Monday night: I set up the sprinkler and water my lawn.
Tuesday night: A severe thunderstorm watch kicks off what looks like a week of on and off storms and showers.
And for my next trick . . .
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary has added “to google” as a verb in its latest edition, joining the Oxford English Dictionary’s online edition as recognizing that the name of the search engine has become a word in its own right. The article says that the first use of the verb was in a newspaper article five years ago, which is pretty young for a new word to be making it into the dictionary.
Unsurprisingly, the article also explores the dilemma that occurs when a brand name becomes so ubiquitous that it becomes an ordinary word: the company can lose trademark protection. The Merriam-Webster mentions that the term is derived from a trademark, and defines the word to specifically refer to used of the Google engine as opposed to a generic search. Given that Yahoo turned its own engine brand into a verb with the “Do You Yahoo!?” campaign, I think it’s hard to argue with the dictionary folks on this one.
Pattie and I had really good seats for tonight’s Phillies game, with a fireworks show afterwards. She wound up having to cover for a vacationing coworker, so we sold the tickets – to said vacationing coworker.
I’m really not sure who got the better deal out of that one.
So I’m breaking in a new shredder because I busted the old one. No fault of the older machine, a very nice model by Fellowes, but of the operator who forgot to check his junk mail to make sure there wasn’t one of those fake credit cards in it before he put it through the shredder and completely jammed up the machine. I really hate shredding my mail. The breakdown is usually
On the other hand, it is nice to have a lot of that paper someplace other than the office floor. I’ll take the small victories where I can get ’em.
Growing up my mom always bought American cheese from the supermarket deli, so that’s what I’ve been used to eating on my burgers and sandwiches for the last 25 years or so. But recently I started noticing that the stuff I was getting from the deli counter was labeled American cheese product. A quick check of Wikipedia reveals that American cheese is actually a product made from the scrap of other cheeses combined with emulsifiers and other products to make it melt more smoothly. (Although the American Dairy Association does call it a cheese, it confirms that American cheese is “actually a blend of Cheddar, Colby and other cheeses.”) That has not been real cheese on my grilled cheese sandwiches. This is the kind of revelation that should have a big “EVERYTHING YOU KNEW IS A LIE!” legend on the front cover.
Or maybe it’s just an odd bit of food trivia. Either way, I’ve been eating muenster lately. Good stuff.
In today’s Inquirer, food columnist Rick Nichols complains about the devaluation of the word “organic” in describing food. I think the piece rambles a little bit, but the heart of the complaint seems to be here:
Organics aren’t built for an SUV economy: They are, by their essence, small-scale, local, landscape-protecting, low-impact, natural.
The Earthbound Farm organic baby arugula salad at Whole Foods, as Steven Shapin wrote in this week’s New Yorker, is indeed grown without synthetic fertilizers, weird genes or toxic pesticides. But the compost is trucked in, the monocultural fields are laser-leveled for speedy mechanical harvesting, and the whole process (long-haul transport included) uses up nearly as much fossil fuel as a conventional head of iceberg lettuce.
Maybe I’m late on the organic bandwagon. Maybe I’m a reflexive Whole Foods defender. But I don’t automatically associate organic with local and low-impact. I associate it with the lack of “synthetic fertilizers, weird genes or toxic pesticides.” Local, low-impact, and landscape-protecting are all good, mind you, but I don’t find them essential to the concept. And if organic farming merely breaks even with conventional farming on the fossil-fuel issue, that still gives it advantages on the health-of-the-food issue. So if it takes some technological compromises to spread that health benefit to others, then I’m willing to file this under “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”
I’m in the process of breaking in a new Dell PC, which is actually going rather smoothly now that I figured out which of the video ports on the back I was actually supposed to plug the monitor into. Next up is wiping my old Dell clean, installing Windows XP on it, and giving it to Pattie. Since the copy of XP that I have was given to me by a friend shortly after the OS came out, I expect to be hunting for drivers for much of the weekend. So if you hear the rending of garments coming from the northeast U.S., that’s me.
So I was channel surfing a few hours ago and came across a rerun of a special on Richard Pryor. This particular segment dealt with Pryor’s use of taboo language, and I watched for a few minute before I realized two things:
1) The network was not censoring out all of the taboo words. Especially not one that Pryor used repeatedly and with great vigor in discussing race.
2) Alex was three-quarters asleep on my lap. Which means she was one quarter awake.
I’m expecting the note home from her teachers any day now . . .
I just finished bringing my Quicken records of my credit union accounts up to date for 2005. Unfortunately, there are still several accounts left tp update, but that ain’t happenin’ before midnight. The exercise has definitely reminded me I need to stay on top of my record keeping a little better this year. So let’s call that my first major resolution.
Another resolution is to try not to become too cranky this week. I’m going to try and go without caffeine now that I’ve gone through the 24 bottles of Snapple I bought last week. I really hope someone else drank some. But I have a nagging feeling I went through them myself. Which is why I think it might be good to detox a bit. So, apologies in advance if I try to bite off anyone’s electronic head.
Gonna sign off for now and wish everyone observing the standard Western calendar a Happy New Year.
Last night I finally put into practice a suggestion from Alton Brown’s Gear for Your Kitchen. I had been getting frustrated at the tangle of cooking tools contained in various drawers in the kitchen. So last night I emptied all the drawers onto the counter, sorted the tools into groups (tongs, spatulas, scoops, etc.), and went over them one by one. If Pattie or I couldn’t remember when the last time we had used the tool was, it lost its place in the drawers and went into a paper bag destined for the garage. I realized I have three carving forks. I barely use one, let alone three. Next step may well be putting labels on the drawers. Obsessive-compulsive? Probably. But there are a fair number of people coming and going through the kitchen who may not remember the organization system. And believe me, when I’m cooking, it’s hugely helpful to know where things are.
For Christmas I got a copy of the new America’s Test Kitchen Family Cookbook, so I’m going through my every-few-months ritual of going through my cookbook collection looking for chapters I previously skimmed over and recipes I may have missed. I’ve mastered a couple of good techniques over the last couple of years, but I definitely want to broaden the possible menus around here. (As opposed to broadening my waist line.) Right now I’m going back through Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise. This could take a while.