Well, Funny made it over to BlueHost but still has some going to arrive intact. Watch this space! 🙂
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Funny switches servers tomorrow
Well, tomorrow’s the day of the big switch. Mrs. Micah is going to help me convert Funny to a monetized site (anyone wanna buy an ad, BTW?), switching to Bluehost in the bargain. I have no idea how this is going to work, and of course given my advanced level of technobumbling, the site may go down for a while. But not because I’ve forgotten you! One way or the other, Funny will be back.
It will be interesting to see if this li’l blog can make any money. I’d be surprised, frankly. But really, even a couple hundred bucks a month would help! Every $2,400 it makes is one section of freshman comp I don’t have to teach! The delightful Poisoned Pen Press gives me about a novel a month to proof, to the tune of two or three hundred dollah. So it looks like the class load could be 3 and 2 or even as few as 2 and 2.
Ugh. Teaching freshman comp until I can’t hold a pen any longer was not quite what I had in mind for old age! Ohhh well. Could be worse: could be lighting a campfire under the Seventh Avenue Overpass.
The other day when a cool evening was coming on (temps have been all over the thermometer the past couple of weeks) I saw a woman who looked to be about my age, her shopping cart parked as she tried to scavenge under some trees for firewood. Poor old gal. Makes freshman comp look mighty fine.
Sorta…
What d’you want to hear on NPR?
For several months, I’ve been participating in a series of National Public Radio surveys, which are always kinda fun and make me feel like I have some tiny voice in…somethingorother.
Today’s survey asks what kind of economic news we’re hearing and what kind we want to hear. At one point, it inquires what proportion of national news we’d like, what proportion of stories about individual citizens, what proportion of local reporting.
I guess I’m an awful crank, but you know…I could do with a lot fewer human-interest pieces. Today, for example, NPR focuses on the life and hard times of Ms. Sylvia Martinez, whose luck has been flowing downhill since she was laid off a $52,000-a-year job. “Fifteen days from homeless,” she’s victimized by a fire in an apartment above hers, which leaves her few belongings soaked and the ceiling down in the living room. She’s unsuccessfully assayed suicide, her grown daughter has fled (taking Sylvia’s grandchild), and on and on.
It’s not that I’m not sorry for the lady. It’s that I don’t think wallowing in stories like this serves any purpose. We know, already, that things are tough all over. Breathes there one American citizen who doesn’t have a relative, friend, or acquaintance affected by the collapse of the Bush economy? If we haven’t seen the equity in our homes disappear, if we’re not making payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of the asset underlying it, if we’re not out of work ourselves, we certainly have enough people in our own lives who have been hurt by this disaster to understand what it means on a human level.
Please, dear NPR: Take your reporters off the sob stories and assign them to local coverage. Get rid of some of the gab-fests and replace them with in-depth local news programs. As newspapers close and local television and radio news stations deliver little more than advertorial and infotainment, we need professional, responsible, investigative reporting on the local level. We need news, real news, on all levels: international, national, and local.
Do you listen to NPR? If so, what would you like to hear more of? Or less of?
Potatoes ‘n’ cheese
Now that we’re back in business here, I’d like to share a dish I invented a few days ago.
Backstory: as much as I enjoy scalloped potatoes, they seem a little watery with all that milk and stuff squishing around. It occurred to me that you ought to be able to cook potatoes much the same way you make macaroni and cheese: layered with white sauce and cheese.
The possible trap is that macaroni is already cooked, and so traditional macaroni-&-cheese bakes only about 20 minutes. Being at heart incorrigibly lazy, I didn’t want to have to precook the taters. So I decided to use a mandoline to slice them very thin, which I hoped would allow the oven to heat them more efficiently. This trick results in a lot of potato slices! To accommodate them, I used the largest flat baking pan in the house, preparing it with a liberal coat of butter.
