Wow. Twelve thousand calories a day. And what calories! I think even Pippin would have turned his nose up at pizza.

Via Hot Air.

A plan for widespread certification rather than four-year degrees. It makes a lot of sense. I had a conversation not too long ago with an architect who went to a technical school rather than a university, and he talked about how the young college grads in his office struggle to keep their heads above water because their university courses hadn’t taught them about the building codes and laws they need to know to be licensed in their state.

No technical barriers stand in the way of evolving toward a system where certification tests would replace the BA. Hundreds of certification tests already exist, for everything from building code inspectors to advanced medical specialties. The problem is a shortage of tests that are nationally accepted, like the CPA exam.

It makes a lot of sense for editors. Though I doubt individual employers would stop testing individual candidates on their skills as they do now, at least they would know going in what skills those candidates are supposed to have, if they’re certified as having passed tests on the various style manuals, and could stop wasting their time testing everybody with a degree who thought editing looked easy enough for them to do.

Oh wait, except that’s how I got into editing myself. Well, no, not really–I focused on editing as what I really wanted to do, as opposed to what I studied in college, and I passed with flying colors the test my hiring manager gave me. But still, would my employer have looked twice at me under a certification system that I had not entered yet? A widespread system of certification would make it more difficult to change careers in that way, would make it much harder to apply for a new batch of jobs and see what shook out, but then editing is somewhat unique among professions in that it doesn’t necessarily require a specific degree or certification (like passing the bar, for example) but it does test you at the door. Perhaps it is one of very few professions that you can currently switch to relatively easily, as I did, and maybe for people wanting to switch to other professions, a certification system would actually make it easier, in potentially not having to go back to college before being able to switch.

At any rate, the point is well made about cutting through a lot of BS in the four-year system … and in life, as well, including BS like this:

Here’s the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders.

I wish that were true, but think back to college, think of that professor whose class you knew was bogus or lightweight. What’s he or she doing there? The dual-pronged BS of the college system: It confers degrees on people who might actually be ready for not much and promotes teachers who lead to the same result. A certification system would certainly require colleges to be more competitive outside the zone. That would be a good thing.

Via Hot Air headlines.

I love B-17s. I love Memphis Belle, I have a framed drawing of the Shoo Shoo Baby, I think the men who flew in them and their near mechanical relatives were a particular class of hero apart. I almost cried the other day describing the scene where John Lithgow tries to raise a cheer for the men of the Belle because they’re going to fly their 25th mission in the morning, only to be slapped down by the superstitious air crews who know it’s bad luck to count chickens before they’ve hatched. And I only got into the discussion in the first place in order to mention Harry Connick’s rendition of “Danny Boy.”

Anyway, there are still a few airworthy B-17s out there. Apparently if you’re in the right place at the right time, you can crawl up the hatch and get a feel for what it was like. Wow.

Scene: Playground, summer, a couple hours before sunset.

Son: “Mom, climb up here and slide with me.”

Me: “No, I’ll watch you slide.”

Son: “Noooo, climb up here, I want to slide together.”

Me: “No, I’m too big [fib, hoping he’ll just accept it]. I’ll just watch.”

Son: “You used to slide with me.”

Me: “When you were little. Now you’re big and you don’t need me to slide.”

Son: “Did you slide when you were 32?”

Me: “Probably.”

Son: …

Son: “Has your tush gotten wider?”

***

Later, inside the house, Mom returns into the kitchen to find son staring at the computer monitor.

Son, grinning the grin of the one who knows he won: “That’s what we said.”

I’ve taken on quite a devotion to cooking in the last couple years. I love my cast-iron pans, I love broiling steaks in them, making pasta sauces in them, making everything I possibly can in them, and next weekend I’m going to try a giant apple pancake in one of them. I’ve always suspected, though, that I would be looked down upon by serious enthusiastic cooks and food lovers, because there are so many different foods I don’t like. These fall into a few categories: Foods I like okay but probably wouldn’t choose if given options (shrimp, for example); foods I don’t like but will endure if I have to (citrus fruit, cilantro, others); foods I don’t like on their own but will accept in other things (blueberries in pancakes or muffins, avocado in guacamole); foods I simply cannot stand and will not eat under any circumstances (beets, mushrooms, artichokes, any of the weirder types of fruits like mango, nuts other than peanuts, tea, coconut, etc.).

Recently I’ve become completely enamored of the Smitten Kitchen, so it was with glee that I came upon her entry of some of her food weirdnesses and discovered that even serious cooks have a lot of stuff they don’t like.

