Arroz con Pollo

This is a favorite from my childhood. I've been experimenting
with it for years, and have never really been satisfied with
the results. Until this version.

1 clove garlic
1 1/2 tsp kosher salt
2 black peppercorns
pinch (or a couple grinds) black pepper
1 tsp oregano
olive oil
3 lb or so chicken pieces (I use all dark meat and leave the skin on)
1 onion
1 green pepper
3 tomatoes
2 tsp tomato paste
1 qt chicken stock
pinch saffron threads (preferred), or 1/8 tsp saffron powder
12 or so large green olives
1 tsp capers
3 pimentos
1 cup frozen peas
2 cups rice

In a mortar, grind the garlic with the salt, pepper, peppercorns,
and oregano with a little oil. Add more oil (a tablespoon or so)
to make enough of this mixture to rub the chicken pieces with.
Let the chicken marinate in the oil mixture in a plastic bag for
at least 20 minutes or so.

While the chicken is marinating: chop the onion and green pepper;
blanch, shock, peel, halve, seed, and chop the tomatoes, and steep
the saffron in a bit of hot water (if using threads).

Brown the chicken on both sides in a dutch oven, and set aside.
Add additional oil if necessary and saute the onion and green
pepper just til the onion is translucent. Add the browned chicken,
tomatoes, tomato paste, saffron, saffron water, 2 cups stock, and
salt and pepper to taste. Simmer 1/2 hour.

While the chicken and etc. are simmering, slice the olives, take
the peas out of the freezer, and slice the pimentos into strips.

Lift out the chicken and set aside. Strain the liquid, reserving
the solids, and bring the volume of liquid up to a quart with
more chicken stock. Correct seasoning. Add liquid, rice, and
solids back to the pot, mix, and bring to a gentle boil.

Arrange chicken pieces on top of the rice mixture, and sprinkle
the olives, capers and pimentos on top of the chicken. Cover and
simmer gently till rice is tender and liquid has been absorbed.

If peas are still cold, cook them briefly in a bit of boiling water.

Remove chicken pieces. Mix in the peas, and turn everthing out onto
a platter. Arrange chicken pieces on top of rice for service. Serve
with hot sauce (e.g. Tabasco) on the side.

Some of the rice will probably stick to the bottom of the pot. DO
NOT THROW THIS OUT - it's the best part. The Panamanians call this
"concolon" (sp), and the favored child or guest gets it.

You can leave the peas out. I have to at my house.

Some cooks bone the chicken and slice it into strips before browning
it. This is, quite obviously, bizarre and wrong. How are you going
to suck the bones at the table?

Just gotta get this off my chest

I fucking hate Bruce Springsteen. Can't stand his shit, except perhaps for a couple of cuts from his album "Nebraska" which nobody ever plays. Bleah.

That is all.

Update to my last post

See "A Radical Idea" just below. I must have been fucking high.

After this shit: I will never, ever, ever vote for a fucking Dummycrat. Even to force a race over an even worse Dummycrat. There's no such thing as one Dummycrat worse than another.

God-all-fucking-mighty.

UPDATE: The link is now broken (actually, it goes to a different vote). This was the bill to protect citizens who report suspicious activity in good faith from later being hauled into civil court. It was overwhelmingly opposed by Democrats.

A Radical Idea

I think that, to finally force the Democrats to act like adults where the War on Terror is concerned, it will be necessary to put one in the White House.

There, I've said it. It's painful, for someone in my position - but I think it'd be impossible for anyone further to the right than I to even consider. But I think the Republic will survive the obvious disadvantages, particularly if the Congress remains relatively evenly matched.

The only question is, who?

If the GOP nomination is sewn up by the time the Primaries are held in my state, I may vote as a Democrat and cast a ballot for Barack Hussein Obama. I wouldn't be able to keep my gorge down long enough to vote for Clinton, and Edwards is just another narcissistic peacock.

Our pals the Italians

Remember the Sgrena incident?

An Italian court is going to try the US soldier who fired on her speeding car to protect his checkpoint. For murder.

Can we question their patriotism now?

From a far-left USENET group I read, someone is commenting on today's rocket attack on the US embassy in Athens:

Apparently they were aiming at the US Emblem and missed, destroying a toilet instead.

And someone else responds:

"Instead?"

Nice, huh?

An open letter to the Democratic leadership

The Honorable Nancy Pelosi
Speaker of the House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515

The Honorable Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Madam Speaker and Senator Reid:

First, my congratulations to both of you and to the Democratic Party in having retaken both houses of Congress in the recent elections.

I come to you as one who has never voted for a Democrat, but who has -like so many others - become increasingly frustrated with the failure of the Republicans to take a leadership role in returning the operation of this country to first principles.

The Democrats have the opportunity, at this historic time, to capture a more permanent majority via appealing to the values and principles of classical liberalism. Your party already represents an attractive alternative by virtue of owing no obeisance to the religious right and to the isolationist element so prevalent in mine. On the other hand, however, there are a few areas where people such as me find the Democrats to be seriously lacking. I’m sure you have at your disposal any number of experts who can expand on that point, but I want to offer two major examples:

Stop trying to raise our taxes to the Moon. The moral questions surrounding confiscatory taxation quite aside, it has been shown time and again that limited federal taxation is much healthier both for the larger economy and for the treasury itself. I call on you to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and to expand upon that theme by making further cuts where and when possible.

Start respecting the entire Bill of Rights. Over the past couple of decades, gun "control" measures instituted at the federal level have been rolled back or modified in favor of legitimate firearms ownership, and numerous state measures have been put in place to compel so-called "shall-issue" concealed-handgun licensure. All of these changes have had positive results, with statistically insignificant examples of the kind of violence and lawlessness breathlessly predicted by opponents of the Second Amendment. I call on you to oppose efforts within your party to reinstitute failed measures such as the ban on so-called "assault weapons," and to work to encourage or even compel state-by-state reciprocal-recognition agreements for concealed-handgun licenses.

Thank you for your consideration of these matters. I urge you to take this opportunity seriously - if you do so, you may be surprised to find many first-time Democrat voters in the next and subsequent elections.

Sincerely,
[real name deleted]

CC: internet posting

Update: nine months later, and still no response.

Cheap red pasta sauce

The world has waited for this long enough. Here's my basic red tomato/meat sauce for spaghetti; what they might call "gravy" on The Sopranos:

* 1 medium onion, chopped
* 3 cloves garlic, minced
* 1 lb lean ground beef (but not TOO lean)
* 2 28oz cans tomato puree
* 1 28oz can italian plum tomatoes
* 1 tbsp ground oregano
* 1 tsp dried thyme
* 3 bay leaves
* 1 tsp dried basil
* 1 tsp salt
* 1/4 tsp sugar
* black pepper to taste
* olive oil

Saute onion and garlic in olive oil till translucent. Remove to bowl and reserve.

Brown ground beef in same pot. (This is, ideally, an enameled dutch oven or a stainless-steel pressure cooker.) Add half the oregano while the beef is browning. Drain any grease you consider to be excessive.

Add everything else. Simmer slowly several hours, or pressure-cook 1/2 hour, release pressure, check for sticking and taste, pressure-cook an additional 1/2 hour if you think it needs it and can take it.

I'm pretty sure this is the same recipe my dad made going back to when I was 4 or 5 years old.

My dog has decided that he should help out a bit

.. like with the laundry.

Expectations of privacy, and granting of same

I had an experience yesterday and today that gave me pause to think about what we've come to expect from society in terms of our expectations of privacy, and the lengths to which we'll go to honor those expectations.

My boss never showed up for work on Monday. This is quite out of character for him; a classic workaholic. And even if he were ill, or had gotten called out of town, he'd have left a message for one of us via email or the like.

We emailed him. We called his cellphone. We called his home phone. We checked with the department secretary. No info.

Finally, about noon, a coworker and I printed out a Google map to his house and went over there. Both of his cars were in the driveway, and all the doors were locked. No answer to our rings and knocks. I gained access to the back yard and searched it thoroughly. No sign of him. And his family left for an overseas vacation last week, so he would have been home alone.

For any random individual, you might think this was a case of him taking advantage of having the wife out of town to catch a flight to Vegas or the like. Not P___. Completely out of character. And remember how he's a workaholic? We're currently very much under the gun; trying to get a chip finished and out the door for manufacture. There's no way he'd take off at a time like this unless there were some really good reason.

Given all the above, we came very close to breaking a window. But as we were there not only as individuals, but also in some sense representatives of our employer, we felt the best course of action would be to return to the office and ask our superiors for direction.

The upshot: they called the police, who made pretty much the same search we did, and refused to go further.

Finally, after office hours, I returned to P___'s house. A couple of other senior engineers were there, along with a guy from Human Resources. We conducted a more thorough search, going so far as to search a nearby creekbed - even though going for a walk near a dirty creek in midsummer would have been even more out of character for P___ than any of the other possiblities already mentioned. One of the others was tall enough to see, once I gave him a boost, through part of a window not obscured by blinds. No sign of anybody.

The Human Resources guy, however, had a cellphone full of phone numbers available to him, and one of the people behind those numbers apparently had some pull. About nine in the evening, the police entered the house. And found P___ dead.

No details yet on how, or when.

That second factor is kind of important to me. In retrospect, the obvious thing to do, in the face of all the wrongness of the situation, would have been to enter the house. But even given all that, we did not. P___'s presumed expectation of privacy, and our respect for that expectation, held us back. I have to believe that in other cultures - say, those of totalitarian states, or those otherwise not accustomed to such niceties of civilization, entry would have been accomplished in short order, either by my companion and me or by the police.

And, if the time of death turns out to have been sometime between noon and nine- well, you can kind of see why it's important to me.

I still think I did everything correctly. But I have to say that I'll be pretty unhappy if it turns out that P___ was alive and retrievable during my first visit.

UPDATE: It turns out that he most likely died about 36 hours before our initial visit to his house. That makes me feel slightly better, but only slightly. I haven't heard any official word, and (again!) that respect for privacy has kept me from asking, but the most likely cause of death appears to have been heart attack.

