Friends

Mike and I missed the Tai-Pan Holiday Party this year, and it's been reported that folks whimpered when we didn't bring a platter of these treats to the gathering. ;) I thought I'd share the recipe so you can make them yourselves in the future, if you like. (I'm making them for the next Steampunk game, though, so some of you will get to try them!)

*** Baked Bacon-Wrapped Brown Sugar Smokies ***

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John Hodgman (The PC guy in the apple ads), an unabashed nerd, talks about aliens and falling in love. It's an amazing piece of verbal imagery.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/john_hodgman_s_brief_digression.html

Dan Ariely, who studies how people make decisions has two talks about how we think that will make you boggle. It's game theory, with psychology mixed in.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_on_our_buggy_moral_code.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Hans Rosling is a statistics genius, and the brain behind the wonderful Gapminder World application, which was coded by his son, and I believe is now owned by Google. I love all the talks he gives, but I picked just one to put here. I urge you to go to Gapminder and look at other talks.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_the_truth_about_hiv.html

An illuminating talk on how bacteria work. Also gives new hope for combatting drug resistant infections. Also take a look at Kary Mullis' talk on a different but no less impressive way to combat bacteria. (Kary sounds like a drugged out hippy, but he's also a nobel laureate in chemistry)
http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

I recently discovered that Hulu has all of the episodes of Kitchen Confidential available for viewing - watch, and enjoy!  :)
 
http://www.hulu.com/kitchen-confidential

It's a hoot, and there are a lot of recognizable faces!  You'll see actors we now see in Fastforward, Bones, and even Nicholas Brendan from Buffy.  Good stuff, so go and watch!

"Based on renowned chef Anthony Bourdain's best-selling autobiography and from executive producers Darren Star (Sex and the City) and Dave Hemingson (Just Shoot Me!, American Dad), Kitchen Confidential exposes the secrets of the restaurant business through the delectable story of a talented chef who's determined to climb back to the top of the food game. Chef Jack Bourdain (Bradley Cooper) found enormous success at a young age. Unfortunately, Jack's culinary genius also led to a lifestyle of boozing, womanizing and drugs, excesses which eventually landed him in the gutter. After hitting rock bottom and deciding to sober up, the only job he could get was slopping soggy pasta for the masses at a tacky opera-themed restaurant. Out of the blue, Jack was offered an opportunity to get back in the game as head chef at a top New York restaurant. Jack hastily assembled a renegade crew of colleagues from his past. From the diners at the front of the house, to the head chef and his rock-star culinary team at the back of the house, Kitchen Confidential is a tasty look at the underbelly of the restaurant world."

I was given permission to pass this message from Edward James Olmos on to whomever would be interested - so please feel free to pass it along, yourself! I encourage you to donate to Sextol Sol's cause as part of your holiday giving, as I have.

-------------------------------------

From Edward James Olmos:

I would like to extend my season's greetings to you. As we approach the end of another year, I am often reminded how blessed I am to have the friendship and respect of all of you. I am humbled and grateful for the support you give to me and to my projects. I couldn't do what I do without you.

Now that the giving season is upon us once more, I would appreciate it if you would consider offering your support to an organization whose work is close to my heart. The people of Sexto Sol Center for Community Action are tireless in their efforts to serve impoverished communities in Chiapas, Mexico and Guatemala. With economic times being what they are, it has been especially difficult for non-profits to maintain their former levels of contributions. I know that many of you have generously givien to Sexto Sol in the past. I appreciate your thoughtful kindness more than I can say. I am hoping that even more of you will consider making a contribution towards helping them this holiday season. No amount of a donation is too small. Pennies add up to dollars, and dollars change lives.

You can go directly to http://sextosol.org/ or reach them through my web site to read more about the vital work that is being done. There are a variety of ways that you can help. If you are a coffee drinker, bypass Starbuck's one day and send the money to Sexto Sol through whom, by the way, outstanding coffee can be purchased.

I hope that you will find it in your heart to help. There is no greater holiday gift you could give to me than this.

With all my love and appreciation and good wishes for a blessed new year,

Edward James Olmos

Well, this is preposterously frustrating. I'm due to fly back to Maryland today, to spend the holidays with my parents and sister. I went to check in for my flight last night per usual — especially since I'm flying on Southwest, which means no reserved seating, which means early check-in is a must if you don't want to be in the middle of the back row — and the website said (cutely and unhelpfully) "Oops! Your itinerary is not eligible for online check-in."

