Every New Year's Eve we roast a duck. I started the tradition almost a decade ago. It's not from either of our families, but we like duck, so one year I roasted one, and a tradition was started. I'm a bit sick of the whole holiday meal thing by now, so rather than planning out a whole feast like we did for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we went with the duck, and just looked around at what else we had. Zucchini. Shrooms. Milk. Potatoes. Butter. Asparagus. Cheese.

The duck's out of the oven, and done resting. The potatoes au gratin and roasted zucchini are done. Didn't do anything with the mushrooms. We're ready to eat as soon as SJ carves the bird. Not a fancy meal, and certainly not a difficult one to fix, but it should be pretty tasty.

Happy New Year!

I posted my thoughts about Saddam's execution over on Cricket Frog with a cross-post on Bullfrog at Townhall.com. Townhall is full of such blog entries this morning, as is to be expected. One such blogger, going by the name "The Rogue Jew" had some funny lines in his entry:

• Breaking New- Saddam Hussein Is A Well Hung Dictator
  
• Or Shall we call him a Dope on a Rope. Possibly a new gift Idea for the next Muslim Holiday!
• I pray that G-d sees fit that the “virgins” awaiting Saddam in hell resemble Helen Thomas, Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno!

Ouch, to that last one! I might have added Madeleine Albright to the list.

I wish the guy would learn to use the work-around for block quotes. The template he and I use, for whatever reason, has a block quote button that doesn't work. However, he can still highlight the paragraph, and use the paragraph indent button. It accomplishes the same thing, which is to make it clear what are quotes vs. his own commentary.

Hopping along to another topic, I hit pay dirt last night with a Yahoo! Search on Nickolaus Pacione, the awful self-published horror writer. Not only did I find a rejection letter from Jim Baen's Universe to his submitted short story "Flying Cigars" (rejected within three days, no less!), but also the full text of the latest short story he got picked up by two magazines that have yet to actually publish it. The latter is called "Spectral Exile," and was posted at Spinetinglers, a UK forum board, complete with unflattering comments by a number of people, none of whom is I.

I have to wonder about the quality of submissions when sh!t like that gets picked up for publication. The very first sentence made no grammatical sense whatsoever! It wasn't worth my time ripping the story to shreds, but putting on my Widdle cap, I did take five minutes to rewrite his first three paragraphs. In addition to losing well over half the words, I lost nothing of his original meaning, assuming I followed the guy's disconnected thoughts. The whole thing is filled with sentence fragments, incomplete thoughts, and unrelated thoughts cobbled together in single sentences. This is extremely typical of his writing. If I can follow James Joyce, I should certainly be able to follow Pacione, but I find it quite a struggle.

Spinning My Wheels

This image sums up my day. All week long, I've been the ranking "officer on duty" at my office. In fact, I've been the only company officer on duty. Tuesday was "work like a dog" for both me and my assistant--in the office. We got three days worth of work done in a day, each on separate projects. I worked a deal with him Tuesday afternoon in which we would both be "on duty" Wednesday and today, but would trade off work-from-home days, then both be back in the office on Friday.

Yesterday was dead as a doornail for both of us, with him at home and me in the office. Today might have been nothing for him in the office but was nutso for me working from home.

Again, I got several days worth of work done by logging remotely into my office PC from my den, and my assistant, who really was there, knows it. I didn't drive him nuts, but he is well aware of what I got done, after we traded a short IM session around 4:15 asking if Ed had already left for the day.

I've had it up to 7'6" with whiny sales people on the Left Coast getting all panicky, and sending freaky email and phoning every three minutes demanding something within five minutes that they'd never formally put in a request for, for a client, because their year-end revenue depends on li'l ol' me!

People, if your ass (and your bonus) depends this badly on my ability to turn on a dime for you, with no warning, then you'd better be prepared to either: 1) learn to, and do, the work yourself, or 2) forego your revenue recognition and bonus.

With little to no distraction, I can accomplish three days worth of work in a day, but not five days worth of work. The fact that I got it 90% done instead of 100% done is your problem with which to deal. Nuff said.

I thought this item from Gallery of the Absurd was hilarious. Note the glassy eyes, way overdone mascara, and rubbery lips. Note that the flies are shaped like dollar signs. Do not let your children near those "tater tots!"

