Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Did you hear something?"
¤ Usage: *cats crash through the room engaged in noisy mortal combat*
Flux: "Did you hear something?"
Malaya: "Nope."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Notes: This one is a little game Malaya and I play where in one of the cats makes a loud or pathetic noise, and I ask if she heard it, and she says no.  Dusty used to be the cause of this, with his frequently yowling or noisy/clumsy TV-mounting attempts, but now that we have two cats who frequently chase each other around and make a lot of noise doing it, the saying is more all purpose.

Over the months it's become ritualized to the point that any time we hear any loud, interrupting noise, at home or elsewhere, I can say, "Did you..." and she'll immediately reply, "Nope." -- January 14, 2004

First off, you must realize that I use "dawn" as a metaphor, since the actual time of sunrise is a lot closer to the time that I go to bed than the time that I get up. But with that understood, just play along.

I woke up and felt pretty good; pretty awake.  I moved out to get to work on the computer, wanting to put several new photos pages online after my long hours of work sorting and cropping and optimizing photos the day before.  However my legs were really sore, so I took a very hot bath, and by the time I got out Malaya was home from the gym.  She was feeling cabin feverish so we went out to an early dinner and browsed at Borders, and then we got home and my right thigh was really aching and throbbing so she gave me a bit of a rubdown while we watched some cheesy TV on tape, and after I surfed/blogged a bit we went on a deep frying frenzy and late night snack binge, and then we spent some quality time, and next thing I knew I was tucking her in at 4am and coming back out here to write this and put the blog online.

Imagine how much I'd ever get done if I had a real job?

I did at least find a good amount of stuff that's worth comment in the blog, and also received several interesting emails, which you'll see below.  And I should also stress that I'm rating my day in terms of work accomplished, not in terms of enjoyment or personal satisfaction, since it would rank pretty high in those, aside from my aching thigh.

Speaking of, that's come from the long run I took over the weekend. I hurt walking down stairs on Sun and Mon, but my legs feel pretty okay for other things, and I was considering going for a run on Wednesday, when I woke up and laid in bed for a few minutes.  It hadn't rained since last week, which is about the longest we've gone without rain since October, and I figured the trails would be dry enough to make decent time on without mud puddles to leap or track shoe treads entirely clogged with heavy mud.

So of course it was raining Wednesday afternoon when I got up.

I considered going out in the rain for a moment, but when my right thigh was aching before I even had breakfast finished I realized running on it would be a bad idea. Perhaps Thursday will be dry enough to run without an umbrella, assuming I can get down the stairs to the street in the first place.

A health club membership is looking like a better and better idea, what with the weather, me being too lazy to keep up on my sit ups and weight lifting at home, and me not getting exercise at work at the stadium as I always did back in San Diego.  I just can't get past the "I'd never go if I had to drive 10 miles each way." problem. Yet.

Some news.  More written that I'll save for tomorrow.

¤ Depressing story about the dangerous food preparation and low quality of food the US troops in Iraq are being fed.  It's depressing not for the facts of the case; I don't think too many people are under the illusion that low paid military are fed decently, but you'd at least like to hope that they aren't being poisoned.  The thing about the story that I hadn't thought about is the private contractors.  Rather than the Army making their own food, with fellow servicemen as cooks, the food service is purchased from an outside company, a Halliburton subsidiary in this case, and they buy the food, hire locals to prepare and serve it, and pocket the profit.  Rather an obvious motivation there to skimp on quality and sanitary conditions, eh?

ON JULY 17, 2003, HEATHER YARBROUGH [photo at right] flew to Kuwait to start a new job: monitoring the quality and safety of food served to soldiers on U.S. military bases in Iraq. Her employer was the Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) Government Services division of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney that has contracts with the U.S. government to support military personnel in the field and to help with Iraq reconstruction.

Yarbrough, 33, felt upbeat and excited. She had trained hard for a position like this, one that required expertise in food and science. She was banking on the high salary -- $1,500 a week -- to pay off her student loans. And unlike many of her fellow students at Humboldt State University, she supported the Bush Administration and its war on terrorism.

Yarbrough never dreamed she'd be fired a month later for what in her view was simply an effort to implement the Army's own safety and sanitation standards. Nor did she imagine that she'd be telling congressional staffers about potentially dangerous food being served to U.S. soldiers by ESS Support Services, a food-service subcontractor to Halliburton.

While Yarbrough did not see any soldiers fall sick from food served by ESS, she did witness something else that disturbed her: the labor system that feeds and supports U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait. It's a system in which highly paid Americans oversee a huge corps of Indians, Pakistanis and other so-called "third-country nationals" working in sweatshop conditions for as little as $3 a day.

So basically, this idealistic young woman is hired to go onsite and supervise, and when she starts trying to clean things up, to make healthier changes the cronyism of the old guys who run the whole thing, active duty servicemen and their old friend/ex-service guys now working for Halliburton get her fired for some bullshit reasons.  Anyone in her position with more common sense and less integrity would just roll over and not worry about it, but she was oblivious to the currents beneath the surface (I don't get the sense she was a crusader.) and got backstabbed and removed, and I'm sure they'll find some other good old boy to come in and nod and wink and take his dinner in the officers' mess, with the other people who know better than to chow down with the grunts.

