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Google Vs. DOJ - Satire?

It’s funny because I think we all believe thats how things really get done in Washington.

Google Vs. DoJ

Sound Familiar?

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to dragthe people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

— Nazi Reichmarshall Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

Read this open letter, and tell your conservative friends.

Movie trailers redux

Sleepless in Seattle

The Shining

Hilarious!

Science Can Be Fun

So I know this person we’ll call “F” who does brain research. We’re having a totally off the wall conversation about what I think would be fun to do to study brain activity and in a related vein “F” says “I have a pic of an MRI of a bj”

!!!!!!!!

So I ask if this was an after-hours grad student hijinks thing, or a legitimate study. The after hours idea makes the most sense to me, because I can’t imagine how you’d word the grant application to fund that sort of thing. Maybe for the Viagra set of drugs? As it turns out, “F” doesn’t know anything about it, but found the pic somewhere, presumably in some database and it was an actual study.

It reminded me of the Psych building at UW-Madison with the grad student postings to participate in their experiments.

Wanted: “intimate” couple for neurology scans. Must be borderline exhibitionists. Legitimate scientific research. No names will be used, the only photos taken will be of your brain.

Raise your electronic hand if you’d do that.

Um, no.

PS Sorry for the gear shift from cute Adam things to weird science experiments.

Rrraooorw!

Last night Adam showed up at our bedside at 3:30am.  Too sleepy to try to take him back to bed, I let him sleep between us.

Somewhere around 5:30am I hear Adam make his all-purpose lion/tiger/monster growl noise in his sleep.  It was almost cuter than when he laughs in his sleep.

I wonder what little boys dream of to make them growl in their sleep?

Banana Bread Part Deux

Last night I made banana bread again. This time I used frozen bananas that had been thawing in the frig for 2 days. I used my silicon baking pan again for the task and, as promised, I touched the pan after I’d taken it out of the oven.

Yep, its hot to the touch. Not like metal or glass because it didn’t burn on contact, but it was still pretty darn hot.

I guess the moral of that story is, if you really had to take one out of the oven because evil baking gnomes had taken all your oven mitts, you could do it and not have blistered fingers if you were really quick.

Also, as an interesting visual — if you take lovely blackened thawed bananas, cut the top off, turn it upside down and squeeze on the un-cut end your banana will slide right out into your bowl and make a wet plopping noise when it hits bottom.

That is all.

Changes afoot

First, a quick warning:
If you keep a bottle of Beajoulais Noveau for 2 years, expect it to taste like a bit, um, dusty.
In fact, use it for cooking.
Don’t drink it, unless you really need some wine.

Also, in the interest of separating personal opinions and rantings from a more public me (I’m sure you know what I mean), we’ll be moving this blog to another location. It isn’t ready yet, and I’m not ready to post the new domain yet.
Anyone who wants to know can e-email me or leave a comment and ask for directions.
I’d expect the new location to be up by the end of January. If you see a new layout here, you’ll know its moved.

See ya on teh internets, ppl.

Cooking with Silicone

For Christmas I got a lovely set of silicone baking pans (muffin/9” cake/bread pan). Tonight I had my first opportunity to use one when I made banana bread.

I’m impressed. The bread baked evenly and didn’t stick to the pan. I didn’t think to try and touch the pan when I pulled it out since I’m usually not in the habit of touching things coming out of a 350F oven. I may next time to see how hot it feels.

I’m not sure I’d use one for something heavy like lasagna, but for most baking applications I think they’re great.
I highly recommend getting a set if you like baking.

