The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Rikibeth:

Potato-leek soup can also be made satisfactorily with standard yellow onion instead of leek, and water in place of any sort of stock. And if you cube the potatoes pretty small, they're soft enough to puree in half an hour, at least in the quantity I usually make it (one 5-quart Dutch oven full).

Butternut squash bisque is another nice pureed soup. Dice carrots-celery-onions, enough to cover the bottom of your pot, wilt them in butter, add peeled seeded chunks of squash and some salt, add stock or water to cover, simmer until squash is soft, puree with cream. Ginger and the assorted pumpkin pie spices are nice in it, but so are bay and thyme.

Cream of carrot soup works about the same. The recipe I have calls for a couple of jalapenos added to the pot, but if you don't want heat, you could leave it out. It's pretty mild even with the jalapeno, though.

Caught the tweet, posted it on my LJ. I'm not good at praying, but I'll try.

John Hawkes-Reed @136: does the rugger player have unusually protruberant eyes?

The Austin-Healey Mk 1 Sprite has been my dream car since I was ten years old, and I saw one in a TV ad for soda. Doesn't everyone want a car that looks like a cheerful Muppet?

Bruce Durocher @531: Perhaps I'm not sufficiently fiendishly inventive, but the only spin I can put on Bujold's line involves a popular urban legend about Rod Stewart that circulated in the early 1980s or thereabouts.

Oh, wait. I just thought of another one, more suited to John Waters' early films, particularly Pink Flamingos.

Ew. I wish I hadn't thought of that.

Diatryma, does your printer have fax functions? Mine does, and although I haven't quite sorted out how to use it that way, not having needed to yet, I do know that you have to plug a phone cable from the printer to a landline jack.

My local Freecycle is still on YahooGroups, and is full of helpful people -- while I didn't get an iPod wall charger when I posted a "wanted," which I kind of expected and admitted it was a long shot, someone DID tell me where to buy one for $10 instead of the $25 I hadn't been able to afford.

I gave away a LOT of stuff when I moved, and my current (gorgeous! rolltop oak!) computer desk and my super-fancy printer are both Freecycle scores.

Serge @726: But if you rub it long enough it turns into a briefcase?

er... never mind.

fidelio, I've used it for that myself. When you go beyond the standard as-directed dose, you get more complicated effects than mere sleepiness!

Epacris @86, that's an antihistamine, right? Excesses of antihistamine can do highly disorienting things, as I remember well from emergency treatment of an allergy attack! To this day I'm not quite sure what triggered it, although best guess is that the nut topping on my sundae was cross-contaminated with Brazil nuts. I didn't have an Epi-pen, so we got me outside of a heroically large dose of Benadryl on the way to the ER. I was LOOPY.

David Harmon: I didn't say that I thought drinking dextromethorphan cough syrups was a GOOD idea! I just wanted to note that they DID have some opioid effects, contrary to Thomas' claim @76.

If you're a codeine non-responder, it's not surprising that you don't get any codeine-like effects from dextromethorphan, either.

I haven't tried large doses of dextromethorphan, only as-directed cough suppressant doses. It's SLIGHTLY effective on my coughs. As-directed doses of codeine cough syrup are notably more effective. I can't report on the psychoactive properties of larger doses of codeine, either, because the amount in a Tylenol 3 will reliably make me toss my cookies, as will Vicodin.

Oddly, this effect does not seem to obtain from opiates administered via other routes.

Dextromethorphan has SOME opioid sedating effects, just not as strongly as codeine. Which is why people who drink OTC cough syrups for the mood-altering effects tend to down a whole bottle at once.

And, yeah, there's some alcohol content in there too, but if they were just getting high off the alcohol, they'd ACT like a whiskey drunk; they don't, and they DO act like someone who's had some codeine.

Oh. Yeah. And it also doesn't suppress coughs as well as codeine does. Proved that last year with the kid's post-flu bronchitis.

Serge, when I cook, I keep my hair covered with a bandanna, or else a Red Sox cap. The poofy chef's hats don't stay put on my hair without a bobby pin, which in turn tends to pull on my scalp.

David Harmon, I could have sworn the dish was "mamaliga," and that it was Jewish specifically by way of Romania -- cornmeal doesn't show up much in Ashkenazic cooking otherwise, as far as I can tell. Maybe I misread "rn" for "m" in a more compacted typeface somewhere?

Sharon M @264, I am positive that it was Anything Muppets with letter signs on sticks singing a very catchy song. Electric Company would SAY the sounds closer and closer together, but no cute song.

Isn't a whole lot of Sesame Street's reading-skills stuff phonics? A couple of Anything Muppets bouncing around holding signs and singing "You take a J, that's juh, and e-t et, put 'em all together and they spell jet..."

'Fess up, how many of you just got earwormed?

Kevin Riggle @181: do I remember that you're Greater Boston? Was that Hubba Hubba? I've heard stories like that about their staff before.

David Harmon, *I* could read at 1200 baud! I could only skim at 2400, though. And the Wikipedia article about hyperlexia doesn't sound like me, but your description does, except for the delayed speech. One of the visual effects that Criminal Minds used to emphasize Spencer Reid's enhanced perception was to show words popping highlighted out of a word-search puzzle -- and I was bouncing in my seat going YES THAT IS WHAT WORD SEARCHES LOOK LIKE!

Lee @144: Now I'm trying to remember who got the attention from salespeople when my dad and I went to FIVE DIFFERENT STORES in one night looking for a 10" rather than 9" Pyrex pie plate. He was male in cookware stores, but I was under 20.

Of course, it was the night before Thanksgiving, so I wouldn't be surprised if we both got roundly ignored in the chaos. I can't even remember where we finally found the pie plate. Possibly Sears.

fidelio @105, it's waaay slower than the Twitter-based Comcast service! Last summer we had an unexpected outage, and I twittered a grumble about it (because I could do that from my cell phone), and within FIVE MINUTES I had a reply from one of their Twitter support people saying "can I help?" I was astonished.

Still, sort of cool that they monitor it at all.

Zelda @77: If you are not doing one of the Approved Projects, but rather need a specific item-- e.g. a small quantity of (literal) brass tacks, not brads, not wood screws, but brass tacks of a certain size to make a cosmetic repair to the brass fittings on a piece of furniture-- they can't help you. Go to a hardware store.

This isn't ALWAYS true. I needed some 1-1/8" dowel stock cut into lengths to make cannoli tubes, and a pack of sandpaper to smooth the edges, and Home Depot was closer to the restaurant I worked at than the small hardware store, and they were able to provide it. I did have to wander for a little bit to find Someone In An Orange Apron, but once I found them, they didn't have a problem getting the person who actually ran the cutter.

However, if I have a problem of the "This $THING broke, and I'm not even sure what it is, let alone how to fix it," I definitely go to the local hardware store. Even if they don't have the doodad, they can identify it and tell you where to go to find another.

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