Minus 20 IQ Points

How many cat owners do you know who could pull a turkey out of the oven, pop the rack in the kitchen sink to rest before carving, pack up five or six slices from each side of the breast along with all the fixin's, leave the turkey on the kitchen counter with foil loosely over the top and come home a couple of hours later to a cat waiting to be fed? Oliver would have begged, but with nobody around, would have climbed up and helped himself. Eeky would have been on the counter daring me to get my hand between the bird and her mouth. But none of the above seems to have occurred to Emma. She waited until we got home, then sat down and meowed while I diced up a bit of drumstick for her, then waited patiently until I put her bowl on the floor. Maybe she's not really a cat . . .

As for dinner, mom had her top oven on at a relatively low temp to warm up the dinner. It's really hard to keep everything warm for the drive over, even in a cooler with dishtowels, and even when it was quite hot when we left the house, but nothing needed more than a few minutes of reheating time. Dinner was pretty good if I do say so myself. I love the new roasting pan and rack. The high sides seem to do a good job keeping the splatters in the pan instead of mucking up the whole oven.

Can't wait to see what SJ's going to do with all the leftovers tomorrow while I'm at work. We've got the carcass along with the neck, appendage bones, and the wing tips simmering away with whatever onion and apple chunks were still left inside the bird after I dumped out most of them. Sucks having to work this week, but at least it's a short one, and probably will be dead as a doornail with most people blowing the last of their vacation days. I can hope, anyway.

Smelling Good . . .

Between my pumpkin pie and SJ's loaf of sourdough, this house is starting to smell awfully good. I'm not so sure about the pie crust for this one, since I made almost a double batch of dough earlier in the week, and used most of it for the double crust boysenberry pie (now, sadly, and deliciously deceased). That wouldn't have been so bad, except that I forgot to put plastic wrap over the extra dough before I shoved it in the fridge. But what the heck--it rolled out just fine this afternoon, and as far as I'm concerned, it's the filling that really counts, anyway. The batter passed the taste test before I poured it into the crust, so it should be fine.

I think tomorrow will be a bit of a test. I've always just used the broiler pan that came with the oven to roast birds, but it's really messy, not to mention a PITA to heft the bird off there onto a carving board without dripping gooey stuff everywhere. Right after Thanksgiving I treated myself to a brand new Calphalon roasting pan and rack--on half price sale at a new kitchenware store around the corner from my office (The Broadway Panhandler). I really didn't want a non-stick one, and the stainless steel one just happened to be a featured sale item. As far as I'm concerned, it's just as well made, and heavy duty, as All-Clad, but less expensive. I did compare the two brands side by side, and would have spent more had I seen any extra value in doing so.

Though I'm just your average home cook, I really do appreciate having quality kitchen tools, from Henckel knives I bought myself, to Revereware pots mom gave me that are older than I am, but I also have cheap stuff like an indispensible set of Lodge cast iron skillets. My mom gave me her Cuisinart food processor right after Thanksgiving, but I've really only ever used it once. That's one more time than she used it. Dad bought it for her for Christmas, I think, back when I was in undergrad college. Newer models are better designed, but I don't really see that it can do anything that a mandoline, mortar & pestle, mezzaluna, food mill, quality whisk, or a chef's or santoku knife can't do, except speed up the slicing and dicing of mass quantities of ingredients. For your average two-quart pot of chowder, cream of mushroom, or potato-leek soup, I just whip out my Braun "boat motor" to "whoozh" it to the proper consistency. It's easier to clean than a blender. The blender only gets hauled out for an occasional fresh blueberry-vanilla (or lemon) yogurt shake--perhaps twice a year.

My Spock Market ranking climbed all the way from 475 to 501, even after gaining 65.4 million kopeks. I must be among a really competitive set of players who are all clustered around my "net worth." It's odd that 659 million would lose 26 places in the ranks, but so be it. It's still a fun game to play on a Saturday afternoon.

Hmm. My Spock Market holdings are up to 658.78 million "kopeks," aka "Federation credits," from 593.4 million after last weekend's play. I could have made more, but failed to sell "Klingons, Romulans, and More" and "Enterprise" at the right time. Still, for not working on Wall Street, I'll take an 11% gain for three hours worth of work. It's just a game, anyway. Mostly, I want to see what it does for my rank which has risen from the 9000s to 475, since I started playing. If only it were this easy to make U.S. dollars, and if SJ wasn't ranked 204 going into last night's play . . .

