My Top 10 Blog Posts - Evah!

I started this blog on January 23rd, 2006. So I've been at this for almost 5 years and have over 1450 posts up.

I've never been concerned about how many readers I have or how many hits I get. That's not why I'm here.

But I recently clicked on my Stats according to Blogger.com and found the results somewhat interesting.

Strictly in terms of Page Views, these are my Top Ten Posts of All Time.

10. "Guest Blogger" April 18, 2007: 726 Page Views - I copied and pasted a diatribe from Lee Iacocca. Virtually no original content.

9. "Speaking of Ice" December 10, 2007: 980 Page Views - My review of Dan Simmons book 'The Terror'.

8. "WWI Museum" November 11, 2007: 1,062 Page Views - My appreciation of our incredible World War I Memorial and museum. It is an international treasure.

7. "Beer Can Chicken" November 27, 2010: 1,183 Page Views - This recent post got a boost from this mention on The Pitch's Fat City blog.

6. "Beneath The Temple of Quetzalcoatl" August 7, 2010: 3,157 Page Views - Just some cool archaeological research results from Central Mexico.

5. "Soccer Is So Incredibly Gay" June 18, 2010: 4,969 Page Views - This was my lamest post ever. I just Google Imaged "Soccer is gay" and posted the images without comment. I credit the popularity of this post to all of the closeted gay, pretentious, American, Anglophile soccer fan wannabes who get wood whenever they hear someone say "Manchester United" or "Arsenal".

4. "Das Boot" January 27, 2009: 5,102 Page Views - This was a post about my fucked up feet. Seriously?

3. "Gay Marriage Finally A Reality" June 16, 2008: 7,383 Page Views - Strong on subject and visuals, light on original content.

2. "Business Travel" December 19, 2007: 10,344 Page Views - My build up to tell the Tonto Kowaslki joke. Really, people?

My most popular post ever? Drum roll.....

1. "Tattoos and Piercings" July 26, 2008: 33,360 Page Views - Wow. I should post more about tats. Something I know absolutely nothing about. LOL! You fuckers are funny!

This is precisely why I don't craft my posts to generate traffic.

I think I'll keep writing about whatever the fuck I want and let the stats be damned.

An Environmental No Brainer

I don't normally write about environmental issues. I don't even recycle so I don't have any standing to be pontificating on the virtues of being green.

But a couple of recent inputs came together to generate some thoughts.

I watched a documentary the other day about the Great Migration that takes place in the Serengeti.

"The extraordinary annual Great Migration of wildebeest and other grazing herbivores across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is one of the greatest spectacles in the natural world. Over two million herbivores partake in this journey, with about 200 000 zebra and 500 000 Thomson's gazelle behind the main players... one-and-a-half million wildebeest!"

It was absolutely fascinating. It is the last great migration left on the planet. American Bison used to participate in a similar migration before the Europeans showed up and, well, ya know, killed them all and built all kinds shit like highways, railroads and fences that prevented any mass land migrations by any animals.

Then I saw a news story tonight about plans to build a huge highway straight across the Serengeti to handle commercial mining traffic from newly discovered Rare Earth Element deposits in Tanzania to shipping ports at Lake Victoria.

"REEs are widely used in emerging "Green" technologies. Each hybrid Toyota Prius is reported to contain 66 lbs of REEs. REEs are used in wind turbines, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), flat panel displays, catalytic converters, motors and magnets. Military uses include radar and guidance systems."

So the demand for the natural resources that allow us to be more "Green" threatens to destroy one of the greatest, open ecosystems left on Earth by disrupting their natural migration routes. African wildebeests, zebras and gazelles would suffer the same fate as American possums, skunks and raccoons. Roadkill.

Building a highway across the Serengeti would put in place an incredibly expensive piece of environmentally destructive infrastructure that would need continual maintenance and repair while allowing polluting diesel trucks to belch poison into the fragile ecosystem.

The need to get the REEs from mine to port can be accomplished faster, cheaper and with absolutely no impact on the Great Migration or the Serengeti ecosystem by using cargo airships.





You put an Airship Port at the REE mine.

You put an Airship Port at Lake Victoria.

You transport the REEs across the Serengeti without impacting the environment below. In fact rather than building a drive-through highway for poachers, you could equip the Airships with high-tech surveillance equipment to scan for poachers and serve as wireless communication hubs to link law enforcement and park rangers.

