I Question The Choice Of Words
Mr. Caption Writer could have called the mount a Percheron thoroughbred mix but nooooo. (click to embiggen if need be)

I Got This Ad In The Mail
It seems there really is a magazine for everything.
And my first thought? "Hugged it? No. I might have choked it a little...."

A Video For Next Year's SOTU Speech
Barry, baby, let me save you some trouble:

Add This One To Your Foodie Links
Chow. I've already watched the video on the "perfect soup dumpling" and it's brilliant. My jealousy of the chef's technique is boundless. The site looks to be as full of good info as anyone could want.

Hackintosh Update
Baby steppin' here boss. The colored purple Dell Mini 10v is here, as is the 8 GB flash drive. My research has shown me that stuffing the max memory into the thing will make the machine a vastly more useful one than trying to run it on the installed memory so I've ordered the upgrade from my favorite RAM source Crucial.com. I've already slapped a white Apple sticker over the Dell logo on the top and, deliciously, the old logo is still visible through the sticker. Heh heh heh. Me likee.
Once the memory comes, I'm pretty much going to have to gut the little beast to install it but disemboweling computers is fun. I've tried a little typing on the netbook and I'll give Dell credit for making a nice keyboard at that size. Not brilliant, mind you. But definitely good. I figure one full day to install the memory - no use trying to overdo and get all gumption trapped on the project. Tear it down, clip in the new memory module, stick it all back together, be sure it's running properly is enough for one day. Then the next day do the install. I figure that should take the better part of an afternoon, working "apace."
On the critical side, the trackpad on the Mini 10v kinda sucks. It may be partly because I'm not accustomed to it but I tried to play a game of Freecell and I was fighting the trackpad more than just using it. I'm hoping the drivers for the Hackintosh will make it run more to my liking. AFN.

Retro Thursday
Another place holder day here on PoW. A little 70s flashiebackie with a man who managed to pen a couple of iconic songs, sing a superb re-make of an icon's iconic song (Roy Orbison's "Crying") and then be left adrift in the ocean of time and the culture passing. I give you one of my favorites of his oeuvre:

Why Is This?
I would pay serious money for a fish taco right now. Watch it! I mean a fish taco at a place like Baja Fresh. I'd even settle for a really nice tuna sandwich. I think I'll make myself one tomorrow for lunch. My technique for using less mayo is to sub in a good shot of cottage cheese. It even helps with the texture.

Have A Great Day Everybody
A busy day will lead to a decided lack of posting here at PoW. So go, enjoy the lengthening of days and I'll try to come up with something interesting or amusing for another day. My netbook is slated to be delivered today so the great Hackintosh project will begin at the start of February.
ADDENDUM: The Woot Off is still ongoing. Check it for strange and wond'rous bargains on things you don't really need.
DAMMIT: The Woot off had a Kai Shun Yanagiba knife for $65. I missed it. Click the link for some unutterably gorgeous knife porn.I would have gone for the 270mm version. And then I would have gone to my local fish monger for some sushi-grade fish just so I could slice it. Oh, I'd eat it too. Make no mistake about that.

Woot FYI
Woot is having a Woot Off today, which means a stream of products all day long as they sell out. When I tuned in, it was a $600 Ken Onion knife set. I doubt there were many of them but oy! such a knife you should have!

Yummeh
Another test case from Amazon: microwave pork rinds. Surprisingly good. A nice way to make a fresh snack which isn't that revolting microwave popcorn. I don't suggest you rush out to try it but sometime, when you're inclined, give it a try. Warm and flavory.
In Other News: A friend recently gave me a small supply of mixed nuts in shell. I can crack walnuts, almonds, Brazil nuts in hand as long as I have two nuts to work with so my inability to find my nutcracker wasn't a problem. Until I got to the hazelnuts. Too small to use 'against' each other in hand. I was nonplussed until I looked at my garlic press. Hmmm. Worked like a charm. A short, sharp thwap and the shell was cracked sufficiently to open with a nut pick. Just goes to show - there's more than one way to flay a feline.

Since Rachel Ray's Ass Gets More Comments Than Anything Else
I see your static image and raise you Lisa Loeb in a thong:


UPDATE: In the "teach a man to fish" category of assology, The Other McCain posts something worthwhile.

