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November 6th, 2009

12:20 am - An incredibly dorky art project... I'm cranky. For the 4th time in 2.5 years, our hot water tank has gone belly-up. This time, the flame won't stay lit. I will not have a hot shower tomorrow AM, and I'm ready to go after GE and Rheem with a torch and pitchfork... So, by way of stress relief, I decided to engage in one of my long-term art projects. If such can truly be called "art." You see, I got into a conversation about 4 months ago about Internet memes. Conventional wisdom is that such things are fleeting and ephemeral. They show up, everybody laughs, and then they fade into nothingness. By the time next year rolls around, fully 90% of the Internet won't even know they ever existed. I disagreed. While, true, memes and the copycat works they inspire are meant to be cultural throw-aways, so too were more traditional art pieces in the past. A Rembrandt portrait, hastily done. A still-life found buried under old boxes in a French apartment. How many artists never achieved fame until long after they were dead? Someday, something that started as an Internet meme might become art. An image that lasted for less than 2 hours on 4chan, might end up hanging in the Louvre. To demonstrate how this might be so, I took a famous work of art and started incorporating some Internet memes into it. Just as a gag... but then every once in awhile, someone would resurrect it and I'd go home and add something else. Well, 4 months later, and I have something that's actually pretty funny, IMHO... Click on it to see the large version, which is kind of necessary to really spot all of the details thus far: Appropriate responses may be: 1) Ha! Win. 2) WTF? I don't get ANY of this. 3) I see what you did there... you should add X to it. 4) Dude. Too much free time, apparently. You suck. Internet statistics would suggest 90% will go for #2, 6% for #4, and maybe a 2%/2% split between #1 and #3. #4's, you can bite me. My water heater is broken again, and this is stress relief. I don't need your pity. ;) Current Mood: bitchy

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November 5th, 2009

02:52 pm - Joining the fray on gay marriage... I have no idea why I'm compelled to post this, given that I'm very likely to get flamed to little tiny bits. But given that my social circles, my Friends' list, and the Interwebz at large, are all a'twitter with the Maine gay marriage vote, I feel some compulsion to chime in. Here's the thing, kids... I am PRO gay-marriage in theory, and ANTI gay-marriage in implementation. How is this possible? Well, because I'm actually anti straight-marriage in its current implementation as well. As zoethe and others have correctly pointed out, marriage is a social compact. It's not some right given by [G/g]od, nor some inalienable birthright granted by nature. You can believe what you want, hang out with whom you want, and yes, sleep with whomever you want -- even if you have to do so discretely in some parts of the world if you wish to remain upright. But when you take advantage of certain social compacts, you have to play by the rules of the society who created them, and who are ultimately responsible for bearing the costs and imposing the responsibilities that they entail. So what does this have to do with heterosexual marriage? Well, our system is broken -- especially at those times when things go wrong. In response to the progress made with womens' rights in the last few decades, we have now massively unfair and inequitably-applied alimony and child welfare standards. Abusive heroin-addicted fathers would never see their children again, while abusive heroin-addicted mothers get joint custody (NOT a theoretical situation here, given that a colleague is living through this right now.) We have ridiculous tax structures that benefit some couples while penalizing others. Our society as a whole has all sorts of operational problems that result from name changes by marriage -- or occasionally even worse, NOT changing names as a result of marriage. Even when things are going very well in a marriage, the social systems that it's built upon are inefficient, inconsistent, and occasionally downright broken. As we progress with new Homeland Security initiatives (read: Secure ID and Secure Flight programs), impose new restrictions on medical care (read: HIPAA laws), and turn our schools into hardened bunkers, even the "traditional" trappings of marriage become a burden for anyone who isn't in a One-Man-One-Woman-Same-Last-Name-and-Address relationship. So now we expand to gay marriage. When things are going well, married gay couples will probably have about the same level of hassle as your average straight couple with different names. But when things go badly? (Bearing in mind that the US divorce rate is currently around 50%...) How will US courts -- bearing in mind that the laws are all set up with an assumption of the traditional marriage structure in mind -- deal with child custody issues? How about alimony, and who gets it, and why, and for how long? How about even tax issues, given that millions of dollars in IT that run the machinery of this nation don't have the ability to have two 'M' or 'F' check-boxes on the same form? Percolate that down to customs forms if you travel abroad, or FAFSA forms for a kid's college aid? What about disputes with family when one spouse dies? I am not in any way saying that this is fair, or just, or that the problems cannot be overcome. What I am saying, however, is that gay marriage in the USA will be a fantastically expensive, convoluted, and technical process to implement. Then you complicate all of those tractable problems with the intractable problems of a significant portion of the population (and government functionaries) believing that gay couples are an affront to capital-G God, and re-igniting decades of the same kind of social discord we saw in the racially-based civil rights movement. As a married straight guy, I suppose it's easy for me to say this. But I think that the gay marriage movement is reaching a little high right now. Atomic one-step change would be great, but it's not realistic. Instead, the gay-rights organizations should be focusing on fixing the problems with marriage in general. Fix the tax system, fix the HIPAA laws, fix child welfare processes, fix estate law, and fix ID standards and practices. It's a big, big job. But if you do that, then there wouldn't be any reasons not to let ANYBODY who wants to get married, get married. Then it's a social contract with a tractable meaning. Right now, the meaning and implication of marriage is widely open to interpretation -- city to city, state to state, and even department-to-department at the federal level. We spend zillions of man-hours on entitlement programs, making sure that anything breathing American air has a valid Social Security number, but somehow nobody can get a grip on a social entitlement like marriage?? It's just not a priority yet, and someday hopefully it will be. At the end of that day, the only barrier to gay marriage will be the religious one. And ultimately, despite the wailings and demagoguery that goes on about religious nut-jobs, America is fundamentally a secular nation. But presently, it's the religious nut-jobs leading the charge against gay marriage, and most of the rest of the nation honestly just doesn't care enough to sign up for the turmoil it would likely bring. I would love to attend the weddings of some of my gay friends. (And I'm pretty sure that I'd also bear witness to the divorces of a few other gay friends, should their own weddings ever occur...) But when that happens, I don't want their happy event to be responsible for making a fairly-dysfunctional legal and administrative system fall entirely into disarray. (Not to go off-topic, but it's the same reason why it isn't going to work to fix Health Care in this nation by just opening the flood gates to another 47 million people, without fixing the harder problems that created this situation in the first place. Throwing more bodies into a broken system doesn't make the system better. Fairness alone cannot be the ultimate goal of any functioning society.) It just doesn't seem like a good idea to make things slightly happier for some, at the expense of everybody being a lot less happy in the end. So we have to do this correctly the first time, and not just hope that by calling something a "right", that an entire society will make a million overnight adjustments to fall into line. Especially when that "right" really isn't anything other than a mutually agreed-upon set of rules and responsibilities by society as a whole. Our society as a whole has rights too. And it has the responsibility to fix things that are broken so that those rights can be justly exercised. Gay marriage is not an issue of rights for gay people. It's an issue of our society as a whole failing in its responsibility to effectively implement and maintain social contracts. Current Mood: disappointed

