Why Are You So Unsporting?

OLYMPICS

Our Leading Youth Masterfully Participating In Competitive Sports

Stephen Colbert who? When we need some patronizing right-wing anti-social diatribe delivered by a pudgy, nerdy, stone-faced, unfunny neo-con, we'll call on our Prime Minister, thank you very much. In the meantime, as Spiro Agnew used to say, "Love it or leave it." Aw, is he gone already? Pity.

Some people are upset with the scores of the woman's football, sorry, I mean hockey scores. There's even talk about voting the event out of the Winter Olympics because of lack of competition. It would be a travesty if woman's hockey were removed from the games just as it is a travesty that woman's ski jump is not part of the Games.

Maybe Team I.O.C. should vote out some other activities first. How about the TEAM IOC GORGING events? Eat and drink to excess at will. TEAM IOC EXCESSIVE WORLD TRAVEL TO INSPECT VENUES events.could be cut back maybe. TEAM IOC is the only team allowed to participate in these sports and there seems to be no age limit.

Here's a hot, hitherto undiscovered fact, a real news flash! The bobsled/luge/skeleton track is dangerous! Getting into a cage with a 900lb gorilla is dangerous. Formula 1 racing is dangerous. Base-jumping is dangerous. Here's a venue that has as one of it's event names, the part that's left of your body if you make it down successfully. Of course it's dangerous. The Downhill course is dangerous too. No one should have to lose their lives for their sport but these are inherently dangerous and the athletes know it. No one is to blame.

Two one-hundredths of a second is not a particularly long time. Driving (or skating) at 100km/h you would move about 55cm or 22in. That was the distance between our own winner Christine Nesbitt and Dutch skater Gerritson. That's not very much but a better margin by which to win than to lose.

So the British Press is unhappy with Vanoc and the Games. That's not very sporting now is it chaps? After all 2012 is not far away and what comes around goes around. In a country where one can hardly swing a Yorkshire terrier there may a slight hitch here and there to which the world's attention may have to be drawn. The Queen may still be our Head of State but we can change, if we have to. President Harper sounds no worse than Prime Minister Harper.

Copyright 2010 Stargeazer

Why Are You So Half-Baked?

Bread - The Staff of Life

(Bake Responsibly Employing All the Dough.)

Have you seen Food Inc.? I'm not really sure if you should see it on an empty or full stomach, but you should see it. It is a mind-opening, albeit discouraging, documentary.

At least some food producers are making attempts to raise and distribute organic, ethical and humane crops and meats. It made me wonder where yeast fits into the fabric of life. Is it a plant or animal? Should vegans avoid yeast and yeast products?

Yeasts are fungi as it turns out. Saccharomyces_cerevisiae is the name of the fungus responsible for beer, wine, cheese, yogurt, vinegar, sauerkraut, sourdough doughnuts; and of course, bread. The taming of the yeast was probably more important to kitchen civilization than "The Taming of the Shrew," but there's really no need to go there right now. The picture above shows Cinnamon Pecan Sticky Buns, a calorie-enriched distant relative of what is often called "The Staff of Life."

Bread is a staple without which one's life can be miserable at worst and mundane at best. Not only is it a staple around the world, but variations have become delicacies. Bread has "terroire" as wine and cheeses do and the yeast mixed with the huge numbers of grain flour varieties, gives us an abundance of bread types, ranging from dark, dense German "Rogenbrot" to delicate, airy croissants. Vive la patisserie Francaise!

If you don't have a bread machine or food processor, get one! We'll wait. It's worth it. Besides, we're going to make a braided egg bread, or Challah and we'll be counting on the machinery to do the initial mixing and kneading. This recipe makes a 24 oz loaf that will be gone before you can even begin to think about what fabulous French Toast this would make in the morning. So here are the instructions with a few pictures for reference.



Ingredients (in the order recommended
by your machine)
3/4 cup water
1/4 cup butter
2 eggs
1 yolk (save the white for an egg wash)
2 tbsp sugar
1-1/2 tsp salt
3 cups white bread flour
2-1/4 tsp active dry yeast
poppy seed or sesame seed
Egg wash - white + 1 tbsp water
Whisk vigorously.

Set machine on "Dough" cycle

After finishing in machine, remove dough and punch down.

Divide dough into 3 equal portions and roll into 15"-18" strands.

Pinch the ends of the strands firmly together and braid the strands.

Pinch the other ends together.

Place on a lightly greased sheet in a warm place.

Cover and allow to rise, doubling in size.

Brush with the egg wash and sprinkle with poppy seed or sesame seed.

Bake at 375F for 20-25 minutes.







Bet you can't wait until it cools before trying some!
















The following was awarded 3rd prize in the Leacock Festival Limerick Contest a few years ago.

