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

The proposed site of the so-called 'Ground Zero Mosque'

I blog this morning feeling quite thoroughly American.  I have taken paid time off from my stressful but cushy job where I work from home for a corporation halfway across the country.  Engineerboy is manning the homestead while some electricians work their electron magic on our old 1940’s-wired cottage.  I’ve taken refuge at a local coffee shop, chilling in the air conditioning with an espresso drink, a blueberry muffin, and Wi-Fi.  I’m humming along to the Garbage song that’s softly playing in the background.  Baby Bootsie is snugly snoozing and strapped to me in the that marvel of upper middle class parenthood engineering, the Baby Bjorn Synergy.  The only other patron of the coffee shop is a retired grandfather who chats with the coffee shop owner about how he comes here every day for coffee and Internet access because he doesn’t want to pay AT&T $50 for broadband at his apartment, then he proceeds to head out in his brand new Mercedes. 

The whole scene embodies a lot of what is unique, slightly ostentatious, but ultimately lovable about America – the coffee shop owner happily offering free Wi-Fi to entice the locals to spend time with coffee and muffins, my husband and I fixing up our crappy old war cottage one paycheck at a time, me getting my choice of whole, 2%, skim, rice, or soy in my latte.  Even among the cushy capitalist trappings, it’s down home and small town and very friendly and sweet.  The paintings on the wall are from our favorite local artist (the same who did the Donkey family tattoo marathon session when the G-I-R-L turned 18, paid for in trade for us doing his website).  The New York pizza shop that connects to the coffee shop (Who has a combo pizza shop / coffee shop?  This place, that’s who) recognizes me when I call, just by the pizzas we always order (“Hey, were they cooked well done enough for you last time?”). 

As I sit here sipping coffee and periodically stopping to smooch the snoozing Baby Bootsie, I ponder the outline of the New-York-skyline-with-Twin-Towers painted on the wall of the pizza place with a “Never Forget” plaque.  9/11 was a shattering day even for those of us not in New York City, especially for those of us young enough not to remember other where-were-you-when-it-happened events of pivotal violence – the unreal kind that we had always grew up dispassionately watching happen elsewhere on the global news.  On 9/11 it took me all day to get hold of one of my college friends in New York City, and he’d spent his whole day frantic until he’d finally located his sister who’d been scheduled to take an employment drug test in one of the Trade Center buildings that day.  I watched the towers fall on live TV from the snack room at work.  I was working for ExxonMobil at the time, and I was afraid for any workers at the downtown Houston office; what an appetizing target the headquarters of the world’s largest American oil company might present to a group interested in attacking outposts of American imperialism. 

I know that I, not being a New Yorker, not having personally lost anyone in the Twin Towers or the Pentagon attacks, do not have the same visceral relationship with that tragedy or the Ground Zero site imprinted that day with the terror of the thousands of souls who perished.  But even knowing I can only witness the debate on the current proposed “Ground Zero mosque” as an interested party rather than a member of those directly affected, I am astonished and ashamed at the opposition I am hearing.  The politicians who categorically oppose it are – at best – gently abandoning our core American beliefs in a misguided attempt to spare pain to non-Muslim New Yorkers, or are – at worst – consciously and maliciously fanning the current anti-immigrant terror-baby flames that so easily ignite the tinderboxes of fear in the minds of perhaps otherwise sensible Americans. 

If local efforts to block the construction of the mosque are successful, it will be a travesty of how America should work and in direct opposition to one of the core beliefs that makes our country unique and admirable.   It is because we defend unpopular religions that we are the country we are.  The right of my neighbor to say things that irritate me (or practice religions I don’t like) makes this country so great, not just because it protects me when I want to say something that irritates my neighbor or practice a faith that she finds objectionable.   This setup, inconvenient or emotionally charged though it may be on an individual basis, ensures the wonderful rich marketplace of ideas and perspectives that makes the U.S. the country to desire to come to, rather than one to escape from.   We generally like to have a lot of options in that marketplace, even if not everything is to our taste.  I mean, sure, pop-up ads are annoying, but at least we don’t make Google filter our traffic, right?

I hope constitutional precedent and cool heads will prevail on this topic.  After all, nothing’s more patriotic in America than upholding the rights of someone to do or say something you don’t like.

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Don't lose your cool...

