Day: February 25, 2006

I have just read something that makes me so angry I say we declare war on Canada and invade tonight!

Ok seriously my buddy Tiberius over at DSOTW dug up this story somewhere.

It seems this woman named Judith went to Hawaii on vacation and lost her expensive camera with over 500 of the pictures she had taken on her trip. So she created a blogspot blog called “Lost Camera” (another great blog name!) and loaded up a bunch of pictures that strangers had taken of the places she visited to kinda sorta keep a journal of the places she had seen.

Then the story takes an interesting twist. Her next post about 2 weeks after the original starts like this:

I hadn’t posted here in a while, because just after the last post, I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that “a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!” She gave me their name and number, and I eagerly called to reclaim my camera.

Sounds like good news: she is gonna get her camera and all her pictures back, right?… WRONG!

The post goes on:

Continue reading “Lost Camera”

Kakistocracy: Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.

In politics, education and entertainment, as a general rule the worst, stupidest and most venal rule.

Take Congress (Please!!!). Jean Fraud sKerry. Teddy “Swimmer” Kennedy. “Leaders of the pack.” OK, ‘Nuff said. Saves a load of time and typing.

Education? Just look at the idiotic “let’s experiment on the children” fads over the past 35-40 years emmanating from the fever swamps of schools of education:

Continue reading “Scum Rises to the Top”

As I have already said I am against this. Not because it is the UAE I just don’t think it is a good idea to let any foreign government operate portions of our ports. A lot of information has come out since this was first blatantly misreported.  Today Wizbang and Big Lizards have some very interesting information and supposition.  That when combined with what I have learned from several sources including an excelent interview on Hugh Hewitt’s show with Robert Kaplan (transcript here, audio here)  and two fantastic posts by All Things Beautiful (the second here)  has me much more open to allowing this deal to happen.

My position was and is We should not allow foreign governments or foreign companies to operate parts of our port system.  However we already allow Chinese companies (owned by the Chinese government) a and several other foreign companies to operate parts of our ports all over the country. So I will now say I am open to allowing DPW to operate in this 6 ports if we are going to continue to allow other foreign companies to do the same thing.

Now on to Wizbang and Big Lizards.  In Jay’s post today titled Enemies to Port says a wise crack he made got him to thinking:

Continue reading “The Real Deal on The Port Deal”

One interesting thing about our income taxes for this year’s returns was the differential between fed and state. We’ve been doing a little every year to both reduce our tax burden and reduce our refund.

Yeh, I know that’s backasswards for some folks, but it makes sense. Our income is increasing by tiddly lil baby steps—which is fine for our situation. At the same time, we’ve been fine-tuning things here and there a little to decrease the bite the various governments take out during the year, so we have more of our money to work with throughout the year, thus a lower refund.

The ideal, as long as income taxation remains the norm, would be: do returns and owe nothing, get nothing back. Even steven.

This year, our total refunds—state andf fed—were well under $500, so although we e-filed, I did not request (or pay the fees for) direct deposit, simply requesting checks. The largest check by a good deal was to come from the state. (Need to work on state witholding/payments—overpaid too much during the year and the state had our money to play with instead of us having the money.) Yeh, it was still not much, but still, any overpayment is too much.

But here’s the cool thing. The check from the state was here three days after the return was e-filed (still waiting on the piddling lil check from the feds, naturally).

That’s as good as—or better than—some years’ direct deposits.

Wanna make sure that state treasurer keeps her job…

🙂

Still, alla this would be unecessary if we were to have a non-slavery tax put in place: The FairTax.

The FairTax Book

…knocks one outa the park.

The Mary Hunter has completed his “music meme game” post, and while I’ll probably just let folks list theirs in trackbacks, TMH not only made time in a very busy schedule, he also included some pieces that really brought a smile to my ear (if I may be allowed to severely mangle a metaphor—heck, whether I’m allowed to or not! Zelda B.’s not standing over my shoulder to correct me… ).

One, the Dona Nobis Pacem section of Bach’s B Minor Mass, spurred recollection of the older “dona nobis pacem” canon that’s most often sung as a three=part canon (though it can have as many parts as you darned well wish it to).

Here’s a cut of The Frazier Horn Choir playing an adaptation, with structured chorale additions:

donanobispacem2.mp3

This week, I fixed a nice pot of pinto beans and hamhock, and since I made them using a pressure cooker—a departure for me, but one I’ll do agai, cos the beans turned out great!—I decided to also vary the cornbread.

So, I took last week’s bread machine bread and varied it thusly:

• 1.5 cups warm water (about 115 degrees fahrenheit)
• 0.5-1.0 tsp salt (mostly a matter of taste)
• 3 Tbs oil (I prefer a good, full-flavored olive oil for this)
• 2 eggs (added last immediately before the dry ingredients)

Mix the dry ingredients separately and add them all at once:

• 1.5 C corn meal
• 1 C white flour
• 0.5 C whole wheat flour
• 3 tsp active dry yeast
• 0.25 C oat bran
• 0.25 C garbanzo bean flour
• 0.5 C vanilla protein powder (mostly soy)

Dumped it all in the order listed in my bread machine, set for a 2-pound loaf and walked away.

The bread and the pressure-cooked pinto beans were ready together.

Ambrosia.

Oh, the pressure-cooked pintos? Sure, why not?

2 C washed and sorted pinto beans (I just used a colander and picked them out of a full stream of water by the handful to sort and rinse, this time)
6 C water to start

Brought the pressure cooker to a “huff” under 15 pounds pressure and removed it from the heat. Let the beans soak for an hour. Removed the lid, discarded the water and re-rinsed. Added 6 cups water, 2 smoked hamhocks and set them on the stove to presurize at 5 pounds. When the cooker began huffing, I backed the heat off to the lowest setting and left them. When the bread was done, so were the beans and the hamhocks. Added some barbeque sauce and brought them back to a simmer, uncovered for about 15 minutes, to thicken the juices a bit.

Too delicious to save any leftovers for chili… *sigh*

🙂