Super Hero Supplies

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Unfortunately, I didn’t get this one up before Christmas. So hopefully you found something else for the superheros and super villains in your lives. However, for all future transactions, you’re going to want to look up the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.

The crazy part, it’s not just an online store! It’s a a real life brick-and-mortar store.

I would love to visit sometime!

There are so many items for sale, that I can’t even go into all of them here. You should check out the online store. Some of my favorite categories include:

  • Capes – A must for any superhero. Including sidekick capes!
  • Robots – Such as a robotic shark. What villain doesn’t need a robotic shark?
  • Lairs – You can go high-tech with the forcefield generator, or low-tech with the prehistoric guardian fern.
  • Lab Supplies – Including bottles of chaos, antimatter, or immortality, evil blob containment capsules, and even a tote bag! I like the unstable mutation catalysts. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone all over the city looking for “claws for hands”.
  • Secret identities – Pick from several choices, such as “Selfless Firefighter”, “Cocky Fighter Pilot” or “Cranky Head Chef”

Dessert of the Month – Part II

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Last year for Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me the gift of a dessert every month. Unfortunately, the year has finally come to a close, so here are the rest of the desserts. You can see the first six months here.

July – Peaches with Honey Chevreau cheese

August – Peach crisp

September – New Orleans Praline Brownies

October – Aunt Helen’s Apple Pie Cake with homemade whipped cream

November – Pumpkin Marble Cheesecake (with gingersnap crust)

December – Bûche de Noël with Nutella mouse filling, chocolate ganache frosting and meringue mushrooms


Has it really been a year already? 🙂 Thanks again Barb, they were all delicious. I’m very disappointed that I have no more deserts to look forward to. However, Evie immediately volunteered herself and her mommy to start making the desserts instead! So maybe they don’t have to stop!

Updated Blogging Timeline

/ Shane / Leave a comment

The end of the year/ beginning of the new year is always a time for looking back over the past year and reviewing. So, since I didn’t do any end-of-the-year type post, I’m doing this one instead. I originally posted a “history of my blog” timeline here. However, many important milestones have happened in the last year or so, since I originally posted it. So I am reproducing it below, and then adding the new things at the bottom.

[EDIT: I totally forgot about almost kind of being mentioned on the radio once, see 6/5/2008!]

2/17/2004 – My first post ever. Not very exciting.

8/3/2005 – This was my first post back after a one year blogging hiatus. This was significant, not only because I resumed blogging, but also because it marked a new era. Previous to this, my blog was more of a personal journal, after it became more of a “best of the Internet” aggregator and link place holder, which is more or less what it is today.

8/2/2007 – Announcing the birth of Evie. This post straddles the line of important event in my life vs. important in terms of the blog. However, I think it is safe to say that Evie has had a big impact on blog, both in terms of giving people a reason to check here, and for giving rise to the “Evie Update” category (138 items), and the “From the Mouths of Babes” category (86 items).

3/26/2008 – My first post on WordPress. I can’t say enough how much better WordPress is compared to LiveJournal. LiveJournal has some advantages, particularly in the facebook type community aspect, but in terms of pure blogging power, there is no contest. So switching over to WordPress had a big impact on how the blog evolved after that.

6/5/2008 – After a friend and I both blogged about eating a delicious cupcake named after a radio host, said cupcake was discussed on the program and the host mentioned that two bloggers had talked about him and his cupcake over the weekend. OMG, that was totally us!

6/21/2008 – Childhood hero of mine, Commander Mark Kistler, comments on my blog post about him.

6/23/2008 – A title mishap (in which I may have implied their product causes rickets) brings me to the attention of Bob’s Pickle Pops, ultimately leading to them sending me some free samples. This was the first and only time this blog led to any sort of compensation.

8/25/2008 – Someone from my favorite store ThinkGeek comments on a post. Of course it is the one and only time I am bashing one of their products (for something that was totally not their fault, mind you), but hey, I’ll take it.

1/3/2009 – First post of the 3rd incarnation of my blog, in which I started blogging every day. It wasn’t exactly formal, I was just sort of testing myself to see if I could do it, and then I just kept doing it. At first I planned to blog 7 days a week, but I eventually settled into a M-F pattern. Coming up with 5 topics a week is extremely difficult, and I was worried that the quality would drop off. I don’t think it really has, though I might not be the best judge.

1/21/2009 – My 500th post.

2/17/2009 – My 5 year blogiversary.

2/24/2009 – My 500th comment.

5/21/2009 – The first post after I started to push my posts out to Facebook (and then later, Twitter). This was significant because I think most people I know didn’t really know I had a blog. So this opened us up to a much wider audience.

10/5/2009 – My post about Chicago getting passed over for the Olympics gets picked for the front page of WordPress.com. It was a wild ride which resulted in 10,384 visitors to my site for the month, about 4 1/2 times more than my highest regular month.

4/12/2010 – Oliver’s birth announcement. As with Evie’s birth, I expect many future blog contributions due to this. Of course this spawned the “Ollie Update” category.

11/11/2010 – My 1,000th post. Interesting how it took me 5 years to get the first 500, and less than 2 years to get the next 500.

11/17/2010 – Moved the blog to shanehalbach.com, and also changed the look of the blog for the first time in 2 years (and the first time I changed the color scheme ever, since I started blogging).

11/29/2010 – I had a guest post on the food website Cheap, Healthy, Good. Although it didn’t bring that many hits to my own blog, it was still fun to put a post of mine in front of a lot of unfamiliar eyeballs. (According to this, at the time of my guest post, Cheap, Healthy, Good was getting about 15,000 hits a day…significantly more than what I got in my best MONTH, which itself was way higher than an average month)

Quote Monday Keeps Bees

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie: “Do bears like bees?”
Me: “Umm…”
Evie: “Because then I would marry one. I like bees and I want to marry someone who likes bees.”
Me: “So you would marry a bear?”
Evie: “If he liked bees.”

Me, singing to Evie: “You’ll go down in history!”
Evie: “No. Herstory.”

Dad: “I have a good trivia question for you! Who originally wrote and sang Frosty the Snowman?”
::thinking::
Me: “I don’t know, I give up. Who?”
Dad: “I don’t know. I told you it would be a good trivia question!”

Sara: “Evie, can you pick up that fuzz ball on the floor?”
Evie: “Where is it?”
Sara: “It’s right there.”
Evie: “I can’t see it, I don’t have my glasses!”

I think she was spending too much time with Grandpa Johnny!

Oh. My. God.

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When a company goes out of business, in addition to all the people losing their jobs, there are a lot of other unintended consequences. For example, if back taxes force a poultry farm into bankruptcy, what happens to all the cute little baby chicks?

Well, you have to dispose of them somehow.

Baby chicks were dumped into barrels outside in the winter air before water was added to drown them. Adult birds were thrown into a pit and buried alive with a tractor.

This article is ridiculous. It describes the workers tasked with destroying the 400,000 baby chicks, sobbing as they did it:

“It was breaking my heart seeing the little ones die like this in the frost,” said poultry worker Svetlana Grivko. “We worked round the clock to keep them healthy and comfortable and now we are killing them with our own hands.”

They tried to sell some or give them away, but there were a total of 1 million birds to be disposed of. And the worst part? There’s still another 3 million birds left. The disposal is just beginning.

If this is not the saddest story you read all day (or at least the pictures in the article), then I don’t know what to tell you.