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Observe The Snow, It Fornicates

Brian — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:33:13 +0000

Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we can remember what Harvey looked like with hair. We’re having a slightly-below-average snowfall so far this winter, including the “Snore-easter” that missed us a couple of weeks ago, so any mention of the Blizzard of 78 this season is totally gratuitous anyway. It’s time to relegate the legend to wherever things like Harvey’s hair have gone to its reward.

And to Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Dick Ebersol, and pretty much everyone else who works at NBC: the same goes for the motherfucking “Miracle On Ice”. It’s one thing for Mike Eruzione to make his entire career milking it to death, and maybe even Al gets a free pass for putting it on his resume, but otherwise STFU. There will never be another “miracle” hockey team because the whole Olympic hockey competition is basically an NHL round-robin tournament, so let’s agree it was an amazing upset moment, like 1969 was for the Mets> and the Jets, and move on to more exciting things like those smokin’ hot curling chicks.

Follow-up: I’ll Take Menhaden

Brian — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:14:46 +0000

I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all that omega-3 in the first place. Algae oil also seems to be poised to take off as a source of biodiesel, so maybe in the future you can fill up your car AND reduce your cholesterol at the same time…but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Meanwhile, the other primary commercial use for menhaden is to be ground up and turned into fish meal, which is then fed to farm-raised fish (because, after all, the sea is a hungry place), continuing to keep pressure on the fishing stock. Now, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking at using genetically-modified barley protein as an alternative to menhaden in farm fisheries. The researchers believe that the barley could be sold at half the price of conventional fish meal. Also, a second derivative of the barley called beta-glucan also has potential health benefits.

iCan’t Take Anymore

Brian — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 18:41:54 +0000

It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.

Since you cannot click a link without getting someone telling you something about the iPad, iHave iNevitably wound up reading a few of them, and iThink this guest piece at Tech Crunch by iPhone app developer Ethan Nicholas is the closest to my own opinion: the iPad is the final distillation of the personal computer into the iDiot’s dream machine. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, because he is talking about his mother…and my mother…and your mother…and every other person who wants this level of technology to be as simple as turning on the television. And so now the Next Big Thing has reduced the personal computer to a television you hold in your hands and also use for some other entertainments like music and books and those addictive little iPhone games, and they’ve taken away all the scary stuff like video editing, spreadsheets, antivirus programs and Flash.

I talked to my mother on the phone a few nights ago, and she told me that she is considering buying a netbook to replace her aging desktop computer. She asked me for a recommendation on the hardware, which I gladly gave her, but now I’m thinking SHE should get an iPad, too, for the same reason: even a netbook is more computer than she really needs. For example, I spent this weekend watching my wife drive herself mental trying to install iTunes on her Windows netbook. All she wants her netbook to do is to play videos, play music, play simple games, and the netbook still want her to be able to finagle her way through downloads, installations, customizing the software, syncing the iPod and then troubleshooting when it doesn’t work properly. The netbook is not simple enough. If my mother buys a netbook, you-know-who will have to drive up to Maine to set it up for her and continue to provide her technical support as I have done for the last nine or ten years.

I wish I had some sort of data source to support my hunch, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that you could probably replace 60% of the home PCs in the United States with iPads without the owners feeling the slightest bit cramped by the limitations of a closed-source proprietary device that only supports a single task at a time and imposes content restrictions. In fact, I’ll bet that most of those people would PREFER it, because it takes away the intimidating vastness of all the things you can do with a full-fledged computer, but still lets you enjoy the benefits of being able to magically access all the wonderful things the Internet has to offer. It’s no accident that the basic iPad is priced to compete with netbooks, after all. For all the talk about the iPad killing the Kindle, et.al., it’s actually a netbook killer.

If the fanbois would all just shut up for a bit and let the people who are the ACTUAL intended market for the product have a chance to discover that their long-awaited Home Entertainment Device Of The Future has arrived, it might actually turn out to be more transformative than the technobabblers said their fantasy iTablet was going to be.

New Year, Same Old Nonsense

Brian — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 21:31:26 +0000

Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into pre-packaged ten-year segments that align perfectly with the calendar. And we won’t even go into the whole “No Year Zero” argument that needed to be made over and over again about the turn of the millennium. This is a good opportunities to realize that there was no such thing as “The 60s” or “The 80s” and that we’re probably nowhere near the end of the era that began on September 11, 2001.

Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

Brian — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:58:25 +0000

This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with:

Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole
GateCrashGate
Meredith Baxter Birney, stealth lesbian
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and those intensely awful Best Buy carolers

¡Ya basta!

Follow-Up: Mad-Lib Blogging

Brian — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:40:44 +0000

Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.

