Em got on the bus to go to 4H camp today. Last year's attempt ended with her calling to come home the first day. She knew nobody there, and the whole setup ended up freaking her out.
This year, it's a different camp and she's bunking with her BFF. I'm not even thinking about what I'll do if she pulls a sequel to the bail-out because I'm certain she's going to have a flat-out blast.
I mailed her a card at camp yesterday, she should get it Monday. I made it the same evening I made a birthday card for my sister-in-law, and a Fathers Day card for my Dad.
She spent the night with the BFF, but me and Mo went to send her off, give hugs and whatnot.
I spotted this wind turbine near the extension office. With a plaque explaining that it generates enough power for about half a single family home and that it's new technologies generate this juice for about the same cost as coal or nuclear.
Awesome. I'll take two of them. Seriously, if the cost is the same, plant two of them in everyone's yard. If you think they're ugly, cope with it. Actually, let me buy three, and I'll pocket the money selling my surplus to the grid (or maybe I'll just turn my AC where I want to in the summer).
These planes are recreations, I doubt there's any flying specimens around from 1918. They're mostly 3/4 scale, big enough you can get in a fly but light enough the FAA barely considers them airplanes. As I understand it, if the airplane is light enough, the FAA's attitude is, 'Well, it's your ass.'
Which I guess is puzzling since they start to regulate model rockets starting at one pound, and a few hundred pounds of gasoline powered airplane with a dude sitting in it could cause considerably more mayhem.
I remember asking one of the guys one time, how dangerous did it feel to build something like this in your garage and then trust your life to your workmanship.
"I feel safer in this plane than I do in a car," he said.
My friend Roj (the dude who drew my Lobster logo almost twenty years ago) posted this link as a comment on my rarely visited myspace page. I though it was worth sharing.
It was a simple cash advance at the bank. Not something I do much: in fact, I don't even know the PIN for my credit card. So I have to take the card to a bank lobby and give it to a live cashier. Which normally would probably be better than dealing with a machine, but...
I had a repairman coming for an estimate at 4:00 and my bank is less then two miles from home. I'd taken the afternoon off to accommodate the repairman and to run some errands like this stupid cash advance business.
I started this little transaction at 3:00. Right away, I could tell something had gone wrong. I knew it wasn't a problem with my account, but still.
Then after a few minutes passed, one employee flags another, and now they're tag-teaming the credit card machine. Then they're on the phone.
Then they're changing the tape.
About a half hour into this, I said, 'Surely this doesn't happen every time the tape runs out.'
They went on to explain the building was struck by lighting last night and the machine wasn't right.
This I could buy. I stayed late at work to finish some personal projects, and when I drove home I seriously wondered if I would be struck by lightning. It rained so hard it was impossible to drive over 20 mph on the highway. And the lightning was coming so fast and so violently, it felt like trying to get home through an aerial bombing assault. Squint to see in the dark, then get blinded by yet another flashbulb and physically jarred by the shock wave of thunder.
Still, 45 minutes to take a cash advance and deposit it? That's got to be some kind of record.
Then I realized, it was Friday the Thirteenth, and only a dork would have left the house.
So I took my dork self home for the repairman, who was late because he got lost following MapQuest directions.
Then when I got the girls, Mo had a seizure.
Recovering from her seizure, she still wanted to go to the Purple Park after Em was off on a sleepover leading into her 4H camp.
And I got a couple of launches in, but Scribble V drifted into a ball diamond that turned out to be padlocked. I don't know why, it's a public park, but me and Mo walked the circumference of it and all three entrances were locked.
There was a picnic table I could have climbed to get over the fence on the way in, but I feared I wouldn't be able to get out. I don't have that much upper body strength, and unlike the last time I climbed chain-link, my foot is now too large to insert in the diamonds of the fence.
Plus, I featured myself being stuck in the ball diamond when Mo decided to do something dangerous or have a seizure or whatever.