The Airships could be the equivalent of Serengeti AWAC units protecting the area by coordinating government resources.

This is so obvious. Just fucking do it.

Reader Alert Redux

Hey folks! Remember a couple of weeks ago when I had to lock down the comments with Comment Moderation to keep all you lovely folks from getting hit with spam comments?

Of course you do. I however, had mostly forgotten about it and the blog had become severely constipated with unreviewed comments.

Good news for you, the cyber-sphincter has been relaxed and the backlog of comments have been released.

Thanks to my buddy Jools for alerting me to the blockage. It's all cleared up now.

Henceforth, if you post a comment and don't see it, shoot me an email so I can release it. In the subject line of the email, type "Shit Or Get Off The Pot" so I know what its about.

The Death of a Moustache

This moustache was OK, because Oliver Hardy was funny.



This moustache was OK because Charlie Chaplin was funny.



Then this fucker had to go and ruin the moustache.



It's hard to see how that moustache can ever make a comeback, what with the Holocaust and all.

Fucking moustache killing bastard.

Net Neutrality. What Does It Mean To You? A Primer.

Today, the FCC approved Net Neutrality rules governing how your Internet provider can control bandwidth based on the content and the source.

What does this mean to you?

Thankfully, absolutely nothing because the FCC put rules in place to keep things exactly as they are today. That means that everyone is an equal content provider and we are all equal content receivers.

Which is why conservatives, republicans and greedy corporate fucktards have their panties in such a twist! THEY FUCKING HATE EQUALITY! They are screaming that this is another over-reach of Big Government into the private sector! It's more Socialist Obamalism!

Corporations don't want equality. They wanted to ease us into a tiered/metered Internet instead of the flat rate model we enjoy today.

Let's say you pay $30 a month for broadband Internet access from your Internet service provider. Whether you only use the Internet to check your email twice a week or whether you sit at home 24/7 streaming movies, you still pay the same affordable rate for access.

The Suits don't like that. The Suits want to charge power users more than they charge casual users. That's not such a foreign concept. People who consume more electricity have a higher utility bill than people who consume less electricity.

That's metering.

But it's a false comparison. If an Internet service provider wants to offer users streaming video, they have to put the infrastructure in place to accommodate it. If they don't, users who want that broadband service will find another provider. Bandwidth is a commodity. There isn't much in the way of service differentiation.

So they tell you it's all about the users, but it's not. It's about the deep pocketbooks of the content providers.

Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, all of The Big Suit Internet Providers have huge corporate content providers. What they really want to do is give "preferred bandwidth" to their own content and choke out everyone else through tiered access.

So lets say your Internet service provider is Time Warner and you want to get streaming video via Netflix or Hulu.

Time Warner wants to be able to reserve the largest bandwidth and highest speeds on their Internet service to content owned by Time Warner. All other streaming video providers would have to pay fees for tiered bandwidth that would all be below the Time Warner level.

So ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX and all the major networks might be able to afford Tier 1 and be equal with Time Warner.

Local outlets like KMBC, KSHB might only be able to afford Tier 2 access so their content would be slowed down.

Public outlets like YouTube might not be willing to pay for anything higher than Tier 3 access so their content would only be delivered after the Tier 1 and 2 level content had been delivered.

But if you are a blogger and want to provide your own content over the Internet, you would be at the bottom of the barrel. Tier 4,5,6 or 7. What ever the structure was. The average Internet user would never, ever get to your content unless you were willing to pony up Big Money to get the Tiered Access controlled by your Internet Service Provider.

What the FCC did today was guarantee that corporate greed cannot silence you on the Internet.

The content that you offer on the Internet is treated in exactly the same way that content from CNN or Time Warner is treated. As completely neutral bandwidth with no regard to content or source.

The FCC made the right call.

How Many Dark Ages Were There?

Lost Civilization May Have Existed Beneath the Persian Gulf

The Dark Age we all learned about in school was the period that immediately followed The Fall of Rome.

For 6000 years of recorded human civilization, mankind has grown from a common core and spread a cultural legacy. Sumerians, Persians, Greeks, Egyptians, Romans had all grown strong, conquered, expanded, enslaved and spread a more or less common spiritual and cultural inheritance.

The first Big Change to this dynamic was the birth and spread of Christianity in the 1st Century of the Common Era.

