These Gravely Digs of Mine

Username:	Password:
Forgot your password?	Remember Me

Time:

2:55 pm.

To those of you that spoiled the twist at the end of yesterday's Dexter for me today, I hope you die.

No crazy hijinks, no wild tortures or punishments, no elaborate purple-prosed imprecations.

Just death. Swift, inexorable death.

Comments: 3 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

1:03 pm.

I overheard a co-worker in the elevator today talking to another co-worker about how she tried to rent an action movie for her kids, and she was so embarrassed because she had to show the clerk the movie on the printout she had made, and then he corrected her pronunciation of the name of the film.

The film she asked for? "The Metal Lions". The actual movie? "The Medallion".

Here's the worst part: In the elevator, she was still pronouncing it wrong. She kept saying "Muh-day-lee-on".

Comments: 3 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

6:12 pm.

The gods of random radio play have decreed today is Red Hot Chili Peppers day.

To celebrate, I'm going to wear a sock on my penis, grab a guitar and dance for my cats.

Comments: 8 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

12:17 pm.

Well well well. The police report puts a very different complexion on events.

Comments: 7 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

2:39 pm.

Dear internet:

Before you get your outrage on over that poor SF writer Dr. Peter Watts who got roughed up and detained at the US border (link to boingboing version, link to his own version, no "official" version of events yet), consider that the poor bastard got out of his car during a traffic-stop-style temporary detention, and then failed to comply with orders to get back in the car.

Out here in Philly, if you try to pull that during a traffic stop you might get a verbal warning before they taser you, or you might not, and then you're going to get forcibly restrained. It's still a one-way ticket to getting your car impounded and spending at least night in jail, and there are good odds you'll get a nice set of bruises as well. After that they'll throw as many charges as they think they can make stick to you.

I'm definitely not saying that he had it coming, and it's very possible that the border guards used inappropriate force to detain him. By all means, if you think he got a raw deal, throw some money to his legal defense -- the charges of assaulting a federal officer could very well be completely bogus.

But.

Realize that anyone else that did what he did -- got out of the car, didn't comply when they told him to get back in, and I'm guessing probably behaved in a noncooperative and belligerent manner -- would almost certainly get themselves forcibly detained, locked up and thoroughly and completely investigated, just like he did. If you think that's unjust, fine. Throw your support in his corner, but be aware that (to the best of my knowledge, and IANAL), the level of compliance with an officer's orders required during a Terry stop is fairly settled law.

For me, the real question here is whether or not he was roughed up unnecessarily, and whether or not he fought back unjustifiably, and whether or not he's guilty of criminal assault. Personally, I can't say for sure either way. I just don't know enough.

Comments: 17 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

1:12 pm.

Been a while since I posted any recipes here. In my defense, I have been sick as hell. Here's my lasagna recipe, cribbed heavily from Emeril:

4 chicken breasts
1 medium onion, diced finely
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 pint sliced white mushrooms
1/4 cup gluten-free flour (I use Bob's Red Mill)
3.5 cups whole milk
1 bunch (roughly 1/2 lbs) spinach (don't forget to wash the spinach first!)
1/2 lb gluten-free lasagna
2 cups grated parmesan cheese
Butter
Olive oil
Nutmeg
Salt
Pepper
Various other spices to taste

Boil a pot of salted water, for the spinach. Once the water boils, blanch the spinach, then drain it thoroughly and chop it roughly. Start another pot of water for the lasagna, unless you're using an oven-ready kind.

Spice the chicken to your taste -- I used ground ginger, chili powder, salt, pepper, garlic powder. Melt two tablespoons of butter in a large saucepan, and sear the chicken on both sides until it's fully cooked (about 4-6 minutes). Remove the chicken from the heat and let it cool.

Add a stick of butter to the chicken pan and melt it over medium heat. Add the mushrooms to the butter and cook them until golden-brown, roughly 8 minutes. Once the mushrooms are done, add the onion and garlic and cook until soft and transparent, roughly 4 more minutes. If I were you, I'd take this opportunity to cook the lasagna according to the instructions on the packaging if you're not cheating with oven-ready pasta. I'd also start pre-heating the oven to 375 degrees right about now.

Next, add the flour to the pan, mix well and cook for a couple of more minutes, until it's a light blonde roux. Now start adding the milk to the pan, little by little, mixing the previous batch of milk into the roux thoroughly before adding any more (if you've ever made a flour-based gravy, this is the exact same process). Next, add the spinach, 1/4 tsp of nutmeg, about 1.5 cups of the cheese and salt and pepper to taste to the sauce, and mix thoroughly until it's smooth. Cover immediately. This is your bechamel (ETA: Well, technically it's a Mornay sauce, but nobody knows what a Mornay sauce is and people know what bechamel is, so I'm just going to call it a bechamel sauce). Now personally I like to wake the bechamel up with some hot sauce, but that's because I'm a barbarian who adds hot sauce to everything. You probably want to skip this step.

The chicken should be well-cool by now, so chop it into bite-sized or smaller cubes. Coat the inside a casserole dish with olive oil (I use a brush or paper towel, personally), and then add a layer of bechamel sauce to the bottom. Add a layer of lasagna, another layer of sauce, a layer of chicken, some more grated parmesan. Add another one or two layers, depending on the size of your dish / amount of ingredients you have. Finish the top off with a layer of sauce and a generous grating of cheese.

