Merlin of Chaos

This isn't actually to most people I know. This is only to a few people I know.

Please understand that your enjoyment of a movie and a book or other entertainment is your own personal set of emotions. It is unfair to cast blame upon others for affecting your your enjoyment when ultimately, only you can affect your enjoyment. If you feel as though expectations have been raised or lowered or otherwise created by comments that a very, very few people consider to be spoilers, please remember that only you have the power to alter that. Holding others responsible for your own inner foibles is unfair.

To translate this into English: Creating an air of over sensitivity to spoilers for even mentioning whether you liked a film is actively harmful to my friends list.

We were at Costco today and dover sole was $3.49 a pound, the cheapest fish there. For $3.49 a pound I had to get some, but I have no idea what to do with sole. So after a little sole searching (thanks google) I found half a dozen interesting stuffed recipes that I took what I liked from.

• 1 Costco sized package of dover sole fillets. This turned out to be 25 fillets. They're very thin.
  
• 4 slices of bread -- we use fairly wide loaves so if it were normal loaves I'd say 5.
  
• 1/2 to 1 onion, diced.
  
• Butter -- I won't say how much because I used too much (it was still very good but didn't need to be that buttery), so we're still going to have to guess. At the moment I think probably not more than 3 tbs, divided into two parts.
  
• 1 can lump crab meat
  
• A handfull of cooked, tail off shrimp -- theoretically canned shrimp will do but I had none. I did have frozen, cooked tail on shrimp, and I used, literally, a handful. I chopped the shrimp pretty fine.
  
• Dried parsley
  
• Ground sage
  
• Dried thyme
  
• (Sorry I didn't put rosemary in this)
  
• 1 tablespoon of chicken soup base -- Costco started carrying the "Better than boullion" brand which is better than the Minor's brand I used to use.
  
• Salt
  
• Old bay
  
• paprika (I used smoked, spanish paprika and it is a good flavor)
  

The stuffing:
Dry the bread in a 200 degree oven until all the moisture is out of it. Try not to toast the bread, so put the oven as low as you can get it and still actually dry the bread. When it's dry, break it into chunks and grind it up in a food processor until you have crumbs. Sure, you can buy bread crumbs if you want, but this really isn't that much work and it's much better than stale bread crumbs.

Melt the butter in a pan and sautee the onion until soft. Combine melted butter, onion, crab meat, chopped shrimp, parsely, sage, thyme, soup base and a little bit of salt. Add enough liquid to turn the stuffing into a nice, thick consistency.

Butter a baking dish; lay fillets out flat. The sole fillets are so thin I decided to double them up. I brushed melted butter and sprinkled a little salt between teh two layers if fish; place a bit of the stuffing at one end and roll the fish up, then stand on its side. I added a little more stuffing to the top of most. Brush remaining butter on the outside of the fish, sprinkle with old bay and/or paprika, or frankly whatever else you like. Bake at 350 for 25 or so minutes. THe fish should be flaky, but you don't want to overcook this.

Serves 6.

Vouchers are one of those partisan ideas that has great support amonst Republicans and is almost universally reviled by Democrats. The problem have with vouchers is that the plans I've seen basically violate the laws of supply and demand.

According to this 25% of the schools in the US are private schools. However, 82% of those are also very small schools (under 300 students) so the actual capacity of these schools is in fact much lower -- 11% of all students in the US go to private school.

So let's say that current capacity is at 15%.

As of right now, market forces have found a sort of medium for the supply and demand for private schooling. While currently demand is quite high, supply is limited by the cost of equipping a private school, qualified teachers, staff, and all of those things that go into teaching children.

Let's put vouchers into the system. Now, theoretically anyone can go to private school. Right?

But wait, we only have capacity for 15%. Supply will surely go up once vouchers are available -- there is money to be made now that the government is giving it away -- but how long does it take to put together a school? How much can the existing schools grow? Sure, there will be a lot of teachers out of work as the money for the public school system dwindles and they go into private teaching, but there are still facilities to deal with, and putting together an organization.

Hey, economics 101 question: When supply can only increase slowly but demand rises sharply, what happens to prices?

If you answered "They go up" you are half right. If you answered "They go up a lot" get a gold star. Since anyone can have a Voucher's worth of tuition, and there isn't enough supply to meet the demand of "Anyone who wants one" then costs will very quickly go up to Demand + $X, where $X is probably a little less than what the parents currently sending their kids to private school will pay.

What does this mean? Anyone who currently attends private school gets a discount, anyone currently attending public school who wants to go to private school STILL has to pay for it, public schools lose some unknown but let's face it, probably large amount of their funding, and the inner city kids get shafted because there aren't private schools in the inner city anyway. But all the existing private schools get to double their income while the rich parents get a discount AND get to feel like they've "helped" the poor.

