Dangerous Oyster Noms

Ever since my wife and I went to New Orleans and dined on chargrilled oysters at the Acme Oyster House, I've been striving to recreate that oyster-y goodness at home. Last night, I had two separate bottles of fresh, shelled oysters and made them into Angels on Horseback (without jalapeños) and Devils on Horseback (with jalapeño slices). Photos below.

Seasoned, fresh oysters about to be wrapped in bacon.

Same after baking at 450 degrees for about 15 minutes.

The results were good, but since you can never tell how fresh the oysters are, you eat them with a certain amount of trepidation. My method for testing oyster jars for freshness is to see if the lid is convex. I figure that's a decent guide to whether or not the oysters have started fermenting. If the lid is flat, they're probably OK to eat. Still, it's not foolproof and I've eaten oysters a few times, had mild discomfort afterwards and wondered if they were the cause.

Our problem is that we live in San Diego and oysters have to be imported. How fresh are they? You can't really tell. I think that if I were more confident in the quality of the oysters, I'd keep going through my oyster recipes, but until I feel totally safe, I'm going to call it quits.

What Do You Think Of When You See This Couch?

Another one from my wife and I shopping for furniture recently. The big part sticking out is a bit smaller than a twin bed. The cushions were very soft so that you sank into them.

My answer in the comments.

Sit In The Angry Chair!

... and get even angrier!

My wife and I went furniture shopping yesterday and came across this beauty.

If you weren't angry when you sat down, you would be by the time you got up. I got agitated just sitting in it briefly. Yowza!

Ivy League Universities Are Effectively Seminaries

... since progressivism is a religion.

Dig this.

With their campuses rocked by social justice protests, anxious Ivy League presidents are trying to appease campus radicals with huge payouts to left-wing identity programs. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, apologized to protesters (“we failed you”) and wrote a campus-wide letter promising to create a new “university center” for the study of “race ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” He also pledged to double the budget for the African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic cultural centers, and to devote new resources to “educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.”

Not to be outdone, Brown University President Christina Paxson has answered protests by unveiling a $100 million program for creating “a just and inclusive campus community.” Among the budget items: “expand mentoring resources for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and first generation college students”; create “workshops” to “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”; and “promote university-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Identity and Structural Racism.”

This is theology and nothing but.

Addendum: Belief that "diversity makes us stronger" when it comes to sex or race is religious in the worst sense - it is errant nonsense contradicted by fact. If you disagree, then please let me know how many Hispanics should be included in a team of 100 accountants to make that team stronger.

Diversity doesn't make us stronger, strength makes us stronger. If, when recruiting your accountants, you find that the 100 best candidates are all Kumeyaay Indians, then your team should consist of 100 Kumeyaay, 0 whites, 0 Hispanics and 0 blacks.

Giving Thanks

This year, I have a particular reason to give thanks. I'm truly thankful for El Niño. The Catican Guard recruits are absolutely annihilating my irrigation system. Fortunately, El Niño will bring plenty of rain this winter so I don't have to rely on the shattered remnants of my drippers.

Hopefully the new Guards will grow up in the next few months and get over the chewing phase.

There are plenty more out in the yard where this came from, all in an equally ruined state.

Here's hoping you have plenty to be thankful for as well.

What's Worse, A Confederate Flag Or A Burka?

As I understand it, we're being told to take down Confederate flags and allow Muslim refugees to enter the country. We're also being told that Confederate flags are racist and ISIS is not Islamic. I'm a bit confused.

I kind of like the Confederate flag. I'm an admirer of Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. I think the performance of the Confederate army early in the war was impressive. I'm a Yankee through and through, but I love the people, the food, the climate and the geography of the South. I also like the subtext of the flag - it kind of tells the Federal government to bug off. All in all, I've got no problem with the Stars and Bars.

Yeah, I get how some people could be offended by this, but there are things out there that offend me and I don't rush about calling for them to be banned. Life's full of things that bother some people and you just need to learn to deal with it.