We recently replaced two of our old, crappy window unit air-conditioners with newer models.  The new units were from Home Depot and the installation was do-it-yourself, and when I was done I realized that I had two undisposable hunks of junk to deal with.  You can’t just throw away a system loaded with refrigerant, so I figured all I had to do was figure out how everybody else did it, then do that.

My first strategy was to ask at the local recycling center here in Brenham.  They said I could probably take them to the collection station (dump), so the next time I went to the dump I asked at the office if they would take window unit air-conditioners.  They said they would, as long as all the coolant had been recovered by an authorized contractor, and the units were officially tagged as being empty.

That sounded good, so I started calling the local AC contractors around town, and found that 90% of them responded with “we don’t work on window units”, 5% took a message and called me back looking to schedule a coolant recharge, and 5% had no idea what I was talking about (and/or feigned ignorance because they didn’t want to do it).

At this point I’ll clarify that I clearly expressed that I was willing to pay a fee for this service, I wasn’t looking for it to be done for free, or anything, and still no takers.  I finally started doing some serious web searching and found this site:

http://www.texaspowerfulsmart.org/rebate/recycling_partners.php

Which bills itself as “Official Texas Trade Up Appliance Rebate Program”, and that link goes to their list of recycling partners.  That list looked very promising, especially when I saw that all Best Buy locations were drop-off locations that take room air-conditioners, as shown here:

Problem solved?! Nope...

With a song in my heart and a ‘green’ aura, I figured my problems were solved, so I loaded up the air conditioners (one of which was a 25,000 BTU model weighing 200+ pounds) and prepared to get rid of my albatrosses…albatrossi?…albatri?  Before heading out I figured I’d make a quick call to my local Best Best buy to confirm, and that’s when I got the bad news – they didn’t take air conditioners.  They didn’t really care too much about the fact that they were listed on the Texas site as being an authorized recycling center that took window units, it was no dice.

I figured I’d double-check on the Best Buy website, where I found this:

Confirmation of misinformation, frustration

I figured, oh well, just some miscommunication and/or old information, no worries, and I’ll just work my way down the list of nearby listed recycling centers.  Unfortunately, each one I contacted had variations of the same story, they either didn’t deal in window units, or they only recycled old units when they were selling you a new unit.

My strike-outs continued and my frustration mounted, until I got to ‘Barker’s Heating & Cooling Inc’ in College Station.  They knew what I was talking about, told me the fee ($75), said I could drop them off, and that they were open until 5pm.  I headed out as fast as I could, overjoyed at finally being able to finally get rid of these units in an ethical way.  Dealing with Barker’s could not have been any easier, they knew what they were doing, offloaded the units quickly, I paid the invoice, and I was on my way within 15 minutes.  Whew.  Here’s their website:

http://www.barkerservices.com/company.shtml

We’re planning on eventually installing central AC, and when we’re ready Barker’s will be getting the first shot at it due to their efficiency and friendliness in dealing with the recycling/disposal of these two window units.

I’m posting this in case it might prove helpful to somebody else in the same dilemma.  Those of you Texans in bigger  cities and/or in towns that already have a straightforward way to recycle air conditioners, be thankful.  For the rest of you, I hope this saga includes information that may prove helpful to you if you happen to be finding it frustrating to figure out how to get rid of your old window units ethically and legally.

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Did Disney at least buy you dinner, IMDb?

I started visiting the IMDb site way back in the day, even before they were bought by Amazon.com.  Back then, IMDb was a site for film lovers and film scholars, an encyclopedic collection of information and opinions about film (and, later, television).

However, once Amazon.com purchased IMDb they have slowly but inexorably worked to “monetize” the traffic on the site.  They added a fee-service called IMDb Pro, which provides deeper and newer information, and they have also blithely accepted saturation advertising for any and every piece of crap excreted by Hollywood, as long as the budgets were big enough.

For example, the screen shot to the right is of the home page today, and as you can see it is *plastered* with advertising for and editorial references to Disney’s “Prince of Persia”.  By all accounts, this film sucks mightily, and will quickly take its place in the pantheon of mass-produced, mass-marketed, money-grubbing, mediocre, mainstream, meaningless films, and no self-respecting site for film fans would feature it so prominently.

