The Viking Pundit offers up some demographic data, and it looks like his conclusion is close to the one I first raised in the comments here. If there comes a point that the only way to keep Social Security going is to turn it into an overt welfare program at the cost of the economy, the party which refused to deal with that possibility when it was first raised gonna have some 'splaining to do.
From a corporate law professor well versed in Constitutional matters comes a joke about appeals to the Supreme Court. He of course follow it up with "But seriously, folks..."
Ann Althouse has an interesting inquiry regarding cover songs, but she doesn't take it the final step. She looks only at the sex of the singer. Imagine, if you will, a woman singing the Allman's One Way Out. The risks she is facing if that is her lover's man down there are so utterly different than those a man would that I can't imagine there is anything more radical performed at those Wymyn's Songfests held on the day of the full moon. Conversely, Ive long thought that Patsy Montana's (I Wanna Be A) Cowboy's Sweetheart has Over The Rainbow beat all hollow as a transvestite's big number.
On the larger issue of song covers, Colby Cosh raises an interesting point about a change in the nature and role of songwriting. What he has to say is actually specific to the range of genres known as rock and roll. Black and country music of various styles had long included singer-songwriters. Hank Williams had most of his success as a performer with his own material, but the way the recording industry worked back then his songs were taken to the top by performs ever "whiter" than he was. This pattern had begun to break down by the time the Beatles arrived, with increasing acceptance of crosssover hits.
Today it is taken for granted that performers will be involved in the creation of the songs they present. A song stylist, such as Michael Bublé, is now a niche performer whereas he might have made the top of the charts in the '50s. There has been much debate about cover recordings in the blogosphere. II'm solidly in the "like'm" catagory. Anything from Bublé's stylings to Jerry Garcia trying out Let's Spend The Night Together to the Holmes Brothers urban take on He'll Have To Go. You can learn things about the performers and the songs when style and content intersect. That last number, by the way, comes closer than any other version to my take on the song.
Based on a bit of conversation I overheard, after having underheard the rest of it, it occurred to me that altho one can be a half hour early or a half hour late, one cannot be a half hour on time.
Found via Mish-Mash, an application of microprocessor and sensor technology of a sophistication and practicality such as to make one proud to be a geek.
Actually, nobody can ever be the new anybody else. What we have instead, is a new and different surreal blogger who assembles sentences correctly from correctly spelled words. The result is just as amusing and almost as meaningless. Lampshade-tip to Ann Althouse.
Given that I don't pay any attention to anything on telivision, one would not expect me to keep up with what happens on American Idle. It seems to be in the air, or at least on an undue number of the blogs I read. As a result I knew who they were talking about this morning when I walked past a radio in the electronics section of the Walter Market this morning and heard the latest guzz about the possibility that Paula (there is, after all, only one woman who would be identified simply by that first name) might have been engaged in inappropriate contact with some or another male participant. I'm not sure this was inevitable, but if the whole thing were rigged it surely would have been in the script.
My son believes that the entire nature of our neighborhood can be summed up by the fact that the local gas station, which doubles as a convenience mart, sells seven varieties of pork rinds but no tortilla chips. I believe he's being pessimistic. Many people who live around here would never set foot inside that store, in fact they buy their gasoline at the other end of their travels, and do their shopping a ways to the westward, where the two major chain groceries have altered their stock to compete with the nearby member-owned earthy crunchy store. Be that as it may, and despite the fact that the cracklings calld for in the original recipe are harder and greasier than pork rinds, I offer up the following recipe traditional Hutterite recipe.
1-1/2 cup brown sugar
1-1/2 cup crushed pork rinds
3 eggs, beaten
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1 cup raisins
1 cup broken nut bits
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Walnuts would be traditional, but either cashew bits (and cashews are much cheaper when not whole) or unsalted sunflower seeds (whole, in this case) would work well.
Mix all the ingredients, and then add flour a little at a time until you get a dough which holds together when rolled into a ball about the size of a hailstone the size of a golfball. Flatten with a fork like you would for peanut butter cookies, and bake in a 400 degree (Farenheit) oven (preheated) for ten to fifteen minutes (and yes, I know that parenthetic expressions don't belong in a recipe).
It appears to be the official blogosphere Complain About Obtrusive Questions At The Checkout Counter Week. The Vodkapundit has a discussion of what noted shopper James Lileks has to say on the subject, and Kim du Toit (whose professional background is in in Customer Loyalty Marketing; he has the personality for it) has a discussion of what the Geek With A .45 wrote about it. It all centers around Best Buy, and the comment threads contain more complaints aboout them, but they are merely the worst of a bad lot. I encounter such an intense "we exist solely to collect your money for corporate" vibe when browsing there that I have no tales of interacting with their cashiers, but I certainly run into the same issue elsewhere.
Like the dozens of people who have commented in these threads, I do not choose to provide information which is not relevant to the transaction. When grocery stores in Chicago first started asking for Zip codes, I tried responding with the postal code for an industrial suburb of Toronto (no, I no longer remember it), but the cashiers were unable to input it and got all flustered. I then started telling them I don't have one. Most just input something (probably the local one) and the ones who insisted I had to got the paranoid paleocon rant about an unconstitutional Federal District scheme. Since we moved to Milwaukee I simply give the old Chicago one. The Zip code question is purely demographic; if mine identified me as inner city but didn't include downtown I would provide it proudly. Data specific to me as an individual they simply do not need and do not get.
I recently bought a replacement processor fan for the wee wifey's computer from a local white-box chain. The geek at the counter asked me if I had bought from them before. I hit him with a bit of my lack of gruntle over earlier events of the day. "Yes I have, not that it matters. I'm paying cash for something not worth coming back with when it fails." He didn't get it, and asked for my name. "Cash." He understood that enough to go ahead and enter the sale that way. He still insisted on telling me to have a nice day, and got a response somewhat more hostile than my usual "Oh, OK."
Another stupid question I get at the checkout quite often is "Did you find everything you are looking for?" Answers range from "No, thank G-d" to "Once I do I'll never come back." Some actually get it.
One thing which doesn't set me off is the customer loyalty card, as long as it is free. Barnes and Noble want's $25 for theirs, and then gives back ten percent. I simply keep my purchases there under $250 per year so as to come out ahead on the relationship. There are anti-card activists who insist that you don't save money using the regular grocery cards. They are so tied to this notion that my documentation of comparison shopping was rejected as erroneous. They also seem to believe that these cards are part of the same Big Brother operation wherein some clerk is analyzing why we have Mennonite and Christmas cookbooks and a book on the massacre of the Nepalese royal family checked out of the library right now. They are either getting obsolete information (only one Jewel checker had ever seen my 30 year old card before; it isn't even in their training literature) or the information for the people who dropped cards in the parking lot, which doesn't much matter because I really doubt they track that closely.
Via Joe at Dean's World, we have an update from Annie Jacobsen regarding her report of an apparent hijacking dry run on a Detroit to Los Angeles flight last year. At the time, the official response was "Nothing to see here, move along" but that is not what she heard now that she has been interviewed by investigators from the Department of Homeland Security. Not only did they ask her the sort of questions that show they shared her concerns, but they told her things, knowing she would share them online, which raise my concern.
The thirteen Syrians who Ms. Jacobsen suspected were hijackers were supposedly musicians, and were in the country on cultural visas, but nobody in airport security confirmed that their luggage contained musical instruments (could this be one reason searches are getting more detailed?) and nobody made note of the fact that their visas had expired.
They also told her something else, which I think would have been all over the news had it already been public information. In August of 2001, respected character actor James Woods became concerned about passengers on a flight he was taking. He informed the pilot that the thought the plane was to be hijacked, and after the flight filed a report of an apparent dry run. What the agents told Ms. Jacobsen, and I am viewing as a deliberate leak, is that later review shows that 9/11 team leader Mohammed Atta was on that flight.
Folks, if you are planning on flying anywhere, get one of those high grade solid metal pens, and find out where to hit with it. If anything going on during your travels sets off your intuition, don't disregard it, and make sure to report it in detail.
Update:
I'm pleased to note that these characters were not carrying umbrellas.
I've been collecting Nigerian 419 letters for so long that in one or another box in the basement is one typed on paper like the Rathergate documents weren't. Altho some people seem to have missed it, I didn't post this just to share one. There is a link in that post - there really were five million dollars and someone apparently did move them away from where it was meant to go.
