Friday Food Blogging part 1

The past two mornings, I've made the Most Delicious Cream of Wheat Ever. There are no pictures because, well, it's Cream of Wheat, but if tastes could be transmitted via ftp, http or even gopher I'd have set some aside.

The best part about this, it's easy.

Step 1: Make Cream of Wheat per box instructions.
Step 2: Dice 1/2 to 1 apple per serving
Step 3: Heat apple pieces in pan over medium
Step 4: Add a Kahlua and a little water to keep the apples from sticking
Step 5: When the apples are soft, and there isn't an abundance of liquid with them, add it all to the waiting Cream of Wheat
Step 6: Profit Enjoy.

There's no need to add any sugar, the apples have plenty and the Kahlua adds a nice little bit of unusual yet delicious flavor to the entire thing.

The Catch-up

I've intended to keep a book log for a bit more than a year now, and that road's nicely paved by now. What's kept me from actually following through is a combination of laziness (shocker!) and not knowing where to start. Hopefully, by doing a quick recap of what I've read in the past few weeks, I can get a little bit of inertia.

So for now, here's the (very, very brief) recaps:

The Forever War and Camouflage by Joe Haldeman

Both are quick reads dealing with war, violence and communicaion. If it weren't for a rather male oriented view of women in military service, The Forever War would be a signifcantly better novel, entirely due to the ambiguity at the end of the war. As it is, every time the problematic part of The Forever War came up, I focused on it a little too much, especially considering it had little to do with the plot of the novel.

1491 by Charles C. Mann

An overview of current thought on the Indian civilizations in terms of population size, and technological and cultural complexities before and slightly after Columbus. Well researched and very clearly presented with nice rhetorical touches, this is a really excellent book.

The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney

The title says a lot about the book, but Mooney's pretty balanced in his approach to the topic, noting instances of Democratic abuses of science and scientific phrasings. Plus, he talks about doing shots. Party on, Chris!

Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut by James Marcus

A light, entertaining read. Marcus seems to be trying to make his time at Amazon a little bit more literary, or possibly he's using words and phrasings that he knew wouldn't fly too well in short reviews, because the book is peppered with nicely erudite sentences that try just a little too hard. Fun though.

Jumper by Steven Gould

This is the precursor to Reflex which I read about a year ago. Davy Rice discovers he can teleport ("jump") when he's 17 and awainting a whooping via his dad's belt buckle. The story then traces his attempts to escape from the shadow if the trauma of his life. I very much enjoyed the book, reading it all last night.

I'm

Stolen from Uncertain Principles:

I'm a mess
I'm a Mindless Idiot
I'm a Wheel
I'm Always in Love
I'm Bound for the Promised Land
I'm crying
I'm Finding it Harder to be a Gengleman
I'm Getting Back into Getting back into You
I'm Glad
I'm Going Slightly Mad
I'm Going to Change the World
I'm Goint to Memphis
I'm Gonna See You
I'm Having a Heart Attack
I'm in Love with my Car
I'm John Kerry
I'm Leavin' Now
I'm Lonely (But I ain't that lonely yet)
I'm Looking Through You
I'm Not Angry
I'm Not Bitter
I'm Not Here
I'm Not in Love
I'm Not Sacred of You
I'm Old Fashioned
I'm On Fire
I'm Only Sleeping
I'm Sailin
I'm Set Free
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry
I'm So Open
I'm So Tired
I'm Sorry I Love You
I'm Still Your Fag
I'm The Man Who Loves You
I'm Tounge-Tied
I'm Totally Not Down With Rob's Alien
I'm Waiting (Leeanne's Song)
I'm Waiting for the Day
I'm Waiting for the Man
I'm With Her
I'm Your Kind of Guy
I'm Your Man

Gonzo Imperial Porter

Brewed by Flying Dog Brewery from Denver, it's a fitting tribute to Hunter S. Thompson. Bitter, but with acerbic wit, dark as anyone on the Christian Right probably assumes Thompson soul is, and with enough flavor and bite to make you take your time with this beer.

The 9.5% abv creates a sensation much like Thompson's work does in me; it's fun to visit every once in a long while, but it's not something that I'll want around to casually pop open. I'll have to try it in beer bread to see of some of the flavor comes through better without all the alcohol taste. Hopefully it does, as there's probably no way I finish even the four pack anytime soon.

A brief update on eMusic downloads

Oh weblog, how I've forgotten you. To make up for that, here's a list of what I've downloaded from eMusic, solely in terms of full albums.