Seriously, what would you think if you visited the Architectural Digest site, and found the front page emblazoned with a half-dozen ads for mobile homes, or if you visited the Bon Appétit site and found they were garishly sponsored by McDonald’s, touting the return of the McRib, for a limited time?

You’d think that they had sold out, wouldn’t you?  But that doesn’t stop IMDb from whoring itself out to the highest advertising bidder.  You see, IMDb is no longer run by or for film buffs.  It’s run by Amazon.com as a vehicle to sell you entertainment, or to sell advertising to companies that want to sell you entertainment.  IMDb has dropped all pretense of being an arbiter of or commenter on the quality of the films on its site and/or in general.  Oh, it still lets members post reviews and ratings, and links to external reviews, but there are apparently no quality barriers to the films they allow to be advertised and prominently featured on their site.

In the interest of fairness, I will stipulate that IMDb is still a great source of information, and if you can block or ignore the advertising, it can still be a valuable resource.  But it’s become like WalMart – a soul-less emporium that has a vast selection but has no sense of quality or discrimination about their offerings, other than low-prices.  I sometimes go to WalMart, when I have to, but it is a joyless, draining chore.

And that’s exactly what IMDb has become to me – the WalMart of film information.  I go to IMDb for specific reasons – to look up an actor or actress, to find the details of a particular TV show episode, etc, and then leave immediately.  But what I don’t do is browse IMDb as entertainment, like I used to.  Back in the day I could wander the virtual halls of IMDb, coming across tidbits, discovering new films I might like, getting information about a particular film’s history or production, etc.  It was an enjoyable place to mingle digitally with like-minded film buffs.

Sadly, this is no longer the case, at least not for me.  The incessant pop-ups and blinking+pulsing advertisements on every page, the editorial highlighting of films whose only “quality” is a big advertising budget, and the distinct lack of discriminating, discerning editorial slant when it comes to the world of film.  So IMDb still gets some clicks from me, but now that I have no respect for the site, I have even less respect for anything they allow to be advertised, so those clicks are not “monetized” in any way.

I doubt I’m the only person who has gone through this disillusionment with IMDb, and they have to be feeling it.  Or am I misjudging the number of non-discriminating, non-discerning filmgoers who will visit the site, become enthralled by the flashing and pulsing advertisements for a piece of crap, and then go spend money on a ticket for it?

Sadly, I think I am, and I think that IMDb represents a crystal-clear microcosm of what is wrong with film today – the soulless pursuit of money by bean-counters, who see sheep as their customers of choice.

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You probably wouldn't remember, I probably couldn't forget

Today I was sitting in the car in the car wash listening to tunes, and I heard an old favorite – “Jungle Love” by The Steve Miller Band, from 1977.  The song sounds kind of pop-y and like a confection, but the lyrics have, to me, always been more poetic and abstract than the tune and the refrain.  Here are the lyrics, as best as I can decode them (leaving out the refrains):

I met you on somebody’s island
You thought you had known me before
I brought you a crate of papaya
They waited all night by your door
You probably wouldn’t remember
I probably couldn’t forget
Jungle love in the surf in the pouring rain
Everything’s better when wet

But lately you live in the jungle
I never see you alone
But we need some definite answers
So I thought I would write you a poem
The question to everyone’s answer
Is usually asked from within
But the patterns of the rain
And the truth they contain
Have written my life on your skin

You treat me like I was your ocean
You swim in my blood when it’s warm
My cycles of circular motion
Protect you and keep you from harm
You live in a world of illusion
Where everything’s peaches and cream
We all face a scarlet conclusion
But we spend our time in a dream

Now, I’ve only seen a few random episodes of the TV show “Lost”, but during the leadup to the recent finale my daughter was home from college catching up on episodes so that she’d be ready for a finale viewing party, so I got some summary information about the show, the characters, the plot, the show structure, etc.

And I have to say, based on my limited information about the show, the lyrics above sure seem to evoke the vibe of the series.  Specific examples include this lyric:

I met you on somebody’s island, you thought you had known me before

Which almost seems like almost a one-line summary of the series.  Everybody is flashing forward and backward, into and out of parallel universes, vaguely remembering or forgetting each other.

And this one:

You treat me like I was your ocean, you swim in my blood when it’s warm

They are on an island surrounded by water, regularly in the ocean trying to escape or move between islands, spilling a lot of blood in the process – so much that you might say they were…swimming…in it?

