08:44 – It was 68.0F (20C) when I got up this morning at at 0620, pouring down rain. It was 0730 before the rain slacked off enough to take Colin out. We’ve had 4.6 inches (11.7 cm) so far, and it’s still drizzling, with heavier rains forecast for later today and tomorrow.
Barbara made a skillet dinner last night with Costco sausage, macaroni, and a jar of Classico spaghetti sauce. I washed out that jar, of course, and will use it for repackaging LTS food.
Not for canning food, though. The Classico jars look like canning jars. They even have “Atlas Mason” and a graduated scale molded into the glass. But they are most definitely not actual canning jars, and everyone from Classico themselves to the Center for Home Food Preservation says not to use them for canning, particularly pressure-canning. Here’s an article that summarizes everything you need to know about re-using commercial glass food jars as canning jars.
In short, don’t do it. You may get away with it, and if the lid seals the food will be safely preserved. The big issue is that both failed seals and broken jars are likely, particularly if you pressure-can rather than use a boiling water bath. It’s simply not worth taking the chance of spoiled food, broken glass, and so on to save the relatively small cost of a real canning jar.
Since 2014, I’ve bought (at a guess) three or four dozen boxes of Krusteaz Cinnamon Crumb Cake. We’re now down to whatever’s left in the kitchen pantry–maybe three boxes–and I don’t intend to buy any more. We like the stuff well enough, but when Barbara made one yesterday I commented that I liked the chocolate pan cake we make up from scratch just as well or better. She feels the same, so no more Krusteaz cake mix. That, and the fact that the price has increased from $2.14/box to $3.58/box. We can make it ourselves exclusively from stuff in our LTS pantry, and make it a lot cheaper.
The same thing is true of the Krusteaz pancake mix, which I’d bought in 10-pound bags. (The price on that has jumped from about $8/bag to about $10/bag.) We have everything we need in LTS to make pancakes from scratch, so why bother paying more for the pre-mixed stuff?
As we’ve been cooking more and more from scratch, one of the things we’ve discovered is that (usually) it doesn’t take any longer starting with discrete components than it does to start with a mix. And having those discrete components gives us much more flexibility. The only thing we can make with a box of Krusteaz cinnamon crumb cake mix is a cinnamon crumb cake. But we can use the discrete components to make up literally dozens of different things. It costs less, it takes little or no more time, and the shelf life of our stored raw materials is essentially unlimited, which can’t be said for mixes stored in cardboard boxes.
I’m thinking about doing the same thing to replace our stored stock of soups as we use them. Although a can of soup doesn’t cost much, and Sam’s (and presumably Costco) still sells Campbell Cream of Mushroom or Chicken for about $9/10-pack, Walmart, Amazon, and other vendors are typically up around $1.50/can or higher. That’s maybe five times what it costs to make them up on-the-fly. I have a recipe for Cream of (fill-in-the-blank) soup, and it’s pretty simple. Just make up a rue with butter (or butter powder and oil or shortening) and flour and stir in the name ingredient. It takes five minutes, and we can do that while we’re standing in the kitchen working on other parts of the meal. And, once again, that gives us a lot more flexibility.
I’m still working on my post-apocalyptic novel, but it’s a matter of an hour here and 15 minutes there, as I can find the time. I just fixed something in it yesterday. Amateur radio plays a small part in the novel, and I’d been trying to come up with decent fake call signs.
I was going to use my old call sign that I had back in the 60’s, because the FCC has completely forgotten that I ever had a licence back then. The problem is that that call sign is now showing up in the database as unassigned, which means the FCC could end up assigning it to a real person. For obvious reasons, I didn’t want to do that.
What I really needed was a ham radio equivalent of the hokey 555 telephone exchange that’s always used in TV shows and movies to provide non-working fictional telephone numbers. Unfortunately, there’s no such range for amateur radio call signs.
I’d never seen the TV series Last Man Standing, but an Internet search turned up the fact that Tim Allen’s character is a ham radio operator, and the show’s producers ran into the same problem I did. They wanted a real-sounding call sign, but found only one way to do that. They made his call sign KA0XTT, which looks kind of like a real ham call sign, except that the X in that position indicates an experimental station and would never be assigned to a real ham operator.