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November 1st, 2009

10:41 am - Halloween 09 gieves and I had a fantastic Halloween again this year. There was much screaming and possibly a few ruined pants among the children of our neighborhood. The frightful festivities were then followed by a visit to Ferrett's house for the Post-Bachelor/ette-Party-Party of yuki_onna and justbeast. Best experience of the scare-fest: Me leaping out of my concealing pile of leaves (behind the tombstones) at a group of ~13 year-old kids, and a few of them shrieking loudly enough to blow out everyone's eardrums for miles around. Then, after I sat back down in my pile and said "Happy Halloween" to them (in my trademarked spooky-voice), they called down the driveway to their friends: "Hey - you have to come up here and see this! It's like motion-activated or something!" We were laughing about that one for the rest of the night. Because we have a professional photographer as a houseguest this weekend, I will not punish your eyes with my own photos of our Halloween display. Instead, you can read (and see) all about it HERE on the LJ of kylecassidy. Happy Halloween!! Current Mood: amused

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October 27th, 2009

01:27 pm - Neighborhood politics A week away from Election Day here in Cuyahoga County, I would strongly encourage all of you locals to bone up on Issue 5 versus Issue 6. Other than the billboards and lawn signs that have started popping up around town, I think these issues are being buried in the line noise of the casino and animal-rights debates. They are the most important issues on the upcoming ballot, bar-none. For years, I've lamented the fact that Cleveland-area voters clamor and protest for change, but then continue to elect the same old corrupt (and now indicted) local leaders that have tanked this region for the last 25 years. So long as there is no forward-looking vision in NE Ohio, there will never be progress. Issue 5 is the hastily-thrown-together proposal by the incumbent County Commissioners. It forces the creation of an elected study commission to investigate changing county government sometime in 2011 or beyond. For now, it retains the 3 commissioner positions who are pretty much unanswerable to anyone. It keeps the existing power structure in the county in place, and shelters the jobs of the current batch of officials -- many of whom, I will reiterate, are under indictment or investigation for the widespread Cuyahoga County corruption probe. Issue 6 is a fundamental change to county government, making the region more like Pittsburgh or other reformed rust-belt areas. Starting next year, it creates a County Executive and a board of council members representing the entire region. It creates boards for economic development and education, and eliminates a bevy of elected positions that NOBODY in this area (and I mean NOBODY) has enough information to intelligently vote for at present, like Cuyahoga County Sheriff or Coroner, by making them council-appointed. Vote NO on 5, and YES on 6 if you have any hope of changing this area. Why do I say that? Well, not only does Issue 5 pave the way to retaining the current structure, should the committee decide (on their own) that's what's best, but it creates a whole fleet of NEW elected positions for the committee itself. When you go to the polls on election day, how often do you know the pros and cons of candidates for County Recorder, or Coroner or Engineer? If you, yourself, are boned-up on the issues, how about your neighbors? Or the elderly around town? Or the folks who live down on East-55th? Is there even enough information out there in the public domain to MAKE such a decision wisely? In most cases, these positions are running un-opposed anyhow -- so is it really democracy in action to "elect" a person who cannot be removed from office by anything other than a referendum vote when nobody knows who they are, most of them don't campaign, most of them have been pointed at the position by the incumbent county power structure, and (at present) many of them are under investigation??? How many of you even know the platform of a single candidate running for this new study commission? Do you think you can knowledgeably vote for 15 of them?? Issue 5 is status-quo. Issue 6 is change. What happens if we pass them both? Well... nobody is really sure, quite frankly. The one thing that is clear is that county government would change next year. But then the commission would have power in 2011 to tear down that structure all over again after only 1 year, and re-stack the deck however they like. However you slice it, passing both spells turmoil for years to come. "But we'd be the only county in Ohio to have a structure like this", you say? Mostly true -- since only Summit County has a similar structure. But Ohio is the only state in this region, and one of only 6 in the nation, that has a current centralized-power structure like what we have at present. The more common form is an elected council, with local reps, and a charter government. Whatever else you do on election day, make sure you know what's going on here. If you believe in Issue 5 -- fine, vote that way. But for god's sake, whatever you do, don't vote for both!! And only vote for either after you've read up on the issues. Cleveland is dying, and the last thing it needs is more of the same medicine we've been feeding it for decades. Current Mood: worried