I'd never seen that message before, so I called Southwest, and they said that as part of the new Secure Flight Resolution (or some such), I had been "randomly selected to check in at the airport." Meaning, randomly selected to get on the plane dead last and sit in the middle of the back row. WTF? They told me it was an internal system thing, and there was nothing they could do about it except advise me to call the TSA.

So I called the TSA, and they told me it's probably because my middle name isn't on the itinerary, and I probably have the same name as someone on their no-fly list. So I basically have to show up at the airport and prove my identity. And if I want to make sure this doesn't happen again, SOP is for me to request they do a background security check on me to make sure I'm not a flight hazard. That involves filling out a bunch of forms and waiting 30 to 45 days. Though she thinks probably just adding my middle name to future airline tickets will solve the problem.

As much as I hate bureaucratic bullshit and resent the petty inconvenience, this whole thing actually kinda makes sense to me; my dad bought these plane tickets for me back in September, and if someone else with my name has gotten in trouble in the interim, it's no big surprise that I can't get a boarding pass remotely without showing any form of ID. I can't fault them on that. And "You have the same name as a criminal" is still less apoplexy-inducing than "Our computer has randomly selected you to be screwed out of using our standard system." I'm just anxious and frustrated, because it's snowing in Chicago, and I'm flying into a city that was just buried under two feet of snow and is still reeling from days of flight delays, and it's the holidays and in my experience, the check-in line at Midway right now will snake through the airport and take an hour to get through, and that's already three forms of uncertainty about whether this flight will actually happen. So I don't need one more, particularly in the form of "Wait an hour in line to be told you can't fly."

And I hate sitting in the middle of the back row. And given all the other problems, if I can't make my flight, who knows when I'll make it home.

So basically I'm just a sullen ball of vibrating anxiety right now. The problem with being singled out for faceless bureaucracy inconvenience is that you never know how far it's going to go, you just know that you're doomed to hear a lot of "Well, there's nothing I can do about that, sorry."

The TSA lady I talked to sounded like she was about 16 years old, and not very experienced; she sounded like she was reading from a script, but she stumbled over it a lot, and kept repeating herself. And once she'd convinced me that I had no recourse, and I was about to hang up, she added "Oh! Make sure to mention that this is happening because of our new Secure Flight Initiative, which makes everyone's flights safer."

I honestly couldn't get any words out. Mention that… where? Did she just assume, in this day and age, that everyone blogs or tweets or journals everything, and that I'd necessarily be telling this story to someone? Or am I supposed to pass that on when I complain to… my senator? The local paper? In this strange TSA-mandated script, why would I make a point of passing on, to whomever I bitch to about this, that it's happening entirely for my convenience and security?

Oh wait, I did. The system works!

Current Mood: cranky

Saw the new Sherlock Holmes last night. Liked it quite a bit on the whole, though I think it got a little repetitive about two-thirds of the way through.

As would make sense from Guy Ritchie, who's kind of the Tarantino of England, the movie was constantly reminding me of other movies. The cinematography and the detective made me think of From Hell (with a side-order of Sleepy Hollow), some "stalking the powerful" moments from both good & bad guys seemed out of V For Vendetta, and some of the not-quite-integrated steampunk CGI & politics forced me to recall Wild Wild West.

Robert Downey Jr. does that RDj thing he does, quite competently, and the filmmakers seem to be aware that some moviegoers will have an interest in his physique (both bare-knuckling it with enormous toughs and handcuffed to a bed with nothing but a small pillow for modesty).

Jude Law was an interesting "back to the book" take on Watson, a fellow crimefighter more impulsive and less brilliant than Holmes but not at all stupid or cuddly. He also comes off as younger, but since their backstory is obscure that does little harm.

This is somewhat more of a problem with Rachel McAdams as Holmes' other love interest. She looks quite a bit younger than her 31 years and yet is supposed to have been a recurring foil in the past of RDj, who looks older than his 44 (from the neck up, anyway). She does okay with the emotions and the trickery, and would have worked fine opposite Law, but against Downey it's a bit like Regina George used her wiles to get a role in a grown-up play.

