This last election in California has been quite interesting and there’s been much hoopla made about the presidential race and the results in various states including California. I’m not going to talk about any of that. I want to point out a state proposition that was on the ballot and was a fairly useful indicator of, what I think is, a major problem with our voters.
(  Click here to read the rest of It’s okay to abstain (from voting)  )

So, I’ve got the TV on while I’m working on my computer and Blade: Trinity comes on TNT (a basic cable station). The opening sequence involves a lot of violence and action where Blade (Wesley Snipes) kills a bunch of vampires and then stakes a human (non-vampire). He asks, “I staked you with silver, why aren’t you dead?” and the guy gasps, “Why aren’t you smarter?” and then in a COMPLETELY different voice, “Drumstick!”. Obviously, TNT felt it necessary to dub over whatever obscenity was originally there, but who came up with the idea to say “Drumstick”?!? Of all the words they could have chosen to fill that spot, “drumstick”?

One thing that I really hate is when I’m left alone WAY too long at a restaurant. When a waiter doesn’t come by for a while after we’ve been seated, it’s really frustrating. This evening, I kept trying to catch the eye of the waitress that was serving all the tables around us, but she was VERY adept at not looking in our direction. Finally, our waiter arrived (it wasn’t the waitress that was serving all the other tables in our vicinity) took our orders and disappeared. Apparently, we were in the boondocks of this guy’s waiting area and stuck in the middle of a different waitress’s realm. They we realized that we were starting to get really cold (near an air conditioning vent). We kept looking around for our waiter but he didn’t come back. Then a server (not our waiter) arrived with our food and we asked if it was possible to move. She said she’d find our waiter and disappeared. By the time the waiter returned, we had practically finished eating. Unfortunately, I didn’t immediately ask for a to-go box so we once again had to wait and wait. I eventually stood up and walked around to look for our waiter. After returning to our booth, I stood there long enough for a passing waitress to ask if I needed anything. I asked for our check and she went off in search of our waiter. He returned shortly with our bill. I feel that restaurants, even casual ones, should do a better job with dividing up tables so they are accessible to their wait staff.

So, I’ve been watching (of and on) A Lyon in the Kitchen, a new cooking show on Discovery Health. I began watching because I received some promo material a few months ago and watched a few of the show clips and wrote up a brief article on Cooking For Engineers. His shows are nothing special when it comes to cooking shows, except for the fact that he spends about 45 seconds at the begining of each show visiting a source for one of his ingredients - a mushroom farm, cheese market, beet farm, etc. I had a real problem watching the Grilled Halibut and Provincial Bread Salsa episode. He starts off visiting an olive oil producer and the on screen tip tells us to eat olive oil because it contains “monosaturated” fat. Okay, it’s just a typo, and it’s probably someone else’s fault they he’s got “monosaturated” instead of “monounsaturated” on the screen. Then he come back to the kitchen to demonstrate how to make what he called a “Provincial” Bread Salsa. I’m thinking, what does he mean by “provincial”? Does he mean from a local or rural dish? Or does he mean provençal (which is of course spelled differently and pronounced differently - [PRO-von-sawl])? He then explains that the dish is an homage to the Provence-style of Italy. So, he does mean provençal. My next problem is that Provence is French! Maybe that’s why his show is on Discovery Health… and that would also explain why no one caught these fairly big mistakes that occurred in the first five minutes of this show. For all the faults of Food Network, I think someone would have pointed out that this wasn’t quite right.

I think I can stop recording his show on my DVR.

The New York Times reported today that the social security number of 30,000 people “who received loans or other financial assistance from two Agriculture Department programs were disclosed for years in a publicly available database, raising concerns about identity theft and other privacy violations”. The first question that comes to mind, is why does this stuff keep happening?
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This week we were all shocked by the tragedy at Virginia Tech where Cho Seung-Hui gunned down and killed at least 33 people. I don’t really want to blog about the events or the manifesto or how crazy Cho Seung-Hui must have been - but I do want to talk about getting upset over an interview with Karan Grewal (Cho’s “roommate”) and Chris Matthews.
(  Click here to read the rest of What’s wrong with Chris Matthews?  )