The burka is an Islamic dress for women designed to protect them from men. The underlying assertion is that men cannot control their sexual urges, so the best way to keep women safe is to cover them completely. The burka, unlike the Confederate flag, is not something up for personal interpretation. It is part and parcel of a certain style of Islamic canon. It establishes an unequal relationship between men and women.

Let me know what your wife has to say when you ask her to wear one of these.

While I can happily volunteer to mentor young, black men so that they achieve as much as anyone else while driving around with a Dixie flag on my car, I'm not sure I can force my wife to wear a burka while looking at women as similar equals.

So what's the deal here? Why are we supposed to chant SJW slogans with Pavlovian reflexes whenever we see the Confederate flag, but we're supposed to be gentle and open-minded when we see a burka?

Could it be that we're intellectually lazy and voluntarily ignorant?

Spectre

We saw it last night and I'm not sure what it was, but I don't think it was a Bond movie. Trying not to spoil things, I'll just say that I had no idea why anyone was doing anything. No one's motives seemed on par with all the mayhem. If the bad guy won, he would have had ... what?

Beats me.

If you want to have a spoiler-filled conversation in the comments, I'm in.

Robert Heinlein Didn't Believe

... his own ideas on marriage.

In The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and, as I recall, in Stranger In A Strange Land, my man Robert suggests that marriage will evolve in the future into all kinds of different, flexible alternatives. Everyone will be cool and groovy with whatever floats your boat.

In Harsh Mistress, the hero has a line marriage, where a couple starts the line and then after a while, a new, young wife is added to the mix making 3. Then a new, young husband is added, making 4. Then another wife making 5. Then another husband making, so long as no one has died, 6. And so on. People die and sometimes people are "divorced," but on the whole, the family is one, big, happy cluster off into infinity with the kids being raised communally.

Bob has plenty of prose devoted to how awesome this all is. He takes aim at prudes who think there should be monogamy, sex belongs within marriage, prostitution is a bad idea and so forth. What a bunch of dummies! Life would be much better if we all just ditched our hangups about sex and stuff like that.

Robbie didn't believe a word of this. His heroes always hook up with a single girl. In fact, their lady love is one of their big motivations. When the couple* comes home from slaying the aliens or freeing the planet, they ride off into the sunset together with no one else involved. At the end of Harsh Mistress, Manuel (the hero) definitely does not find Wyoming (the heroine) just getting out of bed after having slept with husband 7b in their line marriage.

In short, Robert Heinlein wanted you to think he was a full on commune-living hippie when it came to sex, but when it came right down to it, his alter-egos weren't having any of that.

Love ya, buddy, but you've got no one fooled when it comes to that modern marriage stuff.

* - Heinlein's heroines were always very feminine and very capable - right in the thick of things at all times, but never becoming men themselves.

Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein

Prompted by some twaddle I read on the web about social justice warrior tantrums over science fiction, I've gone back to reading the "classics" - Asimov's Foundation, Clarke's Childhood's End and Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

They were all horrible and I was only able to finish Heinlein's book. I could only make it through half of the other two. Reading the last quarter of Moon was like crawling through broken glass. In each case, the authors draped a science fiction robe around their own personal, political manifestos. Only Heinlein managed to work in a healthy dose of science and engineering. The other two didn't bother. Instead, Foundation and Childhood were more fantasy than anything else.

Foundation is a story of religion as a massive con game. Asimov wanted to attack religions of all sorts and so creates a story where everyone in church leadership positions are knowingly perpetrating frauds on a credulous population. It's so poorly thought out and Asimov was so dreadfully ignorant of theology that none of it is believable and a third of the way in I grew unbearably tired of what became a crude polemic.

Childhood's End has similar problems. Aliens come to Earth, orbit the planet in huge ships, don't land, but using what is effectively magic, end war, injustice, poverty, crime and all icky things. The population, freed from fear and want, goes on to achieve great things. The United Nations is the focal point of dealings with the aliens. It's a progressive's personal fantasy and it's embarrassing to read.

