Hello Lamppost! Whatcha Knowin?

A mockumentary about a mad scientist behind the creation of some...

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 23:46:42 -0500

A mockumentary about a mad scientist behind the creation of some insane, insane, rides. Love it!

For old time’s sake. Me want!

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 22:17:38 -0500

For old time’s sake. Me want!

Treasures! Treasures! Free Treasures to Grab!

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 03:26:49 -0500

Treasures! Treasures! Free Treasures to Grab!:

A fuckload of classic literature:

1984 by George Orwell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

Aesop’s Fables by Aesop

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll

Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dubliners by James Joyce

Emma by Jane Austen

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Grimms Fairy Tales by the brothers Grimm

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson

Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad

Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

Swanns Way by Marcel Proust

Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Great Gatsby

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Iliad by Homer

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

The Odyssey by Homer

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault

The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan

The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells

The Trial by Franz Kafka

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Ulysses by James Joyce

Utopia by Sir Thomas More

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Click on the motherfucking Hypelinks bitches.

Here! Have a fuckload of modern literature, too!

A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith

An Abundance of Katherines - John Green

Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer

Bossypants - Tina Fey

Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Truman Capote

Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger

Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

City of Bones - Cassandra Clare

Clockwork Angel - Cassandra Clare

Damned - Chuck Palahniuk

Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay

Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris

Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card

Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk

Go The Fuck To Sleep - Adam Mansbach

I Am America (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert

I Am Number Four - Pittacus Lore

Inkheart - Cornelia Funke

It - Stephen King

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Lolita - Vladmir Nabokov

Marked - Kristin Cast

Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden

My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro

One Day - David Nicholls

Paper Towns - John Green

Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightening Thief - Rick Riordan

Pretty Little Liars - Sara Shepard

Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Snow White And The Huntsman - Lily Blake

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

The Giver - Lois Lowry

The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks

The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

The Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky

The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot

The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien

The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

Tuesdays With Morrie - Mitch Albom

Uglies - Scott Westerfeld

Vampire Diaries: The Awakening - L.J. Smith

Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen

Wicked - Gregory Maguire

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 22:50:47 -0500

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Sad Perkedel

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 07:42:01 -0500

This is, ladies and gentlemen, a picture of sad perkedel.

Sad perkedel, like its name, looks really, really sad. Miserably sad. It breaks my heart to look at the picture of sad perkedel. It looks like it’s there as a result of some cruel, arbitrary conception. A crooked sense of humor, perhaps. Only it was not initially meant to be a joke.

Sad perkedel, dear universe, are my creation.

Its grotesque nature was never intentional. Perkedel is actually an Indonesian version of Dutch’s frikadeller, a dumpling of ground meat and mashed potatoes, dunk in egg white and deep fried. A simple dish, really. Or at least that’s how I thought it would be.

Obviously forgetting the fact that I am a nightmare when it comes to cooking. Even for something as simple as perkedel.

On the night when sad perkedel was conceived, I had thought that it was a good idea to cook for my husband. He had been busy with his papers and essays from school that I had wanted to make him a nice meal. I had never made a Perkedel in my life before, but I had read the recipe and it looked easy peasy.

As it happened, I spent 15 minutes peeling off the potatoes, another 15 minutes peeling the shallots and garlic WHILE bawling my eyes out crying, then more than 45 minutes trying to mash the goddamn potatoes in the mortar and pestle. That’s not mentioning the hot damn mess of a kitchen I made at the end of the whole ordeal. Worse than a shipwreck, as my mother would aptly phrase it.

The result was the sad perkedel in the picture. Which looks horribly deformed, compared to this, for instance.

As sad as it was, we still ended up eating the sad perkedel. My husband said it didn’t taste so bad. I believed him, in terms of the taste, it’s kind of hard, really, to fuck up with mash potatoes and ground meat. Will I attempt to make another perkedel? Maybe. But perhaps less emo next time.

3,5 Peanuts in A Bowl

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:01:23 -0500

We count time in peanuts, my husband and I. And woot this is actually the first time that I refer him as “husband” in this blog. It sounds a little odd, but it feels right. It’s like that off-key note in a song that fits the music somehow, almost intentional. I like it.

But back to the peanuts business, it’s a habit that started a while ago at times when we’re often separated by distance for many reasons. It’s always excruciating to be away from your loved ones, no? It always summons the cranky, bitter witch out of me. So he started to send me text messages every day when we’re away, counting down the day when we’re going to finally reunite again. 32 peanuts in a bowl, 31 peanuts in a bowl, 30 peanuts in a bowl. And so on and so forth. And when it’s only 1 peanut in a day left, we would count the hours in peanuts. It will be 24 peanuts to 1, to none, nada, zero.

(To clarify things, no when it’s down to hours, we dont send each other text messages every peanut. That would make me totally NUTS. Ha-ha okay that was not funny)

Since then it became our habit, our word. We count times, especially when it is related to us two, in peanuts. Why peanuts? I don’t know. I guess it’s just a random word that was thrown in the moment, that ended up bunked snugly in the corner of our cheesy words dictionary.

