Dinner

Dinner was simple, easy and as you can see, poorly lit. Some rice, some Tilapia and some citrus sauce tossed into the rice cooker, with some asparagus set up in the steamer basket. By the time the rice was done, everything else was cooked nicely.

The asparagus came out a bit tough and stringy, having sat in the fridge a few days longer than is ideal.

Lunch, Mostly Leftovers

Let's see, I've got some of the chicken and rice dish, mixed with some Stop & Shop meatballs, and I munched on the last of the leftover grilled steak from last week.

All told, the chicken ended up a bit tough, having been grilled, then cooked with the rice and finally microwaved, with a day or two of refrigeration between cooking stages, but the rest of it came out nicely.

I've also got the last of the Asian "Jelly" snacks, Apple flavor this time. Some more licorice and some Ginger Chews round out my snacking for the rest of the day.

To drink, unsweetened tea, and some Poland Spring orange flavored seltzer.

All told, a lot of meat, some starches, and no vegetables other than some corn. (Despite what the Reagan Administration said, Tomato sauce is NOT a vegetable.)

Breakfast

I know, I know, a breakfast sandwich is hardly a healthy (or inexpensive) meal, but I was in a rush this morning, and we are out of bagels, so I ended up going on a Charbucks run after I got to work. I needed me some coffee and food!

Dinner and putting bunnies in new cages

Dinner consisted of some sausage, steak and corn on the cob (Not pictured) grilled by some friends. My wife and I are still renovating our kitchen, so we do not yet have a functional stove, kitchen sink or much in the way of counter space.

Yesterday however was dedicated to dismantling the rabbit cages and giving them a through scrubbing, also know as the annual "traumatize the rabbits with all the spring cleaning noise" event. We also set up Cheyenne with a much larger cage.

As you can see from the picture above, Cheyenne's new cage used to be a dog crate. This is substantially more space than she used to have. Unfortunately, the floor flexes a bit, which makes it rather noisy when she moves about. Any recommendations on how to resolve this conundrum would be appreciated.

The black and white bunny in the pen on the right is Holly, and the goal is to bond the two of them. Moving Cheyenne into the floor level cage (Her former cage was on legs) is part of a plan to get the two of them more accustomed to one another. By placing them next to each other they can grow accustomed to each other's presence.

Jasper

Jasper is a foster bunny, staying with my wife and I until he's adopted. Jasper isn't up for adoption YET, because he suffered from a nasty bout with malnutrition While his weight has stabilized, he still needs to gain a few ounces, and he still isn't eating rabbit pellets on his own. He needs daily syringe feeding as a result.

We brought both the foster rabbits upstairs this past weekend to given them a little more sun than they get in the basement. They enjoyed the out time and the romp time in the pen.

Now if only we could get Jasper to EAT on his own, and end the need for the syringe feeding.

Breakfast

Dinner after a Saturday at work

This was both Lunch and Dinner, as I spent the day at the office. A nice pastrami sandwich, with a few extra slices of pastrami and cheese on a bit of lettuce.

Breakfast (Photo missing)

I was tired this morning, and forgot to photograph breakfast, which consisted of a bagel, veggie cream cheese, some coffee and two lumps of sugar.

Dinner

My wife and I were eating at Tony's Clam Shack in Quincy and I ordered the Buffalo Clam Strip sandwich. Sadly, it ended up tasting just like a Buffalo Chicken sandwich. I also had a Raspberry Lime Ricky. Not pictured was the slice of birthday cake I noshed, as we were there for the birthday party of a friend's six year old daughter. I would have taken a photo of the cake, but my cell phone giving me a low battery message and put the camera on standby.

Lunch 4-27-2007

Lunch consisted of leftovers from last night, and some tea.

You are no doubt are wondering why there are two small plates of rice as opposed to one larger one. The reason is simple. I didn't bring my own plate, and those small plates are the largest microwave safe plates in the office kitchen. There USED to be real plates, but now it's just plastic and paper.

we have larger plates, but they melt if you out a piece of toasted bread on them, and do some rather unsettling things when microwaved.

I really need to remember to bring some a microwave safe plate from home.

Welcome to the Police State, Assuming they Let You in

Andrew Feldmar has been bared for life from entering the Untied States of America.

