Star Wars: One New Rogue Force Awakens

In keeping with our Christmas break movie tradition, my family saw The Force Awakens and Rogue One the past two years when my brother and I went home for vacation. I’m somewhere between a casual and hardcore Star Wars fan – I’ve seen the Anakin sand quote¹ make its rounds on the internet, heard the Jar Jar Binks Sith theory, and know about some of the more . . . interesting CGI effects George Lucas keeps adding every time he digitally remasters the series, but I can’t name every character in the cantina scene or recite the soundtrack listing from memory. That said, I liked both movies.

Spoilers from this point forward.

The main complaint I heard about The Force Awakens is that it was A New Hope with different characters. I think Rogue One makes that less of a problem – the trilogy movies can all follow parallel structure and/or ring theory² while the stand-alone movies are new Star Wars stories. The one thing that was a little much was the destruction of the third Death Star, I mean Starkiller Base. Seriously, the Death Star was already blown up twice; have they not learned their lesson about fatal engineering design flaws?

Apparently not, but other than that, my criticisms are mainly the Millenium Falcon coincidentally rusting on the same planet Finn and Poe coincidentally crash land on where Rey coincidentally is, and the lightsaber battle. Rey has never touched a lightsaber before but somehow manages to hold off Kylo Ren, allegedly one of the strongest force users in the galaxy. No matter how strong Rey is in the force, I feel like inexpertly waving a glowing laser stick around should have resulted in someone losing a limb. Finally, I don’t care that BB-8 couldn’t actually move an inch in the desert sand because he’s kind of adorable. Apparently I like small round things that make chirping sounds (Star Wars droids and penguins).

While the plot was a little stale (though executed well), the rest of the movie was good – the visuals, music, cast, BB-8. I like that the main cast wasn’t big name actors, and there’s a female (co?) lead³.

Moving on to Rogue One. Finally, a new plot. With male and female actors who don’t fall in love with each other at first sight, realize halfway through the movie that they’re secretly in love with each other, or have a sordid love affair just for the heck of it. I read a spoiler-free review of Rogue One that said it was overall a dark movie, heavy on the war part of Star Wars. Other people said they didn’t connect with the characters or care much about any of them. My take on these points: it’s definitely a violent movie, particularly the last third, but it’s not gory. And it is dark, but it has to be because it’s leading into A New Hope. As for the characters, there were a couple of the less-main characters that were kind of just hanging around, though they were important for the final battle scenes. I will say that as a group, Cassian, Jyn, K-2SO, Bodhi, Chirrut, and Baze worked well together even if I didn’t care as much about some of them. Also, K-2SO sounds too much like potassium sulfate (K₂SO₄).

One note about the soundtrack. It’s not scored by John Williams, but by Michael Giacchino, who also composed the music for Zootopia, Inside Out, Star Trek, and a bunch of other popular movies. I didn’t find the soundtrack extremely remarkable, but it was well done. Giacchino used themes from Williams’s original music, including the perfect fifth that opens the iconic Star Wars theme, except then he composes a different melody for it. It’s painfully brilliant, because you want to hear the Star Wars theme, except Rogue One isn’t in any of the trilogies, so it has its own themes.⁴

I’ll end with a couple of my favorite scenes from Rogue One. First, the scene where Cassian and company are stealing a ship to steal the Death Star plans and are asked what their call sign is. That’s when Bodhi Rook replies with “This is Rogue One,” and when the group is really, truly, in it together. And second, the moment you realize that the Rogue One characters aren’t in A New Hope. Instead, they’re on a planet with seven million Stormtroopers shooting at the rebels in general, a desperate weapons developer shooting at Jyn and Cassian, and, oh yeah, a giant superlaser beam aimed at them. Painful, yes, but if you can achieve that moment in the middle of an epic battle scene, that is good storytelling.

¹”I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.” This line probably gets more flack than it deserves, but it’s a pretty bad line, and even worse used completely out of context.