The second Big Change was the Fall of Rome.

When the "barbaric" Germanic tribes sacked Rome and brought down the Roman Empire, there was nothing to fill the vacuum. These were the Dark Ages we learned about in school. When civilization as we had known it for thousands of years was absent and much knowledge and wisdom was lost.

It wasn't until the next Big Change, the Islamic expansion several hundred years after the Fall of Rome brought translations of ancient wisdom and the Muslim's own discoveries in mathematics and astronomy that the dregs of Europe were re civilized.

1,2,3,4,5. Know what those are called? Arabic numerals. They're what we use today.

Know what we don't use? I, II, III, IV, V. Those are Roman numerals.

My point is, the Dark Ages that resulted from the fall of a major civilization just 1500 years ago, only lasted a couple of hundred years, but had a profound impact on our modern society.

Now we learn that

"Veiled beneath the Persian Gulf, a once-fertile landmass may have supported some of the earliest humans outside Africa some 75,000 to 100,000 years ago, a new review of research suggests.

At its peak, the floodplain now below the Gulf would have been about the size of Great Britain, and then shrank as water began to flood the area. Then, about 8,000 years ago, the land would have been swallowed up by the Indian Ocean, the review scientist said."

"The study, which is detailed in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology, has broad implications for aspects of human history."

"The Gulf Oasis would have been a shallow inland basin exposed from about 75,000 years ago until 8,000 years ago, forming the southern tip of the Fertile Crescent, according to historical sea-level records.

And it would have been an ideal refuge from the harsh deserts surrounding it, with fresh water supplied by the Tigris, Euphrates, Karun and Wadi Baton Rivers, as well as by upwelling springs, Rose said. And during the last ice age when conditions were at their driest, this basin would've been at its largest.

In fact, in recent years, archaeologists have turned up evidence of a wave of human settlements along the shores of the Gulf dating to about 7,500 years ago.

"Where before there had been but a handful of scattered hunting camps, suddenly, over 60 new archaeological sites appear virtually overnight," Rose said. "These settlements boast well-built, permanent stone houses, long-distance trade networks, elaborately decorated pottery, domesticated animals, and even evidence for one of the oldest boats in the world."

Rather than quickly evolving settlements, Rose thinks precursor populations did exist but have remained hidden beneath the Gulf. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]

"Perhaps it is no coincidence that the founding of such remarkably well developed communities along the shoreline corresponds with the flooding of the Persian Gulf basin around 8,000 years ago," Rose said. "These new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf, displaced by rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean."

"The most definitive evidence of these human camps in the Gulf comes from a new archaeological site called Jebel Faya 1 within the Gulf basin that was discovered four years ago. There, Hans-Peter Uerpmann of the University of Tubingen in Germany found three different Paleolithic settlements occurring from about 125,000 to 25,000 years ago. That and other archaeological sites, Rose said, indicate "that early human groups were living around the Gulf basin throughout the Late Pleistocene."

We have clear evidence how far human knowledge was set back by one Great Civilization collapsing for a few hundred years before another Great Civilization came to the rescue with rediscovered wisdom.

Think about how much knowledge has been lost and what a small fragment of it has been rediscovered if human civilization dates back not a mere 6,000 years, but 75,000 years or 125,000 years.

All of a sudden the Mystery of the Pyramids isn't how Ancient Egyptians 4,000 years ago managed to build such magnificent structures (without the unlikely intervention of alien technology), but what fragments of even more ancient human technology the Egyptians, Incas, Mayans, Aztecs, Toltec's and Polynesians had access to that allowed them to accomplish their myriad wonders.

There are perfectly rational answers to all of the mysteries of the universe. Science will give us those answers.

Reader Alert

Blogger recently implemented a new feature to filter and minimize spam comments.

As a result of Blogger's eternal vigilence, I have been FUCKING INUNDATED WITH SPAM COMMENTS!!!!

I already had word verification in place, but I have now had to start comment moderation in the hopes that this will stop the assault on your in boxes.

Hopefully this will fix the problem. If not, I might have to go to a membership model.

Goddamn fucking useless taintsucking asslicking knobgobbling fucking spamming motherfuckers!

Burning Bridges

My 2nd wife and I were married for almost 10 years. From 1993 to 2002.

The life-long friends that I brought into the marriage, friends dating back to high school and even grade school, became part of our network of shared relationships.

When she betrayed the trust in our relationship with one of the members of that network, our marriage imploded and never recovered. We divorced.

In my opinion, you only get one shot at trust. When it's betrayed, it's gone forever.

In the aftermath of the divorce, I made a conscious decision to make a clean break with everything and everyone in my life that had existed prior to that.

The only exemptions were my daughter and my first wife.

Everyone else was dead to me.

Occasionally, someone from the Old Days will find me and want to reconnect.

Sadly, it's generally people who had nothing to do with "The Unpleasantness" and are innocent.

But a clean break is a clean break and I have no desire to reconnect with anyone and take any walks down Memory Lane.

So here's the rule.

If we were friends prior to 2002, we're probably not friends any more and we never will be again.

It's not your fault, you didn't do anything wrong, it's just a personal choice I've made.

I have new friends now.

I'll never go back.

Good Bye, Good Luck and have a nice life.

Americans Are Stupid

That's not my opinion. That's a fact. And it doesn't surprise me one little bit.



Americans have been willfully dumbing themselves down for many, many years.

Our Founding Fathers were polymaths. They were educated and well read in mathematics, philosophy, literature, art, physics, geography, geometry, history, theology and political science.

If they were alive today they would be derided as "intellectual elitists".

Americans in 2010 don't want to know anything, they don't want to think about anything, they don't want to scrutinize the world around them and they sure as fuck don't want to examine their own lives.

Fuck, a significant number of Americans can't even find the United States on a map of the world and view any effort to get them to do so as "gotcha, drive by, journalism".

Americans in 2010 want to sit back on their fat white asses and have some television talking head tell them what they should think and believe.

Beck. Olberson. O'Reilly. Maher. They're all the fucking same.

Granted, I find some more entertaining than others, but I feel obligated to sample them all. Not as a source of actual information, but as a way of bookending the boundaries of extremity in the country.

Holy Fuck!

As that great, liberal, intellectual Statesman once said, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."

To which Karl Rove countered "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Our leaders today (and yes, I include President Obama and our Democratic Leadership)think they can just make shit up, call it real, and Americans will accept it as True.

After all, there's a precedent for that! That's what Americans do every Sunday when they go to church! "Oh! That guy up there in robes said something that's written in a really old book so it must be true! OK! I believe that!"

We live in a country where a significant number of people actually believe that a blithering, rambling, idiot, quitter from Alaska who reneged on her obligations to her constituents because she couldn't stand up to close scrutiny from the press and would rather get rich spewing venom and selling books should be within arms reach of the nuclear football!

We're doomed. Learn to speak Chinese.

Beer Can Chicken

I've only made this once before when I followed a recipe by the book. This time I had some fun with it.

INGREDIENTS

A whole fucking chicken
A Beer Chicken Rack
Some Thyme and some Basil
Olive Oil. Extra Virgin or Trailer Trash Slutty. Your call.
McCormick Peppercorn Medley Grinder
McCormick Sea Salt Grinder
McCormick Grill Mates Chicken Rub
Old Bay Seasoning
Sweet Yellow Onion
Some beer and a can. Or a can of beer.

Take the chicken out of whatever packaging it's in and pull out the giblets. Throw that shit away. Some folks will try to tell you to keep it for soup stock, or fried gizzards or some such shit. Fuck that. I don't eat guts. Throw that shit away. Or feed it to your dog or cat.

Next, wash the chicken inside and out. Wash it good! When you're done washing it, set it on a platter lined with paper towels. Take some more paper towels and pat it dry.

Mix the thyme and basil together and rub that all around the inside of the chicken.

Take some olive oil and pour it into the palm of your hand. Rub your hands together and then work the olive oil into the skin of the bird. Massage that chicken like it's your new girlfriend.

Then take the Peppercorn, Sea Salt, Chicken Rub and Old Bay and season the chicken to your taste.

Cut the Sweet Yellow Onion into wedges and shove a couple of them up the chickens ass. Not too many or the chicken won't sit sit in the can rack right.


These racks are maybe 5 bucks and you can get them just about anywhere. They make this so much easier.

I don't drink canned beer because I'm not a fucking animal. I'm a human being. All I had on hand was some Boulevard Single Wide IPA. So I used a funnel to decant a bottle of the IPA into an empty Diet Coke can.

