1970's Weight Loss

I've been thinking of dropping a few pounds this winter. Call it my "resolution".

Remember how fun and cool weight-loss products were in the 70's? If you have forgotten, let me reintroduce the "Slim Jeans". Yes, you too can drop all of that unsightly water weight by wearing Slim Jeans patented silver sweatsuits. Wear them excercising or doing your everyday housework. It even works while you sleep or sit your big ass down on the couch watching TV. Slim Jeans are comfortable enough to wear around the house, and stylish enough for a night on the town!

Watch:

Farewell, Yet Not Farewell

It has been almost a week since Mr Pandora died, and I went to the pet crematorium to pick up his ashes. I thought I handled it pretty well. I've been able to talk about it for a few days and keep it together.

Today, I looked at the Certificate of Cremation, and read the little poem in the corner. It brought it all back again:

After Death
Farewell, Master, yet not farewell.

Where I go, ye too shall dwell.
I am gone, before your face,

A moments time, a little space.
When ye come where I have stepped,

Ye will wonder why ye wept.
-Edwin Arnold

A Christmas Quiz

How well do you know Christmas?

More specifically, how well do you know those Christmas specials on TV? Take this quiz and find out!

A Christmas Special Quiz

See if you can beat my score of 28 out of 36.

Christmas Afterglow

Well, it's December the 26th, time to go back to work.

It was a pretty good holiday. I got to spend it the way that I like best; preparing overly-complicated meals that require hours of careful planning in order to come together all at once at mealtime.

It began on Sunday, when I made dough for the fresh breads, and took the turkey breast out of the freezer to thaw. Monday morning, I crept downstairs before my wife awoke, to shape the bread dough into clover-leaf dinner rolls, and the family-specialty cinnamon rolls, and set them in a warm spot to rise. I had just enough time to make the batter for the waffles when she awoke and came downstairs.

The Iron Chef secret ingredient this Christmas was: Pecans.

Breakfast consisted of pecan waffles, link sausages, juice and coffee. Since we waited until after the opening of presents, and it was almost 11:00 when we ate, we decided to skip lunch and have dinner around 5:00. So, I spent most of the afternoon in the liesurely application of a couple of unusual holiday recipes.

I took the turkey breast, brushed it with some olive oil, garlic and salt, and roasted it for about an hour. Then, I glazed it with orange marmalade, and coated it with a mixture of chopped pecans, ground coriander, and cinnamon. Back in the oven for another 45 minutes.

On the side was a three-chesse mac and cheese with sharp cheddar, monterey jack and fresh grated parmesan. There was lots of fresh garlic in the cheese sauce, and a few dashes of habanero pepper sauce. The topping consisted of a mixure of chopped pecans (again), fresh breadcrumbs and more grated parmesan. I buttered the baking dish, and then coated the butter with a thin layer of the topping. The rest of the topping went on top (where it belongs).

The non-pecan elements were freshly made cranberry sauce with ginger, and a little turkey gravy. The dinner rolls were ready to go into the oven when the turkey and macaroni came out. There is nothing like breaking open a dinner roll at the beginning of a holiday meal that was in the oven just a minute earlier.

Dessert consisted of little molten chocolate cakes; crispy on the outside, and liquid chocolate on the inside. Small but rich. Just a little dusting of powdered sugar is all they needed.

The cinnamon rolls went into the oven at about 8:00, for a little evening snack with tea.

That should be just about the last of the holiday indulgences. Back to my signature "big salads" for dinner in January.

Mr Pandora

My little buddy, Mr Pandora, died yesterday evening at home. We were there, holding him when he passed.

We will miss him very much.

In loving memory,

Mr Pandora

1995-2006

Trump vs. O'Donnell

I'm not sure why Rosie O'Donnell actually gives a crap about Miss USA and Donald Trump, but it was almost a guarantee that since she does, she was going to say something unbelievably stupid. That's what she does.

So now "it's on", as the youngsters say. I'm not quite sure why I care about the Trump, O'Donnell throwdown, other than it makes for some fine holiday entertainment after you've seen "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" for the 87th time.

Trump was on Entertainment Tonight last night, and it was hilarious. His comments were not so much "Rosie-stupid", as they were just mean, vindictive and funny all at the same time.

Watch:

Second Chance for Miss USA

Donald Trump is giving Miss USA, Tara Conner, a second chance. He is quoted as saying,

"She's agreed to go into rehab. She knows that if she makes even the slightest mistake from here on, she will be immediately replaced. I believe she can do a tremendous service to young people."

Well, she already got drunk and went down on Miss Teen USA, how much more servicing of young people does she need to do?

Or, does this sum it all up?

It Could Be that the Purpose of Your Life is Only to Serve as a Warning to Others.