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October 25th, 2009

09:24 pm - An infusion of inspiration About 5 weeks ago, gieves and I quietly embarked on a project with an uncertain outcome. We started infusing liquors. Most cooking experiments have outcomes that are known in minutes, occasionally hours, or at very worst, days. Your successes and failures are based upon your own skills, techniques and the quality of your ingredients. With infusions, quality certainly matters, but patience... weeks and weeks of patience... are essential before the magnitude of your success (or failure) will be known. Skill only involves being able to throw things in a jar, and swirl it once in awhile. The hard part is figuring out what's going to happen with an assortment of complex flavors a couple of months down the road. Today, we un-batched the first of our 6 experiments: Vanilla & Fig infused Canadian Whiskey If this is an indication of future success, we're in for a very good fall!! The liqueur is sweet, aromatic and unctuous. The smooth smell of vanilla comes out immediately, followed by the thick sweetness of figs before the warm burn of the whiskey works its way down your middle. On urging from gieves, I made a martini for our first mixed, home-infused treat. Loosely based on the conglomeration of drinks or martinis we've had at three different restaurants -- Crop here in Cleveland, a bar in Portland Oregon, and a little restaurant in Sonoma CA. A sort of figgy, vanilla, apple cider martini... * 2 oz Vanilla-Fig infused whiskey * 1 oz VSOP Brandy * 1 oz Apple Cider * 1/4 oz Grand Marnier * 1 spoonful infused fig paste Yes -- the figs that had given almost their all in the infusion were removed, mixed in the blender with simple syrup and some water, and whipped into a paste that will probably be excellent on toast. 80-proof toast... Shaken and served with a piece of brown sugar-caramelized bacon from a batch of fresh Gibbs' bacon that I cooked up earlier today -- albeit with this drink partially in mind. Oh my god is this good! I'm pausing in my typing every minute or so to take another tiny little sip, and nibble some of the sweet, now-liquor-infused bacon. We might be organizing a small gathering in the near future for heavy hors d'oeuvres and infusion drinks. Details to come... maybe... probably... Upcoming experiments to report on: - Home made cucumber-thyme gin (I'm excited about the potential of this one) - Apple-Lemon Liqueur - October Surprise (an apple, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, clove, pie-in-a-bottle experiment...) - Fresh-picked blueberry infusion - Fresh strawberry infusion (well... fresh-picked in the spring, but frozen since then.) Current Mood: blissed

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October 3rd, 2009

12:48 am - Cultural satire applies even when it shouldn't... So for those of us born into the Queen's Good English, it's easy (and fun) to visit sites like Engrish.com and Engrishfunny.com, and laugh ourselves sick at the mangling of our mother tongue. Some instances are the fault of Google Translations-like tools, while others are problems with homonyms or synonyms that don't entirely apply. As I sit here in meetings in Tokyo, I must admit that I was shocked. Some of the most devoted fans of Engrish mockery? Asians. The Koreans laugh at the Chinese's feeble attempts, while the Chinese laugh at the Japanese, while the Japanese laugh at the Koreans. Of course, they admit that sometimes they don't understand why certain examples are funny. Those are usually generated by their countrymen. But they more than compensate with the delicious schadenfreude derived from making fun of the distinct Engrish dialects of their Asian peers. As a devoted Engrish fan myself, it was rather surreal to watch while a Korean woman tried to explain to a Japanese man why "Hambuggers" was funny. Sometimes the world is a crazy place. =) Current Mood: amused

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September 25th, 2009

09:55 am - More friendly fire... Since I bothered to post yesterday about the doings of the UN General Assembly, I figured I might as well give an update... * Col. Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi: Short Bio: Absolute leader of Libya, leader of the "Revolutionary Sector", publicly ordered assassination of dissidents living abroad by Libyan hit squads, sheltered known killers and terrorists throughout the 90's, self-appointed "King of Kings of Africa." "I congratulate our son the president, Obama ... we'd be content and happy if Obama can stay president forever" * Hugo Rafael Chavez: Short Bio: President of Venezuela, leader of the Bolivarian Revolution, coup-leader against President Carlos Andres Perez, expropriated private businesses in multiple sectors resulting in severe shortages and 30%+ inflation, decimated Venezuelan economy, changed Venezuelan constitution to eliminate his own term limits. "It doesn't smell of sulfur here anymore, it smells of something else. It smells of hope. ... May God protect Obama from the bullets that killed the late president [John F. Kennedy]." Wow. We've really changed our standing in the world. And just in case you've not yet bought into the Cult of Personality, how about a video of New Jersey public schoolkids taught to sing a song of praise to Obama during class time, set to the tune of "Jesus Loves the Little Children". ("He said red, yellow, black or white/All are equal in his sight. Barack Hussein Obama.") Seriously?? "Jesus Loves the Little Children"??? Of all the songs you could have picked to propagandize, that one? It's almost like they're trying to sling arrows at the Administration. I actually feel bad for Obama on this one, since at least a couple of his supporters are just complete boneheads. Current Mood: annoyed

