When I signed off last night, I was sure the wife had the stomach flu. Happily, it turned out to be a 24 hour stomach bug. A little cleanup on aisle six and I got her to sleep. All good today. I was NOT looking forward to several days of that.
Birthdays were had today. They were covered in OMWC’s morning link vomit.
Out of the bowels of the media, let’s do some links!
Stomach churning. I’ve always found it ironic that the annual flu shot is based on a guess. And many times wrong.
If there’s a way to screw up a good thing, California knows how to puke it up.
Plenty of rhetoric being spewed on both sides, but I think I come down on the side of the ranchers.
More verbal diarrhea from a failure of a politician.
Continuing with our epic journey through the war on Christmas; the last Christmas movie I think needs to be discussed is the Jimmy Stewart classic, Its a Wonderful Life.
This is my review of Guinness Over the Moon Milk Stout
In this movie we find the protagonist, George Bailey takes over the family business, a small Savings and Loan in his hometown of Bedford Falls. We learn a lot about George personally in the beginning of the movie: Why he was deferred from serving in World War 2, how he met his wife, and his overall outlook on matters related to his family business. We find out fairly early in the movie about, Mr. Potter, the antagonist as well. Mr. Potter is major a shareholder in the Savings and Loan. He voices his opinion during a board meeting regarding the “rabble” in the town that triggers George. The idea that people should save before trying to purchase a home is apparently evil and issuing sub-prime loans to workers that may or may not be able to afford to pay back the loan is as pure as the driven snow.
We find out later, during the depression both men were the only ones in town with businesses that survived. For the most part, Potter is portrayed as a caricature of a greedy, monocle twirling capitalist. I might even go so far as to say he probably fits in around here. Eventually, Potter discovers somehow Bailey’s Savings and Loan is still afloat in spite of questionable lending practices and alarming issues with his book keeping, but is the only real competition Potter has. That is, if you want to define Bailey as a competitor…after all, Potter is a member of the board. So he tried to do the sensible thing, and buy out Bailey.
Later Bailey’s uncle, Billy, loses a large deposit which is seriously troubling because it is potentially ruinous to their business. It is also a seemingly small amount for a mortgage lender of only $8000 (~$110,000 today), and he is depositing it in Potter’s bank (really?). Bailey then goes to the only person in town that can save him—Potter. It is here that Potter learns the $8000 in cash he randomly found in his bank earlier that day was Bailey’s. For better or worse, he tells Bailey to pound sand.
Bailey falls into a drunken depression, and considers suicide but is sidetracked by a stranger, whom he saves from his own death in an icy river. Remember–Bailey is not a shady businessman and is supposed to be the good guy. This random stranger is an angel (in training) named Clarence, that shows Bailey what the world is like without Bailey. People he saved by telling the pharmacist he filled the prescription with the wrong drug, pulling his brother from the ice in a frozen lake, who goes on to save other servicemen in the war, etc, is the impact Bailey made. This part in itself actually is a good message: one person (all of us, really) can impact the world in a variety of ways, with an infinite number of possibilities—it is up to you to make that impact positive.
Hopefully your impact is not crashing the economy through sub-prime lending.
Can this movie be made again today? I am here to tell you, if this movie is made again today it will be labeled by right leaning media as socialist or anti-capitalist propaganda–because it already is. Every speech Bailey makes, including the times he needs to weasel his way out of satisfying his customers is a smear on Potter. While Potter may be a cold-hearted businessman, portraying him as a villain is unfair. Others previously made a similar argument in pointing out that Potter is the only honest businessman in this story. His frequent complaints about the savings and loan can be argued are in his interests as an investor; how he insisted on customers having adequate collateral before approving loans supports this point. Even offering to buy out a large percentage (50%) of customer accounts when Bailey was unable to cash out his customers and offer full payment in 60 days, does not lend itself to the idea Potter is a villian. The only real crime Potter did was keep the money, but even there he comes across it by accident and only learns who left it in the scene where Bailey asks him for a bailout. He didn’t intentionally steal it. Given the issues Bailey has caused Potter over the years, is keeping that part a secret in that moment as unethical as it sounds? Is calling the banking authorities unethical, when bailing out Bailey would make him complicit in the scheme? He could have easily had a change of heart and deposited the money into Bailey’s account the next day, but we will never know.