Movies, etc

Last night Mike and I saw Narnia. And just as I did as a pre-teen and a bored 23yr old re-reading the books because there was literally nothing else to read where I was, the Christian symbolism totally missed me.
Seriously.
If I’d never heard a pastor on Christmas eve talk about it, or seen churches plugging it like it was whatever that Mel Gibson movie was (i think some called it the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre), or read/heard any of the other hundreds of stories about how Lewis was a Christian apologist I swear I would have missed it completely.
Son of Adam? Daughter of Eve? Lion sacrificing himself on an altar to appease deep magic.
Huh?
Seriously.
It could have been Son of Odin/Zeus/Osiris and Daughter of Freya/Athena/Isis. Aslan could have been a nice bull named Mithras ritually sacrified every midwinter.
Um.
And sure, I read the Wikipedia articles on each book (mostly because I’d forgotton most of the books, except for the bit where they all die in the last book). And each article told me exactly how each book was like some biblical story.

I think some guy named Heinlein wrote a book about a biblical story once, too.

Anyhoo, as a child I was raised Catholic and I’m sure some of us know what that means.
Yep, almost NIL in the bible reading. Round about the 7th grade I ordered some books through the book order thingy and got some nice books on Greek Mythology.
Then I had some friends who were all like crazy protestant christian and all so I read a few chapters of the old testament because everyone had read the bible cover to cover.
And I thought to myself, wow, this reads a whole lot like those other mythology books that used to be someone’s religion except its not even as interesting. I never finished it. I even shelve the bible, over Mike’s objections in the mythology section of our books. I suppose I could file it in the philosophy section, or maybe in the history section next to the book called something like the Power and Politics in making the Bible.
So I’m sure you can see how I failed to see that C.S. Lewis was evangelizing to me and maybe even forgive me a teensy bit for having a blind spot to these things.

The only thing that was driving me nuts through the movie was WHO IS DOING ASLAN’S VOICE??!! AAAAAAAAGGGGGH!
I kept having these little Star Wars flashes. In fact, I kept hearing Aslan say “the force flows from within us…”
Clearly Alec Guinnes is dead, not James Earl Jones, not Ewan McGregor, not Samuel L (but that would have been awesome), and I totally forgot about Liam Neeson since he was killed by some overly tatooed sith in Ep. 1.

There was one preview for a movie about college basketball in the era of segregation I want to see, which I will admit is completely out of character for me. It looks good. It’s called Glory Road. Anyone up for an uplifting sports movie?

Government-Sanctioned Insemination

A while ago I blogged about the insane state of Indiana and how a republican state legislator wants to make sure that unmarried women can’t get artificially impregnated.
It would seem Virginia has one of their own from white-trash central, Manassas, VA.
Read here.

Everyday I read the Post, browse Fark, CNN, and read my list of political and scienctific blogs (and my friends’ blogs too).
I’m really in a dead panic about the state of my country and the direction it is taking.

It reminds me of all the bullies when I went to school. Not the ones who beat kids up in the hall, no the ones who intimidated other students and ridiculed them for their beliefs and their politics and said if you don’t like Reagan, then STFU and move to Russia.
I didn’t like Reagan, and I’m definitely not a communist or a Stalinist. I lean left and believe in social welfare and taking care of our fellow man, but I also appreciate business and enterprise and I enjoy our constitutionally protected rights. These people, however, believe in a more Machiavellian government and ruling by fear and intimidation and hitting people with the backside of the bible. And the democratic leaders in this country can’t seem to do a damned thing about it and middle f’ing america is too scared and cowed by shadowy men in shadowy organizations spreading fear and terror across the country and they’re also afraid of al-qaeda, too.
Yes 9-11 was scary and I was right here in DC. I saw the huge smoking hole in the Pentagon. I lived near Dulles airport when all sorts of post-9/11 crazy shenanigans were going on in the middle of the night. I still occassionally look at an airplane flying and wonder if its really going to land where it’s supposed to. I worry about an attack on DC and the housing market going kerplop, the job market doing the same and being financially ruined. I don’t worry about it every minute of every day, and the thought that it could happen doesn’t paralyze me with fear. Nor do I vote republican, or endorse domestic (illegal, totally 100% unconstitutional) spying, or the Patriot Act, or the war in Iraq or any of the other 100s of excuses those men in DC keep throwing at us to keep us afraid and putting them in office.
Remember, Bush said a dictatorship would be easier as he could be dictator.

