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BSG: The countdown begins…

StarbuckWoo-hoo! Battlestar Galactica returns tonight for its final season. I’m pumped – are you pumped?

I can’t wait to see what happened to Starbuck… and that frakin’ hawt collarbone of hers… seriously, have you looked at Katee Sackhoff’s collarbone? It’s freakin’ perfect. Starbuck can punch me in the face any time.. especially if she’s all sweaty and wearing that sports bra thing, and…

Wait – what? Oh yeah. I can’t wait to see what the Adamas are up to as well. I can’t wait to see what the whole damn crew is up to, actually. Will they find Earth? Will Starbuck be their doom (as predicted in Razor)? Who is the last Cylon? Will it be one of the Adamas? Will it be Starbuck (please say it ain’t so). How about Laura Roslin or Gaius Baltar?

Man, I can’t wait for tonight… although watching BSG on “regular TV” will probably drive me nuts. I wasn’t a BSG fan until last fall, when I downloaded the entire series. I watched all of seasons 1-3 in around 2 weeks, sometimes watching 4-5 episodes per day. Watching one episode per week will probably make me break out in hives… or something.

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Friday Fun: Wind Chimes

Syntrillium Software was a company formed in the early 1990s by former Microsoft employees Robert Ellison and David Johnston. Their most popular product was Cool Edit, a sound editing program. The company was purchased by Adobe in May 2003, and Cool Edit henceforth became known as Adobe Audition.

Sadly, it seems that Adobe has killed off Syntrillium’s other products, which included the popular Snoqualmie screen saver and Wind Chimes, a silly (but much loved) program that imitated wind chimes on your computer. Wind Chimes not only imitated traditional wind chimes, it could also do piano improvisations and imitate several Asian types of wind chimes. You could even “roll your own” chimes by choosing the number of chimes, the base note, the music scale… even the wind speed!

Many people loved Wind Chimes… so much, in fact, that it developed its own little cult following. Since I seem to be the “last hope” for certain software programs, I decided to add Wind Chimes to my collection of ancient downloadable apps:

Wind Chimes (163kb)

The program will run without installation (just unzip and run the chimes.exe file). You cannot register the program any more, and you’ll get an occasional “nag screen” that stops the chimes and reminds you to register (although you can find ways around this if you know where to look… wink-wink!).

If you are the owner of this software and you’d like for me to remove it from this site, please check out the Contact Me page to get in touch with me!

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Another Sign of Doom

The Rev. Bryan Owen found this following ad in the latest issue of Episcopal Life:

THE ANGLICAN USE SOCIETY in America in communion with the Holy See of Rome offers to Clergy, Religious and Laity of the Anglican Tradition an information booklet explaining THE PASTORAL PROVISION, the canonical instrument that has made possible their reconciliation with the Holy See as units of common identity which preserve their Anglican heritage of liturgy, hymnody and spirituality.

As he notes, this amounts to “an official publication of the Episcopal Church includ[ing] an advertisement from an official Roman Catholic organization that invites Episcopal congregations to leave the Episcopal Church and become Roman Catholic”. Additionally, “Episcopal priests of those congregations will be ordained as Roman Catholic priests, even if they are married. Those congregations and clergy will also be allowed to ‘retain certain liturgical elements proper to the Anglican tradition’.”

Wow. Read all about it here.

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BREAKING: Court Sides With Parishes!

From various sources:

A Fairfax circuit judge has awarded a favorable judgment to a group of 11 Anglican churches that were taken to court last fall after breaking away from the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia in late 2006.

In an 83-page opinion released late last night, Judge Randy Bellows ruled that Virginia’s Civil War-era “division statute” granting property to departing congregations applies to the Northern Virginia congregations, which are now part of the Nigerian-administered Convocation of Anglicans in North America.

“The court finds that a division has occurred in the diocese,” the judge wrote. “Over 7 percent of the churches in the diocese, 11 percent of its baptized membership and 18 percent of the diocesan average attendance of 32,000 [per Sunday] have left in the past two years.”

The lawsuit, which is the largest property case to date in the history of the Episcopal Church, involves millions of dollars of real estate and assets. With the finding that a division has occurred, the congregations get to keep the property under Virginia law.

