Via Kevin Drum at Mother Jones, “Star Trek Is Now Officially Forever”. Fifty years is a pretty good run for a sci-fi series originally described by its creator as “Wagon Train to the stars”!
***********
Apart from nostalgia, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Betty Cracker
Love the Star Trek stamps but probably won’t have occasion to purchase any. A book of stamps lasts years thanks to email and bill paying apps.
Trying to think of some simple appetizers I can bring to a woodsy (yet electrified) campsite this weekend. Leaning toward a pimento cheese dip and meatballs & sauce in a crockpot.
raven
@Betty Cracker: smores
MattF
@Betty Cracker: Yeah… stamps and checkbooks. And envelopes. A year and a half ago I (finally) started using the bill pay service offered by my bank– and I’ve written a grand total of four checks since then.
kindness
@Betty Cracker: A portable TV so you don’t miss any college games. Oh, you meant food?!?
Betty Cracker
@raven: A great idea! What is camping with out s’mores?
@MattF: The only checks I write anymore are to the IRS and school fundraisers. I was behind a guy in the checkout line at the grocery store the other day — express line, too! — and he wrote a check. Everyone was giving him the stink-eye!
MattF
And, this evening, I’m going to Blues Alley in Georgetown with an old friend. There’s a tradition there of having a great pianist perform in the days before New Years. For years it was Ahmad Jamal, then, for the past few years it was Monty Alexander. This year it’s Cyrus Chestnut, who I haven’t heard before, but he got a rave review from the WaPo.
Mnemosyne
I have spent a large proportion of my holiday vacation laying around in my pajamas reading romance novels (Mary Jo Putney and Lisa Kleypas, for the curious), so today I got up and took myself over to the Huntington since we’re members, so why not? It’s busy, but not as nuts as LACMA was on Monday.
Shell
Sending out Christmas cards allowed me to get some Charlie Brown Christmas stamps.
Star Trek over? Never!!
A
Caught Cyrus at the Reston Community Center maybe 12 years or so ago? He’s totally top shelf, and in good company with the others you listed, who I’ve also had the good fortune to catch around town over the years. Now if it were McCoy Tyner with Michael Brecker again…those were the days!
Satby
Unexpected day off, after I drove to my job to find out the client evidently was fired for no show, no call. So… enjoying the quiet because the girls were dropped off soon St. Joe before I went to the jobsite and I can’t contact them to pick them up till I go get them. I have two hours to do something productive and I just want to chill.
Betty Cracker
Serial rapist Bill Cosby does the perp walk. It’s about damn time.
@MattF: My husband is a pianist, and Ahmad Jamal is one of his heroes.
bmaccnm
@Satby: Chilling without the children can be most restorative. It will produce a better relationship. At least that’s the line I fed myself.
Davebo
@Betty Cracker: Chili might be appropriate given the weather.
And Betty, there are no beans in chili just as there is no such thing as a chicken tamale!
MazeDancer
@Betty Cracker:
Good to see that Cosby vid. About time.
Also, just saw this vid on Twitter and thought, of course, of you, while laughing hard. It’s a boxer dog being picked up at the vet, giving its owner very explicit messaging on how the boxer dog feels about the entire situation.
Didn’t realize how articulate and expressive boxers are.
Germy
@Betty Cracker: interesting comments at the link about the cane he brought along.
bystander
@MattF: Love Cyrus Chestnut. Have fun!
Betty Cracker
@MazeDancer: Haha! That boxer looks just like my Patsy Marie! They are incredibly expressive dogs. Our Daisy has a “WTF?” look that cracks us up all the time as well as a “repressed rage” face reserved for baths.
bmaccnm
@Davebo: I’ve eaten chicken tamales in the Maya Mountains of Guatemala. Freshly ground masa and a little chicken steamed in a banana leaf, served with a little dab of red sauce and a cup of atole. Yum.
Gimlet
from Raw Story
Florida woman killed her 27-year-old daughter after mistaking her for an intruder, officials in St. Cloud said on Wednesday.
Police said that the mother was sleeping when she heard something that sounded like an intruder at around 11:51 p.m. on Tuesday, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
St. Cloud Police Department declined to release the identities of the shooter or the victim because someone in the home works for a law enforcement agency. Police also declined to say if the resident who worked for law enforcement was involved in the shooting.
jeffreyw
Mrs J is making carrot cake from scratch and it looks like it’ll be good eatin’.