Today's Fortune Cookie

Good news for 2007:

A way out of a financial mess is discovered as if my magic!

This is especially good news, since we just had a 2 hour company meeting to discuss the 2007 finacials. For the 4th year in a row, they've designed the annual bonus plan with more loopholes than an Enron retirement package. No bonus for you!

The fortune had the usual set of "lucky" numbers, but I'm not going to post them, because I'm thinking "Powerball".

Roots

There's really nothing better than seeing embarrassing photos of someone who has done something horrible, splayed out for all of the world to see on the Internet (see my "Holiday Party" post below).

Take the case of that bitch Liz Carroll, who with her husband, allegedly tied up her special needs foster child with a blanket and packing tape, and left him in a closet with a fan for a weekend in August. When they came home to find him dead, they burned his body, and claimed that he had wandered off in the park, sparking a full-scale search operation.

Her court proceedings are underway, and it looks like someone hasn't had a chance to touch up her roots in the last 4 months or so.

Burger King Remix

This is a very busy week. In addition to being the week before Christmas, I also have the January edition of the Mensa newsletter due on Thursday.

While I'm busy with that, please enjoy one of my favorites:

Bengals fortunes

Tonight is the big Monday Night Football game against the Indianapolis Colts. As I sit at work in anticipation, and gaze at the four Bengals bobbleheads that required such blood, sweat and tears to collect from Burger King this November, I realize that I also have four random slips of paper sitting on my desk from Chinese fortune cookies. Do the fortunes match? You be the judge:

CARSON PALMER

Pleasant experiences make life delightful. Painful experiences lead to growth.

RUDI JOHNSON

To measure up to all that is demanded of him, a man must overestimate his capacities.

MARVIN LEWIS

People rise to your expectations.

CHAD JOHNSON

God gave man limited ability, but unlimited ambition and desire.

"Holiday" Party

Today is the company "holiday" party. Remember when companies used to have Christmas parties?

Speaking of holiday parties, there has been a news story for the last couple of days in Cincinnati about a local firefighter who was driving home from his own holiday party a little too sloshed to be behind the wheel. He turned onto one of the exit ramps of I-71 near downtown, and ended up driving south in the northbound lanes. He ran head-on into a woman driving in the correct direction, and killed her. Since this all happened within a couple miles of 3 different TV stations' offices, the footage of his late-night arrest has been rolling on the news non-stop for the last two days.

They keep referring to this guy as a Cincinnati Firefighter, even though he wasn't on duty or driving a city vehicle at the time. This guy is probably going to prison for a very long time. To make things even more humiliating for him, since he was at a "holiday" party, he was wearing a lame-ass red Christmas vest, complete with embroidered snowmen and reindeer. He's probably very popular in the Hamilton County Justice Center right about now.

But anyway, back on topic. Today is the holiday party here at work at 4:00. That's a full hour and a half before normal quitting time, in order to make attendance mandatory. The co-workers who normally get off work at 4:00 are thrilled that they "get" to stay around work for another couple of hours. I specifically wore clothes to work today that I wouldn't be emarassed to get arrested in, just in case things get out of hand.

Each department is supposed to bring a different meal course to the pot-luck. Operations is doing side dishes. So, I threw something together into the crock-pot and have it sitting under my desk bubbling away right now. Here's the recipe that I made up for it:

Black-Bean and Corn Chili

2 cans black beans

2 cans peeled diced tomatoes

1 jar pizza sauce

1 small can tomato paste

1 can white corn, with liquid

1 can yellow corn, with liquid

1 medium white onion, diced

1 red bell pepper, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 bay leaf

1 Tbsp chili powder

1 pkg taco seasoning (chipotle flavored)

Throw everything into a crock-pot and cook on low 7 hours.

Oblivious

What is wrong with people?

I made it to my work exit off of the freeway with an entire 12 minutes to spare. Woo-hoo! What should I do with the extra time? Surely not get into the office an entire 12 minutes ahead of time, that is MY time. There was plenty of time to stop at BP for a coffee and pastry.

Or so I thought.

BP was really hopping this morning, lots of cars in the lot, but I had a full 11 minutes to burn by the time I walked through the door. I poured my coffee, and grabbed the last apple fritter (I was feeling frisky and indulgent), and hopped in line. Just two people ahead of me, and still 9 extra minutes - fantastic.

Or so I thought.

It turned out that the woman at the front of the line had picked 8:21am to do all of her Christmas shopping. At BP. She was literally buying $300 worth of $20 BP gift cards. One at a time. Each card had to be individually activated by the cashier. The only cashier. By the time she got done, I had completely run out of spare minutes, and was starting to twitch. There were also about 15 people in line behind me trying to buy their own coffee and gas getting equally twitchy.