I briefly considered using strings that could never be assigned to a real ham, like K33RTK. The problem with that is that any reader who had any knowledge of ham radio would be jarred by such a fake call sign, probably enough to knock himself out of the story. I don’t want any clangers like that, so I ended up using the X the same way that Tim Allen’s producers used it.
The next issue I had to fix was when news reports of the Las Vegas Massacre revealed that the shooter had used a bump-fire stock. Shit. I’d already written a section that had one of the main characters mentioning the three Slide Fire stocks he’d bought recently for his family’s AR-15’s, and how they were completely legal. So I rewrote that to have him buying them years before and paying literal cash so there was no record of the transaction.
Just in general, I have to agree: there’s really not much point to pancake mix, or cake mix, or any of that stuff. One you’ve made something from basic ingredients a couple of times, it goes fast – the time savings is very small. On top of that, you are more flexible: you can make practically any baked good from the same basic ingredients. Third, you know what is actually in the product – no weird chemical additives, imported palm oil, or whatever. Finally, the results generally taste better.
Just as an example: I made biscuits from scratch for yesterday’s breakfast: 20 minutes – including the 10 minute baking time. Cookies, cakes and such take a little longer, because there are a couple more steps, but never more than 45 minutes.
The other change we’ve made is that we now weigh almost everything when we’re baking and usually when we’re cooking.
I originally bought one of these
smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00739RFHM/
for processing packages. Even though they sell it as a shipping scale, it’s perfect as a kitchen scale, so I keep another one in the kitchen. It runs on AC normally, but can also use three AAA cells. I also use it a lot for prepping activities like repackaging food.
Volume measures are sloppy and offend my inner scientist. Weight measures are precise, reproducible, and the product always turns out as expected.
Ahem. Roux.
Aside from that, yah. Almost all of the groceries I buy are plain ingredients.
That said, there is a place for canned soups (eg, grab-n-go in an emergency; cold soup is hardly a treat, but it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing and it’s more nutritious than a handful of saltines) and pancake mix (making one small pancake for a kid’s breakfast).
@SteveF: I would have thought you would approve of making “rue”. Isn’t that your thing?
“Volume measures are sloppy and offend my inner scientist. Weight measures are precise, reproducible, and the product always turns out as expected.”
This x1000. We translate all of our recipes to weight, before saving them. Excellent program, by the way: Paprika Recipe Manager. My only complaint is that it does not “understand” measurements. If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of something, and you scale it by 96, it will then call for “96 teaspoons”, instead of “1 cup”. Of course, if you move to metric weights, this becomes irrelevant.
“Ahem. Roux.”
I spells ’em as I sees ’em. And pronounce ’em, too. For instance we’re currently watching season 2 of Versailles, which I insist on pronouncing “ver-sails”. The way they say it, one would assume it’s spelled “ver-sigh”.
I don’t hold with this foreign spelling/pronunciation crap. Seriously. Quinoa is “qwin-oh-uh”. If it was “keen-wah” it should be spelled keenwah.
I’m beginning to rue the spelling controversy here, so might make up a roux later for a soup and then reread Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murders_in_the_Rue_Morgue#/media/File:RueMorgueManuscript.jpg
Rain here today, too, “heavy at times.” Sunny the rest of the week until the weekend, supposedly.
I don’t hold with this foreign spelling/pronunciation crap. Seriously. Quinoa is “qwin-oh-uh”. If it was “keen-wah” it should be spelled keenwah.
I’d spell it garbage.
… so might make up a roux later for a soup …
Cream of ‘roo?
I spells ’em as I sees ’em. And pronounce ’em, too. For instance we’re currently watching season 2 of Versailles, which I insist on pronouncing “ver-sails”. The way they say it, one would assume it’s spelled “ver-sigh”.
I grew up in Florida. New Orleans is two syllables (nor-lins) and the landmark Cuban restaurant in the Little Havana section of Miami is Versailles (ver-sigh).
Atlanta is Hot-lanta. 🙂
Kalifornication’s North Bay is on fire:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/2-big-wildfires-prompt-evacuations-in-Napa-County-12262945.php
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/10/08/wildfire-raging-on-atlas-peak-in-napa-county/
And they wonder why. As you sow so shall you reap.
It goes without saying–not that that’s gonna stop me–that, due to the lack of local ingredients, the residents of Quintana Roo would rue making a roux for ‘roo soup.