Speaking of which, Watson has his own girl to deal with, his fiance Mary, played by Me & Orson Welles' Kelly Reilly. Mary sort of balances on a triangular knife's edge between being uninterestingly submissive, "you're tearing us apart" bitchy, and anachronistically heroine-y (distinct from heroic), and she brings it off. She asserts herself but doesn't gratuitously make anyone else bow to her will, and although I won't say she and Law have amazing chemistry I could see why he'd see her as his last best chance for a life away from Holmes.

There's some cool stuff in the "intrusive direction" department, including some risky ways of presenting a fight or an explosion, and for me they paid off handsomely. There's also some fast-forwarding & re-winding to show how clever Holmes and his quarry are being, which were occasionally jarring but did what they were supposed to.

There's a slight lack of truly likable and relatable people; the hapless London police are really the closest things to sympathetic characters. But the villains, of whom I will say almost nothing, are so marvelously despicable that I rooted for Holmes just to see them get their come-uppance, and that carried me through the more wearying bits.

So keeping in mind that there's nothing contemplative, transgressive, or all that new, the Sherlock Holmes thrill ride delivers. It starts at a gallop and pretty much stays there all the way to the (very sudden & sequel-anticipating) ending.

Current Mood: pleased

STEWART LANDS KNIGHTHOOD
British actor PATRICK STEWART is to become a 'Sir' - he will receive a knighthood in QUEEN ELIZABETH II's New Year's Honours list.
The 69-year-old star will be honoured by the British monarch for his 50-year acting career, which spans the stage and screen and includes roles in sci-fi TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation and comic book blockbuster franchise X-Men.
Stewart follows in the footsteps of another legendary actor, Sir Christoper Lee, who received his knighthood in October (09).

Would love for you pick up some coke (the legal kind, it has cane sugar not icky corn syrup), chocs, and painkillers (OTC) if you are. Will pay well :-)

Man shoots himself through the heart with nailgun to scare his fiancee, gives love a bad name.

How to be sensitive to other religions this holiday season

And how not to be sensitive at all.

And if you go to google and type in "tips for", here are the top 3:
...getting pregnant
...losing weight
...Farmville

Seriously, is Farmville that hard???

I guess I should be comforted by the fact that getting pregnant IS a bigger problem.

There's a girl missing in your area. Her family misses her and is scared spitless; the police are considering her a runaway and thus aren't doing much. Anything you can do to help will be very much appreciated.

I don't have a huge emotional reaction to Brittany Murphy's death. I never connected up her various roles into a gestalt image of her, so I don' t have that (possibly false) sense of having known her. But it is sad & troubling to see the death of yet another person younger than myself, and those who knew her seem to have genuinely liked her, so it seems like someone good has been lost.

The thing I'll remember, and perhaps the closest thing I had to a glimpse of the real her, was a crazy cold open she did for the Craig Ferguson show, in which Steven Wright pushed her on a swing and they all just had some giggles.

Current Mood: contemplative

Brittany Murphy died.

I loved her music work, but apparently she was in a bunch of big movies I never saw.

At this point I hope 2010 is better than 2009 -- but that's not setting a very high bar.

Current Mood: sad

It's been over two years since I have had internet access so it has been a long time since I've been here. I got myself a shiny, new laptop as a b'day present to myself this past week though so I am now re-entering the online world.

I'm only planning on stopping here long enough to tell those of you who may have been concerned over the last couple of years that I am okay. Life isn't perfect, but it isn't bad either. I moved back home to Tennessee quite awhile back ago due to some Family Drama and it is here that I will most likely stay (unless something comes along to change my mind...I know better than to claim anything as an absolute).

It's funny but once I got away from people who were constantly harping negatively about things in my life such as my job, I actually started to enjoy my life again. Once I stopped being around people who seemed to always find a way to tell me that I was doing things wrong - such as getting on my case for not saying "thank you" at the start of something instead of how I was taught, that the "thank you" is delivered afterwards, and therefore causing me to feel horrible about myself...talk about toxic behavior. I'm only thankful that I had a fabulous counselor along with a psychiatrist who pointed out how thoroughly toxic those people were for me. I'm not saying they are bad people. They meant well, I know. But the hurtful words, comments, and judgements were the exact opposite of what I needed at the time. And it didn't matter how many times I told them it was, they still assumed they knew better than me what I needed..thank the Divine that I had professionals to direct me on a better path. Again, I'm not saying they themselves are or were bad, just misguided in their behavior towards me - once I got away from all that, I actually found my confidence in myself and joy in life again.

Oh, and I found out that the reason I was in so much pain all the time is b/c I have fibromyalgia. Now that I am having my pain managed and treated properly (and that it all wasn't in my head after all)..well, I still have BAD days, but they are few are farther between.

I'm now managing a C-Store out here (so, yes, indeed there is room for advancement in that job), and truly enjoying it for the most part. Money could be better, but you can't have everything.

Anyways, for anyone who may be interested in getting back in touch with me, I will no longer be on LJ, but I am on Facebook and Myspace. Although if you are just wanting to be negative, please don't bother finding me. The less drama in my life, the better off I am. I am going to be trusting here and actually update my e-mail address to my new one. All I ask is that if you desire to contact me, please let's keep it positive. I have no desire to wade through old baggage that I have been quite successful in moving on from. (although there is some I haven't completely and totally gotten over. But it is mine to work through and I will continue to move on at the pace that I can)

And, yes, the new e-mail is a Battlestar Galactica reference. I'm not ashamed to admit that I cried all the way through the series finale. Wow, do I miss it (and, yes, I have seen The Plan - it is also truly brilliant). Thankfully, Children of Earth aired on BBC this past summer and I have now discovered Torchwood (and through it rediscovered Doctor Who), so I now have something new to look forward to entertaining me.

Current Location: home
Current Mood: productive
Current Music: Torchwood "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang"

A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women's breasts is good for men's health and increases their life expectancy.

Gotta love the germans...

Saw Me And Orson Welles last night, in which '30s teenage dilettante Zac Efron lands a role in Welles' 1937 stage production of Julius Caesar.

The characters have a sort of forced energy and wonder that grated a bit at first, but I think was part of what the film was going for, a place where actors are always acting in order to, as Orson puts it, never have to be themselves. Or in Efron's case, never find out what they're meant to be. It's not very smooth about its vision but it is about some important things (finding yourself, reacting to fallen idols and tarnished or unreachable dreams) without copping out too bad in the end so I came away liking & respecting it. I liked Men Who Stare At Goats for some of the same reasons. I'm perhaps an easy touch for the affable guy who decides you should pitch in even though life sucks, rather than going all Salieri or Tyler Durden with things (see also Velvet Goldmine). This leads towards rather undramatic endings, but nothing ever ends anyway.

The guy who plays Orson, btw, walks away with every scene he's in, as he should (although if he was the protagonist a more restrained take like Liev Schreiber's in RKO 281 would be more appropriate).

princeofcairo

Current Mood: happy
Current Music: NPR: 12-12-2009 Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! - NPR

"[Some people] have called attention...to the brutality and stupidity of many of our traditional child-rearing methods. These methods are "brutal" and "stupid" only if[...]one regards the goal of child-rearing as the production of a sane, balanced, creative...human being. This has never been the goal of any society in the real world. The traditional child-rearing methods are quite logical, pragmatic, and sound in fulfilling the real purpose of society, which is not to create an ideal person but to create a semi-robot who mimics the society as closely as possible - both in its rational and its irrational aspects, both as the repository of the wisdom of the past and as the sum total of all the cruelties and stupidities of the past."

-Robert Anton Wilson-

Today The A.V. Club posted its consensus list of the best films of 2009, though as always, "consensus" is pretty shaky when you're working with such a small group of people with such strong, divergent opinions — for instance, everyone else had the Coen brothers' A Serious Man on their best-of lists, while I wrote it up as Most Overrated Movie Of The Year. (To be fair, Nathan wrote up my No. 1 movie of the year as HIS Most Overrated choice. This is typical of what goes on behind the scenes.)

Frankly, we get to a point with the consensus list where two out of five writers strongly liking a film is enough to put it on our "group" best-of list, which is frustrating to me when I either actively disliked that film (A Serious Man), felt pretty indifferent to it (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Humpday) or, sadly, didn't manage to see it. (Still Walking, Summer Hours.) Not to mention when one of my favorite films (Moon) was something only one other person on staff saw. And I think I'm the only one who saw Ponyo. But that's the nature of the beast. It's all just grist for discussion anyway.

So for the sake of that discussion, and because I had to come up with it for voting purposes anyway, here's my top 20 of the year so far. (This still feels wildly incomplete, given that I have at least a dozen films at home that I feel I still need to see to properly round out 2009, and there are a handful of others, like Lorna's Silence, for which we didn't get screeners, and there's no word on a DVD release. So… this may change over time, but here it is at the moment.

1. Where The Wild Things Are
2. The Hurt Locker
3. District 9
4. Ponyo
5. The Informant!
6. The Brothers Bloom
7. Julia
8. Coraline
9. Big Fan
10. Moon
11. Up
12. Inglorious Basterds
13. An Education
14. Sugar
15. A Single Man
16. Duplicity
17. The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus
18. Thirst
19. Antichrist
20. Up In The Air

Current Mood: busy

1 EC down...

ETA:

Eventually I'd like to do at least an EC per month... That was the goal for this month, but events got in the way and it won't happen.

I also need to decide if I want to keep doing superslow. It is a fair amount of money and if the condo thing actually goes through (*) then I'm planning on tightening my belt as much as I can. This would be one place where it'd be easy to trim. But what do I replace that drug with?

*) who fuckin' knows... *shrug*

Still no time to talk about Cancun, given that I'm still sorting through pictures, and we're trying to get three issues of the paper to print simultaneously at work, and I barely have time to think coherently. But while sorting pictures, I came across this set, and I just have to ask.

See, our resort was all-inclusive, with meals provided, and we could go to any of a number of different mini-restaurants on the grounds: Thai, Mediterranean, Italian, sushi, Brazilian steakhouse, or "international buffet." The buffets weren't that great, but they always had a wide variety of tropical fruit, including stuff I'd never seen before, like guava and some kind of incredibly bright scarlet cactus. Also, one day at breakfast there was a huge pile of these:



Granted, they didn't look very appealing, given that they were all spotty and a little shriveled, and vaguely dried-out and crunchy to the touch. But hey, I liked the guava and the cactus, and I'm generally eager to try new things, so I took one of these back to our table.

( Then when I cracked it open, there was a horrible slimy Giger-esque facehugger thing inside. What the hell is this? )

Does anyone have any idea what this fruit is called? That slimy alienbaby thing was actually kind of tasty — Cass thought I was crazy for putting any of it in my mouth, but I figured I'd opened it, I had to eat some of it. The liquid was very sweet, like pear syrup, and the seeds were crunchy and very mildly nutty, like toasted pumpkin seeds. If I was trapped on a desert island with nothing to eat but alienfruit, I'd probably survive. But I couldn't bring myself to eat the whole thing. And I didn't even try with the rind, which was extremely dry and bumpy, kind of like the inside of a dried-out orange rind. What do you think? Were these things meant to be eaten, or was I chewing on a centerpiece and wondering why it tasted funny?

Current Mood: curious

It seems as if I have been in a Livejournal posting coma. I have been here all along, just not saying much. I am on leave now and starting to unwind. It has been a good year overall, though very busy.

I have been feeling lately that I have been teleported 50 years into the future and that the things I am used to can no longer be bought. My big 21 inch CRT monitor is starting to get old and I have been looking for a possible replacement.

I was surprised to discover that PC monitors acceptable for photo editing are not sold in Seattle stores. CRT monitors have a decent colour gamut and show the same colours when viewed from angles slightly off from straight on. Up till recently LCD monitors have been inferior to CRTs in almost every way except size: the colours change dramatically as the viewing angle changes, the dot pitch is large, there is ghosting and after-images, the black levels are poor, and the number of available colours are limited, and the image from the video card is delayed a little before it is shown on the screen.

Apparently, there are 3 families of LCD panel technology: twisted nematic (TN), vertical alighnment (MVA, PVA, S-PVA) and in-plane switching (IPS, H-IPS, eIPS.) The only PC monitors on display in Seattle stores are TN monitors. You can tell a TN monitor by changing your viewing angle slightly and seeing the colours change. If you look at it from low down the image is inverted ( black is white, white is black) S-PVA is a bit better (some Samsung monitors) and the best monitors use IPS panels (the Apple Cinema displays use IPS panels and look lovely, but the 30" is a bit too big and out of my budget and the 24" ones won't connect to PCs.)

I could buy a monitor sight-unseen from some online store but I have no good way of choosing a decent one. Online reviews are not really trustable, and many models have problems (e.g. an HP (or Dell ) IPS monitor that costs >$500 and gets good reviews apparently is often pink on one side and green on the other. IPS monitors also apparently have poorer contrast and have higher image lags.

If anyone has managed to buy a non-crap monitor recently, please let me know how you did it.

(Other things that surprisingly got left behind in the last century: twin-head electric razors, multi-compartment hinged pencil boxes, underpants.)