Ephemeral Effluvia

Brian — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 03:54:11 +0000

More additions to the list:

Levi Johnston
Carrie Prejean
Blue Dog Democrats
The Entire Lohan Family
The 2012 Apocalypse
The Republican “Comeback”
“ordinary heroes”

Addenda

Brian — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:57:41 +0000

More effluvia:

Those Northwest Airlines pilots
Zombie Michael Jackson
Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween)
Celebrity Twitters
Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)

Follow-Up: Good Without God

Brian — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:19:24 +0000

Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s website has the entire thing on its website in easy-to-digest segments.

I’ve just finished watching the first segment, which lets Epstein get in a nice plug for his new book, and features a typical Boston-area yuppie couple who are atheists themselves but still want all the trapping of a traditional religious experience for their daughter — a “naming ceremony”, Christmas, etc. Epstein lays out the central conceit of Humanism — you can have all the warm fuzzy lovies of belonging to a church without all that silly God/Jesus stuff. The ideal message for people who are smart enough to realize that nobody needs all that superstition, but who can’t quite bring themselves to let go of their middle-class American upbringing. It’s the same marketing device that the Unitarian Universalists use to a large degree: “Come for the company, stay for the moralizing.”

Yes, I am being too cynical about that by half, I know, but c’mon kids. If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck…well, you know. Believe it or not, though, I am sympathetic to the promotion of Secular Humanism because one of the things that traditional religions highlight is the ability to provide a community of like-minded people to share consensual meaning and context. A lot of people simply need that to make their worldview work. If Humanism can impart context and assert the validity of non-belief as a worldview, then good for them; my concern is that by doing so, organized Humanist communities will, over time, develop the same bigotries, exclusionary tenets, and transference of presumed divinity that Christian churches have. I like my atheism like I like my sushi: raw, fresh, and with a big dollop of wasabi to clear out my head.

Six Minute Egg

Brian — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 13:56:21 +0000

Update to yesterday’s post about boiled eggs:

The picture at the top is what I got by boiling two eggs in 180-degree-ish water for 6 minutes. Sorry for the so-so photo, I only had my cell phone handy.

The eggs were indeed nicely done. The cooked ring of egg white was consistent in its thickness around the egg, with the texture ranging from firm along the outermost edge to barely set toward the center. The yolk was warm and cooked just enough to maintain its shape. That is indeed EXACTLY how I like a soft-boiled egg (pardon me, Shelley, soft-cooked egg).

But it wasn’t easy finding the sweet spot on my stove burner control to get the water to the right temperature and KEEP it there. Setting the stove directly on “Medium” got the water to 120 degrees. The next mark up took it to 160. One more mark and it shot right past 180 to 200. I ended up letting it go to 200, putting the eggs in the saucepan, and then removing the pan from the heat entirely. The combination of heat loss from adding the cold eggs to the water and moving the pan off the hot burner didn’t seem to over-cool the water. It’s also a pain in the butt to stand there holding a thermometer as close to the center of the water as possible while waiting for the desired temperature. Somebody should really make a set of cookware with built-in temperature sensors; how hard could that be?

So, like Messrs. Savage and Hyneman say, “Myth Confirmed”, but given all the fiddling around I had to do, and given that my totally non-scientific method produces almost the exact same result, I don’t think I would bother making my soft-cooked eggs this way. Chef Jo or anyone else who needs the assuredness of having the exact same result every single time probably should standardize on this method, but it’s not worth the bother for making a little brekkie.

I’ll probably try the hard-cooked recipe some other time. I rarely use hard-boiled eggs and don’t eat them plain, so it will have to wait for some occasion when I’m in need. If any of you regular visitors try it, do let me know.

The Inevitable Update

Brian — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:03:20 +0000

Bridget’s mother called yesterday to say that she’d taken Barkley to be put down. When we saw him over Columbus Day weekend, he was noticeably thinner and having trouble breathing. It was a bit of a spot decision by my mother-in-law, but she felt the time had come. I’m glad she came to that decision on her own and was able to be with the dog at the end. Both of Bridget’s parents are pretty broken up. The news was received fairly matter-of-factly around here; I think having had the chance to say goodbye to the dog was a good thing for Charlotte, who seems to have worked through her own emotions about it.

Goodbye, Barkley.

Does This Theme Make My Ass Look Big?

Brian — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:14:28 +0000

Why, yes, I *did* make some “cosmetic enhancements”, thank you for noticing.

Do you like them?

Pondering

Brian — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:14:14 +0000

Can someone explain to me why iced coffee tastes so good, but hot coffee that has gone cold tastes so awful?

BrianKaneOnline » Sidebar

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Observe The Snow, It Fornicates

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Follow-up: I’ll Take Menhaden

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iCan’t Take Anymore

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New Year, Same Old Nonsense

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Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright

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Follow-Up: Mad-Lib Blogging

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Ephemeral Effluvia

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Addenda

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Pondering

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