According to Reuters, the Pirate Party has actually won a seat on the European Parliament, via Sweden, including this no joke quote from the article:
The Pirate Party captured 7.1 percent of votes in Sweden
Pirates going legit? Gaining political power? What has this world come to?
Possible Pirate Party Logo
It seemed like one thing after another went wrong this weekend. I will hit some of the highlights.
First off, almost as soon as we left Chicago, we had troubles. I was driving and Sara wanted to go to sleep. “We just stay on this until we get to 196, right?” I asked. “Right,” she said and fell asleep. 45 minutes or so later I pulled off to get gas at an oasis on the highway and Sara woke up. “There’s not supposed to be an oasis on the correct highway,” she said. Sure enough, I was not in fact supposed to “stay on this” until 196, I was supposed to get off onto another highway.
Okay, no problem, there was another highway coming up we could take to get back on track. I thought Sara said the highway I should watch for was 30. Eventually an exit came up and it seemed like the one I should take, except it said highway 31. “Is this the exit?” I asked Sara. I don’t know what she said, because I thought she said, “No.” So I drove past it. About 5 miles after the exit, Sara said, “We still haven’t come to the exit yet?” I was like, “I don’t know, I guess not.” And she was like, “The one we saw the sign for?” “The one you told me not to take?” “No, the one that I said to take.” So sure enough, that was our exit after all and we missed it by quite a long shot. This forced us to take a detour through the lovely city of South Bend which appeared to be the construction capitol of Indiana.
To top this off, Evie woke up while I was getting gas after only 45 minutes of napping. We had hoped she would sleep the entire trip, about 3 hours. So we had to deal with keeping her happy for almost 3 hours (since our little detours made the trip take quite a bit longer). And of course, this meant her shouting, “I’m going pee pee and poo poo!” (she’s learned that this is the phrasing that gets the most immediate reaction) every 15 minutes, forcing us to pull over and go into a bathroom, only to have her decide, “Nope!” and not go. She quickly realized the power she had over us, and used this tool to get whatever she wanted, such as the sock she threw up in the back window and couldn’t quite reach, because we had to put her socks and shoes on for a bathroom break.
That has to be it, right? As Evie would say, “nope!”
When we finally got there, we went to Festival and Evie had to use a port-a-potty. Apparently, someone stuck gum in there somewhere and I got it on my pants. Later, I was crouching down and the gum got stuck between my upper thigh and my calf so that when I stood up it stretched out like a big, gummy, extraneous leg tendon. So I had to walk around the rest of the time in this big crowd with bright green gum on my pants.
The next day, we were getting ready to go to a graduation party and Tom stopped me and said, “Your tire looks really low.” This didn’t come as too much of a surprise since my two front tires have been slowly leaking and needing air every couple of months. Luckily, Tom had a mini air compressor in his trunk, which was absolutely amazing, and we filled up the tires. However, as we were filling them, we noticed that A) they were completely bald, and B) there was an ugly bulge on one of the tires that looked like it was going to explode at any second. So before we left the graduation party, we switched the tires around so that the time-bomb tire was in the back instead of the front, so that when it inevitably blew out I would have a better chance at controlling the car. Luckily it did NOT blow out, but I had to drop some serious cash on a new pair of tires.
Add this to the general aggravation of getting Evie to put all her pee pees in the potty, and you have a lovely weekend! Actually, despite all the troubles, the weekend was pretty enjoyable. I guess we can chalk that up to not getting too stressed out about the little things in life!
What I’m Reading:
I picked up a short story collection by Philip K. Dick.
It is not uncommon to repackage a short story collection after a movie is made out of one of the stories therein to try to capitalize on the success of the movie, even though the story is often quite different. I didn’t even know Philip K. Dick had written Minority Report. I knew he had written Blade Runner, which is awesome, and also A Scanner Darkly which I have not seen, but that was it. So after I finished the titular story of this, I was amazed to discover the second story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, was actually Total Recall, a movie that I have seen more times than I can count. Double my amazement when the next story was Paycheck! So, there were three sci-fi blockbusters in a row that I didn’t know he had written. That was a nice surprise. I was excited to see what huge movie might be next on the list, but neither of the remaining stories were movies, at least of the blockbuster variety. I will say that I thought one of those stories, Second Variety, was the best one in the book, even if the “twist ending” was painfully obvious. Looking up info on Philip K. Dick, I discovered that the movie Next is (very loosely) based on a story of his. So he’s got movies with Tom Cruise, Harrison Ford, Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ben Afleck and Nicholas Cage. That my friends is what I call not too shabby!
What I’m Watching:
Nora Robert’s Midnight Bayou, and on Lifetime to boot.
