Michael Kindt's Blog, page 439
December 5, 2011
December 4, 2011
Jack Nicholson receiving shock treatment in the greatest movie...
Jack Nicholson receiving shock treatment in the greatest movie ever made. Now called "electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)" after the great American tradition of applying more syllables to something horrible to make it sound scientific, then using initials to render it completely soulless, shock treatment is given to an estimated 1 million people worldwide every year. All systematic published reviews of the literature have concluded that shock treatment is effective in dealing with depression, probably because life always seems better immediately after they stop electrocuting your brain.
Dreaming along with a tv showIt's always very weird when I...
Dreaming along with a tv show
It's always very weird when I do this. I'm not really sleeping, just deeply dozing, and my dreams mingle with what's going on in the tv show. Just now, I was dozing on the couch with a Mythbusters dvd in. It was the one where where they raised a sunken ship with nothing but ping pong balls.
It turns out I came up with this idea. We were all flying back from Japan on a commercial jet. Jamie and Adam were sitting in one seat, Tori and Kari in another, and me and Grant in a third. Why I wasn't sitting with Kari is beyond me. We were talking, me and Grant, about the filming of our next episode, which we'd begin shooting just as soon as we got back to San Francisco. Jamie and Adam were going to raise a sunken ship using a unique means: balloons. They were going to fill up thousands of balloons with air, put them in the ship as it rested on the seabed, and see if it would float to the top.
I expressed concern to Grant. "Won't a lot or even most of the balloons pop? I mean, there's a lot of sharp stuff in that old ship, not to mention all the pressure. I don't think it's going to work."
"Yeah," said Grant. "That's a really good point."
"Personally, I think ping pong balls would work better," I told him.
He was silent for a minute and then excused himself to go to the bathroom. Later, after we landed, I found out that Jamie and Adam had scrapped the balloons for—guess what?—ping pong balls! I was excited despite not getting any credit for the idea. Not only didn't I get any credit, no one was even talking to me or acknowledging my existence.
The next thing I knew the Great Ping Pong Ball Experiment was underway. I was standing on the pier watching it all go down, sipping Anchor Steam beer in the salt air and happy to have such interesting friends.
Then my phone rang.
December 3, 2011
"Let's redefine scandal. Scandal is not who so-and-so is dating, scandal is 1.2 million people..."
-
Olivia Wilde
A quote I just read in the john from the August Marie Claire. It made me think of Herman Cain and why he should never have run in the first place.
Herman Cain quit?
I didn't see that coming. Wow.
Flyer I made for the Wax Bananas. As you can see, I swiped the...
Flyer I made for the Wax Bananas. As you can see, I swiped the local paper's logo. Sue me. I work for free since my son is the singer and guitar player :)
Ogdoad!
Ogdoad was the Minuteman's last Vocabulary Word of the Week. The Minuteman was a convenience store I ran in South Dakota back when I thought I wanted a career. I have a degree in business, you see.
I up and quit at the end of "Week Ogdoad" and nowadays, of course, I am a starving writer. The 9 to 5 grind is beyond me.
So I ran a convenience store before this and, lemme tell ya, it was a dream come true. Whenever I was ordering a case of energy drinks, I would pause wistfully, tears filling my eyes, and contemplate suicide.
But I tried to make it fun, and one of the ways was the Vocabulary Word of the Week. I would write it out in block capitals with a black sharpie and put it up on the store bulletin board every Monday where it would be promptly and continuously ignored by all my employees.
An ogdoad is a group of eight things and comes from the Greek. It has three syllables, not two, so it goes like this: og-doe-add. If you discover a used condom, a dead moth, a rusty screw, two golf balls, and three cigarette butts in, say, the water tank of your toilet, those items constitute an ogdoad. In this example, an ogdoad of weirdness.
It's a good, solid word, ogdoad. Every convenience store in the world should have a weekly vocabulary word to enrich, not only the communications skills, but the very lives of its downtrodden and underpaid employees.
Even if they ignore it.