He is a Holocaust survivor, psychologist and respected academic. He'd been entering the United Stated five to six times a year on business and to visit his children, both of whom live in the USA.

"Why?" you may ask, "What did he do?"

He dropped Acid 30+ years ago. It was LEGAL at the time, and it was provided to him as part of government sponsored research. Not only that, but he wasn't even in the USA when he dropped acid.

And because of this he is now banned form entering the United Stated of America. He has the option of appealing the ban, but it would cost a minimum of $3,500 n legal fees for each visit, and even then, his lawyers say he'd only have a 90% chance of being granted entry.

Anyone who doesn't think we're living in a police state really needs to get their heads out of the sand. This IS a police state. Habeas corpus is history, we have people being "disappeared" without any rights, secret courts, torture and people being barred from entry for absurd reasons. Just because we aren't having Soviet style parades in the streets doesn't mean we're any less of a police state.

"I never thought I'd live to see the Magna Carta revoked." -Rep. Jerry Nadler, House Judiciary Committee

Breakfast, and more disappointing coffee

Breakfast was a bit late this morning. An everything bagel toped with light cream cheese, as well as some coffee and some chai (separate cups, not mixed) sweetened with equal. I also added a dash of milk to each.

I don't normally use artificial sweetener, but the only sugar we have at the office is the rather hard to dissolve "Sugar in the Raw."

Lo and behold, as I'm typing this, I remembered the bit of Stevia in my desk drawer, so I'll likely use that to sweeten my chai at work.

I expect I'll keep sweetening my coffee until I use up the current bag. I'd picked up some Chocolate flavored Folgers coffee to drink at work, and I must confess it's a bit disappointing. I'd been blaming it on the unfavorable brewing conditions, but today I used boiling water from a tea kettle and a French press, a combination that normally produces very satisfactory coffee. Despite having used twice the label's recommended quantity of coffee grounds, the cup is still weak and devoid of any flavor beyond a vague chocolate. I suspect I'll just use it up next week and buy some better coffee.

Dessert

Last night's Dessert consisted of some chocolate cookies I bought at the Super 88.

Dinner

Dinner was a lovely rice dish my wife put together using some left over chicken and some canned artichoke hearts, along with the corn from a leftover cob we'd grilled a few days ago.

Lunch 4-26-2007

Today I had leftovers for Lunch. The bowl contains something I cooked up in our rice cooker a few days ago. I took some Edamame left over from Sushi a few days before, shelled them and put the beans in with some Tofus, mushrooms, Sweet Potato Noodles, cranberries and red peppers. I also included some light soy sauce, hot sauce and sesame oil.

After mixing everything with some water, I turned on the rice Cooker mode, waited 15 minutes and ate up. I noticed that the cranberries, having been in the fridge a bit, largely dissolved into part of the broth. This caused them to add a bit of fruity tartness to the dish while helping thicken the broth just a bit. I could have added a dash of arrow root to thicken ti some more, but I was tired, hungry and it tasted good as it was.

Sadly, the hot pepper sauce made it a bit spicy for my wife, and to tell the truth, it made my own lips tingle a bit. Fortunately, it mellowed in the fridge, so today it was actually a bit mild. It could have used a dash of salt the second time around.

The moral? Hot sauce can cover up the need for more salt.

The packet in the photo is the last of the Fennel tea I bought a while back. I actually ended up making some English Teatime instead, saving the caffeine free fennel seed tea for the afternoon.

I've also grabbed a Poland Spring Raspberry-Lime . I tend to prefer Poland Spring favored waters over Fruit2O, largely because Poland has no extra sweetener, artificial or otherwise.

Start of a Food Blog

The above photo represents my first attempt at a Food Blog. Basically, I, like many before me, plan to post pictures of all my food.

I'm doing this for a number of reasons:

• I need to lose weight, and I figure paying more attention to WHAT I eat will help with that goal.
• Having photos of my food online should discourage me form "cheating" and sneaking a snack here and there.
• Using Blogger means I can snap the photo with my cell phone, send the photo to my Blog and not have to worry about things like image resizing, getting photos off a camera or memory card and that sort of thing.