Good News Everybody!
Emm Gryner has a new disc coming out. "Stray Bullets" by name. And if you pre-order (that's about $15 US), you're entered in a contest to win a home show from the talented lass. I don't like my odds but it would pretty damn cool.
Also, read this post by the vivacious and perspicacious Kathy Shaidle. There is much truth therein young padawan. Then again, why are you not reading her every post every day? You got some splainin' to do!
UPDATE: In my continuing efforts to find strange and wonderful things that I can order from Amazon, I stumbled upon Madagascar pink rice. It's not cheap, I can get a really nice Basmati from Costco or my local Korean supermarket at about a buck a pound. But ... it's pink rice. I have to try it. The description includes this: "tropial spice taste with hints of cinnamon and clove" (which I assume should be tropical). To have that 'built in' to the rice is really intriguing.

30 Minute Meal..
Ok, so Rachael honey, you may not be the best cook in the world and your blatant disregard for the English language-EVOO, Nutrish, Spoonula..ug..may pluck my last nerve...but OMG!!..I'll be right over with a 55-gallon drum of E.V.O.O., some shrink wrap and my snorkle..

Enigmatic's "Where are they now?"

Peter Billingsley as Ralphie Parker in "A Christmas Story"

Then...

Now...

Testing, Testing
With the greater amount of space PoW now has, a change to a larger font size may be called for. This post is just a test to see how it would look. Also, the font is changed from Lucida Grande to Trebuchet.

Layout Change
I've been dissatisfied with the width of the previous blog design for a while. I've elected to move to a new layout which I'll be tweaking in terms of color and other touches in the next couple of weeks. I hope you like it. These new things always take some getting used to.

That Mitchell & Webb Look
Great Brit comedy with one errant naughty word toward the end. Too funny not to post. "At least pigs are for sausages." Hat tip to Coyote Blog.

Sigh
It's muzzable weather here in the NoVa - rain and sleet, grey skies, cold with that penetrating edge that wet brings to winter weather. Survivable of course, but iconic in the sense that Lycurgus has identified "Virginia weather." Ah well, time to take as hot a shower as I can stand, break out a new blade and scrape face to the point of pseudofolliculitis barbae, cook up some oatmeal and coffee and scramble a couple of eggs in a knob of butter and catch up on reading. I believe I finally managed to corral the ingredients for the honey-wheat berry bread I didn't make before. Filling the house with the smell of baking bread would be a very good thing.
Which brings to mind my latest small experiment - bacon popcorn. My first batch was good but not what I wanted. I started with rice bran oil in the popper and added some bacon grease to the mix. What I found was that the fresh popcorn has so much flavor that the bacon became a trailing flavor, a hint o' bacon in the aftertaste. Despite its low smoking point, I'm going to have to try using pure bacon grease to pop a batch. Keep in mind though, that "Whirley-Pop" maker takes between one and two tablespoons to pop a batch. That's not much for a big fluffy bowl of corny goodness. And besides, it's bacon.
In other news, I just ordered a Dell Mini 10v refurb and an 8GB flash drive to geek it up and make myself a "Hackintosh." It's a project I've been wanting to undertake out of pure cussedness and seeing a coupon for 15% off a Dell refurb made me pull the trigger. I'll report on it as it happens.
Have a great day, those of you who don't have to deal with the greys and perhaps I can scare something really worth posting about over the weekend.

Blogdog's Poetry Corner Presents:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

A Couple Of Bumper Stickers
I'm considering having CafePress make me a couple of one-off bumper stickers:

Paybacks are a Pelosi
and
Life's a Pelosi, then you're taxed

And I think the Rolling Stones need to be re-recorded:
"I see a blue state and I want to paint it red..."

Massachusetts - Scott Brown
Sweet.

Obama has lost traction with American voters in part due to the slick of blood and internal organs from all the people that have been thrown under the bus. Look for even more furious spinning of wheels in 3, 2, 1....
UPDATE: Congratulations to Lycurgus for getting his brilliant line quoted by the Blogfather, Instapundit.

Enjoy Yos'ef!
PoW regular read and blogpal Joe Sherlock is taking off for a while. So The View Through The Windshield will be on hiatus for a bit and we will miss it but very much hope Joe has big ol' buckets of fun while he's got his digital feet up. It must be noted (and to my chagrin, has not been yet) that Joe's addition of his own videos to his blog is a great example of the active and involved mind. My father, who was a huge 'gadget guy' would not only have approved but would have been pestering me to get the whole video thing running for him. And I would have.

Mr. Word Man Learns Something New
I've never bothered to dig into the word "petard," as in "hoist on one's own." But the idea of "hoist" always made me think of something mechanical, something pole-ish as it were. But I was everso wrong. It's actually a wall-breaching bomb. And, to Mr. Word Man's great delight, the etymology of the word is from the French for flatulation. Yup. The root of "petard" is a fart.

