Tequila Is A Girl's Best Friend href

I just received this email. Sounds like he needs help.

Hello,

I am Bashar Al-Assad the Syrian President

I anticipate that you read this mail quickly and let me know your opinion on this classified information herein.

I would like you to assist me to move my resource to your country or any safe location.
This resource is my only security to help sustain my future amid the current crisis in my country and this is the main reason why I still hold onto the presidential seat.

Your immediate attention to this matter will be highly appreciated.

Thanks and God bless you.

Sincerely yours,
Bashar Al-Assad

So, what's the consensus: help him or not?

Busy day at the old liberal media:

Top ten political stories are all about Romney or the GOP.

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit will be released in two installments. But could there be a third?

PETER JACKSON: Well, it’s very, very premature. We have got incredible source material with the appendices. There’s the novel, but then we also have the rights to use the 125 pages of additional notes where Tolkien expanded the world of The Hobbit. We’ve used some of that so far, and just in the last few weeks, as we’ve been wrapping up the shooting and thinking about the shape of the story, Philippa [Boyens], Fran [Walsh] and I have been talking to the studio about other things that we haven’t been able to shoot and seeing if we could possibly persuade them to do a few more weeks of shooting. We’d probably need more than a few weeks, actually, next year. The discussions are pretty early, so there isn’t anything to report, but there are other parts of the story that we’d like to tell, that we haven’t had the chance to tell yet. We’re just trying to have those conversations with the studio, at the moment.

Yay!

Ulam Spiral

Complaint Department href

Nikon D90, 28-105mm

I'm growing shishito peppers this year, in planters on our front porch.

We first had these last spring on our trip to Miami Beach, served as appetizers at the hotel bar. And I've been waiting ever since to grow some of these myself.

They're chili peppers. They're smaller and not quite as fleshy as a jalapeno, but they're completely heat-free^*: no hotter than a bell pepper. So, you can just eat them, seeds too, one after another. Pluck em off the plant, pierce with a knife, throw into a hot frying pan with a touch of oil, cook for a couple minutes until they're just soft and starting to brown, then sprinkle with kosher salt: instant snack. Their stems make nice handles.

* - in general, sometimes a rogue will surprise you with a bit of heat.

Jon Lord, the former keyboard player with the rock band Deep Purple, has died.

T'was quite the groovy scene, there in the video.

Anyone up for a Favorite Song poll?

The favorite album thing was fun, but we've done that. A favorite song poll seems like it could play out differently - listening to all of the submitted songs would not be an impossible task, the way it was with albums.

Lessig:

A tiny number of Americans -- .26 percent -- give more than $200 to a congressional campaign. .05 percent give the maximum amount to any congressional candidate. .01 percent give more than $10,000 in any election cycle. And .000063 percent -- 196 Americans -- have given more than 80 percent of the super-PAC money spent in the presidential elections so far.