jr conlin's ink stained banana

Recently, Anne Marie signed up for the Cook's Country magazine. For those that are curious, that's one of the publications from the folks that do America's Test Kitchens (a show like Alton Brown's, but with less sock puppets).

It's got a lot of good recipes and guidelines in it, but there's also a column that i swear is there for pure comedy reasons. In it, there are folks looking for their lost bits of heritage.

That or they're hoping that you lose your lunch.

Believe it or not, i know of tomato butter. Interested in trying some? Go get yerself an 8 oz. jar of unsweetened apple sauce and four cans of tomato paste. Blend. Serve on toast. Know, just as you begin your second chew, exactly why kids don't clamor for big helpin' spoonfuls of the stuff every fall with their pork chops. Also realize that i didn't even mention that a good many recipes also include cinnamon in this delightful pool of purplish acid.

As a side note, you can use the rest for Purple Slime Molds for your next LARP. Trust me, nothing will go near them.


But wait, there's more!
i feel a little bad for this one. i'm betting her grandfather was a really nice guy. i'm also betting that when he concocted this recipe he was probably thinking "Hey, Corn and pimentos isn't bad. You dress deviled eggs with pimentos. Let's mix them together and we'll be in business forever!" See, now, i'd never go near a dish like this, nor would i go near someone who ate it because i know that the sort of reaction the flora living in one's lower digestive track would have to the combination of the sugars from the corn plus the proteins and sulfates from the egg whites. Perhaps this individual is hoping to harness this new source of a nearly unlimited supply of methane.

Possibly by fitting a hose from the drivers seat straight into the engine intake.


And finally…

Green Walnuts (for those not familiar with Germanic Cuisine) are immature walnuts that are usually pickled. They have a tart/sour taste to them rather than the creamy/nutty flavor you normally get. Not a huge fan of them myself, but i can see where some folks could well be.

Now imagine a sweet green sauce with the distinct flavor of, well, crunchy floor varnish mixed in with your eggs and you can see why this assuredly mild mannered 90+ year old woman might have a slightly different taste in mind.

Yeah, look, there's a darn good reason that many of these recipes are hard to find.

Still makes me want to join the fun and see if anyone can help me chase down a childhood favorite of mine, pickled herring sorbet with chocolate sprinkles.

With the terrible spectre of a second pandemic disease lingering over the populace (this one that doesn't just attack those godless, filthy hemophiliacs), there are steps that you can take to remain as germ free as we were at the Bicentennial.

Here are some easy steps You can take NOW:

1. DO Wash your hands
2. DO Wear gloves and a mask
3. DO Wash your hands
4. DON'T pretend your Zorro
5. DO Wash your hands
6. DO wash your belongings and children
7. DO make sure their sanitized
8. DON'T boil your children and belongings together
9. DO boil them separately.
10. DO Wash your hands
11. DO provide fresh linens to the lepers living in your basement
12. DO not combine Avian Flu with Swine Flu
13. Because then Pigs will Fly, and that's bad.
14. DO Clap your hands, say yeah!
15. DO avoid contact with known carriers of the disease such as politicians and reporters.
16. DO avoid inhaling when outside.
17. DON'T go outside!
18. DON'T go into the basement!
19. DON'T hang up, we're tracing the line!
20. DO pay no attention to that man behind the blood stained curtain.
21. DO consider replacing the contents of your lungs with Mountain Fresh™ Lysol®
22. DON'T chew matches
23. DO wash your hands
24. DO compulsively organize the peanuts in your pantry by number of surface salt grains.
25. wash your hands
26. Panic because you just ran out of soap.
27. Run screaming through your house because the germs will get you now.
28. If you survive this biotic Armageddon, Swear off eating at Chili's.
29. Swear that the hallucinatory germs are wearing burkas and turbans.
30. Drop into a fetal position in your living room floor while the Television runs "Ice Station Zebra".
31. Pray for a quick and timely death.
32. Let the sole, remaining braincell calculate the sort of odds of being one of the 64 (out of 300,000,000 residents in the US alone) who even have the flu and that the folks that died of it were already not in the best of health to begin with.
33. Sane and tough it up.
34. Turn off the damn TV and the hyperventilating talking heads.
35. Get dressed, tear down the plastic and duct tape and walk outside
36. Breath deep that fresh air
37. Feel the warm sun on your face
38. Hum a little tune
39. Hear the distant laughter of children
40. Get hit by a car driven by someone changing tracks on their iPhone.

Walking by a school tonight, there were those traditional charts above the less traditional whiteboards, each displaying the two solid and middle broken line with carefully rendered cursive lettering. Granted, not the Palmer method, but still, up there in all their rounded glory.

And i wondered why the hell they're still teaching it.

Seriously, i know my signature is supposedly "cursive" (it looks a lot more like my initials when i'm having a stroke), but i can tell you that it wasn't worth spending eight years mastering the proper lowercase distinctive forms of m and n. For everything else, my handwriting resembles Arial more than the flowing script that was originally created so that documents created by fountain pens could be drafted quickly. Heck, i pride myself on my handwriting.

i'd be quite happy to print out my far more legible name on various documents, and considering that most of your average 6-12 year olds are going to be exchanging most of their text via their thumbs.

Yes, there's the definite risk that suddenly the youth of our nation won't be able to read the Declaration, which is something that you know, they don't read now even in printed form. Or perhaps the original, original works of Shakespeare, which are easily readable… yeah, no.

Look, if said future generation were to encounter great-great gran'pa's dissertations about the Nazis, he can spend the week and a half required to figure out what the funny squiggles mean.

Unless he wrote it in shorthand.

In that case, you're screwed.

A few quick 9.04 updates:

1. When doing an update, make sure that you don't have any dead repositories hanging out in your sources lists (e.g. opensourcemirror.org). This will make you think you can't update, when you can.
2. KDE 4.2 is A LOT BETTER than KDE 4.1. Plasma is nice, but there's a reason you have a "Desktop" folder, and it's not really to be shoved into a stupid widget. Fortunately, there's now a setting to fix that:
   
3. Having grown a bit tired of the ATI dance (and having a perfectly good monitor sitting unused that really ought to give my main system a dual head), i went and grabbed an NVidia card. Sadly, even though the drivers are open source, i've not yet gotten the nvidia drivers running quite right yet. Fortunately, i'm guessing it's only a couple of weeks before that problem is solved, and there's nothing critical i need to use the card for right now.

Still, even with the video glitch, so far big thumbs up for the Ubuntu guys.

So, yeah, 9.04 is out, and having installed it on a PC at work, i can say that it's better than 8.04. For those using KDE, a HUGE improvement in my view is that you can now get your desktop back as your desktop and not a widget.

Hang on a sec…

Nope.

Where was i? Oh yeah. And it is indeed faster about launching things, mostly because it's fairly well stripped down.

Any luck now?

No, dammit.

It's not all sunshine and roses, though. Kubuntu also has yet again swapped out the default package manager so you'll have to grab synaptic or adept yourself. Also some of the plasma applets changed so you'll have different looking widgets, but that's a minor thing.

C'mon, still not yet?

i haven't futzed with a lot of other things, mostly because it was kind of late in the day when i got a chance to play with it and i figured i'd just update my home desktop tonight. Except that everyone else on the planet has the same idea, so getting an upgrade to run all the way without a server timeout is a bit of a challenge.

Also i'm planning on swapping out the ATI card for an nVidia since that has proper driver support.

Don't you people have other things to do?

More as i can (hopefully) provide it.