October, 2007 archive
Beer Batter Chicken 1
Ingredients:
(Quantities depend on how many pieces of chicken you are cooking. This is based on five boneless, skinless chicken breasts.)
Chicken.
1 cp Flour.
1/2 Can Stale Beer (That’s because I found a half can of stale beer left on the porch by someone who shall remain nameless).
Pepper.
Assorted Spices (I like sage, garlic, basil, pepper, marjoram, and thyme, but sometimes I cheat and use garlic and poultry seasoning).
1 cp. Goose Grease reserved from last year’s Christmas goose.
Heat grease in skillet. While grease is heating,
Put flour in bowl.
Add beer and, if necessary, water, to make a batter the consistency of pancake batter.
Add spices and mix well (as I write this, I realize I should have added a raw egg, too. Yums.)
When grease is hot, dredge chicken in batter.
Gently put chicken in skillet so as not to disturb the batter.
Cover skillet with splash screen, if you have one, but do not cover it with a lid.
Fry until brown on one side.
Turn chicken and fry until brown on the other side.
(Approx. 1/2 hour per side over medium flame.)
Serve over rice.
If you feel really ambitious, make gravy:
Pour off excess grease and reserve a couple of tablespoons in the skillet.
Add water.
Add flour.
Whisk out the lumps (it’s okay if you leave a few lumps–makes it look homemade).
Add a little salt.
Add lots of pepper.
Keep adding stuff till it comes out right.
It’s trial and error, my friends. You make an error, you go on trial.
Bean Soup 0
Ingredients:
1 Medium Onion, chopped.
1 generous pour Garlic Powder (approx. 1 tbs).
(Face it, if you have to measure, you can’t cook.)
2 Cans Red Kidney Beans (may substitute black beans).
1 Can Diced Tomatoes.
4 or 5 Italian Sausages.
1/2 tsp Salt.
Several Grinds Pepper.
Four Shakes Basil.
One Small Shake Thyme.
One Pour Olive Oil.
Some Paprika.
Some Hot Sauce.
Heat olive oil (Extra Virgin, of course. Cthulhu says there are never enough virgins ).
Add onion and saute until golden brown.
Brown sausages in the mixture.
Add beans, diced tomatoes, and some water.
Add remaining spices.
Simmer until you can’t stand it any more.
Add additional herbs and spices to taste.
Wait a little longer for everything to cook down.
Best served with Amoroso rolls, but we didn’t have any of those tonight.
Talk someone else into doing the clean-up.
Guiliani Trips over the Facts. Again 0
Whereas Fred Thompson gets his facts straight. From FactCheck dot org (follow the link for detailed analysis):
- Giuliani claimed Sen. Hillary Clinton once called the free-market economy “the most destructive force in modern America.” She didn’t say that. She quoted another author who said free markets were “disruptive.” She also said free markets bring prosperity.
- The mayor falsely claimed Clinton proposes to give $1,000 to “everybody.” Her proposed subsidies to workers’ retirement accounts would be for couples making up to $60,000 a year and would be $500 for those making up to $100,000.
- Giuliani falsely claimed that more than 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product is spent on “frivolous” lawsuits. The figure is from a study about the cost of all lawsuits.
Honestly You Just Can’t Make This Stuff Up 0
The problem was, the demand was written on the suspect’s pay stub. That clue, along with fingerprints retrieved from demand notes from two convenience store robberies on Sept. 30, led to the arrest Tuesday of Robinson Rivera for all three crimes, police said.
HT to Linda.
Public Discourse Has Gone into the Crapper 3
A comment here has implied that Democrats and Republicans both are more or less equally responsible for the decline in the level of public discourse.
I’m not going to take on the comment when Digby has already disposed of that line of reasoning.
Not that I think Democrats are inherently the greatest thing since sliced bread, but I will point this out: Republicans turned me into a Democrat.
Before Bush, I was not a contributing member of the NAACP, the ACLU, the SPLC, Moveon.org, or KOS.
Now I am all those things.
Because I care about the blood that has been shed to create, preserve, and protect the ideals of the Founders.
I care that the government of the United States of America should stand for something other than invading civil liberties and torturing perons whom the Current Federal Executive doesn’t like.
I care that this great experiment not be betrayed, as it is being betrayed by the Current Federal Administration.
I’ve Been to Lake Eola Park 2
Frankly, it ain’t that great:
According to wftv.com, 22-year-old Eric Montanez was in April this year caught on video camera providing nourishment to a group of the less fortunate in Lake Eola Park in contravention of the ban on “mass feeding in one area”. He was duly cuffed for his trouble.
Neither, for that matter, is Orlando.
Near Death Experience 2
I went to the local Radio Slum today and, on my way back, I’m sitting happily in the left turn lane.
The light turns green.
And the bozo in the straight through lane to my right turns left, nearly hitting me. Had I not laid on my horn (and I can count the number of times I hit my horn in a year on two hands–well, maybe two hands and a foot), the oblivious selfish auld phart probably would have hit me. He still managed to cut me off.
