Towse: views from the hill

January 12, 2009

/ RECIPE / A different way with brussels sprouts – not Kosher

Filed under: recipes — Tags: — Towse @ 11:22 pm

(1) Trim brussels sprouts’ stem ends. Shake in water and shake water off. Toss into covered dish and microwave, just enough to cook, don’t let them get soft and soggy. I usually cook for four minutes and then use a fork to pierce the sprouts to see how they’re doing. Keep cooking until they’re as done as you like them.

(2) While the brussels sprouts are cooking, take two or three strips of bacon. Cut them into small pieces. Toss them in a frying pan and cook until crisp. Take the bacon bits out of the pan and pour the bacon fat into the refrigerator dish you keep full of bacon fat down on the next to the bottom shelf in the ‘frig.

You do have a bacon fat dish in your ‘frig, right? How else do you cook your eggs in the morning, mon? How do you fry your leftover noodles? What do you add to the pan for some added flavor when you fry chicken? What do you use when you’re making fried mush? SAVE YOUR BACON FAT.

(3) Throw a couple large spoonfuls of sour cream into the frying pan, which should still have teeny bits of bacon stuck to its bottom. Stir around until the sour cream warms up and thins and the bacon bits stuck on the bottom of the frying pan get mixed in.

(4) Add horseradish to taste — make sure you can at least taste the horseradish in the sour cream sauce.

(5) Add the crispy bacon bits.

(6) Either toss the cooked brussels sprouts into the pan and stir until the sauce is evenly distributed

Or serve the brussels sprouts and add the horseradish-sourcream-bacon sauce on top or to the side.

Trust me.

/ BLOG / Bookride

Filed under: blog,books,bookstores — Towse @ 11:03 pm

Bookride, a blog from ANY AMOUNT OF BOOKS, 56 Charing Cross Road, London.

“a guide to the most wanted and collected books. There is some evaluation of why the book is wanted, what it is worth – with a range of selling prices, some trivia, apercus and bon mots, a few anecdotes, so called jokes and occasional rants.”

Entertaining blog for book huggers.

Walkaround yesterday.

Filed under: books,bookstores,life,San Francisco — Towse @ 6:48 pm

Started out just after 1P. Stomach still gurgling from too much fish & chips at the Duke the night before at the Mx meetup. And I’d ordered the small portion! Not used to fried fish no more. …

We decided that on our way to chk out the rental (we’re meeting the new tenant there today and didn’t want to be surprised by some horrible something) we’d stop at an Open House I was curious about and then wander over to the rental and on to elsewhere.

We set out first to find the Tatiana statue that’s been hidden off the Greenwich Steps. Not so “hidden” anymore. Someone’s chalked TIGER –> arrows on the Steps to point out the side path where the statue’s been placed. Walked back up the steps to verify the location of a GWSF photo. Walked over to Russian Hill and stopped at 1145 Vallejo.

1145 Vallejo
SFH. 3BR 2.5BA sep gdn apt. (“legal” the blurb sheet sez, but only because there’s no stove — only a microwave oven — so it’s considered a guest room with separate entrance, I think. Perhaps the “legal” means that the lower level re-do into guest quarters was done with permits.) Pkg. (Actually, once we saw it, we decided “Pkg” was “parking for two Minis” or “parking for a Mini and “that Smart car I plan to win at the Tel Hi North Beach Citizens raffle”)

Only $1.495m (marked down on the blurb sheet from $1.625m).

Deals abound in San Francisco real estate! Nice wood floors. Maple on the staircase w/ a great banister. Oak on the floors. Gas stove. Yard. Spruced up and all. Quiet street. (Street stops at Jones, so there’s not much through traffic.) No views. Only!! $1.495m. Kee-ripes. There must still be people these days with cash in their pockets or something. I would not want to be an appraiser in this market. Where are the comps? What is a place worth? (Whatever anyone is willing to pay.) How much should a bank lend?

From Vallejo we walked down to Polk and poked around in antique and cool-stuff shops, Walgreen’s. Walked over to the rental to make sure everything was set for the meet with the new tenant today. We walked down Laguna to Fort Mason and stopped by Book Bay, the Friends of the Library Bookstore, to … um … browse

We browsed. I browsed through the ($0.50 or 3/$1) tables. His nibs browsed through the Californiana and elsewhere. I browsed elsewhere. We wound up with the following, which include a couple San Francisciana books:

Ruth Newhall San Francisco’s Enchanted Palace 1967 HB $30 – his nibs was quite intrigued by this book about the Palace of Fine Arts. The book was dust-jacketed and wrapped in Bro-Dart cello and had ephemera tucked inside dealing with the initial setup and publicity for the Exploratorium. The ephemera really sealed the deal for his nibs, who is a huge Exploratorium fan. The splurge for the day.

Jerry Flamm Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco’s ’20s and ’30s $5 TPB
Patricia Highsmith Plotting & Writing Suspense Fiction HB $5
1930 Annualog (Sci Am Pub Co) HB $5
Lee G. Miller An Ernie Pyle Album: Indiana to Ie Shima 1st. HB $5

on the 3/$1 tables
Round Up: the stories of Ring W. Lardner (Scribner. c 1924, 26, 29) HB
Jacqueline Winspear Pardonable Lies HB 2005 1st
Lee Child Bad Luck and Trouble BookClub 2007
Joyce C Oates. Beasts Carroll &Graf “copyright TK” (TK???)
Angus McDonald The Five Foot Road: in search of Vanished China SC. 1st ed.
Dunning – Booked to Die PB
William Murray – Tip on a Dead Crab PB
Gallagher Gray – Death of a Dream Maker PB (GG pseud for Katy Munger)
Wm Faulkner – Six mystery stories: Knight’s Gambit (who knew Faulkner wrote mystery short stories? I didn’t.)