Germy
@bmaccnm: chicken tamale sounds like it would be a great term of endearment.
Betty Cracker
@Davebo: I’m as agnostic on the beans vs. no beans in chili question as I am on Chicago vs. NY-style pizza. Chili good! Pizza good!
JCJ
@Betty Cracker:
That happened to me a few months ago. The guy would not tear out the check until he had recorded it and v e r y s l o w l y did the math to balance it. I was initially pissed but I found it so ridiculous I started laughing at myself.
Davebo
@bmaccnm:
Sorry but Tamale’s are pork.
A chicken tamale is boiled chicken with some masa wrapped around it! Call me a purist…
But I do love some good chicken mole!
schrodinger's cat
@jeffreyw: Ooh nice! Does you has a recipe? Also too, does any one has a cake recipe that uses cranberries?
Davebo
@JCJ: What drives me mad is when they wait until the checker has finished checking all of their items before pulling out the checkbook.
But honestly it’s mostly really old ladies and you can’t be mad at them.
JCJ
@Davebo:
Is that the menu for Betty’s camping trip or the weather forecast – Chili today and hot tamale!
bystander
@Gimlet:
What are you gawking at? Move along. Nothing to see here.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@MazeDancer: I enjoyed this one, from the same guy’s Twitter feed.
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
raven
@Davebo: Green Corn Tamales are great. Also,. tamales are made with all kinds of ingredients including fruit.
“The most common fillings are pork and chicken, in either red or green salsa or mole. Another traditional variation is to add pink-colored sugar to the corn mix and fill it with raisins or other dried fruit and make a sweet tamal de dulce. Commonly, a few “deaf”, or fillingless, tamales (tamales sordos), might be served with refried beans and coffee. Most recently the roasted pepper and Monterey Jack cheese (chile con queso) tamales have become a favorite recipe.”
Schlemazel
Nice story about Idaho teens fighting back when a handful of parents got the school district to ban “The Absolutely True Diary “,
I held my nose & dove into the comment section and was glad I did! Not only no nut jobs but someone labeled the parents Y’all Qaeda. That should get regular rotation with “American Taliban”
jeffreyw
@schrodinger’s cat: We haz recipe, yes. Mrs J and I like to add raisins and pineapple, we made sugared pecans and added them, crushed, to the frosting.
Roger Moore
@Davebo:
Tamales go back to well before Columbus, so it’s silly to claim that pork is the only legitimate filling. I would think turkey- or venison- would make a more genuinely authentic tamale.
Schlemazel
@Roger Moore:
Probably Cuy would be more authentic than all those things but eating Guinea pig in the US will probably get you a lot of hate. I’m with Davebo on the pork part (as well as chicken in mole’) simply because the pork holds up better against the tamale ingredients but YMMV.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
Tell him that Tranquility (1968) has just been rereleased after long being out of print. But wait a few minutes, because I have to order one of the last five CDs! (It’s also available on vinyl and MP3.)
ETA: The title is a hyperlink, in case you’re getting the no-see-um color scheme that I am.
dexwood
@Roger Moore:
Tamales made by my wife’s Pueblo Indian grandmother with elk and a terrific red chile sauce were so damn good i salivate just remembering them.
Steeplejack
@Davebo:
Sheldon Cooper on Penny’s “chili” with beans: “This is delicious—whatever it is!”
Matt McIrvin
Dammit, the XBox One I got for Christmas is broken.
This is 2 for 2 on XBoxen I’ve had to send in to Microsoft for repair/replacement under warranty. I knew they took a bath on this with the 360, didn’t know it was still going on.
Schlemazel
@Steeplejack:
I always assumed the reason it was “chili con carne” was because it contained meat & that just “chili” was the cheaper, just beans, version for when you couldn’t afford meat. Then the purists arrived and “con carne” was loped off and beans became a cardinal sin.
Felonius Monk
@Betty Cracker:
I remember going to a college dance in the early 1960’s: Stan Kenton and his orchestra in the main ballroom, Dizzy Gillespie in the small ballroom, and the Ahmad Jamal trio in the lounge. Quite an evening, musically anyway.
Steve in the ATL
Open Thread: To Boldly Go
Are we splitting infinitives now? For shame.
divF
@Germy:
Why not – dixie chicken works.
M. Bouffant
Will they stop splitting that infinitive before 100 yrs. have passed?
bmaccnm
@Davebo: Dude, you go tell these 4-foot-tall Mayan ladies that they aren’t really making tamales, and neither were their grandmothers’s grandmothers’s grandmothers. Where does one buy a food purity badge?