Said a bread baker's wife in Schenectady,
There's a dozen now have the vasectomy.
But with thoughts of a knife
Near his own staff of life,
He insisted his tubes should connected be.

Copyright 2010 Stargeazer

Why Are You So Puzzled? (4)

PUZZLE #3 ANSWERS:

Across: 1. Swipe 5. Tune 6. Bali, 7. Strep
Down: 2. Warsaw 3. Patriot 4. insane
Sign: WET PAINT

Why Are You So Challenged?

It's Saturday February 13, 2010. Happy Valentine's Day tomorrow and Happy Family Day on Monday. Today's the day the secret of THE CHALLENGER is revealed. You'll find it on P7, in the puzzles and comics section of the Saturday Star. Get over it! Go buy one.

For reference let's number the rows 1 to 6 from bottom to top and the columns will be 1 to 5 from left to right.

The fist thing to look for is a row or column with a low total. Look at column 3. Subtract the given number,6 , from the total of 12 for the column and we have 6 left to make up in that column. This can be made up with a 4 and 2-ones. But where to place them? Consider row 4. If the 4 is placed in the third square , the ones go above and below it.

The current total then for row 4 is 7. Subtract this from 25, leaving 18. This must be made up with 2-nines.

Looking for similar relationships, check column 4. 16-9-2=5 which is made up with a 4 and 1-one. Place the 4 in row 3. The remaining square in row 3 must be 9. The rest of the puzzle is duck soup, as the Marx brothers would say.

Let me know whether or not this makes any sense at all.

Why Are You So Caught Up?

CAUGHT - Can't Actually Understand the Gravity of His Trysts



Tiger Woods - CAUGHT.

Lord Black of Cross Harbour - CAUGHT

Bernie Madoff - CAUGHT

John Edwards - CAUGHT

Adam Giambrone - CAUGHT

Eliot Spitzer - CAUGHT

30 Would-be Winter Olympians - CAUGHT

Bill Clinton - CAUGHT

Two Pound Smallmouth Bass - CAUGHT (and released)

Why Are You So Longing for Summer?

"Oh the Summer sky!"









"It's OK Granddad. We can catch him again." (Photo by Matthew Nitsch)

























Not to mention........

















































Copyright 2010 by Stargeazer











It won't be long now!

Why Are You So Poetic?

When we bought our house in 1969, beginning 4 decades of fixing and renovating, there was a modest two-holer outhouse, "out back." It was insulated with white-washed, corrugated cardboard nailed to the inside of the clapboard. That insulation wasn't very effective on bitter cold January nights. It was on one of these nights that a former owner, Harry Crossen, died. According to Donald Beamish, a neighbour and rescuer, Harry's body had fallen against the outhouse door, which swung in. This made retrieving Harry awkward and time-consuming. The side of Harry's face was solidly frozen to the door, Donald recounted, and required prying with a spade to loosen it. Donald also noted that Harry looked quite himself when he was laid out in the parlour for his wake.

When time came to remove the outhouse, we first removed the cardboard. Behind one piece we found a few scraps of Eaton's Catalogue which had not found their way into the pit. They had some pencil scrawling on them which has only recently been deciphered.. Before you think this might be a ghost story, I assure you the writings had nothing to do with the circumstances of Harry's death and although the voice comes from beyond the grave it is not a malevolent one.



The first piece consists of only the last five lines of what was obviously a searing love poem. I call it,

"Love Poem, Unbegun."
............
They're luscious just to gaze upon,
And now Dear Sarah that is it,
My thoughts have wandered quite a bit,
It's just as well you're not here now,
I have to go---------- and, milk the cow.





The next poem we call,

"Why I lie here as I do."

The ox what gored me must have thought
that in his yard I shouldn't ought
to have been running so unclad
to rescue from our little lad
the cat which he had strung aloft
above the empty old hay-loft.

He hadn't tied the line 'round Kit
but stuffed her right in old basket
and rope up over beam he threw
as Kit to greater heights he drew
and I was witness to the deed
from window which the barn o'ersee'd.

So wanting not to waste a step
the barnyard fence I deftly leapt
forgetting that the yard was home
to ugly ox we called Jerome.

I never saw his startled face
so caught up was I in the race
to reach the lad and make him stop
before the basket reached the top.

When tough old horn met weak old flank
perhaps he thought I should him thank
for helping me move swiftly on
to heights and speeds I'd never gone
but thoughts like that just never came
while yelling curse in ox's name.

It's mostly turned out quite alright
our Kit was rescued from her fright.
The lad's been punished as is fit
(Manure from oxen smells a bit)
and while I lie here as I do
Jerome is down there lying too.

