The personal blog of Paul Krohn, writing in San Francisco.
With the movie out, there is a lot more interest in Ms Child these days and Jacquie and I have been cooking and watching a little Julia and Jacques. The quotes are the best! A couple of samples:
Making creamed onions: “You can make it without cream, but you’ll be sorry!”
On choosing a turkey: “If you want leftovers, you’ll need about a pound per person. If you don’t want leftovers, well … that would be weird.”
For all the bits spilled on the subject of Michael Duvall, I have not been able to find anything about any potential penalties he may face.
Can’t one of our many fine publications let us know? Isn’t he guilty of an ethics violation for every energy vote he didn’t recuse himself from? Wouldn’t that be a lot for a sitting member of the “Assembly Utilities and Commerce” committee?
I’ve always been sort of a semi gamer. I don’t think I’ve ever bought or even upgraded a computer to play more or even a certain game. I’ve always satisfied myself with the hot titles from a couple years ago in the bargain bin, played on past-it’s-prime hardware.
I didn’t realize how big a club I was in, because one of the disadvantages of this practice is that there is no-one left playing the games to trade tips with. I was very amused to see xkcd weigh in on the subject, and thought it would be fitting to post on the subject well after the fact.
Birthers & Truthers are, at least to me, coming to mean anyone on the far left or right who holds on to some sort of crazy conspiracy theory in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
One of the reasons I read a blog called Dispatches from TJICistan is that I find it both bracing in terms of an opposing point of view and a window into some of the crazier theories on the right of American politics.
We agree on not a few things, which is good, but one recent post seemed just a little too Birthy to be true.
The post alleges that the United Nations General Assembly named Fidel Castro the “World Hero of Solidarity”. Since far fewer than half the states with seats on the General Assembly are even nominally Socialist or Communist, that sounded rather surprising to me.
A little basic Googling indicates that all the smoke-blowing in the Birther-blogosphere leads back to a story in the “Latin American Herald Tribune”. One of the blogs that links to it alleges (actually, states as fact) that this publication is affiliated in some way with the International Herald Tribune. We’ll leave figuring out who and what the LAHT is for another time; let’s just take a look at the evidence at hand.
In fact, the link map of this “story”, if that is what it is, is so circular that one wonders if the “LAHT” story/page was required at all.
Anyway, I hope TJIC amends or takes done the post, because it is based on a completely unverifiable information.
There is a fine line between frugality and cheapness and I had the good fortune to observe the father of two girls while I was shopping for stuff to organize my desk. Dad and the girls — very close in age and I’d guess in third and fourth grade — were shopping from what seemed to be a school-provided list. I stalked/followed them while they were shopping because I was so interested in what they were doing.
From what I overheard, Dad turned this in to a bit of a competition. He had offered them a prize of some kind to fulfill the list at the lowest possible cost. He accomplished a few things:
What he was probably not counting on was the ‘co-opetition’ that emerged: the girls, while he was distracted by shiny guy/gadget stuff, quietly conspired to pad their totals slightly to avoid the most egregiously generic supplies. In any case, I think Dad came out way ahead with his little scheme.
Lighting is a key component of a comfortable, relaxing room. We’ve always wanted some light coming from the kitchen end of the kitchen/living room/dining room. There are lights under the cabinets to provide “task” lighting but there are problems with that: they hilight any mess you left behind cooking dinner; they are directly visible when seated at the table; and they are not dimmable.
A while ago we took NERT training and bought all kind of stuff to prepare for an eventual/inevitable earthquake; while we were at it we got some LED lights. I installed them this weekend, which turned out to be relatively minor project since there was a handy way to feed an ordinary extension cord up from a countertop outlet to above the cabinets; all I had to do was trim off some extra cord length and replace the manufactured plugs and all was well.
Though still not dimmable, the results are pretty good:
They look a lot more blue in the pictures than they do to my eye. I’m thinking I’ll need to add some yellow gel over every second or third LED to sort that out and warm them up a bit.