Been a little busy lately, but I will soon get back to blogging. In the meantime, just a few unrelated thoughts. If you are looking for something vaguely religious here, don't bother:
1) The world's best fruitcake recipe.
I'm actually one of those people who likes good fruitcake. Unfortunately, that is pretty much impossible to buy. You have to make it. I have a chocolate fruitcake recipe that takes a month and a half to fix that starts with "soak the fruit in a bottle of whiskey for a week." How could you go wrong after that?
But for the rest of you, here's a recipe you definitely want to try. Well, at least you definitely want to read it. I am not the origin of this one:
Classic Fruit Cake Recipe
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Ingredients:
- One cup of water
- One cup of sugar
- four large brown eggs
- Two cups of mixed dried fruit
- One teaspoon salt
- One cup brown sugar
- Juice of one lemon
- One cup of coarsely chopped nuts
- One bottle of whiskey
Instructions:
Sample the whiskey to check for quality.
Take a large bowl. Check whiskey again. To be sure it's the highest
quality, pour one level cup and drink. Repeat.
Turn on the electric mixer, beat one cup of butter in a large fluffy bowl. Add one teaspoon of sugar and beat again.
Make sure the whiskey is still okay. Cry another tup. Turn off the mixer.
Beat two leggs and add to the bowl and chuck in the cup of dried fruit. Mix
on the tuner. If the fired druit gets stuck in the beaterers, pry it loose
with a drewscriver.
Sample the whiskey to check for tonsisticity. Next, sift two cups of salt. Or something. Who cares? Check the whiskey, darn good whiskey. Now sift the lemon juice and strain your nuts. Add one table. Spoon. Of sugar or something. Whatever you can find.
Grease the oven. Turn the cake tin to 350 degrees. Don't forget to beat off the turner. Throw the bowl out of the window. Whew, check that whiskey again and go to bed.
Who the hell likes fruitcake anyway?
2)Whatever happened to quality control?
The SIMS 3: World Adventures is an expansion pack to one of the best selling PC video games of all times. It came out this week. Word has it that the program freezes up on Windows 7 computers.
My question is,"How could anyone make such a big cluster**** as to release a game without testing it on Windows 7? I have to admit to being a SIMS fan (yes, I know that sounds bizaare) but even I have to jump ship on this!
3) H1N1 Redux
What else is there to say? The swine flu is apparently waning--though I would not be surprised if next week they told us it was coming back--and life goes on. Some people died, just as they do with the flue every year. A whole bunch of people were afraid of the vaccine. Congress bitched in August because they did not think the vaccine was getting properly tested, that it was being rushed. Congress bitched when it did not come out as fast as it was supposed to. Congress blamed the president for not being in the lab every day testing the vaccine. The liars bitched because Obama was not vaccinating his kids (A lie. They had already gotten shots before the rumor was even started). And now it's waning before millions could even get the shots.
I hope somebody is studying why this went the way it did. A milder than normal flu that was off season got more attention than the seasonal one that will probably kill more people world wide. At every step we second guessed ourselves. And still virtually nothing went right. There has to be a lesson here.
In the meantime, can we please put clergy on the list with health care professionals for people to get these vaccines in the future (and Mall Santas too). We work with sick people, and, let's face it, between the peace and communion, we are on the front lines.
Not that it matters if you are on the list. My doctors are still waiting for their shots, and I got one by being on a college campus. Hmmm....what's wrong with this picture?
4)Aren't we lucky?
My local newspaper has just informed us that we will be getting the Thanksgiving edition of the paper even if we do not normally get the weekday edition. As they put it, it is one of their largest editions of the year, with some carriers delivering it in two installments on Wednesday and Thursday.
Wrong. This is not a newspaper, but a circular. The paper is crammed with black Friday ads. The actual news is, as you would expect, almost non-existent (the normal state of my local paper lately). If you, like me, have no intention of entering a mall on Friday, this is nothing more than the most colossal waste of paper for the year. And you have to call them to let them know you do not wish to receive it. And we wonder why the newspaper business is dying....
5) The chief theologian in my house, my dog Andy, is lying on the sofa with the sun beaming down on him. At least one of us knows how to take sabbath time....
