About capsaicin, lemme double the comment to handle with care. They call it PEPPER spray for a reason, and the cap-sprays are supposedly far more effective than mace. To paraphrase Alton, getting maced in the kitchen while making your dinner is DEFINTIELY not good eats.
On the other hand, I suppose there's some benefit to a combined condiment and personal protection device. Alton actually suggests non-powdered surgical gloves to handle hot peppers. Rub your eyes accidentally after cutting a habanero and you'll agree.
If you want a more unusual heat, seek out Sichuan peppercorn oil from your Friendly Neighborhood Chinese grocery store. As far as I know, it's legal in the U.S. (vs. the actual peppercorns) and provides mostly the same odd, numbing heat of good Sichuan food. Eating enough of the stuff triggers a pretty serious endorphin rush. I don't think it breaks down as quickly under heat as some of the other hot pepper flavorings, making it more likely to outlast the cooking process.
-- Ed
Howdy,
The fellow at nitpicker.blogspot.com is now receiving ballpoint pens "by the thousands." If you still want to send stuff, you can either e-mail the current blog maintainer (who was very responsive to my request) or send small pads of paper instead. When I asked, that was the response I got. All the pens in the world don't do much good if you don't have things to write on, I suppose.
-- Ed
Howdy,
Operation Comix Relief is apparently a dedicated group of people looking specifically for comic books to send out to the troops.
-- Ed
Howdy,
bellatrys writes: 'And William Safire is still declaring that things are getting better...
"The great majority of Iraqis are glad that Saddam is overthrown. We and the U.N. are giving them democracy's moment, but courageous Iraqis must come forward to seize it."'
All the courageous Iraqis who stepped forward to seize democracy's moment were killed in 1991, when the first Bush encouraged them to Rise Up Against Saddam and then abandoned them to get massacred by the hundreds, if not thousands. None of the talking heads who blather about how Iraqis have to "take control of their own destiny" seems to remember this inconvenient fact.
-- Ed
Howdy,
John M. Ford writes: "Is anyone still not clear on why I don't work in Hollywood?"
Yes. Clearly, you have far too much cleverness and imagination for them.
I think that's one of the funniest pitches I've heard in a long time, and if I had a million dollars to fund it, I'd at least want to see a treatment.
-- Ed
Howdy,
So I have a good news joke and a request for comments.
The good news is that all that data mining crap that the political parties are spending money on is garbage, seeing as I've gotten two mail solicitations to donate to the Bush-Cheney campaign. I can't say my behavior would lend itself to being a supporter of the Republicans, considering I've donated to places like the Sierra Club and public TV & radio using credit cards, and I bought a Honda Civic Hybrid last year. I also got a solicitation from the RNC about a year ago and sent them back a nice letter saying, "Please take me off your mailing list because I'm never giving you a voluntary dime," which you'd think would get me on a different list somewhere.
However, if they're willing to waste money on stuff like this, I figure it's that little bit less they have to spend on anything else.
The request for comments is: what to do with the nice postage-paid envelopes that they included with both solicitations? I'd like to make sure that they get their money's worth. My requirements for suggestions are:
1. Legal. Obviously.
2. Cheap. Let's say under $20 for whatever I send.
3. Easy. Partially because I'm lazy and partially because I'd rather spend the energy on more productive endeavors than GWB.
-- Ed
Howdy,
You guys know that sci-fi cliche about the time traveler from an ugly, dystopian, or even just unpleasant future who goes back in time to change one event, resulting in a shinier, happier future?
I think we're in the bad timeline now. Someone go build a time machine. The event that needs to change is left as an exercise for the reader.
-- Ed
Howdy,
The Howard Dean speech linked to is fantastic and heartbreaking at the same time. Then again, maybe Dean's value is not as an actual politician, but as the gadfly who says what the politicians can't.
The photo essay that starts at http://www.gmooth.net/dean/ (not there forever, according to the person running the site) is terrific, too. I'd send him/her an e-mail, but there's none easily visible on the site.
So, if you're reading this "Gmooth," thanks.
-- Ed
Howdy,
Julie M writes, "Yeah, I knew I was in trouble on that search (for gigantic deer mice) when Pinky and the Brain Lab results was the lead off link"
Actually, right this very second, Google's top search result for "gigantic deer mice" (minus quotes) is this page. Followed immediately by the Pinky and the Brain website, which unfortunately does not include a plan to take over the world using gigantic deer mice. Or pygmy mammoths, for that matter.
In Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ book, he talks about gigantic kangaroos and other marsupials in Australia, I think. Diamond does not find it coincidental that these and other gigantic animals died out almost immediately (geographically speaking) when people started showing up in sizeable numbers.
(Off-topic aside: oddly enough, the Google Ad I'm getting when I search for "gigantic deer mice" is for John Deere's web site, obviously because tractor lawn mowers are known for being effective defense mechanisms against incursions of gigantic deer mice. After seeing a number of amusing results from Google Ads, I'm beginning to wonder if they code them specifically so people will start looking at the ads for entertainment value.)
-- Ed
Howdy,
Neil Gaiman's pointed out that Lieberman would look like a Guardian of the Universe (from the Green Lantern Corps) if you painted him blue.