Copyright 2010 Stargeazer

Why Are You So Puzzled (3)

MINI-CROSS PUZZLE #3




















ANSWERS for PUZZLE #2
Across: 3. miasma, 5. antonym, 7. bottom
Down: 1. riot, 2. Tammy, 4. barbs, 6. neon Place: Manitoba


Many of you may be familiar with a number puzzle, The Challenger. It is syndicated across the continent including in the Toronto Saturday Star. It is credited to Linus Maurer, an artist and cartoonist who was also a friend of Charles Schulz. Mr. Maurer's puzzle consists of a 4x4 square grid in which 4 numbers from 1 to 9 are placed so that there is only one given number in any of the four rows or four columns. Along the bottom and right side of the grid are given numbers which represent the totals of all the digits in each row, column and diagonal. The object is to enter digits from 1-9 into the blank spaces in the rows and columns so that the totals are all met. I hesitate to show an example here because this puzzle is copyrighted and I don't wish to infringe on that. I think my description is accurate.

What irks me about this puzzle is that a "Working Time" is given in minutes and seconds to guide a player, presumably into comparing oneself with the rest of the puzzling population. How does he know how long it should take anyone let alone give that time to the second? It seems disingenuous to even quote such a figure. I want to show you how to solve this puzzle in under a minute, every time. And I will do this in a post on this blog next Saturday February 13. I'll use the numbers for that day's puzzle in the Star for the explanation. Your time is too valuable to waste so much of it on the Challenger. Let me show you how to drastically cut that time and you can then spend more time googling other stuff.

Why Are You So Cold?

Why Are You So Sorry?

I'm so sorry. There was an error in the recipe for Egg Benedict posted on Groundhog day. The price of saffron spiked to $US700/gram. That was supposed to be the unit, gram, not kilogram. Pricey stuff but it was worth it wasn't it?

Speaking of apologies, we are all owed big ones from whoever coined the phrases "Going forward" and "Drill down." GF is almost always used by someone who is not the least bit interested in G'ing F. They want us to think they're G'ingF when they're really quite happy to ride the status quo train and typically display a fondness for the "Good Ole Days." "Drill down," must have been coined by a dentist. I'm not sure what it's supposed to mean but it sounds like I'm soon about to experience some kind of pain. These phrases are no better than "Like, you know." They are the mean-nothing fillers that are the "Hamburger Helper" of English. They are the bread crumbs in the meatloaf of this rich and noble language. These may also be the same people who use the phrase "As far as," incompletely. You may hear them say "As far as the weather, it's raining," or "As far as my salary, I'm not making enough. They say one is getting old and curmudgeonly when he starts to complain about language and usage. Have they read the title of this blog? As far as my complaints I will go forward to drill down to get to the bottom of all these errors.

Toyota's sorry. This is a big one and it hits home. Hundreds of employees in Canada may be affected even further by this. Imagine the scale of this bailout.Toyota can't be allowed to go under but who's going to buy one when/if production starts again? Somehow it's hard to shake the image of incompetent executives getting more megabonuses with bailout bucks. Maybe that's what the mint should start printing, bailout bucks. We would know they're worthless but we would all let on they're not. What's going on in GM corporate HQ? Are those popping champagne corks?

Stephen Harper is sorry. He's sorry he underestimated how many dictionaries there were in the country and how many people could use them. The Liberals are actually 0.9% ahead of the Conservatives. Now that's a lead that could be overcome by the margin of error like a Boxing Day tsunami on a Bali beach but it gives the Liberals momentum in the upward direction. Pro-prorogationists are dismissing protests on the basis that the PM's actions were all "legal." We all know that sometimes "the law is an ass."Consider these; the Senate is a legally instituted body which many protest and strive to change. Slavery was once legal. Women were legally non-persons. The list is long. Many see prorogation as an abuse of power and they strive to change that situation. That change begins with protest.

I'm sorry there isn't more snow this year for snowshoeing. There's an activity that is richly rewarding and ironically its greatest reward comes from looking back not forward. There is beauty in the stitch work the shoes make on the snow blanket. The path is there, every step, and every slight and not-so-slight deviation from that path. You see it in the solidity of the snow and the ice that supports it. There it is, for a time.

Why Are You So Obsessed?

I love fishing and I have come to really love fly fishing or flyfishing. I'm not sure which form is exactly correct but my Word2003 dictionary says the latter is not correct. I'll leave it. A few years ago my wife and I and another couple spent a week at the Lazy M Ranch, owned and operated by Maggie and Lane Moore, near Caroline Alberta. Part of the week was spent at their camp in the foothills, beside Cutoff Creek, a famous brown trout creek. The creek was fed by snow melt from the mountains and it cut through a clay plain to form a crystal-clear, ice cold winding conduit of the purest water imaginable. Besides brownies, there was, as we now know, a tiny population of bull trout protected by all the laws and regulations the Province of Alberta had time to pass before we got there. All fishers should know the regulations.