Because the diocese and the national Episcopal Church are expected to challenge the constitutionality of Virginia’s division statute, the judge has already scheduled arguments for that trial for May 28.

The 11 parishes, which include some of Virginia’s most historic churches such as Truro Episcopal in Fairfax and The Falls Church in Falls Church, voted in December 2006 to leave the Episcopal Church over longstanding disputes on biblical authority and human sexuality, most specifically the consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

The Episcopal Church has been called to repent the Robinson consecration by much of the rest of the worldwide Anglican Communion, and its standing as the U.S. representative of Anglicanism is in question over the issue.

Thanks to Stand Firm and Baby Blue for keeping us updated!

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Get well, Jen!

I’ve known Jennifer King (Dunn) for… almost 17 years now. She’s my second oldest friend in the entire world, and it makes me feel old to think that in my life I’ve known her longer than I haven’t known her. I also think that it’s kind of sad that I’ve lived in Charlotte for 5 years now and I’ve probably seen her less in that time than when I lived in Atlanta. People change, though, and when Jen got married she “adopted” her husband’s friends. I’m not gonna knock her for that; I know that it “just happens” with people. Hell, my “Duluth High School crowd” were freakishly close until everyone started to hit their 30s, and then folks started moving away, or having children, or what have you. Where once 50 of us would get together to celebrate someone’s birthday, you’re now lucky to even get a tiny handful for almost any reason.

My point behind all this is that even though Jen and I aren’t nearly as close as we once were, I still care about the girl an awful lot. And if you’re one of the “Charlotte gang”, you probably know what happened to her this week. It’s depressing and it’s pointless… and I sincerely hope that she gets better ASAP.

I love you, you damn weirdo! Get well, and soon!  🙂

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News for 04/03/2008

It seems like it’s been forever, and I’ve got a huge backlog of stuff, so… LET’S DO THE NEWS!

Singer Bobby Brown is writing a tell-all book… in which he claims that it was Whitney that drove him to do drugs (and not the other way around, as many of us have assumed). Naomi Campbell done got herself arrested again and New Kids On The Block are getting back together. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away, I guess.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a nationwide recall of cantaloupe sold by Dole and Chiquita , so if you see any in your local store, please don’t buy any!

Researchers at Harvard University have discovered bacteria in the ground that not only aren’t affected by antibiotics… they actually eat them! This explains why scientists have generally not found high levels of antibiotics in soil samples, even in fields spread with manure from cows treated with antibiotics. The really scary thing about all this is that many of the bacteria wouldn’t die until they were given 50 to 100 times the amount of bacteria that would kill a human. Although these bacteria are so far harmless to humans, let’s hope that these traits don’t cross over to other types of bacteria any time soon.

In travel news, the Westin Casuarina Hotel & Spa in Las Vegas has started charging convention attendees the fee their organization would have paid to host the event. Let me explain: an Austin, Texas-based group called “The Coaching Center” wanted to have a convention in Las Vegas. The Westin charged them a $50,000 fee to hold the convention, but when The Coaching Center didn’t pay its bill, the Westin started adding $600 to $1200 to each attendee’s bill. Classy, Westin! And you’ve probably heard about the disaster that is the new “T5” terminal at London’s Heathrow Airport. The $8 billion expansion was supposed to be “state of the art”, but has been a nightmare for travelers. The high-tech luggage system has broken down multiple times, causing British Airways (BA) to cancel hundreds of flights. The luggage situation is so dire, in fact, that BA is shipping 28,000 pieces of luggage to Italy, where they’ll be sorted by hand. The whole fiasco has cost BA £16 million so far, although Deutsche Bank estimates it’ll cost BA £150 million when all’s said and done.

