Sometimes I do things for no reason; or, Editing Wikipedia.
Sunday, March 15th, 2009 | conventions | No Comments
I’ve just made all the known updates (dates/locations) to this page:
List of science fiction conventions
If you know of any conventions they missed, or any wrong info on there, I’d encourage you to edit the page, or let me know so I can edit it. It’ll be nice to have all the correct info in one place.
ZombAid
Saturday, March 14th, 2009 | conventions | No Comments
There’s Something About A Zombie – The ZombAid Benefit Song
Filmed live (undead?) at the MarsCon Dementia Track FuMP Sideshow Showcase
My camera filmed all my video in 320×240, so I wouldn’t advise trying to view this larger.
Well DUH, or, Why Bad Mortagages Happened
Saturday, February 28th, 2009 | political | No Comments
This video shows the story of Jeff Gray, a man who is going to get kicked out of his home. It’s a nice home, not a McMansion, not a hole in the wall. He originally bought it for $200k. When he got laid off and his wife lost her job and had to take a “significant pay cut”, they refinanced their home.
And got $347,000.
Yeah. You read that right. The mortgage company swooped in, waved their magic wand and said they were making $13k a month (when they were actually making $9k a year), and handed them $347,000. They were supposed to be paying $2500/month from day one, and never made one payment. Well, duh! It would have been impossible for them to make payments like that. But whoever created that mortgage for them didn’t care. They just wanted to make big numbers in their book, and the guy didn’t know what he was signing. He just knew if he signed it, they would give him lots of money. In the video, it’s obvious he has no idea what happened to him.
Here’s my conundrum: I’ve been smart with my finances since I got out of college. (Before then I was a complete idiot, and needed help fixing the disaster that resulted from that.) I paid my debts and loans on time, and they didn’t get reduced for any reason other than me handing someone a check. I still haven’t bought a home because I haven’t felt that buying a home without a down payment is a good idea. I pay my rent every month on time, and have done so for over a decade.
So, how should I feel about Mr. Gray, who has had a free ride for the last 4 years? Should I feel like JP Morgan, who bought this toxic mortgage from some no-name mortgage company that no longer exists, should cut him a deal? If so, what kind of deal? Should his repayments be stretched over a longer period, or should his repayment just be cut to something manageable over 30 years? And honestly, what kind of payments is this guy going to be able to make on $9,000 a year with two kids, anyway? If I do the numbers right, that family’s been living on roughly a $50k a year budget for the last few years – there’s no way they’re going to be able to live on 1/5 of that, and make mortgage payments.
Should I say, “Cut the guy a deal, no one should lose their home”? Or should I say, “you were an idiot, Mr. Gray, suck it up, your life is ruined”?
I guess it comes down to compassion, and tolerance for ignorance (in this case, financial ignorance). And I’m finding the older I get, the less I have of both.
Filth and Infestations
Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 | ramblings | No Comments
I often enjoy shows on the Discovery Channel. One of my favorites is Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. (If you haven’t seen the clip with him and Oscar the Grouch, you really should watch it. The mud bath is giggle-inducing.) He goes to the filthiest, nastiest workplaces, and shows the rest of us just how good we may or may not have it with our sterile desk jobs, where we complain if the bathrooms aren’t cleaned at least weekly. These are jobs that are just gross, they have to be done, and that’s that. I respect anyone with a dirty job.
Today the show following Dirty Jobs was “Verminators,” about – you guessed it – exterminators. Roaches and rats were on the menu today, being the most common critters that hang around. There were three places featured: a horse stable with a major rat infestation, an apartment with roaches, and a house with a mild rat infestation.
The horse stable, I can understand. One pair of rats gets in and they can make up to 100 rats a month. Boom, huge rat infestation. Especially in a place like a stable, which isn’t necessarily kept squeaky clean because it’s impossible. The house with rats was actually a clean house, they’d just gotten rats in the attic and they were nesting behind the oven. The woman’s reaction was appropriately horrified. She was willing to do whatever it took to get the rats out because she was afraid of the diseases they might transmit to her family. Eww, gross, kill rats, yay, job well done.
