Nobody Knows Anything

My God, how I love the Internet. I’m still going through the projects, so I can’t even tell you which is my favorite yet. The giant Bounty! The insanely large Kit Kat! The liquid gold caramel that ate Leeds! Or vice versa! Wow, does this site inspire me. Unfortunately, it inspires me to try one of these things with really high quality and expensive ingredients, thereby missing the point entirely. (Via Sugar Savvy.)

A killer parody of “I Am The Walrus.” How somebody did this so quickly — well, thank God for podcasting, the Web, and home recording equipment.

(Via Atrios, in case you hadn’t seen this a million

Looking for a reason to go on? Looking for inspiration on that hard, nay, impossible quest of yours? Look no further. He is waiting for you everywhere!

(I wonder if I could find a Zeus one. Even an Artemis.)

Via the comments section at Firedoglake, I found a link to No More Mr. Nice Blog, who found this delightful story:

WOODBRIDGE, Va., April 9, 2006 — The Landstuhl Hospital Care Project added $4,400 to its coffers April 7 to buy items needed by wounded, injured and sick servicemembers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany, and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Karen Grimord, the project’s coordinator.

The money was raised during the “Hook & C’s Karaoke” 2nd annual benefit, held here this year at American Legion Post 364….

This marked the fourth benefit held by the Landstuhl Hospital Care Project since Grimord and her husband Brian founded it in November 2004. “We try to provide mostly clothing items, but we’ve also extended to hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan that need supplies, including bed sheets,” Grimord said. “The project started supporting three hospitals In Iraq in 2005 and one in Afghanistan this year.”

… the hospital in Afghanistan asked for bed sheets and pillows to use on litters….

Some muckraker didn’t dig this up. It’s a story from the Department of Defense.

Military hospitals are holding benefits to raise money for items needed by wounded, injured and sick servicemembers. They have had four such benefits since November, 2004.

How much have we wasted on this war? 200 billion dollars? Probably more. At this point, who can keep track?

None of the money, apparently, is going to the people actually doing the fucking job of operating this damned war. Where’s it all going?

And what makes you think you’re entitled to find out?

One day Rob mentioned to me, “Hey, did you know that MacBooks are available for Employee First Discount?”

I ran to Darin with this news. “Okay, then, let’s get you a MacBook,” he said. He got onto the Employee Purchasing website, filled out the information, hit Send.

Seconds later he realized he’d put 3 Infinite Loop as both the mailing and delivery addresses. So he called the support number listed and changed the addresses.

He called back the next day, just to double check. And indeed, they had made one teensy, weensy, mistake: instead of actually changing the address, they’d merely changed the city name. So instead of sending the computer to 3 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, they were sending it to 3 Infinite Loop, Small Town Silicon Valley, CA.

Sigh.

The computer ships from China. They try to deliver it to an address that doesn’t exist. They ship to a gigantic Apple warehouse in Elk Grove, where it sits and sits and sits until they can figure out what the frack is going on.

Meanwhile, each and every day I asked, “Didja hear anything? Is it on its way?” Darin patiently explained the situation to me a few more times, and every time when he finished I asked, “Is there anyone we can call? Seriously, they’ve got to have packing numbers!”

Who cares. The Sturm und Drang is over. The doorbell rang this morning and I glanced out the window. “FED EX!” I yelled. Darin beat me to the door and he took in the smallest, thinnest box I’d ever seen. I felt a wave of disappointment. “That can’t be it.”

“Oh yes it is,” he told me, and he opened the outer box to reveal the Apple packing box, which is a marvel of modern industrial packaging. Seriously, if you want to see excellent design in box-making, hie thee to an Apple store and ask to see the box the MacBook comes in. It’s fabulous: thin, compact, yet complete.

And now, after double-checking that all the files have been ported over and all my major apps are working, I have a brand new machine. As I lay here on the couch, my MacBook rests on my abdomen, kind of scarily warm (gotta look into lapdesks). I am happy. All is right with the world, and not just because I made a killer lemon Bundt cake this evening.