Hmm, I just checked my Krusteez receipt and I’m paying $6 for that big bag at Costco….
I’ve got good arguments for mixes and prepared food, but have to go USE one to feed the kids.
AFK BRB
n
Yup, Napa and Sonoma and pahts of Marin, my old stomping grounds back in 1973, are merrily blazing away.
Somebody just finished their house in 2014 and now it’s probably gone. Yikes.
For the Pushing Old Hyperliterate Dave into a Rage category:
College Student Rewarded For Study Showing Proper English Is Racist
Kalifornication’s North Bay is on fire:
YIKES !! Looks bad. I have brothers that insist on living in N. Marin County and a good friend who just completed a home in Petaluma. Fingers crossed for them …
I am not real optimistic about the Petaluma and Santa Rosa areas. Hope your brothers and friend are OK, Mr. Harold. I loved north Marin and that region back in the day, too.
“For the Pushing Old Hyperliterate Dave into a Rage category:”
Note the provenance; Madison, WI. Known hotbed of commie bullshit for decades. Then she takes her screed out to Portland, OR. That pretty much sez it all, eh? As one of the commenters said, when we lower the bar for a group of people, it lowers the bar for the whole culture/society. Which we’ve been doing in a variety of fields for a long time now.
For the Pushing Old Hyperliterate Dave into a Rage category:
Not JUST Old Hyperliterate Dave, but anyone who loves language, including yours truly.
Pushing Dave into a mass of seething hate was the target. Any other effects are pure gravy.
For me, I’m annoyed at the likelihood that tax dollars are funding at least some of this, but otherwise it doesn’t matter. It’s like Hollywood rapists giving each other awards for being more PC than thou, or any other meaningless passing of meaningless tokens between subhumans. It might be a bit amusing to watch for a moment but overall is less important than whether the guy walking his dog right now lets the little bastard poop on my lawn.
(I have a way of dealing with that situation: a shovel. I run outside, scoop up the shit, run after the dog walker, and throw the shit at him. In point of fact I’ve done this only once at this address, on account of usually not noticing when worthless owners don’t clean up after their blameless dogs. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, that one time I threw the poop I missed the worthless pile of crap. In my defense, swinging a shovel like a lacross stick and having the poop to fly off at just the right time is trickier than it sounds. Still, it really pissed him off, which was the tertiary goal.)
Well, half the pop is what I’d consider illiterate anyway, including college-educated types and high-level manglers and politicians.
Apres-moi, le deluge, ain’t dat how it goes?
” It might be a bit amusing to watch for a moment but overall is less important than whether the guy walking his dog right now lets the little bastard poop on my lawn.”
And there it is. Hollyweird, Mordor, Pyongyang, Brussels, wherever and whatever, short of nuke warheads exploding, is of smaller concern compared to morons letting their mangy mutts crap on our properties or the highway department not plowing this street after a blizzard.
Note the provenance; Madison, WI. Known hotbed of commie bullshit for decades. Then she takes her screed out to Portland, OR.
Future lecturer at Reed. When we lived out there, the joke was that the Reed bookstore gave out free skull bongs just to get the students to walk into the place.
With legalization, maybe it isn’t a joke anymore.
Ok, back.
The place for any mix is convenience. When I make breakfast for the kids, I don’t need ot get out 4 or 5 ingredients and carefully weigh/measure each one. I open the repurposed nut jar from costco (that holds exactly 6 cups of pancake mix) and get a couple of scoops. Mix with water until the right consistency and viola, bob’s your dad’s bro….
People have been able to cook from primary ingredients from the dawn of time, and yet somehow, there is a whole industry of prepared mixes and food to make that process quicker and easier. Embrace progress.
YES, primary ingredients are more versatile. Non-issue for most people, who wouldn’t cook at all, let alone start making up stuff from primarys… and there are whole cookbooks written filled with the things you can make with the mixes as a starting point, if you are so inclined.
For me, it’s a bit like watching a chinese cooking show… the chef stir fries the meat then says “add spices and other ingredients” while he picks up and dumps in 6 little tiny bowls full of a bit of this and a bit of that. Easy peasy if you have all the little dozen bowls ready. But it totally leaves off getting those ready, and what’s left over from the tablespoon of onion, 1/2 tbs of green pepper, etc. I don’t have all the primary ingredients just sitting on the counter, like granny did back in the day. So it’s a bit of ‘get stuff out, open, measure, put it all away’ vs tear open an envelop and dump into a cup of water to make gravy.