The Weather

Is it March and someone forgot to tell me that I’ve been asleep for 2 months?
Seriously.
High 50’s in January?
I’m not really complaining. I swear. I’m just worried about a repeat of 2002 where we had such unseasonably high temps all winter that everything bloomed all at once in March and I discovered that I actually do have allergies when you can taste the pollen in the air and the pollen on your car in the morning is 1/8” of yellow, sticky disgusting-ness.

Lil Ooks says its warm and sultry down in North Carolina. If I wanted warm and sultry in January, I’d be in the Caribbean or Mexico sipping margaritas.

The other possibility is that we’ll all be lulled into a false sense of security about warm weather and them WHAMMO! we’ll have a month straight of sub-zero freeze-yer-ass-off winter weather that just won’t go away and a blizzard in March.

De-Lurker Week

So I hear from very reliable sources that this is De-Lurker week. That means leave a comment, damnit.

So last night Mike and I were planning on making some delicious pork chops. We stopped at Wegmans to pick up some accompianments and I dropped Mike off to get started while I picked up Adam.

When I arrived home, the other car was gone. I was confused. Where could Mike have possibly gone in 15 minutes? Why would he have gone? The note jammed in the door said all I didn’t need to hear.
“Major problems with server at . Will call when I know more.”

So our relatively brand new server at work, a DELL not even 6 months old apparently has a bad motherboard. After many hours of effort in troubleshooting and restoring from back-up, Mike was able to come to bed, but I don’t know when that was because I was sound asleep.
And he’s sick and was planning on taking the day off if he was still sick. Instead, he’s sleep deprived and at work and still sick and he had to lug that incredibly heavy server upstairs to our office in the building that doesn’t believe in service elevators.
Everyone say poor Mikey and buy him a beer.

Funny Cartoon

Blah Blah Blah Blaaaaaaaah

It is January 6th. Allegedly, the days have been getting longer for the last 16 days. You can’t argue with facts, I suppose. But what I can argue as counter-evidence to the more sunshine fact is that ‘round about January/February the cumulative effect of progressively less sunlight and less warmth and more cooped-upedness are causing my edges to fray ever so slightly and tempers to flare ever so slightly.

I had the vacation and the sleeping in til 9 or 10 and the relaxation and the free babysitting.

Now we have the baaaad traffic, the Mike and Kirstin who are almost physically incapable of responding to incessant beeping at 5:30am, and the cranky Adam who does NOT want to go to daycare.

Yesterday was one baaaad traffic day on both ends of the commute. Pea-Soup fog in the morning with visibility barely off your front bumper and the usual 5:30pm ickiness all the way from 28/Toll Road to Farmwell/Ashburn Village.

It’s almost enough to make you iiiiiiiiinsaaaaaaaaaane as you contemplate minutes turning into hours into days into weeks into months into years of the same god-awful, horrible, soul-sucking commute. One can only hope that things can find a way to get better sooner rather than later.

And with that, I hope everyone has a much merrier winter than this and we can comfort ourselves in the fact that we’re not living 90 miles from the arctic circle with nearly 24hours of darkness, or surely we’d all be alcoholics or prozac-popping addicts.

Observed absurdly funny phrase

“….that would have gone over like a fart in church.”

gigglesnort

Fun with sleepiness

Around 2am I’m downstairs watching TV and Mike is definintely upstairs playing with Civ4. I’m channel surfing and watching all the bad movies airing on New Years Eve. Mike came down and said “what are you watching?”
Me: (mumbling sleepily) “Animal House”
Him “As in On the Prairie?”
Me: “Yeah, Animal House on the Prairie”
Him taking TiVo and pressing the channel display “Ah, Animal House, why did you say Little House?”
Needless to say, it was time for bed.