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Out of my mind... back in five minutes.
Weirdness
Monday, August 11, 2008
My Muse has departed
With all of the juicy stories going on around the globe, I cannot seem to find anything worth writing.
Even trying to explain takes more energy than I have.
Check back every now and then, but I need to take a little time to recharge. My fellow Authors will have something from time to time (I hope).
I keep getting these requests for membership from guys who are using some Russian anonymizer site as their e-mail address.
Just as an FYI, I delete those summarily, because if you can’t use a real e-mail address (including at Yahoo or G-mail), you don’t need to be able to comment here. If you feel you must be anonymous and comment about something I or my other Authors have written about, then start your own blog and comment away.
I promise that I will never know who you are. Or care much.
My all-time favorite musical is ramping up for the Big Screen
Because great things are expected out of Mamma Mia! (we may not see those results initially, but this thing will be in theaters around the world clear through Labor Day), Universal is skimming the cream of Broadway again, reaching a deal to bring Wicked to theaters.
Talk about a movie that’ll make a lot of money…
The musical has been an enormous hit, it’s based on a very popular book, and with musicals suddenly getting as much play as comic book movies - and wouldn’t be something to counterprogram every superhero movie with a musical, like they’re doing this week? - I’m frankly very surprised that this one hasn’t already happened.
You folks have already been treated to some of the best that Wicked has to offer…
So I want to ask who you would think would make a good fit with the movie version?
A while back, I found a clear break in continuity regarding the color of Ginny Weasley’s eyes in the Harry Potter series. (In one book, they are described as green, and in a later book, they are brown.)
Well, I have another question regarding a plot point that seems at the very least unlikely and at worst, downright impossible. I am open to any reasonable explanation, but it needs to explain all relevant facts.
Bear with me for a brief synopsis of the events as they occurred just before the beginning of book one (HP&tSS/PS): Lord Voldemort had been spreading terror and misery to all and sundry, and his Death Eaters were randomly torturing Muggles and killing wizards. But for whatever reason, Voldie gets it into his pointed little head to kill Harry and his parents.
He fails, Harry’s parents are killed, Voldie is blasted to almost a spirit form, the house is destroyed, and Harry is picked up out of the wreckage by Hagrid.
What happened to Voldemort’s wand? James’ and Lily’s wands would have been found next to their bodies (and probably buried with them), but Voldemort’s wand would have been dropped, too, since he came closer to death than even he could have imagined, requiring extraordinary efforts just to stay coherent. Deep in the forests of Albania, I might add.
Wouldn’t his wand have been picked up by the wizarding equivalent of CSI teams? And then snapped in half to make sure that he could never come back to power?
When he finally regained a body in Goblet of Fire, how could he have ended up with exactly the same wand (down to identical cores - both wands had phoenix tail feathers from Fawkes) as he had when he was blasted into near-nothingness thirteen years before?
Having a bad day couple of days and tonight I finally transmogrified into actually feeling like shit.
Fibromyalgia is a shitty condition to have. “Trust me,” he said fervently. Please don’t judge the Patriot’s Journey too harshly for my absence. There are plenty of good things to go around at any of the sites of my fellow Journeyers. (Or would it be “Sojourners”?)
No matter. Let me wish our Eldest Daughter a happy birthday, and tomorrow is Da Missus’ birthday. As before, gifts should be made in the form of tax-deductible gifts to your favorite charities. If you don’t have one, I will be glad to recommend a few good causes.
I’m talking about quick and simple recipes for foods that are filling, nutritious and quick and easy to make for a single guy who is simply trying to impress a girl on the date before you get to taste her mother’s cooking, yet has never learned the difference between ”saute” and “sear”. Pay attention, now. There will be a test later.
Drumwaster’s BBQ Meat Loaf (Prep time: about 30 minutes, resulting in a small-to-moderate mess. Cook time: 75 minutes.)
5 pounds of ground beef (one of those big tubes they sell at the grocery store is perfect)
2 packets (one box) Lipton’s Onion/Beefy Onion Soup Mix (either is fine)
1 1/2 cups hot water
6 large eggs
one section of saltine crackers (about 40 2"x2" crackers inside a wax paper wrapper)
2/3 cup catsup
one 16-18 oz. bottle of BBQ sauce
Turn on the oven and set it to 350F (177C).
Locate and wash a large casserole dish (a big glass dish about 9"x13", and about 2-3” deep) and a large mixing bowl. (The largest bowl you can find. Think “punch bowl” or “family-sized salad bowl”, not “cereal bowl”.)
Before opening the wrapper of crackers, carefully crush the crackers into fine crumbs. Open wrapper and pour crumbs into mixing bowl. Mix both packets of soup mix into hot water, using a fork to mix completely. Pour soup over crumbs. Add catsup to bowl. Add eggs (discarding the shells) to bowl. Blend mixture with fork to a soupy consistency.
Wash hands carefully, just like you see the doctors on TV do. (Trust me. Wash the hands.)
Add hamburger to bowl, and knead with hands until it has reached a moist doughy consistency and all ingredients have been blended thoroughly. Dump the mixture into the clean casserole dish. Pat the loaf until it has spread evenly throughout the dish. You’re definitely going to want to wash your hands again at this point. Make sure you have all your rings while you’re at it.
