Sundry and various?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how our educational system sets children up for a lifetime of disappointment. Think about it: for 12 years, 16 if you go to college and don’t take summer school, you work something like 37 weeks out of the year and vacation for the remaining 15. Then you join the work force and you’re stuck with two measly weeks of vacation a year. Four if you’re really lucky.

And now they’re talking about boosting the retirement age to 70, and of course one “benefit” of the current recession is that those of us with jobs are, of course, very grateful for that fact, and not too inclined to question the status quo that has us working like oxen.

I like to imagine a world where we didn’t have to spend half our budget on defense and where corporations paid their fair share of taxes. In that world, I suspect we could all work four-day weeks and have at least four weeks’ vacation per year. Sigh.

I think I’ve finally perfected pad thai. So often, my pad thai comes out soggy or soupy. This time, I decided to prepare things in four separate batches, which I would bring together in the end.

First, I made a salad of bean sprouts, green onion, cilantro, and radicchio (red cabbage is more traditional). I tossed it with a little sriracha sauce (that sweet – garlicky – red pepper sauce you find sometimes in Thai restaurants). Second: I sliced up part of a cucumber and also a carrot. Third: I sauteed shrimp, mushrooms, and the white parts of green onions, along with some garlic, tofu, and pad thai sauce. Once that was cooked, I put it in the oven to keep it warm. Finally, I made some wide rice noodles and then sauteed them in the same wok along with extra pad thai sauce. And then I put it all together.

Yes, kind of a production, but I think it worked out well. The noodles had the right chewiness and weren’t overly soggy, which is what usually happens when I make pad thai. Plus I was able to keep the flavors distinctive. Jake only liked the noodles and the tofu, but Karen and I thought it was all decent.

Tonight, Keith Olbermann railed against the Obama Administration’s spinelessness in light of the recent Shirley Sherrod brouhaha. In his Special Comment, he made reference to a bit of French history I’d heard of but never bothered to learn about: the Dreyfus Affair. Go to that link, read the Wiki, and explain to me why no one has ever made an English language movie about this bit of history.

It has everything: Treachery! Prejudice! Spineless bureaucrats! Noble, heroic authors! Devil’s Island! And ultimate exoneration!

No sex, not that I could see, but any competent screenwriter could fix that omission in a heartbeat.

D.

One of my favorite Tick moments

Watch at least the first 1 min 30 sec. Some of the best TV. Ever.

D.

Various & sundry

We’re coasting along at supra-100 degree weather (38 C) and the only good thing I can say about that is, in our garage it sure is easy to soften butter. Makes it much easier to prepare Lemon Squares, dontcha know.

Right now I’m baking Raspberry Squares. Instead of two tablespoons of lemon juice (and the lemon rind), I used about two tablespoons of fresh raspberry puree, maybe more than two tablespoons. I also added 1/4 teaspoon of vanilla (just because) and 1 teaspoon of Chambord (raspberry liqueur). I’ll let you know how it goes.

We were good consumers today. Yes, we did our part to bail out the flagging economy. Aside from dropping nearly three hundred dollars at CostCo, I bought a memory foam mattress and a new bed frame and head board from a local mattress store. We’ve been going without a head board ever since we left Oregon — if you think about it, it’s not exactly an essential item.

I also priced sofa beds, recliners, and bookshelves. We have a spare room which, until recently, was the inevitable (for us) junk room — boxes and boxes of books, old office papers, stuffed animals, and Jake’s old clothes. I’ve donated what I could, and I moved the “books to keep” boxes into the garage. At last, we have an empty room.

Which is striped with different shades of pastel pink.

A painter is coming early next week. I don’t have the aptitude to paint a room. I do have the aptitude to make a mess with paint and kind of paint a room. A man’s got to know his limitations.

The goal is to turn the room into a combo library/guest bedroom. Will anyone ever visit us in Bako? I don’t know! But at least now they’ll have no excuse.

I finished True Grit today. Great stuff. My edition had an interesting afterword, wherein Donna Tartt (an author who recorded the audio version of True Grit) mentions that the novel used to be favored in high school honors English classes — until the John Wayne movie came out. I suppose folks couldn’t take it seriously after that.

So I’m wondering what to read next. Little Big Man, perhaps? Hard to imagine that the book is much better than the movie. And . . . hmm. An introduction and a foreword? Does verisimilitude truly require 31 pages?

I spent last night killing Sister Miriam. Well, technically I didn’t kill her. Technically I carted her off to my interrogation chamber, and I could hear her screams as the chamber’s iron doors slammed shut. But the satisfaction is much the same.

Alpha Centauri is an oldie but a goodie. It’s brilliance lies in the fact that the various AI players each have distinctive political philosophies. Thus each human player can choose to play a faction whose philosophy matches his own; for example, I like to play as the University, which favors scientific achievement over all else. And each human player is free to go after the chief proponent of whichever political philosophy that human despises most.

Do tree-huggers make you sick? Then swear vendetta upon Lady Deirdre of the Gaians. Hate money-grubbing capitalists? Spit in the eye of the Morganites. Do communists toast your buns? Drop a planet buster on the Human Hive. And so forth. You can also victimize Che Guevara-style militants and bureaucrats. Honestly, there’s someone in this game that anyone would hate.

My pet peeve is religious fundamentalism, so I go after Sister Miriam.

Whenever I do this, I feel like I’m entering Sid Meier’s brain. Surely the creator of Alpha Centauri hates religious fundamentalism too — why else would he have handicapped The Believers with such backward research capabilities? It’s like he’s begging me to kick their asses. Their only advantage is a growth buff; yes, they breed like rabbits.

Jake watched me play last night. I was driving him crazy. See, Sister Miriam had declared an unprovoked war of aggression against my ally, Brother Lal of the Peacekeepers (the bureaucratic faction), and I had kindly agreed to defend him. First time around, Miriam kicked Lal’s faction into the dirt before I could bring over reinforcements. I rebooted to an earlier save, and this time managed to bring in reinforcements soon enough to save ONE of Lal’s cities. I used this as a base of operations to retake more of his cities — which I controlled, since I was the conquering party.

And I turned the cities back over to Brother Lal. That’s what drove Jake crazy. Why would I do something like that when I could expect nothing in return from this sorely abused AI player?

“I can’t very well kick The Believers asses if I have to leave units defending Brother Lal’s cities now, can I?”

Jake just shook his head. World domination is the only thing that makes sense to him. And, in the end, Jake’s outlook took hold. It drove me nuts when The Believers retook one of Lal’s cities. I captured it back from Miriam and renamed the city* Brother Lal? You mean Brother LOL!

Come to think of it, perhaps I should go haul Brother Lal off to my interrogation chamber. Just on general principle.

D.

*One of the many brilliant touches in Alpha Centauri: you can rename captured cities or come up with clever names for your own cities. Once I played as Miriam just so I could name her cities “Den of Iniquity,” “Satan’s Stronghold,” “The Devil’s Backbone,” and so forth. And then I let the University trounce me.