Come to think of it, we did invent a lot of nonsense words together. It’s never intentional. It’s just sort of happens. I guess both of us likes to talk in gibberish and we like to laugh at each other’s babbles and baloney a lot. It’s never something that we crafted, it just seeps to our heads and stays.

And it’s fricking cheesy. And weird. If you ask me, I am sure I wont remember all, but I think I can name a few.

Solicitor = Bolster pillow

Pampereddick = A state of lying down perpendicular on the bed

Kekunya = A state of being full (of food), and comfortable at the same time

Doodooish = A state of being really, really sick

Tren Bedo = Bed

Brenda = My left boob

Stella = My right boob

Brenda & Stella = boobs

…

There are still plenty of more. But I guess the weird thing is, I never really remember them all. They’re completely random, bizarre, pointless and irrelevant in my daily social interaction with other people (and believe me, I think I kind of know how to communicate in a less dopey manner with other people), so I lock them out in the back of my head I guess. Until I come back home and start mumbling jibber jabber twiddle twaddle with someone who also speaks my language :)

The Marvelous Misadventure of the Twosome Klutz #6

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 04:50:06 -0400

Him: Babe I got a question.
Her: *waking up* ... huh? What's up?
Him: Why did I sleep in the kitchen last night?
Her: Eh? Huh? What?
Him: Why did I sleep in the kitchen last night?
Her: But you didn't. You fell asleep here, next to me, last night. We were spooning and watching The Simpsons before we fell asleep.
Him: But I woke up in the kitchen.
Her: What do you mean??
Him: I woke up in the kitchen. I was lying on the kitchen floor with two pillows.
Her: What are you talking about???
Him: I was sleeping in the kitchen floor. How did that happen?
Her: How did that happen???
Him: Hey I asked the question first!

cinderellainrubbershoes: MY LIFE IS COMPLETE. I just realized...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 06:18:31 -0400

cinderellainrubbershoes:

MY LIFE IS COMPLETE. I just realized that these are real things:

“In the Library” by CB I Hate Perfume (Old Book Scent)

“Paper Passion” by Geza Schoen (New Book Scent)

JGlobe Review

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 11:35:00 -0400

JGlobe Review:

“The lifestyle tips laid out eschew any spiritual claptrap; instead they jump

between whimsical factoids and unambiguous notes on u

nderstanding and surviving the daily routine.” - Jakarta Globe

Click on title for the full review of my book ;)

(Pic is courtesy of Siswanto Sidharta)

ugambreng: #176 The Everlasting Love...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 10:10:36 -0400

ugambreng:

#176 The Everlasting Love #366Tulisan2012

adakah?

View Post

shared via WordPress.com

We Are All Made of Stardust No? And I like what you said that...

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 03:59:00 -0400

We Are All Made of Stardust

No?

And I like what you said that day. That these whole things feel surreal, because it’s memories in the making. Everything is memory in the making. I’m crafting pictures of you and us and everything we do with my senses. It’s okay to feel surreal because I know that memories fade and one day when I get older and older and my brain will shrink like that grandfather tree on your mom’s favorite secret country lane, I might not be able to remember what had happened exactly. I might invent stories and distort reality. So it’s okay that everything feels surreal now when we’re memory making and crafting pictures in our head to remember. Nothing will be so farfetched to recall and invent and distort later when everything is already so surreal to begin with.

Here goes: that night, in your father’s land, we’re surrounded by woods. You and me alone, and woodland critters. We could hear breeze sighing between the leaves of pines and birches and maple trees, and some apples fell to the ground. They were ripe enough. We could hear fishes swimming and sometimes making splashes and ripples on the lake, your favorite lake, mine too. With small island and a sole weeping willow in the middle of it, an 8 years-old.

And everything was dark, except for the fire you built by throwing branches and logs to be lit and blown, into pretty little crackles. They flew like fireflies. And on the trees we saw the faux-fireflies’ shadows, dancing slowly like drunken ballerinas.

So we lied down. On the grass, and we looked up.

And we saw the milky way. Vast vast sky with gazillion of stars. And we saw shooting stars. Every five second. And you refused to make wishes because you said yours already came true.

Then you held my hand. And we held hands lying on the grass, stargazing until the fire went to sleep and turned into ashes. Ashes that look like stardust.

So I’ve been absent for a while. Here’s what...

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 04:53:48 -0400

So I’ve been absent for a while. Here’s what happened. I got married. With the love of my life. And it’s been great, honest! Of course, some absurdities here and there tend to happen, including some mohawks, jellyfish sting, indonesian tradisional lap-dancers, crazy circus and more.

Oh by the way, it’s Real Love that I’m covering this time. In sort of a John Lennon-Regina Spektor confusion kinda of yadda yadda. I love that song. It’s our first dance song in the wedding, where we successfully managed to embarrass everyone and ourselves with our awkward moves. But we’re happy. Ever so happy.