Clarke, like Asimov, is utterly ignorant of religion and brushes it aside with magic boxes the aliens give the people of Earth that allow them to look back at any place, any time. All religious figures are revealed to be ordinary people. Nothing to see here, Earthlings, move along. Unlike our own real world, relieved of any responsibility for their own lives, people don't turn to weed, porn and increasingly trivial outrages. (See also: microaggressions, pampered university children complaining of.) Clarke shows he knows little of human nature or faith.

Heinlein is the most readable, but only because he lays on the engineering and science good and thick. The rest of the book is his own libertarian manifesto. At first it's refreshingly different, with economic discussions included, but in the end, it turns into Reason Magazine dressed up with lasers and rockets.

I'm not as familiar with Clarke's work, but I do recall enjoying Asimov's and Heinlein's juvenile novels. I'm hoping to go back to those and find some happy nostalgia.

Read The Comments Section

... of this article and do a quick count of the number of people pro and con the argument. I think you'll immediately come to the conclusion that the college social justice insanity sweeping the nation is being driven by the tiniest sliver of the population, made up of the academics, the administrators and a small pack of crazed SJWs. The vast majority of people think it's total bullocks.

Giving moral power to these people is effectively engendering a tyranny to rule over us.

Two Standard Deviations Of Irritability

... is probably all you need to get a crazy social justice warrior who will stand in front of a professor or university administrator and scream at them.

A population curve for irritability.

If you immerse children in anything long enough, you're going to end up with a set of the population who get all wound up about it. I would think that if you made every kid play violin from grades 4 to 12, you'll end up with about 2% of them enjoying it to the point where it's really hard to stop them from continuing to play.

In the case of the current college lunacy, you've got almost an entire generation who have had social justice themes shoved down their throats for years. I figure that irritability, for lack of a better term, is distributed on a Bell curve with those above the second standard deviation naturally cranky and confrontational.

By giving them fuel for their crankiness and all the same fuel at that, you've created a cadre of social justice crazies who can't be controlled. Had the education establishment been a bit more balanced, these cranksters would be distributed throughout a whole variety of crusades. Instead, we've worked our hardest to concentrate them in a single area.

Well done, education industry. Like Victor Frankenstein, you've got a real mess on your hands.

Woodrow Wilson Is Just The Tip Of The Iceberg

So the kids at Princeton are all up in arms about old Woody.

Student protesters filled Princeton’s historic Nassau Hall Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the university president’s office and refusing to leave until their demands to improve the social and academic experiences of black students on campus are met — starting with an acknowledgement of famous alumnus Woodrow Wilson’s “racist legacy” and the removal of his name from all buildings.

Woodrow was a racist, to be sure, but then again, most Democrats pre-1970 were, too. Old FDR refused to allow Jesse Owens to visit the White House after his heroic performance in the 1936 Olympics. FDR also put a member of the Klan on the Supreme Court and it was that dude what wrote the "separation of church and state" ruling.

Once you get started down this road, there probably aren't many old time Democrats who are safe, it being the party of segregation and all. We've reached a new battlespace for the Social Justice crowd. Now not only are the progressives devouring each other, they're devouring their past. It's hilarious on so many levels and seemingly unstoppable.

If my daughter's experiences in public high school are anything to go by, these children have been steeped in grievance theory. Some of them will be naturally hot-tempered as some of all of us are and those are not going to be calmed down without re-conditioning them to see the past in a more nuance way. Oh yeah, that's going to be easy.

This could go a long way before it stops.

Racism, sexism, rape ... these guys (Carter excluded, probably) are a treasure trove of aggressions of all sizes.

The Silence Of Homogeneity

Only crazy people, extremists, if you will, don't think like the rest of us. Everyone is the same, or would be, if allowed to reach their own personal equilibrium end state.

That's the message from the left after the Paris attacks as well as the theme of the latest round of campus protests. It's also the underlying principle behind the push to accept the refugees from the Middle East.

Yes, all religions are the same, there is a universal set of values, everyone is trying to maximize the same things and minimize the same things. We all have the same ideas about freedom, success and security. Only a few, crazy fundamentalists disagree. They don't really see things differently, they're just completely nuts.

If everyone is the same, then we can all live together in peace because every conflict will be something we can talk out since we're all trying to achieve the same ends. Being the same simplifies so much in life!

Furthermore, because everyone is the same, there's no need to learn about Islam. No need to read the Koran, the Hadiths or any books summarizing their belief system. There's also no need to read the Catechism of the Catholic Church or G. K. Chesterton or C. S. Lewis. We can probably throw out the philosophers as well - Nietzsche, Rousseau, Aquinas and the rest. Everything worth reading will naturally lead you to the same conclusions since we are all, as I said before, the same.

But hold on one minute. If we're all the same and all thought leads to the same place and we all share the same values, then what you have to say is no better or worse than what anyone else has to say. If you're writing a book or giving an interview or making a speech, isn't it all just a waste of time since it's only going to end up right where everyone else is?

When you get right down to it, you've made your point very well, Mr. President. You have nothing of value to say at all.

Non-Profit Nation

In all of the hoo-hah about taking more Syrian refugees, what I can't seem to find is any concrete benefit that would accrue to the United States. They don't have unique skills, it doesn't cement any important, but fragile alliances, they don't come from an allied nation who has fallen to an enemy. I short, what's in it for us?

To ask the question is to earn a derisive label. Profit-monger, perhaps? Self-centered, maybe? Whatever it is, by bringing it up, you're putting your own interests ahead of needy people. You're just as bad as Exxon, General Electric and Koch Industries* - organizations who only care about the bottom line.

So I guess we should take in the Syrian refugees because we're moral, caring, compassionate people. At least that's what it seems like to me. Too bad that to do this, we'd have to borrow yet more money from our kids.

* - But not Apple. Apple is not evil. Apple is hip and cool.

Quick, Someone Call PETA!

... because at least one of these dogs looks mildly uncomfortable. Well, maybe not uncomfortable, perhaps just not in total and utter bliss. OK, maybe they're in total and utter bliss, but I'm sure the lighting in the room wasn't perfect.

So call PETA! Right away!

The Sentence Of The Week

... comes from Roger Simon in his column on last night's Democratic debate. Here you go.

Sorry, that’s all I have to report, other than that none of the candidates seemed to know what their proposals would cost, quite probably because they have no idea and couldn’t care less.

Bingo! I hadn't thought of that before. Essentially, the costs don't matter at all. None of the people who are going to vote for Hillary or Bernie care what anything costs because it's always going to be paid for by "the rich" and "the 1%." I've blogged many times before about how math always wins, but that's not quite true in the short run.

Math doesn't win Democratic primaries. Math doesn't win votes in Congress when new spending bills are being enacted. In the end, however, math will have its way.

Take it from the Greeks. Math wins. Math always wins.

Paris Is A Big City

... with lots of places to hide, lots of places to attack and too many places to defend. Right about now, if I was a Parisian, I'd be rethinking my dinner plans for the time being. Best to grab some groceries and eat at home. Telework would sound like a good idea, too.

When I walked down the street and saw Muslims near me, I'd be wondering just what they were thinking and what they were up to.

All of this puts me in mind of Mark Steyn's assertions in After America. Cities are going to end up with "Green Zones" where you can enter only through security checkpoints like the airport. I think that's a bit hyperbolic, but for the citizens of Paris and other French cities, I'm sure they're pretty shaken by the whole thing and are wondering just what's coming next.

Hiring And Experience

One of our boys is about to graduate with an EE degree, but he's having a tough time finding a job. He's got years of intern experience and is a leader in his senior project classes, but that's not translating into interviews, much less offers. Crazy!