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September 24th, 2009

09:46 am - Judged by the company you keep I wish I had the time for a full-bore political post right now, but unfortunately I do not. Nonetheless, I cannot help but comment upon yesterday's visit of President Obama to the UN General Assembly. He gave a speech. He received a soaring round of applause. I'm sorry, but this is a problem. It's not that anything in his speech was overtly Marxist or damaging. He continued to beat the drum of a waning America, which is unfortunate, but nothing that cannot be reversed (because nobody in the rest of the world is going to step up to the plate anytime soon...) The problem is how the rest of the world sees him, and that they're willing to applaud him roundly. George Bush got jeers and a mini-walkout from the UN General Assembly. Bill Clinton got jeers and a mini-walkout. So did George Bush I, and Ronald Reagan. Superpower leaders always get lukewarm welcomes from the General Assembly. That august body is essentially made up of petty dictators. For every elected first-world leader in the room, there's two representatives of Asian despots, or South American junta generals, or African dictators, or middle-eastern warlords. Hugo Chavez gets ovations at the General Assembly. Robert Mugabe gets rounds of applause. American Presidents do not. And that's because we're a direct and justifiable threat to 66% of the self-appointed power-mongers in that room. We're supposed to be a goal-oriented, unified front against the sort of single-point, autocratic nations who comprise the majority of that body. For pete's sake, Andrei Vyshinsky nearly started a nuclear war in that room in 1948 by calling for world defensive preparations against the USA, and he got a round of applause. Being popular in the UN General Assembly is like being popular on the streets of Bogata. You're excessively open with your largesse, and there's probably a pile of bodies behind you somewhere... The fact that our President has earned the respect and support of the world's most infamous and unstable leaders is not something I'd be proud of. With friends like that, we really don't have any need for enemies. Current Mood: distressed

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September 15th, 2009

04:18 pm - A Dirty Mind I'm sorry... I don't really have a FILTHY mind. But it's fairly well down there in the gutter most of the time. But if you ran a business whose name was the initials of a well-known carnal act, would YOU run an ad like this? Was there ever really a wrong time to try one of those? (And I'll point out to the advertiser, that the best way to "Get Started" generally doesn't involve continuing to click on things on the Interwebz.) Since apparently some people really don't know, we're talking about BJs Membership Warehouse here... the Costco competitor. And honestly, the only reason I knew it wasn't an ad for some new male-inflating product was because there weren't any puppies or middle-aged women running through grassy fields in the ad. "Now's the time to try BJs. And that's why there's new Fellatix breath freshening tabs..." Current Mood: amused

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September 9th, 2009

03:49 pm - Mad Skillz Have you ever taken out the trash, mowed the lawn, or fixed the car? Have you boasted about this to your friends or family, only to be asked: "What do you want? A friggin' medal?" Yes. Yes I do want a friggin' medal! And now I can have it! Thanks to the World Skills Competition, which was going on while gieves and I were in Canada. It's a biannual competition that brings over 900 competitors from 47+ countries together for a no-holds-barred, Olympic-style throw down. There are judges, there are medals, there are national anthems, and the Prime Minister of Canada opened the 8-day event noting that the "world's eyes are on Calgary" in the most significant way since the 1988 Olympics. Raise your hand if you've ever heard of the World Skills Competition. Go on. I'll wait. Right. But my friends, you have NO idea what you've been missing. Re-branded from their former name as the "Skill Olympics", they've captured the imagination of the world. You could defend the honor of your nation and win a global medal in high-stakes competitions like: * Metal Roofing * CNC Milling * Floristry * Restaurant Service (Waiting) * Refrigeration ... or my favorite: * the Team Caring competition "On your marks competitors... get ready... aaand... CARE!"** The host nation took gold in Cabinetmaking, Restaurant Service and Graphic Design, only to be narrowly defeated by the brutal Australians in the Beauty Therapy competition. But their spunky newcomer's strong Silver showing in the Aircraft Maintenance competition, beating out the crowd-favorite UK competitor, really pulled at the heart strings of the Canadians and made front-page news in the Calgary paper. The demonstration competition in Plastering and Drywall Systems went to France, with Switzerland and Japan close behind. The WSC committee is currently in hot debate whether Plastering will be a mainline sport when the games go to London in 2011. The US team was a shameful boil on the rump of our fine nation. We took silver in Automotive Service and Welding. Consolation prize "Medals for Excellence" were taken in Printing, Car Painting, Cooking and Hairdressing. I blame the schools. But how can anyone resist signing up?! You can "battle it out against the clock, and against difficulties commonly encountered in the workplace." Grrrrr!!!! The 2011 HP Printer Paper Jam competition is MINE, bitch... do you hear me? MINE!!! I don't much like my chances in London, against the crushing speed and power of the Japanese and Norwegian Information Network Cabling teams, though. Those guys can plug in Ethernet like nothing I've ever seen before. Golly... No. Freaking. Joke. (** - I really do have to wonder... Do they like bus in a bunch of invalids from the nearest nursing home, dump them into the ring, and send in the national teams to try and sort things out? Are you judged on your compassion? Do you lose points if the diapers are all full before you finish changing all of the TVs over to Maury?? The website is unacceptably vague!) Current Mood: laughing unstoppably

