October 2007 - Posts
I decided to do some surfing online tonight since I was a bit wound up after taking my nightly walk, and wasn't quite ready to go to bed. I contemplated writing a blog post, but then I didn't really have anything interesting to share. Then, I stumbled upon a website called "Worse Than Failure, Curious Perversions in Information Technology."
Some of the posts are pretty funny, and this one, in particular, cracked me up. Security by Letterhead is also amusing. The latter reminded me of some pretty hilarious customer service experiences that I've had over the years, but I'm not wearing my story-telling hat at the moment. Perhaps another time...
The Washington Post has weekly contests called The Style Invitational. You have to register to partake in the contests, but registration is free and easy, and you aren't asked to divulge anything terribly personal. An example contest was to write a rhyming couplet containing two words that are anagrams of each other.
Another previous style invitational asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are a few of my favorites (I left out the racier ones. Sorry.):
Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.
Bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.
Decafalon: The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
Arachnoleptic fit: The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.
Excuses for sale for those who can't muster enough work ethic to get themselves to their place of employ on a faithful and consistent basis. This is an all-time low.
As a sidebar, I'm wondering how many other people that have read this article are asking themselves, "Did I just read wrongful, the adjective, being used as a noun?" Yes, you did. And by a pretty educated person, at that. Sorry, I'm anal. No need to point it out to me. 
I love those moments when I get an unexpected blast from the past that causes me to reminisce about some enjoyable childhood memory. This happened to me yesterday afternoon while visiting Nickelodeon's website with my kids. Nickelodeon offers a handful of free games that kids can play online and yesterday we stumbled upon SpongeBob SquarePants' Pyramid Peril.
Pyramid Peril is a Q*bert remake. If you've never heard of Q*bert, I'm almost certain you didn't grow up in the 80's. I couldn't resist playing this reincarnation of my once favorite childhood game, all the while grinning joyously at the thought of the hours spent playing the arcade version of Q*bert at Carroll's
Bowling Lanes in Fort Erie, Ontario, as an 11 or 12 year old girl. I bowled in a children's league every Saturday, and I'm not entirely sure if I was there more for the arcade games and snack concessions, as I was the bowling itself. "Kristin, you're up!" was commonly heard being shouted by my little bowling comrades, necessitating a momentary disruption of my current game of Q*bert so that I could obligingly fling the ball with two hands from between straddled stance, in order for the next person to have their turn. I could then return to the beloved quirky orange protagonist bobbing rather inertly on his square. Sometimes, I returned to find the masked expletive "!%#@?!" on the screen, having recently been snuffed out by Coily the snake. I vividly remember the utterances of Ugg, the purple warthog, which was only one of several bad guys out to get Q*bert; kay yug yug, is the best phonetic approximation that I can come up with.
After playing a few levels of the SpongeBob game, I decided to see if I could locate the original Q*bert game online. A visit to Google and a few keystrokes later and I was in business. If you're interested in giving it a whirl, you can find it here. It's the simple things that make life so good. 
I love, love, love to cook, and the weekend is usually when I have time to experiment and try new things. A few weekends back I made a tasty chicken wing sauce by just dumping various ingredients into a bowl and tasting it until it was just right. Maybe I'll blog about that some other time.
Today, I decided to try something new with my chili recipe. I made a spicy black bean chicken chili, and it turned out quite nice. I think I still prefer my ground beef and ground turkey chili the best, but it was a refreshing change.
I 've decided to post my base chili recipe today (though not without some degree of angst) in the spirit of sharing. 
Feel free to modify it to your taste. I've made dozens of pots of this stuff, and the resulting recipe is a culmination of those efforts. By the way, if you want to make chicken chili, substitute one of the packages of ground meat with 3-4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts. Boil them until cooked through, chop them up, and add them at the same point you add the meat in the recipe below. You want to boil the chicken so the breasts retain more moisture.