The apartment was what got me. When I say “they had roaches” it wasn’t a few behind the stove, or hiding in the baseboards. They were camped out in front of the TV smoking cigars. (Frank Hayes’ “Roaches on Parade” comes to mind.) Everything they touched in the apartment had roaches on or behind it. And there was a LOT of stuff. Stuff piled up on beds, stuff piled on couches, stuff piled on tables, pile, pile, pile. And everything with roaches. The baby crib was crawling with them. And it was all filthy. And the people living there just kind of shrugged, resigned to their filth. Obviously they had called the exterminators so they were concerned with the problem, but it didn’t look like they had tried to do anything about it.
I have had roaches in places I have rented. It’s almost impossible not to. I even had mice at one apartment, since the idiots who had installed the stove cut a giant hole in the wall and left it unpatched. Luckily, I had cats who were more than willing to camp out in front of said stove and wait for “playtime.” (The mice smartened up quick and didn’t come back.) This apartment was near a drainage ditch – not a concrete one, but a dug-out which had only a trickle of water through it that led down to a runoff-pond. It was an excellent breeding ground for damn near everything, and damn near everything thought it would be great to come inside since the food was better. At one point, the downstairs neighbors – filthy, annoying, tactless people who let the entire neighborhood of kids run in and out of their place – moved out, and the clean-up crew said it was the worst apartment they’d ever seen. So when they moved out, what do you think happened to the horde of critters living off them? They spread out to look for new sources of food. Suddenly I had roaches coming out of the woodwork – literally – to see what was for dinner.
I fought. I cringed. I scrubbed. I researched. I put down sugar and borax, I put bait paste in the corners and along the bottoms of the cabinets, I tried one of those devices that emitted sound to drive bugs away. (Which was the only thing that didn’t work. I pulled that out of the wall socket a month later to find the roaches LIVING IN IT.) I took out the wall plates and put bait paste in. I changed out roach motels constantly. I repackaged all my food to be in airtight containers. I left nothing out and no dishes in the sink. And it took a few months, but eventually I either killed them all or made the place so inhospitable that they left for good. I did not have any interest in living in a place with roaches, to have them near my food, to have them near me while I slept. I immediately started fighting and didn’t let up until I’d won. I imagined them crawling all over everything and I couldn’t stand it.
So why is it that people resign themselves to living in filth? To living in infestations, in dirt, in dust, in sticky floors and heaps of trash? I’ve had friends and neighbors who live like this, with piles of dirty clothes and things heaped up everywhere, floors unwashed, toilets worse than a truck stop bathroom, kitchens I wouldn’t boil water in, pet urine and feces left in the corners (one person I helped to move had so much cat urine in her apartment that my eyes burned), litterboxes overflowing, rooms full of junk they never look at. I once had a sinus infection that required a month-long regimen of heavy-duty antibiotics from helping a couple clean their house.
I simply cannot understand it. I’m not spic-and-span by any stretch of the imagination. There’s dust on my shelves, my sink gets full of dishes, and cat hair gets on everything. My mother is the Clean Queen. If she says a place is clean, it means you can eat off the floor. That is, you could eat SOUP off the floor. My house will likely never be as clean as hers, but I do attempt to keep it tidy. I vacuum once every week or two, I wash the bathroom and kitchen every other weekend, I change the sheets weekly and do my laundry when the hamper gets full.
But really… how can you come home every night to the smell, the dirty carpets, the peeling paint, the skitters out of the corner of your eye when you flip the light switch on? It’s foreign to me, when cleaning agents are so cheap and plentiful. A bottle of Mr. Clean is only a couple of bucks, and you can get a cheap knockoff that works just as well at the dollar store. The best toilet bowl cleaner out there is $1.50 a bottle (The Works – btw, will also remove rust and hard water stains). Scrubbing bubbles? Spray it on and leave it for 10 minutes, then wipe it down with a sponge and rinse. Bleach is your friend. How hard is it? Were people never taught how to clean by their parents? Was having a clean home never important? Is it just easier to resign yourself to living in junk and dirt and “someday I will clean up”?