Meanwhile the troops go on eating spoiled mayonnaise and food that's been sitting out for hours, or isn't hot enough to kill of bacteria, etc.  But it's all good, since as every good Republican knows, private industry can always do everything better and cheaper than government.  Except of course the "invading other countries" part, but in those cases it's best to let the government pay for it since that comes out of taxes that would otherwise be spent on wasteful programs like medicare, welfare, education, etc.

¤ You seldom see a child molester with the balls to go out like this.

Before he took his own life, a 34-year-old Ypsilanti Township man confessed to his wife that he had been molesting young girls for years and provided the names of a handful of victims, authorities say.

Investigators now believe that there were at least nine young girls who were molested by Herbert Neil Johnson II during the past 14 years, according to Washtenaw County Sheriff's Cmdr. Dave Egeler. There could be more victims, he said.

Johnson was found dead of a self-inflicted knife wound in his home last Friday, the words "I'm sorry" scrawled on the wall in his blood, Egeler said.

That would make a nice death scene in a movie, eh?  They don't say where he cut himself, but it's nice to picture the old "thrust into the stomach" seppuku move, and as he gasps in agony and slowly slides down the wall, he dabs his fingers into his own blood and pens his grisly goodbye.

Of course it would be even more fun to picture him being sent to prison, where word that he was a pedophile would have gotten around, and resulted in him receiving a great deal of special, intimate attention from huge, muscular, tattoo-covered men serving life sentences.

¤ Send this one to all of your dentist-o-phobe friends.

An Oak Lawn dentist is facing two counts of misdemeanor battery for allegedly ripping a tooth cap out of a female patient's mouth because he thought she owed him money, police reports say.

Gombis, moments after implanting the cap, misread his account records and thought the woman, who is 58, owed him $200 for previous dental work, the report states.

Gombis then reached back into the woman's mouth with pliers and yanked out the cap, she said.

After an assistant told Gombis that the woman was paid up, the dentist forced the cap back into his patient's mouth and stormed out of the room, the police report says.

The woman said she was bleeding so much she spent the evening in a hospital emergency room after reporting the incident at the Oak Lawn police station.

Off topic, but this is perhaps the worst-written news article I've ever seen.  Does the reporter not know about quotations?  I've never seen so many "she said" and "he said" and "police report says" in one article.

First up, we have this one from Samantha, in response to my post on Tuesday about Malaya's new iMac needing a name, her wanting suggestions for it, and me wondering how prevalent computer naming was. This email touched on all three topics:

This could well be a Mac/PC difference -- see for example this page I stumbled on while I was trying to Google for a poll I once did on the subject (now apparently lost to the ether) -- I have found that while PCs may or may not wind up with names more meaningful than an "identify which box this is for network purposes" tag, it's quite rare to find a Mac that DOESN'T have a proper name. My own iMac, for example, came to me secondhand, and as it is of the old Grape persuasion, it got dubbed "the iMac Formerly Known As" before I even got it home, and I suspect it's not alone in bearing that name, either... Similarly, a hand-me-down Mac I set up for my mom arrived with the curious name of "Dennis the FAT", so I'm obviously far from the only Mac-anthropomorphizing kook out here.

As to why PCs don't get named as often, I think you're probably on the right track with the "sack o' parts" line of reasoning. Which could get into an interesting Ponder about whether a machine that's had all of its organs swapped out over the course of its lifetime is in fact the same machine it started out as, which could further get into whether the same argument applies to SFnal visions of extreme *human* organ-replacement morality/psychology/whatnot... but that would be digressing just a tad from the original discussion, I think. :)

As to a name for Malaya's new iMac, that big round base has always made me think of Hostess Snowballs, for some obscure reason. YMMV.

I've never named a computer and never even seriously considered it.  I've never owned a mac either, though I suppose that if I ever do, I'll have to name it.  I would give it an appropriate name though, Pariah or Inexorable Whore or something along those lines.  I might consider naming my next PC also, especially if I ever have enough money to get exactly what I want and it's all state of the art and glorious and stuff.  The challenge there would be to come up with a name that I wouldn't be ashamed to repeat in mixed (non-techie) company, that summed up what it meant to me, was easy on the tongue, and catchy. No small task.

And given that it took Malaya and I several days of intense brainstorming to come up with "Jinx" for a small gray kitten, and all of our initial ideas were to use ancient gods (Greek, Sumerian, Egyptian, etc) for a name, I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to pull off the uber PC name.

Fortunately there's no way I'll have the money to get the machine I really want this side of 2006, so there's no real hurry, and an anonymous $500 stop gap partial upgrade machine between now and then will probably be required anyway.

This email is from Donnie, and it's an excerpt from an email about a given recipe he sent in after reading an old blog of mine with a recipe included in it.

