Gib lays out the pros and cons.

Former Sen. John Edwards (D-SC)
Pros: Is not, so far as I know, the mind-controlled love slave of Kim Jong-Il.
Cons: Is actually John Edwards.

My parents are in town, so blogging’s a bit light following last night’s excursion around the neighborhood with a handsome, Super Bowl-winning quarterback. He’s just as cute in person. A bit shorter, though.

In the lack of more substantive posts, enjoy the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain performing “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”

“All right, my lover?”

Which I’m going to use as my excuse both for linking the Huffy Post and for finding this somewhat hot. The Obama part, not the Ellen part, I hasten to add. SOMEWHAT, I said.

Ever tried Estancia Cabernet? I highly recommend it.

I had to type the period in that last sentence three times before I could make it be not a >.

Via (where else) Allah’s Fun House.

The whole thing reminds me, vis-a-vis Bill’s saxophone, of the time Billy Joel went on Letterman on his first night at CBS (or it may have been his last night at NBC). Dave told him he’d heard that Billy had been invited to Martha’s Vineyard to “jam” with Clinton, but that he hadn’t gone. Billy, my love, said (paraphrased), “Yeah, it wasn’t anything political or anything like that. I just didn’t think it would be a very good jam.”

My boy. Right on.

Have your party.

I think this leaves my Cubs as the last goat in baseball.

At least I still have my Colts and their now world-beating QB.

I’m occasionally taken in by a good story, I’ll admit. I didn’t see the ending of Sixth Sense coming. It’s probably better for my enjoyment that way but it does occasionally make me feel foolish.

So here’s a little tale, completely true, about a visit to Sea World I was on with some cousins of mine. They won’t mind me telling the story since even if you knew my real name you couldn’t guess which cousins it was–I have a lot of them.

So I’m sitting next to my cousin, we’ll call him Stu, at the dolphin show, with his wife, we’ll call her Jane, on his other side. Gorgeous dolphins with incredible hang time, yay Sea World. They bring a family out–man, woman, daughter–to let the little girl give the dolphin a treat for its tricks. Aaww. The trainer suggests that Mom go up on a little bridge between the audience and the trainer area to take a picture of Daughter interacting with Dolphin. Aaaww. The next thing we know, Mom is in the water, she’s fallen off the bridge. And she’s freaked. She’s flailing and screaming as if there are barracudas in the pool instead of cuties who like to nudge you with their noses. A dolphin comes over to her and she goes even more berserk, screaming and splashing at the dolphin in a panic. Clue #1: No trainer had dived into the pool at this point. The sum total of their action consisted of encouraging the woman, via the microphone, to swim to the front of the pool where there was a ladder. I turn to Daddyman demanding to know how anybody can be such a total panicked loser twit that they would scream and splash instead of making nice with the dolphin and enjoying the accident of a lifetime. Probably his silence on this point was to spare my feelings. The bozo mom is making her way, with much trembling and drama, to the front of the pool, and still no trainer has taken charge of the situation. About this time, both woman and dolphin go under and suddenly the show finishes with some finale human-dolphin trick that I can’t remember right now. Oh.

I turn to Stu, deflated but giggling, “I feel so stupid. They really had me going.” Cousin Stu turns to me with a matching grin. “This’ll make you feel better. They took me in too … until Jane said, ‘You idiot, they got you with this one the last time we were here.’”

Eah. He works in the industry which is one of my primary areas of consumer input–Hollywood. I suppose a reasonable–reasonable, I said!–dose of credulity is an advantage for people who work on or just love good stories.

Took The Little Bean, age four, to the local high school football game tonight, between the public high school (1-4 going in) and the Jesuit high school (4-1 going in). I saw a public HS twit with the following legend magic-markered (I guess it would be “Sharpied” nowadays) on his shirt: “We don’t need Jesus to win.”

I don’t think Jesus, or Jesuit’s star running back, liked that at all. Jesuit walloped the public school 42-zip.

Allah admits evidence of God.

…this cat’s bulk or the likelihood that some geek actually grokked the Huttese to make the caption.

1) Docweasel asked for my contact info. It’s now in a page linked off the sidebar until I can figure a better way to display it.

2) Karol asked for recipes. My “signature” dish, so called because I’ve made it enough never to screw it up and it’s a yummy, nutritious meal, is pepper steak. I’m making it tonight, in fact.

–1 lb. beef for stir-fry (if your grocery store packages this already sliced into strips, so much the better. If not, get something in a sirloin-class cut and slice it perpendicular to the grain into two-inch strips)
–two or three cloves garlic, chopped
–one white or yellow onion, chopped
–two or three bell peppers, various colors, sliced into thin strips
–two roma tomatoes, quartered
–olive oil
–salt and pepper
–soy sauce, approximately 1/4 cup
–2 tbs. cornstarch
–1/4 cup water
–rice prepared according to box directions

Start your rice simmering according to box directions.

Heat a large skillet or wok over medium high heat. Add approx. 1-2 tbs. olive oil. When oil is hot, add chopped garlic. When garlic is sizzling (if garlic begins to brown, turn the heat down!), add steak, salt and pepper to taste, and stir-fry until well browned on all sides. Remove beef and garlic and any liquid from frying to a bowl, add 1/4 cup soy sauce and set aside. Return pan to the heat and add a bit more oil, enough to stir-fry the onion and peppers until crisp-tender (they will be lightly coated with oil and take on a more intense color, but not brown or soften noticeably). Return beef to pan and add a dash more soy sauce. Soy should mix with beef broth and come to a boil. Lay quartered tomatoes on top of the mixture, cover the whole thing with either the pan lid or aluminum foil and turn heat down till the mixture is simmering enough to steam the tomatoes, about five minutes or until tomatoes look cooked. If there is not a reasonable amount of liquid in the pan, add water, soy sauce, or both and bring to a boil again. While the tomatoes steam, add 2 tbs. cornstarch to a bowl, add the 1/4 cup water, and mix well with a fork or a whisk until liquid is smooth.

When tomaoes are well steamed, add cornstarch mixture to the pan and stir. Sauce should thicken.

It’s done! It can sit on the very lowest “simmer” setting for a while without hurting it if your guests are late or you forgot to cook the rice, as I’ve done many times.

Serve over rice. Enjoy! When I make it tonight I’ll try to measure the soy sauce and update.

Update: If all goes well, 1/4 cup soy sauce is about all you’ll need, and I’ve updated the recipe accordingly. If, however, you cook the beef till the liquid boils away, you’ll need to add some water (1/8-1/4 cup) to your mixture after returning the beef to the pan, with maybe a dash more soy sauce. Mine is simmering and steaming the tomatoes right now, which means I’m live-blogging a recipe, which makes me some kind of serious fusion geek, I think.

3) nk asked for the tank/bra boobage pictures in order to judge whether it’s a traffic-stopping look or not.

Well, you don’t get everything you ask for.

… though I do know the way. Of course.

Telemarketer: “Hi, my name is [X] with DHM. We’re doing a public-opinion survey about the future of Portland. May I please speak with a male in the household between the ages of 18 and 35?”

Me: “No.”

It was actually kind of a shame, though, because I was curious what angle they were going to be flogging about the “future of Portland.”

See?

I told you.

I gotta start watching more Tucker Carlson.

Update: Okay, seriously, everybody from Tucker to AP (comments to the above thread) to See-Dub to See-Dub’s dad apparently has one of these “Yeah, happened to me” stories about being propositioned in the men’s room. Tucker’s dead on that gay groups need to be disavowing this sort of thing early and often, unlike “It’s My Culture” George Michael.

Ew.