Then there’s this one:

My cycles of circular motion protect you and keep you from harm

Isn’t that the crux of the show, every X number of minutes somebody has to go down the hatch and push a button or something, and in doing this repetitive, circular process they are protecting everyone and keeping them from harm?

And then the final lines:

You live in a world of illusion
Where everything’s peaches and cream
We all face a scarlet conclusion
But we spend our time in a dream

Sounds like “world of illusion” is a correct description of the island, “we all face a scarlet conclusion” could mean that everybody dies, and “we spend our time in a dream” seems to accurately describe what it must be like for the characters, at least as I understand it.

So, I’ll put it to you Lost fan(atic)s out there – do you see any parallel between these lyrics and the show?

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"If you could make God bleed, people will cease to believe in Him."

Iron Man 2 is a not-disappointing sequel, however it’s also not as entertaining as the original.  But, there have been only a very few sequels that equaled or surpassed their predescessors, so that’s not surprising. 

What was surprising, for me, was the understated performance by Mickey Roarke as Ivan Vanko (right), Iron Man’s nemesis with a family grudge in this installment.  Calling his performance “understated” is an…well…understatement, because Vanko is of course a larger-than-life comic book villain.  However, within that context, Roarke’s performance is carefully restrained and excellently realized.

Also well cast and well characterized are Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer, head of a competing defense contracting firm, and Garry Shandling (Garry Shandling?!??!?) as Senator Stern, Iron Man’s foe in the Senate who is looking to have the government own (and exploit) the underlying Stark technology.  Scarlett Johansson also does a good job as Natalie Rushman, Tony Stark’s new assistant who is “from legal”.

The story…well…the story gets us from Point A to Point B very effectively, but it felt like a transition piece instead of a complete story.  That may be the way it has to be for movies based on comic books, since the comics have been around for decades and have much more story material than can be compressed into a movie (or two, or three).  However, it seems like a movie of this caliber should at least strive to end at a more momentous and climactic juncture.

The film-making is also sloppier than in the first one.  As an example, there is a sequence where Tony Stark appears as Iron Man at his own Expo (about the size of a World’s Fair) and is attacked by an army of drone robots.  These drone robots are similar to Iron Man, can fly, and are packed with advanced weaponry.  Iron Man takes off with the fleet of drones in hot pursuit, launching a continuous stream of weapon fire at him.  Does Iron Man fly as far away from the gathered expo-attendees?  No, he spends five minutes swooping and diving around the Expo, causing the drone-fire to strafe the crowds of innocent bystanders below, over and over and over and over again. 

He has no reason to hang around the Expo, there’s nobody he needs to rescue, nothing he needs to disarm or defeat, and if he had simply headed as far and as fast away from the Expo as he could he would have saved many, many lives.  In fact, after his 5 minutes of induced-strafing-of-the-innocents, he finally wises up and says something like, “Holy crap, I better get away from the Expo!”, and then zooms off.  Narcissistic personality disorder, indeed.

But, overall, it doesn’t disappoint, which is a bit of faint praise, but also a bit of a relief.  I really liked the first film, and was very worried that the sequel would go off the rails.  It didn’t.  It also didn’t blaze any new trails, but that’s okay.  This is one of the few sequels that left me wanting to see the third installment, and was definitely worth the price of a non-matinee, first-run movie theater ticket price.

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Dogs eat it, flies swarm to it

I thought I’d try to be a little more gentle on the environment and use an ‘organic’ fertilizer for our yard.  I found Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food at the local Home Depot and decided to give it a try.  I just spread it this weekend so I can’t speak to its greening or healthifying effects on the lawn, but I can state, unequivocally, that my three dogs and every fly in the general area *love* it.

I first spread it on the front lawn, without any drama, and the only slight warning sign was the very…er…’organic’ smell of the stuff.  However, it smelled like it could be a rich source of nutrients, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Then I spread it in the back yard, where our dogs have access to the fenced yard.  I locked them in the house while I spread it, and as soon as I finished and let them back out all three of them started snuffling around the entire yard like prized truffle pigs.  Things took a turn for the worse when I noticed that all three of them were also licking the grass and ground and ingesting the fertilizer grains.

I also noticed that there were flies all over the yard, landing randomly all over the grass, apparently drawn in by the organic lawn food.  Note that I’m pretty meticulous about keeping our yard clean of doggie bombs, so the appearance of swarms of flies is not normal.  Also, the flies weren’t hanging around any dog piles, they were all over the yard.

I locked the dogs back in the house and figured I’d try watering the Scotts into the yard and see if that would help.  It didn’t, it only seemed to add an irresistable ‘gravy’ to the granules and made even more attractive to my dogs and the flies.

So, now, here I sit with my dogs locked in the house, waiting for the time when (I hope) the Scotts has lost its mojo enough that my dogs won’t continually graze on it.  The stuff claims to be safe for kids and pets, and there’s even a picture of a kid and a pet laying in a grassy yard on the label, but I bet this stuff isn’t designed to be a dietary supplement. 

I checked the Scotts site here, but they don’t have any helpful information, and as of the time of this posting the “View Label” button on that page returns:

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but this information is no longer current and accessible.”

Similarly, the ‘FAQ & Help’ tab says:

“Sorry, no F.A.Q. material for this product is available.  If you have product questions Scotts experts are available by email and phone in our Help Center.”

Which neither answers my questions nor is helpful.

So, if you’re like me and you’re exploring more natural ways to keep your lawn green, and you’re wondering about Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food and your dogs, I can tell you that I won’t be using it again.  My dogs haven’t seemed to suffer in ill effects, but still, I don’t want them eating this stuff.  Also, the flies were just the icing on the cake and completed my disappointment in this product.  I mean, even if I didn’t have dogs, who wants to have a fly-infested green lawn?

Not me.

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The preparation and the finished product

I’ve always been partial to McDonald’s Sausage McMuffin with Egg, but I prefer to avoid fast food whenever possible, and I prefer to eat healthy ingredients.  For the sake of this article, “healthy” refers to the ingredients being as natural and pure as possible, and as free of chemicals, hormones, pesticides, preservatives, cruelty, and “modified” ingredients as possible (and not necessarily “food pyramid” healthy).

So, over the years I have learned to make breakfast muffins at home, and have refined the recipe to the point where I can barely eat fast-food muffins any longer, since they pale by comparison (if I do say so myself).

The recipe below is for three muffins, the ingredients are:

• 3 farm eggs
• 1/3 lb of natural pork breakfast sausage
• 3 tbs butter
• 3 slices Kraft Deli Deluxe American cheese, 3/4 ounce per slice
• 3 Bays sourdough English muffins
• 2 tbs of pure maple syrup (not Log Cabin or Butterworth type, but actual pure maple syrup)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Tabasco to taste (optional)

A few words about the ingredients – we get our eggs and pork from Yonder Way Farm, which we are lucky enough to live a 10 minute drive from.  If you live in or around the Houston area we highly recommend either driving out to the farm (just outside of Brenham), or getting your order from one of their many delivery locations in the area. See more about Yonder Way Farm at the bottom of this article.

Also, if you’ve never had farm eggs (or if it’s been a while), they are amazingly better tasting than store bought eggs.  The yolks are almost orange, instead of yellow, and the eggs are naturally a variety of shapes and colors (see picture above).

One other ingredient note – the cheese we use is specifically and only Kraft Deli Deluxe American.  Don’t confuse this with the individually-wrapped “cheese food” versions of American cheese, the Deli Deluxe American is actually cheese, not a chemical concoction, and is significantly better tasting than the disgusting “cheese food” versions.

The gear is as follows: 

• 12″ Emeril Pro-Clad Stainless frying pan (which we *love* and use almost daily), for the eggs
• Cast iron frying pan, for the sausage (if you don’t have one, ask your mama about them)
• One Non-stick egg ring, for forming the sausage patties (but NOT for the eggs)
• Three stainless-steel egg rings, for the eggs
• Nylon spatula
• Scissor tongs
• Coffee cup or small bowl
• Butter knife and fork

First, leave the cast iron skillet cold for now, but put the stainless steel skillet on medium-low heat (setting 3 out of 10 on our electric stove) with the three stainless steel egg rings in it, to pre-heat.

Now, in the COLD cast iron frying pan, we need to create the sausage patties in place in the pan.  Lay the larger, non-stick egg ring where the first patty will go, then take enough of the breakfast sausage to roll into a ball about 1.5″ in diameter.  Put the ball in the ring, then gently work it flat until if forms a thin layer at the bottom of the ring, all the way to the edges.  We like our patties as thin as possible without falling apart, which means starting with about 3/8″ thickness of the raw sausage.  When finished, lift the ring off the sausage, leaving the patty, and move the ring to the next position, and so forth until you have three patties.

Now, put the cast iron skillet with the three patties in it on a burner on medium heat (5 on a scale of 10 on our electric stove).  Now reach over and turn down the heat under the stainless steel skillet to low (2 out of 10 on our stove).  Crack the three eggs into the coffee cup (or small bowl), salt and pepper to taste (and add Tabasco if so inclined), then use the fork to lightly stir to break up the egg yolks and even out the seasonings.

Put a pat of butter in each stainless egg ring to melt, use the tongs to move the rings around to spread the butter evently.  Pour an equal amount of egg into each egg ring.  Let everything cook for a minute or two here.

Now, about the English muffins.  Unless you have a six slice toaster you’ll have to do multiple batches to get all three toasted.  Now would be a good time to start dropping the muffins to toast – you’ll probably have to experiment to get the timing correct for toasting the muffins, depending on the number of slices your toaster holds, how fast it toasts, how brown you like it toasted, etc.

Now, flip the sausages, they should be pretty browned up on the cooked side by now.  Watch the eggs, you’ll be able to see the cooked part solidify in the bottom and along the sides, when it looks cooked about halfway through (bottom half solid cooked, top half still runny), use the scissor tongs to hold the tongue of the egg ring in place, use a butter knife to run around the inside edge of the ring to loosen the egg, then use the butter knife to lever up under the cooked part of the egg, letting the runny part run back down into the bottom of the ring, then flip the cooked part of the egg over and set it back down inside the ring, covering the runny part that just ran into the bottom.  That’ll put what was the cooked bottom of the egg on top, and allow the rest of the egg cook below it.

It’s a bit tricky to do the egg flip maneuver, but with practice you should get it.  I sometimes have egg run out under the bottom edge of the ring, or slide out over the top edge of the ring – if that happens, let the escaped egg cook for a few seconds to get slightly solid, then scoop it up and put it on top of the source egg to maintain egg volume.

After a few more minutes the sausage should be done, flip to be sure, it should be browned on the other side, too.  Remove the sausage to a plate, and pour a small portion of maple syrup onto each patty, and spread it around a little to cover the top.  You’ll probably want to add the syrup to taste, but my recommendation is not to put to much on, or it’ll drip on you while you eat it.

You should also be able to remove the egg rings from the eggs now, again using the tongs to grab the tongue of the ring and using the butter knife to run around the inside of the ring to loosen the egg.  If you do this too early, you’ll get some runny egg leaking out from the middle, and you’ll have to learn the timings for your stove, tools, and methods.

Flip the eggs again, and then at this point I use the spatula to flatten them out a bit, which spreads them out and makes them “English-muffin sized” and a better fit when put together.  At this point I also turn the heat under the eggs up to 5, to prepare it for grilling the muffins and to finish the eggs.  I also cut the corners off the cheese slices to make them octoganal and a better fit for the sandwich…if you leave the corners they tend to droop and “over-cheese” the taste.

Remove the cooked eggs to a plate, and put a cheese-octogan on each one – the cheese will melt slightly during the rest of the process.  Add a bit more butter to the pan, then grill the English muffins (insides only, not the outsides) in the pan – this crisps them up and makes a nice grilled taste.

Now assemble the muffins – muffin bottom, egg with cheese on top, sausage patty with a hint of maple syrup, and muffin top.  Voila, ready to eat…enjoy!

[stextbox id=”grey” caption=”About Yonder Way Farm”]

Marie and I are not health nuts, but we do try to eat natural and healthy foods as much as possible.  We have been astonished at our luck in living so close to Yonder Way Farm, and the great folks and products there.  We drive out every couple of weeks to pick up our eggs, sausage, pork chops, steaks, hamburger, chicken, ham, etc.  If you go out to the farm, you pull through the gates and drive right up to one of the outbuildings, and you pass free ranging chickens, wandering cows, and un-penned pigs – including the cutest packs of running/playing piglets that you’ll ever see. 

