Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: April 2007
Live blogging live blogging
7:02 PM. We had ham, buttermilk biscuits, and broccoli for dinner. The kitchen’s clean, so I’m rarin’ to live blog. Let’s see how long it takes for Shaina to show up.
7:07 PM. Yes, it would help if I kept my speaker on. Otherwise, how will I know when Shaina shows up? Oh, and Shaina’s Brother? Your little sister is safe with me. Seriously.
7:18 PM. Just spent the last 11 minutes finding out whatever happened to Vanessa Del Rio, the first Hispanic porn superstar. Hint: she’s alive and well — you go, Vanessa!
7:19 PM. and yup no one has shown up yet. It’s like y’all have lives or something.
7:29 PM. I’m looking at the Bitches’s Chink and Jewy cover again, cuz I’m preparing a 13 entitled, “Thirteen Intertubes that make me grin.” Bloody brilliant. My high school gf’s mom wasn’t a smoker, though (not to my knowledge). But I learned recently the woman liked me. She reeeally liked me. She just had to pretend she hated me.
7:38 PM. Ah, yeeeeessssss. My first victim visitor. PatJ.
8:31 PM. Pat had to leave. I’ll keep things on a while longer for the night owls. Meanwhile, I’m going to check out some Machinima.
8:33 PM. Live blogging live blogging . . . you know, the concept hinges on me actually being able to DO some live blogging . . . just thought I’d point that out 🙂
9:00 PM. Major faux pas. Blue Gal came on and I wasn’t here! BG, how do you want to punish me when you see me again? You choose!
9:15 PM. BG came back long enough to make me grovel. Thanks, BG! Now Suisan and I are dishing on Passover food.
9:33 PM. Poor Blue Gal was burned out from her Blogswarm. Suisan and Noxcat and I are talking about rodents. We all agree that MICE ARE CAT FOOD!
10:28 PM. And that’s it. We all faded out at about the same time. Nice long discussion about feeldoes and fuck-me furniture, cookies and seders and chili — oh, my!
Good night, everyone.
D.
Answer me one simple question
This is the last day for the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm, and I’ve finally figured out what I wanted to say. I know I can’t say it without pissing off a lot of people, but I hope I can at least make myself understood.
I have no problem with people of faith who cherry-pick their beliefs. These are folks who adhere to the higher moral and ethical precepts of their religions, and who choose to ignore the crazy stuff. I’m a cherry-picker myself, as I have stated. Shorter version of that post:
. . . the Golden Rule is everything. We don’t need anything else.
And if each one of us could take that to heart and jettison all the other “articles of faith” (note, please, that you don’t even need faith to adopt the Golden Rule), the world would be a far better place.
So — what’s the obvious problem with theocracy? Theocrats aren’t cherry-pickers. They believe it all. Oh, they may not want to bring back the blood sacrifices of the Old Testament, but are they literalists otherwise? You betcha. And that’s a problem, because some of those beliefs are mighty suspect.
I’m not even talking about the obscure stuff, like combing through Leviticus to find justification for one’s hatred of gays. I’m talking about big league, central-tenet-of-faith stuff — like Passover, for instance. Passover is key to both Judaism and Christianity. Everyone knows the story: the Hebrews are enslaved in Egypt*, God directs Moses and Aaron to free the Hebrews, Pharoah resists, God punishes Pharoah and his people with ten plagues, the last of which is the Death of the Firstborn, in which the Angel of Death kills all firstborn Egyptians but spares the Hebrews. Moses and Aaron have instructed their people to mark their doors with lamb’s blood so that the Angel of Death will “pass over” those homes. Hence the name.
Yes, most folks know this story, but who ever bothers to question it?
I will, and I’ll do it with typical Jewish panache:
God kills all the firstborn Egyptians, babies to ancients, guilty and innocent alike. And this is a good thing?
Cat o’ nine
Today’s Random Flickr Blogging image is slightly unsafe for work, so I’ve buried it below the fold. Tom has links to this week’s other participants.