Soups have the added disadvantages of taking a lot of time and energy to make your own. Easy enough to bubble a bunch of bones in water for 6 hours to make broth NOW, but if you have to mind the heat, and you’re doing other things, it’s a bit more difficult. Not impossible, as people did it forever, just takes more time and attention.
My experience from hurricanes primarily, is that your day is full enough without spending the whole day in the kitchen prepping and cooking and cleaning.
n
It boils down to (get it? boils down to?) how you’re living and where and how much time you have for this stuff. Under pressure and with SHTF and other nasty priorities, I doubt we’re gonna have time to mess with measuring out primary ingredients in multiple containers (which all have to be cleaned afterward, using what for water and cleanser?). OTOH, if you have a group running a farm and there’s a division of labor where somebody is in the kitchen and pantry all day, wunnerful.
Cooking-from-scratch has its place and we do it here all the time, but there are also plenty of times and events where we just gotta go with the flow and open a can or a box and mix it up. We also use our grill a lot, and all year, too.
But if we’re buried in snow and ice with the power out, we’re gonna heat stuff up on the woodstove or grill and otherwise keep the firewood coming through the door and staying warm. Ditto if we’re being hit with two-legged assailants here in the ville; no time for a big pot of chili; gonna choke down a Cliff bar and slap another mag in.
But we can use the discrete components to make up literally dozens of different things. It costs less, it takes little or no more time, and the shelf life of our stored raw materials is essentially unlimited, which can’t be said for mixes stored in cardboard boxes.
This is one of the common threads in Richard Irvine’s Restaurant: Impossible. Many of the places he tries to rescue make their food from kits from Sysco and the like.
The downside of this is that you are trading prep time for against the cost of the mix. In some cases, it’s a good trade. In others, not so much.
Volume measures are sloppy and offend my inner scientist. Weight measures are precise, reproducible, and the product always turns out as expected.
For baking, weight measure is preferable. For savory preparations, precision in measures is not really necessary. In molecular gastronomy, high precision is mandatory.
Ah, the joys of diversity:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4962264/Furious-woman-brawls-mother-holding-TODDLER.html
This is a couple of miles from my secondary location. A location that over the last 13 years has gotten significantly nicer looking and safer as hispanic (mostly illegals) residents have pushed out the blacks. Magic Johnson’s cinema chain moved out years ago, and the taco trucks moved in. Since then, Wal+mart and some other national and regional chains have moved in too. Houston Community College system built a campus, and the city extended the light rail into the area.
This is also near the area I mentioned here before in the context of a guy who returned fire on a drive by, killing the shooters, with an AR from his front yard.
It’s a neighborhood “in transition” in other words…..
n
A little while ago there was some mention here of using LED lighting as gro lights….
here is some info of interest:
http://newsletters.pennnet.com/leds_enl/450079313.html
With links to more resources.
n
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, ‘tards.
There’s no reason to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day today. The indigenous peoples did nothing of note on this day. Or on any other day. Oh, but wait: maybe we can find one day out of the year when no member of any indigenous tribe ate human flesh. Nah…
Happy Indigenous Peoples Day, ‘tards.
Too bad schools are not allowed to teach the real truth of the majority of the Tribes. In a highly abridged form, slavery and ecosystem destruction were the norm.
RE: Ingredients VS mixes
My wife is an excellent cook, learned it from her grandmother in a (literal) log cabin cooking over a wood stove and that’s a challenge. She has always used ingredients. However, after her last heart attack and triple bypass and a year in and out of hospital fighting VRE which eventually cost her a sternum and half of 2 ribs, she does not have the energy to retrieve, measure, and mix ingredients any longer. We have to use pre-made mixes for most things now. Getting older is a bitch in so many ways.
HEY !!!
Why do I have to share my Indigenous Peoples’ Day with a stinking Itallian?
We demand our own day. How about June 25 (1876), date of the Battle of the Little Bighorn?
Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadians!
What color was the ground at Little Bighorn?
…
White. Because those fuckin’ injuns just kept comin’ and comin’.
Custer beleived his own publicity.
He didn’t beleive his scouts intelegence of OpFor size.