We lean towards vegetarianism, for animal-cruelty and unhealthy additive reasons, and Yonder Way Farm addresses both of those for us.  They process their own chickens, and use local processors for the beef and pork, and don’t send their animals off to large, commercial processors where the necessarily gruesome end is an inhumane nightmare.  The animals are finished on the farm, not at the processing plant, meaning that the animals are fed their healthy diet and treated humanely until just before they are processed. 

Most “organic” or “natural” meat available from grocery stores comes from animals who, although perhaps raised a bit more healthily at first, are sent off to commercial processing plants in a process that can take days or weeks, necessitating that the animals are fed whatever crap the processor uses to keep the stock alive until processing – definitely NOT natural or organic feed.

So, if you live in the Houston area we highly recommend getting your eggs and sausage from Yonder Way, and if you live elsewhere you may want to check with Local Harvest to find fresh, natural, humane farms in your area.

[/stextbox]

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Nobody puts crazy in a corner...

Marie and I decided to play multiplex roulette today, where we spontaneously stop at the movie theater and watch the most appealing next show.  There aren’t a lot of rules to Theater Roulette, but we reserve the right to veto and play again another day if nothing seems worthwhile.

Today’s winner was The Crazies, a remake of the George Romero film from the 1970’s with the same name and storyline.  Neither of us knew anything about the film, other than I recalled a vaguely non-terrible mention of it from somewhere, but not even a full-fledged review.

I’ve never seen the original, so can’t compare them, but the current version is an interesting twist on the zombieless zombie film.  The basic storyline is that a government plane carrying biological weapons has crashed upstream of a small farm community, and the infectious agent has seeped into the town’s water supply.  The infection causes people to go catatonic, then go crazy, then go homocidal, and was designed to destabilize the society of our enemies. 

The story focuses on the local sheriff, his wife, and an ever-decreasing band of survivors.  The sheriff and his deputy piece together what’s happening just in time to find their town completely isolated – no landlines, cell phones, internet connections, nothing.  The roads are blocked and an overwhelming force of highly uninformative government agents and soldiers take over, separating everyone into the infected or non-infected holding areas. 

The sheriff goes to one, his pregnant wife goes to the other, and thereby hangs the tale.  If you’ve ever seen a zombie/infected-people movie you’ll get the gist of the overall story, but The Crazies brings a good deal of art and craft to the telling.  As an aside, I find it amusing that people will dismiss “zombie movies” as something that have been done before, but to me that would be like dismissing all rom-coms or cop procedurals for the same reason.  The entertainment with these genre films isn’t in the uniqueness of the story, but in the nature of the telling.

For example, I grew up in a small town, and I live in a small town, so I know what small towns are like, and the director (Breck Eisner, son of Michael) nailed it perfectly.  The small town looks like a small town, not like what some Hollywood production designer might imagine a small town would look like, if they ever saw one other than out of the window of their coast-to-coast flights.

And the characters are small-town.  The sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) is polite and taciturn, but he’s not a dummy.  His wife (Radha Mitchell) is the town doctor, and his deputy (Joe Anderson) looks and talks like he grew up playing banjo on the porch, but when the chips are down he takes care of business.  The acting is excellent throughout the cast, and the effects are subtle and well-done.

Put it all together and The Crazies is fun (if you are the type who can see a zombie film as being “fun”), smart, unpredictable, and even humorous in parts.  Well worth the ticket price for any aficionado of the genre.

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"I'm sorry, Dave, that's prior art..."

"Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device..."

The first picture is of Apple’s new (unfortunately named) iPad, the second picture is from the film 2001:A Space Odyssey, showing a remarkably similar device being used by astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole as they eat their delicious, extruded paste meals.

I wonder if Apple and/or Steven Jobs have thought about throwing Arthur C. Clarke and/or Stanley Kubrick some scratch for finally bringing their design to market?  There is precedent for “new” inventions being denied patents based on prior description in science fiction works (e.g. waterbeds described by Robert Heinlein).

Even if not legally required, I think it would be a public relations coup for Apple to at least make the gesture of offering something to the originators (or, populizers, at the very least) of the pad screen concept.  In fact, tying in the marketing of the iPad with an undeniable cinematic masterpiece like 2001 sounds like a pretty Apple-y thing to do, and I think would show some class.

