(I’m posting more today because I have nothing to do except wait for QA to find bugs for me to fix.)

Last night I bought Brain Age for the Nintendo DS. It was made based on the research of Japanese neuroscientist. He found certain types of exercises stimulated blood flow to various areas of the brain and Nintendo took those activities and put them in electronic form. It evaluates your brain’s age and so you can see how you are improving with the best age being 20.

The initial evaluation used voice recognition where you had to say the color the color-word was drawn in so for “Red” you would say black. I paused for awhile after 10 because it said 10 completed and I thought I was done, instead it was just a milestone. Anyway, my starting brain age is 55. I look forward to getting down into the 20s.

I’ve seen a number of studies and surveys that show women having a preference for a man who makes them laugh. I’ve also read about a study or two that showed that women tend to have a more advanced sense of humor than men. Advanced being more word based and less physical based. This leads me to think that we are selecting for humor.

I would have thought that humor was perceived as more intelligence, but a survey I read yesterday showed that the impression women had of the humorous men was that they were less intelligent. It seems that if you are doing more verbal humor which would attract the verbal humor loving female that more intelligence would be required, but I guess a sense that the male is a clown takes over and the humor is just appreciated for humor. Also, since some researchers now think that intelligence is completely determined by the woman I guess selecting for intelligence isn’t really necessary and whatever leads to humor can be the focus.

Thank you to everyone who brought chocolate goodnesses and to everyone else who helped eat them.

I only have a few pictures of the desserts because I got too busy.

brought the Dr. Delicious cake and it was by far the best looking chocolate there. Suitable for service in a restaurant easily. It was delicious but it wasn’t very deadly

Joel and brought chocolate mousse made with 72% cocoa. Rich and addictive, but also not too deadly. Unfortunately, Nicole threw the rest away when she had all she wanted instead of saving it for me.

brought mummified life-after-death truffles, mummified in white chocolate. He reported that it was a big hassle to do the mummification and looking at it, I would agree. The results were really good though and several people chose these as deadliest.

made Igor bars from The Dork Tower. They weren’t deadly at all but they were good and creative and much loved by some.

Dan made cereal bars which were like Cocoa Pebbles crispy treats with a layer of fudge on top. Dan himself considered these the 4th deadliest.

Shelley made the Hershey Syrup cake with glossy fosting and this got a number of votes for being the deadliest and was declared the ideal chocolate cake by some.

I made three recipes. I was just going to make two but since I didn’t know who was coming or bringing anything I feared lack of variety. Unfortunately the ones I made didn’t make it to the tasting table until 30-60 minutes after everyone was already tasting so people were already at chocolate saturation and they were only tried by one or two.

I made a brownie brandy trifle with the help of Julie. I couldn’t find instant mousse so Julie made chocolate fudge pudding for it. It was well liked but it wasn’t deadly. Looking at the other trifle recipes after this one, I don’t believe any will every be deadly.

I made a simple chocolate pie. It was very good even though I didn’t quite mix it up correctly. For Nicole it surpassed the Hershey cake as her favorite which means it didn’t really go overboard. It went really fast at work.

Finally I made a recipe that claimed to be deadlier than death by chocolate and tasting the results I personally have to put this one first one the list of deadliest so far even though I overcooked the base a little so it didn’t stick together or the top. The look of shock people get when they pop it into their mouth often followed by an exclamation show its potency. Oh yeah, I messed up the top too since I was ina hurry and used unsweetened chocolate instead of semi-sweet. But I realized my mistake and added some sugar to the right level before it was too late.

Because of the staggered introduction I have to list three recipes that will come back for the final rounds…
Hershey Syrup cake with glossy fosting
mummified life-after-death truffles
deadlier than death by chocolate

Stay tuned for Mortal Chocolate II in a few months.

Today I decided I was up to tackling the bathroom fan in Dar’s bathroom again. The old fan didn’t really move much air and it turned out it just blew the air it did move into the attic. I was going to run the vent line through the roof, but then when the contractor did the one in the master bathroom he recommended against that since it’s no fun going through shake roofing.

I saw that he went through the side, but when I tried to copy that I found that he was able to do that because he had the ceiling open. I didn’t want to punch a hole in the ceiling. So today I cut out the chimney from the old floor heater that no longer exists and made everything fit to the existing vent hole in the roof. I used spray foam to fill and gaps (gas venting didn’t seal the gaps) and used spray foam to seal the lower part fo the old chimney. Yay!

I saw the trailer for Slither and I knew I had to see it. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I know I made the right choice. Slither is from the writer and director of Tromeo and Juliet, but that’s not important I just like mentioning that movie. Anyway, it’s a good, fun, gross, movie with a few good jump-scares. Check it out, even if you have to wait for a DVD release.

I just finished reading the latest Christopher Moore book, A Dirty Job. Like all of his books I’ve read, it made me laugh out loud. Get it, read it, laugh, be happy.

I finally got around to reading “Dark Lord the Rise of Darth Vader.” It takes place right after “Revenge of the Sith” through probably a few months after. In the beginning he’s hating his cumbersome suit. By the end the Emperor has put him in situations that let him truly value and embrace the dark side. The transformation runs fairly smoothly which surprised me somewhat, because books focusing on a single Star Wars character are usually pretty weak.

After that I read “Outbound Flight” which takes place between “Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” Some Jedi want to send a colony ship to the unknown regions of the galaxy and to the next galaxy to preserve the Jedi since some sense dark times coming. Senator Palpatine sees it as a way to eliminate a chunk of Jedi all at once. This covers the back story for Outbound Flight that was laid out in previous books that involved Grand Admiral Thrawn and in turn gives Thrawn’s back story. There probably going to be another book to explain how Thrawn ends up serving the empire though.

I was reading “Fledgling” by the recently deceased Octavia Butler, but when I got to page 129 it didn’t make any sense. That’s because page 129 was really page 161 and the book was missing 32 pages. I took it back to Borders to exchange it and the other copy they had was missing the same 32 pages. So they are ordering me a copy that will be there next week and hopefully that will have all the pages.

Please join me in…

MORTAL CHOCOLATE!

Appliances got installed on Friday. Not all of them, we’re still waiting on the refrigerator, and dishwasher needs a test run before use, and the remote blower for the down-draft unit needs to be installed.

That said, the cooktop works very well and I was able bring 1/2 gallon of water to a high boil in 4.5 minutes. A watched pot does boil.

The oven (which has a Sabbath mode) did a wonderful job cooking a chicken. It’s also amazingly insulated. We turned off the oven and went for a quick trip to Joel & Cathi’s which ended up being 1.5 hours. When we got home the chicken was still almost too hot to handle.

Nicole loves her coffee machine and is tuning it to make the perfect cup of espresso.

During our week of not living at home because the floors were being done, my copy of “The Frisco Kid” arrived. I have seen this movie probably about a dozen times now and I still love it. I wanted to show this for my birthday movie fest long ago but it wasn’t available, so yay for it finally being available on dvd.