Chili Recipe
1 cup chopped onion
3 cloves of minced garlic (or 2-3 tbsp if you have a jar of minced garlic)
1 package of ground turkey and 1 package of lean ground beef (you can substitute ground chicken, or use all ground beef but the goal is around 1-2 pounds of meat total)
3 cans of 14.5 oz petite cut diced tomatoes (I love Del Monte Petite Cut with Zesty Green Chiles)
3 cans of beans, thoroughly rinsed and drained (1 black, 1 great northern, 1 dark red kidney)
3 tbsp chili powder
1 generous tbsp oregano
1 tsp habanero pepper sauce (I use Tabasco Brand Habanero Pepper Sauce)
1/2 tsp crushed red pepper flakes (ground cayenne pepper is a good substitute)
1/2 tsp coriander (cilantro can be substituted)
1 can of stock (chicken or beef)
1 can (8 oz) of tomato sauce
1 can (6 oz) of tomato paste
1 lime, juiced
Do not add salt. All of these canned products have plenty of salt in them already. I even buy no salt added stock and it is still plenty salty. Optionally, you can add some cracked black pepper and chopped jalapenos. The chili above will have a nice spice to it but is not terribly hot. The habanero sauce is potent, so an extra 1/2 teaspoon should be plenty to give it a bit more kick.
Directions
Pour a couple of tablespoons of olive oil (or regular cooking oil if you don't have olive oil) into the bottom of your chili pot at medium-high heat.
When the oil is heated, add the chopped onion and saute until the onion becomes translucent. I then use a garlic press and add the three cloves of garlic and then continue to saute the onions and garlic together for another minute.
Add your thawed, raw ground meat and stir until browned. Do not drain the meat as you will drain away the flavor. Instead, buy leaner ground meats so the chili isn't oily.
Next, add the 3 cans of tomatoes, chili powder, oregano and red pepper flakes.
Open all cans of beans, dump them in a strainer and rinse thoroughly with cold water. After the beans have drained, add them to the meat and tomatoes.
Add the can of stock, tomato sauce, tomato paste, habanero sauce and coriander (or cilantro). My mother hates cilantro in the most unimaginable way, so I never use it just out of respect for her giving me life.
Cook for 30 minutes on stove top. Add juice from the lime and transfer to a slow cooker for later consumption, or serve now.
I've messed around with the order of adding ingredients and can tell you that the end result really isn't impacted that greatly so don't sweat the order too much. An exception to that is the browning of the meat. You always want to start with the oil, onions, garlic, and meat browning process. Anything after that is when the order ceases to matter. Dean Stresing, a former co-worker of mine, originally gave me his chili recipe, and I've just made slight modifications over time. It really is my favorite chili of all time. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Enjoy!
Ty Medina, a co-worker of mine, told me an absolutely hysterical story today while on a conference call with him. He was telling me that he, his wife, and his son went to some healthy, organic grocery store. While there, his son spied a pumpkin pie and asked if they could have it. Ty looked at the nutritional information at the bottom of the pie and, to his surprise, it contained a mere 160 calories per serving. The best news of all? The entire pie was ONE SERVING! Traditional pumpkin pie is definitely high fat, high calorie, so Ty decided to give this low-cal pie a try (I couldn't resist the Dr. Seuss rhyming there).
After having dinner that evening, he served his son a piece of the pie and decided to try a piece himself. As it turns out, the pie was gloriously delicious! He decided then and there to eat the entire pie in one sitting. His wife, the voice of reason, informed him that they must have made a mistake on the label, and that there is no way an entire pie is only 160 calories. He then proceeded to tell her, "No way; those labels are never wrong!"
Ty was so excited about this delicious low calorie pie that he decided he could easily eat it everyday for breakfast! Fast forward ahead in time when his family is in the same grocery store. Ty looks at the bottom of another pie, only to discover an altered label reading not 1 serving per pie, but 8. The nutrition information, in fact, had been incorrect. So, let that be a lesson to you boys and girls; Wives know best, and had Ty listened to his, he wouldn't have consumed 1,120 calories, on top of his dinner, in one sitting.