Again, what is wrong with people? First of all, I wouldn't try to do that kind of transaction during the morning rush at the convenience store. People have places to go and things to do. If I sensed that I was causing that kind of road-block in the normal flow of operations, I would step aside, or just come back later. I am personally very self-conscious about inconveniencing other people, but apparently other people are just oblivious to the rest of the world around them.

This woman was the equivalent of the financially inept customer who attempts to solve all of their overdrawn, bounced-check, repossessed-car woes at the teller's window of the grocery store bank branch during the lunch hour. There could be 100 people in line who just want to deposit their paycheck and grab something to eat before going back to work, and this lemonhead is trying to get a teller to balance their last year's worth of checking account statements for them.

I actually felt sorry for the BP cashier. It wasn't her fault that one customer decided to break up the natural flow of her morning work cycle. But she was the one who had to pay the price of a line out the door, that probably wouldn't be back under control for an hour. I think that she thought I was mad at her because I was at full-twitch by the time I got to the head of the line.

Anyway, I grabbed my change and jumped back in the car to scoot the final mile to the office. I got in 2 minutes late. The fritter was a little stale- that probably happened while I was standing in line.

Fine Indian Cuisine

My co-worker Doug looked a little down at lunchtime today, so I pulled into one of his favorite dining spots, the local Indian buffet. The name of the restaurant has the phrase "Fine Indian cuisine" in it, which may seem like a triple oxymoron.

He refers to the place as "Red-green-brown" after the pans of colorful goo on display at the buffet table. It's good stuff. I suspect that more westerners would take a liking to Indian food if they could accept a couple of inevitabilities:

* Don't bother asking "Where's the beef?" There isn't any, but lamb and chicken will do just fine.

* Don't try to figure out exactly what ingredints are in the big pan of yellow/red/green/brown goo. You probably haven't heard of most of them anyway. No, the little label next to the buffet pan isn't going to help either unless you know the proprieter's regional dialect of Hindi. Whatever it is, it will be delicious.

As an extra added bonus, you can almost always find a big bowl of candy-coated fennel seeds on your way out the door. Grab a big handful and munch away on the walk to the car. Mmmmm...fennel. It's like a handful of miniature good & plenty.

UBIK

The monthly Sci-Fi book group meeting was last night, and the book of the month was UBIK, by Phillip K Dick. This is the second Dick book that we’ve read this year, and I think that I may be his only fan in the group.

It started a bit slow, but still managed to thrust the reader right into its world with little introduction. The major technological and societal differences must be understood through observation rather than explanation. It took me about 4 days to read the first 60 pages, mainly due to the process of absorbing the details of the setting. However, once the plotline’s major conflict began around the middle of chapter 6, I finished the remaining 160 pages in a single evening. It was one of those situations where it completely captured my full attention, and everything else was tuned out.

Dick’s style of writing is extremely easy to read; very simple, straightforward sentences. However, his plots tend to veer into the complex. Reading UBIK is meant to keep the reader off guard. Two conflicting versions of reality are presented, and one’s assessment of which of these two is actually “real” continually shifts back and forth throughout the entire novel.

The essence of the plot is that the dead are kept in a frozen state with continued brain activity. The living can then continue to communicate with the dead in this state of “half-life” for a limited period of time. After an assassination attempt on the major characters, it becomes apparent that some of the characters have survived, and some have not. The challenge, for both the reader and the characters, is in determining which ones are truly alive, and which are in “half-life”.

Eventually, the reader is given the answers to the questions that they have been battling with during the entire story, and the results are bittersweet. Both the story’s villain and the true nature of “half-life” are revealed, and leave the reader sad but hopeful for the protagonists.

An interesting side-note for me was the introduction of a minor character named “Nina Freede”. As that last name is specific to my relations, I can only assume that unless Phillip K Dick invented that name randomly, he must have met one of my distant 2nd or 3rd cousins at one time while living in California.

Today's fortune cookie

Technically, yesterday's cookie:

You are the crispy noodle in the vegetarian salad of life.

That is open to so much interpretation, I'm not even going to touch it.

What's in a name?

So, here we are.

After encouragement from friends, I've decided to begin making many of my thought processes public. Time will tell as to whether that is a good thing. I do not know in which direction this blog will go, or how much of it will eventually be filled with political or social commentary. For now, it will simply be my release valve for whichever part of my brain requires it.

I suspect that this will largely go unnoticed by the world, blogs of every flavor being a dime a dozen. That realization (or was it hope) was a large part in selecting the name for this blog. It is from the following quote:

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What's a sun-dial in the shade? -Benjamin Franklin

This perhaps conceals a double-meaning. Is this blog, hidden in a dark corner of the Internet, a misuse of talent? Does any talent exist in the first place? Or, is this blog itself the equivalent of the sun-dial in the shade? An excercise in futility.

Time will tell.