CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

I was never able to find the spaghetti sauce that I wanted, so I decided to figure out making it for myself.  You see, I wanted a combination of a meat sauce and a vegetable sauce, and could not find a restaurant or a recipe that fit the bill.  Note that this is ‘homemade’ only in part, as it includes marinara from a jar.  I have made it completely from scratch, and it’s good, but it’s wayyyy too much work and it takes wayyyy too much time, and it’s only slightly better/different, so the marinara from a jar is simply a nod to the realities of a hectic lifestyle.

This recipe makes enough for four people, plus a healthy helping of leftovers – as with all spaghetti sauces, it’s better reheated the next day.  Ingredients as follows:

3 jars Newman’s Own Marinara sauce
2 lbs. lean hamburger
1 sweet onion
8 cloves garlic
1 bunch asparagus
2 green squash
2 yellow squash
2 cups mushrooms
8 tbsp olive oil
salt
pepper

Heat a large skillet on medium, add 2 tbsp olive oil, and saute half the garlic and onions (both diced) for 4-5 minutes, then add the ground beef, and salt and pepper to your tastes.  Let the meat continue to brown while chopping the rest of the vegetables.

Finely dice the rest of the garlic and the other half of the onion, and keep them separate from the rest of the vegetables as they will be cooked separately.  Cut the asparagus into .5″ to .75″ lengths, making sure not to include the woody base of the stalks, which can be tough.  Slice each squash in half lenghtwise, and then slice each half in half again lenghtwise, so it is in long quarters, then thinly slice making little pie-shaped chunks.  Slice the mushrooms thinly.

Heat a large pot on medium, add the remaining 6 tbsp of olive oil, then add the onion and garlic and saute for 4-5 minutes, then add the rest of the vegetables.  Continue cooking the vegetables for another 10 minutes, until they begin to get soft.  At this point the meat should be close to done browning – when it’s browned, drain any fat, then add to the vegetable pot.  Add the three jars of marinara, and stir.

Reduce head to medium-low, so that it cooks at a slow simmer, cover, and cook for 2-3 hours, stirring occasionally.  That’s it.  I occasionally juke it up with fresh basil or oregano, but it’s not strictly necessary.  I also sometimes add broccoli, but only some of the time since it turns it into a much chunkier, more vegetable-ier sauce.  We have taken to eating over Barilla Pasta Plus spaghetti, which has protein, omega-3s, and fiber, but tastes like regular old empty-calorie pasta.  And don’t forget some freshly-grated parmesan!

There’s nothing magical here, but I can say that this sauce is universally popular, and we always end up eating all the leftovers as well.  It is also a unique combination, in my experience, of a meat sauce and a vegetable sauce, and it’s something

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Can't we all just get along? Probably not any time soon...

Disclaimer: the article below represents the noodlings of a dumbass who is talking about things way over his head, but which he nonetheless found interesting as a mental exercise.

James Buchanan was the first bachelor US President.  JFK was the first Roman Catholic President.  Richard Nixon was the first to resign from office.  Barack Obama was the first African American President.  That leaves some interesting milestones still ahead of us, such as first female, first (openly) gay, and first (openly) atheist/agnostic.

I think there’s a good chance that we’ll hit all of those milestones, at some point, and that it’s just a matter of ‘when’.  I also think we’ll hit them in that order (female, gay, secular).  And I also think that as we hit each milestone, it will create a greatly increasing disturbance among conservative US voters.

The first milestone, female, will not have any overtly negative reaction at home or abroad.  There have been plenty of female heads of state, and anybody who publicly takes issue with that will be nearly universally condemned as a backwards nincompoop.

However, the next one (first gay) would set up the beginnings of a political holy war, as the groups who are anti-gay are really committed to being anti-gay.  These are people who put the behavior of same-sex consenting adults in the same category as child molestation or bestiality.  They will see a gay US President as the beginning of the end of the world, and will fight against it appropriately.

But the last one (first secular) would potentially set up an actual Holy War (notice the caps).  There was a recent survey that showed that people of faith trust atheists to the same level that they trust rapists.  Yes, really.  And a group with that outlook is going to work diligently (to say the least) to prevent it from happening.