I had no folding money on me, but found 94¢ in my pocket. I offered this to a park rat to go get the rocket. Small, athletic, I figured he could climb the fence, did such things all the time.
He accepted my offer and went straight to the locked gate, jiggled it and it came open.
He promptly went and retrieved my rocket, earning every last penny in my pocket for having the instincts I clearly lack.
John Maynard Keynes and his disciples would tell you that inflation and recession can't go together. Of course Keynes and his ilk are morons trying to dictate economic activity with no comprehension of it.
They're like me trying to fix a car. Cussing at it, kicking and hitting things does not work. Sorry.
Stagflation in the 70s was a bunch of egg on the faces of Keynesian economics, which had been almost universally embraced by Republocrats and Depublicans alike.
And some people are convinced it can't happen again. Which astounds me, because shit that has happened before is just about the only thing you should expect to happen. Nothing new under the sun and all that.
I'm a graphic designer at a small commercial printer. Every single restaurant menu order I've seen in the past three months has included upward price changes as restauranteurs attempt damage control in the face of rising food prices. And I don't know anyone who isn't doing less stuff because they're spending a lot more money for gas all of a sudden.
And all an economy is, really, is folks doing stuff. When they do less of that stuff, the economy shrinks, and that's called a recession.
There's been a lot of talk about four dollar gas, but last time I filled up (sadly, just three days ago thanks to my lengthy commute), I got by at $3.92. Which is as good as four bucks, I know, but still.
Today: $4.04.
I'd ride my bike to work, but that would require me to own a bike, plus avoiding Interstates it'd be over 50 miles round trip. Meaning I'd have to get up to ride to work something like four or five hours after I got home from work. I'd get into great shape or, more likely, die in a week.
Okay, so after dinner me and Mo went to the Purple Park. I broke a kite and she got her chalk thing on.
And as I do, I got to talking to someone. His kids have become excited by rockets, and it's my fault. He's down $30 or so and they've already lost one of their two rockets.
That's just where the conversation started, after a whole gang of the neighborhood kids treated me as if I were some sort of minor celebrity, addressing me as 'Rocket Man' and 'Rocket Guy.'
So it's getting dark, but Mo is still happily coloring the blacktop, and I called Em to tell her we were heading to the Purple Park when we departed. And I figure it's past nine, the dark and all, and at some point I think, wait a minute...my cell phone isn't in my pocket. I go to retrieve it from the car as me and the guy I'm talking to continue to discuss Scientology, the OTO and other bullshit, and my phone is ringing.
I figure it's Em, but no, it's the Artist Formerly Known as Frau Lobster. Em has called, eleven times in a half hour span, but since I wasn't answering she gave up and called Mom.
Who pointed out, quite rightly, that it was past Mo's bedtime. Mo has school tomorrow. And Em is freaking out.
So I called Em, we're on the way, and she's pissed.
Really pissed.
And I'm like, well...you're right.
I screwed up, totally. This particular parental guilt beef was good for:
1 extra Oreo (four instead of the usual three) 1 skipped shower (I don't know why she likes to ditch this element of hygiene but she does) 1 first crack at the 'puter when I got it set up after Mo was in bed
And a whole bunch of apologies.
The computer time was focused on Fred.
Fred is an incredibly annoying youth who has entirely too much free time. He makes YouTube videos documenting his Fredness, with his voice modulated like a chipmunk.
And Em is beyond infatuated with the kid. I'll give him that he's at least found a creative outlet. He's not sitting around watching MTV, he's decided to be a pint-sized Pauly Shore instead.
Good for you, Fred. Stay away from my daughter if you want to keep your teeth.
Still, Em's unaffected delight watching this nonsense got to me. If I'd kept my cell phone in my pocket and not pissed her off so badly, I might have missed this.
Okay, so after 20 hours at 175ºF, my chops were ready to pull.
