Quickie - 'Cuz I Can't Resist the Dumbass

The lack of regular posting is due to the MOUNTAIN of stuff I have to do. I'm in the midst of three yard projects that I'm trying to get done before nasty weather settles in, and I'm also trying to build my Daughter a piece of furniture she's been wanting for Christmas. Posting will be hit and miss for a good while - until I get caught up.

I came in to look something up on line, and stumbled across a story that made me laugh, as much as I tried not too..

Ever seen or heard of a Bugatti Veyron?

Nice car, huh? It just so happens that, in addition to looking way cool, the Bugatti Veyron is the fastest production sports car on the planet. We're talking 16 cylinders and four turbochargers. When tested, it does 0-60 in 2.5 seconds and can reach a top speed in excess of 250 mph! This is a very rare, very high performance vehicle - that will set you back about $2 million, if you can even get your hands on one.

Here's what one looks like when you get distracted looking at a bird flying by, drop your cell phone, and plow it into a saltwater marsh outside Galveston:

Retard.

I've never known anyone with the amount of cash it takes to get into one of these cars. However, the general douchiness of every high dollar sports car owner that I ever have known, makes me completely comfortable making fun of this guy.

If you've got the time, check out this video of someone test driving a Veyron - its bad assed.

Veteran's Day

Today, when some of our leaders will be taking the (photo) opportunity to publicly express their support for our troops overseas and at home, please take a moment to hold them in your hearts and prayers.

To the Veterans who read this post, you have my eternal gratitude and respect.

Defending our Place in the Food Chain

I've been enviously reading the hunting stories on a couple of my usual blog haunts over the past couple of days. Then, I read this story.

SHERIDAN, Wyo. – Retired orthopedic surgeon Chris Smith thought his hunt was over when he bagged a white tail deer with a bow and arrow near Sheridan. Because the light was fading, he decided to return the next day to recover the deer. But when he returned Wednesday morning, the carcass had been covered by grass and bush — which is what mountain lions typically do.

Smith, who was unarmed, then saw the big cat about 25 yards away.

He backed away slowly and went to call the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Officials said he had two choices — return with friends, making noise to scare the animal away, or purchase a mountain lion hunting license.

He opted for the license, and dropped the lion in one shot.

Good for you, Dr. Smith! Aside from the fact that I personally wouldn't have walked around in Mountain Lion Country without a means of defending myself - The rest of the story is the perfect example of enjoying your place on the food chain, and then vigorously defending that spot :)

Cinnamon Swirl Bread

This is one of the first breads that I ever made. The basics of the recipe I got from my Mom, and she used to make it around Christmas and Thanksgiving every year when I was a kid. I came to associate cooler weather with it, and still do today.

This is an "egg bread", meaning that there are eggs among the ingredients. At it's most basic, bread is just flour, water, yeast (or some other leavening agent), and maybe a touch of salt. Although, you could argue that "bread" doesn't even need yeast. It would be unleavened bread.

Its important to note, though that flour + water is also the basic recipe for a type of glue. It's the combination of technique and additional ingredients that make bread stand apart from elementary school paste.

Here's the basic recipe:

6 to 7 cups flour
2 pkgs yeast
2 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup butter
2 tsp salt
3 eggs

Cinnamon mixture:
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp cinnamon

Powdered Sugar Icing (optional)
1 cup powdered sugar
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
milk to drizzle consistency

Combine 3 cups of the flour with the yeast in a large bowl and set aside. Heat milk, sugar, butter, & salt over low heat stirring until the butter melts and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat. As a rule of thumb, the milk mixture should be pleasantly warm, but not too hot to hold your finger in it before proceeding.

Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture and mix together. Add eggs, and beat with an electric mixer until it looks like smooth pancake batter (about 3 minutes on high). Mix in enough remaining flour with a large spoon to form a dough. Remove dough to a floured surface and knead well.

I won't go into instructions on how to knead bread. If you've not made bread by hand before, check out the kneading instructions here.

Once you've kneaded the dough, rub cooking oil all over the inside of a large clean bowl and place the ball of dough inside. Turn the ball to coat the ball with a touch of oil. The ball in the picture below looks a bit smaller than yours will. The recipe above makes two normal sized loaves. I was making two half-sized loaves when I took these pictures, so I halved the recipe.

The stoneware bowl in the picture above, is one of two that my Grandmother gave me before she passed away.

Cover the bowl with a towel and place in a warm place to rise until doubled. I turn my oven on preheat just long enough to warm the oven a bit, then turn it off before putting the bowl inside. You want a warm enough environment for the yeast to make the bread rise, but not so hot that it kills the yeast.

That's how it looks when doubled. Punch it down and divide the dough in half. Perform the following to each half of dough.