He split his forces.
He dis not maintain communication with his remote forces.
He left his heavy machine guns (gattling guns) back at camp.
He was facing superior firepower (rate of fire) as the Indians has a number of lever action repeating rifles.
Q. Where did Columbus first land in America?
A. On his feet!
A: Columbus never landed in America
From this month’s Firefighter/emgmt newsletter, a Review of active shooter resources and training, The Technical Resource, Assistance Center, and Information Exchange (TRACIE) site put together a page of information and resources related to mass violence, and one featured topic collection is Patient Movement and Tracking.
The link is direct to the pdf newsletter, which has the embedded links.
https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/infograms/40_17.pdf
useful and interesting stuff.
n
Whew, cooling down and drying off. Spent just an hour working on weeding, and doing some raised bed prep. Didn’t realize the temp got up to 97F and 50%RH. Felt light headed and fatigued. Time for a break.
Spent yesterday at the beach with the family. Got some tips for surf fishing off Galveston Island, which I’m gonna count as a prep. Got a bit of sunburn, so that might be contributing to my heat sensitivity today.
Time for some more work indoors, on my closet.
n
Big brush fire 20 miles NE of my place, Anaheim Hills. Seven or more houses down and ashes all over my backyard (patio and picnic table).
http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Wildfire-Rages-in-Anaheim-Hills-450110903.html
California fires: just returned home last night from a wedding in Glen Ellen on Saturday. Woke up to hear that the venue and the hotel nearby that I was staying at have probably been burned to the ground. Bride and groom, and their respective parents are all OK but were evacuated amidst flames in the middle of the night. I texted the brides family this morning and everyone is OK but rather stunned.
OFD, drop me an email from your new email address. I have an MP3 to send you: “BBC’s Best of – Today at 60 – How Have Accents Changed”. About 35MB. If I’d noticed I had it a week ago I could have simply pointed you to the link on the BBC site, but it’s gone now.
Ed, be sure the newlyweds know of the destruction, and speculate on whether it’s A Sign.
The bride and groom escaped with nothing but the clothes on their back. To their credit they are more concerned with the staff that they worked with for the wedding, and what’s going to happen with them.
A story for the grandchildren someday.
Hmmph. If the bride and groom had any clothes on, they were doing the honeymoon wrong.
As may be, condolences for all involved, clothed or otherwise.
“Cream of ‘roo?”
I’ve had Kangaroo tail soup. Once. Never again.
Kangaroo steaks and sausages, OTOH, are really nice. Emu and Crocodile steaks are delish too – not much fat, and very flavorful…
Disasters can happen anywhere and any time.
Hope they had the wedding cards somewhere safe…
n
Time to put on your tinfoil hats.
The California fires started around 10p.m. Sunday night (not all at once).
What was happening a week ago Sunday around 10p.m.?
These fires may be burning some houses, but more important is all the agricultural crops going up in smoke and what about all the cows, sheep, and other livestock.
Like the Lost Wages Massacre this firestorm will be blamed on the deplorable ray-cyst whiteman. Everything possible is being done to divide us.
BTW, my Viking ancestors were here first. Nothing to rape, pillage, and plunder so they moved on.
Wow, I did not know Russia and North Korea shared a border. I just read a scenario of Russia invading North Korea in 2019 as a start for WW III (IV for OFD). Of course, China and Russia eventually go at it. The end of that WW is a ten+ year war in the USA with a conglomeration of South American countries and Mexico backed by Russia invading the USA.
https://www.google.com/maps/@46.7635247,117.5353201,5z
Now THAT’S a cheery thought….
n
Sounds kinda like that “Red Dawn” movie. The good one, the first one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn
Not sure about the cards. I hope so.
Someone sent me a picture a few minutes ago, parts of the Olea hotel are still standing, the cottages out front are gone.
and the vegas shooting has gotten even weirder. the whole timeline has changed, as well as who should have known what, and when.
http://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/
n
“…It’s a neighborhood “in transition” in other words…..”
Wicked pissah fight scene! Esp. when the chubby guy gets tangled in the middle! Outstanding, Chubby! Then a regular pig-pile. And what pigs they are, too! How would anyone know that chick was pregnant?? The hairstyles are to DIE FOR!
“Getting older is a bitch in so many ways.”
