Last month, this painting appeared on the cover of Der Spiegel (here’s the international edition, in English), the most-read news magazine not just in Germany, but Europe as well. Its title is Der Feuerteufel (the firestarter), and its subtitle is Ein Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand (“a president sets fire to his country”).
To find out more about this magazine cover, see Ad Age’s article, Germany’s Leading Newsweekly Decries Trump’s Incendiary Approach.
For the next five weeks, I’m teaching an online Python class from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. That means that on those days, I eat dinner a little earlier, which in turn means that I’ve got to have it prepped earlier.
Luckily, I have all sorts of tricks for this sort of schedule, one of which is the mid-afternoon veggie roast: Cut up some vegetables, drizzle with oil and seasonings, roast in the oven or turbo broiler for 45 minutes. It doesn’t take long to put together, and it doesn’t need to be attended to while in the over, allowing me to continue working.
Last night’s vegetable was a whole head of cauliflower in curry powder (I used Badia’s “Jamaican style” curry), truffle salt, and ghee.
While tasty, it doesn’t look pretty close up. It’s layogenic (pronounced “LIE-o-jennic”), a Filipino/English hybrid term that was BBC’s “Word of the Day” back in January. It means “attractive from a distance, but not close up,” — the “layo” part comes from the Filipino word for “far” or “distance”.
May 20, 2020: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, toeing the Trump Administration’s line of pretending everything is fine, castigates the media for overhyping the coronavirus threat.
An excerpt from his rant:
You got a lot of people in your profession who waxed for weeks and weeks about how Florida was gonna be just like New York.
“Wait two weeks! Florida’s gonna be next! Just like Italy. Wait two weeks.” Well, hell, we’re eight weeks away from that, and it hasn’t happened.
So we’ve succeeded, and I think that people just don’t want to recognize it because it challenges their narrative, it challenges their assumption, so they gotta try to find a bogeyman. Maybe it’s that there are black helicopters circling the Department of Health. If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
Two months after the rant:
Nice going, Governor DeVirus.
Why play a human, elf, or dwarf in Dungeons and Dragons, when you can play a race that really knows how to have a good time: a Floridian?
This D&D parody page does a great job of describing the strange race that inhabits the swamps of America’s drainpipe. It’s actually pretty good — I would want to play as a floridian bard in my next D&D campaign!
Here’s its text:
Much like tieflings carry the essence of Asmodeus, the floridians are descendants of a human bloodline cursed by the trickery domain. A floridian parent will pass along this curse to any and all offspring they create. Anyone born to at least one floridian parent is destined to become an agent of chaos themselves.
As a floridian, your traits combine those of a human with uncanny traits provided by your chaotic nature:
One of my favorite Chinese dishes is mapo tofu, a Sichuan dish whose name translates as “pockmarked grandma’s tofu”. It’s a nice, high-protein dish as it’s made from ground pork and cut-up firm tofu, and it’s also a high-octane dish thanks to its use of Sichuan peppercorns. It also calls for lots of garlic, ginger, and green onion.
I was out of that really red Chinese chili oil that always ends up on whatever white that I’m wearing. I replaced it with a mix of Chinese chili sauce (not sriracha — this is different stuff), Sichuan pepper flakes, and sesame oil, and it still came out pretty tasty.
…for I studied physics, and I have duct tape.
Here’s the story: I was assembling a set of shelves for our front hallway, and I was having trouble driving in its screws with the allen key provided. So I duct-taped the allen key to a screwdriver, which provided the necessary torque to finish the job.
Watch this video before Disney issues the takedown notice! It’s the ad for Walt Disney World re-opening, but with the audio track replaced by Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear the Reaper.
The people who made the video also added some cuts from the film based on Stephen King’s The Stand, but they’re quite unnecessary. The empty Disney World scenes with masked staff are creepy enough, as the stills below will show:
