Cathy's Mom's Pho Recipe

A couple of months ago, Cathy's mom was generous enough to share her pho recipe with us. Even better, she demoed the entire process, involving us at every step. This, friends, is the right way to teach a non-linear multistage process! Also, we got to totally eat it after, which seems to have spoiled me for the pho found in Vietnamese restaurants. I have yet to make Cathy's mom's pho at home, but I have compiled my notes into this stupid drawing, posted here with permission. Start in the upper left hand corner and work your way down.

Also there are photos. Not as many as I would have liked. Fugu and I took photos, but as it happens, we both took photos of exactly the same things.

Big thank you to Cathy and her mom.

Fig. 4 Character Alignment Graph

Atheist, Gnostic, Theist, Agnostic

Here's an interesting delineation of terms often thrown around during religious debate, using a diagram that looks like it could appear in the appendices of Deities & Demigods. He's definitely coming to this from a certain point of view, and I'm not sure he gets everything right. For instance, I bet there are a lot more theist agnostics around than he thinks. Also, you can make his diagram out of origami.

Unrealistic but very appealing idea of the week

Lawmakers in Britain and France want to make advertisers put warning labels on digitally altered photos in their ads. The French MP also wants warning labels on retouched editorial photos. Strikes me as unrealistic, but I like the idea anyway. Thoughts, anyone? Demon?

Concerned that girls and women feel excessive pressure to live up to the digitally Botoxed and liposuctioned images of human perfection they see in glossy magazines, lawmakers in Britain and France are trying to push advertisers to get real.

Under their proposals, ads containing altered photos of models would be required to carry disclaimers.

Enough with the auto-tunes already. After this one.

Seed Bank

With the election of our racist Muslim President, Drudgereport's previously merely-unhinged advertisements have transmogrified into full-on demented fever dreams. Case in point: a world-gone-wild seed bank with enough seeds to plant a full acre "crisis garden."



Think about it. The year is 2011, and a drooling gaggle of mutant commies are slouching across the fallow fields toward your now-illegal private property. You've stocked up on enough crossbows and lacrosse pads to fight them off, but have you thought about where your next meal's going to come from? Of course you haven't, you fucking, fucking idiot.

That's where this here seed bank comes in. You just sprinkle some seeds (grown by "small, fiercely independent farmers," i.e., vicious halflings) over genuine American soil, and next thing you know, your multiple wives and children will have a veritable horn-o-plenty jammed into their awful, insatiable maws.

Other points of interest:

• Provides insurance against a "belligerent lower class demanding handouts"
  
  
• The seeds are grown "in remote plots, far from the prying eyes of the big hybrid seed companies"
  
  
• Seeds are kept fresh by "a very expensive desiccant"
  
  
• Unlike today's hybrid seeds, these were "created by God"
  
  
• "Indestructible Survival Seed Bank Can Be Buried To Avoid Confiscation."

Thanks, and have a great Rapture.

Incredible

A look at TV news in America:

While doing some recent research on the news business, I came upon this remarkable fact: Katie Couric’s annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric’s salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news.

Monty Dead Parrot Sketch performed by Nigerian Scammers

This is totally old, but it came up in conversation, and I thought I'd post it. You needn't watch the whole thing. The performance isn't terribly interesting--but the quality of the performance is hardly the point.