Maybe eventually the government giving away of money will cause the supply to come up to reach the new demand, causing prices to go back down to reasonable levels, and I have to wonder if the public school system will even survive. But of course private schools, who won't have any real accountability, will naturally be much better than public schools. Because the current excellent education that 10% gets will continue to hold when 80% enroll into the same system. At least they won't be saddled with No Child Left Behind. After all, private schools get to kic out whomever they want whyever they want. Sounds like fun to me.

This little diatribe brought to you by CNN and the letter F.

1) George Carlin was a funny, funny man. I'm glad I got to see him live once.

2) I'm really tired of anybody who supports Obama over Clinton being called sexist. If anyone dare SUGGEST that a person supporting Clinton over Obama is racist, you'll never hear the end of it, but thinking Clinton is too heavily tied to the establishment and mistrusting her for her actions? Sexist.

Tired of it. Sorry, just because Clinton has tits different anatomy from me doesn't make her any more qualified than Obama, any more than being Obama being a black man brother has anything to do with why I think he is the better choice.

(Edited slightly to preserve intent; original phrasing left in).

I made the sausage soup again.

This time I left out the carrot and diced 2 zuchinis; I used 2 scallions, cooked early with the sausage. And I salted the potatoes prior to cooking (this pulls some of the liquid out of them which is then replaced with liquid that is generated putting it all in with the sausage. Tasty).

But I can make stuff up.

To be fair, esmerel and her mom went shopping. I worked.

Five o'clock rolled around and it came time to figure out what dinner was going to be. I didn't feel like spending a bunch of time and energy cooking, but everything I could think of required an hour or so of prep.

But we did get some Italian sausages at costco, and we had some potatoes.

( So I started there... )

I'm definitely keeping this recipe in my repertoire; if I can get the beans going in the afternoon, actually preparing the soup is not that much effort, and it's quite filling, tasty, and it's pretty different from everything else I cook.

I need to do a better cherry pie filling, though.

That said, the savory ones...oh goodness, YUM.

The meat:

• 1 package ground turkey (1.25 pounder)
  
• 2-3 cloves chopped garlic. I am lazy and I like garlic, so I buy a big thing of chopped garlic from Costco. It's not as good as fresh garlic but it's close enough for me, and using more helps make for it. I use a big heaping tablespoon full.
  
• Herbs that sound good: In my case, ground thyme, french sweet basil and ground oregano.
  
• Salt to taste (I use a big pinch of kosher).
  

Brown the meat in a skillet, adding in all the ingredients. Ground turkey doesn't have much runoff, so there's no need to drain. Set aside.

Mashed potatoes, standard fare:
Cut and boil 3ish potatoes. I like gold potatoes, of course. These happened to be 'yellow'. Mash with buttermilk + milk, butter and a little salt until creamy.

Combine the meat and mashed potatoes. Divide into two. In one half...or if you want, don't dive...add 1 tablespoon of garam masala and 1 tablespoon of sweet curry powder. Mix thoroughly.

Use as a filling for pocket pies. I used Alton Brown's recipe but I didn't have any shortening so I substitued butter one for one and put the butter in the food processor, as I've done with pies in the past. The butter crust browns a lot more than the shortening crust.

I made a double batch of the skin; had enough for 40+ pies. Most of them savory, as above, 5 or so with cherry pie filling, another 7 with some raspberry filling (frozen strawberries + sugar + flour, reduced in a saucepan for about 20 minutes), and the last few with some chicken & cheese salvaged from leftovers, just to use the last wrappers. They'll be yummy too.

I don't really use this blog to talk about my daughter a lot, but I have to share this one.

Yesterday, she turned 11 months old. Just before she turned 10 months old, she started walking (right before we went to Boston, in fact, so she was toddling around the hotel room getting her sea legs, so to speak.) In the last couple of weeks she's started really picking up various signs -- she knows at least a dozen signs now and it seems to grow nearly daily.

Anyway, neither of those are what I wanted to talk about here; they just set the stage. I take care of her pretty much by myself 3 days out of the week. I fed her breakfast and lunch, but a couple hours after lunch, she was making the eat sign. But she wouldn't eat the Os I had out for her, so I figured she was just being difficult.

She disappeared toward the kitchen for a minute, so I started to get up to see what trouble she was getting herself into, and she appears around the corner with a packet of oatmeal that she is holding out. She toddles up to me and thrusts it at me in the "Here, take this". As soon as I do, she makes the eat sign and toddles off to the kitchen. Now, she loves oatmeal, so I figure I'll go ahead and make it for her, and I'm expecting her to eat a couple of bites of it and then go off and be bored.

No. She devoured the entire serving. She doesn't normally eat an entire serving of oatmeal. But she ate this, even though she'd had a sizable lunch.

I am shocked that she is cognizant enough to understand that the oatmeal that she loves comes from those packets, and that she was able to so clearly communicate to me that she wanted me to make it without actually using more than just the 'eat' sign. At 11 months old.

LogrusMUSH and TooMUSH are back.