I put the Coke can full of beer into the rack and mounted the chicken. When I was done mounting the chicken, I put it onto the rack over the can of beer.



Beer Can Chicken is typically cooked on a charcoal or gas grill, but I made mine in the oven. Set the oven to 375 and cook for about 90 minutes.

It comes out looking something like this.



Add some boiled spuds, some biscuits and gravy and you've got a right proper Ray County feast on your table.



Bone Abba Teat!

The First Thanksgiving...

...didn't look like this.


Not even close.

But let's take a step back and look at America's true Founding Father. A Pequot Mohigan member of the Wampanoag Confederacy named Tisquantum, but more commonly known as Squanto.



In 1600 the Wampanoag lived in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, as well as within a territory that encompassed current day Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket. Their population numbered about 12,000.



From his Wikipedia biography:

"On his way back to the Patuxet in 1614 Tisquantum was kidnapped by Englishman Thomas Hunt. Hunt was one of John Smith's lieutenants. Hunt was planning to sell fish, corn and captured natives in Málaga, Spain. There Hunt attempted to sell Tisquantum and a number of other Native Americans into slavery in Spain for £20 apiece.

Some local friars discovered what Hunt was attempting and took the remaining Native Americans — Tisquantum included — in order to instruct them in the Christian faith.

Tisquantum convinced the friars to let him try to return home. He managed to get to London, where he lived with and worked for a few years with John Slany, a shipbuilder who apparently taught Tisquantum more English. Slany took Tisquantum with him when he sailed to Cuper's Cove, Newfoundland.

To get to New England, Tisquantum tried to take part in an expedition to that part of the North American east coast. When that plan fell through, he returned to New England in 1618.

At last in 1619 Tisquantum returned to his homeland, having joined an exploratory expedition along the New England coast. He soon discovered that the Patuxet, as well as a majority of coastal New England tribes (mostly Wampanoag and Massachusett), had been decimated the year before by an epidemic plague, possibly smallpox; it has recently been postulated as being due to leptospirosis. Native Americans had no natural immunity to European infectious diseases.

Tisquantum finally settled with Pilgrims at the site of his former village, which the English named Plymouth. He helped them recover from an extremely hard first winter by teaching them techniques to increase food production by fertilizing crops. He also showed them the best places to catch fish and eels. He was critical to their survival."

Of the 102 Mayflower passengers who landed at Plymouth in November of 1620, only 52 were left alive when Tisquantum settled with them in the fall of 1621.

There was indeed a feast that year where the famished, malnourished Pilgrims shared what meager food they had available and the Native Americans who, led by Tisquantum, added to the feast by hunting deer and returning to their villages to bring additional food to help feed the starving Pilgrims. This went on for 3 days with Tisquantum translating.

Without the generosity of the Native Americans, and Tisquantum in particular, despite his being previously kidnapped and mistreated by the Europeans, the Pilgrims would not have survived another winter.

But this feast was not an annual event and it was not referred to as Thanksgiving.

In fact there are exactly 2 historical references to this event.

This from Elizabeth Armstrong's 2002 Christian Science Monitor story:

"In a letter to a friend, dated December 1621, Edward Winslow wrote: 'Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a more special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruit of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time, among other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest King Massasoit, with some 90 men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others.'

Twenty years later, William Bradford wrote a book that provides a few more hints as to what might have been on that first Thanksgiving table. But his book was stolen by British looters during the Revolutionary War and therefore didn't have much influence on how Thanksgiving was celebrated until it turned up many years later."

The idea of "Thanksgiving" as a recurring national observance has nothing to do with what I've just described.

The first "Thanksgiving" commemorated the Pequot Massacre a mere 15 years later.

From The WEYANOKE Association:

""In 1636 ninety armed settlers went to raid Block Island, off the coast, because a white man had been found killed on his boat nearby Whet the armed party landed, they found that the Indians of Block Island had gone into hiding; they burned the villages and crops and returned to the mainland, where for good measure they burned down some Pequot villages. The English went after these Pequots and told them that they were held responsible for the murder. The Pequots had to hand over 'the remaining murderers' and provide assurances about future behavior. The Pequots 'obstinately' refused (in the words of an English eyewitness) and in the resulting fight several Pequots were killed and wounded, and their belongings destroyed or carried off. Thus started the Pequot War...

