Today was industrious.  I went to class, the bank, and the library, made an errand at Tim’s dorm, picked up lunch, baked some Double Peanut Butter Triple Chocolate Cheesecake Swirl Brownies for Jonathan Hallet’s birthday (yesterday) to take to him in class, went to class again, went to the IMA to play badminton and lift weights, came home to get dinner and take a nap, then had Tim and Ryan come over to work on their Political Science papers.

Today’s brownies turned out remarkably worse than previous iterations.  In a gesture of great self-responsibility, I choose to blame it on my oven.  I’ve always baked them in other people’s ovens prior to this, and my oven’s temperature is definitely off quite a bit (I’m guessing about 100° F) so that makes for crusty outsides and unbaked insides, such as what I had to give to Jonathan.  Fortunately, it was not too burned, and he seemed happy to receive it.

I went by myself to the IMA today, which I think is the first time I have ever done that, but I still wanted to play badminton.  I ventured into the badminton gym to see if there were any groups of three that would want a fourth for doubles.  Sure enough, there was a group of three Chinese people (who were very intimidatingly good), so I approached them.  I asked if they thought I could play with the person who was sitting out, and they thought that I was trying to kick them off the court or something, and they were just so nice but their English was not entirely perfect, so we had some difficulty communicating.  I figured this was a prime opportunity to use the little bit of Chinese I’ve picked up from Tim and Bill, so I got to say things like “Good!” and “Thank you!” and “Your mom is hungry” in applicable contexts.  This made me feel quite accomplished.  We played for about an hour together (I actually did pretty well with them, and the girl named Sarah on whose team I was playing kept saying “O-kay!” every time I made a good shot, which was very reminiscent of a Japanese tennis video game where I would expect the heavily accented “O-kay!” to accompany every ace serve.  I believe I would like this particular “O-kay!” to grace everything I do well in life, e.g. getting a test back with a 100% and an “O-kay!!” reverberates from the sky)

It occurs to me that I’m all out of vanilla extract.

OH!  I want to organize a flash mob group.  The term flash mob is starting to gain recognition, but in case you are unfamiliar with a flash mob, I use the term to loosely describe public pranking. Imagine, for example, that you are in some unsuspecting little store, like a Blockbuster or something, and suddenly within 30 seconds the store is filled with about 200 people.  Exactly 6 minutes later, all of those people are gone.  That is a generic flash mob:  just a large group of people organizing together to essentially put on an ad hoc show for all of the people unsuspecting of what’s going on.  A group called Improv Everywhere (www.improveverywhere.com) has done a number of epic ones.  One of my favorites is they organized for a whole bunch of people wearing bright blue polo shirts and khakis (the Best Buy uniform) to go into Best Buy and just stand around.  They also organized a similar number of men to go into the New York Abercrombie and Fitch with their shirts off and just stand around like the model (yes, apparently the NY A&F actually has a shirtless, live male model standing at the front door at all times).

A couple of other classics are organized pillow fights in unexpected places (e.g. at a mall or something similar), “Freezes,” which is where a large number of people will infiltrate some place like a grocery store and freeze completely still at exactly the same moment in a normal action-pose (e.g. getting a can of beans off of the shelf.)  The effect is tremendous, because it looks to anyone that is not involved like they have walked into some sort of time warp or something because so many people are so frozen.

Anyways, I would tremendously like to organize something like this in Seattle or with UW students specifically.  I could definitely set up a web site that would accommodate the communication, idea generation, and event planning, and I think it would be a really fun project.  Anyways, I’ll be looking for some sort of partner(s) in the matter and see if we can’t put it together together.