16 Horsepower - Folklore
Aimee Mann - One More Drifter in the Snow
Asobi Seksu - Citrus
Bert Jansch - The Black Swan
Bobby Bare Jr. - The Longest Meow
Devotchka - How it Ends
Devotchka - Una Volta
Dirty on Purpose - Hallelujah Sirens
Dirty on Purpose - Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow
Dirty Three - Horse Stories
Finest Dearest - Pacemaker
Girl Friday - Swimmer
Heavenly - Le Jardin de Heavenly
Heavenly - The Delcine and Fall of Heavenly
Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights
Joseph Arthur - Nuclear Daydreams
Les Issambres - Sand Theatre Poetry
Low - Secret Name
Low + Dirty Three - In the Fisthank 7
Of Montreal - Satanic Panic in the Attic
Of Montreal - The Sunlandic Twins
Old 97's - Drag it Up
Old 97's - Wreck Your Life
Richard Thompson - The Old Kit Bag
Shearwater - Everybody Makes Mistakes
The Black Keys - Thickfreakness
The Chalets - Check In
The Green Pajamas - Seven Fathoms Down and Falling
The High Violets - 44 Down
The High Violets - To Where You Are
The Innocence Mission - Befriended
The Methadones - Not Economically Viable
The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely
The Organ - Sinking Hearts
The Pipettes - We Are the Pipettes
The Rogers Sisters - The Invisible Deck
The Russian Futurists - Our Thickness
The Submarines - Declare a New State
The Weepies - Say I am You
The Wrens - The Meadowlands
Venice is Sinking - Sorry About the Flowers
Vivian Linden - Watch the Light Fade
Vox Vermillion - Standing Still You Move Forward
Yo La Tengo - I am not Afraid of You and Will Beat Your Ass

Some quick thoughts: The Submarines are delightful, potentially more on this later. I love Vox Vermillion, many others will not. The Pipettes have, indeed, dropped me in their nets. I don't remember a darn thing about Vivian Linden, The Organ, or Joseph Arthur. The Rogers Sisters were dissapointing. The Weepies are nearly perfect background music. Devotchka remain my favorite band that features a french horn. There aren't nearly enough downloads available. I have over 50 albums in the Saved For Later list. I don't have enough time to really know most of this music.

Work: The Next Generation

I hurt in ways that are not unusual by themeselves, but the combination of aches, near muscle pulls, bruises and other abrasions have me seeking an odd combination of comfort food bedfellows: beer and tapioca pudding. I'm sure it'll be just like bubble tea. Honest.

Hooray Beer! Hooray Weekend!

Employment

Today was my third day of training at a national shipping company so that I may become a package handler. My legs look like I owe someone money. Not enough debt to break bones, just enough to slap a rubber hose across them repeatedly. My right forearm looks roughly the same. In short, ow.

The job kind of sucks. The pay definately sucks. The hours don't suck, but only because I don't have any sort of social life, and as I'm not getting paid enough to have one, this works out rather well. The bright side of this: I get to work in a field (manual labor) that I've not yet worked, and I get to drop my gym membership and not baloon up like a Sally Struthers.

eMusic!

I have an intense dislike for DRM. It's a pointlessly restrictive method of copy protection that's as functional as a 20 year old Yugo. It's also why I'll never purchase any music from iTunes. To me, limiting myself to a single type of portable music player (or doing so on this side of the DMCA, anyway), and to a small amount of transfers is more cumbersome than buying a CD and then ripping the tracks.

I'd pretty much resigned myself to only buying physical copies of music, so I was pleasantly surprised by a post on BoingBoing about eMusic, a site that has legal downloads (and not quasi-legal Russian based servers) with no DRM, no restricions on transfers between storage devices, and a high bitrate.

Their selection, for me, is really quite good. Last night I downloaded the Old 97's album Wreck Your Life and a couple of songs from The Weakerthans. Today I used up the rest of my free trial (25 songs) on a few songs from Spain, Vox Vermillion, Petra Haden (from that dog. and The Rentals), Eletric Frankenstein, Future Bible Heroes (an alternate outlet for Stephin Merritt), and The Decemberists.

In the light of day, I'll probably activate the billed portion of my subscription. $10/month for 40 downloads means about $3 a cd, and still room in the budget to, you know, eat. I'm in favor of eating, especially to good, new music.

A man who should wear tweed

From the Village Voice, via Boing Boing

He is kind, awkward, and modest, and tends to explain things with charts.

This is not the context you're looking for

Pulled from Open Thread 68 at Making Light we have quite the painful imagery:

fanwanking the lemons of bad writing and worse acting into an only slightly palatable lemonade

Edited to add another bit of geeky behaviour:

"I've got to go polish Boba Fett."
This is not what it sounds like either.