Friday, December 7. 2007

DAILY BREAD

Ketchup with pot roast is a French-Canadian genetic thing.
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Happy Pearl Harbor Day.
Pearl Harbor Day is a major family holiday for us. It's the only 'day' both our cultures have in common. When the war ended, my Dad was in Manila, staging for the million-man invasion of the Japanese home islands, while my future mother-in-law, a middle-school student, was being trained to charge the American invaders with a sharpened stick.
In honor of what might have been, but never was, what better dish to celebrate the day than the cultural synthesis of Pot Roast Japonaise.
A few years ago some friends from Japan were in town for a business trip and we invited them over for dinner. I suggested we have a pot roast (the high end kind described in the addendum to this article), sort of easy to make and bullet-proof even for the inevitably inebriated chef. May suggested I make it with "a Japanese taste".
I came up with a cool compromise, taking some hints from, well of course Sukiyaki; plus a related beef, potato and onion soup/stew. I've tinkered with the recipe over the years, but on that first try I somehow nailed all the basics, meaning it all came out pretty much as planned. |
The first step is getting your hands on the right cut of beef for the roast. I make my high-end pot roast with a sirloin or rib roast, but for family meals I usually choose a less-expensive cut of chuck. Now, chuck is a large cut and you want only a 2.5 to 3.5 lb roast. Make sure you get the shoulder (upper) end of the chuck, which will be more round than square, well-marbled and tied up with twine. A roast from the lower, leg end of the chuck, will require a longer cooking time and your veggies may cook down to mush.
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Continue reading "Pot Roast Japonaise"
Thursday, December 6. 2007
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 A member of your congregation will open fire with automatic weapons after the church serviceLUCKY INSECT: domestic cockroach |

Tuesday, December 4. 2007


Guest Columnist
Annie Whiplash |
People like Joe Biden are somehow shocked that President Bush continues to beat the war drum at Iran, despite the recent National Intelligence Estimate that the Iranians have no active nuclear weapons program, and haven't since 2003.
Biden and his treacherous ilk just don't understand the concept of leadership; that leaders have to think differently, the very thing that makes them leaders. Any fool knows this, Joe Biden, and where have you been?
Though President Bush is often criticized as a lightweight, lacking depth, or even a simpleton, the Bush administration's Middle-East policy remains a work of genius, aimed at a single all-important goal: maintain a long-term status quo of instability in the region in order to artificially inflate oil prices.
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| The Sunni Saudi's are big Bush supporters, therefore Sh'i'ite Iran becomes the target of demonization, a requirement to keep up the scare factor with the great side benefit of pumping up the defense budget. Moreover, with Iran under a boycott and the Iraqi insurrection crippling their oil production, guess who stands to makes the most profit off that inflated crude? The Saudi Royal Family, long time Bush allies and business partners.
So it looks to me like everyone's happy: the oil companies, the OPEC nations, Halliburton, Lockheed, Bechtel-Parsons and the Pentagon. These are the things that fuel our economy, or at least the top of it, and you have to start somewhere.
If George Bush does step over some ill-defined, out-dated sense of Presidential powers, he certainly does so with the best interests of the country in mind.
That's called leadership, Joe Biden. |
The genius of the neo-con simplified Roadmap of the Middle-East is that it maintains a dangerous status quo of instability in order to pump up prices for the oil business.
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( Annie Whiplash is a regular contributor at Blog from the Future Past )

Monday, December 3. 2007

Earlier in the week, the Idaho Statesman published transcripts of interviews with four more men who claim they either had sex with conservative Republican Senator Larry Craig, or were approached by him in a sexually suggestive manner.
One of the men was at one time the plaything of evangelical minister Ted Haggard, but perhaps the only connection between the two is that they read the ads in the same magazines.
Despite this third major exposé by the Boise paper, Craig maintains an insistence that he isn't gay.
"You can check my apartment," he told reporters at his daily denial, "I guarantee you won't find a single Johnny, Judy or Barbra CD in my entire collection."
At one point in the interview, Craig pointed to his right ear lobe and said, "Look... no pierced ears. Everyone knows gays have pierced ears."
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Boise State football fans who claim to have had sex with Larry Craig in a Bronco Stadium men's room during halftime of the Fresno State game identify themselves to reporters by raising their hands.
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The embattled lawmaker has promised to carry on the legal battle to clear his name and overturn his solicitation conviction. "I may have done a few things that look funny," he said, responding to a reporter's question, "But I was only trying to find out who was gay and who wasn't, so I would know who I could trust if I needed someone to watch my luggage or check how I wiped."
It's sad, really... at this point, the only one who seems to care if Larry Craig is gay is Larry Craig.

Sunday, December 2. 2007
| Too bad on you if there's a little dirt in your closet and you happen to be murdered. The Media would no doubt pile on the 'speculation', as happened with Emily Sanders and Sean Taylor, as if the tragic loss of these young people somehow is deserved or inevitable, based on "who they were".
News outlets must think it's good business: gets more click-throughs, sells more newspapers or keeps little fingers off the remote. When Emily Sanders first went missing, the headlines read, 'High School Student Missing'. Shortly after, news came out that she was a semi-regular on some bush-league internet porn site. All of of sudden, she becomes a MISSING PORN STAR.
Linda Lovelace, she ain't... Emily wasn't famous, even to porn experts, and believe me, I checked. They might as well have used the headline, 'LITTLE SLUT GETS WHAT SHE DESERVES', for God's sake.
Here's the rub... police say Emily's budding porn career had nothing to do with her murder. They have a suspect, someone she left a bar with on the night she died. CNN even reported that, according to the local Chief of Police, all the porn talk was causing false leads and a media crush and was hampering the investigation.
It was nice to include that in their story, however, it didn't make them change their headlines.
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Why is the media trying to imply that the little slut Emily Sanders and the bad-ass black man Sean Taylor got what they deserved?
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Sean Taylor, who millions watched every Sunday collide with behemoths for millions a year, all of a sudden, 'had a past', was 'turning his life around', and all the other code-words they use to paint some brother as bad news.
This was no strip club shooting or nightclub jealousy. Sometimes people kill people just for their money, and that appears to be the case in the shooting of Sean Taylor. He was in bed asleep with his fiancee and baby girl, for God's sake.
Shame on you media guys... can't you at least wait until after the funeral?

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