Some moron commented on my last two Bullfrog at Townhall entries. Far be it from me to discourage comments, because I seem to get one per 100 readers, but this person's remarks must stand on their own. It's Townhall. Government types read it. If it's not politically related and thoughtful, don't post it there, but if you must, try not to look like a fool. Read the comments if you want a laugh.

On today's agenda is one pumpkin pie. That can be made a day ahead. Yummy.

Joyeux Noel, Feliz Navidad, and Merry Christmas.

~ Froggie

Meals On Wheels

SJ and I spoke with my dad earlier this evening, or last night, by the time I post this entry. We didn't really invite ourselves over for Christmas dinner, but managed to get invited when we offered to bring over dinner for them like we did for Thanksgiving.

I asked whether dad whether he wanted us to bring over Christmas dinner. Dad said they were just planning to have Stouffer's "Lean Cuisine," but he'd check with mom, and asked whether we wanted to stay and eat with them. Naturally I asked whether mom was up to having us over again rather than just dropping off the food. Mom was up for the company. They have no presents for us, nor we for them--just our presence and the home cooked feast.

My side of the family stopped exchanging presents a few years ago. No real need to with two elderly parents who have everything, two middle-aged kids of theirs who don't need anything, and no children of either of ours who would want anything. My cat can be mollified with a pillow sewn from a bit of old t-shirt, filled with catnip from my garden that I dried after the last harvest a couple of months ago, when I let it go to seed.

It's sort of a family joke about Meals On Wheels. When I taught Sunday school as a high school senior, one of the kids in my fifth grade class said his mom was a volunteer for Meals on Wheels. Although I hated to embarrass the guy by bringing it up as an example of charity more than once during the school year to illustrate various lessons, he seemed cool with it, as long as I said outright to the class "I don't mean to single out John (again), but his mom's volunteer work is a perfect example of . . ." You've got to give a fifth grader a way out of looking like "teacher's pet." That seemed to do the trick. Nobody picked on him, and he showed up every Sunday chipper and ready for his lesson.

I have done volunteer work before: teacher aiding fourth-grade math and grammar, and second-grade "art," when I was in high school in London, teaching fifth-grade Sunday school back in NJ, and teaching Head Start when I was an undergrad at Bucknell in rural PA. I've never been a volunteer for MOWAA.

Despite that, I don't really think the folks at MOWAA would mind my cooking my own Christmas feast and packing it up in a cooler to bring over to my own elderly parents to share with them, so they don't end up heating up frozen dinners. Yes, the elderly poor who can't really get out for meals anytime of year need the excess food more than my own parents do, but family is family, and I'm sticking with them.

Today, I think I'll take a leaf out of Kevin Stilley's book, so to speak, and mention a few bloggers I've discovered during 2006 who have become regular readers. First up is Kevin himself, of course. He's become one of my most loyal readers, here and at Cricket Frog. Mutual linkage is good--thanks, Kevin!

Next is Peaches at The Peach Pit. Funny woman--I like the way she thinks! Anyone who urges people to get off their duffs and go vote is okay with me.

Then there's the DesMoines360 and Nancy Dancehall duet. I stumbled across these ladies by clicking on links from other sites I read fairly regularly. We all sort of link to a number of the same people. I should mention Barb the Evil Genius here as well, because she became a reader of mine around the same time, and links to several people I do. Gotta love a name like that!

I also rediscovered a couple of people I used to link to at Sock Monkey before I got orchid forum trolls from five years ago stalking me there back in January. I didn't shut down Sock Monkey (it was my first blogspot blog), but I let it lie fallow until they went away a few months ago.

St. Disgruntled is a copywriter in suburban Detroit with an attitude the size of Alaska. Having worked in advertising myself for almost two decades before switching to an allied field six years ago, I know exactly where she's coming from with her, er, colorful rants. I worked in media, not creative, but her coworkers are everywhere in the industry. I know them, even though I've never met them.

And just this morning, I finally rediscovered Evan Maloney at Brain Terminal. I used to link to him on Sock Monkey way back when. Evan's a fellow Bucknellian who also graduated with a business degree. Before I let Sock Monkey hibernate, he and I actually corresponded a little, although I've never met him . . . it started when I emailed him to ask if he'd mind if I linked to him, and mentioned that I too had graduated from his alma mater ten years before he did. I'm afraid I'm dating myself, but so what? I found a link to his site on Townhall.com, bookmarked it, spread around the links to it here and elsewhere, including Bullfrog, then grabbed an RSS feed in my Sage feedreader add-on. Nice guy, and politically, he thinks like I do. Considering when he graduated, he was probably a bigger rarity on campus than I was in my day when professors didn't feel obliged to force-feed their students left-wing dreck.

