Sit For A Spell

Tonight the finals of the National Spelling Bee are on ABC.

WAY Too Much Time on Their Hands

Speaking of too much time on their hands... Take a look at some of these collections. My favorite is the Snoopy collection (about six slides in). And I used to think my brother had a lot of albums until I saw the guy about 4 slides in. George Carlin would have a field day with all that stuff.

Too Much Time On Their Hands

I think some people have nothing better to do with their lives than look for problems. People complained that a scarf Rachael Ray wears in a Dunkin' Donuts ad looks similar to a kaffiyeh, the traditional Arab headdress and, therefore, shows support for terrorism. Unbelievable! I don't blame Dunkin' Donuts for removing the ad because, after all, they just want to sell coffee and donuts, not become embroiled in controversy. But, people, really. Get a life! I picture someone just sitting and watching movies and TV and reading magazines looking for the evil boogie man.

And even if the scarf WAS a kaffiyeh, so what? What if Rachael Ray is Muslim? Does that even matter? Not every Muslim is a terrorist. Geeez! You'd think we were live in the 1950s. Is that McCarthy's ghost I'm seeing?

Dude!

The story says it all.

Signs of a Recession

This family is facing hard times:

Stacy and Chuck Burris are considering canceling the annual family vacation to Maine. They have already cut their daughter's pants legs to save money on buying shorts.

The horror! Having to cancel a vacation? No! Having to "cut their daughter's pants legs!"

I'll have you know, young lady that [here it comes] WHEN I WAS YOUNG, in the sixties, we cut our pants legs ON PURPOSE. Because IT WAS COOL. Who in the world would spend money on nicely hemmed shorts when you could just chop the legs of off old jeans and be cool. A couple of pair of old jeans cut and frayed just right and I was all set for the summer.

The important part was cutting them just short enough to be cute and not have your mother tell you you couldn't wear them out of the house.

How The Internet Works, Part II

My brother and I recently moved our blogs to Blogger. In the course of moving, my brother, updated his sidebar links to include The Humor Blog. Since my brother and I often laugh at the same things, I linked over to visit and thought the site looked interesting. Before I could explore too far, I found a link to the owner and went to look at his site. That's how the internet works; you travel from link to link and, after awhile, can't remember how you got where you are. It's a like a virtual maze.

This time I actually didn't travel too far and could probably find my way back to the Humor Blog link, but I stopped to tell you about one of the finds. The Humor owner had this post which made me laugh. Not every entry made me laugh, but many did and so I'll just share my first laugh and you can go find others if you're interested.

'When fog is really thick, people always compare it to pea soup. But when pea soup is really thin, nobody says, "Wow, it's like eating fog."'

Okay, maybe not laugh out loud funny, but amusing to me. Very Steven Wrightish.

How The Internet Works

I received an interesting email from my SIL today. It contained a list titled "Israel's Achievements In The First Months Of 2008" and was quite an impressive list. The final sentence of the posting read "In contrast to the efforts of tiny Israel to make contributions to the world so as to better mankind, one has to ask what have those who have strived to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth done other than to create hate and bloodshed." Good question.

Before I pass email on to others, I usually check with Snopes to see if the information is accurate. In this case there was no entry in snopes so I googled the title and found several other entries. In the list of matches there was also one that had the year 2007 in the title instead of 2008 so I looked around some more. Eventually I found this.

The last item in the 2007 list refers to Norway's boycott of Israeli goods, just as the 2008 list does, but it includes a link to the story about the boycott.

I'm thinking someone read one of the 2007 postings and thought it would be good to pass the information on again. Perhaps they thought people wouldn't pay as much attention if the news seemed "old" so they put a 2008 date on it. The 2007 posting says the article was attributed to "Allan E. Mallenbaum, the founder and Chairman of the Jewish Survival Legion" while the list I got in email is anonymous and some of the other postings attribute it to "Joshua J. Adler".

Allan Mallenbaum is credited in other articles as Chairman of the Rosa Robota Foundation and as Chairman of the Jewish Survival Legion. There is a Joshua J. Adler who contributed to Jerusalem Post as recently as March 2007. Whether either is the author of the list isn't clear.

The point? I find it interesting how information traverses the internet and so when I didn't find any reference on snopes, I tried to to see if I could track the origin of the article. Ultimately I failed, but I had fun trying. If I were working for snopes, I'd indicate the information in the article is correct but the author is unknown.

Quinoa

Debra showed me the yumminess of quinoa when I was visiting her house over Mother's Day. We went to the Lazy Acres store, which is Santa Barbara's version of Whole Foods, and picked up several things for lunch, including the quinoa salad. I liked it from the first bite and when I got home I set about learning to make it for myself.

The ingredients as listed on the container we brought home were quinoa, corn, kidney beans, green onion, olive oil, cilantro, basil and honey. I've settled on about 1 1/2 C cooked quinoa* to 1/3 C beans, 1/3 C corn (I used frozen roasted corn from Trader Joe's), 1 chopped green onion, 1 T of oil, 1 T cilantro, 1/2 T basil and a dollop of honey. Be careful with honey and the basil because they can overpower. Mix it all together and eat it warm or chill it. Delicious! Try it and adjust to your own tastes.

* Easy to cook: Twice as much water as quinoa, throw in pan, bring to a boil then simmer about 10 minutes until water is absorbed.

I've Moved

Hi, yes here I am over here on Blogger. I decided to move because I've had a couple issues with my old site and it uses older software. Since I was hosting it through my work account, I can't really cause an uproar over my personal stuff so I decided to move here. This is also where I decided to plant my other blog, Daze of Wine.

I'm still working through a few customization problems with my images on both sites but the posting works. You may see the headings changing as I play around with it so, please, just ignore the woman behind the curtain.

New Blog

Even though I sometimes flake on updating this blog, I've started a new blog. It is in its infancy so don't judge it too harshly. I got the idea the other day when I made the mix tape of wine songs and named it "Daze of Wine". I decided it would be fun to have a blog about wine since I'm enjoying finding wines and learning about wine. So I registered dazeofwine.com and created a blogger account to house it. So welcome to Daze of Wine.

Daze of Wine

tnx to freakgirl for the link

Make Your Own

tnx to freakgirl for the link

It's Just So Taxing

"It's an industry that made an average profit of nearly 17 percent in 2007 while most Americans could barely keep up with inflation"

I didn't realize colleges don't pay taxes on endowment income. I think I'm sort of with this guy. Though I did read that Harvard grants free tuition to families making under $60K a year so that is something.

Good News!

At least until new prohibitions are implemented, this is good news. It never ceases to amaze me how much time people want to spend worrying about who loves whom. And don't give me any crap about how marriage needs protection. Tell that to Britney Spears et al. If a church doesn't choose to perform same sex marriages, more power to them but the government should stay out. Let the government be in the business of domestic partnerships. Just think how much better off we'd be if people had to spend as much time to create a marriage partnership as they do to create a corporation. If they had to agree up front about having children (or not), contributing money, purchasing goods, going to church (or not) etc. I know I would have been better off thinking about it a little longer.

Who Knew?

Did any of you know about the locking tab on plastic wrap and aluminum foil? If so, why didn't you tell me? All these years I've been annoyed when the roll of wrap jumps out of the box when I try to pull on it. And now I learn there is a locking tab to prevent that. Right there on each end of the box. Sometimes it even has instructions. Or it could just be a perforated section at the end you are supposed to push inward to lock the roll.

Sneaky manufacturers.