2. As the above should suggest I’m really quite the curmudgeon about food; cooking allows me to hide this: I hate beets, green peppers on anything but pizza and even then not really, find cilantro (the green, not the powdered spice or seed) distasteful, as well as most teas, broccoli rabe and kale,all chais, cardamom, caviar, cheese-stuffed or coated items, dolma, minestrone, coconut curries, mustard that looks like yellow paint, the vast majority of fruit juices, nectars and smoothies and the vast majority of California cabernets and chardonnays I have tried.

Awesome. I don’t like smoothies myself because of a very limited relationship with fruit in general (strawberries, apples, grapes, and bananas, essentially, make the cut, and sparingly). She hates beets and dislikes cilantro! Just like me! Woo! But best of all was this bit:

1. After being a vegetarian for more than 15 years, the thing I took most quickly to was bacon, followed by any sort of pork, mussels and then beefy stews in butter-enriched sauces. Perhaps I wasn’t so much a “vegetarian” all those years but “rebelling against Jewish food.” Meanwhile, I have no love for typically easy-to-love non-vegetarian items such as chicken, turkey and shrimp. I’d pretty much rather eat a beet than a grilled chicken cutlet, which I will insist to my dying day tastes closer to cardboard than something edible.

Hallelujah. I have only recently come to the conclusion that the main reason I haven’t worked with raw chicken in my kitchen for a year or more, other than to roast a whole bird now and then, is because I really don’t enjoy eating the results. I made a heavy-duty chicken stir-fry the other night because of a sneaking suspicion that I’d been going too heavy on the beef lately, and it just. is. not. worth. it. The slimy, raw chicken that you have to pull strings of bloody tendon out of, and what do you get? Little chunks of white, dry, tasteless protein only marginally rescued by the glory of veggies around it. Yuck. I’m with Deb: Bacon, pork, beef. (I’ve never tried mussels.) Give me a steak to slap into the cast iron, any time, or chopped bacon on my spinach salad, or pancetta in my mashed potatoes, or pork tenderloin … did I mention the steak broiled in cast iron? Yum.

“The franchise [of Indiana Jones] really depends on me coming up with a good idea.”

—

… wait for it …

—George Lucas

You know, I’m kind of sure that was sort of true. In about 1986.

Maybe if he got Lawrence Kasdan, or even Frank Darabont, to write everything else once he’d come up with “a good idea,” it would actually stay good. Hell, I’d like to get a peek at Tom Stoppard’s efforts, too.

More head-scratchers in the piece:

The filmmaker scoffed at the possibility of passing the famed fedora from Ford to Shia LaBeouf, the 22-year-old actor played Indy’s son Mutt Williams in this summer’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.”

“He is Indiana Jones,” Lucas said of Ford. “If Indiana Jones wasn’t in it, you’d have to call it ‘Mutt Williams and the search for Elvis.’ … “Yeah, it’s ‘Mutt Williams and the Search for Elvis.”

So … smoking something, then, were we?

“I have an idea to make Shia [LaBeouf] the lead character next time and have Harrison [Ford] come back like Sean Connery did in the last movie.”

I get that “lead character” is not the same as saying Shia Labeouf will be Indiana Jones, but it sure sounds the same as “New Lead Character and the Search for Elvis.” And even if he does call it Indiana Jones and the [Whatever], I stand by my statement that we don’t want it and that I, at least, won’t watch it if he’s not the primary lead. Says the girl who didn’t even watch the last one.

Not the only howler in the piece, either:

Lucas plans a live-action “Star Wars” TV series as well, and he’s also looking into re-releasing the six “Star Wars” films using new 3-D technology.

God have mercy on Anakin Skywalker’s soul. I don’t even own the original three on DVD. How sad is that, for a girl who was in love with Han Solo from age five? Fie on thee, Lucas.

And lastly and bizarrely unrelated, this charmer:

“Like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, I’ll go out and adopt twins if they’ll pay me $14 million to do it.”

Jerk.

I hope he doesn’t regret it.

Zabaduba again, to be specific. And I remember the lining up. For the morass of digital images that was Episode I. So I know that his commenter has a point too. Sadly.

Except painted faces at a Cubs game, or any baseball game, are far rarer than at a football game. FYI. Baseball fans don’t want that paint all up in their beer.

It’s simple: Keep only 100 things, not including anything in your shared household, anything you might want to use later, anything with personal history, or any books. Then get rid of crap you’re not using, like a yoga mat, and some extraneous clothes and the pewter LotR figurines. Voila!

Zabaduba describes in detail this guy’s self-parodying “purge.”

So, Dave was so disgusted by his cluttered lifestyle that he’s rebelling by living in a fully furnished house (with piano!), with a completely stocked kitchen and loaded bookshelves, while keeping all the personal items he doesn’t use everyday in a box for a year. Wow. Inspiring.