²Ring theory says that the story comes back to its beginning at the end. For the first six Star Wars movies, this would mean that A New Hope (episode IV) and Revenge of the Sith (III), The Empire Strikes Back (V) and Attack of the Clones (II), and Return of the Jedi (VI) and The Phantom Menace (I) parallel each other.

³Just as long as they don’t force it to the point where it looks like a college brochure, as in one smiling student of each race/gender artfully placed on a lush green quad with bright blue skies and ivied stone buildings in the background. Because that totally happens all the time, especially when you go to college in the northeast and your quad is buried in snow over half the time classes are in session.

⁴You can hear the part (two notes) I’m talking about at the end of “A Long Ride Ahead,” the middle of “Rebellions Are Built on Hope,” and the middle of “The Master Switch.”

Eating Ann Arbor, Part 2

Here are the rest of my Ann Arbor restaurant ratings (part 1 is here and includes my rating system):

8. No Thai (Thai) – I overheard a very heated conversation about this place last semester. The consensus was that the food is Not Thai. It’s not. When I went with my parents, we ordered pad thai and green curry. I’m not sure what we actually got, but there was a lot of it, and it was edible.
Rating: 1.5/5

9. Palio (Tuscan – Italian) – I paid this restaurant a visit with some ChemE friends during Restaurant Week when they were doing two meals for $28. For $14, we got an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert to share. The tomato soup I started with was good, but nothing too special. For the entree, I ordered the veal tortellini, which I really liked. There were mushrooms, I ate all the mushrooms, and I don’t even like mushrooms. Then dessert was Nutella bread pudding. Nutella. Enough said.
Rating: 4/5 (This was the most satisfying meal I had all month. Meat that wasn’t dry chicken, dessert, free bread, and special pricing.)

10. Panera (American) – I am aware that Panera is a chain restaurant found across the United States. I like Panera. They make good sandwiches.

11. The Lunch Room (American – vegan) – Did not pick this place. Did not realize it was vegan until after lunch even though the cream cheese in my bagel tasted nothing like cream cheese because it was cashew cheese. I also accidentally ate blue cheese once, so that should give you some idea of how my brain reacts to my taste buds. As long as you don’t expect the vegan substitutes to taste like their animal counterparts or insist on meat at every meal, you’ll be fine at The Lunch Room. I’ve heard their desserts are really good though I haven’t personally tried any.
Rating: 3/5

12. Tomukun Korean BBQ (Korean) – Ate here after the Ford Museum. I don’t know if it’s completely authentic, but I liked it. They have a variety of soups, noodles, stir fries, and hot pot, as well as bbq. If I remember right, we ordered an appetizer, an entree, and one order of bbq.
Rating: 3.5/5

13. Tomukun Noodle Bar (noodles) – Ramen is pretty good, though the noodles and ingredients come swimming in a sea of broth that’s on the salty side. It’s also a bit lacking in meat and vegetables. I’ve had better ramen back home in New England. I’d go here for an easy meal but would otherwise try another place since there are so many restaurants nearby.
Rating: 3/5

14. Zingerman’s (American) – On one hand, they make really good sandwiches. On the other, they’re just sandwiches. That cost as much as a fancy meal at other places. Zingerman’s is Ann Arbor’s famous restaurant, and they do sandwiches and everything else really well, it just feels overpriced because I can make a peanut butter and jam sandwich¹ for less than a dollar and be only slightly less satisfied.
Rating: 4/5 (food), 3/5 (value – still worth going to so you can say you’ve been to Zingerman’s, but some of their sandwiches cost more than half of my weekly grocery bill)

Overall, excepting whatever was going on at No Thai, I haven’t paid² for a bad meal in Ann Arbor. I’m not super picky about authenticity, except if I’m trying to get closer-to-actual Chinese food³. I also don’t eat out that much so I don’t mind paying a little more for my meals occasionally ($15-$20 – I'm a single grad student with no car on a stipend, so money's not tight, but I'm not running around throwing $20 bills around like confetti either). So far, I’ve been happy with the variety and quality of restaurants in Ann Arbor. The only things missing are Dunkin Donuts and a waffle place, then I would be completely satisfied⁴.

