Amazing speech.
“No way. No how. No McCain.”
“Keep going. …”
Well done, Hillary.
August 27, 2008
August 26, 2008
Michelle Obama @ DNC
Took me a long time to get the vid for this, so if you’ve been having the same sorts of issues, here you go.
I don’t remember other political spouses doing their thing at conventions.
Michelle’s was … pretty good! I think.
… and I think, after labeling this “politics,” maybe I should have a “2008 elections” label, eh?
Update: I’ve added an election2008 label to the stasho’labels. I’ll fill it in over the next while.
And so it begins … Balsa Man, A Diminute Effigy For A Reduced Community
Folks I know remember the original Burning Man events out on Baker Beach and … refuse to go to the what-now-it-is experience out in the Nevada desert.
(Shout out! to Don who’s off on his post-significant-bday Burning Man experience! and to those folks his nibs worked with in the Exploratorium tech haven who are burners in their off-hours!)
Here is an alternative this Saturday out at Baker Beach for those in town.
We’ll be up at Donner Lake with the Bixby Creek crowd who soon (well, now, obviously) will no longer have a Bixby Creek place to gather because our illustrious hosts are selling their place and none of the rest of us — much as we love the place and the memories — have the wherewithal to buy it.
Alas.
[via Laughing Squid]
Ted at the DNC
Towse’s True Confessions…
I have never been a Ted Kennedy fan, for various reasons I won’t go into here.
But this made me cry.
(Thought it was interesting that C-SPAN thought they had to identify Caroline Kennedy as “daughter of John F. Kennedy”.)
August 25, 2008
Joe Biden and smart women
Adele Stan @ Huffington Post (Careful, Joe! "Smart Woman" Jokes a Dicey Game) isn’t the only commentator to hear Biden’s crack about his wife Jill’s doctorate degree as a slam against smart women with too much education.
recap:
“Ladies and gentlemen, my wife Jill, who you’ll meet soon, is drop dead gorgeous. My wife Jill, who you’ll meet soon, she also has her doctorate degree, which is a problem.”
Call me naive or slow to take offense when none’s intended, but I interpreted that kidding to be aimed at her doctorate degree not on the fact she’s a woman with a doctorate degree.
Joe Biden has a law degree from Syracuse University. Jill Biden has a PhD in Education from the University of Delaware.
In the words of a famous person, “Lighten up, folks.”
August 24, 2008
Follow up on "The Omnivore’s Hundred" list
Follow up on The Omnivore’s Hundred list post.
K asked,
Where on the list are: head cheese, Rocky Mtn.Oysters, Finnan haddi?
I’ve eaten head cheese and Finnan haddie.
Mom used to make Finnan haddie when we were young. Not one of my faves at the time. Didn’t like her Swedish meatballs either. Maybe I would now.
She used to make Grandma Towse’s goulash — which is not really goulash by any stretch of the imagination — and humored me by letting me have the macaroni and the ground beef and the tomatoes separate on my plate. She then tossed the ingredients together for the goulash for the rest of the family. For some reason, I liked the ingredients fine apart but I thought that goulash was awful.
Note: this is the singular instance I can recall of Mom making anything special for anyone not much liking what she was making for dinner. I think it was because I wasn’t asking her to go much out of her way — just give me the separate ingredients before you mix them all together.
Had Kobe beef as part of a Dissident Chef dinner over at Crush Pad last night.
Earlier this week, after his nibs had seen my list, he said I’d already eaten both Kobe beef and horse.
“Really?” I said. “Horse?”
“Yes,” he answered. “Well, =I= had it in France and I don’t think I’ve been there without you.”
Maybe so. I have a mind like a sieve.
I meet your head cheese, Rocky Mtn.Oysters, Finnan haddie and raise you:
- tongue (beef tongue is soul food for his nibs)
- pork or lamb kidney (kidneys of any sort. I like them. his nibs doesn’t.)
- tarasun (Buryat ‘vodka’ distilled from soured milk)
- fiddle-leaf ferns
- yak (We passed on a chance to eat yak eyeballs.)
