F-35 Blues

It’s getting seriously hard to find the strength to talk about anything positive since January, and the genocide in Gaza and now Israel is testing Iran’s right to exist, and vice-versa. One bombed-out civilian neighborhood full of corpses and rescue workers looks pretty much the same. As Mark Twain once said, regarding religion, if you take two adherents of the religions of peace and lock them in a room together with knives, you’ll come back to find they have disassembled eachother and taken their case to a higher court.

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If You Read Nothing Else I Write, Read This. Really.

None of this is to my pride or honor, for if it was, I’d be with a troupe in the commons outside the courthouse every day (in Clearfield, that’s where there’s a 10 commandments sculpture) putting my results to music, throwing confetti, and inviting all passers-by for hugs. No, that’s not enough – I’d be standing, with a mariachi band, in Times Square, with dominatrixes (of all genders) holding republican lawmakers on leashes offering copies of this paper with their mouths.

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Randomness

Krea’s chat mode adds an interesting new dimension to image creation. For example, you can tell it “create a portrait of ben franklin” then, when it doesn’t look Franklin enough, you provide an image and say “more like Franklin” then work on the setting. It’s interesting.

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This May Sound Like an Ad

But it’s not, I swear! As far as I recall, the number of products or services that I have actually gotten excited about is, maybe, a dozen. I suppose that’s a side-effect of living in the past, where if someone comes up and wants to show me a new Tactical(r) self-defense cane, I’m going to be comparing it to long-established products like the Henschel VK4501 (aka “King Tiger”) which is almost certainly superior unless you are going on a plane.

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A “game changer” as we Americans say

I can’t remember where and when I wrote about it; I think it was here – but since I forget, it does not count. The point, I recall (because I keep discovering a’fresh) is that there is a certain basic recipe for cake and once you understand it, everything is a matter of proportion of flour to milk and how you cook it. For example, a pan cake is a cake cooked in a pan. A waffle is a cake cooked in a waffle iron. A popover is a cake cooked in a cup. Now, we can argue whether lard or tallow or butter makes a popover a Yorkshire pudding, but the basics are: a quantity of flour, a quantity of eggs (for structure) some salt, some melted butter (or lard or tallow or even vegetable oil, and then something to make it foam a bit, maybe. If there is absolutely nothing to make it foam, I think maybe you have shortbread. If there’s baking powder, it’s a pancake or a waffle. If air is lofted into it with a whisk, it’s a popover or Yorkshire pudding. But once you understand how runny it should be, how fatty it should be, and how airy it should be, you can produce a tremendous amount of Europe’s greatest cuisine. Unless you get into millefeuille which is basically butter/bread damascus with no air in it… Anyhow.

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