Just as an exercise (not a prediction), I could see the future of Presidential politics progressing thusly (major party candidates, unless otherwise specified):

2012 – Obama re-elected, possible female VP (Clinton)
2016 – female President
2020 – gay VP nominee
2024 – gay Presidential nominee
2028 – secular serious 3rd party Presidential candidate
2032 – gay President, secular VP nominee
2036 – secular President

Yes, that goes 24 years into the future, and that seems like forever.  But consider if we were to look backwards, 24 years ago was the election of George H.W. Bush.  Not that long ago, for some of us.  Again, that is not a prediction as much as one possible future outcome, the likelihood of which is open to debate.

However, regardless of the actual dates and progression, I think we’ll eventually see female, gay, and secular presidents in the US, and that that progression of events will stir ever increasing ire among conservative Christian US voters.

Interestingly enough, there is another group whose reactions would, in my estimation, parallel those of conservative Christian US

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Income Equality (lower is more equal)

I’m a data person, and any time I have conceptions, preconceptions, prejudices, opinions, or assumptions, and there are relevant data available, I like to challenge my own opinions with facts.  One opinion I hold is that the United States is losing ground on being the ‘Land of Opportunity’ from an economic perspective.

I’ll stop here to state that I understand I’m talking about ‘first world problems’, and that the average American has it pretty good compared to the average world citizen.  Also, I’m not an economist, sociologist, futurist, or any other kind of credentialed -ist (other than ‘technologist’), so these are just the noodlings of an interested observer.

That being said, the people that put together the CIA World Fact Book seem to know a lot of things about a lot of things, and they share a portion of what they know via their public site.  The charts you see on this page are direct translations of their data into graphical form, and all credit/blame for that data goes to them.

One of the things they gather and post information about is relative income equality for countries around the world.  They share that information on this page:

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html

The chart on the top right shows the Income Equality of the largest 100 countries (by population) from the CIA table, where a larger number is less income equality, and a lower number is more income equality (I know that’s counter-intuitive, but I didn’t develop the GINI scale).  So, the countries to the left-hand side of the chart are the most unequal from an income distribution perspective, and those on the right are the most equal.  The thumbnail view of the chart is pretty small (click chart for larger view), but the red line is the United States, and the green lines are the rest of the G8 countries.  You can see that the US is the left-most G8 member, meaning the one with the least equitable income distribution.

That sucks.  What it means is that the gap between rich and poor is pretty wide.  I think we can all look back over the last few years or decades and see that this has been happening, so although our place in the bottom third of countries isn’t a complete surprise, being the worst of the G8 nations is a bit disheartening.

Income Equality Trending (higher means increasing inequality)

I think that an impartial observer would agree that things are not good from an economic perspective in America today.  However, we have a legacy of bouncing back from adversity and overcoming obstacles.  Are we doing that here?

As you can see in the chart to the right (click chart for larger view), we are not only not improving, but are continuing to get worse.  In fact, only two G8 nations

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Weagle at the beach

Today was the day we took Weagle to the vet for the last time, after her battle with lymphoma.  The photo here is of her last visit to Galveston, which was yesterday.  She loved the beach, it was her favorite place, so we took her for one last visit.  As you can see, we had the beach to ourselves, down by San Luis Pass, and Weagle strolled in the surf and chuffed at some birds, and had her own Sausage McMuffin as a treat.

Weagle was an extraordinary being.  She came into our lives as a tiny puppy, adopted from the Houston SPCA after Houston was devastated by storm damage and flooding from Tropical Storm Allison.  We knew there would be a lot of dogs hitting the shelters after the storm, and we knew we had to help save at least one.

When we got to the shelter, there were two of cutest little black-and-brown puppies in a crate together, litter-mates.  The sign said they were six weeks old, and that they were Rottweiler/Labrador crosses.  We picked one to bring home, and she fit in my cupped palms, and was the calmest, sweetest dog we had ever met.  That changed dramatically once we got her de-wormed and her true nature as a smart, protective, complex, loving, vigilant, fiercely loyal family member was revealed.

We gave her the name of Princess Buttercup (from the film The Princess Bride), and as she grew her face (and howl) began to look very much like a beagle, so we started referring to her by the nickname of Rottweagle (combination of Rottweiler and Beagle), which was quickly shortened to Weagle, and became her permanent name.  We never did figure out her ancestry.

I wrote more about her protective and loving nature two years ago, which you can read here:  http://www.cleverdonkey.com/1385-wonderful-weagle/.

Was she perfect?  No, but who is?  She barked too much, although it was with the best intentions, as she always wanted us to be aware of any real-or-perceived dangers, and we never could convince her the postman wasn’t dangerous (as far as we knew).  She did not enjoy rambunctious puppies, although she tolerated them with extraordinary displays of benign disdain.  She never fully accepted that she was not part of the committee of humans that ran the household, and although she was never actively mutinous, she did sometimes comply to requests with melodramatic resignation and doggy eye-rolling.

But she was a great soul, and highly intelligent.  We recently watched an episode of Nova ScienceNow, where they asked the question, ‘How Smart Are Animals?‘, and they showed some of the astonishing levels of intelligence demonstrated by dogs (and dolphins and octopuses and parrots).  And while it was a very interesting program, it wasn’t all that surprising to us, because Weagle was damn smart.  Smartness is not always convenient in a pet, because intelligence means that the dog will take

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The pitcher in question...

I love home-made iced tea, and have gone so far as to post my recipe for it.  As you can see in the picture to the right, I use translucent Tupperware 1-gallon pitchers for the tea, and after over a year of use the pitchers were getting tea-stained.

I did a lot of things to try to remove the stains – scrubbing the hell out of them, letting them soak overnight with dish soap, filling them with boiling water hoping to cook the stains out, etc, etc, etc.  Nothing worked and the stains just kept getting more stainier.

I eventually turned to the web, and many (many) people recommended soaking overnight filled with warm water and a little bleach (yuck!) or OxiClean (double-yuck!!), but using any kind of chemical like that seemed, well, yucky.

Then I found someone who said they also had a problem with tea staining their plastic pitchers, and they solved it by alternating iced tea with lemonade, and the acidity of the lemonade helped keep the pitchers clean.

I like lemonade, but not enough to put it into my homemade drink-making routine, but it got me thinking.  Specifically, it got me thinking about citric acid, which is the part of the lemonade that is, well, acidic, and I started wondering if I could just buy some citric acid somewhere.

The Tea-Stain Terminator

And, as in almost all cases where I’m looking to see if something is available on the web, I turned to Amazon.com, and lo and behold, they had some – quite a few options, in fact.  I ended up ordering the liquid citric acid in a glass jar, pictured to the right.

I took my most stained pitcher, put about 2 ounces of the citric acid in it, and filled it to the brim with hot tap water and let it soak overnight.  The next day I poured out the water, scrubbed and rinsed the inside, and saw a tremendous improvement, although it was still a bit stained.

But, after treating it a few more times in rotation as the pitcher became empty again, it is now very, very clean.  If you inspect it very closely you can still see some slight discoloration, but it isn’t noticeable in normal use, and seems to be lessening over time with regular treatments.

My plan is now to use this treatment every once in a while on my pitchers, to keep them clean.  And, unlike with bleach or detergents, the worst case scenario is that the treatments might impart a slight citrus taste to the tea, which I don’t think I’d mind if and when it ever happens – and I certainly won’t be worried about any side-effects from ingesting a toxic chemical, because it’s just citric acid, which is edible.

So, if you have stained plastic food containers and are wondering

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The basic ingredients

We love breakfast taquitos, usually from Whataburger or a local Mexican restaurant, but also wanted to make them at home from time to time, and have developed this recipe over a few iterations:

Ingredients:

2 potatoes
6 eggs
6 scallions, chopped
3 oversized flour tortillas
2 tbsp cooking oil
2 tbsp butter
Salt
Pepper
Optional: shredded cheese, salsa, Tabasco sauce, or whatever else you might want to try putting on a breakfast taco

Start a heavy, large skillet heating (we use cast iron) on medium-high heat (set to 7 on our electric that goes to 10).  Wash the potatoes and shred them with a grater, leaving the skins on.  Spread the shredded potatoes in an even layer on a microwave-safe plate, and microwave them on high for 5 minutes, uncovered.  Remove from the microwave and set aside.  This step is important because to get crispy hash browns requires that excess moisture be removed from the potatoes before frying.

Put the oil in the hot pan and swirl it around to coat evenly, then add the chopped scallions.  Cook the scallions until tender and slightly browned, then add the potatoes in an even layer.  While the potatoes fry undisturbed, start another large skillet heating on medium-low (3 on our stove that goes up to 10).

Crispy, brown potatoes...yum!

Crack the eggs into a bowl, add salt and pepper to taste, and stir them up lightly, as if making scrambled eggs.  Meanwhile, let the potatoes fry without stirring until the bottom layer starts to get brown and crispy, then attempt to flip the whole mess over as a whole potato cake, as seen in the accompanying picture.  Expect some breakage of the potato cake, but try to keep it in largish pieces.

