A Little Signification

One investment I made, 20 years ago, has turned out very well indeed. It was then, at the tender age of 31, that I married Sue, who took me for better or for worse. Brave girl!

Today we made the final installment on a small memento to those two decades, and it looks quite dazzling on Sue's right hand. Whenever we look at it we can remember, in the sparkle, how well those "I do"s have paid off!

Stop the Badness!

As I sit here proofreading the lettering of a volume of manga (part of what I do for a living), I now pause to ponder that eternal question…

What the heck is going on?!

I greatly fear we're about to elect ourselves a new President whose administration will make the Shrub years look like a golden age by comparison. Seriously, whoever gets in office will either have more screws loose than the hardware bins at Home Depot or have to spend so much time defending who and what he is to the willfully moronic press that neither will have any capacity to deal with the very grim prospects confronting our beleaguered world.

Now, it's my expectation that the markets will calm down once the election's over, but there seems little likelihood that the crashing losses of the last several weeks will be recovered anytime soon, if ever. So many houses of cards have fallen in such quick succession that one begins to wonder if there was ever anything solid undergirding Wall Street in the first place. More and more it looks like the foundational mechanisms of investing will have to be reinvented.

OPEC promises new, lower production quotas, which is no surprise at all, since they're now aggressively determined to recapture the $100-plus price for a barrel of oil. Our addiction to cheap oil has, of course, kicked us in the teeth lately, and I just hope that we aren't allowed to forget that pain and return to our willful, My-Right-As-A-'Murikan gas-guzzling ways. In that spirit I find I dare declare, "Bring it, OPEC!"

Well, that's what I got right now. Back to the manga…

Apple Update

At long last I report in, and sad to say my wife's PowerMac G5 was terminal. Oh, it could have been fixed, but for the repair price-plus we just went ahead and got her a new iMac, which includes all the latest bells and whistles and allows her to have dual monitors (her 23" cinema display still works fine). Now we have a dead box to do something with…just not sure what yet.

Woe In ITLand

My wife has been the victim of more than her share of computer related headaches over the past year. First the battery in her PowerBook Titanium G4 fizzled, and the replacement I ordered worked for a while and then fizzled just as thoroughly as its predecessor. Our local Mac tech said there's nothing wrong with the computer, we just need to get a battery that seats properly. Since Apple no longer makes the batteries (and charges a fortune for back stock items), we're left to take another stab at a third party unit with no real confidence it'll do the trick.

Next came the failure of the battery in her APC UPS. This is not such a problem, there are plenty of options for replacement, but it's still annoying.

Now, as she has reported on her blog, Color and Caffeine, her PowerMac dual processor G5 tower has gone on the fritz and is in hospital. I'm confident The Beast will be back up and running anon, but I don't blame her for feeling rather perturbed by this run of tech misfortune.

While we have been using Macs since late 1992, and this is by far the worst spate of trouble we've had in all that time, it does make me wonder, now that she's had her three bad strokes…am I next?

 

Talkin' Movies 2

Three movies about food, none of which is Tom Jones:

Babette's Feast – I've only seen this once, but this tale of a French political exile taking refuge in a community of Danish Lutherans features some very toothsome preparations of very simple foods, as well as an amiable yet subtly suspenseful dinner party. I don't believe there's another film in all of cinema history in which the heroine triumphs over her nemesis by simply excelling in the kitchen.

Eat Drink Man Woman – A true don't-watch-this-hungry wonder from Taiwan. The "stunt cooking" alone will make your mouth water, but this robustly romantic tale of a widowed master chef at the end of his professional endurance and the struggles of his three grownup daughters to find their way in the world surprises at nearly every turn.

Tampopo – This first, and most iconic, noodle western from Japan has a wandering spirit, but never strays too far from the main plot of a noodle shop owner and the five men who ride in to aid in her quest to make the perfect bowl of ramen. This may sound altogether silly, but the characters are superbly played and easily convince you that this goal is more than worth the struggle. As for the famous egg yolk exchange scene…well, it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Three Days of Rain in One Week!

Monsoon season as arrived for real here in northern Arizona. After a virtually rainless spring, we've had three major days of rain - July 1st, 4th and today, the 6th. Not sure it's enough to stop the bark beetle, which in the past several years has devastated our stands of Ponderosa pine, but it might be enough to slow 'em down a little. Anyone who thinks it's our famous wildfires that destroy forests around here, sorry to disappoint; the bark beetle is far more destructive, and there is precious little that can be done to fight them…except, perhaps, letting those famous wildfires burn and thin the stands of pines the way nature intended.

Sauce It Right

And here's another tip, for those who wok: prepare your stir fry sauce in a separate pan, to make sure your thickener is thoroughly cooked and the flavor is just how you like it. Then, when the meat and/or veggies are all fried up, add the sauce and stir a few times to mix it in and heat it through. This avoids the often insipid results of pouring an uncooked sauce mixture directly into the wok with main ingredients.