No, that's not some sort of a fricken fracken insult. Fraughan, pronounced as frocken, is Gaelic for the bilberry. similar to the American blueberry. A fool is simply a sort of whipped cream dessert, related to the flummary, syllabub and mousse. You could simply defrost blueberries in syrup, and put them in a bowl with Krool-Whip and have an approximation of this, but I hope you won't. Instead, bookmark this for when the berries are in season, and do it right.
1/2 cup whipping cream
1/2 cup sour cream
2 tablespoons sugar
3 to 4 drops almond extract
2 cups fresh blueberries
4 shortbread cookies
1/4 cup slivered almonds
Whip the cream with an electric mixer to the soft peak stage and fold in the sour cream, sugar and almond extract.
Cook all but a few of the berries over a low flame (you do have a gas stove don't you, no serious cook uses an electric one) until they start to soften and break up, about eight to ten minutes, then remove from the flame and let cool. Put a couple tablespoons of the cooked berries into each of four chilled parfait glasses, fold the rest into the cream mixture and add to the glasses. Crumble one cookie over each, and top with the berries you didn't cook and the slivered almonds. Refrigerate until it is time for dessert.
If you still have a mullet, now might not be the time to abandon it.
Except for the guy I saw a couple weeks ago with a mullet and a comb-over. Time for him to grow up and go with an honest tonsure.
Professor Bainbridge finds himself caught between rock and a hard place.
:
DEAR SIR./MADAM.
MY IS BEN KAMOKAI...FROM SERRIA-LEONE.I JUST CAME IN TO GHANA WITH MY MOTHER TO PROCESS OUR FUND WHICH MY FATHER DEPOSITED WITH ONE SAFE HOUSE HERE IN GHANA FOR SAFE KEEPING WHILE HE WAS ADMINISTRATOR FOR THE "ASANTEMAN COUNCIL'S PROMOTING PARTNERSHIP" WITH TRADITIONAL AUTHORITIES PROGRAM TO PROVIDE VILLAGES WITH POTABLE WATER, SPONSERED BY THE WORLD BANK. HE DEPOSITED THE SUM OF $5 MILLION US DOLLARS,BUT THE SAFE COMPANY ARE NOT AWARE OF THE CONTENTS.IT WAS MARKED FAMILY VALUABLES.AND 1,500 KILOGRAMS OF GOLD.
HOWEVER, I AM CONTACTING YOU TO ASSIST US TRANSFER THE FUND OUT OF GHANA TO ANY OF YOUR DESIGNATED ACCOUNT FOR FUTURE INVESTMENT.I AND MY MOTHER HAVE CONCLUDED TO INVEST THE MONEY IN ABROAD.I HAVE ALL THE DOCUMENTS FOR THE FUNDS RIGHT WITH ME AND I SHALL SEND THEM TO YOU IF YOU NEED THEM FOR VERIFICATION AND CONFIRMATIONS.
THIS TRANSACTION IS 100% RISK FREE AND WE HAVE TO RESPECT THE UTMOST CONFIDENTIALITY OF IT AS ITS ONLY YOU AND I ARE AWARE OF THE CONTENTS IN THE BOX.PLEASE SEND ME YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBERS AND FAX NUMBERS FOR EASY COMMUNICATION.YOU HAVE TO ARRANGE YOUR FLIGHT SHEDULE AND COME DOWN TO GHANA FOR US TO MEET FACE TO FACE AND GO TO THE SECURITY COMPANY FOR CLAIMING.
WE SHALL DISCUSS THE PERCENTAGE AND THE INVESTMENT PROFILE AS SOON AS YOU HAVE ACCEPTED TO ASSIST US CLAIM THIS FUND FROM THE SAFE HOUSE HERE IN GHANA-ACCRA.WE SHALL CHANGE ALL THE DOCUMENTS TO YOUR NAME THEREBY MAKING YOU THE DESIGNATE BENEFICIARY OF THE FUND. CONTACT ME ON MY E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR US TO DISCUSS THIS MATTER EXTENSIVELY. THESE MY PHONE NUMBER IS 00233 27 741 79 86.
LOOK FORWARD HEARING FROM YOU.
BEN KAMOKAI.