- Retsina
- chicken feet
- scrapple
- tripe or menudo
and I’ll stop there.
August 22, 2008
Comcast mail and Usenet connections have been refused since yesterday p.m. What changed?
Those of you spot the tweets over >>> there will notice that I was having problems with e-mail and Usenet connectivity since yesterday.
What changed?
After much poking and what not, here’s what needed changing. I’m putting it here so I can find it again should the situation pop up.
Error msgs indicated that comcast mail connection refused as was pop.gmail. Wassup with that?
Being as I send mail to my personal accounts both to comcast.net and to a gmail account as backup, I could still read my e-mails.
As an aside … turns out =still= that about 10% of mail sent to comcast.net lands in some sys$null in comcastland. The mail that is picked up from the gmail account is more complete. I check the comcast.net bin every once in a bit in case someone sent e-mail directly to the comcast.net account. Usually the only source of mail sent directly to the comcast.net account is comcast itself.
I use the gmail account when I’m “wandering”. …
When I’m “home,” Tbird grabs the gmail account POP mail and puts it in my local folder.
SOLN: (hours later): for whatever reason thunderbird.exe was no longer on McAfee’s goodguy list. Add thunderbird.exe to the goodguy list maintained by McAfee’s firewall.
That cleared some of the problems, but next up: pop.gmail.com timed out.
SOLN: the word from gmail. Simply put: Use port 995. Have SSL set.
So what happened ‘twixt then and now? I’m not sure. I suspect the problems with the McAfee firewall are connected with an update they pushed yesterday. I have no idea where the port/SSL problems with gmail came from. Maybe I fiddled things around while I was trying to make things work earlier today and forgot to set things back where they were. Happens.
Update: Outgoing mail wasn’t going out this morning. (You can tell how much e-mail =I= send.) Had to set the port for smtp.comcast.net to 587. Comcast.net blocks the default port: 25.
Fish Tale Has DNA Hook – Students Find Bad Labels
Fish Tale Has DNA Hook – Students Find Bad Labels – NYTimes.com
Two teenagers, recently graduated from high school, decided to check whether the fish in restaurants and at the fishmongers is really what it’s labeled as.
Upshot? They found 25% of the fish with DNA they could identify had been mislabeled.
(The mislabeling usually meant the fish was identified by the seller as a more expensive fish than it really was. Shock.)
The teenagers shipped the fish off to someone at FISHBOL who did the DNA analysis using a newish technique that is simpler and cheaper than a full-bore analysis.
Bad enough that your wild-caught salmon might not be wild-caught. It might not even be salmon!
How to Smell Like a Used Bookstore
How to Smell Like a Used Bookstore from Dwight Garner’s PAPER CUTS blog about books for the NYT.
Review is of Perfumes: The Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. Garner quotes from a perfume review in the book.
DZING! (L’Artisan Parfumeur) ***** vanilla cardboard
Olivia Giacobetti is here at her imaginative, humorous best, and Dzing! is a masterpiece. Dzing! smells of paper, and you can spend a good while trying to figure out whether it is packing cardboard, kraft wrapping paper, envelopes while you lick the glue, old books, or something else. I have no idea whether this was the objective, but I have few clues as to why it happened. Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good-quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us. L’Artisan Parfumeur is, for reasons unknown, planning to discontinue this marvel, so stock up.
Sounds nice to me.
My American Prayer and musical stops along the way
My American Prayer is a Web site to promote the pro-Obama Dave-Stewart-and-Seth-Dalton-directed video (with a cast of thousands, including Joan Baez, Whoopi Goldberg, and Barry Manilow) called My American Prayer.
Wandering away from there I found there’s also the new “Yes We Can” video (a musical video with no connection to Will.i.am’s classic) out from Maria Muldaur and Bonnie Raitt. Recorded at Studio D Recording in Sausalito.
Count down to November.
Joan Baez, Whoopi Goldberg, and Barry Manilow?!?!! Yipes!