|
Today's Fortune: |
   
|
Saturday, June 01, 2002
Ever heard of the Vidocq Society? What a creepy bunch of folks they must be.
.: posted by andy 6/1/2002
What everyone should do at Taco Cabana:
This requires a friend. Order a pitcher of strawberry margaritas. Very few people realize that Taca Cabana serves alcohol, much less has good frozen margaritas. They used to have really good strawberry margaritas, but they changed the recipe, fewer strawberries I think, yet still quite tasty.
See how many strands of those poblano peppers hanging on the wall you can get out of the restaurant with. Keep score. Points are only recorded if employees don't chase you out the door. Strands of fake garlic are worth half as many points.
Plan a party. The day before or early on the day of the party, go to Taco Cabana and order anything to go. Go over to the salsa bar, and instead of getting salsa (or in addition to getting salsa), grab a bunch of those little salsa cups they have. Go home and eat your taco, then make Jello shots in the little salsa cups.
If you're really hungry, or really poor, order the cheapest 'Plate' on the menu, with boracho beans instead of refried. They always forget. When you get your plate with refried beans, say you ordered boracho beans. They'll give you a big bowl of boracho beans, a $1.79 value, for free. With liberal additions from the salsa bar $3.24 can get you enough food to live on for 2 days.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/1/2002
Recipe for really good, really hard to mess up chocolate chocolate chip cookies:
1 Box Supermoist Chocolate Cake Mix
1 Cup Crisco Shortening
2 Eggs
1 Bag Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chips
1 1/2 Cups Pecans
It's really easy. Mix everything together, put on ungreased cookie sheet and bake at 325-400 for 8-20 minutes. If you cook them for 8 minutes, they'll be doughy until the next day, when they'll be like those soft cookies you buy at the store. If you cook them for 20 minutes, they'll be crunchy immediately, and really crunchy, but not burned the next day.
I usually mess up chocolate chip cookies. They'll be burned on the bottom and raw on top, or they stick to the pan so badly that I end up with little chocolate chip wads when I try to remove them, or some other disaster. Not with this recipe.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 6/1/2002
Friday, May 31, 2002
My loud neighbors got kicked out of their apartment about a week ago. It never bothered me much, but the people below them had a lot of problems with it. The carpet cleaners were in there yesterday getting it ready for a new renter. I just got back from my weekly friday-night drive-around-town, coz that's what I do to keep myself sane on friday nights in houston. There was a cute girl in hospital pajamas with some boxes standing outside my ex-neighbor's door talking to somebody on her cell phone about getting a key to get into the apartment.
The apartment is a two bedroom unit and she looks like she's in her early twenties. I doubt she needs the extra bedroom for a baby. Can you say "roommates"? That is unless she's like bethany, with a husband that needs an extra bedroom for his hardware.
one of these days...
.: posted by Jeremy 5/31/2002
A swarm of honeybees landed near my brother's garden yesterday. He built a hive and collected them, and they seem to have set up in it. I'd been wanting to get honeybees for a while and keep them at his house, but he was skeptical. Kind of funny how things can just fall out of the sky.
In the winemaking department, I'm veering away from meads as my mainstay. Sure it tastes like candy, but I've learned that a lot of people don't like the taste of honey, and that if someone gets sick on mead, they tend not to want to drink it anymore. If they get sick on wine or beer, they just take a few aspirin and are back in the game in no time. My next big endeavour is going to be watermelon wine. watermelons make a lot of juice, and it's fairly low sugar, so the end result won't be really sweet, but should still taste like watermelon.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 5/31/2002
Thursday, May 30, 2002
God save the Queen, and the Hell's Angels.
.: posted by Jeremy 5/30/2002
Wednesday, May 29, 2002
I honestly never knew steroids were so widely used in major league baseball. Ken Caminiti was one of my favorite players back when I was playing little league. I was a 3rd baseman, and he was a 3rd baseman for the Astros. This was well before he started using steriods in 1996, though, so I don't feel like my childhood has been raped.
.: posted by Jeremy 5/29/2002
Apparently Malawi is having a huge food crisis. Drought, famine, etc.. There's also a big stink because last year the World Bank and IMF recommended that the country sell down it's strategic grain reserves. The World Bank replies that they recommended selling those reserves down from 160 thousand tons to 30 or 40 thousand tons, and Malawi got rid of pretty much all of it. Of course, it's estimated that Malawi will need 700 thousand tons in the next three months, so I don't really think it matters what either side says.
This brings us to the next topic. GW pushed a huge farm subsidies, doubling subsidies from $80B to $160B. I don't really like farm subsidies, at least in their current form. I think that these subsidies should be used to buy long shelflife agricultural products which could then bebe sold on a sliding scale price system based on need to groups or nations or whatever. Countries that buy a lot of grain like Japan could just purchase it outright, and Malawi and the Red Cross would get a helluva deal.
Think of all the pork barrel created. We'd need huge supply depots to hold the millions of tons of grain, all of the logistical necessities like shipping, and don't forget helping the farmers. Better than paying farmers not to harvest crops, especially considering most crops that aren't harvested probably couldn't be anyway.
And I liked the Mormon tenet of having food stockpiled in case of emergency, and would sleep better at night knowing that my government had enough grain to feed every man, woman, and child in this nation for a year or two if the shit hit the fan. My only qualm would be the effect on the market of having a large governmental agency puying grain at a set rate and selling it at a set rate.
In more personal news, work has been dominating my life. I got radiation burns yesterday coz I was welding in a sleeveless shirt. Kind of like a mild sunburn, only I got it indoors and after dark. I've been looking to get an old car with a big motor. I've been doing that for a while, but now I have a source of money and am working in a blue collar environment where conversation gravitates to cars and fishing.
There is a 1976 Ford F-350 supercab dually for sale in Sanger for $1,450. It has a 360 or 390 (it's hard to tell coz they're the same engine with slightly different cranks and pistons), anda 4 speed manual transmission. It was originally a U-Haul truck, but the box was removed and replaced with a steel flatbed and the cab was painted primer gray. The back seats in it are jumpseats, but they're as big as the front seats in my Ranger.
I've also been looking for a small cheap 2 door sports car that I could put a big engine in as well, kind of a homemade Shelby Cobra. The problem with that is it's so expensive to build up an engine new, or even rebuilt. A Chevy 350, which is about the cheapest engine around because it's the most manufactured auto engine ever runs about $1,500 with no special add ons. A fancy big block can run $4K+.
.: posted by Grand Inquisitor Fnord Moco 5/29/2002
Monday, May 27, 2002
We're having a hell of a time keeping any help down at the shop. We hired all college kids this year. We got a couple (boy and a girl) from the coffee shop in the dining hall. They were all artsy, and looked the part, but they were good workers. They quit last Friday because they'd been led to expect more money, and also because they didn't like one of the guys they were working with. We had this other guy who's studying chemistry, and plans to join the Navy after graduation, and work in nuclear propulsion on the submarines. Good for him, but if he can't manage to hold down a job for over a week, I'm not very optimistic about his future in the military. He worked two days, missed a day, came in two more days, worked a half day, and then disappeared. This morning we got a new guy in to help us. He talked a lot. I know that his father is a US Attorney, his mother is a nurse practitioner, he used to play football at Florida A&M but now plays for A&T, was a drum major in high school, and at some point supervised a team of people doing the work we hired him for. In any case, he worked along fine until about 9:45 this morning, at which point he told me he needed to meet his mother at the admissions building so he could get his paperwork to fill out his I9 and stuff. So I drove him up there, but instead of his mom, his cousin showed up. He went over to talk to his cousin, and the next thing I knew, he needed to go somewhere with his cousin, to get papers or something. He would meet me back at the dorm where we were working. And that's the last I ever heard of him. I guess I should have known from the beginning that he was orchestrating a rescue for himself. He couldn't even make it to break, and didn't ever even clock out. I guess we got about nine dollars' worth of free work out of him.
It's not like we're busting these people's asses. I understand the coffee kids taking off. They wanted better hours, more money, and less annoying co-workers, and I think they can probably make that happen. I have no idea what these other two losers are thinking. All I want from a helper is someone to come in and scrape some tape off some walls. It's not hard work. It's not challenging in any way. There are no heights involved. It's mostly air conditioned. Sometimes your arm gets tired, but I'm not going to stop anyone from taking a breather. And I sure don't expect anyone to work any harder than I do. Hell, we worked ten hours today, but overall we probably took three hours worth of breaks, not counting lunch (you might think this is typical state employee lazyness, but we worked twelve ten-hour-days in a row, and I think we're just a little burnt out). I know the pay isn't great, but that's life. Either these people are being seriously misled in the interview process, or else they're total rejects.
One of my helpers is the guy who used to have my job. He actually got promoted before he left to go back to school. He's taking a really intense summer course, and working 40+ hours a week right now. Better him than me. At about 5 today we were pretty far ahead, and were pissed off that they didn't let us leave at 8 hours. We pretty much just put down our tools and went on break. We shot the bull for an hour and a half. Management tip: Your employees will know when you've passed a crunch time, and are needlessly pushing them. Productivity will be affected accordingly.
.: posted by andy 5/27/2002
Google
DrinkBoy
Modern Drunkard
DMOZ.org
The Agonist
Metafilter.com
Fark.com
RobotWisdom.com
Memepool.com
Plastic.com
news.google.com