I’ve put up a few “Messages from the Illuminati” in the past, but I think this one may just take the prize for obscurity — if not plain wierdness.
Karl Rove kills the vampiric tuba and the atomic plant.
If you follow the link above, I assure you won’t get the same message. Each cell of the Cabal (fnord) gets its own message, and that message will vary from load to load. Just click on the eye of the Pyramid at the top of the page if you need a clarification.
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Peace be to you.
The tradition of the Mews continues, with this wish for the planet and for children of all countries and creeds everywhere:
May the true wishes and hope of this Christmas season be with all!
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Peace be to you.
In this family, when it comes to hamburgers, I am considered a heretic. Everybody else prefers cheddar or pseudo-cheddar (Velveeta) on the burger — sometimes the extra-thick slices that have more resemblance (for me) to thick sheets of congealed mucilage. Heart attacks by the sheet. I want cheese on my burgers, but when I’m cooking them myself, I prefer something a touch different: something along the line of a good aged Swiss. I have yet to get a few pounds of ground meat and some of that really good Swiss from the Whole Foods Market to cook hamburgers with; but, maybe for some family cookout. (Hmmm; I could do a Who’s the Boss? and have a winter cookout sometime with the grill….)
Where the difference really shows up, though, is what other things I use to dress the burger. The Younger Child is a purist; cheese and nothing else, usually. Older Child has started using mustard, as well as occasional lettuce, and mayo. Kitt also goes for mayo, along with lettuce and tomato, and maybe a good slice of onion. Me, I like the cheese and the onion, sometimes the lettuce and the onion, but usually no other dressings if the burger’s good and juicy…except for those times when I hark back to my childhood and slather the bun with a blast of — Miracle Whip.
“I sense a disturbance in the Force….” Miracle Whip???
Yes, the stuff of Lutheran cold-dish-supper salads and classic commercials that you can find on YouTube. (Remember the ones about the private eye who was always willing to break a case for a turkey on soft potato bread and Miracle Whip above the lettuce and tomato?) It wasn’t a frequent thing; but that slightly tangy-sweet taste worked for me at times. It seemed to go great with ketchup, too, which I used on my burgers back when I wasn’t making them myself.
Kitt tends to Look at me when I invoke Miracle Whip; so does Older Child, in the same way she Looked at me when I told her how some Canadians use vinegar on their fries. (Younger Child finds the concept of variety in food alien.) What can I say? I don’t know if it’s a Midwestern thing, but I do know that I’m not the only one that likes Miracle Whip on the occasional hamburger. (It really shines on a turkey sandwich, but hamburgers work as well.) Mayonnaise — at least the stuff that comes off a grocery-store shelf, some of which is, ironically, prepared by the same company that makes Miracle Whip — is a tasteless, pasty substance with only slightly more redeeming quality to it than guacamole in that it is tasteless. (If I ever sat down to make Alton Brown’s Good Eats mayonnaise, I may change my mind.)
How about readers out there? Is this just a bizarre personal thing, is it a Midwesternism, or is the enjoyment of Miracle Whip on hamburgers more widespread than I imagine?
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Peace be to you.
I just ran into a note in some of my mail (thanks to Paul Chapman at Steve Jackson Games).
You may recall that, during the Battle of Britain in World War II, many residents of London took shelter in the Underground — their subway system — to escape the Blitz. Some tunnels were built especially for this purpose in the Kingsway district of the city, though, and were employed for other purposes following the war: communications center, public records library, even a recreation room. The tunnels are reached from unmarked doors in High Holborn Street.
The current owner (British Telecom, I believe) now plans to sell the tunnels off — 77,000 square of space. They’re hoping for a bid of £5 million pounds.
You can see six pictures of the complex at the BBC article.
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Peace be to you.
Bruce has always seen this as a personal site as much as a news site, and he lets me post what I want, so I’m going to recommend a few knitting sites here.