SING IT, Mr. Harold! Two more near-falls today in the house here. And almost didn’t make it all the way up the stairs. Phone-a-thon tomorrow with the VA, oh boy.
Thanks for those grow lights links, Mr. Nick; will read later. Thanks also for the EMS links.
Mr. Harold is also quite correct on Custer and the chit at Little Big Horn, AND about Cristoforo Columbo not actually landing in FUSA; he hit the sand in the Caribbean and now we have many conflicting accounts of his relations with the indigenous peeps already there and nearby. Some claim he murdered a quarter-million; others say he had the highest respect for them. Who do YOU believe?
The official Lost Wages Massacre Narrative stinks to high heaven. As has been discussed at that link and many others by now.
Meanwhile, in the Things We Can’t Do Shit About Department:
The Russians are giving the Saudi pigs a whole shit-ton of advanced weapons and defense systems.
And our own assholes are selling them a few billion worth of same, mainly THAD air defense stuff.
While the Iranians, Kurds, Israelis and Turks all work just as hard as they possibly can at getting another major war started over there. And we jump in with both feet, per usual, enriching and empowering the usual sons of bitches and their retainers. Furthermore, NATO is now setting up a “Black Sea Force,” with combined air, sea and land elements and few hundred Murkan troops. Ain’t that sweet? I keep wondering why the Russians built their country so close to all our bases…
….and what would we do if they got heavy in our Gulf of Mexico, Cape Cod Bay, Long Island, the Aleutians, and Baja California.
I wish this was just bull-chit, but it ain’t.
From one of my bros just now, dunno where he got it:
“There’s no end to stupidity of some United States elected officials.
Just when you think you have heard all of the stupid things that are
going on in the US — this comes along…
Now it’s Black hurricanes….
Well, it appears our African-American friends have found yet
something else to be pissed about. A black congresswoman (this
would be Sheila Jackson Lee, of Houston), reportedly complained that
the names of hurricanes are all Caucasian sounding names. She would
prefer some names that reflect African-American culture such as
Chamiqua, Tanisha, Woeisha, Shaquille, and Jamal. I am NOT making
this up!
She would also like the weather reports to be broadcast in
‘language’ that street people can understand because one of the
problems that happened in New Orleans was, that black people
couldn’t understand the seriousness of the situation, due to the
racially biased language of the weather report. I guess if the
weather person says that the winds are going to blow at 140 MPH,
that’s too hard to understand.
I can hear it now: A weatherman in New Orleans says…
“Wazzup, mutha-fukkas! Hehr-i-cane Chamiqua be headin’ fo’ yo ass
like Leroy on a rocket! Bitch be a category fo’! So, turn off dem
chitlins, grab yo’ chirren, leave yo crib, and head fo’ de nearest
FEMA office fo yo FREE shit.”
… that black people couldn’t understand the seriousness of the situation, due to the racially biased language of the weather report.
Blacks are doomed to be eternal children, with Democrats forever acting in loco parentis–right, Sheila?
Sheila sounds like a real piece of work
Added: in my original comment I called Sheila “Shirley.” Having grown up in New Orleans in the 50s and 60s, I was probably thinking of these guys.
We are back down to one dog and one cat. And the one cat, Remy the 14 lb Simamese male, is rejoicing as Toby, the 18 lb Jack Russel / Chihuahua mix escape artist, chased him several times in the house. Each time, I had a counseling session with Toby and asked him, “what are you going to do when you catch him ?”. “You’ve got teeth, he’s got teeth and 20 switchblades, you are going to have a bad day”.
Anyhoo, Toby is now the property of a divorced young lady and her six year son living around the corner with her mom. I’m not sure but I think that Toby, named after the wandering kid in the old book about the circus, is now named Batman because of his perky ears. And the mom helped her dad raise police dogs so she knows how to discipline dogs and get them in line. The mom sent the wife a neat picture text with the six year old and Batman laying on his bed reading a book tonight.
https://www.amazon.com/TOBY-TYLER-Circus-Harper-Brothers/dp/B075ZRTW3N/
OK, here is the wild thing. The wife, aka the teacher, and I, aka the bouncer, taught the six year boy’s dad in Sunday school through senior high. And we are friends with his paternal grandmother since we have been going to the same church for almost 30 years. The six year boy’s paternal grandmother was the first person to invite us to her home after church when I moved my family back to Sugar Land in 1990. I don’t know where the six year old’s dad moved to but he is apparently quite a ways away from Sugar Land now. I am disappointed by the six year old’s dad but am not very surprised, he was always in the middle of things.