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September 2nd, 2009

12:28 pm - The Silent Takeover "We will breed with their women, and in time, our differences will be forgotten." ~ Peter Griffin In this divisive political age, many pundits have chosen to dig up old Karl Marx quotes, predicting that the Communists will eventually take over America from within. Yet little notice has been paid to the fact that America is silently and insidiously taking over Canada. You see, due to an enormous shortage of Canadian sperm donors, at least 80% of babies conceived in Canada with donated sperm actually have American fathers. Due to health policies put in place by Canada in 2004, there are (fact) only 33 sperm donors for the entirety of Canada. So they're importing baby batter from us uppity Yanks. Most of the frozen goo comes from southern Georgia and northern Florida. So to all you fertility-assisted Canucks out there: keep an eye on your baby's neck. See that red? That's America taking over. I predict Nascar crowding out professional Curling in Canada within the decade. Current Mood: amused

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August 24th, 2009

11:26 am - Update and 2009 Spot the Spirit I have a rant all stored up, but alas, lack the time to type it up just now. I will sometime soon. For now, updates: A) Thanks to everyone who came to the party on Saturday! No firm headcount yet, but we blew through our estimates easily -- all but about 5 pounds of the 45 pounds of beef were consumed, as were 9.5 liters of rocket fuel!! The last guest left a few minutes before 2 AM, which isn't a record, but still a pretty respectable showing. B) LAST CHANCE THIS SEASON: Weather-dependent, anyone want to go see the Lake Erie Crushers on Wednesday night @ 7:00 PM? (They have games tomorrow, Thursday, and Labor Day weekend as well, but gieves and I can't do those days, so it's our last chance, at least...) C) The 2009 Spot the Spirit Contest This is the third-annual incarnation of our attempt to guess at when our Lords and Masters of Capitalism will deign it appropriate to start cramming Christmas Cheer down our gullets. Before we know it, those end-of-season swimming pool sales will vanish in favor of early-bird sales on pre-lit aluminum Christmas trees. Maybe we'll get a few weeks of Halloween in there, if we're lucky... Da' Rules: 1) By the end of this week (8/28/2009 @ 5:00 PM EDT), comment on this post registering your guess for when the first in-store display or hard-copy printed advertisement will appear from a retailer, for a fully-fledged holiday sales drive on Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/etc accoutrements. Make sure to include a name if you're a non-LJ user posting anonymously!! 2) Advertisements will be defined as materials printed, broadcast, or otherwise displayed in a public area where any odd person off the street could view it. Some liberties may be granted (such as inside an admission-gated location), but it must be generally publicly accessible and not at some private event. No tupperware parties or stamping events, etc... 3) Signs with simply the holiday name on it do not count -- it must be a specifically holiday-targeted advertisement or decoration for commercial products or services, using applicable imagery for the holiday being pimped. It should be that store's official holiday sales kickoff, in a format that at least implies it will be around and replenished from the time you see it through the end of the calendar year. 4) Year-round locations such as "Christmas Stores" or other such permanent or semi-permanent operations also do not count. This includes craft stores or places that start selling the make-your-own-decor bits pretty much as soon as last year's holiday ends. 5) LJ comments making a guess CANNOT be revised. I will use whatever date is submitted as your original guess. How to win: There are two ways to win: 1) Grand Prize: Guess the correct date, or be the closest to the date within 7 days +/-. If nobody guesses correctly within 1 week of the first spotting date, there is no winner. 2) Be the first one to Spot the Spirit. Send me a photo or copy of the advertisement with verification of the date it appeared -- or at least the date you saw it. If there is no winner, per method 1, you will be declared the Grand Prize winner. If there IS a Grand Prize winner, your consolation prize will be a round of drinks at a happy hour or other social event sometime. Grand Prize: As in previous years, the grand prize will be one lavish home-cooked meal for the winner and a guest, at our home. Example menu from at least one previous win can be found here. Your food preferences and tastes will be considered when composing a menu for the award feast. Happy Guessing! Current Mood: tired

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August 18th, 2009

12:44 pm - You've been reading Epicurious too long when... If you're not familiar with the foodie site Epicurious, it's a food magazine, recipe archive, and foodie community centered around an extensive database of higher-end recipes. One of the hallmarks of the site is the tendency for members to post comments on recipes, extolling the wonderful virtues of the meal, but recommending "tweaks". In many cases, these tweaks change the very nature of the recipe into something else. Sort of like taking a recipe for "Garlicky Roasted Chicken", and saying "I LOOOOVE this recipe, and so do my kids! But I refuse to cook chicken, so I used a Rump Roast instead, and substituted shallots for the garlic. Great recipe - delicious!" *stare* Garlicky Roasted Chicken != Roasted cow haunch with shallots. So it was with great amusement when gieves and I sat down to breakfast this morning. Last night, she made a spiced Apricot Tart, which is pretty good. It contains stewed fresh apricots, corn meal, several eggs in the batter, and reduced poaching syrup drizzled on top. But the crust is a little weird, and the filling is complicated to make. Our analysis? You know, we could use dried apricots -- or better yet, plums -- for this. The corn meal is a little weird, but if we substituted oats and used more butter, the crust would be less crunchy and pretty good. The eggs make it a little dense, so maybe if we just used egg whites and beat them into a foam first, and then folded that in. We'd have to sprinkle spice and sugar on top, since we couldn't use the poaching liquid or it would make a light fluffy top crust collapse. That'd be pretty good! Make a note on the recipe. But we loved this Apricot Tart recipe. Highly recommended? *stare* Current Mood: amused