Tonight’s post should satisfy a few of your demands — pix! Flickr Follies! Sex! Blinded by Science (well, kinda science . . . um, health science. I suppose. If you really stretch the point). Maybe even Writer’s Life, if you would like to believe that this is what goes on in the dark recesses of my imagination.
Come along. You know you want to.
Four down, three to go
Busy OR day today — seven cases. I’ll be here a while.
On a positive note, the Feds did not show this week. They’re in Novato. On an even more positive note, we’re keeping this week short; I’ll be off Friday through Monday so that my staff can have an Easter break.
Let’s do something a little different this evening. Pick your favorite category (left sidebar), tell me what it is in the comments, and tonight’s post will fit that category. If there’s no consensus, I’ll pick at category at random from among your comments.
Later!
D.
Well, this blows
Here’s what I heard: some dumbass developer near Sacramento ploughed up a fiberoptic cable, screwing up high speed internet for the entire West coast.
WordPress gives me all kinds of errors when I try to open my comments. I don’t know if this will even post!
Here goes nothing . . .
Yay! It worked! But I’m still disturbed by all these “WordPress database error” files. Next thing you know, I’ll crash my blog. I’ve done it before.
Here. Have a recipe.
From Pampered Chef . . .
Tempting Toffee Crisps
12 whole (5 x 2 1/2 inch) graham crackers
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup butter (do not use margarine)
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup semisweet chocolate morsels
1/2 cup chopped almonds1. Preheat oven to 350. Arrange graham crackers side by side in a single layer pan (with sides)
2. In saucepan, combine brown sugar, butter, and vanilla. Cook over medium heat until mixture comes to a full boil. Continue boiling 4 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from saucepan and pour over crackers.
3. Bake 10-12 min or until bubbly and lightly browned. Remove pan from oven and place on a cooling rack. Sprinkle with chocolate morsels. Allow chocolate to soften, then spread over the crackers.
4. Sprinkle almonds over chocolate. Cool completely. Break into pieces.
I’ve made these using Saltines and they were AMAZING. I can’t even begin to imagine how much better they would be with graham crackers. And, hey, why not throw some marshmallows in there, too? Toffee smores!
D.
Reruns again?
After a crappy night’s sleep, I saw 32 patients today (if not a record, it’s close), and when I got home, I had two hours worth of catch-up charting to do. My brain is a blancmange, and when that happens, you get reruns. Kwitcher bitchin — I don’t do this all that often.
Kate and Anduin might remember this one, but I suspect it will be new material for many of you.
Historical note: this post first aired July 31, 2005. Somehow, the Smart Bitches caught wind of it, shouted it on their blog, and suddenly I had me scads of romance readers/writers. Speaking of the Bitches, did you catch their April Fool’s Day front page? Bloody brilliant. It rices my kishkes from jealousy, it’s so brilliant.
Without further ado:
Everything I know about sex I learned from my tarantula
Yeah. Keep readin’.
Not an April Fool’s Day joke
NASA’s Cassini has imaged a hexagonal structure centered over Saturn’s North Pole:
The feature was noticed over twenty years ago by Voyager 1 and 2, so it’s not an ephemeral finding. From the NASA site,
“This is a very strange feature, lying in a precise geometric fashion with six nearly equally straight sides,” said Kevin Baines, atmospheric expert and member of Cassini’s visual and infrared mapping spectrometer team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “We’ve never seen anything like this on any other planet. Indeed, Saturn’s thick atmosphere where circularly-shaped waves and convective cells dominate is perhaps the last place you’d expect to see such a six-sided geometric figure, yet there it is.”
It’s not a small structure, either — nearly four Earths could fit inside it. (The Earth’s diameter is nearly 8000 miles, and this thing is 15,000 miles across. Four Earths would rub shoulders and spill over the confines of the hex. But, still!)
By contrast, at Saturn’s South Pole, they’ve found a “hurricane with a giant eye.”
There’s even a video (scroll down a bit).
Cool!
D.