I learned something today that is really quite stunning, and I'll get to that in a moment. Last week, a gentleman by the name of Dr. Norman Geisler was a guest speaker at my church. The title of his message was, "Should the 10 Commandments be Displayed in Public?" I don't tend to get involved in politically-oriented religious debates, and while I am certainly supportive of public display of the 10 Commandments, I don't get up in arms when I read about the removal of them from public places, largely because I've come to expect these things given the current ungodly state of our nation.
Admittedly, I had some preconceived notions about what Dr. Geisler's points were going to be at the outset of his talk but, I have to say, I was really taken by surprise at the points he made, and the interesting historical documentation he had to support his position. In a nutshell, he discussed that if displaying the 10 Commandments is unconstitutional then, by the same argument, the Declaration of Independence and The U.S. Constitution themselves are, by definition, unconstitutional. Not necessarily a pioneering argument, but the support is what was quite interesting. I really wish I had taken detailed notes, but I was so engrossed in his talk that the notion to do so escaped me until the end. I'm not going to try to recreate his presentation to you here, because I will badly butcher it, but what I do want to mention is one particularly interesting experience he had shared with us.
You may, or may not, know that the 10 Commandments and/or Moses are depicted in and around the U.S. Supreme Court 6 times. In the courtroom, an allegorical figure known as The Power of Government is depicted resting his arm squarely on the 10 Commandments, symbolizing that the foundational basis of government laws are the laws of God. Dr. Geisler shared with us that he had toured the U.S. Supreme Court and the tour guide not only failed to mention the 10 Commandments when she was describing the frieze along the top of the inner chamber, but she stated that she didn't know what it was when he directly asked her about the tablets. When he told us that, I just assumed the tour guide was inexperienced, but it would appear the ignorance of the tour guides is somewhat intentionally fashioned.
This brings me to what I learned today. Apparently, The Official Supreme Court Handbook has been deliberately altered over the course of two revisions to eliminate references of the Christian influence that imbues the Supreme Court building. The original handbook clearly stated that the tablets were indeed the 10 Commandments (which is obvious) but the subsequent revision to the handbook eliminated the reference entirely. The next revision revisited the human figure leaning on the tablets and provided an explanation that it was a representation of the first 10 amendments to The U.S. Constitution. It's really actually kind of funny what a stretch that is, considering there are, at the time of this writing, 27 Constitutional Amendments, and 21 of them were already ratified prior to the 1935 construction of the current U.S. Supreme Court building.
While nothing surprises me, and I know this isn't the first or last time this will happen, it really is quite disturbing when you think about it. Now, you may be an apathetic audience regarding the significance of Christianity being erased from our country's history, but don't think for a moment that the scope of such manipulation will always be so narrowly focused. As a history buff, I value historical accuracy, and an effort to preserve such accuracy. It really makes you wonder what you can trust when reading the history books, no?
I was listening to NPR's All Things Considered today on my drive home from work and I'm still giggling about the Turkeys on the Lamb story. Apparently the most menacing turkey of all has made Dunkin' Donuts on Beacon Street in Brookline his new stomping grounds. Click the "listen" image right under the heading Wild Turkeys Looking for a Bite Around Boston, found here, to listen to the interview in it's entirety between NPR's Michele Norris and Animal Control Officer Pierre Verrier. Officer Verrier's French accent is entertaining enough, but every time I think of Michele Norris saying, "Is that, as the animal control officer, is that an official statement? Hit the turkey with your purse?" I just laugh and laugh.
Well, I've finally broken down and started a blog. I used to think that blogs were an indulgent activity for the self-absorbed; a way to brag about what a rock star life you have (or want people to think you have). However, since moving to North Carolina from Western New York (I emphasize Western because if I say "New York" everyone assumes I'm from NYC. New York City is the only place in NY state, you know) I've received feedback from those near and dear to me that I need a MySpace page to see what I'm up to. Since I have little desire to entire the world of MySpace, this blog was born. If no one visits, that's okay too. I don't mind talking to myself because there are actually a lot of things going on that I would like to catalogue in a sort of virtual journal. So, with that, enjoy. Oh yes, I will, thank you. You're welcome.