Tag: recipe

Summer is almost over, but it’s not too late to tell you about a recipe that my friend David came up with:

HONEST TEA-QUILA!

Start with a bottle of Honest Peach White Tea – remove half the tea, add crushed ice, a shot of tequila, a half shot of triple sec, a splash of Rose’s lime juice, and a squeeze lemon. Now replace the screw cap, shake it up, and drink.

ABSOLUT HONEST TEA!

We were in the midst of figuring out the best varie-tea to mix with Absolut – and, for that matter, which Absolut – but we did not feel we could do our best work after consuming so much Honest Tea-Quila. Please take some time to experiment and submit a recipe or two of your own. If you don’t drink, or drink as little as I do, that’s okay – forget the vodka, just drink the tea. The purpose here, as long-time readers will know, is to sell more Honest Tea. Foosball tables do not come cheap. (After an Honest Tea-Quila, who can resist little plastic feet?)

BOREALIS – FOD

I know. Still, I thought this, from the FAA, was interesting. FOD is short for “Foreign Object Debris/Damage” – as in, say, a stray luggage container getting sucked into a jet engine, which can’t be good for the engine.

The operative paragraph is on page 9:

The presence of FOD on airport runways, taxiways, aprons and ramps poses a significant threat to the safety of air travel. FOD has the potential to damage aircraft during critical phases of flight, which can lead to catastrophic loss of life and the airframe, or increased maintenance and operating costs. Costs to the industry are now estimated to be in excess of $1-2 billion per year for direct costs and as much as $12 billion when indirect costs are considered. FOD hazards can be reduced, however, by the establishment of an effective FOD management program.

So . . . what if the jet engines weren’t started at the gate? What if the plane could taxi out like a golf cart and only start up shortly before take-off? This is of course what the WheelTug system, being developed by a subsidiary of Borealis, is designed to make possible. One more reason to remain guardedly hopeful Borealis may one day fly.

YUM

Dan Becker: “Regarding your Dashboard Cookie Recipe, here in Austin, Texas, our month of July had 26 out of 31 days with over 100 degrees Fahrenheit! So our local paper ran a recipe for sun-drying Juliet tomatoes. I tried it with grapes, and it worked well also. I guess any sort of fruit would work well. Just put it on the dashboard in the morning, and you have a healthy snack for the ride home in the evening.”

Greg Bandy: “See also Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!”

☞ Listen, if it’s going to be this hot, there’s no point making it hotter and wasting energy by firing up your oven. The Huns had a similar notion. They would place slabs of raw meat between their saddles and their horses’ bare backs and “cook” the meat in the course of a long ride. I know this because when I was 12 I wrote a book about Attila (properly pronounced AT-ill-a, by the way). It began, “Like demons out of hell they came [riding down upon the Romans] . . .” and ended when my parents decided completing it would take too much time away from my studies and hurt my chances of getting into a good college. “Oh, please,” I said, rolling my pre-teen eyes. “They’re going to reject me because my grades suffered, but I wrote a book?” We’ll never know who was right or whether I would have found a publisher (in hindsight, I think not); but I did learn a lot about barbarians.

HEALTH CARE – RECISSION

My guess is that this is overstated – “If you ever really need your health insurance policy, you have less than even odds that the insurance company will actually pay for your health care.” – but my guess is also that it’s closer to the truth than the insurance companies would have us think.

HEALTH CARE – FACT FROM FICTION

James Musters: “This newsletter does for health reporting what Dean Baker does for economic reporting, or Media Matters does for political reporting.”

HEALTH CARE – CYNICISM

Take 30 seconds to watch the opposition.

HEALTH CARE – GET INVOLVED

Find an event near you.

MYMDOS.COM

Hey – look at that. MYM for DOS, orphaned 15 years ago, has its own web page. With its own forum. You can only reach it though on a dial-up modem using 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. (Just kidding.) I have nothing to do with it, but am happy to see MYM still kicking.

ELLEN’S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

So much fun I watched it twice.

COOKING LIKE A GUY™ WITH A HOT ROD

Denis Trover: “Out here on the desert even the women use the guys’ way to cook.”

☞ I love it. A carbecue!

The advice here is really helpful. E.g.:

Obviously, you don’t want to drive around the block 300 times just to cook dinner. That would be a waste of gas and time. Rather, if you’re already driving somewhere, find something to cook that fits into your travel plans . . .

And this, for one of those days when the car is parked in the blazing sun:

Prepare your favorite cookie dough recipe. Slice evenly and place on lightly oiled baking sheet. Place the baking sheet on top of your vehicle’s dashboard . . .