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August 14th, 2009

09:43 am - The addiction returns There's something about the moist heat of mid-August that seems unwelcoming to NFL football. It's a game best played in mud and snow. But that didn't stop us from driving 3 hours last night to go see the Steelers play the Arizona Cardinals in the first preseason game of the year. Loge suite seats in beautiful Heinz Field, catered with all of the junk food and beer a football fan could want. The only down-side was having to get up at 5:30 AM this morning to drive back home in time for work. Steelers won 20-10. I lost my voice screaming at the action. Damn, I've missed football. I need to turn in my Nerd card now or something... my love of Steelers football is unseemly in one who is otherwise pretty geeky. Current Mood: exhausted

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July 27th, 2009

12:39 pm - In sickness and in healthcare By now, all of you have managed to read the 2000+ pages in the Universal Health Care bills that our leaders are trying to ramrod through Congress, right? Of course you have... (just like the politicians supposed to vote on them.) Well, for those who have not, an interesting article popped up on CNN's "Most Popular" list today. If you haven't been keeping a first-person interest in the health care debate, well... now's the time to start brushing up. And I want to point out a few things about this article before you read it: 1) It's on CNN - not Fox News or Newsmax or some other source that makes a habit of trashing the current president's policies. And it's even written by one of the Editors of CNNMoney. So don't accuse me of shopping my sources. 2) It's clear that the article has pissed someone off, because while it's #2 on the "Most Read" list at present, it's all but impossible to find on the main site. Anywhere. Can we say "burying a story" boys and girls? (Let's hear it for automatic content aggregators that don't succumb to editorial control of pages!) 3) It's the only source I have yet seen to, basically, come out and call the President a liar on this issue. Obama keeps saying "You have the freedom to keep your current plan." As it turns out, the bills don't say that. They say the precise opposite -- and the article explains why. I'm not even going to editorialize on this. Just read the article. I've been railing against Universal Health Care, in the form they want to create it, since the very beginning. There's nothing more to be said, except that it's about time somebody in the major media had the balls to stand up and blow the whistle on this crap. Current Mood: annoyed

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July 16th, 2009

01:48 pm - The case against community agriculture This is still a post that I'm not quite happy about yet, but I feel it's time to release it into the wild. If for no other reason than I've been promising it to a number of folks for awhile, and have been getting gently hassled about when it might see the light of day. It's unlikely that I'm going to be able to do much more on-the-ground research in the near future, so consider this more of a very long abstract than a paper... It has become very hip and trendy to talk about CSAs -- Community Supported Agriculture operations -- and similar non-profit organizations like City Fresh, who function in a similar manner. Right off the bat, I can say that they serve a very noble purpose, and their overall goals are pure. They want to help people eat better by providing inexpensive, high-quality produce to everyone. By using ideological marketing and a bit of grass-roots ingenuity, they're cutting through the clutter of mass-market consumer product marketing and encouraging people to pay more attention to what they eat. That's great. But are they really a benefit to the food distribution chain, and/or our society as a whole? Do they serve a purpose beyond being an audible voice that makes people think a little harder about the Food Pyramid? Or are they actually self-defeating enterprises, whose proliferation endangers the very goals they set out to achieve? I would argue that they are rapidly becoming, if they are not already, the latter. Because this is going to be another long research post, it is... ( ... cut for Friends List kindness. ) [1] - Bradford, JC. (2008) Energy Farms Network, Reliable Renewable Energy for a Post Carbon World: "Can My County Feed Itself? Part 3. The Available Land-base" [2] - Tegtmeier, Erin & Duffy, Michael (2005) Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, "Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the Midwest United States: A regional characterization" [3] - US Department of Agriculture, "2007 Census of Agriculture - State Data", Table 44: Selected Practices, 2007. [4] - Oberholtzer, Lydia (2004) Small Farm Success Project, "Community Supported Agriculture in the Mid-Atlantic Region: Results of a Shareholder Survey and Farmer Interviews" [5] - Vallianatos, Mark (2009) Ecology Law Currents, "Food Justice and Food Retail in Los Angles" [6] - Zajfen, Vanessa (2008) Occidental College, Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, Center for Food and Justice, "Fresh Food Distribution Models for the Greater Los Angeles Region" [7] - Rubin, Sarah; Weinmann, Sophia; Williams, Laila (2009) Oberlin College, Food Access Group, "Community Food Systems" [8] - Cleveland State University, Urban Studies Exit Project, "Regional food System Assessment for Northeast Ohio", 2002. Current Mood: tired