Let the potatoes continue to fry until the bottom starts to brown again, and once it looks like the potatoes are close to finishing, put some butter into the other preheating skillet to melt.  The skillet should be hot enough to melt the butter quickly and with a little bit of sizzle, but not brown the butter.

Once the butter has melted, add the eggs and salt and pepper to taste.  Cook the eggs with intermittent stirring to make scrambled eggs.  While the eggs are finishing up, put the three tortillas in the microwave covered by a moistened paper towel and heat for 30-60 seconds on high (depends on your microwave, but you want them piping hot!).  The moistened paper towel keeps them from drying out and helps prevent cracking or tearing when you put together your taquito.

Tip:  It’s a good idea to pull the tortillas apart from one another before heating, so that there aren’t places where they are stuck together from being packaged together.  If you don’t do this, then after you heat them and try to pull them apart you could create holes and tears in the tortilla where they are stuck together,

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How to turn a thin utilitarian onesie into an adorable little mini-dress!

Ruffly goodness!

A little rockabilly one

Two more awaiting wearing...

...and modeled

and a variation with smaller ruffles and bias tape trim!

First, gather your materials:

Your victim onesie – I used a Gerber 12 month onesie that comes in a 5-pack.  Fits my (admittedly monster tall) 2-month old perfectly
Fabric (I used cotton seersucker but any cotton or cotton-poly should do just fine)
Thread
Scissors
Ruler
Pencil or marking pencil (I only had pencil, but it didn’t wash out as easily as I’d hoped, so I recommend a marking pencil if you can get your hands on one)

Your raw materials

Wash your fabric.  For me, it’s always frustrating to have to wait to begin the project, but I’ve learned over the years that it’s really worth it.

Wash the fabric

For the approximate ruffle size you see in the picture, cut two 9 inch strips of fabric that go the entire width of the fabric.  If your fabric is more than 45″ wide you may want to trim it at 45″ so you don’t have TOO much ruffle.

Two 9-inch strips of fabric

Fold each strip lengthwise with the right sides together. Stitch the long side with a very small seam allowance as shown here, making the strip into a tube.

Stitch your strip into a tube

Then, zig-zag the raw seam allowance flat – this means the fabric won’t bulk up when you turn it right-side-out to make your ruffle.  Of course, if you’re lucky enough to have a serger (hint, hint, Engineerboy), you can skip this step b/c you will serge this edge.

Zig-zag the seam allowance

What your finished edge should look like

After that you’ll have two tubes of fabric:

Fabric tubes

Turn your tubes right-side out and iron them flat.

Ironed fabric tubes

On each open end of the tube, fold the raw edge under to the inside of the tube (I did about 3/8″) and iron flat.

Iron under the raw edges of your tubes

[caption id=”” align=”alignnone” width=”300″ caption=”Peeking inside

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Welcome back to the Mynagirl Fashion report, resurrected after many years on hiatus!!  Baby Bootsie has been sleeping peacefully this evening, so I’ve been able to have a nip and quip at the fashion for the 2010 Emmys.  Thanks much to technical crew Engineerboy for giving us these gorgeous images armed with only a remote, a capture card, and some great timing.

Ladies in Nude

Pale neutrals and golds were a definite trend.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Mariska Hargitay

Jewel in Zuhair Murad

Claire Danes in Armani Privé

Claire Danes wears the serious sequins

Sofia Vergara from Modern Family brightens the trend a little with a golden yellow Carolina Herrera.  Engineerboy liked that the beadwork looked like the human genome project.

Sofia Vergara in Carolina Herrera

Golden girl

Glenn Close and her daughter wore matching pale patchwork-y dresses that looked like but presumably weren’t vinyl

Glenn Close and her daughter Annie in matching Rubin Singer

Heavy Hardware

There were a couple Greco-Roman looks, some more successful than not.   I have to say, while I like the cut of Kim Kardashian’s Marchesa column, it’s not very flattering on her. Update – I have become a convert of this dress after seeing some better camera angles on it.  I think Kim looks very statuesque and classic.

Kim Kardashian in a white grecian column

Kim Kardashian in Marchesa

Cool of newlywed Anna Paquin to honor and wear Alexander McQueen, but the gown is better up top than on bottom.  Honestly, it looks a bit like she accidentally tucked the hem into her pantyhose.