Bill was cook and caretaker for Moore’s at the Cutoff Creek camp. He baked great apple pies. Bill wasn’t really a fishing guide but he did show us where the fish were at and he was sure it was a brown trout I had caught. You couldn’t argue with Bill. He was too gentle.

Ranger Dave was a bona fide Alberta forest ranger and newly-vested game warden. He had been in the mountains with his two mules for the previous two weeks and just happened to come out when I had caught THE fish.Here's the story in cowboy poetry form.

Bull Trout Bill © 2010 by Stargeazer

At Cutoff Creek they tell the tale About an Eastern dude Who thought that he would fish a spell To supplement his food. This dude had read a lot of books And filled himself with learning And catching trout in this-here creek Became his greatest yearning. So up he went with rod and vest And flies and creel and hat And Bill from Moore’s said he would show Him where the fish were at. The creek ran cool and deep and clear And flies were hatching strong The mountain sunshine sparkled bright And nothing could go wrong Before too long the trout came out And took to eating flies, The dude tied on an olive dun And cast into their lies.

Then suddenly right at the bank A trout took up the bait, The dude just barely set the hook Before it was too late He fought it ‘til it fought no more And then he hauled it in When Bill said “That’s a brown trout, son As nice as one there’s bin.” As quick as luck comes it’ll go And spoil the greatest thrill, Like when the mules and Ranger Dave Arrived from up the hill. He eyed the dude, he spied the fish, The air was thick and still, And then the ranger, somewhat vexed Said, “That’s a bull trout Bill.” So now the Eastern dude has learned To fish with hand-tied flies And each day Bill goes to the jail To bring him apple pies.

Why Are You So Discerning?

Your taste buds are alive again! Who doesn't like Eggs Benedict? Well, just sit down in the corner over there until this is over. Here's a great new recipe from the latest issue of Gastronomica Pompuoso. I'm just dying to try it but I'll need a little time to gather the requisite supplies. It certainly seems scrumptious in the reading so I'd like to share it with you now even before it's kitchen tested.

EGG BENEDICT

Makes 1. For other quantities, multiply the following by the number required.

1 large Himalyan Ptarmigan egg
Top 1/2 of an English muffin*
3/16" thick slice of Canadian Back Bacon
Yak butter
Golden Parsley
7,5 kg of Saffron from only purple crocus
1 Package Knorr Hollaindaise Sauce mix

Poach the egg, being very careful not to solidify any of the yolk. If any of it does, keep poaching eggs until you get it right. Be sure that none of the white remains runny and if it does, go back to Sentence two.

Toast the top half of the English muffin* over a bed of hardwood charcoal from which no flame should be allowed to rise. The English muffin* should be evenly browned to a colour matching Benjamin Moore Historic Colour HC115 Chichester Tan. You know what to do if it isn’t. Unsalted yak butter is preferred but you may use salted.


In a lightly greased French cast iron chasseur warm the slice of bacon to a temperature in the range of 147.2°F and 52.3°C. Maintain temperature until other ingredients are ready.

Make sauce.

On a fine bone china plate, Wedgewood or Hammersly or Royal Doulton would do, place, adhering strictly to the given order

1. The top half of the buttered English muffin.*

2. The warmed slice of back bacon.

3. The PPPE**

4. Hollandaise Sauce .

5. Saffron (Use liberally. The price is at an all-time low.)

6. Parsley

Bon Appetit!

*An English muffin is not really a muffin. Don’t be fooled into accepting a "Fruit Explosion."

**Perfectly Poached Ptarmigan Egg

Why Are You So Puzzled (2)

A minicross puzzle is solved like any crossword puzzle, with an added feature. When all the words have been entered according to the clues provided, the circled letters that are common to crossing words can be unscrambled to form another word or phrase. The final answer to the puzzle may be a song, book or movie title, a famous name, a place, a common phrase, word or well-known saying. The puzzle is not interactive but it's a .jpg so you can just print it. Have fun!

Answers for Puzzle #1:
Across: 3. Ionic; 6. Needled; 7. Olive
Down: 1. Tinny; 2. Acclaim; 4. Neeson; 5. Adder
Famous Name: Celine Dion


These "ice floats," (my term) are definitely puzzling. They are about six inches in diameter on average. These were just downstream of a dam. Weather was clear and sunny with a temperature of about -5 deg. C. There were no little green men around either. They looked like white doughnuts floating in a huge fryer. Does anyone know what they're called or how they're formed? There were some as wide as two feet in another part of the river