As a good California resident, it's no surprise I cast my lot (figuratively) with Barack Obama, the clear favorite of the Golden State. Indeed, after the shortest election night I can remember, we heard the concession speech just after 8p and the victory speech soon after.

One has to admit that the real surprise of the night was John McCain's concession speech. It was the McCain I remember pre-2004: the man of integrity that puts his country above his own interests and those of his party. He was gracious beyond reproach, in one fell swoop making me forget the rhetoric he had been spewing for months. Besides, the words were aided by his demeanor. John McCain seemed genuinely relieved this election was over. Not that he lost it, mind you, just that it was over and that he could return to being the man he had been his whole life long. I doubt we'll see him running for president again.

Barack Obama's speech was great, but it wasn't a surprise. He said all the right things, he re-emphasized his main campaign points, he pushed the notion of bipartisanship and of coming together. He was brilliant, but somehow we have gotten used to it already, and expectations on this side of the fence are almost infinite, yet it somehow seems that what we consider infinite now is doable, quite doable.

To my dismay, California Proposition 8, the Gay Marriage Amendment, passed by a slim majority of 52% - 48%. I am really heartbroken about his, especially because of the questionable provenance of the support for it.

It's my birthday tomorrow, and I decided to get myself a homemade dessert. I looked up recipes for mousse au chocolat, wanting one that is original both in time of creation and inventiveness.

I got in one of my baking books that I shlep around from move to move, without really having a good reason for them. I started writing down the list of ingredients and found something that puzzled me: it called for egg yolks and whipped cream.

You'll ask me, what's odd about that? Well, the deal is that to make things fluffy, people used to use beaten egg whites. That's how we got baiser, macaroons, and all other marvelous, deliciously fluffy goods from French cuisine. A recipe that calls for beaten egg yolks and whipped cream leaves an important item open: what happened to the egg whites?

Amazing what the web will do! I have been a fan of Intrade for years, using it first to gain a better idea of how the 2004 Presidential election would shape up, and then following the 2006 and now the latest 2008 election. Well, the platform is ever improving, and now Intrade officially tells you to embed the image of their current trades in your site. Here is the probably most important chart of the year, the Obama vs. McCain daily trades:

I thought it might be a good idea to keep it on the front page for a while, so that we all get a glimpse of the future, and how people are betting on it.

This is the first time I've seen this natural phenomenon, although it must be quite frequent: the cloudbow. That's a rainbow (a circular diffraction pattern caused by water droplets in the atmosphere) made by clouds, not by rain.

I walked out onto the lanai to enjoy the (extremely rare) evening sunshine. The sun had already set on Hau`Oli Mau, but it still shone on the ocean, unencumbered by Mauna Kea. There was a giant cloud right ahead of me, towards the wind. And from it rose a vertical rainbow.

The amazing thing about the cloudbow was that (as you can see in the larger image after the break) there was no rain. As a matter of fact, the cloudbow rose above the cloud, mostly.