short takes

[cellio]

Eric Bogle, meet Gary Trudeau and Darby Conley (link via browngirl and several others).

On a lighter note, someone has finally given Jack Chick's "Dark Dungeons" MST3K treatment (link via autographedcat).

A guide to those bizarre glyphs that have replaced actual words on the lanudering instructions on some clothes (link via bhakti). Most bizarre entry, presumably included only for the sake of completeness: "do not dry".

Ok, Enterprise gets points for not using the time-travel reset button I feared they might use after "Azati Prime", but... ugh. I don't like the direction some of our characters are moving in. Archer should not get off easy even if he does save the world.

Last Sunday on the way to the bunny melt we were held up by a large number of police cars that seemed to be in an awful hurry. I counted eleven, and I didn't start counting until I noticed that this was not your run-of-the-mill car or two. As they came through the intersection we were stopped at they peeled off in different directions, so we were guessing it was a containment effort, but we had no further information. It wasn't until I caught up on newspapers last week that I realized that we were right in the path of a chase involving kidnapping and ultimately murder. Ouch. (They chased the guy from somewhere in the west end, onto the parkway, off into my neighborhood, through another neighborhood or two, back onto the parkway, and then onto the turnpike, where he later made an illegal U-turn and finally crashed at an exit.)

Yesterday I cooked red snapper for the first time. I was unsure what other fish might be an adequate substitute if they didn't have any at the store, but I got lucky. (Having now worked with it, if I had to make a substitution I think I'd go for haddock or monkfish -- similar consistency and not strongly flavored. Other opinions welcome.) Here's what I did, which turned out well: brown onions and lots [1] of garlic in olive oil, then add chopped parsley, salt & pepper to taste, and some white wine. Cook down (reduce by half), then add diced tomatoes (I didn't drain the liquid from the can but probably should have). Simmer a few minutes. Then spread half of this in a greased casserole, put the fish on top (in a single layer), spread the rest of the sauce on top, and bake for about 40 minutes at 350. Yummy! (I was working from a recipe, but I tend to be pretty casual about measuring so you're not getting quantities unless you ask.) ([1] "Lots" refers to the conventional understanding of garlic quantity, not to this writer's personal preferences.)

Comments

[cellio]

Yeah, I never got that special lesson, either. I blame my environment; I guess all the cool kids were in California or something.

(How much does a well-thumbed set of AD&D manuals and a banker's box full of Dragon back issues go for, these days?)

Not much, so far as I know. I've got those boxes too. :-) (Actually, I like the magazines for the comics, even if all the articles have pretty much expired by now. But we really don't need three sets of AD&D manuals between us...)