Yeah, and someday I’ll win the lottery, too.
Movie Meme – I’ve seen 116 out of 239
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 | ramblings | 1 Comment
I should be in bed, but instead, I think I’ll do this meme.
Mark the ones you’ve seen. Then, put x’s next to the films you’ve seen, add them up, change the header adding your number, and click post at the bottom. There are 239 films on this list.
Ebay auction for MarsCon Dementia Track
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
This is my 3rd re-listing of this item. I’ve dropped the starting bid to $35. If this doesn’t work, I give up.
I’m auctioning off a white 1000 thread count king-size sheet set, proceeds to go to the MarsCon Dementia Track Fund Raiser. If you are local to Chicago I can deliver. 
http://bid-url.com/h06fdu
Spicy Garlic Wing Sauce
Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | cooking | 2 Comments
Alas, I have no picture to go along with this post. Maybe some other time when I make them I’ll add one. I stole this recipe wholesale from Gourmeted, and didn’t alter it a bit – and let me tell ya, it has quite a kick.
SPICY GARLIC WING SAUCE:
1 cup Frank’s cayenne pepper sauce (I used Smokin’ Joes since it was on sale at Jewel. $0.88 for a pint! Not bad!)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons water
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1) Combine all ingredients except egg yolk, water, and cornstarch for sauce of your choice in a small saucepan.
2) Heat sauce over medium heat until boiling, then reduce heat and simmer for 5 minutes.
3) Remove pan from heat and allow it to cool, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
4) While sauce cools, vigorously whisk egg yolk with 2 teaspoons water in a medium bowl for about 2 minutes or color is pale yellow. Whisk in cornstarch until dissolved. (I used my immersion blender.)
5) Drizzle sauce mixture into egg yolk mixture in a steady stream while rapidly whisking. This will create a thick, creamy emulsion that will prevent oil from separating. (Again with the immersion blender.)
6) Cover sauce and chill until needed.
As far as wings/drumsticks to go with this, I suggest Alton Brown’s method of steaming and baking the parts which is very well illustrated at Paul’s Travel Pictures.
I hate spam.
Sunday, January 25th, 2009 | ramblings | No Comments
Not only have I had to wade through 8,000+ messages trying to sell me a larger penis, a Rolex, or magic weight loss pills since the beginning of the year, but this gem popped up in my inbox this morning:
“I CAN is way more important than IQ – so get that little pill.”
Way to remind me of the sheer mass of stupidity surrounding me in the world first thing in the morning, spam!
Birthday Cake
Friday, January 23rd, 2009 | cakes | No Comments
This was another commissioned cake for a birthday. Some confusion ensued on when the pickup date was, but everything worked out in the end, and they said it was very tasty. It was a white cake with vanilla buttercream frosting – not too exciting, but it had to feed a crowd of varied palates.
(At some point I will set up a place in my apartment with some decent lighting to take cake photos.)
Chalk it up to 50 years of Twinkies
Sunday, January 11th, 2009 | cakes | No Comments
I saw a recipe on the cakecentral.com forums that was highly touted by many people, and it went like this:
1 package dream whip
1 small package instant pudding
1.5 cups milk
So heck, I gave it a shot. And… it tasted like Cool Whip and pudding mixed together. Nothing more, nothing less. That slightly fake, chemical taste, with a lot of air and sugar. I poured the lot down the sink.
What the hell? People think this is a wonderful taste sensation? Come on! Haven’t these people tried ganache, or Italian buttercream, or anything classic and made with care?
Oh… yeah. They haven’t. They’ve had 50 years of Cool Whip Pies and Twinkies.