Oh yeah, just look at that cover baby. You may recognize Jerry O’Connel from such things as Sliders and as being the fat kid from Stand by Me:
Lauren Stamile took me a little longer to place, but she plays nurse Rose, Derek’s other woman on Grey’s Anatomy. Now why was I watching this piece of cinematic masterpiece you ask? Because it is filmed at Oak Alley Plantation in New Orleans, which I have toured.
I know after you saw that promo picture, you probably thought this was an awesome movie. It was not. After watching it, I am certainly not in a hurry to read a Nora Roberts’ book. Ever. However, I think this movie was to romance movies what Ice Spiders is to sci-fi movies and was enjoyable in much the same way. What can I say, there is something about the very poorly done, cheesy nature of these movies that appeals to me. But please don’t take that as a recommendation to watch the movie!
What I’m Listening To:
Better than Ezra is one of my all time favorite bands, and I think they don’t get nearly as much credit as they deserve. I remember one time they were playing at Purdue and we were pretty excited about it, but a lot of people were like, “Who are they? I’ve never heard of them.” Of course, once BTE took the stage and started reeling off the hits, those same people were like, “Oh yeah, I know that song. And that song. And that song…” Side note about that concert, BTE pulled a fan out of the crowd up on stage with them and gave him a guitar and actually let him play along with them…that was really awesome. I will also say that seeing BTE in New Orleans was one of the best concerts I have ever been to.
So lets go to the tape and check their record. Their first album, Deluxe, was released in 1993. Many would say this is the definitive BTE album, containing their biggest hit Good as well as Sara’s favorite, Rosealia. In ’97 they released Friction, Baby which contained some awesome songs like King of New Orleans and Desperately Wanting. Only a year later they released How does your garden grow? which has One More Murder and my personal favorite At the Stars. In 2001 they released Closer which contained the underrated Extra Ordinary as well as the original version of A Lifetime (later re-done on their next album). So that brings us to 2005, when they released Before the Robots, which is actually my favorite of their albums.
That is a decade long career of consistently good albums and I don’t think they get enough credit for it. They’ve just released a new album Paper Empire, which I haven’t heard yet and can’t comment on, but with that track record, I’m willing to bet it is good. So, without further ado:
I read a pretty good article the other day about companies that didn’t really go anywhere, didn’t live up to expectations. These weren’t just tiny little operations though, these were companies that were either A) on the top of their game, huge companies that just fizzled for some reason, or B) companies that had great technology or so much hype that they seemed like sure-fire winners. You will have heard of all of these products and that’s what made it interesting to me.
The first product that came to mind was the Segway. I remember when that came out, they had quotes from people claiming it would revolutionize the world, it was the death of cars, etc. etc. From big names too. And what happened? Do you know anybody who has one? (aside from the Chicago police of course) Sure enough, it was #1 on the list.
Unfortunately, we don’t know why some of these companies failed, but the article tries to at least guess what happened. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting read.
I don’t remember if I mentioned it on here before or not, but Sara’s awesome Christmas present to my brother and I was a gift certificate to a cheese making class, run by Angelic Organics, and the class took place over the weekend. It was really cool!
The class was set up brilliantly. We made 6 kinds of cheeses total, all of which were varieties that didn’t need to be aged very long, so we were able to try all of them. They had each group take one kind of cheese to be responsible for, we had ricotta, but it was timed out so that different cheeses had interesting steps at different times, so we could all gather around to see. Also, the different cheeses were timed out so that they all finished at different times, so we could try them as they were finished.
The cheeses made were mozzarella, ricotta, queso blanco, chevre, feta, and formaggio. The mozzarella was unbelievably delicious, but complicated. I’d say our ricotta was the second best, followed by the queso blanco. The other ones were all good, but they were a little bland. In some cases this is because we didn’t add any flavoring and didn’t let them sit for as long as you normally would. Most of them were made with fresh goats milk, but a few were with cow’s milk. As part of the class, we even got to milk goats!
Nate and I ended up with ricotta because we didn’t care much about what kind we made. It turned out that it was the easiest to make, and the quickest. Despite that, we manged to make a huge mess when ours boiled over, and then later forgot that it had boiled over and used that burner again, causing a small fire. Just a smidge embarrassing. I’m sure everybody was like, “Oh of course, you invite guys to a cooking class, they mess everything up.” On the other hand, everybody liked our cheese. We made one without salt, one with, and one with some herbs like green onions and garlic. That one was the best and it went pretty fast.
The whole point of the class is to enable you to make cheese at home. So they gave us some recipes and pointers and stuff to take home. I don’t think I will ever make cheese at home, but I am content in the knowledge that I could if I had to. And as far as Christmas presents go, I have a little saying, it goes like this: if you give a man some cheese, he has cheese for a day. If you teach a man to make cheese, he will have cheese for a lifetime.
Shane Halbach 