babies aren’t really inside her, they’re just stored up under her swimmerets (which I now understand to be a fancy word for small swimming fins, not a type of water-proof diaper).

Update 2

Mom is finally done. As the last child swam free, she did what many women do after childbirth – she reached up and pulled her own face off. She then proceeded to tear off all of her skin. Seeing her molt was one of the coolest, freakiest things I’ve seen (though not quite as cool as when that cow pulled another cow’s placenta out with its teeth – that was COOL!).

Here she looks from a distance at her newly shed skin.

A few of her many young ones get a good look at mom (moments before she eats them?)

I’ve gained a new appreciation for this amazing animal called the shrimp. How inappropriate that name. I’d never call anything a “shrimp” that gives birth to 28 babies in 12 hours then tears it’s own epidermis off in celebration. I will never look at shrimp the same… unless well doused in cocktail sauce.

Update 3

It has been two days since the “shrimpening” (as it has come to be known) and most of the baby shrimp are dead, I think. Either they are hiding somewhere in the bowl, were eaten by mother, have somehow evaporated, or were added by Mary to tonight’s delicious teriyaki chicken. I can count five still swimming around – which is five that are not fish food, so I consider that a success… so far.

Update 4

It took me a few days to place where I had seen the baby shrimp before. They look just like a very miniaturized version of the alien from the old Sigourney Weaver movies (back when Sigourney was just scary, rather than both disgusting and scary as she is now).

If the missing baby shrimp suddenly pop out of my chest one day, then we’ll know for sure what happened.

Update 5

Failure! The little shrimp have all now died. They are now literally ghost shrimp. I guess the environment just wasn’t properly established to sustain miniature shrimp. Most of the babies quickly died after the ‘shrimpening’, which I suppose is not a whole lot different and perhaps slightly less shocking than quickly being consumed by other fish. One little guy held out for a week or so, and we did our best to nurture and care for him, but he soon relented to the harsh grasp of invertebrate death. Mother is coping with the loss as well as can be expected though she’s splurging on fish feces and does not associate well with the other adult shrimp. We’re hoping that time will bring her comfort at the premature deaths of her 30 or so offspring.

It sure was a fun experiment! And it appears that another is starting to form eggs…

When placed by surveyors in the 30s, their elevations and/or coordinates were very accurate. In fact, if you compare the original 1930′s measurements with super accurate modern GPS equipment, most are within an inch or so. However, the positions of most benchmarks that record elevation were only generally described in the 1930′s or 1960′s. The latitude and longitude coordinates for most of these are just rough guesses based on comparing the text location description to a map. Benchmark hunting involves using a GPS, old general descriptions, and a bit of luck and skill to try and find the original markers. Once found, you can log your finding and the marker condition to help the government and surveyors know if they can be utilized in the future.

As a Christmas Eve activity, Abbie and I researched a few interesting benchmarks to go look for. The coordinates we had were only accurate to within 1/4 mile or so. And most of the descriptions reference things from the 1960′s that are no longer there – such as old fences, telegraph poles, etc. With the GPS, the descriptions, and some big winter boots, we set out on an adventure to see if we could find them. We went four for four!

Our first benchmark was described as being embedded in the foundation of an old building. Luckily the building (the Trenton Feed Co-op) is still standing (barely).

The benchmark was originally 6″ above ground, but as the parking lot was improved and added to, it is barely visible today. We had to dig a bit to see all of it.

.

The next benchmark was buried in a rock outcropping in a field. It took a bit of digging around to locate it.

We went on to find two more after 1/4 mile hikes along some rail road tracks.

Anyway, we both had a wonderful time and have likely found a new hobby. I enjoy using geeky technology and old fashioned ingenuity to try to find old stuff and Abbie is excited to find more treasure markers.

Mad that a crazy guy shot 43 soldiers. Mad that policy ensured they couldn’t defend themselves on a MILITARY base. Mad that our government trusts them with machine guns and tanks in Iraq, but strips them of sidearms at home, or makes them carry them but prohibits any bullets. Mad that I could freely carry a gun outside the base gates, but our soldier’s rights to bear arms are stripped of them inside the base, where it’s “safe”.

I am happy that a brave CIVILIAN security guard was allowed to be armed and arrived in 3 minutes to immobilize the shooter (she was shot herself in the process). In 3 minutes, 42 UNARMED SOLDIERS were shot, 13 killed. On a military base. A United States friggin’ military base.

How can you not be pissed off about that?

Fort Hood is just a few miles from Killeen, Texas, home of one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history. A mad man drove his truck into Luby’s cafeteria and then began shooting, killing 23 people and wounding 20. Hennard’s spree lasted 14 minutes – until he was confronted by the first person to have a firearm, at which point he took his own life.

Suzanna Hupp and her parents were in that diner. She had a firearm, but complied with Texas law which prohibited public concealed carry and left it in her vehicle. When the shooting started, she reached in her purse for her firearm, but realized it was legally stored outside. Her father rushed the shooter and was gunned down. Her mother was shot in the head at point blank range while holding her mortally wounded husband. Suzanna is positive she could have and would have had a chance at saving their lives if she’d have been permitted to have her firearm. Concealed carry is now legal in Texas and all other states which view it’s citizens as human beings with rights. Suzanna Hupp had a significant impact in bringing back lawful carry to Texas. She has said, “How a politician stands on the Second Amendment tells you how he or she views you as an individual… as a trustworthy and productive citizen, or as part of an unruly crowd that needs to be lorded over, controlled, supervised, and taken care of.”

Perhaps it’s time for the U.S. military to take a lesson from Ms. Hupp and realize that those constitutional rights shouldn’t be stripped from our servicemen and servicewomen who fight and give their lives to defend those very rights. God bless them all!

Yes, I am ticked off.