Category: Uncategorized

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Here’s the intro to my favourite article on Valleywag today:

Biodiesel. Hemp. Local sustainable farms. Hippie tech is infuriating. You know in your engineer’s heart it won’t work, but because it’s outside your field of study you lack the handy stats to rebut the moonbat ideas evangelized by modern-day hippies and their shiny shiny cousins, the ravers. Before Burning Man starts up again in earnest, I’ve prepared canned comebacks and bookmarkable URLs from hippie-approved sources like Wikipedia and GreenBiz.

The recipe that this article points to no longer exists, but there’s an equally good recipe for Maple Bacon Browned Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies here!

“Muffin”, the author of the blog Ooh, You Tasty Little Things… (a blog that since has been closed), wrote:

This whole thing started the other night when my husband and I were having a conversation about what foods could and could not be made better with the addition of bacon.

You can see the end result of said conversation in the photos that accompany her article, Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies with Maple Cinnamon Glaze, some of which are reproduced here.

She says they taste good — and why not? She’s not the only person who’s mixed bacon and chocolate: consider the bacon chocolate bar created by Vosges, the gourmet chocolatier and heartily recommended by none other than supersexy celebrity chef Nigella Lawson.

Luckily for those of us with brave culinary spirits, “Muffin” published the recipe for the cookies and the glaze. Who wants to try making a batch of these with me over the Chrismukkah break?

Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein, and Partners (the people behind the “Got Milk?” ad campaign) put together a series of posters that summarize the current U.S. Administration quite nicely — there’s one made up solely of names, one made up of events and the one below, made up of slogans that you should find both familiar and ruefully laughable:

Click the image to see it at full size on its original page.
Found via my friend Miss Fipi Lele.

For more, see this article at The Huffington Post: Posterizing the Modern GOP.

Miss Fipi Lele sent me a couple of scans from a 1974 book titled Understanding Human Behavior: An Illustrated Guide to Successful Human Relationships, whose cover clearly marks it as a book from that era…

The book should come with an explanation titled “Understanding this book’s cover”.

Here’s a painting in the book depicting the many ways a businessman is perceived, depending on the circumstances and who’s doing the perceiving (I added annotations):

When I first saw this painting, I thought of the version in the upper left-hand corner as sober and all the others as varying degrees of drunk.

Here’s the text that accompanies the painting:

These five characters are studies of human personality, portraits of the many kinds of people we can be in a variety of situations. At the bottom is a man as he really is, but the other four figures circling around him show him in entirely different lights. Beginning at the lower left is the way his secretary sees him with a lecherous grin. That noble manly visage is how he imagines himself and the bland, unprepossessing creature is his wife’s perception. Last, downtrodden and ineffectual, is how he feels after confronting his boss.

Another set of paintings depict the different ways a husband a wife are perceived. Here’s the wife:

Desperate Housewives, summed in four paintings.

Here’s the husband:

Mid-life crisis in 3…2…1…

The best and most succinct review of the book comes from one “Bob” who says: “It’s more like a handbook on how to live a life of quiet desperation. With a few pictures of boobs in it.” Based on that, I might pick up this book if I ever stumble across it at a used bookstore.

Welcome to the first Monday in December! Enjoy the winter weather.

Here’s a list provided to me by my friend Miss Fipi Lele showing the combinations that you’re not allowed to get when applying for a vanity license plate in New York State.

The reason many of these are banned is obvious to me, but some I just don’t get. For instance, why isn’t 157A allowed? Is it New York State penal code for a crime, the way “187” is the California penal code number for murder? Or does New York State have a beef with some organization called “ISTA” (Indiana State Teachers’ Association? International Safe Transit Association? ISTA, the opthalmic pharmaceutical company?)?

Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.