The orange juice chops definitely tenderized better. All I had to do was look at them funny and they fell apart. The diced tomato batch was pretty stiff. Not tough, but not as easily worked as I had in mind.
I got a batch of brown rice cooking in chicken broth and most of a eight ounce thing of baby bellas. But we were hungry right now and brown rice takes 45 minutes.
Em had her chop straight, not pulled. She tasted both and decided the tomato batch was less disgusting than the OJ batch. Mo thought both were a confederacy of yuck, and I finally gave up and nuked some chicken nuggets for her.
Me, I did a wrap thing. A little pork, some black beans, a sprinkling of chipotle, a few bits of 'shroom, a green onion, some spring mix.
The brown rice got put away with the leftovers. Which also got dosed with a bit of chipotle because it's obvious I'm going to be on my own to dispose of these leftovers.
I'm a little late on this, a little over two weeks. Utah Phillips died on May 23.
Meaning, among other things, that I can write off my chance of seeing him live and meeting him, which was on my list of shit to do.
Besides being worth two Jack Elliots, Woody Guthries or Bob Dylans, Utah was one of my very favorite people to angrily disagree with. An anarcho-syndicalist Wobbly, he really bought all that bullshit about the workers seizing the means of production, despite such illustrations as the Soviet Union, China, Wisconsin and Cuba that as terrible as Capitalism can be, Communism is far worse.
At least in capitalist systems, the poor get to eat. Plus, socialism has a nasty habit of taking away their right to bitch about their situation. Witness China, which is about to ruin the Olympics completely by ejecting athletes and ticket holders who even suggest Tibet might not want to remain Chinese.
See also the Gulag Archipelago. See also the Holocaust. Socialism has caused more deaths than Small Pox.
Still, Utah Phillips' songs and storytelling opened my eyes to some stuff. Holding the ideals I do, valuing the things I do, given the same relative level of awareness of world events as I have now, a hundred years ago, I'd be a bomb-throwing Red of the first order. People with power always abuse their power, and when the IWW got their shit together, the power of capitalist bosses far exceeded the power of mass communication.
And then, too, another lesson of history is you can get rid of the company store, and in fact you couldn't bring it back because the information needed to thwart it is so easily communicated. But you don't need a company store: people will voluntarily enslave themselves with Rent-A-Center, Visa, Mastercard, 90 Days Same as Cash, auto leases and sub-prime mortgages.
So anyway, Commie that he was, I loved Utah. Plus, his songs were great.
I was printing a poster at work today for a 'Christian Rock' act at a coworker's church, and she suggested I come and bring the honyocks. And I said, 'But I detest Christian Rock.'
Pressed to say why, I really had to think. It's so obvious, I'd never put it into words. The church I go to, it's a rock 'n roll church, and the musical selections probably contribute to my tardy tendencies. If I catch the message, I'm good. The band is talented and well rehearsed, but their material is, well...it's 'Christian Rock.'
But music has to stand on its own merits. If it carries a message, fine. But he message can't save it if the music is contrived and insincere. And almost all the 'Christian Rock' I've heard over the last 25 years is contrived and insincere.
Authentic music reaches past ideas both good and bad. Ani DiFranco is wrong about practically everything, yet I paid to see her in concert and that's something I hardly ever do. But with Ani, the music overcomes her bad ideas.
Hell, Ani is how I came to Utah, come to think of it.
Maybe if the message of 'Christian Rock' was reassuring in and of itself I could choke it down voluntarily. But for reasons that are more complicated than I'm ready to go into right now, it's just not. For every time the notion of salvation as espoused by Christianity holds appeal, the meaninglessness implicit in Atheism consoles. Or I think of the entire civilizations that never, as they say, 'heard the good news,' and try to picture a God who would condemn them wholesale for that which is beyond their power, and reconcile that with such adjectives as 'loving' that are attributed to this God.