"The outcome of such a war was of course never in doubt. It ended with an attack by John Mason and his men on the last Pequot stronghold, their settlement on the Mystic River. 'We must burn them!' Mason is reported as having shouted, running around with a firebrand and lighting the wigwams. 'Such a dreadful terror let the Almighty fall upon their spirits that they would flee from us and run into the very flames. Thus did the Lord judge the heathen, filling the place with dead bodies, ' he reported afterward:

"The surviving Pequots were hunted but could make little haste because of their children, Mason wrote, They were literally-run to ground...tramped into the mud and buried in the swamp. ' The last of them were shipped to the West Indies as slaves...John Winthrop.. .governor once more, ...[offered] ...forty pounds sterling for the scalp of an Indian man, twenty for the scalps of women and children. The name 'Pequot' was officially erased from the map. The Pequot River became the Thames and their town became New London."2"

From The People's Path:

"William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, wrote: "Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire...horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them."

The next day, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony declared "A day of thanksgiving" thanking god that they had eliminated over 700 men, women and children. For the next 100 years, every "thanksgiving day" ordained by a Governor or President was to honor that victory, thanking god that the battle had been won."

As one of the leading theologians of his day, Dr. Cotton Mather put it: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."

That massacre was the true origin of the recurring, annual holiday known as Thanksgiving.

It wasn't until the early 1800's that Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the popular Godey's Lady's Book, stumbled upon Edward Winslow's original passage of the 1621 feast and refused to let the historic day fade from the minds - or tables - of Americans.

About this same time in 1854, William Bradford's history book of Plymouth Plantation resurfaced. The book increased interest in the Pilgrims.

Again, from the Christian Science Monitor:

"In her magazine Hale wrote appealing articles about roasted turkeys, savory stuffing, and pumpkin pies - all the foods that today's holiday meals are likely to contain.

In the process, she created holiday "traditions" that share few similarities with the original feast in 1621.

In 1858, Hale petitioned the president of the United States to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday. She wrote: "Let this day, from this time forth, as long as our Banner of Stars floats on the breeze, be the grand Thanksgiving holiday of our nation, when the noise and tumult of worldliness may be exchanged for the length of the laugh of happy children, the glad greetings of family reunion, and the humble gratitude of the Christian heart."

Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be an national, annual holiday in 1863.

These two polar opposite events, the life saving salvation of Illegal European Immigrants in the Plymouth Colony by Tisquantum and the members of the native Wampanoag Confederacy, and the subsequent, horrific massacre of those same Pequots a scant 16 years later, brutally slaughtered by those same ungrateful Illegal European Immigrants, got mashed together, white washed, papered over and turned into a myth where Noble Savages and Humble Christians began an annual tradition of sharing the harvest and giving thanks.

I think it's important to have at least one day a year where everyone can focus on being thankful and grateful for the people in their lives and the simple things like having a place to live and if you're lucky, a job.

But it's also important to know the facts of history and be able to seperate them from the warm and fuzzy American Mythology. The truth is important. And the truth is, we Americans aren't a very nice people. Never have been. Aren't today. The rest of the world sees it all too clearly, while we choose to remain blissfully blind and ignorant.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Dark Side of Greg Beck's per-fuckin-fect fried chicken

Today, I made my latest batch of Greg Beck's per-fuckin-fect fried chicken for my daughter, young Galadriel Tanqueray Onassis, her friend Kelcie and my own BFF.



I'm not saying it was my best batch ever, but it was pretty much my best batch ever. It was accompanied by a Caeser salad, Greg Beck's fries which are cooked in the same oil as the chicken, a couple of egg-brushed rustic french loaves spread with real butter, and polished off by a Tippins Caramel Apple Pie topped off with Vanilla Bean ice cream.

It was EPIC! The spontaneous reviews were "Toolicious!" and "Stupid good!". I'm taking some leftover chicken in to work for a friend who has never had it before and she be delighted.

But as I was cleaning up, I noticed something kind of disgusting.

This is what a bottle of virgin Canola oil looks like.



This is what that same Canola oil looks like after being brutally ass fucked by Greg's chicken and fries recipe.



Reuse, for any purpose, is contraindicated. It's given all it has to give. You got to throw that shit out!

So I'm Thinkin'...

I have a movie pitch in mind.

I think Joss Whedon should develop a screenplay based on Larry Niven's Ringworld books.