¹With good ingredients, by which I mean not the super economy sized jar of hydrogenated fat peanut butter, high fructose corn syrup jam, or low volume fraction white bread.

²We had these research ethics seminars last semester and one of the times they gave us pizza, it was pretty lousy pizza.

³Pro tips: Cheese is not a traditional ingredient in Chinese cooking. Throwing bean sprouts (or water chestnuts, or bamboo shoots) over eveything doesn’t make it Chinese. And spaghetti is not noodles unless you’re a desperate college student.

⁴With my eating-out food options. I still have plenty else to complain about, because I’m a chemical engineer.

Eating Ann Arbor, Part 1

Without a meal plan for the first time in four years, most weeks I fend for myself for twenty out of twenty-one meals. Meal number twenty-one is usually a shared meal after church. About once every other week, though, I’ve eaten out at one of the numerous restaurants in Ann Arbor. Similar to Ithaca, you can get a wide variety of cuisines in Ann Arbor, ranging in quality from late night drunk food to unaffordable on my stipend. The following is my rating¹ for every restaurant I’ve eaten at so far. Keep in mind that I’ll eat almost anything, I’ve probably had a sandwich for lunch for about 170 of my 180 days in Ann Arbor so far, and I don’t mind eating the same thing for dinner for a week straight.­ I also tend to rate everything starting at a 3 and move up or down as necessary.

1. Bewon (Korean) – After (yet another) homework session, a couple friends and I went out for dinner to celebrate Chinese New Year. I had the bibimbap, which was served with warm (purple) rice and mostly cold vegetables, including cucumber, bean sprouts, carrots, and spinach. The overall portion was large, but it was a little short on meat (beef) and it got cold by the time I finished. Still, it was good, and the rating gets increased a bit because they served us a variety of sides and tea that had taste.
Rating: 3.5/5

2. Cardamom (Indian) – For whatever reason, Ithaca has at least three Indian buffet places, two of them next to each other, and I’ve eaten at all three. At Cardamom, there wasn’t a buffet, but I enjoyed my meal there nonetheless. It’s pretty standard Indian food. They do have a naan that’s filled with nuts and other things that was really good.
Rating: 3.5/5

3. Evergreen (Chinese) – I’ve been to this restaurant twice. The first time we went for a quick meal and ordered off the lunch special menu, which was like every other Chinese lunch special menu ever.² The second time I went with a larger group of people and we ordered family style. Surprisingly, the food was not drowning in sauce, salt, or oil, and we left satisfied with the quality, quantity, and cost of the food. They also have the honor of making the first eggplant dish that I’ve liked.
Rating: 3/5 (lunch special menu), 4/5 (traditional menu)

4. Frita Batidos (Cuban) – Be forewarned this is not where you go if you want a light meal. That said, the frita part of the name comes from Cuban-inspired burgers made from chorizo. The batido is a milkshake . . . and you can add rum to it. So we did. We had a passion fruit milkshake with rum, then for dessert we got churros. It’s something different from standard pasta/burgers/sandwiches, and worth trying at least once. (By the way, Google Translate tells me the name together means “fried batter.” Like I said, not light fare.)
Rating: 4/5 (because alcoholic milkshakes and churros)

5. Kang’s (Korean) – Basic Korean restaurant, decent food. I ordered the spicy beef and it could have come with more vegetables, but otherwise the taste was fine. This is probably the only place on this half of the list I wouldn’t go to if I wanted a nicer dinner, and it’s starting to push the top of my price range for lunch, but it’s another option for Asian food.
Rating: 2.5/5

