firehose

by mriehl

While closely related to elephant garlic, mammoth garlic is shaggier and has much more dramatic tusks, making its home in the far north. A typical herd is led by a garlic matriarch and contains a number of adult females and their young cloves. While female garlic remains with the herd, juvenile males will eventually leave to join the loose bachelor herds of garlic bulls.

Look, I visited my parents last weekend, and somebody gave me brandy. I cannot be held responsible for what happens after that. And as long as nobody asks about the sketches of bighorn pears, or god forbid, the lemonlopes, we’ll all be okay. - Ursula Vernon

forwardtozion:

knatalie:

#she terrifies men because she forces them into their true shapes #she is the sea there is no room for pretense in her #she will not allow anyone to render her less than what she is #she will not allow others to be anything than what they are #barbossa is a corpse and davy jones is nothing more than shell and bone and ruin dredged up from the ocean floor #’calypso’ is greek for ‘to conceal to hide’ and that is her root#she is the truth waiting to devour you from beneath

I’ve been waiting to see Calypso on my dash.

CBC.ca

Germany, France haul euro zone out of recession Reuters By Martin Santa. BRUSSELS | Wed Aug 14, 2013 10:25am EDT. BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The economies of Germany and France grew faster than expected in the second quarter, bettering a widely heralded expansion in the United States and pulling the euro ... Euro Area Exits Record Slump Led by Largest EconomiesBloomberg Eurozone's Longest-Ever Recession Comes to an EndABC News Eurozone comes out of recessionBBC News New York Times (blog) -USA TODAY -Wall Street Journal all 401 news articles »

First of all, these crisps are about the most delicious things you’ll ever eat.

Second, these crisps are about the easiest things you’ll ever make.

Third, when I was a little girl, I had a stuffed monkey named Womba. His hands Velcroed together and I think I might have worn him as an accessory for the first half of my fourth grade year. Sometimes he was around my shoulders like a cardigan. Sometimes he was around my waist like a belt. Sometimes he was criss-crossed over my shoulder like a purse. And if I was nervous, I’d stroke his soft, fuzzy head and would feel better instantly.

I always wondered why Brad Benz didn’t like me.

Back to my original point: These crisps are about the most delicious things you’ll ever eat. I made them using homemade tortillas to go with cinnamon ice cream (swoon) in my next cookbook…but I also made them last week for a Food Network episode we filmed here on the ranch, and the guys absolutely inhaled them. So yesterday, for a Sunday snack, I made ‘em again using storebought tortillas and served ‘em with storebought vanilla ice cream. And they were still utterly divine.

You won’t believe the simplicity. And you won’t believe how addictive they are!

 
This is what you need!

And you also need to preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

 
 
 
Add some sugar and ground cinnamon to a bowl.

 
 
 
Then grab a fork and use it to violently combine the two…

 
 
 
Until the two are now one!

Did you ever wear a stuffed monkey as an accessory when you were a child? I’m just asking.

(Note: If you’ve ever worn a stuffed monkey as an accessory when you were an adult, I’d rather not know. Thank you.)

 
 
 
Next, melt some butter.

 
 
 
Dip in a pastry brush…

 
 
 
And very, very generously brush the butter on one side of a flour tortilla.

 
 
 
Basically, you want to douse the sucker. Pretty much the only way you can mess up these things is if you don’t get enough butter on them at this stage.

 
 
 
Then do the same for a couple of other tortillas.

 
 
 
Right away, start sprinkling on the cinnamon sugar. You want it to totally cover the tortilla and mostly be absorbed by the butter. When most of it has been absorbed, sprinkle on a little more!

 
 
 
Repeat it with the other two tortillas, then flip them all over to the other side.

 
 
 
And repeat the process with the butter…

 
 
 
And the sugar. Next, just pop ‘em in the oven for about 15-17 minutes…

And brace yourself.

Just brace yourself.

 
 
 
This is what they should look like!

 
 
 
They’re crunchy. They’re crispy. They’re magical.