I had my Friends of the Library card, which gives me 10% off, plus my once-a-year coupon for 25% off, so my grand total was $35 or so after the discounts. Not bad for books enough to keep me entertained for quite a while and a couple of good San Francisciana books.

I’d remembered to bring not only the once-a-year coupon but also a cloth shoulder bag, so we piled most of the books in the bag (they didn’t all fit), took the rest in a smaller paper bag, and lugged them up and over the hills home.

home-> Vallejo 0.9m
Vallejo -> rental 1.1m
rental -> Book Bay 0.7m
Book Bay -> home 2.0m

for walkaround total of 4.7m.

Today we’ll do the walk to rental on a more direct route (1.8m) then to dinner at Isa (0.8m). (We haven’t been in what seems like a long while and we’ll be so much closer than we usually are!) And then home (2.4m).

5m total. How did that happen?

Down for everyone or just me?

Filed under: app,URL — Towse @ 6:09 pm

Down for everyone or just me?

Enter a site. downforeveryoneorjustme.com checks to see if it thinks the site is up.

[via tweet from Jessamyn West]

January 11, 2009

Today’s pet peeve: Annoying bloggers.

Filed under: peeves,wordstuff — Tags: , — Towse @ 8:57 pm

I checked all my links on the internet-resources’ WordStuff page yesterday, using the handy dandy Free Link Checker as a first pass and then following with a check of all the other links as a cleanup sweep.

One of the links the free link checker found was a definite 404. (Robin Queen’s collection of linguistics links … The page was 404 and after I found her UMich faculty Web site, seems her collection of links is no more, or not what I remembered.)

I went looking for the substitute link or another link just like it.

And found this.

ovablastic.blogspot.com has cut and pasted and reformatted my wordstuff links page onto its blog — a blog, I might mentioned, that is surrounded by ad stuff.

No mention that the links and commentary aren’t its.

No mention that link collection is mine as is the commentary.

No mention of my collection of links and how to get there.

Now ovablastic itself found that little nest of links through Stumbleupon, which does point people to my site.

Why did it cut and paste the HTML and pop it on its blog with no hattip or pointer to my site?

Because it’s clueless and a thief. Yeah. That could be it.

n.b. for allz of you who may say, “But links are links and not copyrightable!” The collection of links with the associated commentary is copyrighted. ’tis just not worth it to go lay sue papers in ovablastic’s mailbox. I’d rather mention here that someone with ads on its site stole my content and is a thief.

(Hi, ovablastic! Hope you Google your nym every once in a while! If you’d had an e-mail easily available on your blog, I would’ve dropped you a note. This is the next best bet.)

End Bush (Tuesday January 20, 2009. 9AM)

Filed under: election2008,San Francisco,social networking — Towse @ 8:09 pm

Event coming UP! all San Franciscans and those near enough to:

Inauguration Day 2009.

You could be at the Main Library at 100 Larkin Street in the Koret Auditorium watching the live telecast.

OR

You could be at End Bush at Bush and Presidio (Tuesday January 20, 2009)

Meetup and STREET PARTY! at the corner of Bush and Presidio at the END BUSH sign.

end bush

What some people do for fun

Filed under: life,video — Towse @ 7:56 am

Tonight was a meet-up at a pub in the south bay for beer and dinner with friends from the old job. Well-attended. Chance to catch up and see what people are up to.

Here’s what one of the old friends is doing for fun these days.

Tom King’s solo run in a supercharged Acura NSX at 150 mph average speed in the 2008 Nevada Open Road Challenge:

January 10, 2009

Oooh. Shiny! SourceForge’s Apophysis

Filed under: app,graphics — Towse @ 3:17 am

40 Amazing 3D Fractals Using Apophysis

Apophysis is a free Windows program for designing and rendering fractal flames, available from SourceForge .

January 8, 2009

Half a Million Nonprofits Could Lose Their Tax Exemptions

Filed under: nonprofits — Towse @ 7:04 pm

News from guidestar.org:

Half a Million Nonprofits Could Lose Their Tax Exemptions.

Having just FINALLY got final closure on a 501(c)3 after much to-ing and fro-ing with an endless loop of approvals from the Feds and the State and then years after I thought we’d had the final-final step complete, a notice that we were going to be dinged a penalty because we hadn’t paid our corporate taxes, I know how nitpicky and all the paperwork for tax-exempt non-profits is.

(“But the organization was shut down in 2006!”)
(“By golly, it was. Looks like we forgot to update the status in our database.”)

I know how nitpicky and all the paperwork for tax-exempt non-profits is BUT this is important, folks.

If you volunteer with, work for, or give to a smaller nonprofit, make sure the organization’s leadership knows about the 990-N. Encourage acquaintances associated with other small nonprofits to do the same. If they want more information, refer them to the IRS article.

tiltshiftmaker.com

Filed under: app,photographs — Towse @ 3:22 am

tiltshiftmaker.com – Transform your photos into tilt-shift miniatures

What are tilt-shift style photos?
Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.

Now you can easily transform your existing digital camera photos into tilt-shift miniatures using tiltshiftmaker.com.

This is an interesting app.

But why would you want to do this?

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