Can we take a moment to recognize that Wake Forest is the worst tournament team in history?  I (TP) have been welded in a sort of sad alliance to the Demon Deacons since at least 1993, the year that Wake went to the Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl in sunny New Orleans.  Before that I’m not so sure.  But basketball, not football, is the real name of the game for WFU, which is why every season I get my heart set on Wake Forest making a run in March.  They were pre-season #1 this year even.  Our friend has described the losing game against WVU as one of the most exciting basketball games he has ever seen, which makes it even more upsetting that we had to watch it slowly update on over the internet on the ESPN web page.  Why, sports gods, why must you tease me?

In other news, I have been admitted as a non-degree student at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.  Isn’t that nice?  What that means is that I have to waste a whole half day tomorrow (at least) taking the commuter rail down to Bangi, on the far southern end of the metro area, to see about filling in some more paperwork, which will supposedly give me official status to be allowed to use the library at Universiti Malaya, something that I’ve been doing for one month already anyway.

Also, we haven’t mentioned this yet, but we will be taking about 10 days off starting this Friday.  We are going to meet JM’s parents in a nice compromise location: New Zealand.  It’s a 10-hour flight from here to Auckland, and Malaysia Airlines has a nonstop every day.  That makes it just about equidistant from LA and KL, which is convenient for JM’s parents.  Technically, the middle point is Wake Island, but there’s not much to do there.  We’ll take lots of pictures on our trip.  We’ve heard that Auckland and Wellington have reputations as gastronomic centers, and we have been scoping out internet reviews of good places to eat.  We saw a menu that listed the following as an entree: “Furikake crusted hapuka, braised witlof.”  Anyone know what that means?

Speaking of pictures, you can check out the latest pictures from some of our voyages around KL starting here.  If you hit “next” in the series, you will see more new pictures.  Clicking “previous” takes you to other KL pictures that we posted awhile ago.