The above photo represents breakfast. The box is licorice and I had six pieces. A "serving" is 15 pieces, worth about 130 calories. The fruit cup is because I bought a mix pack not realizing it included the flavor, and I figured I'd polish them off, as they aren't THAT bad.

The Equal is for my cup of coffee. Not pictured is the coffee and the once or two of 2% milk in contains, and the bottle of Fruit2O I'm drinking.

The coffee is sadly, a disappointment. I brewed it in the kitchen with a drop brewer, using the hottest watter the sink could muster. The water cooler, which included hot water is out of water, and the coffee pot in the kitchen is something of a leaky joke. Being flat broke until payday, a run to a coffee shop was not the best option. My wife and I have a couple of travel mugs with an integrated French Press. I need to bring one of these to work.

Meet the Meat

Animals that WANT to be killed and eaten.

Some advertising is just plain disturbing.

Please tell me this is a joke

This is a gag, right? The person who wrote the letter below is pulling our leg right? It's supposed to be satire, right???


Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Letters to the Editor
Daylight exacerbates warning

You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two. This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they ? Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
CONNIE M. MESKIMEN / Hot Springs

UPDATE:

Fark.com has a thread about this "Letter to the Editor" and one of the posters there points out the letter is eerily similar to an April Fool's Day post on another site.

My new Niece!

Baby Ruth!

A Marine Comments on the War in Iraq

If anyone has a right to talk about the war and it's supporters, it's the soldiers and their families.
http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/sfo/309485032.html

From an Angry Soldier
Date: 2007-04-10, 1:00PM PDT


I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-fucking-lutely sick to death of it. What the fuck do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever god damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such fucking experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a god damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that fucking hell hole, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse shit? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that fucking festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You fuckers and that god-damn lying sack of shit they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most fucked up thing about this Iraq shit is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We fucked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers whos lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so fucked up, you are a god-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

Fuck you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the god damn mother fuckers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.

Tim Henson has passed away

Many folks know Tim Henson as the host of Distorted View. Sadly, Tim recently lost his battle and has passed on, leaving behind a great and significant online legacy.

He will be missed.

I've created an online memorial to Tim Henson, and hope people will visit it and contribute to its content.

Replace, Rebuild or just give up?

My venerable IBM Thinkpad A20M has served me well over the years. It's still a reliable machine, and despite it's 700mhz processor, fairly zippy when the right software is installed. Sadly, the batter is toast. Years of abuse have left it with a life span of less than half an hour when using the wireless card. I've been thinking of getting a replacement battery, but buying a used one on ebay means I have a substantial risk of getting something that's just as worn out as what I have now. I've been researching other options for Laptop Batteries. Digital Camera Batteries are easy to come by, but Laptop batteries are a bit harder.

There are online directions for rebuilding your own laptop batteries, reconditioned batteries and external battery packs.

The question I now face is do I save up the cash for a new laptop, rebuild the batter pack myself or just order a used internal pack or a new external one.

This would all be easier if I had another digit on my salary.

Could Iran be the West's next source of Mail Order Brides?

Justified by strict interpretations of Islamic law, Iran has a bustling sex trade in Muslim women. Iranian women from impoverished areas are traded like cattle, sold to neighboring nations. Women of all ages are bought and sold like slabs of meat. Iran's ruling clerics not only know about the trade, but are often customers.

The question becomes, what is their stance is on selling women to western nations?

If women are just chattel to them, and they sell OIL to western nations, why not sell us their women as well? Think about it. American men get a new source of Mail Order Brides (Buying Russian women is SO 1990's), and these women get to leave lives of repression and prostitution to become American Citizens!

The men selling them clearly care more about their oil than their women, so why not start making offers?

I know, I know, the argument can be made that using Iran as a source of Mail Order Brides only fuels the sex industry abroad, but the additional "business" comes in the form of women leaving the country for a better life! Not only that, but the women will by and large, be treated with more respect and dignity than they would in Iran, not to mention the extensive freedoms women have in the West. Imagine going from a place where you're not allowed to leave the house without a male relative, to one where you can get a job, buy a car, hell, buy whatever you want without even TELLING your husband as long as it's your own damn money. Yes, most women discuss things like jobs and car purchases with their husbands, but it's not a legal requirement.

