| Disgusting childrearing stories |
[Jun. 27th, 2009|03:04 pm] |
The Spawn has had a cold lately, and anytime he lies down, he has a coughing fit, so his naps have been pretty much futile. So it was a very exhausted kiddo I strapped into his carseat while running errands the other day.
On the way home from the store, he realized he was both comfortable and upright, so he zonked out. I decided to drive him around for 45 minutes so he could get some sleep.
This worked out fine, and while he coughed once or twice, he didn't go into the whole endless spasm of hacking that wakes both the dead and toddlers.
At one point, however, he started to make noises like a pool filter trying to suck a bikini top into the skimmer. (it's a distinctive sound.) I checked my mirror in time to see him clear his nostrils like a breaching humpback off Nantucket. An olfactory Old Faithful. I was suddenly a caregiving Peter Venkman.
And Seth smiled, snuggled deeper into the warm, soothing web of mucus and drifted back to sleep. |
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| Why the fuck does anyone listen to G Gordon Liddy? |
[May. 30th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | Watergate Hotel | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | Gobsmacked | ] |
| [ | music |
| | American Idiot | ] |
I mean, apart from the whole "convicted felon" thing, he says shit like this:
"Let's hope that the key conferences aren't when she's menstruating or something, or just before she's going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then."
-- radio host (and convicted felon) G. Gordon Liddy on Judge Sonia Sotomayor
Is this what anyone really wants in a spokesman?
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| Good call, Dick. |
[May. 25th, 2009|06:45 pm] |
"Anyone who served in Iraq knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq... Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives."
-- Matthew Alexander, senior interrogator in Iraq |
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| Stimulating the economy, one industry at a time. |
[May. 4th, 2009|09:12 pm] |
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/04/ammo.shortage/index.html
Two points we can draw from this article.
1) Barack Obama has been very good to the munitions industry
and
2) These people are idiots.
I think Obama should go on CNN every week and say "This administration has no plans to restrict the sale or ownership of {insert commodity}," let the wingnut blogoshpere do the rest, and watch as sales soar.
One product per week, let industries bid on which he'd deny thinking of banning.
Deficit: solved.
Hell, he could start with "Pontiac Grand Prix's." |
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| Ask and ye shall receive |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|10:47 pm] |
My garlic butter tomato sauce recipe
The amounts here are for two servings, since that's my usual audience, but it scales up easily.
2 Tablespoons Olive Oil
1 clove garlic, chopped fine
4 Tablespoons butter (1/2 stick)
1 large tomato, peeled and chopped
1 good slice of a medium onion (very scientific), chopped
2 Tablespoons Sherry*
1 Tablespoon Mom's homemade spaghetti sauce**
1 tsp parsley
1 pinch salt.
2 cups pasta
2 chicken breasts.
--------------
Heat the oil on low. Chop the garlic, avoiding your thumb, and let it sweat in the oil. Don't cook it high enough to caramelize, or the flavor will change dramatically. Burnt garlic is nasty.
Add the butter when the garlic starts to go translucent. Let it melt on low heat.
Add the tomato, onion, parsley, sherry*, frozen sauce cube** and salt. I like to add some chopped red bell pepper, but it makes a strong impression, so only do it if you really like red peppers.
Increase the heat to medium and let it simmer for 20 minutes.
Grill the chicken breasts and cook the pasta as directed. Toss pasta in sauce.
Serve with a red wine or pale or amber ale and await praise, sexual favors and or marriage proposals.
This is a nice fairly quick meal that tastes like a labor intensive dish. A quick salad and some good French bread and you're good to go.
* Cheat#1- I often marinate the chicken breasts in Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing, so I just substitute that for Sherry. It gives a more complex flavor, but either way, you need the sour/acid element. You can make do with any not too sweet red wine if that's what you have.
** This helps give the sauce more body. You can eliminate it, or even just use tomato paste. When I make my all day spaghetti sauce, I fill an ice cube tray with some and freeze it. When I need to thicken a quick sauce, I pop a cube into the pan. The sauce works ok without it, but it's much better with. |
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| Don't cook tired, Phil |
[Apr. 2nd, 2009|07:59 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  exhausted | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Who Needs Sleep - Barennaked Ladies | ] |
The fact that our kitchen knives have an unsharpened section of blade near the handle is the only reason I didn't lop my thumb clean off this week.
March involved back to back 72 hour workweeks, so I'm stupid with fatigue. In this state I decided to make my signature garlic butter tomato sauce. My attempt to get a nice fine dice on the garlic nearly ended in tragedy.
The sauce would have been nigh unsalvagable with that extra A+ in it. |
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| About time he started pulling his weight. |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|02:27 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Get a Haircut and Get a Real Job - Georgia Satelites | ] |
Seth shovels the driveway.
I mean, the kid is seventeen months old. How long did he think this free ride was gonna last? |
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| Onions are a vegetable, and vegetable are good for you... |
[Dec. 31st, 2008|09:37 am] |
Ergo French Onion Soup must be good for you.
I got me Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles cookbook for Xmas, and now my goal for the new year is to push my cholesterol to 400.