My foster nephew NP was my son's roommate, and is still renting space at the other place now that Emrack is on the road. He has been going thru the stuff he has spread thru the upstairs apartment in preperation for our arrival, and just found some old snapshots of Penny, the older of his two cats. The first one is simply the oddest cat photo I have ever seen. He doesn't look like an actual cat, but like a relief model laid on the floor. I have no idea how they managed to get the effect.
Nowadays Penny is a mature cat who would never be caught in such an undignified sprawl, and has none of the neotenous look which is what we love about kittens. He is still affectionate, stopping by for brief petties whenever I visit upstairs, unlike NP's other cat Swabbie, the notorious double will bite, who has so far managed to avoid being photographed.
Law Professor Ann Althouse is wondering whether there should be an all-women law school. This is one of the most frightenining proposals I have ever heard. Some women simply don't want to go to law school.
As to whether there should be a law school exclusively for women, that is another question entirely. I would think that the benefits such a school would offer could be achieved with a woman-oriented program within a larger law school, and that this would avoid both the need for duplication of resources and the risk of takeover by the men-are-the-enemy brigade.
I worked Thursday, and my wee wifey didn't work thursday night, so we went out for the evening. When we finally got home, I went to bring up Mastercook on her computer, and , not knowing it takes four minute to load all twelve hundred cookbooks, I assumed the program had gotten corrupted again and went to bed without tracking down the recipe I'd planned to post for the Carnival. Even without my contribution, it is of course worth checking out.
Rammer posted detailed instructions on preparing artichokes. I agree with him that the stem should be left fairly long, but ignore most of the other details. Just pull off the first five leaves from the stem, and slice off the very top to remove the worst of the spikyness. Leave the fuzzy choke; it is easy enough to scrape out with a spoon after cooking. The microwave is the way to cook them, but the article he linked left out the most important part. Wrap the described setup tightly with saran wrap. This produces a de facto pressure cooker, which was what we used to cook artichokes in. Before unwrapping, poke the wrap with a fork or knife to vent the superheated steam. Then proceed as Rammer described. This will be our dinner tonite. I might even try a flavored mayonnaise as he suggests, rather than my usual practice of melting butter in lemon juice in the microwave.
Also worth noting: Daily Dave has posted his long-awaited mango-habenero dip. I like stuff where the heat has a creep to it.
In the course of yesterday's driving I passed a couple of sights which managed to amuse me. Altho I should have known better, the first thing which popped into my head when I saw the "Game Farm" sign was that they were probably planting a bumper crop of Texas Hold'em.
I also drove past a large plot of land on which turf to be transplanted is grown. The ground was, because it has been raining and they had previously taken all the sod off, swampy.
Wizbang thinks it's funny, but if that character deserves this, then he also deserves a really low mortgage rate and advance news of penny stocks with serious growth potential.
I misremembered the Goudy quote as being that "A man who would letterspace small caps would also steal sheep." A quick search showed that in fact the reference was to letterspacing lowercase (or maybe blackletter). Be that as it may, I still wouldn't let the stock promoter who spammed me with "Can you afford to ignore SmallCaps?" anywhere near my flock.
Last week I posted a photo of only one of our cats, as I hoped to get better pictures of the other four. I never got a chance to take more pictures of one of them; he passed away on Wednesday.
Creamer was twenty years old, nominally one hundred people-year equivalent. Three years ago he developed a severe bout of anemia. The vet prescribed antibiotics and iron rations, but warned us that if they didn't work we would be looking at an extensive and expensive course of treatments. The simple fix turned things around, but ever since then, he looked old. He was nowt but a skellington covered in fur, but until just a few days ago he was still looking for a chance to leap onto my shoulder, even considering the possibility while I was at camera distance.
His official name was Cream Soda, which continued the tradition of Orange Julius and Orange Crush (better known as Thuuh Crusher). He and his late brother Grey Malkin were known as the Epaulette Twins because as kittens they would ride around on my two shoulders. More recently I took to calling him Mr Bluebird at those times when he was, like the tattoo with a ribbon grasped in his beak which bears my wee wifey's name, on my shoulder.
I should have plenty of time to get good pictures of the other cats here. For next week my foster nephew came up with some neat old snapshots of one of his cats, already residing at the other house.
