Condi Rice gave a royal piano performance for the Queen.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
Is It Just Me?
Or is Summer Glau looking much more hot in the Sarah Connor Chronicles than she ever did in Firefly?
Maybe she’s just growing up. And has a better makeup crew. And is becoming a better actor.
A Golden Oldie Thanksgiving Recipe
Since I’ve been recycling lately, here’s a post from three years ago on my unique turkey dressing recipe. That one got spammed up, but I’ll repeat it here, if anyone wants to comment.
I don’t know if there’s a Carnival of the Recipes for Thanksgiving, but in response to popular demand [cue sounds of crickets chirping], here’s my unique recipe for corn-bread and wild-rice stuffing. It’s higher protein than most.
- A couple pounds of sausage (I prefer some kind of fancy chicken or turkey sausage–this year I found some chicken/brocolli)
- wild rice (maybe half a cup)
- pine nuts (maybe half a cup)
- a pound or so of exotic mushrooms (oyster, chanterelle, shiitake, etc.)
- one onion, chopped
- a few cloves of garlic, diced
- a few cups of corn bread crumbs, either home made or store-bought stuffing
- a few stalks of celery (if desired–I don’t like it that much, but some people think it’s not
- stuffing without it), chopped
- pomegranate seeds (this is the secret ingredient)
- a couple cups of chicken broth (from bouillion is fine, unless you want to be fancy)
- salt, pepper, sage, thyme to taste
- olive oil
Soak the rice overnight in about twice as much water as it needs to cover. Another good thing to do ahead, while watching teevee, is to divest the pomegranate from its seeds (persnickety work).
In the morning, cut up the sausage into bite-size chunks, and saute in the olive oil (amount depending on the stickiness of your saute pan). Chop the rest of the ingredients and boil the rice for fifteen minutes or so (if you overdo it, it won’t have the crunchiness). Set the meat aside and saute the onions, celery and garlic in the same pan.
Put all the non-liquid ingredients in a big bowl and stir well. Add in the broth and mix thoroughly. If it seems too dry, feel free to add as much water…or booze…as you want. It should be moist throughout, but not soaked. You can also add melted butter to taste and texture if you like that sort of thing, and your arteries can take it. Another option, to be more heart healthy, is to fatten it up with olive or canola oil.
Use it like any other stuffing–either inside the bird, or under the skin, or just bake it in its own dish, or all of the above.
Eat, and enjoy.
Oh, and on this Thanksgiving Eve, let us all bow our heads and give remembrance to the woman who invented Stove Top Stuffing™, who has stuffed her last stove top.
If anyone tries it, or variations, feedback will be appreciated.
We Know What We Like
Lileks has a meditation on modern art:
It’s not the humanism that ruined art, it was humanism that divorced itself from the possibility of transcendence. Which would be bad enough if it hadn’t decided to splash around in the gutters as well.
Ah, but why was it influential? It recontextualized the commonplace and made us see it as Art, a process that continues to this day every time you see a book with a title like “The Art of Bread” or “The Art of Toad Sexing” or whatever else has to be elevated to the status of marble sculpture to make the user feel they’re living a rarified life. It played a joke on the Stuffy Academics, which is something the adolescent temperament never tires of doing. This is not encouraged any more, since the Academics are on the side of Truth and Modernity, however defined today. Although I once knew an architecture student who took perverse and boundless glee in shocking his teacher by putting a pointy roof on the house each student had to design. A pointed roof. In other words, a useful roof, a functional roof that didn’t collect rain water. Everyone else had a flat roof, of course. Machine for Living and all that. This was just around the time Post-Modernism made it okay to quote history, as long as everyone saw you wink, or could understand that your overscaled grotesque excretions were meant ironically.
An instructor might not know what to make of a house with a point roof, but if you called it “House In The Time of Reagan” he’d understand.
Read all.
A User-Hostile Service
As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.
I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).
But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.
When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
[message from unnamed service…]
In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).
The response was:
====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======
Hi
Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.
Oh. OK.
They were serious.
They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.
Is it just me, or are they nuts?
Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):
One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:
1) not include my response in your response and
2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?
Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).
WHY DO YOU DO THIS?
Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?
This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.
The response?
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
Here is my response:
Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…
It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.
===========================================================
We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.
That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?
In The Deep End Of The Gene Pool
Kay Hymowitz writes about the chaos of Darwinist dating.
Libertarianism and SF
Katherine Mangu-Ward, in an essay on Tor Books, says that the link remains strong.
Too Much Self Esteem
Never before have so many been so proud of so little:
The findings, published in the November issue of Psychological Science, support the idea that the “self-esteem” movement popular among today’s parents and teachers may have gone too far, the study’s co-author said.
“What this shows is that confidence has crossed over into overconfidence,” said Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University.
She believes that decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.
“High school students’ responses have crossed over into a really unrealistic realm, with three-fourths of them expecting performance that’s effectively in the top 20 percent,” Twenge said.
Don’t they realize that half of them are below median intelligence? Probably not, because they got an “A” in math, even though they didn’t understand it.
One of the perverse and tragic problems with incompetence is that it generally includes an inability to recognize it.
I’d Always Wondered That Myself
Lileks has been musing on why the Three Musketeers never had muskets:
Where are their guns? They never have guns. They must have been a grave disappointment when they showed up. We are here, my liege! The Musketeers! Fine, fine, take up position on the parapet, and aim down at – say, where are your muskets? We have them not, my liege! We live life at swordpoint! All for one, and one for – Fine, you have a motto, I know, but I wanted guns. Why do you call yourselves musketeers if you don’t have any bloody muskets? Tres simplisme, monsieur! We must see the whites of our foes’ eyes, wide with fright! We must – Oh shut up and take these muskets and start shooting at something, for God’s sake.
Other amusing pop-cultural observations as well (and as usual).
Cottage Cheesy Ruminations
Did you know that there were regional styles of cottage cheese?
Neither did I, until I moved to Florida (and even then it took me over four years to discover it). I’ve been buying the stuff for a while, and mostly, I’ve been buying the store generic (Publix, if you must know), which I’ve never been that pleased with–liquidy and runny, regardless of curd size. Recently, Patricia tried a different, name brand. Same thing. So it’s not like they saved money for the store brand by adding water and/or other locally available liquids, such as alligator effluent.
But I was recently there, searching for some other kind, and I found a brand called “Friendship.” And on the side of the plastic container, it said, “California style.” And a light went on. That’s why the local cottage cheese sucked (at least to me). I’d been spoiled by eating the real stuff back in the Golden State for the previous quarter century. I bought it. It was dry, flavorful, ricotta like. Just the way I remembered from LA. One more reason that Florida sux (at least southeast Florida), though at least I can buy the exotic import here.
So, question. Why do the locals like it runny, and do they like it that way up in New York and New Jersey (whence came their ancient ancestors)? Are there other varieties in (say) the Midwest, or Mountain states?