He's stressed about the situation because many of the openings he's finding ask for "a minimum of 2-4 years of experience" at whatever it is they're hiring. Job seekers need to know that such experience levels are often just wishes, not hard requirements. When I hire, I make a similar wish list, but I have to take what's available. If there isn't anyone with N years of experience, then no matter what I asked for, I can't demand it. 

Having been in this game for a while and made some tremendous hires and a few poor ones, I've learned to hire the best available athlete. I hire for personality and drive, not experience or even knowledge. If you're eager, fun to have around and know Visual Basic, I can teach you PHP. If you're a mopey, boring complainer, I can't give you anything to change your personality. There's nothing worse than a cancer on the team and no amount of superstar skills can make up for it.

Not everyone hires like this, but I would argue that you don't want to take a job from those who don't. They're likely to have picked up some unpleasant toads along the way with whom you'll have to work. That won't be any fun at all.

Anything Goes To Mob Rule

Wearing a hat indoors? It simply isn't done, old man.

Well, at least it wasn't done before. Now it's perfectly OK.

Traditions, common cultural practices and rules for civil behavior have all been tossed aside. Yale and Mizzou are, in part, the results of the discarding of such rules. Students screaming at faculty, demonstrators obstructing freedom of the press and professors defying the administration that hired them and pays their salaries are run of the mill events these days.

So why can't school administrations return the favor and scream at people, fire faculty and expel students? Those would at least be more in keeping with traditional behaviors between employers and employees and business owners with troublesome customers.

The reason is that the administration doesn't have a mob behind it and the students and crazier members of the faculty do. Just like I've been saying about Europe, it comes down to a battle between light infantry units and the forces of anarchic "social justice" vastly outnumber the forces of order.

In the absence of cultural norms to keep behaviors in check, the side with the most soldiers is going to determine what is and isn't done, old man.

How Come School Administrators Don't Get Safe Spaces?

... or trigger warnings or the right to not hear abusive language or whatever it is that causes the Social Justice Warrior students to go into Nuclear Freakout Mode? Wouldn't it have been great to see the president of the University of Missouri quivering and screaming like a deranged teenage girl, demanding retractions and apologies and expulsions from the students who had said and written bad words about him?

Why shouldn't he? Why can't he? It would be awesome to see this happen just once - where everyone involved in the encounter is having wild meltdowns. I can just see it. The students are protesting in front of the administrative offices, screaming and chanting, professors are screaming demands and then the administrators come out and start screaming right back. Someone calls the campus police and they show up and start shouting and crying, too. In no time at all, the air is filled with frantic shrieking and incoherent demands, everyone's faces are beet-red with rage and signs with misspelled slogans are being waved by all and sundry.

If I was the president of a campus where such protests were going on, I would pay a good deal of my life savings to go out in a blaze of spasmodic, juvenile glory like this. It would be worth every penny.

Busy

I've spent my fun computer time today on Photoshop, Premiere and PHP. I've not had time to blog, even though I had some thoughts about the Missouri college imbroglio.

I weep for forgiveness.

A Drop In The Bucket

... and a pointless bucket at that.

We're pivoting like ballerinas in the US. Pivot to China! Pivot to the Middle East! Now we pivot to Europe! Dig this.

SIMI VALLEY, Calif.—Senior U.S. military leaders have proposed sending more forces into Europe on a rotating basis to build up the American presence and are stepping up training exercises to counter potential Russian interference with troop transfers in the event of a crisis with Moscow.

The new steps would allow for the presence of multiple U.S. brigades in Europe at any given time, increasing that number above current limits.

Simi Valley? Why is the byline from Simi Valley? Is that some kind of hotbed of military thought that no one ever heard of before? Whatever.

Europe can swallow whole divisions and never tell the difference. Brigades will vanish without a trace. And unless you're willing to use them, you know, like shooting people with them, they're utterly irrelevant. The whole thing is nonsensical. It's all for show while everyone watching the show knows it's nonsense.

Consider it marionette theater. You can see the strings, so you know the puppets aren't real people. In this case, you know the brigades aren't coming over with weapons that will be used, so it's not like they're really a threat to anyone.