It is a small world.
The Democrat half of the Party got taken over by radical Repubs back in the 19th-C and then Professor Wilson and Pharaoh Roosevelt II accelerated the process; the later Glorious Sixties completed the job. Repubs are basically useless (Stupid Half of the Party) and the Dems (Evil Half) have cretins like Shirley and Maxine Waters and the list goes on and on.
So their new reality is that snow and milk are rayciss.
Then we have the spectacle, cheered on by Dems, of white people in black masks condemning white people not wearing black masks, and destroying property and attacking police. White people trashing other white people and calling for the genocide of the white people; how does this not include them, one wonders?
Then we have the spectacle, cheered on by Dems, of white people in black masks condemning white people not wearing black masks, and destroying property and attacking police. White people trashing other white people and calling for the genocide of the white people; how does this not include them, one wonders?
We are truly living in a fallen world. Things are no different from the days of Cain and Able. You know how that worked out.
EDIT: Gotta add a classic Over The Hedge to this, “where is my safe space?”:
http://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2016/05/16
At least she knows a bit about the solar system…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheila_Jackson_Lee#Space_program
Versailles is pronounced Ver Sails, at least in Kentucky. Although my daughter’s French friend from grad school rolled her eyes when she heard it.
It’s already happened abroad:
https://qz.com/1058530/the-bbcs-newest-service-is-in-a-language-spoken-by-millions-that-youve-probably-never-heard-before/
And Cairo is pronounced Kay-row….
n
And New Madrid is pronounced Madd’-rid.
And Nikon is pronounced Knee-Con.
We are truly living in a fallen world. Things are no different from the days of Cain and Able. You know how that worked out.
Sodom and Gomorrah would be the more appropriate analogy.
Six years of Southern Baptist parochial school. Another upside is that I get most of the Monty Python Bible references that leave my wife scratching her head.
When I lived in Ohio, there was a little town not far away called Versailles. I always flinched when I heard the anglicized pronunciation, but I reckon there’s no right and no wrong. It’s not a town in France, practically no one local speaks French, so why wouldn’t they say “vur – sails”.
Sometimes, though, it makes communication difficult. I was talking to a German guy, but in English, about the company Bayer. Do I use the German pronunciation, which would be wrong in English, but he’ll recognize it? Or do I use the English pronunciation, which he may not recognize because it’s pretty different from the German?
Worse is when you can no longer speak either language without throwing in words from the other, because useful words that you want just don’t exist in the language you’re speaking. Languages are fun, but sometimes frustrating…
My daughter asked me why my pronunciation and rhythm change when I’m talking to spanish speakers. Part of it is mirroring, part is using english in the way they actually speak it to be more easily understood.
seems to work.
n
“My daughter asked me why my pronunciation and rhythm change when I’m talking to spanish speakers.”
You mean you just speak English, but slowly and loudly? 😉
A prank that I’ve heard of but never did:
When bringing your girlfriend home for the first time, tell your mother that the girlfriend is almost deaf so she should speak loudly and slowly. Tell the girlfriend your mother is retarded. Stand back and watch the fun.
“I was talking to a German guy…”
Irish yacht to German yacht abeam: “Help, help! We’re sinking!”
German yacht replies: “Certainly! But tell us, vas are you thinking about?”
Speaking of languages we’ve had some discussion here lately on preferences for programming.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/09/fetlang_erotic_programming_language/
“You mean you just speak English, but slowly and loudly? ”
Actually, no, much faster, and with spanish pronunciation of vowels. A LOT faster.
n
your mother is retarded
So much political incorrectness in there I don’t even know where to start. Check your privilege Mr. Non-Developmental-Challenged White Male. 🙂
We are truly living in a fallen world. Things are no different from the days of Cain and Able. You know how that worked out.
Sodom and Gomorrah would be the more appropriate analogy.
Yup, Sodom and Gomorrah are just an expansion of Cain and Able.
With Sodom and Gomorrah God didn’t worry about collateral damage.
We had better take a lesson.
And let’s not forget Noah, again collateral damage didn’t concern God.