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
One of the few—very few—things that I regret about my retail stint at Barnes & Noble was that I never asked one of the occasional check-writers “Why?” And I’m not talking about aging, confused dowagers, I’m talking younger, seemingly with-it people. (None younger than about 35, though. Hmm.) I always figured that a debit card would be a suitable substitute, and you could always write down the amounts in a check register for a hard-copy record. Would love to know the reasoning behind “Nope! Gotta be a check.”
And don’t get me started on the people who didn’t start writing the check—or even take out their checkbook—until the whole transaction was over. You know who it’s going to be made out to, you know the date, so why not get a head start?
mapaghimagsik
So glad my efforts at Trek Fan Fiction didn’t go to waste ;)
Steeplejack
@Schlemazel:
It’s one of those vexed and stupid issues, right up there with Mac vs. PC and vi vs. emacs.
Heliopause
Rather tame. How about Chekov in the Agony Booth? Vina as an Orion slave girl? Dax and Lenara kissing? Now those would be stamps.
J R in WV
@MazeDancer:
To me, the puppy is looking at his pal, desperately seeking freedom, looking hard for the moment the cell is opened. No rage, just “Save me, bro!”
We had a really big cat, who we had to take to an emergency vet, his regular doctor was closed for the holiday weekend. He was white with orange spots, and weighed about 20 pounds! When Mrs J went to get him Monday morning, they took her back to pick him up. There was a standard issue label on Ralph’s cage that said “BITES” and under that was a hand-written addition: “Hard”.
This is no doubt why Mrs J had to get him. He jumped out of the jail cell onto her shoulder, gently.
The boxer is just desperate to get out and go home. They don’t do rage very often.
And most anything can be in a tamale, just as most anything can be in chili. Get over it, rules aren’t for food! Green tamales rock!
tybee
@Betty Cracker:
stuffed mushrooms. grilled.
a dab of strong cheese, a small slice of jalapeno, perhaps a slice of onion.
PurpleGirl
@Steeplejack: When I used to write checks in stores, I’d have planned that before getting to the cashier and have begun writing the writing the check so the only field to be filled in was the amount. These days the only check I write is my monthly maintenance charge because the Co-Op hasn’t instituted using the internet. I wish they would.
Steeplejack (phone)
@PurpleGirl:
I write one, maybe two checks a year. The last one I can remember was to my dentist, who gives a discount for not using a credit or debit card. He gives a slightly bigger discount for cash, but I didn’t have that much on me last time.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Love the stamps. Hopefully the first of a series.
Thor Heyerdahl
There’s always Vulcan, Alberta (historically a farming community 80 miles south of Calgary) which has a replica of the Enterprise, a “Trekcetera” museum, a bust of Leonard Nimoy, and built a model space ship for their tourism centre. Additionally, they host a convention “Vul-Con”.
http://www.townofvulcan.ca/
DougBoy
@Betty Cracker: My head was angled oddly when I first read your comment. The last sentence appeared to my wondering eyes as “Leaning toward a primate dip…”.
redshirt
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): Same. Hopefully some religious nut out there is complaining about having an illegal alien performing their pagan religion on a USA stamp, by god!
I’m holding out for the Captain Archer and Porthos stamps.
Be holding a while, I reckon.
mclaren
To split infinitives no one has split before…
Sorry, my English teachers were just wrong about that one. Split infinitives often work much better than the weird circumlocutions required to avoid ’em.
mclaren
@Heliopause:
Those would remind us too much of the Bush administration.
workworkwork
I’m planning on sautéing some fresh broccoli florets in olive oil and garlic and toss them with some pasta and grated parmesan. Let it cool, box them up and put them in the fridge for an easy, delicious side dish.
Just finished making some crustless quiche that will be our breakfast for the next few days.
What I really need, though, is a day off. When you’re the primary caregiver for your spouse, the holidays can be kind of tough.
In addition, I’m doing some paid work developing some course material and waiting to hear if I got the job I applied for at the beginning of the month. (I’m currently an adjunct instructor and the opening is for a full-time department chair. And I can still work from home.)
Anyway, tomorrow my wife goes back to her day program, I’ve turned in my current set of deliverables and all I have scheduled is a morning trip to the grocery store. If the cats let me, I may be able to take some time for myself.