Tag: stupid is as stupid does

A few of my favorite recipes—all easy, all the time

All easy recipes, all the time…

Quick Salsa

Chopped RIPE tomatoes (not the flavorless rocks you normally buy in the produce section)
Finely minced onion
Finely minced garlic
Chopped peppers: serano, jalapeño, habañero. Whatever suits your taste.
If you can stand the soapy taste, chop a little cilantro and add it.

Mix all that, set it aside for a few hours in the fridge and you have a decent tomato salsa.

A little quicker/easier: substitute a can of Rotel tomatoes and chilis for the tomatoes ONLY. You’ll still need some real peppers to add a little flavor, unless you’re a total wuss.

Basic Beans

Wash and sort 2-3 cups of pinto beans (more or less, depending on folks to be fed, how much you want left over for chili, etc. NOTE: I don’t guarantee the method below for red beans)

In a heavy stock pot, cover the beans with water-about 2″-3″ more water than beans.

Bring to a boil, remove from heat and let sit for an hour or so.
After an hour or so off heat, you have a decision tree branch:

1.) Do beans often give you gas? If so, and if it bothers you or others around you, toss the water and cover the beans with fresh water before proceding.

2.) If beans don’t seem to give you gas or passing gas doesn’t bother you or those around you (in my family, we call passing bean gas “love farts”—well, at least I do), then go ahead and cook the beans in the water they’re in.

Add a ham hock. No, don’t get fancy or make some sort of substitution. Add a ham hock.

Bring the mess to boil again, then cover, back the heat off to a simmer and leave it.

After about an hour cooking time, you can add salt or other seasonings to your taste. With the ham hock in, all I usually add is a little salt.

When are the beans done? Take a bean or two out and blow on ’em. If the skin curls away from your breathe either the beans are done or you have some knarly breath, dude.

What to eat with such ambrosia? Cornbread, of course.

My Fav Cornbread

(One of a very few “measured” recipes in my repertoire)

Make it in a well-seasoned cast iron skillet.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees fahrenheit (Yeh, I know I could just type “F” but “fahrenheit” is a fun word… even after its recent Moore-onic usage.)

2 cups corn meal (white or yellow)
1/2 cup all-purpose flour (wheat or white)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar (I know, it’s not “Southren”—so sue me)
1 egg, lightly beaten (or not. sometimes I just dump it in and let nature take its course as I mix other things in later. Seems to work as well)
2 cups buttermilk (NOTE: no buttermilk handy? put UP TO—no more!—1/4 cup of vinegar in your measuring cup before adding milk to the 2C amount)
2 tablespoon melted shortening or vegetable oil. (But bacon grease, just melted, is MUCH better-tasting. Combine with olive oil if you’re concerned about the trans fat stuff)

Dry ingredients mixed together.

Combine wet ingredients, then add them to dry & stir until it’s all just wetted.

Pour the mess into the skillet and pop it into the 400 degrees fahrenheit oven for about 25 minutes—more or less depending on your oven, etc. When you think it’s done, stick a toothpick into the middle. If it comes out clean, it’s done.

Beans, cornbread, freshly-sliced onion—heaven. Milk or buttermilk with this ambrosia.

Kickin’ grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup.

Kickin’ Tomato Soup

Easy. Just take any old condensed tomato soup. Add your fav salsa. heat. Done.

Kickin’ Grilled Cheese Sandwich

Chop your fav HOT pepper
Mince a slice or two of onion
Combine in small microwavable container with Easy Enchilada Sauce and some olive oil.
Nuke the mess for about a minute, more or less (depending mostly on your microwave oven)
Spread on bread
Add fav grated cheses
Grill. I like butter & olive oil in a cast iron pan, but one of those electric sandwich makers is OK, too.

Pining for rural life

Yeh, I made a big deal when I started this blog about explaining the “Third World County” title. When we moved here 9.5 years ago, there wasn’t a single solitary traffic light in the county. Nowhere was there a four-laned road, let alone a divided highway. And chain stores were unheard of. Sure, people knew there were such things as computers, even computers networked and connected to the internet, even. But the only ISPs were not only out of town, they were out of the county. My first ISP when we moved here was back in OK via an 800 number. Later, local number dialups were made available… by a company two counties away.

Today, even though the infrastructure is primitive by most city folks’ reckoning, we have, IIRC, eleven traffic lights in the county. Eleven! And three of those traffic lights are in lil old Jane, MO, population of just a couple of hundred souls, if that (Jane hasn’t even had a post office for more than 30 years).

Chain stores? Dogone it of Dollar General didn’t make a move on the county four years ago. And today, Walmart opened a brand new supercenter… in Jane, Missouri (now you know why there are three traffic lights in Jane, eh?)

And computers and related technologies? Well, we have a lot of shade tree “computer techs” who put together $300 trash boxes and sell them for $1,000. And a few years ago (along about the year before the millennium turned, you know, the year before 2001) the local telephone company decided to get into “that interned net thingy” in a bigish sort of way offering a local dialup service. Of course, since it was over their phone lines and their servers seemed at times to have been put together with chewing gum and baling wire, that was a lot of fun. So, when they offered “broadband” ASDL, I ran as fast as I could for the cable company’s nearly simultaneous offer of cable internet service.

So here I sit at my computer, connected (in America’s Third World County, no less) at about 2 megabits upload speeds and considerably faster download speeds than the local telco’s fastest “broadband” download speeds, griping about how the county’s going to hell in a handbasket, because… well, because Walmart has opened a superstore in America’s Third World County. (I laugh at irony!)