However, I’m not holding my breath…back in the dark ages, Steve Jobs got a tour of Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he saw prototype computer systems based that had a graphical user interface made up of windows, menus, radio buttons, check boxes and icons, and which also utilized a moveable pointing device.  These elements were shortly brought to market by Apple in the Lisa in 1983, and then in the legendary and world-changing Macintosh in 1984.

I’m not denying the design and marketing brilliance of Steve Jobs and Apple in popularizing these products, but it would be nice to see some humility and respect paid to the originators of the ideas they are getting rich producing.

Update 8/26/2011:  Adding additional image below showing a closer view of the device, which clearly shows that it is not integrated into the desktop, and is a separate device, and is obviously hanging over the rim of the table at a jaunty angle:

JauntyPad is jauntily laid...

It’s also easy to find other examples with Google image search, fyi.

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The Crotch Bomb

The Christmas Day Crotchbomber was simply the latest in a long, long string of airline terror attacks, including the Shoebomber, Lockerbie, 9/11, etc…the list goes on and on.  There is now talk of using full body scans as part of our increasingly intrusive and futile airport security procedures.

So the TSA makes us throw out our shampoo, but that does nothing to prevent continue threats to air travel.  Even full body scans won’t do much, particularly if the terrorists know about them.  What’s next, full body x-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs to look for ingested, explosive-filled balloons?

The issue is that, given the nature and purpose of air travel, we simply do not have a technical solution to preventing airline terror attacks.  There are no security screens, scanners, sniffers, or profilers that can block every potential vector.  Everybody on the plane is wearing clothes, carrying bags, using electronics, eating food, holding books, etc, any or all of which could contain the tiny amount of explosives necessary to poke a hole in the thin, light skin of a jetliner.

And that, to me, is the crux of the issue.  We are flying around in what amounts to reinforced mylar tubes, and all that is needed to bring one of them down is a small explosion.  And punching a hole in the airframe is usually all that is necessary to cause the horrific death of every single passenger and crew member.

However, what if we were to design our aircraft to not be so vulnerable?  What if blowing a hole in the skin simple meant that a handful of people in the blast radius might be injured or killed, but the rest of the passengers survived?  Still a tragedy, but not the horrifying, fiery mass-murder that feeds the tidal wave of fear that the terrorists hope to create.

There are many ways to solve this, but the most feasible (to me) is the use of detachable passenger cabins with parachutes, which can be ejected in the event of an airborne incident and float to the ground/water below (presuming some type of flotation capability, as well).  Picture a jet that looks pretty much like today’s jets, but that the passenger compartment sort of snaps into place, perhaps even in multiple sections, making for lighter payloads and multiple pathways to survival.  This is not my original idea by any stretch of the imagination, but I think it’s something we need to consider.

Part of the issue is that the airline corporations don’t have any real motivation to do this.  It remains cheaper for them to settle lawsuits than to swap out their entire fleets of aircraft, so human lives are lost to the balance sheet.  This might be an area where the government has to step in, like they did with seatbelts, anti-lock brakes, and airbags.

It’s also possible to make the argument that terrorists would simply move on to other targets if airliners became less fruitful fear generators.  This is true in some respects, but airline travel is a fairly unique and one-of-a-kind target.  Humans have a genetic fear of great heights, and even the coolest traveler will still sometimes get that jolt of panic at being at such a height and having no control over their destiny.  If you blow a tiny hole in a jetliner you’ve sentenced every passenger to a terror-filled, certain death.

And there are no other targets that have the psychological impact of a downed passenger jet.  Air travel is something that most of us do on at least a semi-regular basis, and every air travel related incident becomes front-page news even when nobody dies or is even injured (think Sully Sullenberger and the Hudson River Miracle).  Terrorists know that airline tragedies are *huge* newsmakers, and they get the double win of striking fear and also (to a lesser extent) attacking our freedom to travel and to engage in geographically dispersed commerce.

Having jets that could allow most passengers survive an in-flight catastrophic incident would not solve terrorism, but what it would do is remove one of the primary civilian targets of terrorists.  Those who traffic in fear would probably redirect their efforts to other vectors, but none would be as psychologically effective as bringing down a passenger jet in a fiery ball of death. 

We have the technology, so this is simply an engineering and economics task – how many people have to die for this to become viable?

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