Don’t get all smug at BA’s misfortunes, though. By now you’ve probably heard about the poor woman in Lubbock, Texas who was forced to remove her nipple rings by TSA agents. In reading some of the comments by people online, I was struck by how many people have no idea how body piercings work. Yes, most body piercings are removable, but body piercings aren’t meant to be removed once they’ve in. In most cases, body piercings aren’t like an ear ring that can easily be popped in and out. Earrings are holes made in cartilage that may never close up, even if the wearer goes months without putting a ring in their ear. Body piercings, on the other hard, are usually through skin, which may start to close up in minutes. Nipple piercings are particularly problematic; I once knew a girl that took her nipple rings out for some reason, and she found that the holes had already partially healed within a few hours. She had to go back to the tattoo parlor and get the piercing redone, which she said was unbelievably painful. As is happened, the poor girl in Lubbock had to ask the TSA agents for some pliers to get the ring out, and some jerk-ass male agents sat around and snickered at her whilst she took the ring out. This is close to torture, folks. Seriously. Imagine that your big toe set off the metal detector at your local airport, and a TSA agent asked you to pull your toenail off so he\she could examine you in detail. OK, removing a nipple ring isn’t quite that painful, but it’s not far off. When will the U.S. government stop this insane and pointless “security theatre” and let people get back to living their lives?

In case you don’t have enough to worry about, one of the newest scams out there combines identify theft with mortgage fraud to make… house stealing! As The Consumerist summarizes it, “thieves find house, figure out who owns it, assume their identity, forge signatures on the paperwork, get the deed transferred over to themselves, and then quickly sell it and run off”. Great! Thankfully, the FBI says that this isn’t common… yet.

Some jerk-ass hackers broke into the Epilepsy Foundation’s website and filled it with flashing GIFs and links to pages filled with bright, flashing lights and color patterns (around 3% of people with epilepsy can have  seizures based on visual simulation… like flashing lights and colors).  Humanity, it seems, has sunk to a new low.

And lastly, do you remember getting those small “sample boxes” of cereal in the mail? The site Photoshop Disasters has this great picture of a box of General Mill’s “Curves” cereal. Curves is apparently aimed at women on diets, as the box has a picture of a woman leaping (for joy, I assume). Only the woman has a black face and white stomach. Photoshop disaster, indeed!

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Hotel Babylon (Series 3, Episode 7)

Another Tuesday, another episode of Hotel Babylon. The theme of this week’s episode is “don’t take anything at face value”, and the episode lives up to that premise.

Eddie Palmer (Steven Pinder) is a guy that hosts a chat show in the north of England; he’s come to London to try and take the show national, and he’s staying at the Babylon while that goes on. He sweet talks Tony into getting him a hooker. Tony would prefer using one of his own contacts, but Palmer insists on using his own… which leads to Tony escorting Mei (Sophie Wu) to Palmer’s room. Unfortunately, Mei was kidnapped back in China and forced to move to the UK as a sex slave… oh, and she’s only 15! After Tony hears Mei’s story, he finds Palmer in the lobby and punches him, causing his immediate dismissal:

hotel_babylon_s03_e07_01

Tony, being a “good guy”, isn’t going to let the matter slide, however. He changes into street clothes and keeps a watch over Mei. Eventually, her pimp tracks them down and demands £10,000 for her passport. Tony finds all the cash he’s hidden in the hotel and calls in favors from other concierges… but he only manages to come up with £5,000. Will he be able to get the rest of the money in time? And why is he scrambling to pay off a gangster instead of calling the police? Will he be able to get his job back? Does he even want his job back?

Meanwhile, James has come up with an awesome new menu. He’s spent untold hours on the menu, making it as perfect as can be. It’s helped the restaurant soar in popularity, so much so that he has to hire new wait staff. He even develops a bit of a crush on Chloe, one of the new staff, too. Everything, it seems, is coming up James at the moment.

However, he’s also lorded his restaurant’s popularity over Gino, who’s more than a bit jealous of James’ success. When the general manager of The Burlington is spotted talking to Gino, suspicions fly… especially after The Burlington rolls out a new menu that’s suspiciously similar to the Babylon’s. Everyone suspects Gino, but Gino adamantly denies selling out the Babylon to The Burlington. Gino even comes up with a plan to prove his innocence: when the Burlington’s GM was talking to him, Gino offered him some nuts… which he declined, saying that he’s allergic. Jack invites the Burlington GM to have dinner with him to discuss the matter of the stolen menu, and Gino has James drench the salads in a hazelnut vinagrette. Chloe is the waitress, and she nervously serves the two their salads… but just as the GM is about to take a bite of the salad, Chloe begs the GM not to eat the salad. How would a random waitress know that the GM of a completing restaurant is allergic to nuts? She wouldn’t, of course.