But you have to put them aside and let them cool completely.

Note: This will be extremely difficult.

So while we wait: Have you ever given your summer camp crush a hug goodbye when you were twelve, then turned around to leave and tripped over a rock and fell, scabbing your knee?

I’m just asking.

 
 
 
A minute or so after removing the pan from the oven, use a knife to loosen the crisps from the pan so they won’t stick until the end of eternity.

 
 
 
But really, there’s so much butter in these heavenly objects, they really don’t stick that badly.

 
 
 
After they’re totally cooled, break them into pieces. They should be totally crisp and hard, and should break apart pretty neatly.

 
 
 
You can’t know. You can’t know the deliciousness until you try them. And at this point, you could break them up into smaller pieces, bag them up, and use them as snacks.

 
 
 
But I have other plans for them.

 
 
 
I scream.

 
 
 
One…two…three…

 
 
 
TA-DA!

 
 
 
Wondrous. Just a wondrous, wonderful, fabulous combination.

 
 
 
You can also do smaller dishes of ice cream and have some fun sticking the crisps right in the scoop.

 
 
 
And use them as spoons!

Goodness gracious, my friends. Make ‘em this week. They’re too good not to. And they’re a complete cinch.

Here’s the handy dandy printable!

WinCo is an Idaho-based grocery chain that frequently beats Walmart on price while providing health care benefits for any employee working over 24 hours a week as well as an annual pension.

While all of these factors help WinCo compete with Walmart on price, what really might scare the world's largest retailer is how WinCo treats its employees. In sharp contrast to Walmart, which regularly comes under fire for practices like understaffing stores to keep costs down and hiring tons of temporary workers as a means to avoid paying full-time worker benefits, WinCo has a reputation for doing right by employees. It provides health benefits to all staffers who work at least 24 hours per week. The company also has a pension, with employees getting an amount equal to 20% of their annual salary put in a plan that's paid for by WinCo; a company spokesperson told the Idaho Statesman that more than 400 nonexecutive workers (cashiers, produce clerks, and such) currently have pensions worth over $1 million apiece.

Tags: business   Walmart   WinCo

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

oh good

For a space challenged place like NYC this modern Fold-Out Pet Bed makes total sense. Perfect for large dogs or multiple smaller dogs.

Original Source

nbauman writes "Don't get cancer until 2015. The Obama health reform is supposed to limit out-of-pocket costs to $12,700. But the Obama Administration has delayed its implementation until 2015. The insurance companies told them that their computers weren't able to add up all their customers' out-of-pocket costs to see whether they had reached the limit. For some common diseases, such as cancer or heart failure, treatment can cost over $100,000, and patients will be responsible for the balance. Tell me, Slashdot, how difficult would it be to rewrite an insurance billing system to aggregate a policyholder's out-of-pocket costs? 'A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said: "We knew this was an important issue. We had to balance the interests of consumers with the concerns of health plan sponsors and carriers, which told us that their computer systems were not set up to aggregate all of a person's out-of-pocket costs. They asked for more time to comply."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If we told you a story of an ancient city, some 1,200 years old, that has been devoured by the foreboding Mediterranean Sea and entombed under a tons of mud, rock and sand – you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the opening passage to a Disney fairytale. But this is one story that isn’t fantasy, in fact you could say it truly is the stuff of dreams.

Apparently, Bill Nighy was offered the part of the Doctor and turned it down because there was "too much baggage". Legitimate concern, certainly. We're not sure when the part was offered to him (he declined to specify, because saying so would be"disrespectful to whoever did it"), but regardless of where he would have fallen: How cool would a Bill Nighy Doctor have been? Go under the cut for more info about Nighy's almost-Doctor, new speculation about Matt Smith's regeneration, and when we'll be seeing Peter Capaldi taking up the Time Lord's mantle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO7bEmbodDE

Original Source

Cheers! We've got the exclusive premiere of artist Alex Pardee's take on Edgar Wright's apocalyptic pub crawl movie, At World's End.

Read more...

As a gay parent I must flee Russia or lose my children | Masha Gessen | Comment is free | The Observer:

The first time I heard about legislation banning “homosexual propaganda”, I thought it was funny. Quaint. I thought the last time anyone had used those words in earnest I had been a kid and my girlfriend hadn’t been born yet. Whatever they meant when they enacted laws against “homosexual propaganda” in the small towns of Ryazan or Kostroma, it could not have anything to do with reality, me or the present day. This was a bit less than two years ago. What woke me up was a friend who messaged me on Facebook: “I am worried about how this might impact you and other LGBT people with families.” This was enough to get my imagination working. Whatever they meant by “homosexual propaganda”, I probably did it. I had two kids and a third on the way (my girlfriend was pregnant), which would mean I probably did it in front of minors. And this, in turn, meant the laws could in fact apply to me. First, I would be hauled in for administrative offences and fined and then, inevitably, social services would get involved. That was enough to get me to read the legislation, which by now had been passed in about 10 towns and was about to become law in St Petersburg, the second-largest city in the country. Here is what I read: homosexual propaganda was defined as “the purposeful and uncontrolled distribution of information that can harm the spiritual or physical health of a minor, including forming the erroneous impression of the social equality of traditional and non-traditional marital relations”. Russia has a lot of poorly written laws and regulations that contradict its own constitution, but this one was different. Like other contemporary laws, it was so vaguely worded that it encouraged corruption and extortion (fines for “homosexual propaganda” are backbreaking) and made selective enforcement inevitable. But it also did something that had never been done in Russian law before: it enshrined second-class citizenship for LGBT people. Think about it: it made it an offence to claim social equality. St Petersburg passed the law in March 2012. I no longer thought it was funny. I actually choked up when I saw the news item about the bill being proposed at the federal level. My girlfriend had recently had a baby and this, among other things, meant we needed to sell our tiny cars and trade up to something that accommodated three kids and a pram. I asked her: “Are we doing this or do we just need to get out of the country?” We decided we were doing it. We are fighters, not quitters. So I launched the pink-triangle campaign. I went on TVRain, independent internet and satellite-based television and recorded a segment showing pictures of my family and explaining how the law would make it a crime to say my family was equal to other families. I explained the history of the pink triangle. I called on people who did not want to see fascism in Russia to put on pink triangles. Though I have always been publicly out, I had never done what I did then – talked about my family and asked to be seen as a lesbian rather than a journalist first. It seemed to work beautifully. People wrote to me and came up to me in the street. I had had 6,000 pink triangles printed up and I got rid of most of them within a few weeks. The public chamber, an extraparliamentary body formed by the Kremlin, scheduled a hearing on the legislation. I testified, as did a number of human rights activists I respected. The chair read out a draft resolution. I also received private assurances from highly placed officials present that the legislation would never make it to the parliament’s floor. That was a year ago. The public chamber’s resolution never materialised. In January 2013, the Duma passed the bill in first reading. The protesters who came to the parliament building that day were beaten up. There had been anti-gay violence in Russia before, most notably when a group of activists had attempted to hold a gay pride celebration in Moscow, but never like this: brutal beatings in broad daylight as the police looked on – and eventually detained the protesters, not the attackers. One of my closest friends took part in the protest at the Duma that day. The following day, he was fired from his job teaching biology at one of the city’s better schools. He was eventually reinstated after a public outcry – he was arguably the city’s best-known teacher, with his own podcast and television and radio series – but I knew one thing: if he had been a gay man rather than a heterosexual ally, he would never teach in the city again. Oh, and around the same time, Moscow City court banned gay pride celebrations for the next 100 years.

buzzfeed:

I’ll have what she’s having. (via)

