Ignore this teaser post

Update: coffee maker needs to be the FIRST link in my post to qualify me for the $40, according to the agent. My bad!

It's a weird world we live in, with this mysterious paper thing we call money, and food coming out of cans, yadda, yadda. It's almost enough to make me want to become a bushman.

Thanks to a message that appeared on the square piece of glowing glass/fabric that I spend most of my day looking at, I became aware that linking to this coffee maker in a "teaser post" (more to come?) could make me the proud owner of a $40 gift certificate to buy stuff online. Not exactly money, but charming nonetheless.

Squash Smoothie

I was drowning in a surplus of squash, and the Minutia Mama inspired me to be bold.


So I took half a hefty squash, a few dips of ice cream, a few pear halves from can, a spot of cinnamon and cloves, about a tablespoon of real grape juice concentrate, and enough milk to keep my $20 Proctor Silex blender from getting the dry heaves.


The result was appetizing in a way that I could not have imagined:

I drank it all in one sitting. It couldn't have tasted better! It tasted like apple pie.

Storm vs Tower

A Flattering Passage into the Mankiw Echo Chamber

N. Gregory Mankiw, former chief economics adviser to President Bush, evidently took the time to type (or at least copy-paste) the phrase "Freakwenter concurs" and link it to an old post on this blog. I still concur.

UPDATE: I never noticed an increase in traffic due to the link. I think this is partially due to Mankiw's posting the link as an update, possibly several days after the original post. Even if he had included the link in his original post, it would have been worth surprisingly little in terms of traffic, as I noted in a previous post.

Creativity and Garbage

Creativity is one of those over-used words that conjures up images of tacky arts and crafts and people sitting around in brainstorming sessions coming up with garbage proposals for solving problems that they have no clue about. So let me add my idea to the heap.

Today I threw out a couple of perfectly good food mixer beaters because the mixer had died and I got a new one which of course included beaters.

This made me think of an urgently needed web application. It would be similar to craigslist and ebay, minus the complexities/hassle of online payments, buyer ratings, and dealing with strangers. It would be about deepening friendships with business.

The idea is to integrate into a friend network site (Facebook seems to be the default these days) a utility that allows members to list any or all of their possessions in something like an excel spreadsheet with just two columns, with an optional third column: item, price, description.

The resulting data would be made search-able for anyone with permissions (all my friends, for example), and I could search the merchandise data of all my friends. Transactions with friends are easy, and provide excuses to get together instead of incurring shipping costs.

If this application were available to me I would immediately post my sweet dehumidifier that I haven't used for a year, a few odd tools, and stuff like old beaters that I just throw in a pile in the corner and imagine there would be a use for someday.

Slick numbers

My last post on BP relied on now-outdated estimates, but my take remains mild. Here is one of those rare articles that puts things in perspective nicely regarding the BP spill. The point is not that we shouldn't worry about spills, but that there might be even more important things to worry about. You don't want to call the fire department to help put out your camp fire while all of NYC is burning down.

Tuna

Let 'splain you how to make exotic-looking food out of tuna.

TUNA RECIPE #!:
4 eggs, butter on the pan, 10 oz frozen spinach, 6 oz tuna in a can, some cheese. Fry it all together and add catchup:

Freakwenter rating for goodness: 5 out of 10, where 1 = here and 10 = here.

TUNA RECIPE #!!:
Get yourself a drink of grape juice:



As an appetizer microwave some pepper jack cheese over some chopped raw onion. This will help establish a craving for blandness:


Finally, procure a pot of cold boiled potatoes and add about 12 oz of tuna fresh from the can plus a massive wallop of high-fat mayo. Mix that up and yum yum!

Groundhog Quiche [the song]

Half-rap, half-song with a fiddle tune chorus. Find the complete recipe here.

---

round about the time i turned 27
i thought back to my childhood in almost heaven
and i could smell the fresh boiled kale
and taste the fine fat cherries filling up my pail

so i set out to return to my roots in the garden
and i dug my whole yard up just to put some chard in
and tomatoes, squash, peppers and zuchinni
i believed that i could be a veggie garden genie

Chorus:
KILL A GROUNDHOG and put it in a quiche
GRIND UP GROUNDHOG and put it in a quiche
put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a
put-it-in-a put-it-in-a put-it-in-a quiche

well the seeds were in the ground and air was warm
then the plants began to sprout, why, this looks like corn!
i had shown my country light in an urban darkness,
i was superman with green hands fighting concrete starkness

but then a force more sinister than i had ever known
dug her hole by my yard and called it her home
before my eyes she grew in size as the squash disappeared
i felt used by this rodent, it was totally weird

Chorus

1 cup flour, splash of oil makes the crust
spinach, eggs, onions and cheese make the mush
add the de-boned corpse and turn the oven on high
bake it a while and you have yourself a groundhog pie!

Chorus

Freedom means fire

Pittsburgh Nightscape

Star Spangled Sin

The Onion seizes upon an observation oft made by Mennonistas concerning our national anthem.