Administrative

Yes, It’s Me

17 Comments

Sorry for the new look, but I haven’t had time to customize the template–I just grabbed one from the available themes.  And I suspect that I’ll never get it looking exactly like the old one–it was based on HTML tables with a primitive stylesheet–and this WordPress setup is entirely PHP/CSS driven.  But at a minimum I should be able to get the blogroll back up, and it should be much more functional now.  And I’ve always valued function over form.

Anyway, one more unhappy ex-MT customer.  I gave up on it when I realized that the documentation had not improved in any obvious way since I upgraded in January and found that it sucked like a Dyson.

Any comments left between now and yesterday afternoon didn’t get imported, so I’ll probably have to pick them up manually later.  It’s not a high priority.  Or maybe I’ll do another export, now that the old site isn’t functional any more, and no new comments will be coming in.

Anyway, welcome to the new place, with the same old proprietor.

Oh, and one nice immediate feature–as you can see, I now have good category pages up, so those who are interested in (e.g.) only the space, or only the politics posts, can now view them without the others.

Administrative

Warning To Commenters

I have finally had enough, and am moving to WordPress. This means that recent (in the last few hours) comments won’t be picked up in the import/export (and none forward, until I get the new site up). I will try to pick up the stragglers after I deal with the upgrade in general, but will make no guarantees. I’m a little frustrated, because MT 4 decided that any comments issued before I upgraded to it are unworthy of being exported, so older posts won’t see the older comments, unless you find them via the older URLs. And of course, you won’t be able to comment on them, because they’re static web pages.

I’d pay something to someone who has software to merge old with new, but not a lot. On the other hand, there may be a lot of folks in my situation, given the Movable Type disaster…

General, Popular Culture

A Golden Oldie Thanksgiving Recipe

2 Comments

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.

Administrative

Progress

10 Comments

After I got fed up and went to bed last night, I got up this morning and fixed my individual archive template. The RSS feed seems to be publishing reliably now, and the pages are updating reliably as well. But I still haven’t gotten rid of the timeouts, and still don’t know what the problem is. I’ve essentially replaced all of the code in the index template (and its modules) with code from known working sites, but the problem persists.

I still have some fixing to do, to get categories to show up.

[Update]

Dang. The RSS has quit again.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The POR Recession

9 Comments

The unending (and infuriating) irony of this election will be that the Democrats won this election by first tanking the economy and then (with the aid of the MSM) blaming the hapless Republicans for it. Tom Blumer explains:

The recession, once it becomes official, will thus richly deserve designation as the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) recession. Further, Obama’s and the Democratic Party’s performance on the economy must be benchmarked from June 1, 2008 — not Election Day, not Inauguration Day, and not, as traditionally has been the case, from October 1 of the new president’s first year in office.

Evidence of the POR triumvirate’s virtually unilateral damage to the economy began appearing as early as the fourth quarter of 2007, the first quarter of negative growth in six years. The POR recession itself began in June. The historically steep downward revision in second-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth from an annualized 3.3% to 2.8% in the government’s final September announcement was more than likely due to deterioration that occurred in the final month of the quarter.It’s not at all a coincidence that June was the month in which it became crystal clear that despite sky-high oil prices, Pelosi, Obama, and Reid were hostile to the idea of drilling for more oil — offshore or anywhere else. Pelosi insisted that “we can’t drill our way out of our problems.” In the speaker’s world, this means that you don’t drill at all. Reid declared that we have to stop using oil and coal because “it’s making us sick.” Obama seemed pleased that gas prices were so high, saying only that “I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment” instead of the sharp spike. What a guy.

As would be expected, the country’s businesses, investors, and consumers, never having witnessed a political party dedicate itself so completely to starving its own national economy, reacted very negatively to all of this. I said at the time that “businesses and investors are responding to their total lack of seriousness by battening down the hatches and preparing for the worst.” Subsequent events have validated that observation.

As commenter Carl Pham pointed out recently, the American people bought fire insurance from an arsonist.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

We Know What We Like

1 Comment

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.

Administrative

Another Test Post

10 Comments

I think I may have made a breakthrough in finding the problem with the timeouts.

[Update]

Nope. Or at least not as big a one as I thought…

Still timing out.

[Update]

Seeing what happens now…

[Update, infuriated]

OK, now I’ve blown it. I screwed up my comments and individual entry templates, and I didn’t back it up. I’ve had it.

Political Commentary, Space and Campaign 2008, War Commentary

Change I Can Believe In

2 Comments

It’s looking like Gates is going to stay at the Pentagon. I think that’s good news from a space perspective, because I’ve heard that he’s been trying to light a fire under the Operationally Responsive Space folks. It would be a shame to replace him with an unknown in that regard. There should (at least in theory) be a lot of synergy between military and civil space transport needs, in both orbital and suborbital. I hope that the new administration will be able to do better coordination on that than the Bush administration did.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!