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July 10th, 2009

10:13 am - Creepy creepy CREEPY!!!! It looks like I have to exonerate mokatz for his comments on my post regarding the rebranding of the Sci Fi Network. Unknown to me at the time, this past weekend was the annual furry convention in Pittsburgh. Normally, I would refrain from commenting on such a gathering, particularly due to our... distressing... past encounters with furries IRL. But this is JUST TOO GOOD. Apparently the reason that Pittsburgh is the spiritual home of this movement is because they even have their state legislators in on the action. 40-year-old Alan Berlin, a staffer to Senator Jane Orie, was arrested for propositioning a 15-year-old boy, suggesting that they dress up in animal costumes and have sex in his back yard, while the child's parents were asleep inside. He's in prison on $250,000 bail. Also making the news regarding the event was the fact that the Mets baseball team was housed in the same hotel as the gathering the night before a big game with the Pittsburgh Pirates. They blamed their performance on getting a miserable night's sleep thanks to being "freaked out" by their surroundings, and one of their pitchers being awoken in the middle of the night by "a couple of badgers going at it in the hallway." You just can't make this shit up... So my apologies go to mokatz, whom I obliquely accused of being a little bit deviant for bringing up the topic -- and whose office is about a block away from Ground Zero for this event. And my sympathies to the other Pittsburghers who e-mailed me about their weekend (and thanks for the link to the story above). I recommend that you send a stuffed pedobear to your state congressmen to express your thanks for their outpouring of support and involvement in this fine subculture, in your state. ;) Current Mood: scared

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July 7th, 2009

10:36 am - The Year of the Brand 2009 has been a lot of things to a lot of people -- most of them bad. But one thing that it is clearly becoming is the Year of the Brand. Every company fighting for an edge is trying to re-brand their image. Find that magical insight that will make people spend money in a down economy. Frankly, it's getting a little bit funny. We're barely halfway through the year, and already there are enough disasters out there that you really have to wonder what people are thinking. Clearly all of that expensive Marketing school learnin' doesn't prepare you to operate in a crisis situation. Today, the long-venerated Sci Fi Channel is re-branding. As of this morning, they are now called SyFy. Their catchline is "Imagine Greater". What? Completely aside from the fact that I'm never going to be able to call it anything aside from "Siffy" again, and forgetting that its most pop-famous products are absolutely god-awful cult movies, such as this weekend's upcoming sure-to-be-classic "Sand Serpents", I have to wonder who thought this was a good idea. Only some marketing tool could possibly believe that this somehow increases the value of their brand. The best that can be said is that at least they're not alone. Joining Siffy on the 2009 Wall of Shame are many old and respectable companies that ought to know better. Like Tropicana, who briefly, earlier this year, decided to re-brand their classic Orange Juice product to make it look like a carton of bottom-shelf Food Club squeeze. What's wrong with Generic juice?? Nothing! If you're a communist... Apparently not many of them, because sales plummeted precipitously. Or how about Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7, which failed to learn an important lesson from the Vista debacle, and is proceeding to launch with even MORE crippled sub-versions than it's ill-fated predecessor. Nothing like selling the consumer a car and then telling them that it'll be another $99 to make the "optional" airbags work properly. Proving once again that just because a tech company calls something a branded version, doesn't mean it's anything other than a feature scam. US consumers might not have noticed, but overseas, the Quicker-Picker-Upper, Bounty, is no longer Bounty. It underwent a brand change this year to become "Plenty". Why? Who the hell knows, since the official party line is that the new name will focus consumers on the "incredible soaking power" of the towels. This was accompanied by a media blitz featuring two cross-dressing men and the slogan "only the name's changed." Somewhere, Rosie is twisting in her grave... (If she's dead. I'm not sure.) Branding is important to the marketplace. It gives consumers an artificial community to rally around. A sense that you've found something you can relate to, and build loyalty towards in exchange for a valued product or service. When done properly, a strong brand can be a company's largest asset. Or it can be it's largest liability. I rather think that someone might have "imagined greater" than Siffy. Current Mood: amused

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July 1st, 2009

02:23 pm - Mental Whiplash I pride myself on being one of those people who can have temporally-distant friends. Meaning: I tend to hang out with the sort of people whom I can go YEARS without seeing, and then the next time we're together, pick up right where we left off. Being as generally spastic as I am in the rest of my life, this skill is pretty much the one thing that ensures I have any kind of social life whatsoever. But there are times when this phenomenon derails. Times when an external factor is introduced that short-circuits my ability to behave as though no time at all has passed. Kids. For you locals, it's no big deal. I see you and your kids often enough that my mental image updates pretty regularly. They do grow up fast, but it's easy to take, even in discrete little jumps. I got an e-mail today from someone who moved out of Cleveland in 1999, and who I've seen in person maybe 3 times since, and only once with his family. When they left, his daughter was going on 3 years old, and he didn't even HAVE a son yet. Now she's going on 13 and he's ~8. The family pictures he sent are of him, his wife, some teenager who looks like his wife, and some grade school boy that looks like him. I know who they are, but my brain is busily trying to convince me that they're some alien replicants deposited into his family within the last 6 months. Because surely the toddling little girl I remember, who gave her Elmo to me one night while I was visiting, is not 13 years old!!! Mental whiplash is a weird thing. I'm going to have to re-evaluate how I approach long-distance friendships with parents. Today, I think I've realized that the rules of this game are not quite what I thought they were. Current Mood: shocked