I see J.J. Abrams directing with Peter Jackson producing.

I want Johnny Depp as Louis Wu.

Your thoughts?

The Barter System

OK, here's the deal.

I have some shit I need done that I have been tolerating and working around for a long time because I'm either too stupid or lazy to tackle them on my own.

I'm willing to trade delicious food, mediocre sex or, in some very rare cases, actual cash in exchange for your services.

You can pick one task or multiple tasks and name your preferred recompense. I just need to get this shit done.

RECOVERING MICROSOFT OFFICE
I had a Dell XPS that had Microsoft Office installed on it. The circuit board got fried but I was able to save the hard drive. What was the C: drive on my Dell XPS is now the external H: drive on my hand-me-down Dell Optiplex. It still has Microsoft Office installed on it but I can’t get it to run.

Need to fix that.

DELL OPTIPLEX BOOT
Whenever I boot my Dell Optiplex I get a BIOS screen that says “Primary drive 1 not found. Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility”

If I “strike” F1 it finds the primary drive, boots up and everything is fine. Afraid of trying to “fix it” by running the setup utility out of fear that I’ll fuck it up and hitting F1 won’t work anymore.

Need to fix that.

XPS to OPTIPLEX TECH TRANSFER
In addition to the hard drive, I have some leftover RAM and a video card. Need to see if any of those spare parts can be used to optimize the Optiplex. Could use someone who actually knows what they are doing to be my hardware wingman.

Need to fix that.

PS3/STREAMING NETFLIX SURROUND SOUND
According to this (http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/10/netflix-ps3-streaming-app-adds-hd-surround-sound-ditches-disc/) I should be getting full Surround Sound from my PS3 Streaming Netflix content and Blu-Ray DVDs.. My sound system looks like it’s configured correctly, but I ain’t got no Surround Sound.

Need to fix that.

WIRELESS NETWORK
I have a wireless network setup at home, but things on my desktop upstairs that used to be accessible from my Netbook downstairs are no longer accessible.

Need to fix that.

BLOG CODE BLOAT
My blog code has tons of errors that cause it to take FOREVER to load if you are tying to load it native instead of through Google Reader. I think it’s from years of adding, deleting and changing shit through the blogger.com user interface without knowing html.

I need someone who knows html to get in there, fix those errors and streamline stuff.

Need to fix that.

If any of the above sounds like something you can fix and you are willing to work for what I am offering to pay, drop me a line.

I need to get this shit fixed.

Thank You All

Thank you Great Grandpa Anderson (Civil War)



Thanks Grandpa Pawie (WWI)!



Thanks Great Uncle Roy (WWI)!




Thanks Uncle Bobbie (WWII)!



Thanks Uncle Stanley (WWII)!



Thanks Dad (Merchant Marines, WWII and your broke ass T2 Tanker S.S. Sacketts Harbor)








Thanks Again Dad (Army, Korea)





Thank all of you Military Veterans who served in peace and war and protected my right to be a grumpy, curmudgeonly, semi-socialist provocateur and anti-social asshole exercising my Constitutionally granted right to Free Speech.

You have my eternal gratitude and respect.

My Beanless Chili Recipe

The other night my BFF called and wanted to know how I made my chili.

She had some ground beef, was going to make tacos, but then remembered my awesome chili from a few nights before and thought "Maybe I'll make XO's chili instead!"

She was disappointed to discover that like everything I do, it ain't that simple! I'm a complicated man! This ain't no impromptu dish! This shit takes some planning!

But I'll post my recipe here so you can plan ahead if you want to make some genuine XO Chili.

INGREDIENTS

Land O' Lakes Butter
Vidalia or other sweet yellow onion
McCormick Peppercorn Medley Grinder
McCormick "Grill Mates" Steak Rub
Old Bay Seasoning
2 lbs McGonigles Meatloaf Mix
1 Bag of Ol' Hired Hand's Six Gun Chili Mixin's
1 Can of Rotel "Chili Fixin's" seasoned diced tomatoes and green chilies
1 Can of Rotel "Mexican Lime and Cilantro" diced tomatoes
1 Bottle of beer
1 Beef Bouillon Cube
1 Cup of water
Baker's Chocolate

INSTRUCTIONS

Dice up some sweet yellow onion bits and saute them in some real life, honest to God, fucking Land O'Lakes butter!