Bailey’s business model is selling subprime loans; 2008 is still in the memories of many today. Which means neither of the characters can be reasonably portrayed as a protagonist. The honest businessman is a greedy capitalist who wants to own the entire town, and the other is a grifter selling loans to people that cannot afford to pay them back. In this theoretical new version will Bailey see all the people he gave loans to are living in a rental home or an apartment and not in bankruptcy had he never been born? So he has a change of heart and goes back to the universe where he likely ruins the entire town (Potter included) when those mortgages default?
Because why the hell not?
Clarence is gone, unless he’s replaced by a wizard of some kind, played by Oprah Winfrey. According to lore, they thought the movie was too religious…in 1946, which is why they went with singing Auld Lang Syne instead of an actual Christmas song in the final scene. Plus, there are feminist complaints when they show what happens to Bailey’s wife had George never been born (old maid). Bailey’s wife will necessarily have to be more successful as a single woman for whatever reason they want to come up with. Bailey is just holding her back by marrying her and letting him focus on his career.
This movie cannot be made again.
Didn’t I already review this one? Sort of. This is similar but not quite identical to a Guinness varietal that I found at the Dublin airport and packed away to save for the end of my self-imposed temperance. This is a little more like the Extra Stout made in Canada and imported to the US, but it is not as harsh with the burned malt flavors. It splits the difference between those two but it is otherwise solid. Then there is the part where it is brewed in Baltimore. Just do what I did and pour it through a colander, into another vessel to make sure there are no empty .40 S&W cartridges, syringes, or shards of broken glass. You should be good to go. Guinness Over the Moon Milk Stout 3.5/5
Yes, my apologies, I’ve been scarce again- besides working insane hours without access to personal use of the internet, I had some surgery this week and am in recovery. I never knew that a penis reduction would be this complex, but there it is. Another few days in bandages and I’ll be ready to go, and at least I was less work for the surgeon because, you know, Jewish.
STEVE SMITH HAPPY. HIM HAVE GOOD CHRISTMASTIME. HIM FIND CAMPERS ACTING OUT “THE 12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS”. THAT MEAN STEVE SMITH GET RAPE DRUMMERS, PIPERS, LORDS, MAIDS, BIRDS AND A TREE. HIM HAVE NO USE GOLDEN RINGS.THEN HIM LISTEN FAVORITE ALBUM:
HAVE A HOLLY RAPEY CHRISTMAS. IT BEST TIME OF YEAR!
NOW STEVE SMITH RELAX WITH FUNNY GLIBERTARIAN PEOPLE. HIM GIVE LINKS. GOOD LINKS. AND ADVICE. FROM STEVE SMITH!
POLAND PEOPLE TELL EU “YOU BE QUIET. NO TELL US HOW RUN COUNTRY!” WHAT NEXT? PLEXIT?
STEVE SMITH THINK THIS BIT EXTREME. YOU JUST GIVE 1 STAR RATING.
NOW STEVE SMITH GIVE THE BEST ADVICE. BETTER THAN OLD HOOMAN.
Q: My kindergartner arrived home with a princess birthday party invite. We’re new in town, and she’s going to a small private school, so I thought this was a perfect chance to meet new parents.
My husband dropped us off at a very expensive home, where there were coolers full of beer, champagne and wine. It was a Sunday and not even noon. I don’t drink, generally, and definitely not with strangers, or around my 5-year-old, or on Sundays OR mornings — never mind a Sunday morning with my child and a bunch of strangers.
I was confused, for starters, but as I spent the next two hours wandering the party, literally EVERYONE was drinking beer and asking why I wasn’t. They didn’t even have cake or open the presents. I left at the designated party end time, right before the “beer chugging championship” began in the kitchen.
Is this normal for wealthy families? Not only am I scared to bring my daughter to another party, I’m concerned that when it’s her turn for a birthday party, we’ll be the “weird” ones who actually play kids’ games and serve cake. I’ve sacrificed to put her in a nice private school, and now fear I’ve doomed her to be the poor kid.
A: STEVE SMITH THINK YOU BIT UPTIGHT. HIM HAVE ANSWER FOR THAT. HIM LOOSEN YOU UP, WITH RAPE. THEN YOU WANT DRINK WITH NEIGHBORS! IF STEVE SMITH HAD PINECONE FOR EVERY TIME HIM HEAR “Oh God…how can I forget this horrible day!” HIM WOULD BE BANK OF CASCADIA. SO DRINK, LOSE FEAR. LOSE BAD MEMORY. BREAK CHAMPAGNE BOTTLE OVER NEIGHBOR HEAD AND SMILE. BE TOAST OF NEIGHBORHOOD.
ALSO, GIVE CHILD UP FOR ADOPTION. YOU GOING RAISE HEADCASE.
Well, good news, bad news on the L homefront. Good news: I got by the fancy chocolatier in town, so the women in my life are going to have a Merry Christmas. Bad news: The oldest boy is currently blowing chunks and then angry/ugly crying. So it looks like we get (another) visit from the stomach bug this month. We were supposed to have a bunch of neighbors with little kids over tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure we’ll bag that. No use making enemies of them.
Trigger warning: images of butchered animal of the porcine variety.
Not unlike the US and the Thanksgiving turkey, Romania has the Christmas pig. As tradition goes, get one before Christmas and eat it head to tail over the winter months. I have covered some of uses of such beasts in my Christmas food post. This has origins in the times when meat was not a regular meal for many most of the year, but winter was a time for feasting and , I assume, the cold meant the meat kept better. While it was done for Christmas since time immemorial, I assume the origins are older. Families would spend all year fattening the critter, to get the proper use of it. There is even a saying “to fatten a pig the night before Christmas” referring to jobs left to late and half-assed in the last moments, often applied to students studying for exams or the process of morning links on certain websites. A fatter pig was prized, as it had higher not-bones to bones ration, and the abundant lard had many uses.
The pig is traditionally slaughtered close to Christmas, on the Orthodox Christian feast day of Ignatius of Antioch, also known as Ignatius Theophorus, which is the 20th of December. That left time to prepare everything, but the meat was fresh enough on the 25th. Since modern refrigeration exists, and people no longer grow their own pig, the date is now flexible.
The habit is still to avoid so called factory farmed animals for this, and many people have a pig guy in the countryside, who raise some 10 to 20 pigs earmarked for various city families. You generally ask for one in the previous winter/spring, so a piglet can be acquired. As such, the day of the kill depends, as all pigs get their turn. This can be time consuming if done traditionally, with the pig seared on a straw fire in order to scrape the hairs, then washed with hot water. The whole affair usually involves many people and mulled Țuică.
Fat has less uses these days, and a fatter pig is sometimes older and harder to process. My family always got a pig in the 100 to 120 kg range, unlike the 200+ of some. After my father died, we no longer bought a pig, but shared one with my aunt and uncle, getting half for me and my mom. Additional things, like extra liver, are bought from the butchers. My aunt and uncle have two children with families of their own who buy 200+ kilogram pigs each, and so extra meat and fat can be obtained if needed.
That being said, this year’s pig was a bit on the small side, at 90 kg, too small to be honest. But it was what the pig guy gave us. Pigs like this, bought whole with bones and guts and everything, cost about 12 Lei (USD 3) per kilogram this year in Romania. So about USD 125 for the half. The pig was split in quarters for easier handling, and here we have a quarter of small pig
We got it home for the final processing, and these are the images I want to show. Keep in mind this is not how the typical Romanian butcher processes a pig, but how my family does it for the purpose of Christmas. The Day of the Pig day is ended with Pomana Porcului, which translates as the pig’s funeral feast. The Romanian word pomana can refer to either charity in general, or a funeral feast when extra food is made and given to the poor to honor the deceased.
The meat is processed in a few categories.
Some of the skin is taken off and eaten as it is. Not much suet from this pig, but enough it is kept for a bit of dough. Some of the fat is left skin on and processed as slăninuţă (similar to Italian lardo), which is eaten as a cold cut. It is either packed in salt for a while to cure, or smoked, depending on the preference.
The grilling category has the ribs and the loins. For roasting, the large muscle meat from the ham. Most of the rest and various scraps go towards ground meat for sausage.
The spine and various bones with remaining meat on them are used for stock or soups.
The head, tail and feet are saved up to make headcheese and meat in aspic.
The guts are cleaned for sausage.
Parts of the fat are melted and used to make jumari and cooking lard. Jumari are a traditional local winter food. How you make them is basically make small cubs of the fat, usually with some scraps of meat remaining. You put them in a pot on the fire, and after about 15 minutes when the fat begins melting, add a bit of water.
Allow some of the fat to render, and the remaining pieces to get nice and brown, about an hour or so, and you are done. Salt em, eat a few hot and put them in a jar that’s about it. Mmmmm pig fat deep fried in pig fat.
It is fatty, piggy, savory, salty and an acquired taste, in the end. This was originally a preservation method, and it is also done with larger pieces of actual meat, covered in lard – hence the English word larder. This was a staple back in the day, although it is rare and sort of a specialty product these days. Confit de canard, which in some places is a fancy dish, was also meat preserved in lard. They can be eaten as a snack or used when cooking cabbage or beans, and should keep for several months, especially in a cold pantry. Lard is also kept separately for cooking.
Now on to the meal of the day, it is simple. People are usually tired at the end of the day and do not want to cook something complicated. A few pieces of fatty meat and liver are kept from the pig, fried in a bit of lard, eaten with lots of garlic and polenta. Țuică and wine make an appearance, and usually cheese is on the table because cheese is always on the table in Romania, in this case a very fresh cow’s cheese bought from the same farm as the pig. The meat has just a bit of salt an pepper added, because the point is to enjoy the fresh fatty taste.
13 goals in one game? That must have been fun to watch.
I’ve been out of the loop for two days, to say the least. What can I say? Sometimes work just materializes out of nowhere and you gotta jump on it. This was most definitely one of those times. But I’m back today to resume my duties. And from the look of the sports news from yesterday, I didn’t miss much. Almost nothing happened of note except the following hockey results: Dallas, NYI, Philly, Columbus, Ottawa, Chicago, Carolina, Montreal, the MINNESOOOOOOODA WIIIIILD, and Vancouver were your winners. That’s. That’s all of sports.
“Look into my eyes”
Doctor Samuel Mudd (made famous by a Nic Cage movie) was born on this day. As were rubber tire magnate Harvey Firestone, baseball exec Branch Rickey, actress Irene Dunne, olympian and football player Bob Hayes, spoon-bender Uri Geller, TV “creator” Dick Wolf, cutting-edge music producer Alan Parsons, actor Jonah Hill, and soccer player Kylian Mbappe.
Jeez, the birthdays are as bad as the lack of sports stories. Let’s hope we find something better with…the links!
“Bye, EU. It’s been fun, now jog on.”
Man, when Boris says he wants to vote on Brexit before Christmas, apparently he means it. If only he’d had the foresight to mail out a turd in a box to put under every Remoaner’s tree.
Give a Chicago teacher a rope, he thinks he’s a cowboy hangman. If you’re surprised by this, you know little about Chicago Public Schools or their teachers union.
So, holiday spending is in full swing. Assuming you purchase gifts for family/friends/Secret Santa/whatever this time of year, what kind of holiday shopper are you?
I dislike going to brick-and-mortar stores anytime during the year, but especially now. The constant Christmas music, the horrendously gaudy displays, the crowds of humans, the bad parking situations, the fake-cheerful employees…all of it bugs me and makes me more depressed than I already am.
I do nearly all my shopping all year online, including using grocery delivery services, so why would I change now? Right, I wouldn’t. Also, online shopping fits nicely with the fact that nearly everyone to whom I would give something lives far removed from me, so add in that shipping when I have purchased something in person is a hassle.
Of course, I do acknowledge that there are some people who love holiday shopping out in the wild. I don’t understand them, but I know they exist.
How about you? What kind of holiday shopper are you?
Damn, someone tried to shoot up FSB headquarters in Moscow. Good thing they were killed, because I wouldn’t want to be the target of a very hostile interrogation.
I didn’t have the numbers for one side of the colon. But based on the proliferation of newsgroups, online critique groups, publishing forums in 2008, and the number of such denizens all trying to get published, I could guess. And it was huge.
Then there was me. 1 : x6214
Mormons aren’t a cult. I know because I’m a Mormon and I was in a cult. The cult had me far more brainwashed than Mormonism ever did or ever will.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see a lot of green in that cover.
I was 15 when I first found out how to go about querying and creating proposals. I even did that a couple of times for Reader’s Digest. I was rejected. It hurt, not because I was rejected, but because I was running out of time. A favorite author’s bio said she was 18 when she first published a book, which she wrote “on a whim”. If I hadn’t done it by 18, well … (Narrator: That was a lie. She was 25.)
I was eating Harlequin Presents romances for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I knew the formula. I knew the most popular tropes. I had plenty of ideas. I didn’t have such words in my vocabulary as “formula” and “trope.” It was a gut feeling, the natural rhythm of the way a good story is paced.
You can blame her for my May-December fetish.
I never did get a Harlequin Presents romance written. By the time I could actually write a book, I liked Harlequin Superromances better and I trained myself to write within that word count (90,000 to 120,000). It felt more complete than the 55,000 words of Presents. Well, of course it would. It was double.
So here’s what happened:
In 1989, I wrote my under-the-bed novel. The apprentice novel. The horrible one. The one you never want to see the light of day. It’s still out there floating around, I think.
In 1990, I wrote my next novel. It was marginally better.
In 1991, I wrote my third. It was good. I sent it to a publisher that had launched the careers of a bunch of NYT bestsellers. I got The Call. You know, the one where the editor calls you and congratulates you. Then … nothing. The publisher went out of business. Why? The parent company had bought it for a tax write-off and it made money. So bye bye Kismet. Yes, that was the publisher’s name. Kismet.
If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.
In 1993, I wrote my fourth. It was really good. I sent it to Harlequin and got The Call. Sorta. The editor said, “I love this book. However, I bought one fairly similar last month that is not as good as yours, but I can’t break that contract and I can’t sell this to my editorial board. Send me something else. NAO.” I gave a brief rundown of book #3 and she passed.
That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.
So I got an agent with book 4. That relationship ended in disaster after she read book 2 and told me to get a therapist. (Narrator: That book was revamped a few times, published, and remains the fan favorite.)
In 1993, I started writing my pirate novel. I knew what I wanted to do. I also knew I didn’t have the chops to do it, so I fiddled with it for years.
If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.
In 1993, I wrote book 5. It also got me The Call. An editor at Harlequin called me up on a Saturday morning and said, “I want to read the rest of this book. Overnight it.” She called me Tuesday evening and said, “I love this book—except the ending.” Me, having been trained to be a good, dutiful, well-behaved author, said, “I’ll rewrite it!” She sighed and said, “No, that would ruin the book. It has the ending it needs. I just can’t sell it.”
If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.
In 1995, I was a senior in college in the creative writing program. My professor was the faculty supervisor of the uni’s lit rag. After my first assignment, he told me I had an A in the class and I could just skip the rest of the semester because he couldn’t teach me anything. But he would count it a personal favor if I stayed and did the assignments because he loved my work. That class was 8:00 a.m. after I’d spent the night working a graveyard shift at a gas station. You better believe I went to class.
I wrote a story. He was disappointed in me for giving it a “romance novel ending,” but otherwise he loved it. My senior advisor for my capstone project happened to be a Latin teacher (no idea why) who was absolutely fascinated by my creative process. She said, “I don’t care what you do, just tell me why and how you do it.” Okay, so I expanded on my story that had caught my attention.
It so happened that I was in Shakespeare 480 class or whatever really high number and we were studying Hamlet. I decided that somehow my religious allegory for the atonement (with a romance-novel ending) and Hamlet should go together like bread and butter. It didn’t. I couldn’t make that plot work.
Oh, bullshit. Good generals know when to retreat.
If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.
So I was bored at my graveyard job and in class and wrote book 6. That one got me a literary agent who loved it, but could not sell it, either.
If you are a good writer, you WILL get published. Don’t give up.
Let us stop a moment and draw the obvious conclusion.
It was about now I started messing with making my own galleys of book 6. I was never going to self-publish, oh NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Only bad writers self-published. It was the kiss of death. Even if you really were good, a publisher would never publish someone who had published himself. Still … that galley looked awfully pretty. I hesitantly called up a printer as if I were calling up a gigolo to take my virginity for me, knowing I was going to go to hell for it when I died, and said,
“Yeah, um … how … much … would this cost?”
“Twenty grand.”
“Bye.”
So even my attempt at committing the ultimate sin was unavailable to me.
I gave up. I had enough near-misses to let me know I wasn’t a bad writer, but clearly not good enough and I obviously didn’t know how to hit the Harlequin bullseye after all.
No, I didn’t give up trying to get published. I gave up writing altogether.
Fast forward to 2004. I’ve gotten married. I’ve had a baby. I’ve gotten a work-at-home profession as a medical transcriptionist and was doing okay. I’ve got no creative outlet. I refuse to write and only occasionally fiddled with my pirate novel, and once in a while, I tried to make that Hamlet-atonement plot that wouldn’t work, work.
I wasn’t entirely stupid. I still had them on floppies.
My husband had read one of my books and liked it. He had urged me to query it again. I had. I had gotten swiftly and roundly rejected. Apparently, it hadn’t stood the test of time. In anger, I had burned all my manuscripts in the barbecue grill.
I’ve still got no creative outlet except … counted cross stitch. I love it. (Narrator: Loved. She killed that by making it into a business.) There were lots of things I wanted to stitch, so I learned how to convert them into patterns. I then went online and found out people who were “superstars” in the cross stitch pattern world had started out doing their own and just pitched them to shops and then got picked up by distributors. Self-publishing your patterns was the mark of a professional. So I did that. Turns out, what I like and what a lot of other people like aren’t the same, and the few who did like my patterns weren’t enough to pay the bills.
All those bubbles in my head…
That fizzled after a few years of tinkering with it. I was okay with that. I’d had another baby. I was working my ass off at medical transcription because I had moved into a house that we should never have bought and had started having expensive problems. (Narrator: Two weeks after moving in, the back patio sliding door fell out. Just … fell out. That was a very cold winter.)
Fast forward to 2007.
One night, after having invoiced my contractor for my medical transcription work (it was a lot of money), I was very depressed. Not even my newly-doubled-dose of antidepressants was helping. (Narrator: Sometimes you don’t have depression. Sometimes your life just sucks.) As one gets older, one should be making more money for less effort. Otherwise, you’re not life-ing right. I sent my bill and sat there in the dark and looked at my computer. I opened up book 6 and I read my own work for the first time in years.
It was like somebody else had written it, and it was good. Like, really good. I went to bed even more depressed and discouraged and asking, “Why did I give up on myself?”
I woke up the next morning with the solution to my now-decade-old plot problem and I got to writing.
We find out later, during the depression both men were the only ones in town with businesses that survived. For the most part, Potter is portrayed as a caricature of a greedy, monocle twirling capitalist. I might even go so far as to say he probably fits in around here. Eventually, Potter discovers somehow Bailey’s Savings and Loan is still afloat in spite of questionable lending practices and 
Bailey falls into a drunken depression, and considers suicide but is sidetracked by a stranger, whom he saves from his own death in an icy river. Remember–Bailey is not a shady businessman and is supposed to be the good guy. This random stranger is an angel (in training) named Clarence, that shows Bailey what the world is like without Bailey. People he saved by telling the pharmacist he filled the prescription with the wrong drug, pulling his brother from the ice in a frozen lake, who goes on to save other servicemen in the war, etc, is the impact Bailey made. This part in itself actually is a good message: one person (all of us, really) can impact the world in a variety of ways, with an infinite number of possibilities—it is up to you to make that impact positive.