That's about it for my mutual admiration society spiel of the day.

Blogger beta won't let me upload an image this evening. Go here to see it. I am getting boatloads of hits over at Townhall! Now, it doesn't surprise me that people stop by from U.S. government networks during work hours (right offhand, the FDA, and the Forestry Service come to mind, but mysteriously, not the EPA). It does somewhat surprise me that I'm getting hits from people using the Washington State government network. Maybe it's U.S. Forestry people at home after work hours, using VPN. Or the infamous ALFs and ELFs measuring me for a casket.

I'm also getting lots of hits from really random places here in the U.S. and abroad. Most so far have done search engine queries on "Lord Monckton." As far as I know, I'm the only blogger over at Townhall to even write about his open letter to Senators Rockefeller and Snowe. After writing two opinion pieces about Putin and the Russian natural gas takeover he's doing, I only got a few hits from ExxonMobil employees, who have reason to be concerned--but none from the Feds. Odd. At least I don't have the Russians all over me for MHO.

On a more upbeat note, since I've been home on vacation all week with SJ, I've been cooking up a storm. The boysenberry pie I made this afternoon was awfully good, with a little melty vanilla ice cream on top. I always make my pie crust from scratch because it's so darned easy; I never did understand why mom always bought hers frozen. She claimed she couldn't make it, but the sawdust frozen ones couldn't possibly have been any worse than her handiwork.

The weird thing is that I don't like pie crust at all, and pretty much avoid eating even my own pie crust (I'll eat the filling!), but everyone else raves about how great and flaky it is. If it's saturated with a dairy product, maybe I'll eat it, but otherwise I treat it like pizza crust--eat what you have to, but leave the edges!

On the menu for Christmas is:

• 11 lb. turkey
• mashed yellow turnip/rutabaga
• mashed potatoes
  
• cran/orange sauce
• bread dressing
• pumpkin pie
  

Other than the turkey, I can keep it all to where we won't really have leftovers. We can do stellar things with turkey leftovers, so that's not a problem.

New Year's will feature duck, as it always does around here. Orange sauce is optional. We usually toss it in favor of something else, even though it's one of those weird really easy "simmer it in water" packages that comes with the neck and guts.

We always simmer the bird carcasses after they've been picked pretty clean, for broth. The broth freezes really well. So, we're semi-nuts, but if we are going to do the whole holiday shindig, we'll get what we can out of it.

Clockwise from top left are Phalaenopsis amboinensis, Phal. bastianii, Phal. Timothy Christopher x javanica, and Phal. javanica. The white one's a hybrid; the other three with stripes are species Phalaenopsises. The amboinensis is spiking, and should bloom within a couple of weeks. Sorry for the pixilated pictures--snagged the links from the vendor's site, and Blogger/Blogger Beta blew them up, even after I chose "small" from the size options. These four orchids arrived today from a supplier of mine in southern NJ.

Sounds a little like a drug dealer, eh? If you're that much into growing orchids, I suppose getting a few new babies in can be a bit of a "high," maybe? For newbies to growing orchids, certainly, but I've been at it for well over a decade, so it wears off, but new arrivals are still greeted with anticipation, and undergo the inspection routine. I've ordered from many other places over the years, some excellent, and some not so good. Frank Schimpf runs Chesterfield Orchid Co., as well as Chesterfield Dahlia Co. I've never ordered dahlias from him--they wouldn't grow any better in my swamp of a yard than German bearded irises, anyway--two years maximum before they rot into oblivion.

I've been ordering from Frank since the early days of his orchid business, but I can go a year or almost two between orders with him. Still, he remembers me, and makes sure that he sends me very nice orchids for my money, along with personalized customer service.

Let me explain that last remark. I placed an online order last week, but instead of having him ship it to my office in NYC to avoid NJ sales tax, I had him ship it to my home, since I'm on vacation this week. Frank normally ships out orders on Mondays. He decided to go fishing last Sunday, making good use of an unseasonably warm weekend day, IMHO, so he left a note for his staff on my printed order instructing them to personally hand pick my plants (as opposed to just grabbing any old plant that had the right tag without looking it over first).

