WhimsyLand

I spent all day working on a Linux driver for touchscreen monitors.  I know, that is impossibly sexy and now you want my number or at least my instant messaging details.

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I've been receiving The Camera, the newspaper representing the People's Republic of Boulder, for a couple of months now.  A nice young lady called up some time ago and asked me if I wanted to receive it regularly, and I thought what the heck, I need something to read on morning breaks.  She asked my permission to bill my AMEX $1.67 a month, which I thought had to be a joke.  That's about one half of a skinny, no-foam, extra-hot latte, and I end up with enough newsprint to paper the bottom of the birdcage, if I had a bird, which I don't.  You don't expect a lot from The Camera except liberal editorial, decent comics, and interesting local news.  For example, Pete Sheinbaum's yellow Lab was attacked by a mountain lion on Friday, which the latter called off after Pete waved his arms at the 150-pound cat and yelled a lot.  This actually happens a lot to people who live in the foothills, and every 5 years a human gets attacked and sometimes killed.  I guess the theory is they were here first, which goes down pretty smoothly with Boulderites, who tend to have sympathies with the indigenous.  In other news, Maxine Mager, the young lady who runs Creative Acres, is trying to raise money to keep the banks from foreclosing on her animal sanctuary.  Said sanctuary is 40 miles northeast of Denver and is home to 300-odd "cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, peacocks, turkeys, gees, ferrets, hedge hogs, guinea pigs and one iguana".  Everyone loves Maxine, even Washington Mutual, who is the Simon Legree in this story, and another local bank is soliciting customers for donations.  The Business News informs us that local Level 3 CEO James Q. Crowe's tumor is benign.  I remember when the Level 3 folks moved into town to open their headquarters in Broomfield.  This was during the dot-com boom and they were all zillionaires and wanted megahouses built on the prairie right now thank you.  Now, of course, there are LOTS of megahouses on the prairie starting at $2 million but you get 7,000 square feet of living space, a master bedroom suite bigger than most Manhattan apartments, Italian marble throughout the gourmet kitchen and hardwood floors made of some exotic tropical wood that will soon be extinct.  How do I know this?  Because I had dinner with my old buddy Jerry, a long-suffering upscale real estate agent who lists these properties all the time.  Another article discusses the slow decline in land mine casualties and the efforts taken to find them.  This includes a novel Danish plant, the Thale cress, which turns red when it grows near mines, and Columbian researchers who have trained rats to freeze when they encounter them (the rats aren't heavy enough to set them off).  Kate Becker has an entire article devoted to "Uranus" and how it's the best-ever viewing season (I can't believe that somebody didn't mention this in Abraham Lincoln), avoiding every puerile insinuation imaginable and ending on "New moons for Uranus?  Why, the jokes practically write themselves". 

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I somehow missed out knowing that Jim is famous.  I was cruising Wonkette and came across an ad for Gawker that looked weirdly familiar.

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I haven't received a Williams-Sonoma catalog in some years, but one showed up today.  It was inevitable, given that I get Cook's Illustrated and everyone shops around their mailing lists.  I've always liked the somewhat pricey merchandise in WM, but I have to admit the big draw is their outstanding recipes.  This issue revolves around Liguria, the rocky coastal Italian provinces that border France.  WM has some killerbee recipes including Pesto with Trofiette, here's the deal:  Boil a half-pound of Yellow Yukon potatoes cut into circles until tender and set aside.   Now put two bunches of basil, 1/4 cup of pine nuts, two garlic cloves, and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a mortar and pestle it up (I would just use a food procesor).  Add 1/4 cup of Parmigiano-Reggianno (any good cheese of this ilk will do) and keep grinding.  Put in a bowl and swirl in 1/4 cup of olive oil.  You now have your pesto.  Cook trofiette pasta (which is basically impossible to find, so use bowties or small penne) and during the last 3 minutes of cooking add 1/2 pound of  haricots verts (which are those ridiculously skinny beautiful green beans that I only find at Whole Foods, and I suspect that decent Reglar Merican green beans will do in a pinch).  Grab a large bowl and toss everything together, adding 1/4 cup of the pasta cooking water.  They also have an enticing recipe for Veal and Artichoke Involtini, but I keep thinking about the tortured eyes of all those penned lamblings.  Nice recipe for Frito Misto which I first experienced in Venice.  Basically, you take a pound of halibut and a pound of "baby calamari" (which is cook-talk for squid taken before they really got to experience life) and cube the halibut and make rings out of the helpless squid and dip them in buttermilk and flour them and dip them into hot oil for a couple of minutes.  WM has yet another excellent recipe for Frittata with Zuchinni and Goat Cheese, but I'm already too hungry from all this and I'm off to cook something.  The frittata is similar to the Spanish omelet they serve in bars for tapas, but more elaborate (fresh oregano and Italian parsley, goat cheese for God's sake, and arugula for trimmings) as you might expect of an Italian.

More tomorrow.  I need to go watch Starship Troopers again.