Bunny bao

I grew up eating bao tzu (hum bao for all you lo-fan) when we had guests and Mom was making big food for everyone. I have her bamboo steamer and I make them every so often, myself.

Brian sent me photos and a recipe for Easter bunny bao tzu. If you have trouble with them, here are some tips for making sure you get them just right.

Bunny bao.... mmmmmmmmmmmm!

Bunny bao

Something for Friday

There was a chicken farmer who lived in a village in China. One year his chickens were afflicted with a strange blight that caused them to lose their feathers. The farmer was deeply concerned about this because winter was coming and if the chickens had no feathers, they would freeze to death. So, the farmer decided to consult the two wisest men in the land. First, he visited Mr. Hing, the renowned scholar. Mr. Hing leafed through all his agricultural and medicinal texts and pored over books and scrolls well into the night. Finally, he returned to the farmer and told him that, if he crushed the leaves of a gum tree into powder, made it into tea, and fed it to his chickens, they would be cured.

The farmer then went to Mr. Ming, the great seer. Mr. Ming cast stones, read tea leaves, and poked through entrails until finally he came up with the answer: "As surely as gum causes a shoe to stick to the ground, tea made from gum leaves will cause feathers to stick to chickens."

Now the farmer was ecstatic. The two wisest men in the land had given him exactly the same prescription. So, as soon as he returned home, he took some gum leaves and made tea from them. He mixed this with the chicken feed and fed it to his chickens. But it didn't work. The chickens continued to lose their feathers, and, with the onset of winter, they all froze.

The moral of this story: All of Hing's courses and all of Ming's ken couldn't get gum tea to feather a hen.

Something for Friday

Kevin Smith Q&A sessions

I happened on an article in Empire Online about Kevin "Silent Bob" Smith's two four-hour Q&A sessions last week at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. Kevin Smith always has lots to say that's very interesting (get hold of the DVDs of his previous Q&A sessions if you don't believe me), and Empire Online had the following quote:

"Last time I was here I got an award at the Empire Awards. In my speech I hit back at a 3AM Girls column that described me as a fat, bearded, hobbit-like director. So I figured, she called me a hobbit; I'll call her an orc. Come to find out she's in the room. She comes up to me later and says, 'You know, some people could find that comment offensive.'
"Apparently it's OK to call someone a hobbit but not an orc. Boy, was my wrist slapped..."

Kevin Smith Q&A sessions

Johnny Hart is dead

Johnny Hart, creator of BC and co-author of The Wizard of Id, died at his drawing board today of a stroke. I used to like BC an awful lot, but not for years. The strip hasn't been very funny ever since Johnny got religion, the really obnoxious kind that says that his and only his version of Christianity is going to Heaven and that they KNOW, and everyone else's version of Christianity is a deluded fool who's been taken in by Satan.

They have meds to treat this kind of psychosis. Electroshock. Deconditioning. All kinds of things. But it's a repulsive disease, particularly when you've seen it a few hundred times already. And just how am I supposed to believe that this particular fruitcake has been given the One True Word when all the other fruitcakes are saying the same thing? It smacks of hubris to me, it really does.

Well, Johnny's dead now. He can argue about how right he was with Jesus. I had had hopes that the strip would cease, but it's likely to keep going. According to the obits, his family has been doing it for some years now, with him weighing in only occasionally. (You know, that may have been the trouble, which is even worse: we'll have an unending supply of the same drivel with no hope of anything better. Nothing like a long slow literary decline, or however you say that about comic strips.)

Johnny Hart is dead

Quote du jour

I've been spending a fair amount of the week with income taxes, expense reports, FrameScript (which is cool), and Wireless USB. I'm busy with item #3 at the moment and I've got the idiot box on in the background on the movie Monster-in-Law while I three-hole punch a bunch of manuals I printed out (got tired of reading them online and queued up a huge print job last night). J-Lo just got a really nice line: "Life's too short to live the same day twice."