Comic relief for this episode is provided once again by Anna and Ben. Magician Dan Black (David Schneider) is staying in the hotel as he plans his biggest trick ever: disappearing from Trafalgar Square. Ben seems to enjoy the little tricks that Dan plays on them at the front desk, but Anna knows that magic is just an illusion, and she becomes obsessed with finding out Dan’s secrets… so much so that she has Ben break in to Dan’s room… but will Dan get the last laugh? I’ll end the suspense: yes, he does.

Just for tradition (and giggles), here’s this week’s “required” picture of Anna (Emma Pierson):

hotel_babylon_s03_e07_02

All in all, a decent episode for a show on its last legs. I’m still not sure why Tony and Emily would scrape up £10,000 to pay off a gangster, especially when both of them were given free reign to come up with the money. The gangster stayed in the room with Mei and Emily as Tony roamed the hotel and called up his buddies at other hotels. Why the hell didn’t he just call the cops? I’m sure that Tony and\or Jack could have worked out some kind of “deal” with the police that would have kept “HOTEL BABYLON SITE OF HUMAN TRAFFICKING ARREST” headlines out of the papers. I mean, £10,000 is around $20,000. Tony provided half that money… that shouldn’t be a huge problem for Tony, because we know that he makes mad (untaxed) money… but still. Giving up $10,000 to a total stranger? Even if she’s in dire need? And Emily… selling her most cherished ring at a fraction of its value, just to help a stranger out? Look, I’d like to think that I’d help a stranger too… I just don’t know if I’d give her pimp $10,000 and buy her a ticket back to China and give her some pocket money on top of that… not when 911 calls are free.

Next week’s episode looks as silly as ever: there’s some kind of hostage situation, and the Babylon’s staff are tasked with freeing them (again, why not call the police?). Anna is apparently the one to crawl through the air vents in this episode, and she just happens to be wearing a tight white wifebeater under her dress shirt… of course. Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I’d watch a ten-hour miniseries of Emma Pierson mopping her kitchen floor! I just think it’s funny that the BBC showed her in the wifebeater like, 10 times in the previews for the next episode, especially the shot where she rips open her dress shirt. Why not just freeze-frame the shots, so the folks at Mr Skin can capture it easily? Why not have a little siren and the words with “NICE RICK ALERT!” flashing on the screen when Anna opens her shirt? Again, it’s not like I mind looking at Emma Pierson, but damn… could you at least try to be a bit more subtle, Auntie?

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The Riches: Field of Dreams

Well, that was an interesting episode. Hugh has gone off the rails since his stripper wife left him. He’s too busy drowning his sorrows in liquor or buying sports cars to even think about the Bayou Hills development – the $150 million deal that brought the Malloys back to Eden Falls. Dale is busy trying to integrate himself into Panco; he sniffed some of Wayne’s $13 million, and there’s no way that he’s leaving now. Meanwhile, Dahila is having another crisis of conscience, Cael is trying to figure out how to get out of the buffer lifestyle, DiDi is trying to figure out how to get herself in the lifestyle, Sam’s cleaning up bloodstains on the stairs, and Nina is researching “Irish Travelers” on the Internet. Whew!

Dale won’t be alone in his pressuring of the Malloy family. Eamon Quinn (Jared Harris) is a Malloy family member that has just rolled in to town. He’s just been released from prison after serving a 20 year sentence for killing Ginny Dannegan’s father and uncle. He’s actually, you know, Irish, and all… and he’s badass. He’s 100 times smarter than Dale will ever be, and I feel that he’s going to pose a real challenge to Wayne over the coming weeks. He’s also ruthless, too. Dale met Eamon at a local bar to talk about Dale’s latest scam; just to show Dale who is in charge, Eamon stuck a fork in his arm at the end of their conversation:

the_riches_s02_e03_01

There was also some serious tension between Wayne and Cael. You see, at the very beginning of the episode, we see the Malloys walking back towards their house. A police car pulls up and the cop arrests Cael for breaking into the school and changing the grades of several students. Of course, Cael didn’t do it by himself, and Wayne has lunch with all the fathers of the accused students (in a strip club, thanks to Hugh’s recommendation). They all agree to donate a large sum of money to the school as a “bribe” to keep the incident under wraps. However, when they all get together at the school for a meeting with the headmistress, Cale (unconvincingly) admits to the room that he was the sole mastermind behind the break-in (since two of the students were arguing about the break-in being each other’s idea before Cael confessed, I don’t think anyone really believes him). In any case, Cael made it clear to Wayne that he does not like the “rich buffer life”. And indeed, the scene where the rich families attempt to “buy off” the school is, in a way, even worse than the scams the Malloy family has pulled over the years. At least the Malloys admit that they’re petty grifters; the rich families try to give their bribe a veneer of respectability that Cael just cannot stomach. And he’s got a point.

While all this is going on, Dahlia runs in to Nina, who convinces her to go out to dinner and meet her weed hook-up. The only thing is that her hook-up is in AA, so they have to go to a church to buy Nina’s weed. Classy. In any event, Dahila sits and listens to the horror stories from the AA members while Nina does her business. This gives Dahila a “moment of clarity” (or, if you prefer, a “crisis of conscience”)… and she turns herself in to the police as a parole violator! As soon as she says “My name is Dahila Malloy and I’m a parole violator”, the screen turns to black and the episode ends… Wow!

One last thing about The Riches: Hugh really needs to get his act together. Throughout most of the first season, he was a big-dick asshole businessman who saw the entire world as a Panco development waiting to happen. And he was awesome. But now he’s just a sniveling baby. It’s as if J.R. Ewing from Dallas spent an entire season sobbing quietly to himself in a corner. I get that the writers are probably working on some kind of a huge comeback for him… just speed it up, OK?

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The Best April Fool’s Prank Ever

Today is, of course, April Fool’s Day, and I thought I’d share with you one of the best April Fool’s Day pranks ever: the great Swiss Spaghetti Harvest.

It happened on April 1, 1957, when “the British news show Panorama broadcast a three-minute segment about a bumper spaghetti harvest in southern Switzerland”. Thousands of curious viewers called the BBC to ask about the harvest, and many asked where they could buy their own spaghetti trees!

Read all about it here or here.

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Currywurst

You know how it is with Wikipedia: you go there for some specific thing, and the next thing you know you’ve spent hours looking at different pages. I went there recently looking for some information and I somehow ended up reading the entry for doner kebabs, which somehow led me to the entry on currywurst.

Currywurst is Germany’s most popular street food, especially in the cities of Berlin and Hamburg. It consists of slices of bratwurst topped with a tomato sauce that’s best described as “curry ketchup”. It might not sound that good at first, but trust me: it’s delicious. It’s also amazingly easy to make at home:

Ingedients:

2 (15 ounce) cans tomato sauce
3 tablespoons chili sauce (or Sriracha hot sauce)
1 good-sized onion
3 tablespoons honey or sugar
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
2 cloves garlic (diced)
1 tablespoon paprika
Curry powder to taste (I use 4 tablespoons)

1 pound bratwurst or sausage of your choice
1 beer (optional)
French fries (optional)

Hardware:

1 2qt. pot with lid
1 large cooking skillet
Cutting board
Tongs
Knife
Large spoon

1) Chop the onion and place into the 2qt. pot. Add the garlic and just enough oil to coat the mixture, then cook over medium heat until transparent, stirring frequently.

2) Add tomato sauce, chili or hot sauce, honey or sugar, black pepper, paprika and curry powder. You may defer adding the curry powder until the very end if you’re cooking for people with varying “spiciness thresholds”, although for best taste add it now. Stir well.

3) Bring the sauce almost to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

4) While sauce is simmering, cook bratwurst according to package instructions. I prefer cooking the sausages in a pan in beer, but that’s just me.

5) When sausages are fully cooked, remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes. Then cut the sausages “on the slant” into bite-sized pieces. When done, add to currywurst sauce and stir.

6) Deep-fry some french fries. Put them on the side of a plate, then spoon the currywurst onto the plate. Eat the currywurst as-is, and use the currywurst sauce as a ketchup for the fries.