• Food, Glorious Food

    “The Best Food Teacher Who Ever Lived”

    Alton Brown on the passing of Julia Child: She gave birth to the modern American cook, to TV cooks, and one might argue, American food in general. She was and always will be our Queen Mother and our den mother, a perfect blend of fun, passion, style and knowledge all wrapped up in a willing self-depreciation that made us all feel a little better about dropping that chicken on the floor. Oh, God, don’t remind me of the chicken on the floor incident. Oops. Heh.

  • Uncategorical Weirdness

    Ostrich In Time: Knaves Whine

    Hey, if it’s Tuesday, this must be Severe Thunderstorm Warning Bug night on TV! Every week, 2 minutes into TAR, it’s the SAME goddamn thing. At least the local affiliate knows better now than to interrupt the show with stupid storm warnings that I just have to ignore as hard as I can. This may not be a good policy on my part, especially if a tornado sneaks up on me from behind. Fortunately, the basement is nearby, and I could still watch the show on the new TV card software David has on his computer down here (snicker). Yeah,…

  • Uncategorical Weirdness

    No, We Don’t Want One, Steve

    Steve! No! We don’t want to buy one! We don’t care how good a deal it is! We won’t use one as a coffee table in the Underground Lair O’ Computers until one of us kicks the bucket! Honest! On Monday, Costco Wholesale Corp., better known for bulk chicken and cases of soda, started test marketing caskets along side mattresses at a North Side Chicago store and one in suburban Oak Brook. Nope. Don’t care if that’s your Costco. We’re not doing it. So don’t even try IMing me with attractive price quotes in a variety of decorator colors.

  • Food, Glorious Food - Traveling Along, We're Adventurers - Uncategorical Weirdness

    You May Still Call Me “Emanence.”

    Oy. We have made it home. I feel good and we had a great weekend, but it’s good to be back in our own house, and shortly, we’ll be back in our own bed. I didn’t sleep well at all for the whole trip. There was a bit more to the story last night after I went to bed – after a couple of hours, I started to feel very yukky. And then, after a few minutes of intense regret for eating so damn much bagna calda (basically, whole roast cloves of garlic, by the forkfuls), I eventually felt better.…

  • Food, Glorious Food - Traveling Along, We're Adventurers - Uncategorical Weirdness

    Let The Emanations Begin

    Who’da thunk garlic ice cream with caramel mole sauce would be so damn good? I mean, I knew the bagna calda (roast garlic in a skillet) would be good; eventually we stopped bothering with dinner rolls and just ate the whole roast cloves by the forkful. I figured the crab cooked in special garlic sauce would be good (Dungeness, too) and when it came on a giant griddle set on a rack over two big empty “boneyard” bowls (for the discarded shells). But there were a couple of surprises – there was a pasta dish that was kind of an…

  • The Never-Ending Bloga

    Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog

    This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs (and aggregation sites) are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below). Please join the test by adding your blog (see instructions, below) and…

  • Hot Off The Presses

    Salon Runs Abu Ghraib Rape Story

    Salon.com has a story on the Abu Ghraib rape allegations… you know, the one that’s been kicking around since the beginning, with the quote from the same witness as before. They blame civilian contractors in a story titled: “Contract to torture.” The story says “sponsored by the New York Times” at the top. This may be repackaged content from before, but the more major news orgs carrying this story, the less likely it is to remain buried for much longer.

  • Uncategorical Weirdness

    More Weekend, Please

    Weekend? What weekend? This one went by faster than most, and next weekend promises to go by even faster. Friday I didn’t get away from the office until after 6pm. My team leader was out again, and although I wasn’t schedule to stay until closing time, things were hairy enough in the afternoon that I decided to stick around for immoral support. Also, one agent had some sort of personal ticket he wanted issued, but it turned out we couldn’t issue it as an electronic ticket, and he couldn’t use paper tickets. They were for family members to come up…

  • The Never-Ending Bloga

    New Flailing Project

    Elise made me think I could do it; Moveable Blog’s “Asides” template may point me to a solution to a niggling little problem in a flailing project that’s almost ready for the main stage. If I get it to work, there will be a short sideblog of quick links on the left column; this will tend to get the quick choppy link-only posts out of the way of the content. Also, it’ll be quicker to jump in and out with a new link for those time when I gotta blog from work. I’ll have to cut down on workaday blogging…

  • Uncategorical Weirdness

    Warming Those Cockles

    My mom often says this about any hot coffee drink with a shot of Bailey’s or other liqueur added: “that’ll warm the cockles of your heart.” Interesting discussion on the derivation. In the meantime, cockle picking (something like clam-digging, apparently) is still done in Britain, and it can be dangerous.