For my part, I remember using ogdoad in sentences all week long, to the increasing annoyance of everyone:
"You know, if we had two more beers, this six pack would be an ogdoad."
"You know, if one of the Supreme Court Justices keeled over dead, there'd be only an ogdoad of Supreme Court Justices left."
"You know, I masturbated last night and faked an ogdoad of orgasms."
And so forth.
I remember my phone stopped ringing and my inbox was as barren and empty as the heart of a banker.
But, hey, at least I sounded intelligent.
December 2, 2011
CAIN CAMPAIGN UNABLE TO FIND REAL WOMEN SUPPORTERSThe Herman...
CAIN CAMPAIGN UNABLE TO FIND REAL WOMEN SUPPORTERS
The Herman Cain presidential effort, virtually dead from several accusations of sexual harassment and an extramarital affair that ended in financial payoff, is still twitching.
On Friday, it announced the creation of "Women For Cain", a move which can only be described as so obvious as to be tragic. The group, headed by wife Gloria Cain, is designed to "inspire a national women's alliance in support of Herman Cain for 2012," according to the campaign's website.
However, the campaign was unable to locate actual women supporters to give an enthusiastic thumbs up and was forced to use a stock photo, a fact noted almost immediately by several news organizations.
As of this writing, 1:15 pm mountain time, the photo is still up, becoming both funnier and sadder by the moment.
An anonymous spokesman said that efforts are underway to remove the photo, "but we can't seem to find the webmaster," who, the campaign now suspects, is a Democrat.
source :: "Women for Cain"
A delightful person who goes by the Tumblr name of bestgirlbetty asked me for the recipe of my pineapple rice, a picture of which I posted the other day.
Scroll back if you want to see it.
She did so in my private askhole and I tried to respond directly into HER private askhole, but the recipe was too long. Also, too wide (due to significant girth). So I decided to write it all out and post it.
And thus the thing you are reading was born. BANG!
Basically, I pillaged another recipe that lives in one my many Asian cookbooks. I call it The Red One With The Soy Sauce Stains On The Cover. It's a pretty standard Thai pineapple rice recipe, but like I said, I pillage it, taking what I want from the screaming and terrified peasants, then getting back on my longship and sailing for home because I come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. Valhalla, I am coming….
Sorry. Got caught up in the whole 'pillage' thing. This is a pineapple rice recipe. Focus.
Stuff you'll need:
Pineapple, 1 can or, for a livelier taste, you can slaughter your own and use some of the flesh (cut into chunks; you'll want around a cup)
Couple tablespoons of oil—I use peanut
2 red and 2 green chilies, sliced
3 cups cooked jasmine rice, better if cold
About 2/3 of a cup of roasted cashews
Some green onions, chopped
Some peas
Some minced garlic
Maybe some shredded carrot, I think
Soy sauce to taste—tamari is a necessity in my book
A healthy squirt of sriracha (I put sriracha in everything: Dr. Pepper, my bath water, vaginas I'm about to eat out, everything)
The sriracha, along with the chilies, makes my pineapple rice a little on the spicy side. Your mileage may vary. I also threw in some chunked extra firm tofu. The trouble with this is that I never really make it the same way twice. I'm all peering at the photo trying to remember what I stuck into it. I should've wrote it down shortly after she asked me for it!
Damn it.
Anyway, throw everything into a hot wok (on top of the peanut oil, which should also be hot) except for the tamari, rice, garlic, and tofu. Stir more or less constantly until soft, then throw in the rest and stir till the rice and tofu are hot, adding tamari and sriracha, tasting as you go, until it's just right.
Normally, there's shrimp and pork and fish oil in Thai pineapple rice, but I skip those, being, as a relative recently called me, "a vegihomo". By the way, guess who's not getting a Christmas present?
So those are the basics. I vary the veggies and the amounts of everything, based on mood and what I got around here. For best results when making a fried rice dish of any variety, use pre-cooked cold rice. Jasmine is my favorite of all the white rices.
Have fun and remember: it's just food :)
