Safety Fork, the

I emailed my mom on Friday evening because I didn’t have her recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It’s entirely possible that my fondness is simply the result of growing up eating them, but I’ve never found another cookie I like quite so much.

Step two was obtaining a mixer (it is obvious by my diameter that I am much too lazy to mix cookie dough by hand). I made a phone call. “John,” I said to my brother, who verily loves to bake things, “I am going to bake cookies and I need to buy a mixer. What kind should I buy?”

“Kitchen Aid,” he repied, unhesitating, “but they cost money.”

“I have money. I want it to mix things and I never want to buy a mixer again.”

“Then you want a Kitchen Aid.”

So when I went out to exchange my defective copy of (who you gonna call?) Ghostbusters! and buy ingredients (eggs, butter, flour, wheat flour, sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, shortening, baking soda, chocolate chips), I also bought a mixer like these. Boy, does it ever mix things. The recipe I have starts by with an instuction to mix the eggs, sugars, vanila, shortening, and butter. So I put all those things in the mixer and turn it on. It mixes them.

I add a cup of flour. The mixer doesn’t slow down. The pitch of the motor doesn’t change. I keep adding flour. “Bring it on!” says the mixer. This thing is the kung fu action star of stirring stuff in a little metal bowl. By the time I’ve added all four cups of flour and the chocolate chips, it’s picked up the entire wad of dough and is spinning it about like a rag doll, leisurely whacking it against the sides of the bowl, while also juggling six plastic balls and preparing its taxes. It’s also made entirely of metal. I love metal. It’s worth $200, I guess.

I turn off the mixer and taste a bit of the dough. Now I know the cookies are going to turn out just fine. I might burn a few edges if I’m not careful. I’ve always liked the dough almost better than the finished cookies, though, and when the dough is good, the cookies are good, too. The last three are baking in the oven now. They’ll be done in two minutes.

Behold the six dozen delicious chocolatey fruits of my labor.

Same OSX 0.6.

There was a back-to-school advertisement in my mail today.

“So what,” you say, “it’s August and kids are heading back to school in a couple of weeks.”

Yeah, but it was for Firestone. You know, the tire company. I don’t know about you, but when my mom asked me what I needed for the school year, I never said, “Oh, a backpack, some crayons, notebooks, pencils, a box of Kleenex, tires…you know, the usual stuff.” I really love Vic and Sue—I’ll buy them whatever they need—but a quadraplex of whitewalls really isn’t going to help them learn the capital of Luxembourg or the square root of nine.

And it’s not as if tires are some kind of impulse purchase I might get myself while I’m doing their back-to-school shopping, in the way I might think oh, pants without holes…I could use those. And it’s not as if tires are something they’re reminding me I’m out of. “Say, we better pick up some tires; I think I used up the last ones yesterday,” doesn’t exactly roll off the tounge.

Really they’re just saying, “Hey, we’ve got tires for sale. They’re really great tires. We think you’d like them. You know, on your car.” So why can’t they just say that? Are tire manufacturers finding that people need to be cajoled into replacing worn-out tires? Do people actually replace their tires more often when reminded that tires are readily available?

I figure I’ll replace my tires when they wear out. I figure most other people figure they’ll replace their tires when their tires wear out. Since I’m pretty sure that sending us advertisements doesn’t make our tires wear out faster, what’s the point?

I went to Mankato yesterday to photo-journal Darren’s birthday (if you forgot, don’t worry, his birthday’s actually tomorrow) celebration. Without further ado, here are 80 pictures of Darren. For those not inclined to peruse the whole library, notable events of the celebration are Perrier Man, Darren’s Wheat, and Darren Drinks a Bowl of Margarita.

I happened across this story on the BBC’s website. It’s ostensibly about nudist’s family disregarding his last wish to be buried unclothed, but I found this passage most telling:

Brenda Loete said she never spoke to Norton despite living next door to him for more than a decade.

“We didn’t really know him. We just had him arrested,” she said.

So over the course of ten years of living next door to someone with whom you disagree, you couldn’t be bothered to talk to the man? I can understand that he made you uncomfortable, but as neighbors, maybe you could have worked out an arrangement whereby he wouldn’t go about nude in his yard at agreeable times of the day so that your kids could play outside, or when you wanted to have friends over for a barbecue. You could even have tried to work this out by telephone, so that you wouldn’t have had to look at him while you talked.

When the police are the first—and only—means you try to solve a nonviolent dispute, I have absolutely no sympathy for you.

As promised, Same OSX just gained four-tenths of a version.

I stayed up way too late tonight…at least, I should have gone to bed the better part of an hour ago. But really, my sacrifice is your gain, as I’ve been putting the major work into a new and improved version of Same OSX. I’ll put it up tomorrow, but probably not until after work, as I need to make sure that there’s nothing really embarrasing in the source and mark it all up for GPL distribution, as promised.