Because of the amount of potatoes involved, I prepared a double recipe of white sauce, which I flavored up with a little New Mexico chili, nutmeg, and parsley. I pulverized about 12 or 16 ounces of cheddar cheese in the food processor, and then did two layers of potatoes, white sauce, and cheese, ending with the cheese. Didn’t have any bread in the house, so to make crumbs I crunched up some rice crackers. Actual bread crumbs would have been better, but the cracker idea worked adequately.
The result is pretty darn tasty, and it made enough high-protein food to fill half the freezer:
Last night I had some for dinner, with a couple of breakfast sausages and a salad. Couldn’t be easier!
Here are the specifics:
You need:
-about 4 cups milk
-about 5 or 6 Tbsp butter (plus enough to butter the pan)
-about 5 or 6 Tbsp flour
-salt and pepper to taste
-dash of nutmeg
-a few tablespoons of fresh chopped parsley
-something for zing, such as ground pepper, paprika, or Tabasco sauce, to taste
-about 8 or 10 thinly sliced small cooking potatoes, or more, depending on what’s in the fridge
-about a pound (more or less) of tasty cheese, shredded
-bread crumbs
Make the white sauce:
Heat the milk in the microwave or on the stovetop, as desired. It should be almost simmering. Heating the milk isn’t really necessary, but it speeds things along.
Melt butter in a pan large enough to accommodate the amount of milk you’re using. Add the flour and stir over medium heat until the butter foams. Don’t allow it to brown. Now stir in the milk. Heat, stirring, over medium or medium-high heat until the sauce thickens. While stirring, add nutmeg, salt, pepper, parsley, and any other flavoring you’ve selected.
Assemble the dish:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a buttered baking dish, lay down a layer of thin-sliced potatoes, using about half of them. Spread about half the white sauce over these, and then sprinkle on about half the shredded cheese. Layer the rest of the potatoes over this, and repeat the layering of sauce and cheese. Sprinkle some bread crumbs over the top.
Cook:
Bake at 350 degrees for about 40 minutes. Test by poking the potatoes with a thin knife to assess whether they’re cooked to your taste. If not, let them bake a few minutes longer. Remember that if you take the pan out and allow it to set for ten minutes, the food will continue to cook from its retained heat. So, use your judgment in deciding when the potatoes are “done.”
Yay! Cox rocks!
What an amazing difference between Qwest’s customer service and Cox’s!
Yesterday the DSL modem went down. Too busy in the morning to take on a punch-a-button labyrinth, I ran off to campus, where I learned the wonderful RA who recently moved into our neighborhood also had a lame connection. We assumed Cox was having an outage and things would be back up by the time we got home.
Wrong.
So about quarter to five last night, I dialed up Cox’s robot. Interestingly, this voice-driven robot has some capabilities to diagnose basic, commonly recurring problems. Last time I called, the robo-tech instructed me—correctly!—on how to fix the connection. Didn’t work this time, and so after repeating “representative” a few times, I got through to a real, live human being. And get this: the guy could speak English!!!!
Hah! Take that, Qworst!
It took him a few minutes of figuring, but shortly he suggested a series of simple maneuvers that magically brought the system online. It was so wonderful to reach an actual person, one who
a. understood what I was saying;
b. could make himself understood to me;
c. could figure out the problem;
d. had an answer to the problem; and
e. did not try to cheat me or upsell me to a service I can’t afford.
It’s a miracle.
Funnier and funnier!
Remember we were chatting about the Great Desert University’s having invited the President of the United States to give this spring’s commencement address but announcing he hasn’t accomplished enough to deserve an honorary degree?
Well, in response to the ensuing hoots of scornful laughter, that august institution announced that it would instead name a scholarship after Mr. Obama.
Okay, okay. Very nice. Only…
It’s not a scholarship! It’s a longstanding financial aid program largely funded by federal and local grants. It administers Pell Grants.
Heeee! These people have got to stop this. I can’t breathe between bursts of laughter! Funnier than a crutch! Do they have any idea how ludicrous they make themselves look, with their assumption that everyone on the planet is dumber than they are?