On my order, under "special instructions," I had merely reminded him that my weather was the same as his, and explained why I wasn't having him ship to my office as I normally do. The plants looked great, and I replied to their automatic shipping notice to let him know they'd arrived, looked great, etc. Within an hour, he replied to my email in person. Nice guy, with reasonable prices. Not every plant I've gotten from him has been stellar, but 90%+ have been, so I have no complaints.

This shipment is totally up to snuff . . . and sniffing when they bloom. All are fragrant, and not in a bad way, as some orchids can be. Most floofy big hybrid Phalaenopsis have completely lost all scent, even though they look pretty.

Courtesy of Barb the Evil Genius:

You scored as Special Ops. Special ops. You're sneaky, tactful, and a loner. You prefer to do your jobs alone, working where you don't come into contact with people. But everyonce in a while you hit it big and are noticed and given fame. Your given the more sensitive problems. You get things done, and do what has to be done. "VULCAN NECK PINCH!!!" "owww.......(slump)" Special Ops 69% Engineer 69% Combat Infantry 63% Medic 56% Officer 56% Support Gunner 56% Artillery/Armor 44% Civilian 6% Which soldier type are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Christmas Cactus & Happy Chanukah

This is our Christmas cactus this year. No, folks, I will not bow to the PC police and call it a "Holiday Tree." One, it isn't a tree, and two, it isn't for a generic holiday. If I put out a menorah, I'm sure as shooting not going to call it a "Holiday Candelabra." Click on the picture for the full size version.

Allow me to explain the reason for the featured cactus. Neither one of us felt like dragging a 7' conifer in through the living room sliders to the patio, but I happen to have a nearly 4' tall Euphorbia species which blooms yellow in the Fall, but I've never been able to successfully identify. On a lark, I asked SJ whether he thought it would be funny to decorate that particular cactus instead of buy a tree. Unlike my 3' tall Euphorbia trigona, this whole thing's growth habit is more branches than stems, and it's not ramrod straight upright, so it very much lent itself to being decorated.

A couple of years ago, my water heater in the basement went, and most of my Christmas ornaments were on the floor in paper shopping bags, each wrapped carefully in paper towels, so most of them really didn't survive the flood (mildew damage). I've been a cat owner for well over 20 years, and know better than to have glass ornaments. Thus, what's left of my ornament collection wouldn't do much for a 7' conifer anyway. I had to buy new lights, and was a bit annoyed that I couldn't find a string of plain white ones, but the $2.75 multi-colored mini-lights seem to work okay on the cactus. The camera flash at night pretty much obliterates the mini-lights in the photo, but they look much better than I expected.

As far as I'm concerned, having a decorated conifer in the house this time of year is family tradition, but it's not required. Heck, I don't even have to decorate a cactus--that's not required either. I just thought it'd be a total hoot to do, because it's a bit offbeat and slightly kooky.

Chaunkah started this evening. I don't wish to exclude my Jewish buddies by any means--and you know who you are--so Happy Chanukah!

Company Holiday Party

Gak, this thing sucked the wind right out of the clouds. The intentions of the people who made the arrangements were fantastic, and they double-checked on them yesterday to make sure everything was still as planned a month ago.

It was in a place way up in midtown near Rockefeller Center called Mars 2112--a theme joint that had fake rock walls and long cavernous corridors in dim red lighting. Okay. Two-thirds of us got there pretty much on time, and were served a glass of wine soon after we took our seats. Then nothing for another half hour. The rest of the company arrived, and got wine, more wine, cocktails, and hors d'oeurvres before the first of us got finger food. Then our finger food was ripped off our table before we were done with it because "the entrees were coming out." Half an hour later, nobody had an entree.

From there, it just went downhill. The waiters mixed up pre-ordered entrees and said that half the menu items we'd ordered two weeks ago and confirmed yesterday were no longer on the menu. Nice to admit that 45 minutes after the other half had been served. The waiter waved a hand in the air and said "Welcome to Mars!" Not funny!

After two more hours worth of this bull, I couldn't even get a glass of water, let alone a second glass of chardonnay. I was dying of thirst. If I had to leave the joint and walk to a subway stop to find a newsstand where I could buy a pint of water, then I was going to do it. I left just as dessert was being delivered. Too bad, people. I HAD to get out of there.

Our CEO was in town from Chicago for this party. I tried to sneak out so that he didn't see me leave, but if he saw me, so what? I can explain tomorrow, if need be.

Today was Meilin's last day. Our company used to do things like cake and ice cream for people who leave the company, but she'd only been on staff for seven months, so nada for her from the company. I took her, and Gary, out to lunch today at a decent Indian place a couple of blocks away from my office in The Village. The wait was less than I remembered, and the food was just as good. We all did a pretty good job polishing off our food.

Meilin stopped by my office at the end of the day to thank me again, and ask if I was ready to leave, so we could walk across town to the PATH station together. Ever the Chinese immigrant, she did the folded hands with elbows extended head nod salute at me, before reaching out for a hug. Aww, that was sweet. I made sure she had swiped a photocopy of our office phone numbers. She'll be working in the WTC area starting tomorrow. Not many places to eat around there, unless you walk a little North to Tribeca, but I don't know Tribeca really well. Oh well, we'll figure out something for meeting for lunch--maybe West Village or SoHo.
_________________________________________

Townhall.com sure seems to be working for driving traffic. Cricket Frog started out as my experimental blog on Blogger Beta, back in the day before mass migration happened, as suggested by people who had dabbled with beta. It doesn't really get much in the way of traffic--a few regulars, and a bunch of search engine driven hits, but that's about it.

But, like many other people, I am a political junkie, and a news junkie. I wanted a place to actually voice my opinion about topical news items, and actually have people read it. So far, they are. The Bullfrog hits are coming in from curious fellow Townhall members cruising the member blogs, and people are beginning to comment. Sweet.

Lazy days are good. Didn't do much of anything today. Got gas and picked up a few things at the grocery store, but other than that, it was cook dinner, make a batch of gingerbread, and set up a political blog called Bullfrog at Townhall.com, not unlike my Blogger Cricket Frog one.

Avoid Bullfrog if you're a flaming liberal, otherwise, check it out. It's already generating traffic. Being hosted and available on Townhall.com helps; within minutes of my adding a sitemeter, people started showing up as having visited. Most blogs there don't generate a lot of comments unless they belong to one of the columnists, but "Ordinary Janes" do get traffic, and get read. I only have one entry there so far, but the audience potential is far greater than Blogger, if I update it fairly regularly, which won't be difficult to do, given all the nonsense in the news about which to comment.

SJ made breakfast--bacon, scrambled eggs, and biscuits, so the least I could do was pick up the emergency item groceries and fix dinner. He's the king of breakfast, although I can make really good Eggs Benedict. We hadn't had pork chops in a long time, and still had half a dozen Red Delicious apples. There's leftover super-hot chili in the fridge, but somehow pork chops and applesauce sounded more appealing. I can't see buying applesauce any more than I can cranberry sauce--they each take 20 minutes, tops, to make from scratch. Mom always bought applesauce, but then again, she also always bought frozen pie crust, and usually made instant mashed potatoes up until I went off to college.

Tacking to a completely different topic, I went from 336.2 million Federation Credits (aka kopeks, for all they're worth) to 512.0 million yesterday at the Spock Market at G4tv.com. That improved my ranking from 889 to 616 among the thousands of registered players. Not bad for three hours worth of watching G4 on cable, and trading Star Trek stock over the internet while the three back-to-back episodes aired. The leader used to have a portfolio ten times the net worth of mine, but now it's a little over seven times mine. I'm playing catch-up with people who have been playing months longer than I, but I'm doing a pretty darn good job of it! SJ is beating me, but his advantage dates back to the days during early Fall when G4 had interactive episodes each weeknight at 6 pm, which it no longer does.

Anyway, goodnight everyone, take care, and have a good week.

Friday Thoughts

Mel "Are you a Jew" Gibson's "Apocalypto" goes up against Leonardo DiCaprio's "Blood Diamond" this weekend. The box office estimates are already in for the Friday matinee, and "Apocalypto" was number one, vs. number three for "Blood Diamond." Both movies got pretty lousy reviews. Is there anyone alive who knows nothing about the diamond trade and how the war in Namibia was financed?