If ever there were a “last straw” that would be it.

A Viking we will go,
A Viking we will go,
Heigh-ho the merry-o,
A Viking we will go!”

From “Language Log”

Gee. If Microsoft has it right, this may finally explain the Vikings. If, in order to get from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway, one still has to follow the traditional pathway the Vikings took on their Northern European raids, then maybe it was the only way then, as well…

No, really. But don’t you sometimes want to tell stupid people to stand up so you can give their brains a kick start? Me too.

Anyone who knows me knows I rail every now and then against the rampant subliteracy evident in society today. What do I mean by “sub-literacy”? I recently had a conversation with a “special education” teacher in which the teacher—not once, but twice!—used the construction “ain’t nothing” to mean “isn’t anything.” And, of course, this was not the only nonsensical English this person spoke (in fact, much of the conversation itself often reflected a disjunction from reason ). I wondered briefly if this person’s “special education” work was the result of type-casting. (Maybe I ought to voice that in the subjunctive mood… )

Oh. Well.

So-called journalists. Teachers. Businessmen. Politicians. Copy writers for entertainment shows and advertisements. All of them seem to show a growing lack of understanding that much of what they say or write is nonsense full of logic-contradicting grammar, misused words and nonsensical neologisms. It’s enough to bring tears (sometimes of rage) to any semi-literate person’s eyes.

And do not mistake me. I do not make claim to any sort of competent literacy but only a sort of functional semi-literacy. No, the truly literate people I have known are those whose grasp of language, literature, history, etc., are far, far broader and deeper than mine. But at least I know the bounds of my semi-literacy, to some extent. The doofuses who (all too often) are the teachers of our children, our political leaders, our employers, or provide us with art or entertainment are often sub-literate and don’t even know it. Too many sub-literates rest assured of their “literacy” in their (stubborn?) ignorance of the low level of their so-called education.

Time to crack open an old anecdote (arrgggghhh! I just heard echoes of all the sub-literates I have heard say “antidote” when they meant “anecdote”).

Eleven or twelve years ago, I was involved in an email discussion group that was primarily a theologically oriented group. Not all of the discussion was theological, but that was the thrust of most conversations. I responded to one non causa pro causa* argument, in colsing, with the statement that the person’s contribution was all “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I got a private response from the head of a rhetoric department in a major university, a gentleman with a Ph.D. in English literature. He wanted to know if the source of that comment was Faulkner. He asked since I had placed it in quotes, but not given an attribution, thinking that none was required, since everyone on that list was surely literate enough to know the source!

Catch the relevant facts here: Ph.D. in Engliish literature. Head of a “rhetoric department” (sub-specialty of english studies) in a major university. And he did not know one of the most famous Shakespearean soliloquies—not even that it was Shakespearean! In subsequent private emails, he revealed that on the road to “earning” a doctorate in English literature, he had simply not read the author who is arguably the single most influential individual author in the English language, let alone one of the two most-cited works by that author.

He was the very definition of sub-literate.

(And no, I’m not going to identify the play the phrase comes from. If you do not know it, look it up. Read the play and then come on back.)

[Insert Madeline Kahn singing “I’m Tired” here.]

Sometimes I just want to pinch their noses. Hard. We live in a society where access to the wisdom (and flooies) of the ages is ridiculously easy. A truly literate man of the 19th century could be truly literate and still own or have ready access to only a very few books. Today, millions of Americans could have access—without even getting up off their fat, lazy behinds—to literally thousands of the best books ever written, hour after hour of brilliant and enobling music and graphic art. Instead, we have an ever more sub-literate population.

Petitio principii? Not really…

And I have a nebulous hypothesis about that. I haven’t designed a model to test a clear hypothesis, but the idea is intriguing: Civilization—at some point—begins to select for stupidity. Think about it. If there is anything sensible about the idea of natural selection (and I think it’s fairly obvious that more competent individuals are likely to survive when the environment is hostile—at any rate, let’s go with that assumption for now, OK?), then the ease of survival in a liberal society will select for stupidity and incompetence. (I use the word “liberal” here in its classic sense.) If it is easier to obtain food, clothing, shelter and reproductive partners, then it’s obvious that there are lower barriers to stupid people surviving and reproducing.

And maybe that’s part of the problem with modern education: too many stupid people have survived to produce offspring to feed into the system, and too few stupid people have survuved the completely NON-rigorous “education” required to become teachers of that increasingly stupid pool of students. Those students then go on to become yet more teachers, politicians, businessmen, etc., in a population whose proportions of stupid people to competent people are becoming increasingly skewed toward stupidity.

And that is one of two possible reasons why stupid people seem to be ever more and more with us.

The other possible reason that occurs to me—that they simply stand out because they offend the order of the universe—has its own appeal. But that’s for another time.

Another brief clarification or two: sub-literacy is probably the result of two things that may operate independently but, in my observations, usually operate together. One is stupidity. The other is laziness. Indeed, most of the sub-literates I know are self-made idiots. Self-made out of their own intellectual laziness.

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*non causa pro causa—I expect you to know these things. If you don’t, consider this a wake up call. A semi-literate person, such as I, would probably look it up. Ditto for petitio principii. 🙂

N.B. Yes, I know that my “me too” in the subtitle above is ungrammatical. The verb “want”” is understood, and so proper grammar would insist on “I, too.. [want to kick start…]” The difference is that you and I know that it flies in the face of agreement with proper English forms and can speak and write more grammatically. Self-made sub-literates can’t.