6. Madras Marsala (Indian) – Another Indian restaurant. I had the chicken biryani, which I might have ordered a little spicier than I should have. I know authentic biryani involves over a dozen spices (meanwhile, the entirety of my spice rack (okay, it’s a box) in my apartment is eight spices, and that number includes salt and pepper), but it turned out over-flavored. It would have been okay if I’d been eating it with other dishes, but by itself it was a bit much.
Rating: 3/5

7. Neopapalis (pizza) – Average pizza place with the option to choose your own toppings or order pre-set pizzas. The pizza we ordered was a bit oily but tasty. (Cornell dining makes surprisingly good pizza, precisely because it tends to be on the drier side, though they sometimes solve their “crap, these vegetables need to be used up” problems with the pizzas. And giant bins of shredded carrots in the salad bar. And carrot cake, heavy on the carrots.)
Rating: 3/5

¹My ratings can be described as follows:
0 – Don’t eat here unless someone pays you a significant fraction of your annual income.
1 – If it was free, it would still be a toss up whether I ate it or not.
2 – Food is edible, but I wouldn’t choose to eat here if there were better options.
3 – Solid choice, would voluntarily go back.
4 – Very good food, would definitely recommend to other people.
5 – Best meal of any given month.

²My cooking goal is to be able to make subpar knock-off versions of any dish you’d find on a Chinese lunch special menu. So far I’ve made orange chicken, teriyaki chicken with pineapple, General Tso’s chicken, kung pao chicken, and beef and broccoli. And also tacos, but those aren’t Chinese unless you add soy sauce. I basically make the same sauce base for every single one of these dishes and add one or two different ingredients.

The Wright Brothers’ Flying House

File this one under things you can do when you’re rich: buy famous people’s houses, dismantle them, and cart them off to Dearborn, Michigan, to be reassembled as part of an outdoor museum full of famous people’s houses, which is complemented by an indoor museum full of planes, trains, and automobiles. This is, of course, exactly what Henry Ford did with some of his prodigious wealth, opening what is now known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village. I visited with my family during the week I moved to Ann Arbor with my carload of books and dishes, Hezekiah, and my bike.

We started outside with Greenfield Village and saw a sawmill, weaving, a printing shop, a tinsmith, and a pottery shop. At the tin shop, we saw a cookie cutter being made, at the weaving shop there were workers operating the hand looms, and at the printer’s, there was the opportunity to operate the printing press. This part was similar to Sturbridge Village or Plimoth Plantation, both perennial field trip destinations for New England schoolchildren. Next, we moved to the Main Street area, which contains the majority of the transported buildings. Here we saw a millinery, a jewelry store, the Wright brothers’ workshop and house, and the post office, among other anachronistically placed structures. You can send actual postcards from the post office that have their own special postmark.

One of the mills

Later in the day, we ended our evening back in Greenfield Village walking through various homes. Regretfully, we didn’t have enough time to spend time admiring every building, but it was a unique experience. I mean, how else would you ever be able to walk from Thomas Edison’s grandparents’ house to the courthouse where Lincoln once tried cases in fifteen minutes? Overall, I found that the historical presenters were willing and happy to answer any questions, which was a welcome change from art museum docents/security whose main job seems to be yelling at people for using flash photography/taking any pictures at all/getting too near to the art/scaring the paintings by breathing too loudly.

We spent the middle part of the day indoors in the Henry Ford Museum looking at dozens of cars, trains, and any other thing Henry Ford thought would be cool to put in a museum. Highlights include a snowplow train, an(other) entire house, the bus Rosa Parks rode, and a tomato harvester. The house is the Dymaxion house, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller as a cost-effective house of the future. He designed the house to be easily transported and assembled and to be resource-efficient, but the idea never caught on. Fuller has ties to another museum I’ve been to – the Biosphere in Montreal. The building is surrounded by a geodesic dome of which Fuller was the architect. Inside, the museum focuses on the environment, and if they haven’t changed it too much since I went, it’s worth a visit.

A neon Holiday Inn sign.  Because why wouldn't you think
"I should buy this," when you see one?