Judging by the comments, there are too many people who still think that good intentions and high-flown ideals are what count. Why do you have to bother to set up a Game with a Namegoal like 100 Thing Challenge … and then make a mockery of it right from the get-go by taking more than 100 things out of the running for elimination? Why can’t you just get rid of crap you’re not using, like the average rest of us?

Oh yeah … that wouldn’t gain you the admiration of a slice of the masses. But dude, as long as you’re sacrificing, I’ll be happy to take those LotR pewters off your hands.

If you’d just been extracted from your car by the jaws of life and people were trying to shoulder up not to offer help but to snap you with their cell-phone cameras, would you joke about it? Nope, I wouldn’t either, but apparently Morgan Freeman did.

[Charleston Sun Sentinel editor] McFerrin said bystanders converged on the scene trying to get a glimpse of the actor.

When one person tried to snap a photo with a cell phone camera, Freeman joked, “no freebies, no freebies,” McFerrin said.

Swift recovery to you, Mr. Freeman.

Firefly is on sale today at Amazon for $17.99. Get it before it goes back up.

What a circus Green Bay’s management is making of Favre’s wish to unretire. Granted, the wish lends itself to spectacle. In a perfect world Favre would have made sure he was really serious about retirement before going ahead with it, but c’est la vie. NFL Commissioner Goodell has now reinstated Favre, so Green Bay’s choices remain: Play him, trade/release him, or dangle money enough that he will retire at their command.

Management is being extremely silly here. They say they want to move forward with Favre’s replacement QB, but they won’t release Favre because they’re afraid he’ll sign with the Vikings.

This is not even silly; it is downright stupid. There are only two possibilities here that should dictate management’s action: Either they believe 1) That Favre can play at something approximating his optimal levels; or 2) That Favre cannot play at these levels. If they think he can play, they should have taken him back, no questions asked, except with a little private grumbling and a sop to his potential replacement. The man should have earned a little leeway, not to mention loyalty, by now. Replacement QBs will come and go, but in Green Bay there is only one Favre, even with his star slightly tarnished by a false-start retirement. If they believe he cannot play, they should have quietly admitted him back to the rosters and quietly released/traded him. Because if they don’t believe he can play, what harm does it do anybody but Favre himself and the Vikings if he goes to the Vikings? Certainly wouldn’t hurt Green Bay; in fact they’d have a prime opportunity for their players to show the old man that he should have stayed off the field. An ignominious end, certainly, but that risk should be left up to Favre to take.

Seems like management’s letting its pissiness at Favre’s desire to do something other than what they want to dictate its actions. They need to come down off the high horse and make a decision based on football, not their bruised egos.

… do you pass a “comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices” that does not already included drilling in the United States, offshore or otherwise?

“My interest is in making sure we’ve got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices,” Obama said in an interview with The Palm Beach Post.

“If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage — I don’t want to be so rigid that we can’t get something done.”

So to pass some magical plan that’s going to bring down gas prices through Barry Dust and Hope, he’ll throw a bone to “compromise” that will do the thing that actually will bring down gas prices.

It’s not so much that I think Obama’s stupid, it’s that I think he’s deeply invested in the belief that we–both his opposition and his potential base, mind–are utterly stupid. Nobody could say these things if he didn’t believe he was talking to dolts.

Granted, the kinds of people who heckle speeches probably could use some doltspeak, but I have to admit to a little bit of flabbergast even there, at the patronizing, kindergarten-teacher way he speaks to these–black, lest we forget–shouter-downs:

Obama eventually stopped speaking, turned around, and said, “Excuse me, young men. This is going to be a question-and-answer session, so you can ask a question later. Let me make my statement. Why don’t you all sit down? Then you can ask your question. That’s why we’re having a town hall meeting. Sit down. You’ll have a chance to answer your question. But you don’t want to disrupt the whole meeting. Just be courteous. That’s all. All you got to do is be courteous. That’s all. Just be courteous and you’ll have a chance to make your statement.”

The men eventually sat down and their sign was taken away by those sitting nearby, and eventually a campaign staffer took it away.

*** UPDATE *** Per NBC’s Lauren Appelbaum, Obama eventually took a question from one of these protestors. Here’s the exchange:
Obama: I’m going to call on these young men. Just one of you. All right? And remember, I made a promise to you. But also I want you to give your mike back after you ask your question or make your comment.

If you have a four-year-old or similar-aged child, you’ll recognize this phrasing right away. It’s what you do to teach children who are just learning manners and correct human interaction. I give you something, but remember what you have to give me back, courteously. Hearing him speak this way to other adults, even clear jerks, leaves a bad taste.

Frankly, the most amazing thing to me about it is that they even cooperated after being babytalked like that. I don’t expect it to work as well on, say, Ahmadinejad.

All said, I prefer McCain’s manner of handling hecklers: “This may turn into a longer speech than you had anticipated.”