I'm quickly getting into that complicated area I didn't want to go to right now. None of that matters. What maters, is Utah Phillips, a great Folk Hero if ever there was, is gone. A pinko with so much charm even I could love him. He can't be replaced.
Last time I made pulled pork, the rub was heavy with chipotle and Tony Chachere's Cajun Seasoning. I loved it, but when I got Em to try a bite, she liked it for a split second, then realized it was scorching hot and accused me of trying to murder her between gulps soda.
So we're trying a little experiment. I didn't pass the chops over the grill this time. Partly out of laziness, partly because it feels wasteful to use a bunch of charcoal to only sear the outside of the meat. If I'm going to burn up four or five bucks worth of fuel, it ought to cook the meal, eh?
Here's the rub recipe this time:
1 part Coarse Sea Salt 1 part Ground Mustard 2 parts Paprika 2 parts Onion Powder 2 parts Garlic Powder 2 parts Dehydrated Bell Pepper Flakes Maybe half a part freshly ground Black Pepper
I started to try and rub the meat in the mixing bowl, then realized I should do the shake-n-bake trick which works very well.
I debated whether to sauté some onion and garlic to go in with the meat for about three seconds, long enough for me to realize that it's me cooking, so it probably has sautéed onion and garlic as a starter.
Then I split things up to two pans for some experimentation. Six of the cops got diced tomato with their onions as a source of liquid and acid to keep things moist and tender; the other three chops got orange juice with their onions.
Covered with foil shiny-side out (this is slow cooking), and put them in the oven at 175ºF. I'll take them out before I got to work in the morning, they'll be ready to reheat and pull when I get home from work.
It might seem odd to use chops for pulled pork. First off, it's what I had at hand. But also, pork has gotten a whole lot leaner since I was a kid. This is a good thing, a rare instance of the American food industry actually making something a little less deadly. These chops aren't off a lard hog, and sans seasoning they taste suspiciously like chicken. With the loss of all that artery clogging marbling (good riddance), it's gotten a lot tougher. Slow cooking fixes this.
Plus, if I cook them as chops, I'll eat at least a whole chop at a sitting, which is more red meat (or other white meat if you like) than I need to be chowing down. The pulled pork will get mixed with brown rice and black beans and whatnot, my own inexpensive interpretation of what you get at Chipotle (the restaurant, not the pepper that exists in at least three forms in my spice cabinet).
It's been a day or two since I did a Grub post. My left claw isn't 100%, but it's backed off to a nagging ache for the most part, so it wasn't such a drag to stand in the kitchen long enough to throw this together. Plus, I'm running out of leftovers to take to work, and I definitely don't have the budget to be eating at Chipotle when I'm buying a tank of $4 gas every three or four days.
People seems to find its way into the Men's at work like nothing else.
And I've discovered something I like about the magazine. They run these 'Second Look' pieces where they take a photo and alter it, then challenge you to find the six alterations.
I've attempted my own foray into this medium, and I present it to you now. Click on the images and the'll be enlarged. There are eleven changes, I believe. I kind of lost track at one point, it was so much fun. Click on the Comments if you give up, I'll post the answers (such as they are) as the first comment.
And if anyone from People is reading this blog I'd be happy to take over the Second Take puzzle from whatever PhotoShop geek you have on the case. This is something I can do from home in my free time, so you don't need to relocate me to NYC or wherever it is you publish from. The Adam Sandler one I saw today was too obvious. I had it solved before I was done on the toilet.
I'm not a big cell phone guy. I have the cheapest phone the T-Mobile store had the day I broke down and bought one. It was August, 2006, and I'd just had a harrowing experience when Thing One took the bus when I was supposed to pick her up.
Anyway, I buy 1000 minutes at a shot because it's the cheapest per-minute rate and the minutes don't expire for a year. If I buy fewer minutes, they not only cost more per minute, but they go bad in a month if I don't use them. And I often don't use them.