So, Anyway
There I was watching some of the product of the televisioning machine when who should appear but the First Lady of the United States telling me to be all kinds of generous to the sadly afflicted people of Haiti. I'm down with that. I'll be making a contribution to the Red Cross on Monday but not because that zombie told me to. Really. The over-made-up face, the dead, soulless eyes. That is one scary fembot. She must have found where to get a Hillary style nut-vise years ago.

More From The Critter Cam
Blogging has been light of late as there is so much ferment and foment going on that I've been dry. The excitement is out there and my adding some form of dittoes post would really be, well, not gilding the lily but more like overwhelming the lily. Just not really needed.
Yet posting ... is good. So I'm posting a few more shots from the Boca Grande Critter Cam, including the LaserFox! How exciting.

Earthquake in Haiti!
Thousands left homeless! Damage estimated in the hundreds of dollars!

Joking aside, I hope for the health and well-being of those Haitians who are suffering the effects of the seismic event. Remember, the earthquake has done less devastation to your country than the continuing kleptocracy you've had as government for generations.

Ice, Ice Baby
A report from the Southern Front in the War On Global Warming, Lycurgus sends us this photo of a peculiar way to keep your beer chillin: Wait for the birdbath to freeze and then set your beer on it.

You will note that this picture is almost nearly live from Central Florida and that the ice is thick enough to support the frosty can. Not just a thin skinning of ice but about a quarter inch of it. Woooeee. You could drink cold orange juice right out of the fruit.
In other Central Florida news, our intrepid correspondent has set up a critter cam in the lovely isle of Boca Grande and captured a bobcat out for a stroll.

There was also some local kittycat action, a fox and the butt of what would appear to be a rackety coon who was mozying along mostly out of camera range. Critter cams are fun where there are critters to cam. Elly May would approve.

File In "I Love Technology"
I just downloaded a free app for the iPhone - a WiFi based remote control for iTunes. So now I can control my iTunes from anywhere in my house. Why is this such a big deal? It all comes down to my need for talk radio. Rush is broadcast locally on a station that routinely gets a rotten signal in my house. And in my kitchen, despite the nice Bose Wave radio, it doesn't come in at all. So I moved my old iMac to the kitchen to use as an iTunes "server" and to sometimes web surf. But if I boot up the 'puter, the radio goes completely fuzzed out with interference. So then I can only run either FM stations or the computer signal through the AUX jack.
There are problems. Booting up the computer takes time and not a little effort to reach the start button given that the edge behind which said button lurks is the most distant from being easily reached. And the iMac takes up not a little space. Not a lot of space but not a little either. Yet there is a work-around. I have an Airport Express unit (about 2 inches square and and inch thick) which can serve iTunes from a remote machine to, say, a stereo in a different room. So I could leave my main machine booted up and running iTunes to send the signal to the little Airport box and save myself some kitchen space.
I can see you thinking, "But how will he control iTunes if he's in the kitchen and the iMac that's sending his radio is on a whole 'nother level?" Ha ha! Apple has thought of that already. The app store has a free Apple app called "Remote" that I mentioned at the opening of this post. I downloaded it, sync'd it to my iTunes (very easy) and started controlling my musical domain. Then the sticking point hit me. I don't see any controls to run iTunes radio on the remote. Bugger. But my Google Fu is strong. It turns out (and I did not know this) that you can make a playlist of radio stations! And once I did that, I had access to the stations I needed on the remote.
Tomorrow will be the set-up of the Airport Express and then the great experiment should be finished. I love technology that does what I want.

Trippin'
I have the distinct pleasure of relating that I got out of town on Wednesday for a day trip to Wilmington and most of a day with the Wilmington Boyz. The Boyz now include one girl as pupdawg Oliver (the world's quietest and chillin'est dog) has a fellow rescue in Lisa, little under-bitey sweetheart she is too.
The hangin out with was well worth the trip but it was topped off with a dinner of UnkaMika's Extry Special gumbo. Oh man. Sausage and shrimp gumbo that was glorious. I got a container to take home with me and I'm both delighted and sad to report that (you can see this coming, can't you?) it's all gone. It's been nomed-n-ated.
I'm no gumbo expert, as much as I'd LIKE to be! But I have learned one thing about it. If gumbo doesn't have some crawfish or shrimp in it, it's not what it could be. There's something in those critters, apart from their being just tasty, that adds a lush, gorgeous mouth-feel to the stew. Yuh-um!
I also got a take away bag of beignet mix. Looking forward to making those NOLA donuts baby!