Original Source

OnlyMrGodKnowsWhy

http://youtu.be/b-_PHQ8sSvA

Original Source

kdryer39 writes "U.S. District Court Judge Mary Lou Robinson said she will sign an order requiring the American Quarter Horse Association to begin allowing cloned animals to be placed on its registry, according to the organization. A jury last month ruled that the horse association violated anti-monopoly laws by banning cloned animals. The quarter horse association issues and maintains a pedigree registry of American quarter horses, a popular breed associated with cowboys riding on the range in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

 

Nice sign

Officer Dan Waskeiwicz of the Baltimore City Police received a call one day when he was on duty stating that there was a “vicious dog” terrorizing a neighborhood and he needed to help. When he got to the scene, people were yelling at the pit bull as it ran around in a frenzy.

The aircraft is manned by a crew of four—pilot, copilot and two flight engineers—and can carry as many as 32 troops or 20,000 pounds of cargo. Or, in the case of the President's jaunt to Martha's Vineyard last Saturday, a contingent of White House staffers, journalists, and Bo, the president's pooch. But not the president himself. No way, he's not allowed anywhere near this thing.

Luke McMillan has a nice article on Gamasutra entitled “An Intro to RLD,” which is about using math to assess the difficulty of jumping puzzles (and by extension, other parts of the content ramp in your game design).

I’m not here to talk about the article. It’s a nice article. I’m here to talk about one of the reactions to it.

The article is a nice, straightforward illustration of how quantitative methods can bring greater clarity to something that designers do every day, usually by “feel.” And of course, the challenge with “feel” is that it only arises from experience. As I have termed it before, the “apprenticeship model” of learning game design: you do it until you develop the feel, and have internalized heuristics of your own for things like difficulty ramps. Then you struggle to communicate those heuristics to others, and they learn it the hard way themselves.

Michael Joseph, in the comments, states the following:

• that the article shows “a desire to depersonalize game design”
• that no one has “proved that ‘zen’ style of game design is a significant problem”
• that these methods are “design encroachment tool by the business side so that any hairless monkey can churn out a game”
• and that the method “reminds me of the Auto-Tune used by some singers with questionable talent.”

McMillan responded very politely to this comment. I on the other hand… this stuff makes me mad enough to be sarcastic and blunt. I apologize in advance to Joseph, since I know his track record in the industry, and it doesn’t seem reflective of the comments he’s making.

I can only presume that he thinks that measuring when cutting wood for a table is depersonalizing carpentry. Forgive me if I prefer not to live in a house he builds. I have not noticed any lack of creativity among architects simply because they measure stuff a lot.

The “Zen style” isn’t a problem, unless you are trying to, say, work with another designer and want to communicate with them. Or want to tweak your game balance. Or want to train a new designer. The reason it is a problem is simple: the lack of a common language. That would be why designers have been building a common language for decades now. There isn’t any need to “prove” this; a given designer either runs into these issues or they don’t. If they do, would you deny them the opportunity to try to fix it? If you don’t run into these issues, please share how you avoid them; I would be stunned if it didn’t turn out to be “depersonalized” craft language.

The elitism inherent in “with this tool, gosh, any hairless monkey can make a game” is shocking. At a time when the industry is in a ferment over increasing the democratization of game development, increasing access for the disadvantaged, increasing diversity and new voices, the idea that a tool is bad because it increases access is frankly appalling. I don’t think this how this comment was meant, which means it simply wasn’t thought about very hard.

Instead, I suspect (especially given the Auto-Tune comment) that it was meant as a cry on behalf of artistry instead of “soulless business,” similar to the piece by Liz Ryerson that I wrote about the other day. In which case, it misses its target. Plenty of deeply artistic, personally expressive designers use mathematical tools to balance their games, sort of how plenty of musicians use the math inherent in leading tones and chord progressions without having to resort to Auto-Tune.

We disdain Auto-Tune because it does something for you that you cannot do yourself, and thereby also removes all the personal expression from the process. But we don’t disdain singing on pitch, or tuning your guitar, in the name of “personal expression.” This tool doesn’t even come close to being Auto-Tune. It’s not “auto-balance my game.” In fact, I hate saying it’s “a tool.” It’s more like a set of practices.