We might as well be sending little, plastic army men.

November Is Native American Heritage Month, Part 2

Yesterday, I snarked about the American Indians, how they were still in the Stone Age when the Europeans showed up.

I don't like to camp. I don't like setting up tents, I don't like sleeping on the ground and I really, really hate striking camp before leaving. If it was up to me, whenever we camped, we'd just leave our gear behind us when we got tired of living in dirt. Which, for me, would be 2 days at most.

Where do I get off sneering at people who lived in dirt every day? I'd have been contemplating suicide after a month if I had to live like they did. Geeze, the fact that the Kumeyaay survived at all in the desert that is San Diego was one heck of an accomplishment. That they didn't know PHP and MySql is not something to laugh at.

But that's the whole point of the snark. The same goes for the Spaniards. At the time of Columbus' voyage, the Spanish had just completed an existential struggle with the Moors. As in lots of people dying from blunt instruments hitting their heads and sharp and pointy things impaling their bodies. Infections were often deadly and breech births were a death sentence for a woman. Who are we to act all high and mighty about them when most of us couldn't live like that for even a couple of days? The hardships of their day-to-day lives are inconceivable to us.

And yet, the Europeans not only had writing, but sophisticated theology, impressive engineering, fine literature and the foundations of modern science. For cryin' out loud, let's give the poor devils a break and get off this kick of judging them by 2015 standards.

November Is Native American Heritage Month

And here's what that's about:

November is Native American Heritage Month, or as it is commonly refered to, American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. The month is a time to celebrate rich and diverse cultures, traditions, and histories and to acknowledge the important contributions of Native people.

I'd add the following:

Native American Heritage Month is also the time for those of Native American ancestry to apologize to the rest of us for their ancestors not developing and spreading life-saving and enriching goods and technologies.

Seems only fair.

A picture of the Native American Founding Fathers. Or it would be had they had any means of communication, organization, and knowledge recording. Oh, and it would have helped had they not hated each other.

I've Got A Song Stuck In My Head

... and I figured you needed it stuck in yours, too.

You're welcome.

The Crazy-Hot Scale

... is what guys sometimes refer to when discussing a chick. The crazier she is, the hotter she's got to be in order to be worth dating.

Right now, the United States scores pretty high on both marks. We're really hot - we've got all these cool weapons and gadgets, we've got tons of money and special forces guys who can help you out. We're also completely nuts. For instance, you've got no idea at all where we stand in Syria. First we say we want to defeat Assad, then we don't, then we do, then we don't, then we supply rebels, then we dump them and now we're coming back and asking why they don't call us any more.

WASHINGTON—The U.S. and its regional allies agreed to increase shipments of weapons and other supplies to help moderate Syrian rebels hold their ground and challenge the intervention of Russia and Iran on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. officials and their counterparts in the region said.

U.S. officials said the Obama administration is pursuing what amounts to a dual-track strategy, which aims to maintain military pressure on Mr. Assad and his Russian and Iranian supporters while U.S. diplomats see if they can ease him from power through negotiations. U.S. officials said the pressure track was meant to complement the diplomatic track by giving the U.S. leverage at the negotiating table.

Oh, it's a dual-track strategy alright. The two tracks are

1. Come here.
2. Go away. 

The tracks alternate every month.

If you're in the Middle East, or anywhere for that matter, the United States is definitely in the Danger Zone.

What The Eye Has Seen Cannot Be Unseen

For the love of God, why?

H/T: James Taranto.

Giving The Mentally Ill A Megaphone

... might not be such a good idea for anyone.

Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who "self-identifies" as a black. She's clearly a loon. Her race is objective reality and she refuses to accept that. She's like the drunk lunatic I once met in a bus depot who told me he was Mario Andretti's test driver.

