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Monday, February 27, 2012

Recipe of The Day: Italian Pasta

STEP 1: Cook up some pasta, of your choice. For this dish I like small elbows, or sometimes flat egg noodles. Single serving is 4-5 ounces dry. Pour cooked pasta into collander to drain.

STEP 2: In that same saucepan, pour two 'blorts' of Caesar dressing (the brand that I use is Ken's Steak House). Bring fire up to medium high, to boil away ('reduce') the liquid. Also add one tablespoon of butter.

Chop a package of Buddig deli meat, such as ham or beef. Add to saucepan.

Chop one green onion; chop one Roma tomato. Optional: chop a few black olives. Add all to the saucepan. Add drained pasta to the saucepan.

STEP 3: Keep stirring over medium-high heat, until liquid is reduced. Add 1/4 cup parmesan or romano cheese to thicken further.

STEP 4: Serve on a dinner plate. Serve with a glass of red wine if you were a 'good kid' today.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Root Cause of High Gas Prices

An email yesterday from Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida clarified the root cause of today's high gas prices, in just one short sentence: "Congress deregulated oil traders in December 2000."

On December 14 in 2000, Republican Senator Phil Gramm of Texas pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, deregulating all derivatives trading, which was signed into law by President Clinton on December 21.

That law was a major cause of The Enron Scandal in 2001, and also deregulated petroleum futures traders, the cause of rising gas prices ever since.

The price at the pump was $1.29 when George W. Bush became President in January of 2001, and is now a nationwide average of $3.63 – nearly three times higher. The prediction for the Summer of election year 2012 is that gas is likely to be $5.00 per gallon.

I figured this could be blamed on Newt Gingrich, but he was replaced as House Speaker in January 1999 by Republican Dennis Hastert of Illinois. Senator Phil Gramm is currently a full-time lobbyist for Union Bank of Switzerland.

The Republican propaganda machine will, of course, point the finger at President Obama. But the factual root cause of high gas & oil prices remains Republican Senator Phil Gramm and the fascist Republican agenda of deregulation.

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Sunday, February 19, 2012

February 2012 Quotations

"At this point, the Republican candidates for U.S. President in 2012 can be referred to as 'The Four Stooges'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"True religion is the life we lead, not the creed we profess."
~~ lawyer Louis Nizer [1902-94]

"The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man."
~~ Madame de Stael [1766-1817]

"Democrats would never win if we took away women's right to vote."
~~ Ann 'The Man' Coulter

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."
~~ Noam Chomsky

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
~~ British prime-minister William Pitt [1759-1806]

"You can’t wake a person who is pretending to be asleep."
~~ Navajo Proverb

“We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers and sisters.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere."
~~ Frank A. Clark [1911-91]

"All ideals are dangerous: because they debase and brand the actual; all are poisons, but indispensable as temporary cures."
~~ Friedrich Nietzsche [1844-1900]

"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats."
~~ Nathaniel Hawthorne [1804-64]

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."
~~ aviator Amelia Earhart [1897-1937]

"The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"I had, out of my sixty teachers, a scant half dozen who couldn't have been supplanted by phonographs."
~~ Don Herold [1889-1966]

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
~~ Richard P. Feynman [1918-88]

"Getting old is not for sissies."
~~ actress Bette Davis [1908-89]

"I make my pictures for people, not for critics."
~~ Cecil B. DeMille [1881-1959]

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today – perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850."
~~ Adam Gopnik

"Since the 1980s, the great American principle that we're all free to start our own business has been deliberately distorted into an ideology that labels as 'socialist' any regulations that block businesses from lying, stealing, polluting, maiming, or even killing our citizens."
~~ Laura Sanchez of Los Lunas, New Mexico

"Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other."
~~ William Faulkner [1897-1962]

"Don't you walk away from that vote! People died for the right to vote!"
~~ Rev. Jesse Jackson, in 1984 speech

"It takes two to speak truth, one to speak and another to hear."
~~ Henry David Thoreau [1817-62]

"How can [our] society that is so undemocratic claim to be a model of democracy for others?"
~~ comment on IMDb by 'green elephant' of Canada

"I'm not concerned about the very poor."
~~ candidate Mitt Romney

"The only thing new in this world is the history we don't know."
~~ Harry S. Truman [1884-1972]

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
~~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [1929-68]

"Wit has truth in it. Wisecracking is merely calisthenics with words."
~~ Dorothy Parker [1893-1967]

"It's impossible not to take advantage of the people. The trick is to take advantage of them in their own best interest."
~~ Ralph Ellison [1914-94]

"They call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."
~~ George Carlin [1937-2008]

"Expectation is the root of all heartache."
~~ Wm. Shakespeare [1564-1616]

"Words are like money. There is nothing so useless, except when put to use."
~~ Dr. Samuel Johnson [1709-84]

"We cannot control the evil tongues of others, but a good life enables us to disregard them."
~~ Cato the Elder [234-149 B.C.E.]

"Discussion is an exhange of knowledge; an argument is an exchange of ignorance."
~~ journalist Robert Quillen

"It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it."
~~ comedian Steven Wright

"Actions define character, not the other way around."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil - but there is no way around them."
~~ Isaac Asimov [1920-92]

"A healthy pessimism may be better than a suicidal optimism."
~~ Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz [1941-2011]

"Battling ignorance and apathy and magical thinking is a full-time job."
~~ G.E. Nordell

"In the end, I want you to join my gang. I do not want to join yours."
~~ poet Vachel Lindsay [1879-1931]

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Windows Mail cleanup tip

I got to doing some backups of very old data files from my hard-drive to a storage area on my website, whose server moves around but seems to be in New York nowadays.

The plan was to backup all my Windows Mail files, then delete the very old stuff on my hard-drive, those not really of use unless I needed to revisit some communication from several years ago, such as when I uploaded my detective novel to the publisher in 2005.

During my first attempt to upload the data offsite, the FTP software crashed and I found that there were hundreds of null files stored among my real emails, mostly at the top. Each null file had an encrypted name (and thus a directory entry) but size of zero. So I figured no harm in deleting the null files, and removed the ones FTP'd off site, then removed the original null files on my hard drive.

That process got rid of 7500 directory entries from my hard drive, and if each one took 100 bytes to store the name of nothing, then I removed 750K bytes that has been loaded to my RAM every time that I opened Windows Mail.

Two days since I did that, Windows Mail seems to run faster (hard to tell), so today I deleted the 7500 null files from my Recycle Bin too.

So here is how to find the files on your harddrive, knowing of course that my Windows Vista system can easily be different than your Windows system files.

Drill down from your *user name* to AppData then Local then Microsoft then Windows Mail – Local Folders will display the same folder structure as what you see inside your personal Windows Mail. The null files are simple to spot: encrypted name and size of zero. Be very careful not to include any file with non=zero size, but otherwise all you have to do is highlight & Shift-Down, then Delete the file groups in chunks.

(And don't forget to clear the Recycle Bin, which you should be doing on a regular basis anyway.)

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Wednesday, February 08, 2012

News Factoids for December 2011 & January 2012

"At this point, the Republican candidates for U.S. President can be referred to as 'The Four Stooges'."
~~ G.E. Nordell

Notice arrived that I am getting a C.O.L.A. increase (Cost of Living Adjustment) of $40 on my monthly Social Security check, which started in January – after no increase for the last three years. Thank you, President Obama!

About a third of all land on the planet is now desert, almost 20 million square miles, which increases every year.
~~ per New Yorker Magazine

If you are looking for a replacement for WebRing, try Nexus Links

Apparently, the Gingrich gang are paying to destroy Romney by promoting the half-hour docufilm "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came To Town". What I've seen of the film is all anti-Romney and does not promote anything or anyone on the Republican fascist side of U.S. politics.

The percent increase in [people on food stamps] during Mr. Bush's presidency was higher than it has been under Mr. Obama.
~~ CBS News, January 2012

General Motors sold only 7,671 Chevy Volt hybrid electric vehicles in 2011, and Nissan sold only 8,729 Leaf electric cars.
~~ news item

Copyright 2012 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved