Home of the Snarkmaiden

Indeed the world is full of wonders, and horrors, and I try to take note when I stumble across one. I've got several rattling and rolling around my head like marbles now, so I reckon it's time to share them out to make room for more.

First, a horror. I thought it was fine when my buddy Jenn got Seahawks logos put on her most recent manicure. That's cute, in a my-house-has-wheels sort of way (sorry, Jenn!). But a trip to the West Hill Fred Meyer revealed that those people have no business being given a free hand with blue and green food coloring in the pursuit of game-day snack sales. Yes, folks, those are bright Seahawks Green-and-Blue deviled eggs. You can pretty much feel the cancer cells forming just looking at those dyes, can't you? A finer waste of a chicken's fertility, I have yet to see.

On a more positive note, I have discovered that I can make hot buttered rum or hot toddy with Hal's new Keurig. Hal had been hankering for a Keurig pod system hot beverage machine for a couple of years now, ever since his previous employer got one at work, so this year Santa and I got him one for Christmas. I wasn't expecting to have much use for it, myself, not being a super big coffee drinker, but it turns out that you can run the machine without a pod in it to get a really quick cup of hot water, which means that with a batch of rum batter, some bourbon, and a cinnamon stick on hand, I can get a hot buttered bourbon as easily as a cup of coffee. And while I've been recovering from this nasty upper respiratory grunge the past couple of weeks, I have found the ability to have a hot toddy at more-or-less any time has been a real boon.

Hot Toddy Recipe

1 T honey
2 lemon wedges
1 jigger cheapass bourbon
4 ounces steaming hot water
1 cinnamon stick

In a glass mug, squeeze in the juice of your lemon wedges, add honey, bourbon, and cinnamon stick, and drop in the spent lemon rinds if you wanna. Add hot water and stir until blended. Enjoy. This is surprisingly tasty for such a simple thing, and the heat, the lemon, the honey, and the booze are all sovereign for making sore throat and cough feel a lot better. If you haven't got lemons, half a small lime works great too, as does half a mandarin orange. I imagine a small quantity of almost any acidic juice would work well.

And a while back I was having breakfast at the local greasy spoon with Hal and watching the silent Northwest News channel because it's the sort of greasy spoon that has an obligatory television set and I happened to be the one sitting facing the tube, and there was a commercial for some sort of special bag for microwaving baked potatoes in, and in the way of television commercial demos for dubious products, there were a bunch of other things this special bag was supposedly good for, including reviving hardened bread -- just slip it in the bag and microwave for a few seconds and it comes out magically restored. Well, while home sick and wanting something to eat I discovered that all the bits of baguette in the house were rock-like, and since I was feeling too crappy to go to the store for more bread, I thought I'd try microwaving the bread briefly just in its own little paper bag sleeve. Yep, this works fine. No need to add water, just zap the bread for 15 seconds or so, and magic, it's back to being soft if somewhat more chewy.

And last, but certainly not least, and perhaps equally chewy, I have long been experiencing various forms of discontent with the way the term "privilege" gets applied these days and Will Shetterly has a marvelous piece that distills a number of those discontents with remarkable clarity. Privilege is not just the absence of oppression, it isn't privilege if the majority of the population has it. Privilege is something that is experienced by a tiny minority, as a direct result of power and wealth. If you want to talk about how people who aren't oppressed don't always notice the way other people are oppressed, find a different word. But by all means go read Will's piece, and by all means also his take on recent discussions of author "privilege" versus the privileges of fanfic authors, which was how I tumbled on Will's earlier piece.

Overheard somewhere, someone making disparaging remarks about "the boys in Enterprise"... I don't think they were talking about a television show, its fans, or cast members. Pretty sure they didn't mean rental car agents either. And with that I realized it's a new business buzzword, one that seems to have crept into various interstitial spaces in my peripheral awareness, yet I have absolutely no idea what it's pointing at. It's something Google sells, or does, or something. Is it software? Looking at their page it looks like maybe it's aps, which they call "solutions". Wikipedia seems to think it's another word for entrepreneurship, and I've seen some claiming that it is meant to reference risk-taking in business development. Or the fact that something is business activity aimed at making profit. I thought that was what we called capitalism. So I don't know. What the hell is Enterprise, anyway? Maybe it's meant to refer to Enterprise Systems, which clearly are software. I think.

*sigh* That's me, left behind on the curb by the jargon express again.

I can't help thinking that the dogged frequency with which cable station Retroplex is replaying Judgment at Nuremberg indicates someone in the programming department making a political point. Certainly the judicial summary at the end, as delivered by Spencer Tracy, becomes a carrilon descant of peals being rung over the collective heads of America if viewed in the light of current events. It's worth the movie, that speech. That and discovering that William Shatner was ever that young. Good lord.

How seriously is one supposed to be able to take a 16th C. England in which none of the women, including the very proper, very Catholic Queen Catherine, owns a single shift? Or a hood, for that matter? Many of them cannot, so it seems, even afford sleeves. As a result, we are treated to the spectacle of Tudor women routinely traipsing around the countryside, in public, with their hair, their shoulders, and even their entire arms bare for anyone to see.

This is not to excuse the men, who, in Tudor times, had an unquenchable penchant for vinyl doublets, tacky plastic jewels, and unbearably bad hats. Waugh! Honestly, I don't see how anyone is supposed to pay the least bit of attention to the supposed dramatic content with Anne Boleyn swanning about with her razor cut, sausage curled, peekaboo-parted, totally anachronistic haircut bouncing all over, and Cardinal Wolsey progressing from one spavined, polyester square cap to a worse one with every new scene. And what on Earth is Catherine of Aragon doing with a brass partrige stuck on her head? Yes, I fully recognize that Tudor headgear was eccentric- and comical-looking to the modern eye, but it doesn't follow that just any eccentric-and-comical-looking headgear will suffice to signal that These People Are Tudors, You Know.

Moreover, waving naked titties around isn't actually a substitute for story-telling. Even if you like naked titties, and indeed, who doesn't?