Using the same concept as "Black Hawk Down," in taking a news event and making it into a movie, "Blood Diamond" doesn't even have the immediacy of any specific tragic event--it shines a spotlight on decades worth of civil war, and business as usual. If I lived in a cave with no access to the media for the past 30 years, I might be elucidated by the film, but it seems like a yawner to me. Similarly, I have no interest in watching a gory movie filmed in a language that in audio clips sounds like a bunch of high pitched squealing to me. Pass. Not pass the popcorn. Just . . . pass.
________________________________________

The fact that Mary Cheney's having a baby is considered newsworthy to me could get a pass because she's the veep's daughter, but why on earth do so many talking heads have to weigh in it in opinion pieces? Even Ruth Marcus, who wrote perhaps one of the kindest opinion pieces on the subject that I've seen, used it to blast the Bush administration for not being more accepting, tolerant, and legalizing gay marriage. The other opinion pieces I've seen tended to blast Mary for daring to have/raise a child, and bringing it up without a legally married father in the house. They way they go on, you'd think an unrelated male in the house is better than another female who considers herself in a stable relationship with the biological mother. I'm not so sure.

I've yet to see any of these loudmouth wannabe pundits finger any other legally unmarried woman by name, and hold her up as an example of what not to do. Shall, I run down the list? Madonna (with Lourdes) before she married Guy Ritchie, Angelina Jolie (all of her kids), Mel Brown, aka Scary Spice, Geri Halliwell, aka Ginger Spice, Melissa Etheridge, Rosie O'Donnell, Jodie Foster . . . the list goes on and on. Why aren't the pundit windbags ranting about anyone other than Mary Cheney? And why are they not tackling the bigger issue of divorce being the reason that so many kids no longer have a daddy, because the parents split? Why are they not railing against teen pregnancy rates in the ghettos? I guess none of those living in poverty are sufficiently famous to mention, but that doesn't mean the issue at large isn't.

(steps down off soapbox)
________________________________________

Baker et al released their 79 suggestions for how to tuck your tail between your legs and get the hell outta Dodge, without making it look like a "cut and run" job. Not even the troops there think the suggestions are viable. Splashed all over the NY Post today was an article that interviewed the brother of a GI killed recently in Iraq. His brother's fiancee's engagement ring arrived the day after the GI died. Tragic for the Staten Island family involved, and the fiancee, but the gist of the brother's story was "don't give up now and let him die in vain. I wanted to go into the military, and still do, but can't put my parents through that, so I won't, but for heaven's sake, figure out a new strategy, and don't cut and run."
________________________________________

Lastly, a funny topic. I had known about the monkey problem in New Delhi, which briefly made the news a few months ago, but this takes the cake. A judge reprimanded authorities for failing to eradicate the macaque problem, after being given a mandate to do so. Apparently, they're the New Delhi equivalent of NYC pigeons, except that they occasionally bite people.

And the winner is . . . Gwyneth Paltrow for best actress in "How to Be A Dishonest Expat." She was so good that it didn't look like acting at all! This woman is backpedaling faster than a kid on a pedal-boat on a pond. The articles have been many on the subject, but here's the quote from the recent Portuguese article in the weekend supplement of the daily paper Diario de Noticias:

"I love the English lifestyle, it's not as capitalistic as America. People don't talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner . . . I like living here because I don't fit into the bad side of American psychology. The British are much more civilized and intelligent than the Americans."

Um, honey, don't try to claim how much you love America and are proud to be an American. You said the same thing in nearly the same words several years ago in The Guardian:

"I love the English way, which is not as capitalistic as it is in America. People don't talk about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner parties. I like living here because I don't tap into the the bad side of American psychology, which is 'I'm not achieving enough, I'm not making enough, I'm not at the top of the pile."

It sounds like a canned political speech geared to make friends among the America-hating Euros, that you never thought would make it back stateside. Welcome to the global world of the internet. Of course your remarks made it back home, and of course they didn't go over well.

Think about the company you kept in Hollywood. What do you expect? Of course it's shallow--it's Hollywood! But so are you, if you believe it's representative of America. You are also shallow if you buy into the stereotype of the rest of America being all about shotguns and pickups. Sure, that element exists, but you never sat down to dinner with any of them. That element also exists in England, but you never ate dinner with any yobs there either, so your perspective is just a wee bit skewed.

Save your sob story about being misquoted, and having a poor command of Spanish. Your command of the English language must be equally poor if the Guardian also got it wrong a few years back. You can't claim the folks at the Guardian don't speak English.