The difference between her and the drunk is that she's delusional about race. Dittos for Bruce Jenner. The difference between Bruce and the drunk is that he's delusional about sex. Sex and race are magic somehow and all judgment is thrown out the window where they're concerned. Both Rachel and Bruce can find a large number of people who will cater to their delusions because Rachel and Bruce serve the causes of racialism and sexual libertinism.

Rachel is on Twitter. The notoriety she's gained from the racialist crowd has led her to have plenty of followers - she's got a decent sized megaphone. Yesterday, she wailed, "I AM BLACK!" as a tweet in reply to people who were making fun of her. She has since restricted her Twitter stream, so I can't embed it here.

Because she's such a cause célèbre and because she's mad, there's no lack of people snarkily pointing out reality. Poor Rachel has got enough problems without this. The drunk at the bus depot was able to struggle with his delusions in relative peace and quiet, but Rachel is out there on display. Her "allies" in the racialist movement don't care about her, they just love the turmoil and conflict. That she is tormented by her insanity and the insults piled on her doesn't matter to them. They're cashing in on all of this in the form of attention from the press.

Meanwhile, a very sick woman is screaming out on Twitter.

Of Canines And Croquettes

Two little odds and ends today.

The Catican Guard recruits (a pair of adolescent, female Chihuahua-mixes) have sabotaged our irrigation system. Since we live in SoCal, we try to be water-conscious and so our yard is rock, flagstone, grasses and shrubs. Our irrigation is almost entirely drip. The pupsters have decided that it's great fun to chew on the drip lines. Fortunately, they've not gone after the main feed lines, so the leaks are thin streams shooting across the yard, not huge fountains. Repair work is in my future tonight.

I recently found Catalina Offshore Products, a semi-local seafood market that sells high-quality, local picked crab meat. I went out and bought The Louisiana Seafood Bible: Crabs because the other titles in that series have been fabulous. Last night, I made Crab Croquettes which are blobs of mashed potatoes, crab, finely chopped onion and bell pepper which are deep fried. I'm still need to work on my deep frying skills, but all in all it was decent. Not worth a repeat, unlike most of the recipes from those books, but it was still pretty good.

Yum!

Invaders Abhor A Vacuum

Submitted (almost) without commentary. Here's the NYT source.

In early October, the district government informed Sumte’s mayor, Christian Fabel, by email that his village of 102 people just over the border in what was once Communist East Germany would take in 1,000 asylum seekers.

Outstanding! The natives will be outnumbered 10-1. I hope they've got a clear idea in which way Mecca lies. If they don't, they soon will. On the plus side, they'll soon experience the benefits of Sharia. You weren't thinking the invaders were going to live under German laws, were you?

In a small concession to the villagers, Alexander Götz, a regional official from Lower Saxony, told them this week that the initial number of refugees, who start arriving on Monday and will be housed in empty office buildings, would be kept to 500, and limited to 750 in all.

Ahh. Empty office buildings. Well, that's what you get when your younger generation spends time with weed and porn and avoids marriage and children. Nature abhors a vaccum and these invaders are nothing if not creatures of nature.

(Former Sumte Mayor) Mr. Schlemmer is among those concerned that extremists are exploiting widespread concerns, even in the political mainstream, over absorbing vast numbers of refugees, as the influx tests Germany’s capacity to cope.

Darn those crazy extremists! Every time you allow an overwhelming number of invaders who can't speak your language and follow a religion that mandates a complete overturn of your political structures they come out of the woodwork. It's getting to be that you can't even commit cultural suicide without extremists showing up to try to stop you any more. What's this world coming to?

Sumte has no shops, no police station, no school. The initial number of arrivals was, in fact, reduced to avoid straining the local sewage system and give time for new pumps to be installed.

Diversity is what makes us stronger, not shops, police stations or schools. Those are all creations of the patriarchy.

“We have zero infrastructure here for so many people,” Mr. Fabel, the mayor, said.

Don't worry, Mr. Fabel. With the help of your new overlords guests, you will.

The infrastructure of the homeland. Not your homeland, Mr. Fabel, but very soon, you won't have a homeland any more so don't worry about it.