I’ll blog more with some pictures. In the meantime, toodles!

What's On The Menu?

Thu, 31 May 2012 06:47:30 -0400

Vietnamese food’s amazing. But ask that question in a typical Vietnamese sidewalk restaurants or cafes, and you’ll always get unpredictable answers. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes psychedelic, sometimes you cant help but going wtf. But never boring. Never.

Today me and Virginie stopped by at a random cafe by Tay Ho lake. It’s called Eva Club. Despite the bizarre cinco de mayo colors here and there, the cafe’s actually quite nice.

So, what’s on the menu? Virginie asked. I opened the menu and found… well… a lot.

Here we got Dry Cow, Cattle Guards Chicken (how nice of you, Mr. Cattle), and Laughter chestnuts. Tempting, very tempting. It really sounds like something you’d find out of Roald Dahl’s bizarre and revolting recipes.

Check this out! We got swinging cow! I want one of those. I hope it can sing while it swings, that would be really amazing.

Now this section’s just too awesome to be true. The comedy tour section! I’d have the Beer Comedy Tour Attraction, please. With my Swinging Cow.

Eating raw oysters… yay!

Fish pass the banana warehouse…then walk straightly into a bar. Then flirt the hell out of the swinging cow.

… but they found a clams steamed pepper discharge and decided that it’s not their thing…

… but hey! It’s still Interesting!…

… and I mean come on, Interesting! Especially the Fried Pickle Hearts, Bitter Soup. It’s the emo’s favorite, angsty teenagers’ choice of the day. Yay!

Rush Hanoi Rush!

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:16:57 -0400

A call woke me up today. It was one of the tenants in my apartment. She told me that my bike, parked in our basement, was leaking. Gasoline was all over the basement floor and the place’s now reeking the smell of it.

That’s the perpetrator shown in the picture. A Honda Super Cub from the 70s. Actually, no. I sold that bike a year ago because being a vintage bike, it’s broken all the time. Then I bought a new one, a Chinese knockoff called Fonda Super Cub. It looks exactly the same like that old bike in the picture, even with the same egg-yolk color, only a tad chubbier. And now it’s leaking.

I know that there’s no way that I would have the time this morning to bring the leaking bike to a sửa chửa xe (garage), so I decided to take a xe ôm (motorcycle taxi) to the office.

Not having to drive, I was able to capture some pictures of Hanoian rush hour from the back of my xe ôm. All was taken at around 8 o’clock in the morning.

Not as intense as imagined, eh?

That’s Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum.

Still not too bad…

Then suddenly it started to pile up…

A policeman, trying to control the traffic…

Hanoi’s summer fashion for girls

More summer fashion…

Rush rush busy street rush!

Bonus: To fully capture the ambiance, here’s the sound of traffic in Vietnam taken from http://www.goingslowly.com/bicycle-touring-in-southeast-asia/, two cyclers writing about their bicycle adventure all around SEA (read the blog, I personally love it!)

cinderellainrubbershoes: “Writing is perhaps the greatest of...

Mon, 28 May 2012 21:29:36 -0400

cinderellainrubbershoes:

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is a proof that humans are capable of magic”

-Carl Sagan

That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,Silent,...

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 06:18:39 -0400

That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and
stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didnt notice because

That day, the day the saucers came, by some some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-mens nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold,
and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because

On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods
day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true
brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across
the land and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because

That day, the saucer day, the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day,
the day the great winds came
And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling
us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of
the Time Machine day,
You didnt notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.

- Neil Gaiman

“Been There Done That Got The T-Shirt (BTDTGTTS)”...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 03:53:01 -0400

“Been There Done That Got The T-Shirt (BTDTGTTS)” button pins - limited edition. :)

"Je t’aime plus que tout la planete"

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 23:36:00 -0400

““Je t’aime plus que tout la planete””

- followed with a silent sigh

Gramedia is having its 38th birthday! Here’s a happy...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:49:38 -0400

Gramedia is having its 38th birthday! Here’s a happy birthday clip from Agus & Budi of Been There Done That Got The T-Shirt :)) made by Emeralda Noor Achni.

Kakapo

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 06:11:00 -0400

From cracked.com:

“… Over millions of years, most animals have adopted some kind of defensive strategy. An enterprising species might develop camouflage, sharp teeth or spines (if it’s smart, it’ll just go straight for the pistol-hands). But what if there were no natural enemies whatsoever? An animal could put absolutely all of its energy into eating and reproduction! On the plus side, that’s a surefire recipe for a species to thrive. On the down side, those criteria would probably result in a fat, helpless, delicious-tasting nymphomaniac. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the kakapo: the BBW of the animal kingdom.”

:)) :)) I can’t help wanting to sprint home and hug my boyfriend after reading this. It reminds me so much of him. In a good way :)) :))

Pic was taken from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/10565417@N03/