Don't you DARE use fucking canola oil, or olive oil, or margarine, or "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!".

Fuck that! Use real goddamn butter. The stuff with the hawt Native American chick on her knees and wearing buckskins.


Nothing else will do.

For the meat, I use McGonigle's Meatloaf Mix.



Brown that up with the butter and onions. Mix that shit all together and season with the Steak Rub, Peppercorn Grinder and Old Bay.


You can smell it, can't you? Damn right you can!

Now. Pay attention. This next part is important.

DRAIN THE FUCKING MEAT!

Dump that skillet full of goodness into a colander and let all that grease and shit drain off. Press it down with a spatula. Squeeze that excess stuff out of the meat.

Nobody wants to dip through a layer of grease to get to the chili! That's just gross.

Now, I like to cook, but I'm not stupid. I have no desire to reinvent the wheel.

So I use "Ol' Hired Hand's Six Gun Chili Mixin's", but I don't strictly follow their instructions.


Their directions call for mixing the two large packets of seasoning in 1 cup of water.

Fuck that!

I boil a cube of beef bullion in a cup of water and add the spices to that.


Put the drained meat back in the skillet, add the bullion and spices and simmer until it looks and smells good.

Dump the meat into a large pot. Add the Rotel tomatoes...


Add a bottle of beer of your choice. I used a Boulevard Single-Wide I.P.A...



NOTE: This chili contains ABSOLUTELY NO ALCOHOL! The alcohol in the beer gets cooked off and only leaves the flavor of the barley and hops in the chili. This is where you can have fun choosing which beer to add to the mix.


Lastly, take half a block of Baker's chocolate, finely grated, and sprinkle it in the final mix.



Bring everything to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer uncovered, stirring frequently, for 30 minutes.




Serve over a bed of crushed Tostito chips, garnished with shredded cheese, diced green onions and sour cream with a side of corn bread with butter and honey.

Enjoy and embrace the winter!

Kansas City Restore Sanity Reportage

NOTICE: I used the word "reportage" in the title because I'm an Intellectual Elitist who has no patience with "common, everyday Americans" who can't be bothered to expand their limited fucking vocabularies by going to the trouble of Googling new words.

So I had to leave the house today anyway to go into work to finish up some system testing.

As long as I was wearing grown up clothes and out amongst humanity, I figured I may as well go to the Kansas City Satellite Rally To Restore Sanity on The Plaza.

The second thing I noticed when I got there (after the anticipated low turn out...it was more of a nanosatellite rally) was the Po Po!


Apparently, before I arrived there had been a bit of a dust-up, if not an actual kerfuffle teetering dangerously close to an all out brouhaha!

It seems that while the Restore Sanity folks had gone through all of the proper Kansas City Parks and Recreation channels to get the required permit for their event (where they were told they COULD NOT use loudspeakers or any other voice amplification devices...a requirement they complied with), some rogue Tea Baggers showed up WITHOUT a permit and WITH a sound system to mount a counter-rally!





That woman creeped me out a bit. Looked like a Mormon sister-wife.

The Tea Bagger turn out was WAY smaller then the Sane people. It looked like the Tea Bagger speakers and their audience all rode together in the same van.

So I kind of eavesdropped on a conversation between the Po Po and some of the folks from both sides. The police were saying something about no actual law being broken while the Tea Bagging lady was saying

"But we DO have a permit! From God! It's called the Constitution!"

which she then brandished a copy of to the cop who seemed unimpressed.



Later, the police got bored and managed to find the only African-American on The Plaza to interrogate, much to their obvious delight.



The only News Crew on sight was from KSHB. I'll leave it up to you to figure out how I noticed their presence.




Yeah, I'd tap that.

I was only there for a few minutes when I saw my good friend and fellow blogger Average Jane who was giving out Free Hugs!



This was her sign...



That was typical of most of the signs I saw. Level headed, intelligent, rational, non-confrontational and inclusive.















Some of the signs were a bit more confrontational, but barely...









That last one may seem to be the most aggressive, but he's a gutless moderate next to my "Eat The Rich" campaign.



There were some Stephen Colbert supporters who infiltrated the rally in an attempt to Keep Fear Alive...









But these were my favorites...













After the rally I had a nice lunch with Average Jane and her friend Lisa at The Cheesecake Factory.

Nice day!