Israel and Hizbollah: sometimes there's a damn good reason for disproportionality

Read this. I can't say it any better.

Credit where credit is due dept.

Remember back during the early stages of the active part of the terror war, when Geraldo Rivera was expelled from the theater of operations for drawing a map in the sand - on live TV - depicting the deployment of America military assets? Most people with a clue reacted to this with a round of huzzahs, of course.

Now here's a video of Fox News - of all people! - doing pretty much the same thing with regards to our allies the Israelis, and taking a bit of instant heat for it. And to add stupidity to sliminess, neither the field reporter nor the talking heads back in the studio seem to be able to understand what the hell the big deal was.

I'd also note that the nature of the fire the field reporter takes seems more harassing than anything else - a couple of warning shots, if you will. Certainly if it was the IDF firing on him, and they wanted to kill him, they would have done so.

(I owe a hat tip to another blogger for this. Since he didn't provide it on his blog, however, he may not want the tip - so I'm not giving it at this time. If he would like it, he knows how to get in touch with me.)

"Truth, Justice, and...

... all that stuff."

Huh?

...in the latest film incarnation, scribes Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris sought to downplay Superman's long-standing patriot act. With one brief line uttered by actor Frank Langella, the caped superhero's mission transformed from "truth, justice and the American way" to "truth, justice and all that stuff."

Story here.

The sad thing, I guess, is that this isn't really particularly surprising.

The Waiter Dream

Everyone I know who's ever carried a tray has this dream from time to time.

You arrive late for work, due to circumstances out of your control. There are a lot of people in the restaurant, and to handle them the boss has had the busboys set up a number of tables in odd places - such as the parking lot, the alley behind the building, etc. You are responsible for most of them.

The bartenders are all drunk. The cooks are all stoned. The other waiters and waitresses are all playing grab-ass with each other. The busboys are all in hiding.

Every customer asks for something weird, like putting the mayonaisse on the outside of their sandwich, which you can't quite seem to get quite right. You forget about almost every table, and then remember to go check on them about an hour later, at which time they just sort of glare at you. Oh, and of course there's three feet of that mysterious dream jelly on the ground - the invisible stuff that somehow prevents you from moving at more than a slow, deliberate walk.

Then you wake up in a cold sweat.

When you get back to sleep, you most likely fall right back into the same dream, only now you're even more behind because of your little trip back to the real world.

This is why I tend to overtip in restaurants.

A Religion Of Peace

So, it appears that an Afghan man is on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity. The possible penalty? Death.

Yale must be so proud.

What's Iran really up to?

It may not be the destruction of Israel; or at least not primarily. From "Spengler" at the Asia Times:

Iran needs nuclear weapons, I believe, not to attack Israel, but to support imperial expansion by conventionalmilitary means.

Iran's oil exports will shrink to zero in 20 years, just at the demographic inflection point when the costs of maintaining an aged population will crush its state finances.... Just outside Iran's present frontiers lie the oil resources of Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, and not far away are the oil concentrations of eastern Saudi Arabia. Its neighbors are quite as alarmed as Washington about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and privately quite happy for Washington to wipe out this capability.

Hmmmm.

Yeah, sure, gun "control" works

Our friends in gun-free Great Britain are experiencing a 50% jump in crimes involving firearms:

Figures published this week by the Home Office are expected to show that offences involving guns have soared by as much as 50 per cent in some parts of the country.

And, of course, they have a predictable solution:

There have been widespread calls for tighter gun controls in Britain....

I think it was Einstein who said that the habit of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is a good indicator of insanity.

Clinton eligible to practice law once again

This news from the New York Sun.

Money quote: "Since leaving the White House, Mr. Clinton has shown no sign of being encumbered by his lack of a law license."

First Robertson, now Nagin

Looks like Ray Nagin is taking a page from Pat Robertson's book:

Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America"
and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart
with violence and political infighting.

Both of these guys are idiots. Guess which will get more press, though....

Attention parents! Have some damn consideration!

What is it with people pushing strollers and those stupid oversized grocery carts with kiddie seats in them? Do they leave their brains in their minivans? Or just their courtesy and common sense?

Yesterday I'm shopping for weekly groceries at Central Market in Plano, Texas - a kind of upscale supermarket - and the place was full of them. I can't go one way because someone's blocked the aisle, so I go the other way - and that way's blocked as well. The aisles are a bit narrow, but that's not the real problem - rather, these people have parked their SUVs - uh, I mean, strollers and carts - crosswise in the aisle, and are just looking around with stunned expressions on their faces as though they're surprised that the kholrabi isn't just jumping out of the bins for them. You say "excuse me" and they might move very slightly out of the way like so many cattle, but that's pretty much all you can expect - they're definitely in a different world; one where nobody outside of them and their brood even exists....

At one point I got a bit too close to one of those enormous strollers and bumped it a little, and the guy who was supposed to be handling it glared at me as though I'd given his kid the back of my hand. What, was he going to start something with me right there next to the celery? Sheesh!

Arghghghg