Cover a baking pan with tinfoil or parchment paper, and put the casserole dish on top of it (trust me, this will save you a lot of heartache and pain and smoke alarm trouble down the road) before throwing the whole assembly into the oven, uncovered, for 40 minutes or so.

Remove from heat, let stand for 20 minutes, and then enjoy!

Comments: 5 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Subject:	It's that time of year again
Time:	9:36 am.

RIP Star C. Foster

Comments: Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

8:12 pm.

Making a gluten-free lasagna tonight, and to that end I made a bechamel sauce for the first time. Great success! Now it just remains to be seen if the lasagna turns out OK or not. I'll let you know in an hour.

Comments: 9 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

4:31 pm.

Still sick. Head still bound up with something halfway between mucous and concrete. Stomach still... touchy. I feel a bit less like death all the time, but that could just be the caffeine talking -- I had a headache the size of Panama* yesterday and it took me way too long to realize it was because I hadn't had any caffeine for three days, so now I'm drinking tea as a prophylactic measure. I ended up cancelling my New York trip, which makes me a sad panda. I just wasn't up for traveling or socializing.

I also lost twenty bucks at online poker, which is my self-imposed weekly limit, watched a bunch of bad movies (Crank 2: High Voltage is a painfully funny live-action cartoon. It's at once the worst and the best example of its kind, save perhaps Shoot-Em-Up), and almost finished my first run-through of Dragon Age. Oh, and I went through a tub of Carmex, half a bottle of cough syrup, a quarter-jar of Vicks, two boxes of Kleenex, more throat spray and cough drops than I should probably have allowed myself and enough honey to keep an entire small family of apiarists in business. I should just keep my own bees.

How are y'all?

*Panama! Panamaaa-aaa! Panama!

Comments: 5 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Subject:	12/4/09
Time:	5:46 am.

Anyone want to take odds that I see the sunrise?

Comments: 6 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

4:27 am.

Still up. Still sick. I don't know if i'll be in a fit state to drag myself into work tomorrow, but I've already missed two days this week and we're already shorthanded. Ugh. Even if I fell asleep right now i'd only get three hours, and I feel like butter scraped too thinly over toast or whatever Bilbo's metaphor was. I was supposed to head out to NYC this weekend, but i don't even know if I'll be able to make that -- which is a pity, as

dressdragn has been planning a photoshoot/artist's weekend up in the country for a while now, and I'd hate to flake out on that as well.

Comments: 2 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

11:15 am.

At work. Throat still hurts and my sinuses are an everfull pitcher of snot. Send throat spray and a small but powerful vacuum cleaner, stat!

Comments: 8 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

1:16 am.

Head hurts too much to sleep. Took a double-dose of painkiller syrup. That should help.

Comments: 2 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

12:47 pm.

Woke up at 1pm today, fever broken but nose cemented shut with ugly mustard-colored snot. Throat still hurts, but differently than it did yesterday. I'm not 100%, but definitely on the mend. I think tomorrow I'm back at work.

Comments: 3 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

2:07 pm.

Slept until 2PM, dosed myself with more cold medicine, ate some bread and cheese, drank some tea. Now ready to go back to sleep.

Comments: 3 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

9:14 pm.

uuuurgh. Fever, sore throat, sinus stuffiness. Yep, here we go again.

Comments: 9 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

11:14 pm.

Man, the chicken stock that I made today was the best EVER. I think it must have been because of all the lemon-rosemary schmaltz that I added to it, plus the particular blend of veggies, spices and seasonings (cilantro, lemon, lime, thyme, jalapeno) that I used. I could seriously just sit and drink it instead of a meal.

Also, I watched the GI Joe movie and... I've got to say, it was exactly what 12-year-old me wanted in a GI Joe movie. There were ninjas and laser guns and explosions and sneering villains and wisecracking heroes and underwater super-science polar bases and the Baroness looked damn good in glasses and skintight leather. Sure, they might have used some characters that I was more fond of, but overall, thumbs way up.

I also made the mistake of watching the second Transformers movie. Ugh. Ugh! I can't decide if I disliked it more or less than the third and fourth Batman movies, but even without finalizing its position vis-a-vis Schumacher's cinematic abortions, I know that I despised it.

Comments: 11 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Time:

2:56 pm.

Today I'm drinking coffee, doing laundry, making chicken stock and recataloguing all of my books.

That last part is the most fun. It warms my OCD/bibliophile heart like few other activities. I feel like Scrooge McDuck swimming in his giant vault of coins.

Comments: Do you feel lucky?.

Subject:	It's that time of year again
Time:	1:09 pm.

Please welcome the return of Holiday Saruman as my default icon.

Comments: 3 punks - Do you feel lucky?.

Subject:	Win some, lose some
Time:	11:01 pm.

Last night I attempted a quick filipino-style baked fish in coconut sauce. The concept was sound, but I overseasoned and it was way too salty. It wasn't inedible, but it also wasn't good.

On the other hand, I bought some smoked ham hocks in the scrap meat aisle of the supermarket and used them to make a really incredibly tasty lentil stew, so all was not lost. The secret ingredient? Cinnamon sticks cooked into the stew. Delicious!

Comments: 1 punk - Do you feel lucky?.