Big scammers have little scammers,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little scammers have lesser scammers,
and so, ad infinitum.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
The Pythagorean Theorem In Action
My Daguerreotype Boyfriend
Hot Stuff
Last night, the strangest thing happened: I won a chili cook-off.
It was part of a wedding-shower party for some friends. And there were 15-ish different chilis, in three categories: traditional, non-traditional & vegetarian. Good times.
Since I don't really have a specific recipe to share (I don't keep track of what I do - I just add things until it's right) - I will tell you what I think made my chili stand out: I don't use ground meat; I use steak. No, not ribeye or tenderloin, just chuck steak, scraps, trimmings, what the store sells as 'stew meat'. Sure, it takes a good three hours of simmering to get the meat tender enough, and the tomatoes and onions will have completely dissolved, but it's worth it. All the judges who talked to me afterwards mentioned the 'steak'.
Nobody mentioned my carefully cultured intricate and enticing blend of exotic flavors: cinnamon, chocolate, four kinds of fresh peppers, four kinds of dried and smoked chiles, balsamic vinegar. People just really dug the little chunks of stew beef. Good! I like 'em too.
So that's my chili contest advice: use chunks of beef, not ground beef.
My favorite of the night, and the winner of the non-traditional chili category, was the Nepalese Green Chicken Chili. It had a flavor somewhere between Indian and Chinese: complex, with a nice bit of ginger. Pretty spicy. Very unusual. Totally delicious.
Carbon Records : CR200 Comp
My good friend Joe runs a small but very cool record label, Carbon Records, and for the 200th release, he wants to do a very special package to commemorate the artists . But, to cover the up-front cost of that, he's doing a Kickstarter thing.
I'm asking for your support to help make this release as great as it can possibly be. Pressing vinyl is expensive, and doing that, on top of getting 4 cassettes duplicated, and all of the packaging involved, is an ambitious venture. Your support will also enable me to give more copies of the release to each of the contributing artists as compensation. Normally with a compilation, since there are so many people involved, a label can only give a small number of copies to each artist, in order to keep the unit-cost / break-even point reasonable.