I would have expected this sort of reasoning from Aldous Huxley, rather than from his grandfather. Anyone looking scientifically, rather than thru open doors of perception, at the appearance of the Djinn when Aladdin rubbed his lamp would understand that the manifestation was merely a projection resultant from the opening of general interfacing for the entity embedded in the lamp.
I happened upon this recipe in a cookbook the wee wifey had out of the library, but she returned it before I could write down so much as the title of the book. Extensive online searching turned up description of the cuisine from which it came, but even the closest recipe I found lacked this version's distinctive touch.
6 large garlic cloves, peeled and smashed or sliced
2 small whole diavoletto or other hot pepper to taste - diced or ground
2 cups boiling water
Simmer the garlic and the peppers in the water for 15 minutes, and then strain the water into another larger pot with some water boiling in it so as to produce, in total, enough water to cook
1 lb. spaghetti
until it is al your particular dente. Drain the spaghetti but do not rinse, toss with a little olive oil and fresh ground pepper, and serve.
Rather than go out to the Italian market to buy a couple of little devil peppers, I was going to try a tablespoon of crushed red pepper, but the spice cabinet first yielded some dried pasillo peppers. I tore up two of them, and dropped the shreds and seeds into the boiling water. The flavor was delightfull, but the heat was nowhere near devilish. Next time perhaps I will try a couple of fresh habaneros instead.
OK, I did try a couple of fresh habaneros, seeded and diced. A considerable quantity of grated parmesan has proven appropriate. I would suggest this variant only for treating a head cold or livening up a pasta salad.
Marginal Tyler has posted an interesting quote regarding the notion that the United States is a "young" nation. I reckon one is as young as one feels. The British traditions we view as old may have only been established in the 1890s, but they were established by looking backward, with the sense that they were traditions of an old nation. Germany and Italy may be younger, as nation-states, than the United States, but they do not focus their national identity on the time of their unification, but upon past glories and hurts. As long as other nations keep looking backwards, and the United States keeps looking forward, we will remain a young nation.
There was one item in the quote which caught my attention because I had been reviewing the relevant history in connection with my reading of Eric Flint's recent 1634 novel. I had been unaware that "Galileo was offered a chair at Harvard University, ..., before Charles I had his head cut off." As I recall from high school English. the clause ellipsed from between the commas, which happens to be "which was founded in 1636" cannot change the overall meaning of the sentence. Whoever proofread it neads to be eaten, shot and left.
Two weeks after my recent employment ended, something else has come my way. It is short term, part time, and not very challenging, but is nonetheless very encouraging. I am assisting an engineer who is doing data collection similar to what I'd been doing, and based on our conversations he thinks I could be working optimization engineering contracts rather than technician ones. Given that he was fielding calls from recruiters trying to line him up for two different positions, in design rather than optimization, it would seem there may be opportunity to not only remain in my current field but to advance within it.
In the meantime, I have been spending the days on which I am not out working pursuing various projects meant to constitute improvements around the house. Some have failed to achieve this goal. The wiring at the house we are moving to has proven to be so old as to reject minor improvement. The joists in the attic need crossbracing before I can start laying down flooring on top of them. Most serious has been the discovery that replacing Windows 98 with Windows 2000 Professional so as to be able to use the dvd drive and the motherboard's sound features did not constitute an upgrade. Upon completing the install, I went on line to check my mail and comments, and then to pursue updates for the OS. FireFox had become unreadable, so I opened IE. Inside of five minutes I had a bunch of popups, one in front of another, each offering me the option to decline the upload of a wonderful browsing enhancement. Sorry, too late.
After hours of cycling thru Ad-Aware, uninstall, regedit and even booting from a floppy so I could delete Windows-protected files, I have eliminated every visible trace of the wonderful browsing attachments. I removed my Internet connection and built a new one, and reinstalled FireFox from the drive. The damage done by the hijackers remains. I can rarely open more than one page before the browser informs me that it cannot find anything. I will be limited to blogging from the wee wifey's computer, when I can get a turn on it, until I can build myself a new system. The new system will reuse the existing hardware (2.2 gHz equivalent AMD processor in an Asus mobo) but will be built around a new hard drive on which I will install Windows 98SE (I have only a new system disk; upgrades have been unavailable) and whatever I can retrieve from the old drive. Linux will be going onto another partition, and will be getting far more attention once I don't need to boot up another machine to play with it.