Roll the dough out in a rectangle, using enough flour dusted around so that the dough doesn't stick to the surface or the roller. The shorter dimension of the rectangle should be just a bit longer than the length of your loaf pans. Roll the dough out to about 1/4 inch thick. Doesn't have to be exact. Brush the surface of the rectangle with a little water, and sprinkle half of the cinnamon/sugar mixture over it. You'll end up with something that looks like this:

Then start rolling the dough up like a jelly roll, starting from the short side. Keep the roll tight. When you get to the end, pinch the seam and the ends together to seal up the roll.

Place the rolled dough, seam side down, into a greased loaf pan. Repeat with the other half of dough, and place the pans back into the warm spot to rise again. When the dough is risen the way you want it, pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees F. Make sure you take the loaves out of the oven first if you're using it as the rising place.

Bake the loaves 30-35 minutes. The loaves are done when nicely brown and sound sort of hollow if you pop them out of the pans and thump the bottom.

Here's mine after I removed them from the pans:

I used half sized pans that I picked up at a flea market a while back. They are pretty cool old pans, and date back to the late teens-early 1920's.

If you want to ice the loaves, sprinkle the cup of powdered sugar with the vanilla extract. Tip in a little milk and mix to drizzling consistency. Be careful, though. It's real easy to add too much milk.

Here the loaves are iced.

We like this sliced as-is, or toasted and buttered. MMMMmmmm.......

Pretty please.....

Beg will follow.

I read my friend Borepatch on a regular basis.... but it seems I should pay a bit more attention to the Internet Security posts in addition to the gun, climate change, and other interesting posts.

I had to download and run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware today, due to an extremely annoying 'bout with the evil "Antivirus Pro". I must have crapped around with this shite for over two hours before I got it sorted out and removed from my computer.

All is well now, and I can testify that the software does its job. Just with I'd listened to the expert.

Now for the beg: Christmas is coming. I've been relatively good all year.

Someone get me three minutes alone in a room with the rat bastard that developed the "Antivirus Pro" nightmare.

I'll cut that bitch up.

Girl Friday - November 6, 2009

This week's Girl Friday is Ingrid Bergman:

I was watching TCM the other night, and saw Gaslight for the first time. It's a 1944 movie staring Ingrid Bergman as a woman whose husband is trying to convince her she is crazy, in order to have her committed. I won't give away any of the plot beyond that, but Ingrid won an Academy Award for her performance.

You'll really hate Charles Boyer, by the end of the movie. The Bastard. You'll also enjoy seeing a VERY young Angela Lansbury as the naughty maid, in one of her first on screen appearances.

A couple of nights later, I caught another movie I had not seen before. Halloween night TCM played Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde circa 1941. It was the version with Spencer Tracey in the lead role and an even younger Ingrid Bergman as the barmaid Mr. Hyde chooses to canoodle with... against her will, of course.

A very young Lana Turner was also in this movie. Ms. Turner is destined to be a Girl Friday very soon, so I won't dwell on her now, but I was struck by the differences between her and Ingrid Bergman. Both are beautiful women, but Ingrid is much more of an "earthy" type. Despite her obviously-not-english accent in the movie, you believe she would be at home dodging the advances of drunk bar patrons in Londons less affluent neighborhoods at the turn of the century.

She's the hot girl that isn't afraid to get her hands dirty..

Ingrid Bergman spoke 5 languages. Her native Swedish, English, French, German, and Italian. As someone who has difficulty just being understood in ONE language, that amazes me.

And, lest we forget, Ingrid Bergman may be most famous for her role in Casablanca, along side Humphrey Bogart.

Here's a couple of Youtube clips of Ingrid, as she appeared in Gaslight and in Dr. Jekyll.

Living under threat

Saw this story this morning, and thought it was interesting - and it made me a little sad. Not because I have any interest at all in seeing the movie "2012". I'm not a big fan of "disaster flicks", such as they are. They seem to always try to wow the audience with special effects in lieu of anything like an interesting, believable story.

No... my interest in the story centered around a facet of modern life that we generally aren't allowed to comment on these days - lest we be declared racist.

In the movie, 2012, there are a multitude of scenes featuring the destruction of cities, landmarks, and religious sites. All this mayhem is, undoubtedly, meant to instill a feeling that all our works and beliefs as human beings can be laid to waste easily in the face of disastrous forces. They show the destruction of Christian churches, as well as the Vatican.

The writer/director and his co-writer both made a conscious decision, however, to not show the destruction of the Kaaba.



The Kaaba is the square structure in the center of Mecca, around which thousands of Islamic Pilgrims throng during Haj.

Their reason for the omission?

"Well, I wanted to do that, I have to admit," the filmmaker told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said, 'I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie.' And he was right."

Emmerich went on: "We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.

It makes me angry and it makes me sad, but I don't blame them for their choice one little bit.

Am I any worse off because there isn't going to be a scene in a movie that I probably won't even bother to see?


No.



Am I any worse off because there are evil, extremist bastards who will gleefully kill me if I "offend" them, in some way?


Yeah.