There really isn’t a reason to fear the tool. There may be a reason for a designer to fear a businessperson coming in and using the tool as a bludgeon. That’s certainly the undercurrent in the air these days: that artistry is compromised by having to think about money, audience, etc. But let’s be honest, businesspeople will happily bludgeon with whatever is handy. Remove all design tools, and they’ll bludgeon you with the budget instead. In the case of a self-funding indie, they’ll bludgeon themselves, as they wrestle with the question of artistic integrity versus putting food on the table.

Let me turn away from Joseph’s comments for a moment, since what follows really doesn’t apply to him. This all reminds me of something I have heard many times from artists in different fields:

“I have my own style, and I’m afraid that if I take classes, that I would learn to do art like them, and not like me.”

I usually associate this with youth and inexperience. Think about what it implies:

• Fear: that your style will not survive contact with other influences. Which also implies
• Deep insecurity about your skills, coupled with
• Arrogance, to believe that your “style” is somehow unique in the artistic history of the world, and
• Disdain or lack of understanding of the hard work it takes to master new skills, and
• A lack of discipline, in that the person believes that the learning you could get wouldn’t improve your own work.

Look, being serious about your art and your craft means a lot of woodshedding. It means a lot of practice. And doing that means being a vacuum sucking up every little bit of knowledge, every rule of thumb, every example, everything you can learn from. You don’t have to believe it all. I don’t know anyone who does. But you can’t even disbelieve it if you don’t understand it.

If you’re scared that learning how to run a spreadsheet of your difficulty curve is going to make your work soulless, maybe it didn’t have a very strong soul to begin with. Learn how to do it, and then feel free to ignore what it says, as a conscious artistic choice. Accept the possibility that just maybe, the tools might actually propel you to greater artistic heights. After all, Picasso was able to leverage careful study of visual arts into flights of fancy that helped redefine visual representation. He did it by woodshedding a lot.

Grump over.

Is systematic sexual assault a political tactic in Tahrir Square?

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

ABC News

Missing federal investigator's body found near Vacaville Los Angeles Times OAKLAND — Police on Tuesday confirmed that the body found outside a park near Vacaville was that of missing federal investigator Sandra Coke. In a brief news conference, Oakland Police Department spokeswoman Johnna Watson said the Alameda ... Slain woman identified as Sandra CokeSan Francisco Chronicle (blog) Body in Calif. ID'd as that of missing investigatorUSA TODAY Sandra Coke: Body Identified as Missing California Federal InvestigatorABC News CBS News -Examiner.com -Daily Democrat all 39 news articles »

Economic Times

Sailors on board Indian submarine feared dead USA TODAY Indian official says the navy fears all 18 sailors aboard submarine that blew up are dead. indiasubmarine. The night sky is lit up as a fire burns aboard INS Sindhurakshak, an Indian Navy kilo class submarine early Wednesday in Mumbai, India. (Photo: By ... At least 18 Indian navy personnel presumed dead in submarine blastIrish Times Deeply pained at loss of INS Sindhurakshak: ManmohanThe Hindu In its worst peacetime disaster, Navy loses top submarine with 18 men on boardTimes of India New York Times (blog) -Washington Post -Zee News all 484 news articles »

The biggest study of its kind suggests autism might be linked with inducing and speeding up labor, preliminary findings that need investigating since labor is induced in increasing numbers of U.S. women, the authors and other autism experts say. It's possible that labor-inducing drugs might increase the risk — or that the problems that lead doctors to start labor explain the results. These include mothers' diabetes and fetal complications, which have previously been linked with autism.

Baby monitor hacked, spies on Texas child CBS News Marc and Lauren Gilbert were terrified when they heard a strange voice calling out to their 2-year-old daughter Allyson, through a baby monitor in her room. The Texas family learned the hard way that almost anything connected to the Internet can get hacked. and more »