How Did I Not Know About This Website???

Today has got to be one of the greatest days in the history of civilization. For today I discovered a website so near and dear to my heart I can barely contain my joy: Today I discovered the world of online bacon-themed news.

Yes, today, while waiting for bacon to finish cooking, I discovered the Bacon Today website devoted to all things bacon. And for all my love of bacon I discovered so many new ways to eat this “candy of meats” it brings a tear to my eye.

(Pause for a moment of reflection at the mere mention of the website.)

Hallelujah! My life is now complete.

How Many Freaking Bail-Out Programs Do We Need?

The $700 Billion bail-out of the financial industry has not been all that successful, so the government decided to throw in another $300 Billion just for Citigroup. And now they have decided to spend up to $800 Billion on buying commercial and personal debt products???

When does this madness end? If the Fed keeps printing money—Yes. I do know that it is the US Mint that actually prints money—to stimulate the economy eventually all those dollars put in circulation are going to become diluted in value and then become worthless.

Why isn’t anyone in government doing the thankless task of telling Americans that our past actions put us into this situation and it will take several years of strained economic circumstances to get us back to normal. If a problem takes several years to develop why does anyone think it can be resolved in a few months? We need political leaders to come out and tell the nation that things are going to be really bad for a few years and we all just have to suck it up and live with high prices and unemployment until the market works out the kinks itself.

See, I am a big believer in market forces and I think the market should be allowed to remedy the problems we have of ridiculous amounts of bad debt. But, in doing so there will be many, many people who will suffer greatly as a result. I think that it is a good thing, though. People need to suffer now so as to learn from this lesson and change their future behavior. So the folks that thought they could somehow buy a house way outside their price range learn to accept that modes income necessitates a modest house and modest lifestyle.

And if the people who suffer from their poor choices, or the poor choices of others, rise up and confront the powers that be and force fundamental changes in how the economy operates, that would be great. That’s what I think is really missing in all of this. In Switzerland there have been major protests, with significant parts of the population participating, due to the way the Swiss bank UBS dealt with its financial problems. Those protests come from all segments of Swiss society and have been directed at both the bank and the government for not dealing with the bank problems sooner.

How many large protests have there been in this country against the banking institutions and the political leaders who looked the other way as the banks built their huge piles of bad debt. There have been some, but nothing on a wide-scale. I want things to get so bad in this country that people will take to the streets in anger and protest and demand accountability from their government and business leaders. Until that happens, apathy will continue to be the main response to major crises in America.

- – - – -

As for me, I am somewhat apathetic to the whole mess because I reject most of the tenets of America’s consumption culture and live within my means. I have almost no personal debt, a fairly robust savings plan, and a decent retirement plan. Basically, if I can’t afford to buy something outright then I don’t buy it (or buy it with the ability to pay off the purchase within two months).

A New Addition to my Fan Club*

While I haven’t blogged about this before, those of you who know me know I am enamored, for various reasons, of a few famous women. At the top of the list resides the world’s most perfect woman, Tina Fey. She is smart, sexy, funny as hell, self-confident enough to wear glasses on a regular basis and, from what I have read about her and seen of her on TV, a really decent person as well. Coming in a not-too-distant second in the fan club is Amy Sedaris. Again, with her we have smart, sexy, funny, and self-confident enough to wear glasses on a regular basis. Although her funny tends more towards the bizarrely wacky than the observationally witty of Tina Fey which puts her at number two on my list.

There are a few other women farther down the list who are great but don’t meet my ideal. Women like Jodie Foster (crazy smart and sexy but needs more funny), Ellen MacArthur (don’t know about smart but certainly very talented and strong-willed as the youngest person to sail solo around the world, sexy, and probably fun/ny), Kristin Scott Thomas and Tamsin Greig (they seem smart, definitely look sexy, and portray themselves as strong-willed serious and/or funny women in film/tv), and Sigourney Weaver (she’s got smarts, crazy amounts of sex appeal, and, in my mind at least, fun enough to be still willing to kick alien ass to save the planet).

But the newest addition to my fan club is Felicia Day. Her addition might be due to her geek cred as a serious actor in a web-only mini-series, or it might be due to her red hair (a major weakness of mine), or it might just be due to the fact that she entered college at 16 by turning down an admission offer to Julliard to attend school in Austin, Texas with a major in mathematics and music. (She’s got the whole left-brain/right-brain dichotomy solved right there.)

She has done some TV (Monk, House) and lots of movie acting. But what made me fall in love with her is her role as Penny in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I am not a big Joss Whedon fan and stumbled upon the Dr. Horrible series after it was complete but when I saw the full episode—at the link above—I was impressed with Whedon’s story-writing skills and completely enamored of Felicia Day.

 

 

*This is a club of one where I am the fan of other people.

 

[I've got to get back to work on my thesis but I will add more to this post next week.]

Mmmm . . . Pie!!!

So, I got a little crazy yesterday and made an apple die. It’s been several years since I baked anything, let alone a pie. But, my buddy Eric made a pie last week when I was visiting and I thought if he can do it, so can I. And really, how hard is it to make a pie? Not very hard at all, as it turns out. If you start with ready-made pie crusts you can put together a nice apple pie in about 30 minutes, with most of that time spent dicing apples.

My Mom had a box of ready-made pie crusts in the fridge so I grabbed one of them, put it in the pie pan, trimmed the edges, and proceeded to dice apples while the oven warmed up. I decided not to peel the apples—out of laziness more than anything else—and by the time I got seven of them diced the stick of butter was melted and mixed with the sugars (white and brown), flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Throw the diced apples in the bowl with the butter/sugar mix, turn everything over a few times, and you’ve got some pie filling.