1000 minutes lasts me about ten months on average, I think. Perfecto. No minutes go bad, but I'm not overbuying by a wide margin. It's a small thing, but balance is something that doesn't come easily to me, and I gloat when I achieve it.
In fact, I realized how not a cell phone guy I am on a date I recently went on. It was no big deal, just a get acquainted sort of thing, one of those first-and-only sorts of dates. But the chick wanted me to text her as a primary mode of communication.
And before you tell me I should be playing with kids my own age, this chick was practically my age...okay, she was nine years younger than me, but that's six years older than my last first-and-only date.
But I'd never texted. This, I know, is not a good starting point: the middle-aged divorced Dad who cant' see why he'd want to hit the same key four times to get one stupid character, and a twenty-something who can do 40 words a minute with just her thumb on nine keys.
Our common ground disintegrated faster, though, after I'd texted enough to get to the bar with her. She proceeded to text while I was trying to talk to her on our date. That and the fact that she hates football and loves NASCAR, well, I mean really.
Plus, every time a book or movie or even a TV show came up on my side of the conversation, she'd never heard of it. I don't mean obscure stuff. I mean the woman hadn't seen Office Space or Fight Club. Those two movies aren't prerequisites to date me, I'm just saying that's two examples among two hour's worth, and at one point I said, 'Maybe you'd be able to engage the culture you live in a little more if you didn't spend so much time thumb-typing.'
'Sorry,' she said. Then she sent another text message.
But I didn't start this post to talk about my abortive date.
I started this post to tell you about a cell phone so cool even I want it. And I'm not entirely sure I know why. Obviously, I'm not a heavy cell phone user. And obviously I waste plenty of time on the internet (this dork is closing on 1100 blog posts) with just regular computers. Plus, I'm a hi-fi snob and refuse to listen to the MP3 format because I don't believe you can throw out that much information and have the music sound right. An iPod might be okay for audiobooks and talk radio, but I have a car stereo that fills that niche. Plus, I hate earbuds.
Still, if I was going to spend a bunch of money on a cell phone, this'd be the one. Not that I'm going to.
One of the little conversational tidbits from the date was when she explained how she and her ex boyfriend were both on the play they'd got before they became 'ex,' and that they had unlimited text and talk minutes because they got such a deal. And I did the math in my head on what I spend on cell phone minutes and asked, 'Is it ten bucks a month or less?'
'Ah, no.' She and her former beau spend as much in a month as I do in ten on this particular item. Again, a small thing, but someone who fails frugality tests as easily as I do needs to find his kudos where he can.
I loves my consumer electronics, but I doubt I'd love this once the bill came again and again.
The clock broke a few years back, and I just kept meaning to buy new clock guts.
I finally popped for the six bucks.
This was a ten megabyte hard drive from an IBM 8088. Your microwave has more RAM than this computer did. And a 10 MB hard drive was huge at the time. But Ronald Reagan was President when this computer was built.
This pitiful device, with dramatically less brainpower than a modern cell phone was a $12,000 machine when it was new.
Making this, I guess, the most expensive cheap clock ever.
Last weekend, I tried to take Mo to Speed Racer while Em was on a sleepover, but the theater broke.
For real, I've never had this happen, but the IMAX died and after twenty minutes, they started handing out free passes to future shows and offering refunds or tickets to see the same movie on the regular screen.
Mo was out of patience at that point, so I took my refund and fled.
So I decided it was time for our more-or-less annual visit to the big screen, but this week a better film was showing.
Kung Fu Panda, which is Jack Black's bizarre Tenacious D fantasy bred with the Karate Kid.
It was better than the new Indiana Jones, which is what I burned up one of my free passes on. I'm saving the other for the Ed Norton Hulk flick next weekend.
The Indiana Jones flick: am I the only one who as a problem with things like human guards who lie in wait in a temple for centuries so they can pop out when our intrepid Jones comes by? What do they do to pass the time, cramped into a hook in a wall? Do they play Solitaire on their computers? Oh, wait, there's no such thing as a computer back then. It's got to be too dark to read when you're cemented into the wall, so what? They just sit there and masturbate for decades on end?
Or when Jones and Co barely gets down the scary stairs before they retract, how does the villainess get down there immediately when she wants to?
I hope this isn't spoiler material, but really, so many things about the movie were illogical, it was a real distraction.
Keeping Mo settled down was a challenge, but she wasn't the worst offender in the theater. There were several loud, crying children accompanied by parents who were too slow to pull the plug and take the kid outside. When Mo got vocal, which was late in the movie and not nearly as severe as the ones I'd endured, I heard some people shushing at us, and I almost lost it. I'm thinking, There's been three crying kids carried out of here who have no excuse beyond being children. So back off on my autistic daughter.
Anyway, you know those cardboard cutouts they use to promote movies? Well, they've gone big-boy with these sculptures. I asked the girls to post in front of the Hulk, and Em refused but Mo went right to it and clenched her fists and growled at me.
The girls were resisting, honestly, and clouds were threatening, but what harpooned it really was the setup.
I pictured a bunch of booths, food for sale at a bunch of places. Kind of like the Ethnic Enrichment Festival except with just one 'ethnic.' But apparently, there was one long line for lunch, which was all of the food. And you couldn't even tell from the signs how much money might be expected to cover this lunch if you waited in the line.
I didn't want to wait with Mo in such a line and then find out I didn't have enough cash on hand to float the lunch tab. Especially with both girls acting as if my notion of eating Greek for lunch was an attempt on their lives via poisoning.
This Bouzouki (I think—there's a few oddball Greek instruments of similar description) player, besides making me think of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, made me think there's a lot in common between traditional Greek music and blue grass. And it sometimes strikes me that jazz/blues and blue grass have some common ground. But then, it's not like this guy makes me think of Charlie Parker. More like he makes me think of Yani.
Mo usually wants to get out of the evening shower. And since she tends to take her wet hair and burrow into the bed in a way that guaranties ultra-wild bedhead, I tend to prefer letting her shower of a morning.
But this time, she got so much chalk embedded in her skin, her face, her legs, I just couldn't let her out of her shower. I had to make her return to the shower twice. Three showers to get rid of chalk, which is about as water soluble as things get, isn't it?
I remember a guy I knew back in the Nadler Publishing/Waldo's Wurst Wieners days who had a tattoo of the sun, the worlds 'PAPER CRANES' running around it in a circle in letters meant to look like they had been folded out of paper. I asked him about it once, and he said, 'A band I was in in high school. Paper Cranes. I know, stupid.'
Em says she's done one smaller, that her mother took possession of. I'm jealous, despite being thrilled to own this little bird.
Last time I went cheap and grabbed the 80/20 ground chuck that was on sale on top of being the cheapest grade of burger to begin with. This time, I listened to my inner nag. Maybe I can't afford to insist on ground bison every time, but surely I can handle the price difference to go with the 93/7 ground beef.
I did my rolling pin trick to flatten them out a bit after the patty former, but I should have done more. Despite being leaner, they shrank more than I wanted them to on the grill. I did make them lighter this time. Instead of a 2/3 cup patty, I measured 1/2 cup per patty. Eight patties out of a 2-1/4 pound package of meat, I guess they're more or less quarter-pounders.
I tried grilling half an onion, but I think my fire was too tame to do a good job of cooking it, and I should have done something to get some olive oil, salt and pepper (at least) into the half. As it was, it was bland and half-cooked.
I also wished I'd picked up a tomato. I mean, the honyocks only eat the patty and the bun, so it's just me when it comes to veggies on top. As I put a slice of onion and quite a bit of Spring Mix as lettuce, Em told me, 'No! It ruins it! Stupid hobbitses.'