Heh. I lose time because it doesn't queue words up for me so the transition eats 3-4 seconds total, I'd say, which costs me the 9 words away from the 120 wpm I was tested at years ago:

111 words

Speed test

I haven't slept. Sprout has. I am hungry. I am here 'til Mar 8, though Mar 3-7 is almost entirely booked up.

If you answer 'Holes', 'Postmortem' or 'Unshaved' then you've got at least 2 of them.

We're going to Boston Feb 29 (redeye Feb 28, actually) to Mar 8; there's a convention through much of the week so my time is spoken for from Mar 3 on, but the 3 days leading up to that are currently open and we'd like to hang out with our friends and/or see Boston. Neither of us have ever been to Boston.

One Dell Latitude C600 (Pentium III 800 I think) laptop. Needs a new OS (comes with a license key for Win2k and I can provide a CD). The one that's on there got horribly corrupted by ZoneAlarm and the NetGear wireless drivers. I blame ZoneAlarm for that.

It needs a CD/DVD-Rom drive, the one that was in it failed, but those are inexpensive. It has a wireless B (sorry, not G) card in it. And I have a nice leather laptop case for it that unfortunately has a haunted house logo on it but other than that is actually a rather nice bag.

First taker gets it; you either have to pick it up or pay for shipping if you're not local.

The laptop has now been claimed. Thanks!

By way of Political Wire

I hope we answer the alarm clock and take this nation back for Christ."

-- Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R), quoted by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette on June 8, 1998, on "why he left pastoring for politics."

I will be in NYC Nov 13 and 14 (flying Nov 12 and 15) for work; I think my evenings are already booked, but if drinking with my coworkers appeals to you, Nov 13 may be open =)

I would just like to say that, once again, I will be holding Orphan's Thanksgiving this year. The rules have not changed in 10 years. RSVP is required; please bring a side. I will provide turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and at least one veggie, depending upon what is available and what I feel like. If I'm lazy it will be frozen corn.

It is not yet certain whether or not there will be pies, but we will work that out well enough in advance that we can have a backup. Please include in your RSVP if you desire to be part of the backup pie plan.

Some suggestions:

A nice, hearty vegetable soup (I have a couple of excellent recipes if you like)
A bean dish that isn't deadly
green bean casserole
traditional thanksgiving fare that I won't eat but others will, such as cranberry sauce or candied yams
something else that's really yummy and has no connection to traditional thanksgiving fare.

Don't bother RSVPing if you don't intend to be in San Jose for Thanksgiving this year. Yes, this footnote is highly unnecessary.

Yes, I'm a little late posting this.

What else is new? =)

In other news, Charlotte is the cutest penguin ever. Halloween pictures to come when esmerel gets around to it.

Today, Sprout is 5 months old. It's been pretty amazing.

6 months ago, I got a new job. I stepped away from the constant pressure provided by the psycho CEO at my former company and instead I am now working for the faceless corporate giant, Sony BMG. I work entirely from home, and I admit I do have a little trouble feeling integrated into the team, but there are a number of reasons for that and my WFH status is not the only one.

For those with whom I am a little less in touch, my life is basically two things right now:

1) BABY!!!!!
2) Drupal. I have been working basically simultaneously on 4 major projects, plus I'm a high profile member of the community and a lot of different aspects of it demand/deserve my attention. I'm also a pushy bastard sometimes, and I use this feature to try and get my way whenever I think the direction of something needs a tweak.

There are a few other items in my life that are worth mentioning:

NFL: Still a Broncos fan. Disappointed after yesterday's defeat, but I expected it. The team is currently not living up to its potential, alas.
Computer games: Most everything has dropped off, but I play Lord of the Rings Online when I get a chance. I've got a level 37 guardian.
RPGS: Sadly this has completely dropped off. Nothing happening here.
Shadowfist: I get to play about once every 3-4 months right now.
Writing: Haven't written anything new in ages.
Home: Theoretically we're looking to upgrade and buy a new house, but there's a lot of time.

Also, Spain was pretty amazing. The convention itself was fantastic, and Barcelona is a pretty cool city. There is a great deal to see and do, and the food is fantastic. Tapas is a meal that suits me well; though I will say, everything seems to be fried.

Also, I had Lambrusco I truly enjoyed. Alas that particular label doesn't seem to be imported to the US, but I am on the lookout. I know Lambrusco is kind of like soda wine, but I can't generally drink wine, so I will take what I can.

• The gothic quarter is beautiful
  
• The con was awesome. If you care, see my post on angry donuts.
  
• I found a wine I can drink: a good lambrusco and I can get quite toasted.
  
• the food here is wonderful
  
• Carlotta est muy bonita! Ci ci ci!
  
• They speak catalan here but Spanish is ok too, but not a lot of English.
  
• We fly out fairly early tomorrow
  
• Theoretically our stroller is at the airport so hopefully we'll return with it
  
• The metro here is very good
  
• I never did get down to the beach (tho we got very close) so I haven't actually gazed upon the Mediterranean.