Once the filling was in the pie pan my the problem was how to cover it. I wanted to leave one of the two crusts in the box for my Mom to use for pumpkin pie. So, after doing a poor job of trimming the edge of the pie, I had a small ball of crust. I dug out the rolling pin and some flour and had it thinned out to about 1/16″ thickness, but it still wasn’t wide enough to cover the whole top. So, it went on in the middle and I decided to make a crumble to fill in the part of the top of the pie without any crust.

After several discussions with my buddy Eric regarding him making pies I am now aware of the many and varied approaches to topping a fruit pie—full-crust versus lattice (and the debate of flat versus woven lattice) versus crumble. I had left-over butter/sugar mix from coating the apple pieces so I threw in some flour and a bit more white sugar and whipped up a crumble in no time. I added it around the edge of the pie and then it was into the oven.

I knew—and also had heard from my buddy Eric—that you need to wrap the edge of the pie in foil so as to prevent it from burning. I scoured my Mom’s kitchen looking for foil with no success and then spent a few minutes staring at my to-be-cooked pie wondering how to achieve what I wanted to do. I thought of the old paper bag trick I know from cooking a Thanksgiving turkey—you’re supposed to put the roasting pan in a paper bag so the turkey can cook without drying out the crust too quickly. I found a paper bag, put the pie in it, put the whole thing in the oven and set the time for 20 minutes.

Ding! You’re 20 minutes are up. (Actually it’s an annoying ascending-tone chirping sound on my Mom’s stove.) Take the pie out of the bag, put it back in the over for another 25 minutes and go back to washing the dishes. Another Ding! and the pie is done. I turn off the oven, leave the oven door ajar, and let it begin to cool down. After a half hour cooling in the oven I take it out and put it on the stove-top. Another hour after that and the glass pie pan is still too hot to touch with a bare hand. But it is time for some pictures.

On a side note, I never knew how hard it was to take decent pictures of food. I turned on all the lights in my Mom’s kitchen so it would be bright enough and I was still having trouble getting decent pictures of the pie. The three pics below are the best of seven that I kept. These seven were the best from an initial group of 39 pics I took of the pie. Two of the three below needed some color correction done to them to make the pie look more like it did to my eye. But I think these pics show the pie as it really was.

As for the taste review, that is below the pics.

 

Apple Pie 01 (nice golden brown)

 

Apple Pie 04 (Mmmm, cinnamon crumble crust)

 

 

Apple Pie 05 (the cooking show shot)

 

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

We got the first big snowfall of the year in Syracuse today and I went out for a walk in it. (Well, it’s not big by central New York standards but there’s a good 4-6″ of snow on the ground with another 3-5″ of snow forecast to arrive overnight with 4-6″ more tomorrow and tomorrow night.)

I dug out my long-johns, wool socks, and a pair of corduroy pants and added a t-shirt and mid-weight Polartec pull-over fleece. I topped off everything with my L.L. Bean boots, heavy Carhartt jacket and wool hat and mittens—these are the cool mittens with the finger-holes and flip-over front. I made sure I had my phone, a bottle of water, and, most important of all, a pipe and some nice winter-walking tobacco (mostly cavendish with a bit of burley as well). Then I was off into 22F weather (wind chill was at 12F).

It was so awesome!!! I walked for almost 70 minutes and got a face-full of snow—I was walking into the wind—for the first 1.5 miles. It’s so pretty watching snow fall, especially when you look up and see it askance in a street light. The wind was fairly strong—We’ve got a big Alberta Clipper pushing the storm down on us—and I quickly had icicles in my beard and my entire front covered in snow.

My walk takes me up around the campus of LeMoyne College and they’ve got some gently rolling hills on the campus. I just love seeing the snow fall as it blows and swirls and gusts into amorphous shapes before settling across the landscape. There were no footprints in most of the open spaces on campus, even where there were sidewalks. Heck, most of their roadways were not plowed yet. (Whatever partying to be done on campus tonight was going to be indoors, that’s for sure.)

Coming around to the front-side of the campus I got the wind at my back and was partially sheltered in the lee of the small hills on this side of the campus. I had to content with a bit more traffic on this road but there were not many cars and they were all moving slow. A woman waiting for the bus called out to me asking if I had change. She had a $5 but needed to break it to get on the bus. I didn’t have  enough singles to make change for her so I just gave her a buck. She was a bit surprised and at first refused my offer but I said “How long do you want to stand out here in the snow?” We both laughed and she quickly took the dollar.*

Her bus came less than five minutes later as was I turning the corner onto the last stretch of main road on my walking loop. This section of road is the hairiest as there is not much shoulder to walk on and only two street lights over the half-mile length of road. Turning into my Mom’s subdivision I passed the community center and saw a few sled tracks in the snow. Good for them, whoever it was! I got home, shoveled a path across the lawn to my aunt’s house next door—My Mom lives next door to one of her sisters—and shoveled off the steps. I left the rest of it for tomorrow and went inside to have some cocoa.

- – - – -

So far, the snow has been light and powdery and you can look down at it and see little reflective crystals within the snow. If we do get the rest of the forecast snow skiers are going to love it. And I will break out my snowshoes and go for a trek on the tow-path near my Mom’s house. Although I might start out with some early morning sledding down at the local community center where they have a short but steep hill.

 

*She probably thinks I performed an act of charity but I like to think she was the one being charitable towards me. Christianity teaches us to be charitable to others and would see my act as one of charity towards her. But Buddhism would say she was the one who did something for me by giving me the opportunity to be charitable towards her and improving my karma by doing so. If she had not been in need I would not have been able to do something for her. So, as she was the one who gave me the opportunity to do good, she did me the favor.