Here's the sad thing, Gwynnie: I don't think you're all that dumb. I really don't. But you've got to stop shoving your own feet in your mouth, and stop making blanket statements about your home country based on European stereotypes of America and your own severely warped experience here, just because you think it will go over well with your audience. It comes back to bite you in the butt. If you haven't discovered that by now, maybe you aren't as smart as I suspect.

Mus musculus ssp. domesticus

These little rodents managed to somehow get into my house, now that the weather gets down below freezing at night, and not much above it during the day. I've never before had a mouse infestation. Spiders, ants, hornets, and very rarely cockroaches, but never mice. We caught two of them--brown and white like you see to the left. One was nailed by a mouse trap that SJ brought with him from his old house. We baited it last night with peanut butter. Whammo! One dead in the morning with a bit of a splat on the kitchen floor in front of the dishwasher. Early afternoon while I was at work, SJ came down the stairs and saw another one sitting on the rug in my foyer. Whammo, again, but he used one of my hunting boots to hammer it. That may be all we have. My cat's completely useless for actually catching them.

I've never seen ones before that have such clearly delineated light brown backs and milky white bellies, with white bulls-eyes on their butts. I'm used to the ones that run around office buildings in NYC. Those have always appeared solid gray to me like this other one. I actually cornered a gray one at work a good 10 years ago, picked it up by its tail, dropped it into an interoffice envelope, then took it out to the street and dumped it out on W. 23rd St. in Chelsea.

Let's hope those two were the end of it. Last thing I need is one that dies behind the dishwasher and starts to stink up the place.

Hmm . . . Steven L. Layne

I came across a guy named Steven L. Layne on the SFS forum under a thread about things that make you stop reading. One person used as an example the inside jacket copy of Layne's book, Mergers, as an example. In a nutshell, Layne introduces the book by saying it's a story of "four exceptional teens from four different races," then proceeds to name the caucasian guy, and refers to the others as his friends. Right there, he establishes the white guy as the ring leader.

Naturally, I had to have a little look-see to find out who this Steve Layne guy is. Seems he writes for the youth market when he's not gallivanting around lecturing at schools and conventions. After poking around his website, a few things struck me as remarkable, and not necessarily in a good way.

• he looks like a high school basketball coach
• he's a relatively new writer, with his first book published less than 10 years ago, and his second published five years ago
• he has a masters in reading, whatever that is, and a doctorate, yet on his page about his "writer's background," he has some proofreading errors that appear consistently throughout a paragraph

"February of 2004 brought a special Valentine’s gift to Dad’s across America - Steve’s gift book Verses for Dad’s Heart. Longtime friend and colleague Gail Greaves Klinger produced the artwork that brought Steve’s verses farther than they could have ever gone alone. Together these two friends produced a one-of-a-kind book that required three separate print runs in the first three months the book was released! The book seems sure to be popping up in stores for years to come as a seasonal favorite for Dad’s."

First, it should be "dads" with no capital D and no apostrophe. It's plural, not possessive, it doesn't start a sentence, and he's not addressing anyone in particular as Dad. Second, the same error appears in the last sentence as well as the first. That makes me wonder whether he recognizes it as an error at all. Whether he maintains the website himself, or has someone else do it, I have to think he approved the copy for that page, and others about himself.

The copy contained on such sites is by nature self-promoting, but his copy seems a bit self-aggrandizing. It also seems to be more than I want to know about the guy. Thankfully, he doesn't give us the ages of his family members and pets--just their names. I didn't really even want to know that, let alone how "fabulous" his children are. Do I really want to know how much cash he was awarded for winning some prize? No, I don't. It's okay to mention the prize, I suppose. Do I really want to know about every article the guy's ever written? Do I want to know what his favorite foods and restaurant chains are? Seriously--he mentions them! It reads like a multi-page resume. There's too much detail, and more than a little too much preening.

I laughed out loud reading the first sentence on his home page:

"When you hear the words Passionate About Reading spoken in a room filled with teachers and librarians, the name Steve Layne is likely to roll quickly off of someone’s tongue."

I don't doubt the guy's passion for reading. For all I know he may be a really big fish, but his fishbowl is awfully tiny. I'd never heard of him before today, and I'm not likely to ever hear his name bantered about in everyday conversation. I wonder if his name would roll off the tongue of any staffer at my local public library, or that of any teacher in my local public school system.

Seriously, I'm Sane?

Laughing Frog

Passable

Passable

Passable

Passable

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