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June 30th, 2009

11:17 am - The science of envy Ars Technica has an interesting article, entitled: Irrational Markets: People reject free money out of anger. It is a quick and cursory overview of a very interesting topic, and well worth the 5 minutes it takes to read. Essentially, it gives an overview of some new papers released this week on Game Theory. While that sounds like something that might be more applicable to your Wii than the US Economy as a whole, it really isn't. In fact, Game Theory is perhaps one of the best fields of research to pursue if you want to understand why human societies behave the way they do. In short, the article gives an overview of the classic Ultimatum Game. You give one person a stack of cash and tell them to divide it however they wish between themselves and one other person. If the other person accepts the offer, they both get to keep the money. If the other person rejects the offer, neither of them do. Not surprisingly, "unfair" offers are almost always rejected, even though accepting ANY offer would result in both parties walking away with FREE MONEY. Sounds simple, right? We have an intrinsic want for fairness, even if punishing perceived greed is self-defeating. But how do we evaluate that difference? Let's take, for instance, a fast food worker in San Francisco. If you work in an Arby's in San Fran, you're making a city minimum wage of $9.79 per hour. Let's say (for sake of argument) that the President of that company is making $350,000 per year. Is it fair that a clerk makes $19,580 per year, while the president of the same company makes $350,000? Depending on your idealogical leanings, you may answer that question differently. But let's break the question down further... Is it fair that a clerk makes $9.79 per hour, while the head cook makes $12.73? That's a 30% wage increase going from the newbie to a major player in that restaurant. Most people would probably say that's fair. Or how about if the manager of that restaurant makes $33,000 per year? Ok... maybe that's fair too? That is, after all, a 30% pay raise from the cook. Then you have 30% more going to the owner of that restaurant ($43,000). Then you have 30% more going to the franchisee who owns lots of restaurants in that area ($55,922). Then 30% to the District Manager who's responsible for all of the restaurants in San Fran ($72,699). Then 30% to the Regional Manager who oversees all of California ($94k). Then 30% to the National Manager, and 30% to the VP of Operations, and 30% to the COO and 30% to the CFO, and then 30% to the CEO... which is $350,905. If you were at any step in that chain, getting a major promotion to the next level, 30% would seem pretty fair. You're taking on a lot more work, you're traveling, you're dealing with problems at all levels below you in the company, etc... From inside the system, each and every step you claw up seems pretty reasonable and fair. Yet, if you say that a CEO makes $351k in salary annually, while his poor starving front-line employees are below the poverty level at $19,500... well, that's sounds terribly unfair. This is of course a massive over-simplification of both the scenario and the problem. But it does illustrate that there are frequently perfectly rational reasons behind circumstances that we perceive as being irreparably skewed. Most of the time, we never bother to find out... because even when we understand the micro-detail, we still make snap judgments based on our perceptions of "the big picture" when confronted with a decision point. Game Theory is one way to help sort through all of that. To figure out how we perceive the world, and to craft explanations and scenarios that help people make rational decisions based on framing of the available information. Unfortunately, such powers can also be used for evil. And it seems, lately, that is being done more often than the reverse. When you look at everything going on in our government today -- the discussions on global warming "cap and trade", the discussion of health care, the bail-out packages. All are textbook cases of information saturation and game theory. Dump 1,300 pages of dense text on the desk of a Congressman, extract bits of "big picture" information from the summary and fill the rest with placeholders to be determined later. They're forcing an Ultimatum Game by removing the opportunity for rational examination. You have 30 seconds to make a decision that seems "fair". If you guess right, we all win. If you guess wrong, we all lose. Go! Last week the House voted in a climate bill that contains more placeholders than details, and it's pretty safe to say that not a single seated member of that esteemed body would have even had enough hours in the day to read all 1300 pages. Yet they voted anyway because they "had" to. Under such a scenario, the actual detail and rational logic become meaningless. Health Care? How much focus is paid to the 259,798,799 Americans who currently have health insurance, as opposed to the 47 million who do not? When we bailed out the auto makers, who was looking out for the approximately 138,000,000 people who paid that bill, and was it fair in the face of the estimated 377,000 people who would have been directly affected by their collapse? (A 500:1 ratio.) As our understanding of human perception and tribal instinct improves, it's being leveraged by everyone from magicians to high-level politicians. In the same way that Penn and Teller can make 1.2 million people annually believe that they've caught a bullet in their teeth, a politician can make 120 million people believe that they're being treated unfairly. Everyone's too busy watching the people in white shirts toss a basketball around to notice the gorilla walking through the room. Sadly, understanding human perception and decision making doesn't change it. No matter how clearly we understand that you can't win at a game of Ball and Cups, we'll still try to follow the ball as the streetcorner huckster slides them around the table. No matter how much better off we'd be to just take the free $50 with no strings attached, we'll rail against the unfairness of it all when we know that someone else is getting $100. There's a few million years of cognitive evolution backing up that decision process. So the best we can do is learn to recognize the swindle. Recognize when we're focusing on the wrong thing, and try to view situations from a different perspective. Standing on the corner trying to follow the ball is a useless exercise no matter how much you want to do it. It's time to train ourselves to start looking under the table. Current Mood: thoughtful

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