Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: June 2009
Yammykins
The wife and I prefer sweet potato pie to pumpkin pie, candied yams to mashed sweet potatoes. Yes, I’m pretending yams and sweet potatoes are interchangeable, and I know they’re not. This is a garnet yam:
Garnet yams. Note the red skin and orange flesh.
And this is a sweet potato:
The sweet potato: light brown skin, yellow to orange flesh.
If I slip and say “sweet potato,” I mean “garnet yam,” AKA “the tasty one.” And that goes for sweet potato pie, too: when I make it, I use garnet yams. Similarly, my version of pumpkin ravioli in sage brown butter sauce uses garnet yams, not pumpkin (although I have used canned pumpkin in a pinch).
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Let’s test this out
Hmm. Has my audience flown the coop? The only way to find out is to enable comments. Protected Static thinks it’s coincidental that the hacks stopped when I closed B&W to comments, but I’m not so sure. Here’s what I’ve done: I’ve subjected all comments to moderation. I’m not sure that will protect me from code injection hacks, but I’m about to find out.
I’ve backed things up first, just in case . . .
In other news: we watched The Dark Knight on TV last night. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one movie do so much damage to Newtonian physics. Batman gets to fly like a bat, you know, thanks to these itty bitty bat wings in his suit (and I’ve got news for Batman: titanium is heavy). (Oh, and speaking of heavy, the Batmobile must harbor a small black hole in the trunk. That’s the only thing I can figure, since when it collides with the Joker’s semi head-on, it sends the semi flying backward.) And when the love interest, played by oh-so-bland Maggie Gyllenhaal, plummets from a 40-story building, the Bat dives after her, catches up to her, and breaks both their falls . . . how, exactly? Wind resistance on those batty wings, which aren’t even fully deployed?
The script is lifeless. What the hell does this mean? “You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” It gets said twice, so it must be important. And then there’s the movie’s big closing line: “Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we’ll hunt him because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”
WTF? My bogosity meter is stuck in the red zone.
We liked Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent, and had a split vote on Heath Ledger’s Joker. I liked the performance but Karen thought he was too over the top. Definitely better than Jack Nicholson’s Joker, though, which brought back fond memories of Cesar Romero. We both felt the writers could have done more to show “the making of the clown”; as written, we’re given precious little insight into the character.
The movie needed more Julie Newmar
Oh, and while I’m kvetching, Christian Bale’s Batman is lifeless. The voice he provides for the man behind the mask is, what? Some aged rocker after he’s effed up his vocal cords? That got old fast.
My overall rating: three out of four Mehs. I didn’t hate it, but I do feel like I wasted my time watching it beginning to end. I want Michael Keaton back, but I guess that won’t happen. Not unless some production company decides it’s time for an “old Batman” movie — old Batman appeared as a well conceived character in one of the animated versions for TV.
And while we’re on the subject of TV, nothing cinematic compares to
Batman: The Animated Series.
Okay, ready to post. Time to see if fully moderated comments can kill my blog. Of course, y’all will have to make some comments to test this thing out.
D.
Home sweet home
We have a verbal agreement on our offer! The relocation company didn’t even haggle, which of course makes us think, “We didn’t go low enough.” But who knows . . . if we had gone lower, perhaps they would have split the difference and we’d have ended up at a higher strike price.
If this sale goes through, the new home will be our nicest yet. We’ll have a pool and a guest bedroom, so if you and your spouse have ever looked deeply into one another’s eyes and said, “Honey, let’s vacation in Bakersfield this year,” now you have a place to stay.
Just think: you’ll be centrally located. Bakersfield is two hours away from the San Simeon coast, the Sierra Nevadas, and Los Angeles. It’s the ideal staging point for countless adventures.
You’re only imagining that I’m whistling “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.” I’m looking forward to this. Really I am!
D.
Now, this is special . . .
We came back from Bakersfield today, and along the way we passed a huge fenced area on the western side of the highway, near the Fink Road exit (Exit 428?) I mean, we’re talking huge, with what look like 15-foot-tall or higher fences, as if they feared being overrun by giraffes. There’s some sort of factory in the middle of all that land, but no signs. Very mysterious. If you do a Google Map search for “Crow’s Landing Fink Rd.”, click ‘satellite,’ and pan left, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
So I googled “Fink Rd. I-5 gated” and came up with this very odd invitation . . .
Perfection
In a perfect world, we would rent a place for a few months, meanwhile checking out homes for sale in a leisurely fashion. But we don’t want to move twice, which means we decide things quickly, make an offer, and hope things move through escrow ASAP.
We have to find a home we’ll be happy with, of course. That’s proving difficult. The current front-runner is at the high end of our price range, but its kitchen is close to being acceptable, it has a huge master suite, and there are lots and lots of fruit trees in the backyard. It doesn’t croon “home” to me, but few homes do. Put a couple of cats and ferrets and a couple dozen tarantulas in there and THEN it’ll croon home. Maybe.
The ideal situation is when you’re so filthy rich you can get a home built to specifications. We’re not that lucky. You have to wonder about the wisdom of that path, though, since folks rarely get the money out they sunk into such a venture. Far better to settle for something less than perfection and realize that over time, you’ll arrive in a space of comfort. Home-buying as arranged marriage, I guess.
Remember . . . email me at malmerkin at gmail dot com since, for the time being, comments are disabled. (Is it possible that hack-proofing my blog could be so easy? Too bad it leaves me with a semifunctional blog!)
D.
this is only a test . . .
I’ve turned off comments. I think I’m getting hacked by code injection from a site called ‘huge top locate dot cn” (all run together, of course, with the http, etc.) Baaaastards! So here’s my theory: they’re injecting code through the comments, so if I shut off comments, no injected code. Brilliant!
This code forum thread suggests that it is, indeed, BlueHost’s fault: “the problem is with the server and your ISP who has not implemented appropriate security measures to prevent this.” So maybe I’ll switch to a new host once we get back from Bakersfield.
Aside from all that, we’re househunting this weekend. The frustrating thing is that we’re limited by the size and timing of our down payment. We’re also constrained by the fact we want a particular school district, a one-story house, and Teh AWWWEsome Kitchen. Some things are important.
The email I’m using most frequently, for those who wanna say hi: malmerkin at gmail dot com.
D.