So, I found a good deal on a hookah, and it arrived today. Now I'm smoking shisha and playing Civ 4. I feel pretty classy.
In other news, the hookah I bought came with a free travel hookah! It's so adorable.
There's a crap-ton of hookah places near my house. Actually, before I knew what hookah was, I would ways pass this place called "Hookah Source" on the way to school. The windows were covered with brown paper and the hours only evenings. I thought for sure it was really just a "Hooker" Source that they were hiding in plain sight. It was a good running joke between me and my dad, who didn't realize what it actually was.
So one night I'm driving past it and I see some people walking out. I pull into the mini-mall it was in and I see people going in and out. Finally, I park the car and walk up to the door.
I open the door, and it is DARK. I mean DARK. The only thing I could see was a concrete staircase with metal railings leading down to where loud acid electro music was emanating from. I looked down to the bottom of the stairwell, and there is a doorway with a bead curtain and deep purple light coming out of it.
"No. Fucking. Way."
I walked down the stairs as casually as I could force myself to be and walked through the beads. All I saw around me were people leaning back on couches; lots of low couches, bathed in purple and black light. Everyone was puffing on the same sort of thing that the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland was. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, and as soon as they did, I found the bar and tried to figure out what was going on. Except it wasn't a bar. It was a tall glass cabinet like the once in the middle of the floor at comic book stores. There was no liquor, only boxes of "flavors". A guy behind the counter walked up to me and asked me if I was over 18 and carded me.
This didn't help me at all.
I asked the guy at the counter what was this place, and he gave me this puzzled look. "It's a hookah bar. You've never been to a hookah bar before?" "Hookah? I don't even know what hookah is." "Then what are you doing here?" "Um...I just wanted to poke my head in and see what this place was."
Then he told me what hookah was, and suddenly I felt rather silly.
Tee hee. It seems there's a dichotomy between old-school arabic hookah lounges and american-style, hipstery hookah bars. Seems you went to the latter. The former is generally more enjoyable. Either way, interesting story.
You/someone else you know who's skilled could probably make those relatively easily. It's just polymer clay, and you're surrounded by Art Majors, Theater Design and Production Majors, and people who're generally skilled at craft work. It's nothing terribly fancy, I'm pretty sure you/one of your friends could pull it off.
I don't know anything about card tricks or "card flourishes", but this is some pretty incredible stuff. The music is also pretty rad -- wish they said what it was.
I'm just waiting for the moment when the mass media / blogosphere realizes that it'll be a year or two before we have enough data to prove / disprove the Higgs mechanism (unless we are extremely lucky and Nature hand us the Higgs boson on a golden platter).
Everyone knows about The Persistence of Memory as it is an icon of surrealism and pop culture. Well just today, I found out that Salvador Dali (the painter responsible) actually painted a "sequel" (if you can call it that) that he painted about 25 years later which I found very fascinating. It's called The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. I've learned that Dali painted this, because to him it represented new physics-the quantum world which exists as discrete particles instead of continuous waves. My belief (and I've learned that many others share this same opinion) is that the original Persistence of Memory represents Einstein's Theory of Relativity, in the sense that gravity warps spacetime and the original painting is the result of this.
Comments
In other news, the hookah I bought came with a free travel hookah! It's so adorable.
Actually, before I knew what hookah was, I would ways pass this place called "Hookah Source" on the way to school. The windows were covered with brown paper and the hours only evenings. I thought for sure it was really just a "Hooker" Source that they were hiding in plain sight. It was a good running joke between me and my dad, who didn't realize what it actually was.
So one night I'm driving past it and I see some people walking out. I pull into the mini-mall it was in and I see people going in and out. Finally, I park the car and walk up to the door.
I open the door, and it is DARK. I mean DARK. The only thing I could see was a concrete staircase with metal railings leading down to where loud acid electro music was emanating from. I looked down to the bottom of the stairwell, and there is a doorway with a bead curtain and deep purple light coming out of it.
"No. Fucking. Way."
I walked down the stairs as casually as I could force myself to be and walked through the beads. All I saw around me were people leaning back on couches; lots of low couches, bathed in purple and black light. Everyone was puffing on the same sort of thing that the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland was. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, and as soon as they did, I found the bar and tried to figure out what was going on. Except it wasn't a bar. It was a tall glass cabinet like the once in the middle of the floor at comic book stores. There was no liquor, only boxes of "flavors".
A guy behind the counter walked up to me and asked me if I was over 18 and carded me.
This didn't help me at all.
I asked the guy at the counter what was this place, and he gave me this puzzled look.
"It's a hookah bar. You've never been to a hookah bar before?"
"Hookah? I don't even know what hookah is."
"Then what are you doing here?"
"Um...I just wanted to poke my head in and see what this place was."
Then he told me what hookah was, and suddenly I felt rather silly.
*Glub glub glub.*
Why won't the tears stop??
Bravo sir, bravo.
(It's an AMV set to the opening chapter of Pale Blue Dot)
Everyone knows about The Persistence of Memory as it is an icon of surrealism and pop culture. Well just today, I found out that Salvador Dali (the painter responsible) actually painted a "sequel" (if you can call it that) that he painted about 25 years later which I found very fascinating.
It's called The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory. I've learned that Dali painted this, because to him it represented new physics-the quantum world which exists as discrete particles instead of continuous waves. My belief (and I've learned that many others share this same opinion) is that the original Persistence of Memory represents Einstein's Theory of Relativity, in the sense that gravity warps spacetime and the original painting is the result of this.
I laughed so hard I choked when I read this.