Billy Beck Cuts Down To The Bone
And exposes the cancer at what should be the support for society:

(T)his is not a metaphysical crisis. In deepest fact, that can't even happen. (Reality has no "crisis" with human -- or any other -- affairs. It just is.) This is an epistemic crisis, with terminal ethical and political implications redounding to metaphysical consequences: reality will manifest the effects of objectively defective value-selections and ways of acting for them. Sooner or later and one way or another, the attempt of everyone to live at the expense of everyone else will fail, simply because this is not what human beings are. The failure might run over decades and generations, as in a case like the Soviet Union, where untold millions had countless values (unto their very lives, commonly) destroyed to the cheers of defective mentalities who always called it a success. It was always a constant failure, and that was reality having its way.

The added emphasis is mine. As ever with Beck, RTWT. There is great evil afoot in the body politic and only those with the clarity of vision to see it and lay it out will serve to open eyes that are blinkered by failing education, journalism and a multiplicity of social structures that traduce instead of inform. Billy Beck's vision came clear at some point and has remained unclouded ever since. And his voice works as well. Praise be.

UPDATE: After posting this, I read the following quote from the nation's greatest public intellectual Dr. Thomas Sowell: "We're becoming a nation of people who are propagandized from elementary school right on through to the graduate school in a certain vision of the world. And only the ones who, for one reason or another, either experience or insight or whatever, leads them to say 'Wait a minute!' Only those are the ones we have to depend on."
Billy Beck is standing on a rampart saying just that to anyone with the gumption to attend. That they don't listen will be on their heads, not his.

Steven Wright On The Craig Ferguson Show
"I've been having premonitions of flashbacks."

What A Cracking Wanker!
Don't worry. Just trying to keep my new year's resolution.

In Honor Of The Weather
Ladies and gentlemen, the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughn!



Boy could make a Strat sing. Wish he were still around and caught the PRS fever. That'd be cool.

I'm Running Around Today
But there is much chewy goodness at The Smallest Minority. Go thou and do some reading. As Tom Lehrer once said, "Life is like a sewer. You only get out if it what you put into it."
But I would like to note in passing that my weather widget tells me today that the temperature is the same 23º as yesterday but the "feels like" is up to a blistering 8º! If this trend continues, tomorrow will "feel like" 64º! Woo hoo!

Oh My Effin Gee
Pulled out the terminally hiPhone (that's "hip" buried in there, you see) this morning to look at the weather app. Ow! At noon, that's noon mind you, the temp was 23º and with wind chill (it's been more fierce than Beyonce and Christian Siriano put together), the "feels like" temp is one degree. One freakin' degree! Do I have to leave the bed today? I hope not. Wait, I'm at the computer. Too late.

In other news, or other non-news really, tomorrow will mark the first delivery of the revamped Washington Times to my frigid driveway. I believe I've said before that this saddens me. The newspaper is "re-inventing" itself as something akin to a paper which only has the "A section." No sports. Though the sudoku and crossword were brought back, the comics page has been gone for a while now. I doubt those returned features will be in the new version though. Basically, I will no longer be getting what I consider a newspaper. I will let my subscription lapse. And I will most certainly not be replacing it with the Washington Compost. -sigh- Sic transit gloria data.

UPDATE: Well, only the first step has been taken toward honey wheat berry bread - the wheat berries are boiled up to a pleasant mooshiness. Instead I made the first step toward my idea of "mocha" jello. Which would be a pan of chocolate jello. I'll need to make a pan of coffee jello and then cut each type into cubes which will be jumbled into a matrix of "milk" jello. I don't know if it'll be good and it may be not worth the effort but it's something I have to try. The idea springs from a blog post about "stained glass" jello.

A Little Sump'n Sump'n
I'm set up to make a honey, wheat berry bread tomorrow (should I use the tupelo or the non-orange blossom orange blossom honey? I think the latter as it'll sink into the bread better.) Wish me luck. It's been a while since I've been baking. So, being a cautious and optimistic type, I figured I'd get myself a little present from Amazon that will be incorporated into future baking: Dried cherries. Cherry is one of my favorite flavors and I'm thinking of a winter of muffins, breads and, time and aching bones allowing, cupcakes. I want to make a ginger cherry cupcake. I'm open to suggestions as to what sort of frosting would go well with that. Maybe a cherry cupcake with ginger frosting? Comments are welcomed, nay, encouraged.