Then he proceeds to drive ten miles per hour under the speed limit ahead of me for the next mile and a half until he turns off at the Senior Center or the therapy site or whatever.
But that was nothing like this, what happened a few miles up the road from me.
Difference between ordinary ignorance and wingnut ignorance.
Via Atrios.
Common Law (Updated) 0
Peeve 2
After all these years, you’d think engineers would be able to design a coffee carafe that wouldn’t leak when you were pouring from it.
But, nooooooooooooo.
Guiliani–er–Errs 3
From FactCheck dot org:
The actual increase in the size of the force was about 3,660, or about 10 percent, during the period Giuliani pinpoints. And Giuliani doesn’t mention that the cost of hiring about 3,500 of the officers was partially covered by the federal government under President Bill Clinton.
On another matter, we question Giuliani’s claim that on Sept. 11, 2001, he had a new command center “up and running within half an hour” of being forced to evacuate his primary center near the World Trade Center. In his 2002 book, “Leadership,” he says that “we arrived about noon” at the backup site, which was two-and-a-half hours after the evacuation.
Awwww, forget it.
He doesn’t err. He lies. (That’s an honest word for “spin.”)
He would be a fitting successor to the Current Federal Administrator.
Tradition and all that, you know.
Exit, Stage Right 0
The Washington Post recently explored the exit of top aides from the Current Federal Administration:
All the more so in a White House beset by an intractable war, a hostile Congress, a shipwrecked domestic agenda and near-historic-low approval ratings. The long-term ideals that many of them came to the White House to pursue appear jeopardized, even discredited to many. They tell themselves that they have acted on principle, that the decisions they helped make will be vindicated. But they cannot be sure.
A number of the persons quoted in the article expressed regrets of various kinds.
But nowhere did they express regret for betraying the ideals of the founders and dragging the sacred honor of this nation in the dirt.
Drumbeats: Buried Lead Department 0
Deep inside the story about Swampwater, General Pollyanna Speaks:
He asserted that the Iranian ambassador to Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Qomi, was a member of the al-Quds Force of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Reuters news agency reported. U.S. commanders have accused al-Quds of funneling roadside bombs and other weapons to Shiite militias in Iraq.
When asked whether the Iranian government was responsible for killing American soldiers, Petraeus told a small group of reporters: “They are responsible for providing the weapons, the training, the funding and in some cases the direction for operations that have indeed killed U.S. soldiers,” according to Reuters.
Phillybits has more.
And the drums beat: More war, more war, more war. Make up a reason, make up a reason, make up a reason.
DL Tomorrow 0
Tangier Restaurant, 18th and Lombard, Center City Philadelphia.
The hamburgers won honorable mention at the the Inky, but I like the Fish and Chips.
Adventures in Linux: Podcast Edition (Geek Alert!) 1
Many times, when I’m at the cooling tower place, I don’t spend all my time on the floor. Sometimes, I just sit in an office and write.
Friday, I dropped into the local Milford Radio Slum looking for a portable radio so I could listen to WSDL when I’m doing the writing thing.
Now, I already have a couple of portable radios. One I keep in the church office so I can listen to WHYY while I’m doing the Treasurer thing. One is in no shape to travel because the antenna no longer telescopes and it cannot be safely put in my travel bag.
And I came out of Radio Slum with an MP3 player which also contains an FM radio. It was on clearance and cost only $40.00.
The radio was not strong enough to pull the station that I wanted. (No surprise in a big steel building 70 miles from the station.)
So I decided to enter the wonderful world of podcasts.
The MP3 player has a USB connection.
I connected it to the box and, after a bit of mucking about, I realized that Slackware was seeing the MP3 Player as a SCSI drive and calling it “sdc1” (Linux seems to see everying except an IDE device as a SCSI device).
I got it to mount by entering the following line in my FSTAB.
/dev/sdc1 /media/player auto auto,user 0 0
(Instead of mounting to /mnt, like most other drives, including the CDROM and the DVD writer, it mounts to /media, because it is a media player).
I was then able to manipulate the player like any other drive.
I started nosing around for an aggregator that I could use to automate the downloading of podcasts, and I found Podracer. It works like a charm.
One hint, though: Podracer, like most other *nix programs, must be installed by root (for those poor folks who still use Windows, root is sort of like the Windows “Administrator,” only secure). Howsomever, when it’s run for the first time, it should be run by the user name of that you wish to use to run the program. If you run it the first time as “root,” it will not work for other users. The programmer advertises it as a very simple program, and that, my friends, is truth in packaging.
Right now, Podracer is running and happily downloading podcasts that I will listen to later.
You list the rss links to the podcasts you wish to download in a simple text file in this format (the number sign means that line is “remarked out,” that is, ignored:
# ChuckChat Freestyle
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChuckChat
The next step is to identify podcasts I want and to set up podracer as a cron job.
(I’ll leave out the part about calling Opie and having him point out the obvious to me, but my geek license is officially rescinded.)
Torture in the News–Not 0
This week’s On the Media explores the (lack of) coverage of the torture memos on the big three TV network news shows.
Go to the website or listen here: