ObamaTaxCut.com is an interesting site. They say they are nonpartisan, but the language… OY! The language is telling.
For someone who is single, 0 dependents, and AGI is $15k, the text comes up:
Your Obama Tax Cut is: $896.21
John McCain would tax you $877.52 MORE than Barack Obama.
The numbers do match up, I checked. However, it would be less partisan to say:
Your Obama Tax Cut is: $896.21
Your McCain Tax Cut is: $18.69
HT to Pisco.
Dear HUB:
You might remember my friends and myself. We would be the party of three and a half that arrived at 9pm last night. We got our beer orders in quite rapid, but then despite the six foot tall man frantically waving, we were completely ignored for another 40 minutes. Then, it took another half hour after that for our food to arrive.
Being a party of three and a half, one person at all times had their hands full with the Infanta. Therefore, it took us a little while to eat our food. Yes, I did totally attempt to take your server’s arm off when himself tried to take my dinner away from me half-eaten, because at that point I was busy paying homage and playing sedan chair to the Infanta. Holding a two-month-old whilst eating spicy buffalo-style chicken strips* takes a bit of concentration and some juggling, because getting spicy buffalo-style sauce on two-month-old skin is B-A-D.
We were the last ones out, yes. At 10.51pm. Your hours state you close at 11pm, and hustling us out like that was just plain rude, since the delay was completely due to your poor service.
Next time, I’m taking them to Fire on the Mountain. We’ll drink your beer there.
No love,
Mary Sue
*which were v. v. tasty, no complaints about the quality of the food.
I didn’t know that rice could give you food poisoning until I was 20 years old and wound up at Student Health badly dehydrated. I had been boiling up a big batch of rice once a week in the rice cooker and then leaving it on the counter.
Yeah. I stopped doing that.
According to here, the offending bacteria is bacillus cereus, and it can survive being boiled and being reheated. Let me repeat this: even if you cook the rice again, you can still get sick. The problem isn’t the bacteria itself, but its toxic byproducts (read: bacteria poop) that occur when it has a nice, warm, moist home to grow in. And when it grows up, it has babies, who poop too, and then they have poopy babies, and on and on…
The key to keeping the bacteria from pooping all over your rice is to get it cooled down quickly, and to store the cooked rice at less than 46F (8C) as recommended here. That page also suggests you get the rice into the fridge within 90 minutes of cooking.
If you’re like me and you port your rice to work with you for lunch, be sure that you get it into the work fridge as soon as possible. I had to toss a container of lovely fried chicken and rice last week because I got to work and jumped right in to a bunch of crises and didn’t realise until four hours later that I hadn’t put my lunch in the fridge. I hate wasting food, but I wasn’t going to risk it.
- 9 cups rice
- 4 cups chicken-tomato-potato curry
- 1/2 lb basil pork sausage (handmixed)
- a little dance to this song, which I started singing when that line of LOTR came on the all-day marathon.
If any of your coworkers attempt to feed you a viruently blue drink called an AMF (wherein the eff stands for a naughty word and the AM stand for Adios, Mother), I highly suggest you punch them in the nose and run the other way.
This post brought to you by my impending hangover.
mental_floss is a good blog and a good magazine for those of us who are fond of minutiae. They are also fond of lists, as all people who are fond of minutiae do.
Yesterday, Timothy Mercer posted a list: 5 Reasons to Be Skeptical of Charities. It got my dander up.
Sure, there are charities out there that suck, and suck *hard*. Timothy does a good job of pointing them out. However, there are charities out there that are doing freakin’ awesome things every day of the week (and twice on Sundays).
Today being Payday at Big Ol’ Hospital, I did my Dance of Money Transfer and Bill Payment. It’s like the Dance of Capitalist Superiority, only it happens in a desk chair in front of a computer. As part of the Dance of Money Transfer and Bill Payment, I wrote four checks to charities. And I felt good because I know my money’s going to good causes.
How do I know? Because all four charities I am involved with on a personal level. I don’t just send off the money and hope it gets to the causes I support, I get off my butt and volunteer for two of the groups. Shoot, one of those local groups I’m on the Board of Directors.
By the way, if a nonprofit ever asks you to be on the BoD, ensure that you are really, really, ridiculously good looking committed to the cause because BoD meetings are like pulling teeth during the most dull macroeconomics class ever. But, because I’m on the BoD, I also get my own, fresh, shiny copy of the nonprofit’s budget every month and two to three times a year I get to vote on revisions.
Another group is located out of state, and the other is international. BUT they both present financial reports every year with detailed budgets. BoD duty has taught me how to run a scrutinizing eye down those lists, and if the advertising and mailing budgets are higher than the project budgets, I start asking questions like, “Do I want this group to have my cash?”
Another thing I did was ask one of the groups that I send a relatively small amount to every pay period to stop acknowleging the gift with a handwritten note. It’s nice and all, but I promise, I will continue to send my pittance without the note.
My committment to charitable giving is driven by my spiritual beliefs and religious practice. So I’mna gonna give unto you a Word:
If you have a choice in food for a meal, you are rich.
If you have a choice in what clothes to wear today, you are rich.
If you can turn a tap on and have water that won’t make you sick, you are rich.
If you are rich, you should share that wealth.
Run over to Joe’s blog and read about the Tightwad Bank (FDIC Insured).
My wanderings around the Internet brought me to this Salon article about a couple who, for four years, built what amounts to a second home inside a mall.
Here’s their story. Here’s an excerpty:
They never intended to undermine the mall or its corporate structure, or to make a spectacle of themselves. Townsend describes himself as “wired for happiness” and Yoto’s idea of a good time is cataloguing all the items in a store and rating their desirability from “gift-worthy” to “if-it-were-the-apocalypse-and-I-was-looting-I-would-take-it.” Which is precisely what they did during their stint living at the mall. Every day.
So, despite the fact they are the kind of people who I would gladly put my fist through their faces (seriously, if you call anything you do a ‘collective’ and there ain’t a ‘Borg’ in front of that, you need the nature of the universe explained to you with a knuckle sandwich), they did what a lot of PF bloggers do: wonder all day about all the crap offered up for our consumption.
But then they had to go and steal some things:
They added sofas, tables, lamps, a TV, a china hutch and a Sony PlayStation (which was stolen while they lived there, which suggests their presence wasn’t entirely secret), and stayed for days at a time. They planned to install pre-laminated wood flooring and a portable toilet.
Stealing is wrong, kids. And I have a very old-fashioned view of personal property: I don’t dink about in other people’s spaces without their explicit permission. Not from any noble purpose or anything, it’s to keep the big guys with weapons and no Police Oversight Committee away.
The Salon article ends with this bit, which I found interesting due to my recreational musings on humankind and its desire to be individual:
Yoto and Townsend’s great crime — what made the mall feel violated — was to make the mall an individual experience, to define the space themselves. They wanted to replicate what developers had done around them: declare an abandoned area blighted and then redevelop it, to make a tiny piece of the mall uniquely theirs. It was their own personal eminent domain.
In many ways, this blog is my way of making a tiny part of the universe uniquely mine. In my living situation I know somewhere deep in my bones that the solitude of my bedroom is nightly invaded by the eyes of my neighbors and decorating is allowed within limits set by my landlord. Said landlord can legally remove me from the premises within thirty days, and only the scuffs on the floor would remain.
I tell myself I’m actually okay with the impermanence of the human condition, except that’s a total lie because otherwise I wouldn’t spend so much time spinning stories, for my coworkers and friends, for this and my other blogs, and for eventual publication to the wider world. Even I find myself responding to the siren call of singularity, the ingrained desire to be an individual.
Malls, with chain stores and standardized goods, are the antithesis of singularity. They sell conformity. This couple used the mall as the launching pad for their brief flash of individuality.
Inspiration hit me when looking at this absolutely beautiful bowl of cooked grains. As the weather went from 104 to 69 degrees in the space of four days, I wanted something hearty and warm. At the grocery store, standing in front of the bulk foods, I was reminded of the Zakkokumai I’d also recently read about, and how I had planned a field trip to Fubonn to see if they had some to try.
The lightbulb went off over my head. I could mix my own version of zakkokumai! I looked at the various healthy, wholesome, tasty grains on display, and the lightbulb went off, even brighter this time. I had little bits of many of these grains in my pantry, going to waste!
I bought a little barley, and a little wild rice, and went home to play.
I mixed up equal parts of adzuki beans, wild rice, barley, millet, and short grain brown rice. I’ve been using one part of this mix to two parts of long grain brown rice, and I’ve found I need to use about twice as much water as I usually do to make plain brown rice.
The first link suggests serving with milk and sweetener. Tonight I tossed the picked-over carcass of a rotisserie chicken in before boiling until ded. But last night, I cooked it with plain ol’ water and added salt after cooking.
I’ve also been eating it as a main dish. Hmm. I should probably make something different for dinner tomorrow, but why ruin a good thing?
Oh, boy. The advertisers have figured out that the newest trigger word on Americans’ wallets is ‘eco friendly’.
You can’t hardly spit without hitting an advertisement that says, “Be eco-friendly! Buy our crap!”
No, no, NO! PEOPLE! Being eco-friendly means don’t buy crap!
This “duh” moment brought to you by a car company, natch.
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