I just wanted to share that. Back to reading programming manuals and experimenting on unsuspecting files (mwahahahahahaaaaa!).

Quote du jour

The theme to Star Trek

A lot of geeks can tell you that the theme to Star Trek was written by Alexander "Sandy" Courage, who was the composer of a truly incredible number of other themes and soundtracks. This YouTube clip is an interview with him about how the theme came to be and also how the "psssssssssshewwwww!" sounds of the ships zipping by were made.

The theme to Star Trek

Americans aren't short of brains, buster!

Or maybe they really, really are.

Watch this video and make the call for yourself.

Americans are NOT stupid!

Americans aren't short of brains, buster!

The Bush pilot

Not what you think, nor that, nor even that.

The Bush pilot (video clip with English subtitles)

The Bush pilot

It's Palm Sunday

It's Palm Sunday, so, in the spirit of the season, I feel the need to do something totally, massively tasteless (and really funny) on several levels to celebrate the day.

If you're not easily offended, or if you like to live dangerously, go look at this animated gif. But if you don't like it--and you may not--don't blame me, 'cos I tried to warn yuh!

It's Palm Sunday

Pranking the Super Bowl and the viewing public

This clip from zug.com is a story about how a dozen guys got together to prank the Super Bowl under the noses of federal marshals, Homeland Security guys, and probably lots of local police and rent-a-cops. They set it up so hundreds of people in the stands flashed a message on the screen, thinking they were spelling out Prince's name, but in fact, they showed a quite different message. To 93.1 million viewers.

What the author of the prank finds interesting--apart from the fact that they could do this so easily--is that the major news media apparently refused to report on it, on the grounds that (I'm paraphrasing here) this shows, once again, that the Emperor has no clothes. But it's not like we didn't know that already.

The author of this prank has a really good commentary about what they did here:

As I write this, I'm sitting in the Miami International Airport watching a TSA agent systematically destroy my carefully-packed carry-on luggage. He's taking every single item from my bag, including my fake business cards, badges, and detailed plans for the heist. Once we make it through this final checkpoint -- which we will -- we'll be on our way home.

No system is 100% secure. In a system as massively chaotic as the Super Bowl, there are too many variables to ever fully control. All they can do is look for rogue elements, then try to subdue or remove them. But when the rogue employees look exactly like the real employees, what can you do?

We live in a zero-risk society, convinced that more security, more police, more searches, and more technology will make us more safe. This is false. As we've proven, even four comics and a cameraman can outwit the most tightly-controlled event in history. Everyone did their job. No one did anything wrong. But no system is completely safe.

Life involves risk.

I want to leave you with this final thought. Life is some risky business. When we cling to the illusion of security, we give up our freedom and our privacy. When we willingly remove more clothing at airport security, when we allow our government to pass wiretapping legislation, when we give them power to spy on us, we are giving away our precious civil liberties that our founding fathers earned with blood.

So embrace the risk. Take a chance in life. Blow your kid's college education fund on a silly prank. That's what it's about. When we live in fear, then the bad guys have already won. (Are the bad guys the terrorists, or our own government? I'm not so sure anymore.)

It was the prank of a lifetime, and no one else could have done it. A corporate parent like Viacom would never have allowed Ashton Kutcher to do it for "Punk'd." College students could have thought it up, but would have never found the funds to pull it off. It was a magic moment, a momentous message.

Do you see?

The whole description of what they did and how they did it appears here.

Pranking the Super Bowl and the viewing public

Customizing Google

There's a Google customizer that lets me put my name--or anyone else's for that matter--on the page in place of the "Google" logo. Here are a few examples (click any of these to go to the matching Google page):

Customizing Google

A handy guide to sinning

This is really rather interesting and is something that lends itself to a little reflection. Someone's mapped out the 7 deadly sins and then drawn a connection between them to show the outcome of each combination.



This originally came from a nifty blog here on Blogger.

A handy guide to sinning