What a Wonderful World

There are some outstanding things in this world. Some are outstandingly cool, like the mountains. Some are outstandingly scary, like vampires. Some are outstandingly useless, like everything on this site.

But the most interesting things are that are so fantastic and unbelievable and weird that you can't imagine them existing. For me, these are usually crazy animals that shouldn't exist, but they do, so I'm just glad they don't exist where I live. When I look for a future job, I will make sure to do background research on the location to insure that there aren't any, say, revivified velociraptors lurking in the area.

But VRs are extinct! These aren't.

First, I present to you something know as Atractosteus spatula, which looks something like this:

Now, you may say, "But Allen!! That there's straight up an alligator!" Not so! This, my friends, is a FISH. And it's one big, bad fish. Here's a full body view, and let me say, it does not look that much nicer:

Weighing in at over 200 pounds and over 8 feet in length, this FRESHWATER FISH is not something you want to tussle with. Apparently, they only live in the south, from Texas to Florida, which is just as well because I wasn't planning on job-searching those places anyway. Just imagine--you're wading in your nice freshwater stream, skipping rocks, with a picnic ready for later, and suddenly this guy charges out of nowhere to make YOU the picnic.

But the weirdness is not just confined to freshwater--here, we have our saltwater friend, the kelp:

Just kidding, i'm not talking about the kelp. I've helpfully labeled the above figures in a scientific manner. Please note that the thing, a leafy seadragon, looks exactly like a plant. Exactly like a plant. It eats shrimp, plankton, and SMALL FISH. Let's keep in mind it's only about 8 inches long. And has no teeth. How does it eat small fish? I'm imagining something like a vacuum system, like this:

Looks pretty biologically plausible. I even used an anatomical word!

Now if you think the kelp sea dragon leaf is weird, this next one is downright uncanny. As in, who would've thought that these were real? Well, for those of you who are "in the know" will recognize this adorable critter, either from a TV show or an Internet meme. Regardless, this little kip has muddled its way into our collective hearts, and PokeBalls.

Now, you may be surprised to hear this, but this guy is not merely a cartoon character or a virtual figment of the Internet--it is, in fact, REAL! It just so happens that the illustrators for the cartoon messed up the coloring. With a little bit of restoration:

OMG. WTFBBQ. Did anyone else see that???????? Madness? No. THIS. IS.

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AXOLOTL!!!!!!!!

Now, as you know or suspect, this last one is a doozy. This last one needs no explanation. It is, in fact, the most messed up of all, associating one of the cutest animals with something COMPLETELY not. This, ladies and gentlemen, is something SO MESSED UP that I won't even mention it here. Seriously. It takes some seriously messed up people to come up with this.

Click if you dare.

The group that created this calls themselves People Eating Tasty Animals.

*DRAMATIC MUSIC*

*CURTAIN FALLS*

There, and Back Again

The road to ITASA was fraught with perils. But the intrepid crew from Yale, undeterred by difficulties, ventured forth into the great unknown to bring enlightenment to the dim northlands (Boston.)

Okay, so not really. But I can be forgiven for thinking that the trip was cursed to failure after the first day.

Being the studious students that we were, we of course could not depart from our institution of higher education until our scholarly obligations were fulfilled. This meant Friday afternoon--but for the sake of academic advancement, it was a small price to pay.

We left Yale in high spirits--the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and the air tasted like rainbows. Our group was too big to all fit into one sedan, so we split up into two teams.

Team Win

Kevin Shen - Driver

Bernie Kuan

Austin Lan

Ngan Ton

Team More Win

Alan Jiang - Driver

Jin Chen

Vivian Chan

Allen Zhang (myself)

According to Google Maps, the drive would take a very long time. And we could only sing 99 bottles of juice on the wall for so long (99 bottles of juice worth). It was then that we decided that a competition between the two Teams would be necessary, to establish, trivially, which car was the more worthy. the competition of choice was a race.

A race to find signs beginning with each letter of the alphabet, in alphabetical order. The signs could be on anything outside the car, but license plates don't count. Team Win found the last letter first, but it was Team More Win that would end up, well, with more win.

Pulling into Boston seemed uneventful. Too uneventful. We look out the window, and discover that the reason for all the uneventfulness was a gigantic traffic jam on the exit ramp into Cambridge. Go figure. Team Win took a different exit and made it into Boston without mishap. At this point, it seemed that Team More Win may have been a huge misnomer.

But it proved to not be the case. Team Win, in their eagerness to enter Boston, wound up completely lost around Boston University and spent something like 1 hour driving around trying to find MIT. Team More Win patiently waited out the traffic jam, and arrive right on time (1 hour late) at MIT's Dorm Row, where we meet our host, Cyril.

When Team Win arrived at Dorm Row 30 minutes later, we thought that our troubles were over. We'd get a quick dinner and settle in to ITASA activities. Alas, it was not to be. It took until 9:30pm before we could find a restaurant and parking space. That is nearly 2 hours of searching in Cambridge. We wound up going to a Japanese place, where we ate delicious sushi/teriyaki/soba/etc while watching the Olympics. With our bellies full, we now thought our troubles would be over. After all, we only had to return to MIT and find our hosts.

Little did we know, it would be another 2 hours before we could retire. MIT, apparently, dislikes giving out free parking. The official ITASA parking, we were told, was about a mile away from the dorms. Being lazy, we didn't want to park that far, so we decided to try and find closer parking. Wandering around campus on foot and vehicle while trying to coordinate with the hosts was an arduous task. We wound up using the official ITASA parking anyway, lamenting the wasted 2 hours. After some solid ITASA bonding time, we decided to to hit the sack for an early start.

On our way to workshops, we were impressed by the MIT architecture.

Such as the infamous tetris building. If you could see Jin's face, you would see that it is full of awe. And wonderment.

The workshops were very interesting. The best one, though, was a tea-tasting workshop. Thomas Shu brought his vast knowledge of tea, as well as a large variety of tea to ITASA, sharing with us both tea and tea culture. He even brought what he said was the most expensive tea in the world--6 kilos for $90,000!! We each had a sip or two, and expressed our amazement. I had to fake it, though, because (and I confess to being uncultured) I could not really taste the difference in the $90,000 specialtea.

Being Asians in a roughly foreign land, we of course had to take pictures. This building provided ample inspiration

But only after lunch.

And now, the drama of the weekend:

We got trapped in a picture frame:

More shenanigans:

Kevin refines his ballroom dance skills.

While he was thus occupied, the others decide to empirically test whether looking directly into the sun would blind a person, using four conditions: No glasses, tinted glasses, regular glasses, and dyed hair:

What actually happened was that a vortex sucked them into the building. And they got stuck inside:

After rescuing our members, we tried to taking the requisite jumping picture. This one below was our best attempt:

The reason why we failed at the taking the jumping picture was that we all jumped so high, that we missed the camera and landed in a tree. What?

Bernie sums up the whole trip in one word:

"You should all come next year!"