I can see the ad campaign now:

"Iran, America's new, best source for Mail Order Brides."

The only major problem is the current upswing in the popularity of Indonesian Mail Order Brides.

Processing Tragedy

Everyone has their own take on how to process the most recent school shooting. I've chosen to myopically focus on a side issue that is, in the face of human death, a relatively inconsequential problem despite the Censorship Implications.

The dead were still warm when Dr Phil and the infamous Jack Thompson started crowing about how "Video Games" and all their evil were to blame for the VA Tech Shootings.

Let's set aside the fact that millions of people play video games and DON'T run out and start shooting people. Let's not discuss the fact that yours truly used to be a wicked pissa Quake II and III player, and could dominate an online game even with a high ping and a slow computer, yet I spend my free time nursing underweight foster rabbits back to health.

Let's set aside the fact that most the gamers I know see video games as a harmless way to blow off some steam, and would never so much as hurt a fly in real life. While we're at it, we can ignore the complete lack of any credible research connecting computer games to real life violence.

We'll even ignore the fact that even Rush Limbaugh discounts the notion of a Video Game / Mass Murder connection

Let's instead look at the one piece of information that may actually embarrass Dr Phil and Jack Thompson. After searching the home of Cho Seung Hui, the shooter responsible for the rampage, police have found no sign of video games in Cho Seung Hui's home. The killer didn't own them, and according to his former roommate he didn't even play them.

Dr Phil and Jack Thompson would have had more credibility if they'd joined FOX News in asking if Cho Seung Hui was possessed by the Devil.

Jack Thompson is unlikely to apologize for his fabricated claims, but Dr Phil might actually have the guts to stand up and admit he was wrong, so I'm asking folks to go to Dr Phil's feedback page and tell him what they think. Please be respectful, as the last thing Video Game players need is Dr Phil reading a bunch of death threats on his TV show.

I think I had this teacher in 7th grade Science

Apparently conformity is more important than truth.

Fortunately, this may be a fake. I hope it is.

Everyone loves Oolong

A brief Introduction to Oolong the bunny

(Click the image for the big version)




Oolong's Official web Site.

On becoming a woman, a 1940's guide to sex for "Good Girls"

The young person who has been so unfortunate as to develop the habit of masturbation feels constantly let down and fatigued. She adopts an attitude of stupidity simply because she cannot muster sufficient energy to remain alert. Study no longer appeals to her. Thus her mental development lags.



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Tom Delay attacks Rosie over Imus???

From the Blog of Tom Delay

And for the contextual icing on the cake, where are the repercussions for Rosie O’Donnell’s hateful, idiotic accusations that President Bush was behind the 9/11 attacks? And her ignorant parody of the Chinese language? Or her comparison of conservative Christians to Islamo-fascist terrorists? Why has ABC not suspended her from The View? Why has she not been frog-marched up to some radio show to apologize to 9/11 victims/Chinese-American activists/evangelical Christians?

Going after Rosie strikes me as a rather random target. Al Sharpton has a long history of attacking whites on racial grounds, and others are already taking him to task over the hypocrisy of his criticizing Imus.

Mr. Delay's desire to go after a talk show host is a fairly random act. Imus has more powerful and more outspoken critics on this issue, and attacking one of the talking heads on "The View" is a misfire. It fails to address the real issue, and smacks of "Acting for the sake of acting." What's more, he's taking her to task over claims about 9/11. O’Donnell wasn't even quoted on anything related to Imus. What in the WORLD do her comments have to do with Imus and his racist remarks?

More to the point, the linked post by Tom Delay makes him look like he's making a desperate plea for attention.

Is Fred Phelps Gay?

Reverend Fred Phelps, of godhatesfags.com came on the show and, for the second time, refused to directly answer a question about whether or not there was any homosexuality in his own background.



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Watch a madman foam at the mouth!

Logic? Rational Thought? Compassion? These are foreign concepts to Fred Phelps the repressed Homosexual behind the Westboro Baptist Church. Listen and delight in the raw insanity that comes from decades of repressed homosexual desire. Hated by even the right wing anti-gay-rights activists it's a riot to watch his mind degrade before your very eyes



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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is now REAL!!!

Brit Turns Land Rover Into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Before:


After: