May 16, 2013

The only way to fix Congress

Getting rid of all of them won't help. There are some good Congressmen, and we don't want to lose Alan Grayson or Keith Ellison just to get rid of Louie Gohmert.

Term limits are just a form of getting rid of all of them, and for every Michele Bachmann we lose, we also lose a Nita Lowery.

The only way to get rid of the shitty congressmen while keeping the good ones is to elect congressmen statewide.(No, this is not something the Founding Fathers did, but the Founding Fathers required voters to own land and have white skin and penises, and allowed slaveholding, and we fixed that shit...we can correct yet another of their horrible mistakes.)

How it would work: a panel of citizens who are registered voters but who have never run for any elected office higher than county commissioner would join to decide what is a midsize state. Say a midsize state has 27 electoral votes. This means it has 25 congressional districts. Anyone running for Congress in a midsize state, or smaller, will be voted on by everyone in the state. Anyone in a larger state will run in his or her own district plus the 24 closest to it. Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert can win in districts designed to elect anyone with a heartbeat and an R behind his or her name. They'd have a harder time winning in this system. It would also force the GOP to confront their unelectability problem...think back to all the postmortems of the Romney disaster. Not one focused on the real problems: their presidential candidate was less likeable than Richard Nixon, their vice presidential candidate scares people and their platform would have amplified the problems America has. Cleaning all the Republicans out of the House would force them into sober reflection. Maybe.

And yes, House candidates can campaign statewide. Senate candidates do it. Governor candidates do it. The representatives in Alaska and Montana do it. In the days when you campaigned in a horse-drawn carriage you couldn't do it, but we have TV commercials, cars, buses, planes and 501(C)(4) groups now...

It is obvious that this would never pass...consider the state of Washington. They have nine congressional districts. Most of them are solid GOP seats because most of Washington's land is rural and rural voters lean Republican. All those seats would swing Democratic if they had statewide voting because Spokane has Democrats and...well, let's say the Puget Sound isn't the bluest thing in King County.

May 11, 2013

I watched the last two versions of The Great Gatsby last night

While waiting for the showing of the new version to start at the theatre, I stopped by a video store...they had the Robert Redford version of this on Blu-Ray, so I snagged it...watched the film at the theatre, then went home and watched it again.

I've come to the conclusion you can't make a great movie out of this book. BOTH versions were only fair as movies. They were also very, very similar, as one would expect. DiCaprio is a great student of film history, and it's obvious he closely studied the Redford version; some of the things he did (like Gatsby's reaching out with his hand while he was standing on the pier) were almost identical to things Redford did.

(Spoiler alert) In the new version, Nick is a hopeless alcoholic in a sanitarium, and the story is a series of recollections and confessions to his psychiatrist - which he typed out into the form of the novel. The Redford version tells the tale straight out.

The hip-hop soundtrack in the new version really isn't as strange as you'd think it would be - not as strange as the 3-d effects. This movie was shot with 3-d cameras, so there's no reason for the actors to look like they were cut out and pasted on top of the backgrounds. When there weren't any people in the movie, the 3-d was very impressive; when people were there, it looked like "a 3-d movie." (Apparently this is what people expect 3-d movies to look like, and when you pay that extra $3.50 I guess you want proof you're at a 3-d movie.) Gatsby isn't really the kind of film 3-d adds anything to, and in this case it takes away - even though it shouldn't have. See it in 2-d.

I liked Nick's voiceover in the new one. The superimposed typing wasn't all that necessary.

My impression: the Redford one was good but not great, the new one was also good but not great (although the critics are gonna go "it sucked because it wasn't the Robert Redford version" to which I wonder, if all you want is the Redford version why not just watch that?), the book really was great.

May 9, 2013

Exclude Rush Limbaugh orders have him shitting kittens

A little-known secret of the media business: we do nothing unless we get paid for it. And what pays the bills is advertising.

Cumulus Media, iirc the second-largest radio network after Clear Channel, is about to dump Rush because advertisers don't want to sponsor him. People know this.
Now consider having to sell this program to stations that are already scheduled around the clock: "We would like you to take whatever you've got scheduled for the three hours in the middle of the day off and replace it with a show with declining Arbitron ratings and no national ad accounts, and that you can't sell locally to anyone except army surplus depots and cigar stores because the host is radioactive." It's not likely he'd find new stations.

May 4, 2013

An easy premium ice cream recipe

I posted just a few minutes ago The World's Easiest Ice Cream Recipe. That's good for the kids, your 80-year-old mom who thinks the ice cream in gallon pails is just great, or other times when good enough ice cream is exactly what you need.

This is the good stuff.

One pint milk
One pint whipping cream
One pint heavy whipping cream
1-1/2 cups sugar
Six egg yolks
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
Flavoring, and use quality product for this - no cocoa powder, okay?

For strawberry - 12 oz organic, ripe fresh berries, half chopped, half crushed
For chocolate - 8 oz finely chopped chocolate
Chocolate in pieces - maybe 2 oz
Other fruit - 12 oz of chopped, quality fruits or berries. Half crushed. The other half...berries leave whole, other fruits chop up.

Put the dairy, eggs and sugar together and cook to 160 degrees over low heat, stirring constantly.(It is critical that you reach temp very, very slowly...go too fast and this will taste like scrambled eggs.) Add the chocolate or the chopped berries and cook to 180 degrees. Now add the vanilla and put in the fridge overnight.

Put this batter and any whole berries, chopped fruits and chocolate pieces in your ice cream freezer and churn as slowly as you possibly can.

May 4, 2013

The world's easiest homemade ice cream recipe

One quart half-and-half
Two eggs
Sweetener equivalent to one cup sugar
One teaspoon vanilla extract

Whatever flavors you want to use (so far I have made batches of this with four ounces dark chocolate, two medium mangos, and half a pound of strawberries)

Put the half-and-half, sugar and eggs in a pot and cook to 160 degrees F. Add whatever you are flavoring it with (but not the vanilla) and cook to 180 degrees. Take off the heat and add the vanilla. Put in the fridge overnight to get cold, then freeze in your ice cream freezer.

This is a good recipe that produces a not-too-fatty ice cream, and it's reasonably priced - thanks to coffee fiends, they make so much half-and-half a quart of it is less expensive than a pint of whipping cream.

May 3, 2013

The Crickett website is currently down

Crickett is "My First Rifle" and was the gun used in the Kentucky five-year-old's My First Murder. If you try going to crickett.com, you get a Red Hat Linux test page, and if you go to the page Mother Jones has linked to, you get an Apache "file not found" error.

May 1, 2013

Tim Tebow's first post-Jets job offer

http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2013/04/30/tim-tebow-omaha-beef-contract-offer/2124481/

The Omaha Beef, an arena football team, has offered Tim Tebow a "standard player contract" of $75 per game.

James McNear, the Beef's quarterback, says Tebow "can learn a lot from him." McNear has a 70-percent pass completion ratio and 11 touchdowns this season...as compared to none in Tebow's stint with the Jets.