Pluses include: Dinner ready the minute you pull in your driveway; saves the gas or electricity that would have been needed to cook. Minuses: wastes a lot of aluminum foil; can’t have chocolate chip cookies and hot dogs at the same time unless willing to drive for hours with no a/c in the blazing sun.

I KEEP FORGETTING TO RECOMMEND THIS

AmazingMemorySecrets.com. Benjamin is a friend, and truly amazing. You can trust him. He may steal your watch (right off your wrist – that’s how I first met him) but he always gives it back. Want to remember people’s names? Where you left your keys? Check it out.

MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES – MACRO

No one writes about finance more insightfully – or elegantly – than Jim Grant. If you don’t subscribe to his Interest Rate Observer ($850 a year), you can get his collected wisdom here, in Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, for $14.96 – or two samples free.

MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES – MICRO

When the market does get something wrong – and you can see it clearly at the time, without the benefit of hindsight – there is an opportunity. Of course, this doesn’t happen to most of us too often, if ever. And even when it does, the opportunity can be hard to seize.

Say it was clear to you at the time that much of the nation’s real estate market was wildly overheated. How would you profit from the market’s miscalculation? You could short (or buy puts on) the stocks of the nation’s home builders. But if you did it too soon and lost your nerve as the stocks rose even higher – and covered your shorts – or simply watched your puts expire worthless, your sharp insight would have been rewarded with a sharp loss.

So for most of us, it makes little sense to try to beat the market by choosing individual stocks (index funds make more sense) or to ‘time’ the market, attempting to jump in before it goes up and out before it goes down. Both are very hard to do successfully.

That said, there are a lot of very bright people whose professional lives revolve around finding ‘mispricings’ in the market and exploiting them, and – even if only as spectators – it’s interesting to see examples of their strategies. Like this one from my friend Chris Brown of fledgling Aristides Capital. Of the relative pricing of Ford Motor’s common stock () and its $3.25 convertible preferred. He writes:

‘F is at 2.83, the F.PRS is at 8.35. F.PRS converts to 2.8249 F shares at any time at the owner’s option. So, if you buy the F.PRS and short 2.8249 times as many of the Ford common, you are paying $0.36 for the entirety of the future dividend stream of the Ford preferred, which is $0.8125 per quarter, and is supposed to last at least 2-3 quarters.’

☞ In English: you want to be long and short the same amount of Ford so the price movement of the stock doesn’t matter. What you gain (or lose) owning the convertible you lose (or gain) by shorting the common. But! But! But! But! But! You get $32,500 a year in dividends on each 10,000 shares of the $3.25 convertible that you own (convertible into 28,249 common shares); while you pay zero in dividends shorting 28,249 shares of the common. So you get to keep $32,500 a year even if you don’t have any idea whether Ford stock is going up or down.

And the cost of doing this? Well, there are the commissions, but they should be small. And there is the cost of tying up your money. And in Chris’s case, there was a cost of 36 cents* per $3.25 convertible – $3,600 on 10,000 shares (if that’s how many he bought)

*When Chris took this position, shorting 2.8249 shares of Ford at $2.83 brought him $7.99. (Right? 2.8249 x $2.83 = $7.99.) Chipping in another 36 cents out of his own pocket, he had enough to buy one share of the convertible for $8.35. (Right? $7.99 + $0.36 = $8.35.)

So what’s the catch? Well, especially for average Joe’s like us, there are lots of catches. First, when I went to try this myself, I quickly discovered that my broker couldn’t borrow shares of Ford for me to short. Yours may or may not be able to. Second, even if I had been able to short F, by the time I tried, that modest 36-cent spread had widened, to a slightly less attractive 61 cents – because the price of the convertible I would have bought had not fallen as much as the price of the 2.8249 shares of the common I would have shorted. By the time you read this, the spread could be wider still (or narrower). Third, there would be commissions to pay, though at my broker they are trivial. But fourth – and mainly – what if Ford goes broke before it is able to make even one more $0.8125 quarterly dividend payment on the $3.25 convertible?

So there’s risk, but Chris thinks it’s a good risk to take. And that’s how (some) really smart investment professionals spend their days, trying to find little mispricings like that, where Mr. Market, through carelessness, has left a few crumbs on the table.

And now, at last:

EGGPLANT

You’ve heard of the three-minute egg? Behold the three-minute eggplant:

1. Buy an eggplant. They’re cheap. They’re large. And yet a big eggplant has only 125 calories, with the skin. (The skin is good. Eat the skin.)

2. Slice ‘the long way.’ Maybe five or six slices, each vaguely half an inch thick. (It doesn’t matter.)

1. Microwave for 3 or 4 minutes. It’s okay to put the slices on top of each other – microwaves can penetrate anything.

4. Let cool; salt and pepper to taste.

Yes, eggplant absorbs anything – it is the Zelig of vegetables – so you can goop it up with olive oil, cheese, tomato sauce, whatever. But why? Fresh from the microwave it is moist, mushy, and healthy. Where I’d experiment, beyond the salt and pepper, is in whatever other seasonings you might have around. And/or a soupçon of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Lite with each bite.

SARDINES

You don’t hear much about sardines anymore.

PRAYING FOR A PIPELINE

Listen to the Republican Vice Presidential nominee exhorting worshippers to pray for a pipeline. I have little standing in matters of faith, but it strikes me as oddly unChristian to mock community organizing amongst the downtrodden . . . and yet pray for the construction of an oil pipeline.

No?

Oddly unChristian, yet completely in line with today’s Republican Party. They mock Al Gore, they mock John Kerry (and his Silver Star and three Purple Hearts), and now they mock Barack Obama.

Only Sarah Palin – who lobbied for the Bridge to Nowhere, and raised taxes in Wasilla, and left her tiny town, which had been debt-free, $22 million in hock, and says she got a D in macro-economics at the University of Idaho – only she has what it takes to cope with our country’s enormous economic challenges and regain the respect of the world. She and her running mate, the hot-tempered ‘maverick,’ fifth from the bottom of his class of 899, whose campaign is run by lobbyists and who voted 95% of the time with George W. Bush.

To augment her prayer and facilitate the pipeline, Governor Palin has sued to strip the polar bear of its Threatened Species status (tell that to your 10-year-old and ask her how she wants you to vote in November), ignoring the scientists (here we go again) – or worse. ‘Essentially, she lied,’ said University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner, according to ABC News.

Both she and Senator McCain are fine Americans and remarkable people. But they are running this campaign out of the same mocking, dishonest Republican playbook (Obama is ready to lower almost everyone’s taxes, not raise them), in the urgent Republican hope of getting four more years.

SAVE MONEY, TIME, AND THE PLANET

The fastest way to grill, roast, bake, boil or broil something, of course, is to microwave it. This makes Charles a little crazy – he even roasts toast, which can’t be an efficient use of energy, though it’s darn good toast – but I am the kind of guy whose artichokes take six minutes instead of 45, and whose baked potatoes, back when I ate baked potatoes – likewise. (The truly fastest way to grill, roast, bake, boil or broil something, is not to cook it in the first place. Those readers trying to lose weight, save money, or accustomed to scraping extra mashed potatoes into the garbage, have doubtless considered this.)

But if you are one of those gourmets who insist on boiling things, I have a suggestion. Get one of these, if you don’t already have one – a kettle – and bring your water to a boil fast, without a lot of heat escaping, and with a whistle to alert you to when the water is boiling*, so you don’t keep it boiling longer than you have to, steaming up your kitchen, and, if you’ve lost track and become engrossed in a rerun of Law and Order, boiling all the water away, only to realize it when you begin to smell metallic fumes – which can’t be good for you, and which can set off your smoke detector and scare you half to death, and lead to your falling off whatever you’ve climbed on to try to silence the damn thing – and then, with your pot molten and bone dry, have to start the boiling process all over again. (Not that this has ever happened to me.)

Okay? Let me recap. You boil water in a kettle. And now the kettle is whistling. You return to the kitchen, deftly shift the kettle off the hot burner (which you leave burning), switching it for the dry pot of pasta or potatoes or shrimp or whatever you were going to boil . . . even as you pour two or three quarts of boiling water from the kettle into that pot, over the pasta, potatoes, or shrimp.

Tada!

You’ve saved time, money (by using less energy), and, in a tiny but real way, lived a little lighter on the land.

The engineers in the crowd will note that much the same result could have been achieved simply by using a lid. But (leaving aside whatever extra heat escapes from under the lid that a sealed kettle would retain), the problem with this is that, to know when the water has reached its boil – sans a kettle’s whistle – you have to stand there in the kitchen and watch the pot.

I will not insult this readership by supplying the next line.

*I think the model I linked you to has a whistle, but it doesn’t say.

COME MEET SARAH JESSICA PARKER IN CHARLES’ STUDIO TOMORROW

If you happen to live in the New York area and want to help Barack Obama, check this out. It could be fun.

But first . . .

From the Borowitz Report:

Nader Warns Bloomberg Not to Run
Only Room for One Egomaniac in Race, Activist Says

Not so fast.

That was the message delivered today to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg by consumer activist Ralph Nader, who warned Mr. Bloomberg, ‘If some egomaniac is going to jump in and screw up this election, it’s going to be me.’

Mr. Nader established an exploratory committee for a presidential bid today to let Mr. Bloomberg know that there was ‘only room for one self-absorbed gas-bag in the 2008 race.’

At a press conference in Washington, Mr. Nader said that voters who are looking for someone to spoil the 2008 election should be suspicious of Mr. Bloomberg’s motives: ‘Michael Bloomberg has a track record of winning elections, not screwing them up.’

In contrast, Mr. Nader said, ‘I know how hard it is to wreck an election, and I am prepared to put in the long hours necessary to mess this one up big-time.’ . . .

And now

READ THIS

‘If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan to the ultra-efficient Prius.’ That and other assertions in this important New York Times story give us all the more reason to tilt our consumption back toward pasta, pizza, and eggplant parmesan.

(Okay, and egg white omelets, salads, tomato and mozzarella with basil and extra virgin olive oil, a little salt and pepper . . . mmm, mmm!)

It’s amazing the impact of a hamburger on our environment.

And it’s probably not that great for your arteries, either.

It’s time we all read this story and found our own happy medium. For some, this might mean replacing beef with chicken much of the time (it takes 7 pounds of grain to make a pound of beef, but only 3 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken). For others, it might mean replacing chicken with ‘grain’ much of the time (it rather obviously takes just 1 pound of grain to make a pound of grain) – namely, all those dread carbohydrates like bread and pasta that I avoid. For still others, it might mean eating less (haven’t you been telling everybody you need to lose five pounds?).

Anyway, if you’re not already a vegan (and I’m not), this is one of the most interesting articles you’ll read all year. (For example: coming soon, it says: ‘meat without feet.’)

Seriously. Click this.

TITLE SEARCH

A New Orleans lawyer sought an FHA loan for a client who lost his house in Hurricane Katrina and wanted to rebuild… He was told the loan would be granted if he could prove satisfactory title to the parcel of property being offered as collateral. The title to the property dated back to 1803, which took the Lawyer three months to track down. After sending the information to the FHA, he received the following reply:

(Actual letter):

“Upon review of your letter adjoining your client’s loan application, we note that the request is supported by an Abstract of Title. While we compliment the able manner in which you have prepared and presented the application, we must point out that you have only cleared title to the proposed collateral property back to 1803. Before final approval can be accorded, it will be necessary to clear the title back to its origin.”

Annoyed, the lawyer responded as follows:

(Actual Letter):

“Your letter regarding title in Case No. 189156 has been received. I note that you wish to have title extended further than the 194 years covered by the present application. I was unaware that any educated person in this country, particularly those working in the property area, would not know that Louisiana was purchased, by the U.S., from France in 1803, the year of origin identified in our application. For the edification of uninformed FHA bureaucrats, the title to the land prior to U.S. ownership was obtained from France, which had acquired it by Right of Conquest from Spain. The land came into the possession of Spain by Right of Discovery made in the year 1492 by a sea captain named Christopher Columbus, who had been granted the privilege of seeking a new route to India by the Spanish monarch, Isabella.

The good queen, Isabella, being a pious woman and almost as careful about titles as the FHA, took the precaution of securing the blessing of the Pope before she sold her jewels to finance Columbus ‘ expedition. Now the Pope, as I sure you may know, is the emissary of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and God, it is commonly accepted, created this world. Therefore, I believe it is safe to presume that God also made that part of the world called Louisiana. God, therefore, would be the owner of origin and His origins date back to before the beginning of time, the world as we know it AND the FHA.

I hope you find God’s original claim to be satisfactory. Now, may we have our damn loan?”

He got the loan.

☞ This is bogus, but fun.

TOEVS ON KUO

From Jim Toevs, a friend in Montana:

My next door neighbors here in Hot Springs, Montana, are wonderful folks. They are the quintessential good neighbors, in the best “Old West” sense of the word. We have never shared a meal together, but we have exchanged baked goodies on occasion, and we have an unspoken mutual understanding that we can always count on each other in any kind of an emergency.

They belong to an independent conservative Christian church here in town, but they have never tried to proselyte me, and I know from something the woman said, that they voted for Al Gore in 2000, and this year, they had a big sign for a Democrat State Legislative candidate on their property.

They know that I am gay, but we have never talked politics. However, being a former Christian, myself, I was interested to consider how the Mark Foley and Ted Haggard scandals would affect the Evangelical turnout and their votes in the 2006 General Election.

About a month before the election, I started seeing op-ed pieces by a man I had never heard of, named David Kuo, who had just written a book entitled, Tempting Faith. David Kuo was the number two person in the Faith-Based Initiative Office in the Bush White House, who resigned when he saw the way in which the Bush political apparatus was using Evangelicals for purely political purposes.

After reading a couple of his articles in the press, I decided to buy the book to try to understand the impact it might have on the religious right.

As I read the book, my neighbors kept coming to mind, and yesterday morning, I decided to take a risk, and took the book over to my neighbors. I said that I had found the book interesting, and that I thought they would as well. I only said something very general about it being about the seductive nature of power and politics.

Unbeknownst to me, fifteen minutes after I left their home, their pastor showed up. He saw the book sitting on the kitchen table and exclaimed, “That is a VERY important book! I have a copy, and between the two of us, every member of our congregation is going to read it!”

My neighbor could not wait to call me on the telephone and thank me for the book.

I believe Tempting Faith will break the Conservative Republican hold on many Evangelical Christians.

You may not choose to read the book, but at least Google David Kuo and read some of his recent op-ed pieces.

If Progressives are going to claim the political center, which I believe we must do if we are to build a viable national political movement, it is important to understand that we can no longer assume that Conservative Christians are captives of the Right Wing Republicans.

☞ Kuo’s latest New York Times op-ed.

INCONVENIENT DVD

MM: ‘It’s at Netflix, here. And for what it’s worth, all 48 copies were rented all last weekend at the local Blockbuster near Hartford CT.’

FIGS

Andy Maltz: ‘Cut the figs in half, grill them until almost black, top with a dab of marscarpone and square of proscuitto. I don’t like figs, but this is incredible!’

☞ I tried this, but couldn’t find the ‘grill’ setting on my microwave and have no idea what marscarpone is, so I just popped the fig into my mouth. Not bad that way either.

MOYERS

Ralph: ‘You should really have given a warning about the Moyers speech at West Point. I frequently read your blog with my first cup of coffee at work and then settle down to my daily tasks. By the time I got to Emily Perez I was nearly weeping with anger and shame and profound sadness. I am now useless at work for at least the next hour.’

☞ From now on: warnings.

MONKEY BUSINESS

I assume you spent most of the day yesterday designing chimp messages for all your friends. I did.

This one came from a chimp in a major investment house’s syndication department. This, from a trader who was supposed to execute a 25,000-share short sale for his client. Wanna buy some bonds?

SYMS

Suggested here a couple of years ago at $7.90 a share, SYM closed last night at $17.75 on news of a ‘Dutch auction,’ under which the company proposes to buy back up to about 22% of its shares at a price of $16 to $18. I’m not selling my shares, despite the nice 125% long-term gain, because I figure the company has a better idea of its value than I do. It seems to think that, at $18, the stock is worth buying a few million shares. (That doesn’t mean the stock might not fall back after this excitement is over, or that the company’s judgment might not prove wrong. But for those who can afford the risk, it may be worth hanging on.)

QI

It’s now a word in Scrabble. Or in the dictionary, anyway. And my computer doesn’t know! This changes everything.

PROBLEM SOLVED

You were probably wondering what to do with the previously frozen $4-a-pound baby octopuses in the fish counter of your local supermarket. Sitting there right next to the $31-a-pound stone crabs. I couldn’t ask Charles, who only eats things with legs, not arms, so I asked Steve, who manages the fish department at Publix. How do you cook these? His face twisted into a seriously unenthusiastic look (who would want to, it seemed to be saying). ‘Boil them,’ he finally said, as he handed them to me.

Well, I don’t mean to brag, but here it is:

1. Boil them until you are absolutely sure they are dead.

2. Drop them into a bowl of Ragu Lite Tomato Basil spaghetti sauce.

3. Enjoy!

If you want to get fancy, haul out some salt and pepper. If you want to go crazy, boil some spaghetti to underlie your octopi.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am with myself for discovering this.

THE PLUTOCRACY

The Republican priorities are nothing less than astonishing. Now that Exxon’s chair has gotten his $398 million retirement package (plus perks), the Republican leadership seeks to eliminate the estate tax his heirs will suffer when he dies. Click here. (Actually, the article is about much wealthier people, to whom $398 million is just fooling around money.)

CALL YOUR MOTHER

Peg: ‘A few months ago, my father e-mailed that video you posted to my sister and me. She watched it and told me that she was sobbing by the end. I assumed she was, once again, being my nit-wit little sister . . . until I watched it and had exactly the same reaction.’

THEN BAKE HER SOME BANANA BREAD

Tim Bonham: ‘Mike wrote: ‘You would be proud of me. I went to the store and saw the produce guy putting all new blemish-free bananas on display and pulling the bananas that had some brown spots off display and putting them into 3 very large boxes.’ My mother has been doing something like that for years. Started late one Wednesday night after choir practice, when she stopped at the grocery store and found the produce manager throwing bunches of slightly brown bananas into the garbage. She told him that was foolish, they were still good; in fact, brown ones were the best for banana bread. So he said take all you want, just bring in some of the banana bread. So she made some, and dropped off a plate of fresh banana bread at the store a couple days later. The next Wednesday night, he told her the bread was great, and he had a couple of cases of brown bananas in back for her. That exchange has now gone on for 15 years. Through several sales and name changes of the store, two location moves, and many produce managers. The old manager always tells the new guy about this, they always introduce themselves and tell how much they like fresh banana bread. Coming home from college, and having Mom tell you that you can help mash some bananas for banana bread is fine, until you go into the kitchen and see that there are cases of bananas! (And I don’t even like banana bread that much.) But you could tell your readers that if they take these excess bananas and bake them into banana bread, they can then freeze that. And it freezes much better than the fresh bananas do.’

☞ This is way beyond Cooking Like a Guy™, but if you need a recipe, click here.  Or, as Kathi Derevan suggests, how about using them to make Smoothies?  (My recipe:  put two bananas in the blender, some OJ, some ice – hold your thumb on “liquefy” – and if no one else is around, drink straight from the blender jar.  Having a party?  Add Myer’s rum and a little Coco Loco.  Oh, what the heck.  Add it anyway.)

BUT HURRY

According to Popular Science (thanks, Brian), “The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction.”

BAD ADVICE

Last week, I gave a couple of examples of really bad advice we get as children . . . “I before c except after c” . . . you can’t refrigerate bananas . . . and I invited more such from the audience.  Jonathan Pond went way off the reservation and tried to turn this into a money site (of all things) – People: we are here for the recipes! – and then cheated by appending to his recollection of bad advice an example of good advice.

Can’t anyone follow instructions?

Jonathan writes:

“Worst advice from your parents:  ‘The first thing you should do when you start your first job is to put a year’s worth of income in a savings account in case of a financial emergency.’  An obedient child then spent the next 14 years adding savings to the emergency account, all the while earning 2%.  Best advice from your parents (probably given when you were an adolescent):  ‘For one moment’s pleasure, you could end up paying for the rest of your life.’  While at the time you may have thought they were talking about something else, they were actually talking about credit cards.”

SHROOMS

Mark W. Budwig: “Take your mushrooms out of plastic wrap and put them in a paper bag; they keep three times as long without ever getting slimy.  In fact, if they’re fresh and firm to begin with, they’ll keep for a week and a half or longer, just drying out slightly.”

☞ Now that’s news you can use.

Moving on . . .

GOOD QUESTION

David Sirota asks: “How is it possible that Democrats and the media have not reminded the public that President George W. Bush three times was given the chance by U.S.military commanders to eliminate Abu Musab al Zarqawi, but three times he refused? This is not conspiracy theory – this is fact, as reported by NBC News.  Why aren’t the Democrats constantly asking this question when the GOP attacks them over national security?”

In part:

Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.  The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.

“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.

In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.  The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.  Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

CORRECTION

Dan Albro: “Although I agree with the cause espoused by the ‘Velvet Revolution’ link you posted, I was unhappy that you posted a link where merely clicking on it would cause an e-mail of support to be sent out to who knows where.  If you post such a link, please indicate on your site what will happen if you click on it and let the reader decide whether to click or not.  Otherwise you’re tricking readers into expressing support for something they may or may not support.”

☞ I screwed this up somehow.  When I visited the site, it gave me the option to send an e-mail urging Congress to support Rush Holt’s election protection legislation.  I did, and I guess it gave me a thank-you screen that must be what – blearily – I linked you to.  So, never fear, you sent no inadvertent e-mails.  You just got the thank-you screen.  THIS is the one I hope you will click.  SORRY!