This stuff is too good to make up

This stuff is too good to make up,
originally uploaded by ghb624.

Love to follow this Flickr artist.

The heraldry of Worcestershire By Henry Sydney Grazebrook

The heraldry of Worcestershire By Henry Sydney Grazebrook: ""

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Buffalo Rock & Rye

In a little kitchen in the Rocket City, the man who only knows grilled cheese whips up a magical gingery treat.

World falling apart? ILS vendor steering deliberately towards bankruptcy and asset tag sale? Clueless administrators coercing you towards moral turpitude and the bottomless mire of ethical lapses? Just had a crappy Friday the 13th, huh?



The man should hand you a frosty Great Rye Buffalo.

12 oz Buffalo Rock Ginger Ale (there are no substitutes. No. none. Sorry, it's a Bama thing.)
3 oz Rye (quantities negotiable depending upon how many ethical lapses you were asked to take part in over the week)
1/2 lime, juiced
Pour all over ice in ale or ice tea glass. Pour down throat, but slowly.

A dish imbued with Huntsville...

Having just dined at Zola's at the International Spy Museum, I am noting a very fine dish that seems very Southern. Branzini, a european sea bass, very tasty on its own. I had to try it, menu said that it was served on a bed of spaetzle with turnips and ramps.

If you grew up in Appalachia, you know what ramps are--trash mountain onions used to supplement a hillbilly's spring diet, usually fried up with the winter's last potatoes. An old friend of mine told me once that where she grew up, the poorest children were usually sent home from school in the springtime because they smelled so strongly of wild ramps that no one could concentrate on schoolwork. Ramps are even better than onions, but very strong, and if they are most of what you are eating...ramps and turnips both I love, but admit it, they are not usually found on plates in restaurants anymore. I asked the server, and he said, "Ah yes, a very delicate native wild leek".

Branzini is also known as "loup de mer" or sea wolf. Tastes like a cross between bass and trout, no wolf tones. Perhaps this dish could also be achieved with river bass or catfish?

Spaetzle, small drop dumplings textured like pasta, a traditional German recipe also seen in the Yiddish kitchen. The Huntsville of my childhood was crowded with German rocket scientists and German foods and it was not unusual to serve knackwurst with pinto beans and cornbread.

The capper was the watercress garnish. Madison County, before Redstone and NASA, was known as "The Watercress Capital of the World". Which you might only know if you grew up in Madison County.

Strange metaphysical connections, but very good food indeed.

http://www.spymuseum.org/dine/index.php

Those little red tablets...

Every year from preschool to 1st grade the anti-cavity avatar still visits classrooms. I remember those little red tablets and now have some on hand, the household preschooler having thrown the whole packet onto the "flat file", the kitchen island where incoming detritus gets its preliminary sort before hitting the "circular file" or the "Oh, Sh*t! They need how much?" expedition to office.

And now I know that the little red tablets (they are still red, got the packet open by tearing it with my teeth) have a name. (They are also proudly manufactured in Missouri. Very midwestern, this idea of sparkly whites.) Disclosing tablets, a name for the tooth bane of my elementary school existence, because my rocket-scientist mother bought into the theory that these would reduce dental costs associated with offspring, and prevent tooth decay magically by appealing to the competitive vanity and embarrassment of kids who would not be caught dead among their peers with revealing pink stains on their teeth. She didn't reckon on my brother, who thought the red stuff was pretty cool and would leave as much as possible on display, kind of an Indonesian betel nut chewer effect.

Mom actually went out to buy more disclosing tablets when we ran out. We kept running out because I kept hiding the tablets. Brush and floss, but still that stuff just wouldn't come off, and brushing that long cut into my reading time...really Mom, these are just supposed to serve as a guide, not become part of a lifestyle.


Tastes better than I remember. You know, these things will never really work until you make them as easy for a preschooler to open as a can of Coca-Cola....woops. Wow, a fiend of the night. I am not ready for full disclosure.

Knight takes Queen...

Kip says "they" knew about it already and were ready. By the time I got to watching the entry, late on Thursday night/early Friday morning, the most boring entry in Wikipedia had already been locked.

Looking at the edit history, an anonymous IP probably from Hicksville, NY, had edited the trivia section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarians to indicate that "Librarians are hiding something." That was a little past midnight ET of the 25th. Seriously suspect a Colbert Report planted edit here.

From 3:56pm to 4:03pm on the 25th a series of back and forth edits and repairs and then the whammy handle put down on the Librarians article and associated linked articles. Very Lemony Snicket, cutesy-pie, all vandal edits indicate that we are "hiding something". Colbert's Wikipedia profile was locked down at the same time.

If Stephen Colbert had said that Librarians were an endangered species, as he did for elephants, would we have seen the decline in numbers in the profession reverse? Imaginabrarians? He could have saved the profession. Or at least generated more librarians to join ALA and pay those "professional" dues.

http://www.comedycentral.com/motherload/?ml_video=87528