The Moyers

[caption id=”attachment_1735″ align=”alignnone” width=”103″ caption=”Anna

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I still *want* to love you, but you're losing me

Dear TiVo,

I read two articles recently that spurred me to write you this letter.  The first article described how at the end of July 2009 you had 3.05 million subscribers, but at the end of July 2010 you were down to 2.38 million.  Five years ago this would have surprised me, but not any more.

The second article was from your site, describing the spiffy new QWERTY TiVo remote with a sliding face and a full keyboard.  I was overjoyed by the news, as I’ve been waiting for a remote like this since I bought and activated my first TiVo back in 2002.  I read the article in great anticipation, wondering how pricey the remote would be.  Hm, $90.  Not unreachable, but seemingly a little steep, which would make it in keeping with everything else you sell.

But then I got to the last paragraph, where the last sentence read:

“The new remote will work with TiVo Premiere, Premiere XL, TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL boxes.”

No Series 1?  No Series 2 or Dual-Tuner?  Leaving us faithful early adopters behind again, are we?

Typical.  This is typical of everything I have come to expect from you over the years.  I still love TiVo-the-technical-solution, but with TiVo-the-company I have gone from love to like to not caring to being annoyed and, finally, to loathing, where I am today.

I now own and use 5 (count ’em) TiVos, but they are all Series 2.  My disillusionment began in earnest when you released the Series3 boxes, and included things like YouTube browsing that were not made available to Series2 owners.  Now, you had a story for why this was so, which was something about Flash, I think, but I didn’t (and still don’t) buy it.  If you had wanted to make it work, you could have.   But, you chose to have those features and functions be differentiators to try and get Series2 owners to upgrade.

So close, and yet so far away

And it’s continued to be that way over the years, up through the latest insult of not letting us have the new remote (pictured at left).  You continue to add new and improved features and functions, very few of which are made available to your existing base of owners, unless they have the latest and greatest.  Now, I understand this from a business perspective, as I work in technology, so I know that it’s hard to keep the installed base happy.  It’s very easy to add new features and functions to totally new and redesigned devices, and your bean-counters are happy to see the R&D and other expenses that go into anything that will grab new customers and dollars.

I can visualize the meetings where you discussed the strategy of

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Typical US Airline Flight

I loathe and despise coach business air travel.  When I travel personally, it’s usually with Marie, and we usually plan to make sure we can travel in comfort.  You see, I’m 6’5″ and not svelte, and coach seating is not designed for me to fit in comfortably, and when we travel for pleasure we either wait until we can splurge on first class, buy a third seat so we have room, or make the best of sitting side-by-side.

However, when one’s company is footing the bill and you don’t have the flexibility that you do with personal travel, you get the seat you get and you have to make the best of it.  You can try for exit row or bulkhead, but those seats are in demand and sometimes hard to get.

Lucky for me, on my most recent business flight I was able to get the exit row aisle seat both outbound and inbound.  The flight out progressed without incident (thankfully), but as I boarded my flight home and approached my row, I noticed that the two inside seats were occupied by a couple, with the man by the window and the woman in the middle seat, meaning that my aisle seat would place me next to the wife.

Now, although I am a big guy, I can sit in such a way that I stay completely in my own air/leg/shoulder/butt space, particularly in an exit row where I can fully extend my legs.  So, I resolved myself to spend 3.5 hours in my polite, curled up, as-motionless-as-possible seating pose, so that the lady next to me would not feel infringed upon.

As I sat down I could sense the woman was not happy about the situation…I mean, who would be?  Even three normal-sized humans sitting side-by-side-by-side in a coach cabin is oppressively claustrophobic, and when one of the three is a big guy like me it just makes it worse.  So, I understood her pained look at her husband as I sat down, and also understood his reassuring patting of her leg as if to say, “It’s okay, honey, I won’t let the traveling ogre squash you!”

So, I sat down, belted up, stuck my legs up under the seat in front of me, crossed at the ankles to keep my knees clearly in my own airspace and not in any way crossing over into her leg space.  I folded my arms tightly, with the arm closest to the woman specifically tucked up as far as possible, so that I was clearly not infringing on her shoulder room, either.

I had also brought a couple of magazines to read, and when I pulled them out I held them with my arms almost fully extended in my lap, and when I turned the pages I did it with my arms fully extended so that my elbows didn’t bend and momentarily reduce her personal airspace.  I also fully ceded the armrest

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