Two more things you can do at the museum: eat and watch films. We had lunch at the café inside the museum. The prices are pretty reasonable, especially for museum food. It’s not cheap, but the portions are decent and the food’s good. Lastly, they show documentary-type films throughout the day. We saw one on national parks, which we mainly just watched to see scenic shots of nature, and one on transportation, focusing on planes. There were some interesting points in that one, about globalization, and just how quickly things can move now. That movie was the last thing we did at the museum; we returned to Ann Arbor after that for dinner. It was a very long, full, and varied day that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I would highly recommend the Ford Museum.

To conclude, if you’re ever in the southeastern corner of Michigan, pay the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village a visit. You can easily spend a couple days wandering around, because you really can’t go wrong when the theme of the museum is “cool stuff Henry Ford decided he should buy and haul to Dearborn.”

Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North

Better title: Hopefully Five More Years at Forty-Two Degrees North, because less than five years means I got kicked out of my program, and more than five years means I still don’t have my degree. That covers the five years part. As for the forty-two degrees north, after growing up shoveling snow off an abnormally long driveway and catching the bus at six dark thirty in the morning, spending four years at Cornell being rained, snowed, sleeted, and hailed on – with exactly zero weather-related class cancellations – I decided I didn’t have enough of the northern United States’s climate and chose to attend the University of Michigan. I also thought long and hard about the hours of pain and suffering inflicted by four years of ChemE problem sets, classes, and research, and opted for five more years of it to get my PhD in Chemical Engineering.

All of which is to say that I’m currently in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan working towards my PhD in Chemical Engineering, a process that takes an average of five years, and the weather is just as wonderful as in Ithaca.

My new clock tower (with carillon, not chimes) and engineering quad

How I came to this point is one of those stories. Like the story of the time I tried to fly out of Ithaca or the story of everything that happened at Lick Brook Falls. This story starts all the way back during my sophomore year at Cornell. After complaining about everything fluids related for four months, I spent one summer working on a fluids demo project, TA’d the class, spent another summer doing fluids-related research, then applied to grad school. My research group at Michigan studies surfactant solutions and does molecular dynamics simulations, among other things, so . . . more fluid mechanics-type topics.

I applied to six schools spread out across the United States and was rejected by four of them, including all three of the schools with significantly warmer temperatures. As a side note, my home, Cornell, and the University of Michigan rank among the coldest, windiest, and snowiest places in the United States. My only other option besides Michigan was Carnegie Mellon (CMU), which is slightly less frigid, but cold and snowy nonetheless.

I visited CMU and Michigan on consecutive weekends, and had a good time at both schools, besides that whole flying out of Ithaca thing on the way to CMU. The grad students were on their best behavior, we were shown the best of Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor, and there was as much alcohol as we wanted. [A word of caution: I heard that at one of my visits, a prospective student drank and behaved badly enough that the grad students recommended the school rescind their offer of admission.] But back to my decision. I liked the ChemE programs at both schools, but as much as CMU tried to convince us their school wasn’t right in the city, it was right in the city. The University of Michigan is also classified as an urban school, but to a much lesser extent than CMU, so when April and decision day rolled around, I officially accepted Michigan’s admission offer and four months later, reported to Ann Arbor.

Michigan is about twice the size of Cornell, both in terms of campus area and students, though the graduate ChemE program is less than half the size of my undergrad program. They have a bus system similar to Ithaca’s that I’ve already taken full advantage of and lots of local restaurants. What they don’t have is Wegmans, hiking trails within walking/biking/bussing distance, and an on-campus rock wall, but they do have a community band, a nice public library, and my desk in the group’s basement office has a window next to it. Hey, sometimes it’s the little things.

My new ChemE building (the complex houses other departments,
including some of the medical school)

I survived my first semester of classes – Cornell ChemE prepared me very well for grad school – and started my second. Now I just have to make it through four and a half more years of exams, research, and publications, and then hopefully they’ll give me my degree.