Art Model, the team owner who knifed Cleveland Football fans in the back when he moved the Browns to Baltimore has died.
It should be noted what is a decade prior to moving the Browns, he knifed to Baltimore fans in the back by blocking another teen being located in the city.
As someone who was 100 miles from Cleveland when he moved the Browns, I am not mourning his passing.
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My laptop refuses to turn on.
When the BBC game show Have I Got News for You had a politician ditch them for the 3rd time, they replaced him with a tub of lard.
H/t Paul Krugment.
The US has drastically scaled back its joint exercise with Israel, likely to prevent Netanyahu from launching an ill advised attack on Iran:
Seven months ago, Israel and the U.S. postponed a massive joint military exercise that was originally set to go forward just as concerns were brimming that Israel would launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The exercise was rescheduled for late October and appears likely to go forward on the cusp of the U.S. presidential election. But it won’t be nearly the same exercise. Well-placed sources in both countries have told TIME that Washington has greatly reduced the scale of U.S. participation, slashing by more than two-thirds the number of American troops going to Israel and reducing both the number and potency of missile-interception systems at the core of the joint exercise.
“Basically what the Americans are saying is, ‘We don’t trust you,’” a senior Israeli military official says.
The reductions are striking. Instead of the approximately 5,000 U.S. troops originally trumpeted for Austere Challenge 12, as the annual exercise is called, the Pentagon will send only 1,500 service members and perhaps as few as 1,200. Patriot antimissile systems will arrive in Israel as planned, but the crews to operate them will not. Instead of two Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense warships being dispatched to Israeli waters, the new plan is to send one, though even the remaining vessel is listed as a “maybe,” according to officials in both militaries.
The claim is that there are “budget” issues, but it’s a brushback pitch directed at Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, who both seek to derive personal political gain from an attack.
I approve, particularly in the case of Netanyahu, who, if reports are accurate, is still driven by the need for approval from his nonagenarian revisionist father, and that’s a level of crazy that ill serves both the security needs of Israel and the United States.
Amoral and crazy is a toxic mix, and Netanyahu has it in spades.
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it. Or how the capture of our IP regulatory process by rent seekers has f%$#ed us all:
Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction’s most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you’re not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctor’s Wife.” Where Gaiman’s face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?
Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?
………
And then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.
………
This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn’t, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.
I would also note that the use of clips in an award show used to be clearly fair use, but they had the rights anyway, but the zero tolerance of the RIAA, the MPAA, and the BBC (who do you think produces Dr. Who).
Rent seeking is always a source of inefficiency in the economy, and it should be allowed, as in the case of patent and copyright, only to the degree to which we as a society see a benefit.
The current IP regime is an impediment, not an aid to innovation and other productive work.
I was kind of out of it after Saturday’s Trial by Fire, which I put down to rushing, the high humidity, and the fact that I did not eat until 6pm.
It turned out to be a bit more than that.
Yesterday evening, my forearms and calves began to hurt, and I was feeling too crappy to post.
When juxtaposed with the sore throat and cough that I’ve had for the past 2 weeks, had me worried about something like meningitis.
Even though I have a doctor’s appointment later this week, I went to the local clinic at my wife’s insistence.
The doctor saw me, and prescribed antibiotics for my sore throat, a short series of corticosteroids, and a cough medicine.
He also told me to lay off both the statin and the niacin that I am taking, as muscle pain of this sort is a not uncommon side effect for both drugs.
After picking the prescription, and taking all the pills, I sacked out for 4 hours.
When I woke up, I felt a lot better. I still have a bit of pain, but I feel normal, and my sore throat is gone (indicating that it was bacterial).
I need to take a fasting blood test tomorrow to check muscle enzyme levels. (CPK)
So, I appear to be all better, so there will be further bloggy goodness, though with Charlie’s Bar Mitzvah on Saturday, it will be light posting.
On Saturday, I competed in Trial By Fire, which is a cooking competition, where you compete to cook authentic medieval dishes (650-1650 CE in this case)in 4 categories (Meat, Grain, Vegetable, Dessert) in 4 hours in camping conditions (no electricity, but bottled gas/coleman is OK).
I competed with two dishes, Toad in the Hole (Yorkshire Pudding with sausage in it), and Fried Kubba Kari (rice dumplings stuffed with the same), and I also made a thoroughly not-in-the-historical-period sausage gravy, because I had just cooked 2 lbs of lamb sausage, and because I had always wanted to make some.
Both the Toad in the Hole and the sausage gravy turned out well, though the dumplings did not. They were made with broken rice, which was thoroughly cooked, but we could not get it to stick together, so it ended up fried rice with sausage.
Note on Recipes:
The following recipes are airy free. I will replaced milk with almond milk, and butter with rendered chicken fat (schmaltz) so that they were kosher (fleishig) dishes.
Additionally, because of poor planning on my part, I picked up flour in the last minute, and could not find white flour without malted barley flour (Sharon* is allergic to malt and barley), so I used “white wheat” flour, which is not as suitable.
Recipes:
Place cast iron dutch oven in a fire pit with the lid off. (I used the bottom of my charcoal smoker)Ingredients:
Preparation:
Ingredients:
Preparation:
The sausage recipe I posted on the blog in 2007.
I did not win anything, but this is the first time that I’ve had a recipe actually go from the page to the table as intended at Trial by Fire.
I have had things which became successful additions to my culinary repertoire, like my Indian spice rub, but this is the first time that my recipe turned out as initially intended.
There were no fire management issues, the batter came together well.
Considering the fact that I came up with the recipes about a week ahead of time, I got to cooking an hour late, that I didn’t do a trial run, and that this was my first time working with a roux (the sausage gravy), I am pleased with my results.
*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.
Today, I participated in the annual local SCA group’s cooking competition.
We got there late, and I had nothing to eat until about 5 pm as a result of us rushing to get there.
Then I spent 4 hours cooking historical recipes under camping conditions in 90° heat and high humidity.
I feel like a hard of elephants stampeded over me, so I’m turning in now.
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