Did you have an assignment in writing class like I did? You were supposed to write on paper how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, this was to be viewed by someone who took everything quite literal. Feeling a bit lazy that day I wrote simply "Lay two pieces of bread side by side on the table, put peanut butter on one and jelly on the other, then put them together." The teacher put the slices of bread on the counter side by side. Put the peanut butter (still in the jar) on one slice and the jelly (still in the jar) on the other slice, then slid the two slices together. Needless to say I failed that project miserably, as did most of the men (boys at the time I guess) in the class.

It is for this reason, I believe, that men just do not share recipes as often as women do.

He makes an interesting point, and one that I had never before considered.  Do men tend to place much less importance on food preparation, and do humans tend to under-explain things they have less familiarity with?  I mean, if you ran the same exercise with the question about how to check your oil, or mow the lawn, or something else men were (theoretically and stereotypically) more familiar with than women, would the results be the same, with the inadequately-explaining genders reversed? Or is this a more basic human nature thing, where we all tend to explaining things we know more about in great detail?  I wouldn't think fixing a PBJ was all that gender-specific; it's not like the question was about changing a diaper or asking for directions when lost.

So do men just explain less (I certainly don't; I usually over-explain.) or do humans just talk less about something they're less familiar with, or is it just that men don't put much importance on directions, or on food preparation, or both?  Are there more world famous chefs who are male, but more cookbook authors who are female?

Anyway, I am pretty sure that Donnie is right about the sharing recipes part, on an informal level. I've never talked about recipes with another man, other than a few times with my dad, or via this blog. I like to make some things that I know are tasty, and that I've perfected over time, and since I write about damn near everything on this blog, recipes and cooking are certainly fair game.  But in real life, when I'm talking to other men, favorite recipes or cooking tips aren't a real common topic of conversation.

So what was Donnie's recipe in the first place?

16 ounces of No Yolks egg noodles
10.66oz can of Campbell's 98% fat free cream of (I use chicken, but I am sure it would work with mushroom or broccoli also).
1 can of tuna (in water, and dolphin safe, of course, small can)

The basic is to cook the noodles and mix all the stuff in. I also like to add fresh tomatoes and jalapenos, finely diced, of course.

Also, I only use "Mrs. Dash" to season it, because I really hate the taste of Salt.

I asked for a bit more info, and he elaborated in his second email, which began with the above-quoted recipe paragraph, after I asked what the finished consistency was like, and if it was a fork or a spoon meal:

I start with an exact amount of water in the pot when I began to boil the noodles. Because of differences in altitude, temperature and humidity I think it would be a disaster if you were to start with the amount of water I use. I think if you were to drain off the noodles when they were done, and add about 2 1/2 cups of water to it along with the other ingredients, it would be nearly the same as it is when I prepare it. When finished it is definitely a fork meal, but the sauce is not really thick, just creamy, much like stroganoff (or the way I make stroganoff, if that helps ;). Of course, the sauce does thicken as it stands, so if you were to err I would think it would be better to have too much water than not enough.

And yes, I am absolutely sure I am not the first person to make this dish. I was a bachelor at the time looking for something I could cook within ten or twelve minutes with crap in the cupboards, it just happened to taste pretty good IMHO.

So there you go, try it tonight if you want and let me know how it goes.  I haven't tried it yet, but it's not out of the question.  Malaya has made pasta with tuna in it a few times since I've been here, and while hers were tomato-based in sauce, Donnie's bachelor deluxe doesn't sound too bad, if you like that sort of thing.

And finally, this might be the single worst-written email I've ever received at the D2 site.  And given the amount of young male AOL users in the reading audience, that's saying something.

I've also posted it here in the same visually-painful "lucida handwriting" (bold) font I got it in, so if you don't have that font or you have some sort of "use my fonts only" setting in your browser, you're missing half the fun.  Well, maybe not "half" but quite a bit of it.  I was surprised he didn't use neon pink text on some sort of small, repeating, black and white background, just to add to the difficulty in reading it.  If he had it would have gone straight into my "top 10 emails ever" folder.

Tom NZ

Hi to all of yous i was playing d2 norm not xpack and i got bumed off line when i when back on i went into a room i was doing a cs run on hell when i got bumed and so i dit up on act 4 when the sreen started doing wot it dus when you brake all the sells in cs and then it says diablo walks the earth will i did not no wot to do so i just whent on my way i when to act 1 and there was onely 1 person left in the room will cows was up so i went in and to my amase there was 7 gold name cows left but no champ or norm cows i just tort that the ppl in the room where as weak as the person left he was lvl 44 will i was not in his party and then he died and it sed diablo killed him so i fold him not to kill d then i went on my way i killed 4 of the cows and then i seen the person i was going up to him and then i got sum lag and all i seen was the flam and lighting inferno that d dus and after i died the guy sed where the f did c diablo go i did not wot he ment and then on the sreen it sed 5 min till suver gos down and the time started going down will when i kilcked my was keept of bnet for like 2 h will thats all i got to say and that this was on norm not xpack.

Spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, etc.  It's quite a masterpiece. Plus he's from New Zealand, so it's not like he's using English as his 4th language or something. (And the mails I get from people in Germany or Austria or Sweden or wherever, who are using English as their 3rd or 4th language, are always far more lucid and readable than the ones I get from young boys in English-speaking countries.

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