-- Ed
Howdy again,
Boy, that plot synopsis sounded a lot better in my head...
I also realize I forgot to flog Hosler's _Clan Apis_ (http://www.jayhosler.com/clanapis.html), which makes the life cycle of bees a lot more interesting than you'd think it would be.
-- Ed
Howdy,
For a good, child-friendly book to counter this claptrap, I suggest Jay Hosler's _The Sandwalk Adventures_ (info at http://www.jayhosler.com/Sandwalk.html). It's got the audacity to counter creationist arguments using a metaphor that involves no less than Charles Darwin himself.
The premise is that a follicle mite named Mara who lives in Charles Darwin's eyebrow discovers that her host is not, in fact, God, whereupon she makes the dual mistakes of getting Darwin to explain evolution to her AND trying to spread this knowledge to her blissfully ignorant follicle mite friends. Hilarity ensues.
It's actually a pretty good primer on Darwin's theories, and counters a bunch of the awful science that's taught in elementary school. Fun for the whole Evil Secular Humanist Family!
-- Ed
Howdy,
If you don't already know about them, Tekserve on 23rd St. in Manhattan (www.tekserve.com for directions and services listings) is also very good about recovering data on seemingly lost hard drives, and they specialize in serving the Mac community of New York City.
When my brother was in China, he found mold growing on his PowerBook (as well as nearly everything else) due to an unfortunate mis-communication with the cleaning staff. Tekserve managed to recover the lion's share of his data and replaced his drive with a bigger one for a pretty reasonable price when he got back stateside.
Oddly enough, his wife's Windows laptop was one of the only items in their apartment which was mold-free, proving that even mold won't touch Windows.
-- Ed
Howdy,
It's poor consolation, but there's a site that collects Nigerian Spam tales at http://www.scamorama.com/ . Apparently, there are lots of easily amused people out there who take great pleasure at stringing along Nigerian spammers in a variety of ways. Most amusing are the ones where someone manages to scam the scammer out of something of value.
Sometimes, I think of sending an e-mail to a Nigerian scammer (they went away for a while, but they're beginning to come back now) saying I'd love to participate, but all my funds are currently tied up with similar plans from (list 4 or 5 of the other scam e-mails).
-- Ed
Howdy,
Is there a way to get these on-line pornographers to use their powers for good instead of evil? I'm all for sexually oriented material on-line, but I can find it just fine on my own, thanks. Assaulting me with spam, repeated pop-up ads, deceitful web sites, and cleverly misspelled URLs makes me mad, not turned on.
And, in an effort to get something positive out of this, a question, raised by Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (which supposedly got its genesis when he and some other guy were watching a porn movie, and Kubrick turned to the other guy and asked, "Wouldn't it be great if someone made one of these with production values?"):
Is it possible to have intelligent, well-written, well-thought-out porn, in prose or visual form? Or does the nature of the beast tend to shut down other brain functions required for that kind of intelligence or insight? The closest thing I've seen are some of the sex scenes in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods," which got me both interested-in-the-story and hot-under-the-collar simultaneously, but they were only small components of a larger story. Maybe I'm just sheltered.
-- Ed
Howdy,
I'm not sure if the comments are meant for books or for video games or both. I'm going to skew more towards video games, though, so if you're here for books feel free to skip down.
There was a Steampunk CRPG called "Arcanum: Of Magick and Steamworks Obscura" made by the same guys who did the first 2 Fallout games. You could opt the path of Magick or the path of Mechanics, which had major effects on the gameplay. Unfortunately, it never got ported to the Mac (sales tanked on the PC), so odds are I'm never going to get to it. From what I heard, though, it had a pretty good storyline.
I still think Planescape: Torment was easily the best written game I've ever played, and one of the finer works of fantasy fiction I've ever read. There's a website out there which took the (copious amounts of) text from one of the game paths and strung it together to make a "novelization." Came out to more than 200K, and it worked beautifully.
I recall reading that Orson Scott Card was working on a video game for the PS2. Unfortunately, I can't remember the company or the title of the game. I'd lay odds it'll be well written, if nothing else.
John Carmack (writer of the Doom & Quake games) has been quoted as saying plots in video games are like plots in porn movies: you expect them to be there, but they're not the point of the exercise. I might suggest that he thinks this because he's been re-writing the same game for nearly 10 years, now, but that wouldn't be nice. Instead, I'll suggest that I need enough plot to make me feel like my time is worthwhile. I think games like Diablo 2 and Neverwinter Nights (which are both pretty standard fantasty plot coupon questing stuff) manage to provide just enough plot to motivate you to the ever-increasing monster bashing.
A good video game plot can also make sub-standard technology more palatable. No One Lives Forever is a pretty good example of that.
-- Ed
Howdy,
The New York City superheroine is named Terrifica, with the nearest article about her at http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/terrifica021105.html.
I did meet the lady in question at a party once, since, in her civilian garb, she worked at the same institution as my wife. Apparently, she was a performance artist at that time, with a lackey-with-videocamera in tow recording her exploits for posterity.
Unlike the other superheroes mentioned so far, she actually looked pretty decent in the spandex outfit, or at least as "decent" as anybody can look in a real-life spandex superhero outfit.
-- Ed
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 11 |
| 2003 | 8 |
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