The Washington Post speaks today about how Barack Obama is learning a hard and fast rule concerning life in Washington, D. C.: no matter how disciplined your election campaign was, no matter how tightly you keep a secret at the planning stages, you’re gonna be leakier than a folding colander when you start vetting possibilities for top posts. Names are emerging from the control of the Obama transition office, not apparently from the transition team, but possibly because of the security clearance checks such candidates must go through when under serious consideration. From the Post:
Obama has not officially announced any Cabinet appointments, but transition officials have reluctantly confirmed that former senator Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) will be nominated as secretary of health and human services, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is the top choice for the Department of Homeland Security, and Eric H. Holder Jr. is likely to be the attorney general pick.
It is also quite possible that Robert Gates will be retained, at least for a time, as Secretary of Defense. One of the few truly successful Cabinet appointments of the Bush Administration — in terms of assisting the needs of the United States — Gates would be an excellent Republican choice for an Obama White House, and it might be to keep him in office for as long as he is willing to serve in the post.
But word also comes of a disturbing candidate: Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State. On top of the question of does she have the needed diplomatic experience — despite her claims during the Late Great Democratic Primary Campaign of 2008 — this could be the most politically charged choice Mr. Obama could make, outside of nominating Bill Clinton himself. Hard-line conservatives are going to look for any excuse to start hurling charges at Mr. Obama; indeed, he has had no slack cut him from the AM radio types already. Trying to hire Sen. Clinton for possibly the most important Cabinet post (definitely the most senior) would be a mistake of massive proportions, even if her nomination would stand an decent chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate’s advice and consent. Obama needs few distractions as he assumes power, and this would distract him from the important work of the economy and the mid-Asian situation.
A better choice, in this writer’s opinion: former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who is a Republican, sympathetic to Mr. Obama’s preference for negotiation over conflict, and is both respected and liked by other countries. Hopefully Mr. Obama is reading this article (grin).
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Peace be to you.
A few items from Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac (November 14), uttered by humorist P. J. O’Rourke:
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.”
“There are several recognizable types of humorous activity. There is parody, when you make fun of people who are smarter than you; satire, when you make fun of people who are richer than you; and burlesque, when you make fun of both while taking your clothes off.”
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Peace be to you.
Since Barack Obama was elected President on the 4th, I have seen and heard at least three references to his predecessor in the office, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, including this cover of next week’s issue of Time. There is, of course, good reason for such; Mr. Obama is inheriting a domestic situation that is in many ways quite similar to what FDR had dropped in his lap when he was inaugurated for the first time in 1932. Unemployment is on the rise, banks are wobbling if not outright failing, people are losing their homes — sometimes without deserving to — and the rot is spreading throughout the world. The country is desperate for a solution, just as it was in our parents’ or grandparents’ time.
FDR’s idea was the New Deal; he tossed out the old economic paradigm and instituted more government regulation over the financial sector, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the FDIC — but also part of the New Deal was getting people back to work. The many projects instituted under Roosevelt’s Keynesian economics planning were the largest public works program up to its time, and they kept the country going when it needed it, as well as vastly improving the infrastructure and extending it to regions that had barely any infrastructure at all. It also, incidentally, helped prepare the United States for a war that was thrust upon it in December 1941. It did not solve the Depression, but it kept Americans on their feet and with a paycheck, and prevented them from getting into mischief similar to that in Italy and Germany. (There was real fear in some quarters that masses of angry unemployed men would set off a fascistic revolution; radio speakers such as Father Charles Coughlin, with phenomenal followings created by the new medium, aggravated those fears.)
Much of that infrastructure is crumbling now; bridges are rusting, sewers are radically over capacity and buckling, and the sources of standard fossil-fuel energy in America do not meet our ravening needs. Perhaps Mr. Obama might try a Rooseveltian solution to this, as well as helping out on unemployment — and training rising young men in positions they could fill as regular workers/taxpayers in the future. A new series of programs, modeled on the popular Civilian Conservation Corps, might be established to work on repair and improvement of those facilities — a sort of Civilian Infrastructure Corps. What criteria would be set for eligibility I do not know; and some of the aspects of the older program might not work in today’s society. But it’s an attempt at something that could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.
Any thoughts?
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Peace be to you.
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My Unitarian Jihad Name is:
The Hand Grenade of Enlightenment.
Get yours.
