### Suppper club shout-out

While gone are the days of the world's best supper club (I miss you, ladies!), we've been fortunate enough to sneak right in to a group of other lovers of cooking and enjoying delicious meals as a community. We hosted many of them for thanksgiving dinner, which I'm sure got our foot nicely in the door, and last Sunday we attended what will hopefully be a monthly gathering of young families around a central theme.

February's theme - SOUP'S ON. That's right, even in Hawaii it gets cold enough that you want soup... well, then again even I can't consider 68 degrees soup-worthy weather. I simply love that we all wore slippahs and kept the soup warm by placing the huge pots on an outdoor grill.

My best recollection of the lineup:

Pupus: Cheese platter, poke with avocado
Soups: Homemade Thai-ginger soup with salmon and rice; Thai-ginger soup with coconut and chicken (this was a purchased replacement for a homemade wild-mushroom green onion soup that was unfortunatley lost in a blender accident); Tuscan White Bean soup with Kale and cheddar croutons.
Dessert: New York Style Cheesecake with mixed berries (this was my contribution), Chocolate swirl bundt cake with vanilla ice cream.

Stay tuned for next month's report.... which there's rumor will be a Carribbean theme.

karinms said…
Awesome!! I miss supper club a lot...I've been cooking all these recipes off epicurious lately and thinking of the good old days. Hawaiian supper club sounds great, I'm dying to hear about the Caribbean meal :-)

### On the Height of J.J. Barea

Dallas Mavericks point guard J.J. Barea standing between two very tall people (from: Picassa user photoasisphoto).

Congrats to the Dallas Mavericks, who beat the Miami Heat tonight in game six to win the NBA championship.

Okay, with that out of the way, just how tall is the busy-footed Maverick point guard J.J. Barea? He's listed as 6-foot on NBA.com, but no one, not even the sports casters, believes that he can possibly be that tall. He looks like a super-fast Hobbit out there. But could that just be relative scaling, with him standing next to a bunch of extremely tall people? People on Yahoo! Answers think so---I know because I've been Google searching "J.J. Barea Height" for the past 15 minutes.

So I decided to find a photo and settle the issue once and for all.

I then used the basketball as my metric. Wikipedia states that an NBA basketball is 29.5 inches in circumfe…

### Finding Blissful Clarity by Tuning Out

It's been a minute since I've posted here. My last post was back in April, so it has actually been something like 193,000 minutes, but I like how the kids say "it's been a minute," so I'll stick with that.
As I've said before, I use this space to work out the truths in my life. Writing is a valuable way of taking the non-linear jumble of thoughts in my head and linearizing them by putting them down on the page. In short, writing helps me figure things out. However, logical thinking is not the only way of knowing the world. Another way is to recognize, listen to, and trust one's emotions. Yes, emotions are important for figuring things out.
Back in April, when I last posted here, my emotions were largely characterized by fear, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion and despair. I say largely, because this is what I was feeling on large scales; the world outside of my immediate influence. On smaller scales, where my wife, children and friends reside, I…

### The Force is strong with this one...

Last night we were reviewing multiplication tables with Owen. The family fired off doublets of numbers and Owen confidently multiplied away. In the middle of the review Owen stopped and said, "I noticed something. 2 times 2 is 4. If you subtract 1 it's 3. That's equal to taking 2 and adding 1, and then taking 2 and subtracting 1, and multiplying. So 1 times 3 is 2 times 2 minus 1."

I have to admit, that I didn't quite get it at first. I asked him to repeat with another number and he did with six: "6 times 6 is 36. 36 minus 1 is 35. That's the same as 6-1 times 6+1, which is 35."

Ummmmm....wait. Huh? Lemme see...oh. OH! WOW! Owen figured out

x^2 - 1 = (x - 1) (x +1)

So $6 \times 8 = 7 \times 7 - 1 = (7-1) (7+1) = 48$. That's actually pretty handy!

You can see it in the image above. Look at the elements perpendicular to the diagonal. There's 48 bracketing 49, 35 bracketing 36, etc... After a bit more thought we…