For a while I couldn’t decide what to name my new toy. I thought about “Wicked Fast” (given that it’s at least five times faster than my iBook and has four times the RAM) — remember when the Macintosh IIfx was wicked fast? Hahahaha. And then I thought, No! I should name it after a current interest of mine.

Hence the title of this entry, which is also the name of my computer.

You can bookmark the list here.

What if the Rapture came and nobody was aware of it? I mean, especially when we have a President whose current brilliant idea is evidently to nuke Iran? Talk about your End of Days scenarios.

I’ve always been fond of the Knights Templar. I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail a million eons ago. I have The Temple and the Lodge and The Illuminoids and The Pursuit of the Millennium and A History of the Secret Societies. I have undoubtedly even more such books around here someplace (still haven’t organized my shelves by topic, dammit). Jim McDonald’s The Apocalypse Door! Great fun. And, of course, I’ve read The Da Vinci Code and was aware that related books have been coming out.

Yesterday, as Darin and I wandered around Borders, I was struck by how many Templar-related novels there are out right now. And other Da Vinci Code related nonsense, such as (I am not making this up) The Diet Code.

I walked over to Darin with one of the books in my hand and said, “I know this isn’t an original sentiment, but… Dan Brown has a lot to answer for.” He nodded.

So much for the line of dialogue I always wanted to put in a movie: “Those fucking Templars are at it again.”

I took Martha Stewart Baking out of the library. It looked great! Excellent pictures. A wide range of great baking recipes, not all of the whip-up-this-little-wedding-cake-in-your-spare-time variety, but homemade Oreos and cupcakes.

She had a recipe for Pullman bread (also known as pain de mie), and since I am still looking for the sine qua non of pain de mie, I couldn’t wait to try it.

Then I read the instructions and went, “Huh?”

Let me summarize it: make the dough. Let proof. Punch down; let proof again in the proofing bowl. (Most recipes I’ve read do only one proofing in the proofing bowl, but whatever.) Take the dough out, fold up, put in pain de mie pan, let rise.

So far, so good. Then we get to this:

Close the lid completely and bake, rotating pan halfway through, until loaf is light golden brown, about 45 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350F, close the lid, and continue baking another 30 minutes.

I assume that second “close the lid” is there because you opened the lid to check on the loaf’s color. But this baking time — what the hey? 75 minutes total is almost double what any other recipe I’ve read has called for.

I pulled the loaf out after the 45 minutes were up: the loaf was a deep golden brown, and the crust was actually several millimeter thick. To be absolutely sure I used my insta-read thermometer, and the interior temperature was fine.

What’s up with that extra 30 minutes? If this was the first time I’d baked bread, I would have cremated the loaf.

This makes me very nervous about trying other recipes.

March: comes in like a lion, goes out like Poseidon on a five-week bender.

Rain. Rain. More rain. Right now it’s just cloudy, although the forecast says “Rain” when it doesn’t say “Thunderstorms.” It says this, in fact, for the next two weeks.

I’m one of those Seasonal Affective Disorder people. I don’t want to do anything when it’s wet and cold like this for weeks on end. We’ve been home sick and we’ve been home recuperating. My left jaw still hurts from the surgery. I think it may hurt a little from the dampness too.

The ground is full up with water — our front lawn is damp and springy, except at the bottom of the slope, where it’s a big puddle. I think I’ve been running outdoors once, maybe twice in the past month, and most of the trail runs we would normally hit are out of the question. I’m not currently feeling hardcore enough these days to go out in the drizzle, let alone anything stronger. Getting back into it takes time, and as Rob says, when the weather gets better we’ll be able to do lots more runs.

When the weather gets better. I’m really hoping it’s soon.

I don’t know where these storms are coming from. Hopefully they’re passing over the Sierras so we have a lot of snow packed up there. California with rain is not that much fun; California without rain is much, much less fun.