I tried it out and made a truly heavenly French Onion Soup the other day. The half stick of butter, the quarter pound of cubed bacon, and the 3 ounces of Gruyere sprinkled over it may have undone any benefit I may have gotten from the onions.
But, God, was it good.
I'm gonna see if just increasing my red wine intake will balance things out. |
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| On answers, unhelpful |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|07:27 pm] |
"What's the Soup du Jour"
"That's the soup of the day."
I thought that was just a joke until we took the Spud to the Opthamologist.
The nurse was taking the family history, we all wear glasses, her mom has glaucoma, and so on, and she asked us,
"Any history of macular degeneration?"
Now, I'm not sure exactly what that is. I know it generally comes on with age and makes you lose vision, but my practical training in eyeballs in Medic school was checking pupils for drug use or brain injury, and bandaging techniques when you jam a pencil in one. So we ask:
"We're not sure. The whole family has trouble reading any word longer than BAR from more than 20 feet. What is macular degeneration exactly?"
So she says and I quote
"It's when the macula degenerates." |
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| You gotta ask yourself a question.... |
[Nov. 10th, 2008|08:01 pm] |
Can ya tell which movie this is? Well, can ya, Punk?
This Sunday, while I was working on the Ambulance, AMC ran a Clint Eastwood marathon. Now, Sunday TV is pretty bad in general, and mindless violence is always an easy compromise at an ambulance base, so the TV stayed on AMC pretty much all day.
Now it was a pretty busy day, so I never saw a whole movie, but we'd watch 45 minutes to an hour, then run out to save lives and make a difference, then come back and watch some more.
During the course of the day, I learned something.
You can watch disconnected chunks of all the Dirty Harry movies, and never lose the plot or get confused. They're like the same film. The only way you can tell them apart is which of Harry's minority partners is going to take a bullet for him.
You can do the same thing with the Spaghetti Westerns. The opening hour of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly flows right into the last forty five minutes of A Fistful of Dollars. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|11:22 pm] |
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I will say that John McCain made a very classy concession speech. |
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| We've had Eight years of willful ignorance |
[Oct. 27th, 2008|02:40 pm] |
It hasn't turned out as well as some may have hoped.
Apparently, science is for Liberal Elite types who don't hail from the Pro America parts of the country.
http://www.slate.com/id/2203120/
And a quick primer on Socialism in American politics, for those who may like to think of Obama as Karl Marx, since the idea that he's Osama bin Laden isn't resonating.:
http://www.slate.com/id/2202950/ |
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| More thoughts on the election |
[Oct. 22nd, 2008|08:43 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | politics | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  cynical | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Won't Get Fooled Again | ] |
1. Joe the Plumber can suck my big fat cock.
2. If McCain wins, instead of moving to Canada, seceding, joining a domestic terrorist group like the Alaska Independence Party, etc, I suggest we take a page from Alexadre Dumas. We arrange to kidnap Palin and replace her with Tina Fey. We could lock her up and make her wear a goalie mask. With lipstick. |
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| Wow. |
[Oct. 14th, 2008|08:47 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Your Racist Friend- They Might be Giants | ] |
Holy crap!
Look who's deserting the hopefully-sinking GOP ship. |
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| My take on Sarah Palin |
[Sep. 9th, 2008|09:54 pm] |
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Am I the only straight guy in America who'd rather fuck Biden? |
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| On politics |
[Aug. 28th, 2008|10:39 pm] |
OK, I need to say this just once.
This election has two, and only two, options.
If you live in a swing state, I don't give a rat's ass how disappointed you are that Hillary lost, or how the Democrats just aren't far enough to the left, or Obama overuses the word "Sweetie," just vote for Obama, or accept responsibility when the Republicans hold the White House.
'Cause I'm blaming you.
Barring one of them dying or having a stroke in the next few months, the next President will be Obama or McCain. That's it. Those are your options. Voting for anyone else is letting the unwashed, Fox News addled masses choose for you. It's like being told "Eat your green beans or go to bed hungry." You can make a big speech about not abandoning your principles and keep on screaming for prime rib, but don't bitch when your stomach is growling at 1 AM.
One of these two men will be appointing justices to the Supreme Court for the next four years. Force yourself to grasp that.
I feel the need to say this, because the Democrats seem to long for the opportunity to shoot themselves in the foot, and to find a way to fuck this up.
Now, after eight years of Bush, eight years of trashing our reputation and influence abroad, eight years of treating the economy like a particularly pretty altar boy in the Boston Archdiocese, eight years of arrogant, incompetent cronyism, eight years of this, if anyone can defend going third party in 2000 by saying with a straight face "there's no real difference between Bush and Gore," I will hunt you down.
Let's buck the trend and learn from our mistakes. |
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| Just see it. |
[Aug. 28th, 2008|10:33 pm] |
Tropic Thunder is the funniest movie in decades.
It's one of Robert Downey Jr's best performances ever. It is unquestionably Tom Cruise's best performance ever. Jack Black does the best Jonesing act ever on film.
It's like watching a herd of Hollywood sacred cows being led into a Chicago stockyard while huffing Nitrous Oxide.
And ignore the protesters. None of them could have possibly seen it. The movie doesn't make fun of any mentally disabled group except for actors, producers, directors and agents. |
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