Go ahead and put the bowl into the sink and run some hot water into it, spritzing a little dish soap into it. (It makes cleanup easier. Trust me.) Dump the fork and the measuring cup into the soapy water
Place the casserole dish containing your meat loaf into the now-hot oven and close the door. Set your microwave or kitchen timer to 50 minutes.
You might as well clean up the dirty dishes while you’re killing time. (She’ll be impressed.)
When the timer goes off, grab some oven mitts and start running hot water in the sink. Open the oven door and lift out the meat loaf, which will have shrunk away from the edges about half an inch all the way around, replaced by the grease which will have been cooked out of the meat. CAREFULLY tip the casserole dish over the sink to pour off as much grease as you can manage to get rid of without actually dumping the whole thing into the disposal (BAD outcome). You’re going to want to be careful not to burn your hands, either, because dropping the dish at this point would result in massive amounts of FAIL, no matter how much pain you may be in.
Just before returning the meat loaf to the oven, pour the bottle of BBQ sauce evenly over the meat loaf to provide the glaze. Continue cooking for another 20 minutes.
Serve hot with a baked potato or with a veggie dish. Leftovers are pretty good, too. (My wife likes meat loaf sandwiches, cold with mayo. )
You’re welcome. In case you’re wondering, that’s what we’re having for dinner tonight at Chez Drum.
And it was an American invention - The Internet - that let you learn this simple-yet-tasty recipe!
And hit up Vegas. We’ll be back Thursday, and my birthday follows next Friday. Take the money you would have spent on my present and send it - anonymously - to your favorite charity. No fanfare, no receipt, no tax deductions. The only ones who get to know what you did is you and your Diety.
Just because. (Trust me, the Diety will be at least mildly impressed.)
In other news, I sent off yet another year’s rent on this site, so I’ll be here pissing you off for at least another year.
What would you say is the greatest single achievement of Mankind? The Great Wall of China? The Internet? The Printing Press? Philosophy? The ability to laugh at ourselves? Democracy? Landing on the moon? Mathematics? The Golden Rule?
In yet another part of our ongoing series about pointless information, I can tell you one thing that has happened in the universe that would never have happened without our intervention - refrigeration. Before humanity came along, there was nothing in the universe that was colder than the temperature of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - at about 2.7 degrees Kelvin (-454.81 Fahrenheit). We have managed to lower temperatures under lab conditions at MIT to about one-half of one billionth of a degree (0.5 nanoKelvin/500 picoKelvin) above Absolute Zero.
Imagine, if you will, a time and place where you are considered famous for one reason or another.
(Okay, for a good reason - something you can brag about at your school reunion, rather than trying to live it down. Be happy I gave you that much. While infamy isn’t as good as fame, it’s heaps better than obscurity, and this is my scenario.)
Imagine that someone made a museum showcase about your life. Something along the lines of a Presidential Library, with photos, letters, journals, detailed information about your life, the whole kit, including the caboodle.
What would you want them to prominently display?
What would you want them to bury in the National Archives with a “Do Not Open Until Xmas 3008” label?
Share your good stuff with us. “Joy shared is doubled; sorrow shared is halved.”
Things that are “taboo” are things that society frowns upon, irrespective of the legality or morality of the act. The very word ”taboo” means:
1. proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable: taboo words.
2. (among the Polynesians and other peoples of the South Pacific) separated or set apart as sacred; forbidden for general use; placed under a prohibition or ban.
This implies that discussion of sacred things are also considered taboo. Such as the discussion as to whether Jesus died a virgin. Or whether Mohammed was nothing more than a pedophile goat farmer with delusions of Godhood.
But this brings me to my question.
What is the most ill-considered taboo in society today? I’m not talking about Muslim culture where a woman isn’t allowed to leave home without a male escort, or Esquimaux culture where it is considered rude to refuse to sleep with your host’s wife. I mean current Western (American) culture. Such as allowing high levels of violence on Saturday morning cartoons but forbidding the word “fuck” or a bare breast except on cable TV.
What is your personal fave among the weirdest taboos of our culture?
Everyone has heard of “Pi”, that odd number defined as the ratio between a circle’s diameter and its circumference. It is usually represented by the Greek letter, Π.
There have been many different attempts at accurately determining the value of this irrational number (irrational simply means that it cannot be expressed as a whole number fraction), ranging from the attempts (in both the Old Testament and the Indiana State Legislature) to state that pi is exactly equal to 3 to the most modern attempts using high-powered computers.
But I was directed to this program the other day, and it managed to come up with pi allegedly accurate to within 32 million places (actually 33,554,432 - 2 raised to the 25th power) in just a smidgen over 48 minutes.
Now we move into the useless information part…
Just to save the front page I have tucked the first 16K (16,384) decimal places of Π below the fold, in case anyone was interested.
To give you an idea of how fine a distinction this is, if we were to postulate a circle with a radius equal to 1 Astronomical Unit (A.U. - the average distance between the Earth and the Sun; roughly 92,955,825 miles), you would only need to take the division down to less than 24 decimal places to define an irregularity the size of an atom. 13 would be enough to reduce the uncertainty to less than an inch.
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