In the spirit of sharing time-honored traditions, Barilla teamed up with 10 Hollywood stars to create The Celebrity Pasta Lovers’ Cookbook, which features recipes inspired by their favorite pasta dishes.
Barilla asked two of its favorite chefs, Giada De Laurentiis and Mario Batali, to take these favorites and create authentic Italian versions of the recipes that everyone can easily prepare and enjoy. And as an extra treat, Giada and Mario contributed their choice recipes as well!
Download a copy of this free cookbook, and Barilla donates $1 to America’s Second Harvest. There’s a form to fill out – but if you’re worried about spam, you don’t have to give them a real email address – and you can choose where your donation goes, either to their national campaign or to one of their local food banks.
Click on it, you know you want to. At any rate, it looks fun – I’ll let you know how the recipes turn out when/if I make any (and I’m pretty sure I will – we’re always looking for new pasta recipes chez static).
Mary, Mary, Mary… I’m happy for you that you’re so sheltered that you don’t have to deal with the realities of the people who your father courts:
Mary Cheney, the lesbian daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, today for the first time publicly defended her decision to become pregnant and asserted that same-sex couples are equally capable of raising children as heterosexual couples.
“When Heather and I decided to have a baby, I knew it wasn’t going to be the most popular decision,” Ms. Cheney said, referring to her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe. She then gestured to her middle — any bulge disguised by a boxy jacket — and asserted: “This is a baby. This is a blessing from God. It is not a political statement. It is not a prop to be used in a debate, on either side of a political issue. It is my child.”
You see, Mary – you participate in a movement that uses gays and lesbians as props all the time. You’ve been a very valuable prop to them for a while now – the conservative lesbian, quite the rarity indeed. But once people start asking valid questions, boy do you get… touchy:
Her father became testy last week during a CNN interview when the host Wolf Blitzer asked what he thought of conservatives — specifically James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family— who are critical of his daughter Mary’s pregnancy.
In refusing to answer, Mr. Cheney told Mr. Blitzer that he was “over the line.”
Ms. Cheney said in a brief interview after the panel that she was not speaking for her father, but that when she saw the interview, she also felt Mr. Blitzer had crossed a line. “He was trying to get a rise out of my father,” she said.
But you see, no line was crossed – your father and his allies depend upon the support of Dobson and his ilk. And while I’m glad that you were willing to refute Dobson’s ludicrious statements concerning the fitness of gays and lesbians as parents, I find the final comment in the liked article, well, lacking in awareness:
She said Mr. Dobson was entitled to his opinion, “but he’s not someone whose endorsement I have ever drastically sought.”
You might not have sought his endorsement, but the movement you support does. Your father does. And part and parcel of that courtship is encouraging anti-gay hatred, sometimes quietly and tacitly, sometimes openly – and you, your partner, and your child will be insulated from that hatred because of your father and his connections. You know – those political connections to a movement that cannot survive without that support of the Dobsons of this world.
It must be nice to have that kind of insurance. It’s almost as good as being a straight mom, isn’t it?
Too bad Dobson et. al. are actively trying to deny you and thousands of other gay and lesbians, parents and non-parents alike, legal rights and protections. Too bad you and your father have been instrumental in seeing to it that the Dobsons flourish. But not too bad for you – because by using the Dobsons as a foundation, y’all have created for yourselves a little world where you can have it both ways.
How both ways? You get to be a loving, lesbian mom who hides behind a bulwark of political power, a bulwark built upon foundations of far-Right Christianist intolerance. And that is a totally valid point to raise in an interview, so you can get off your high horse. You don’t have to live with the realities you’ve helped create.
Enjoy it, Mary. Other gay and lesbian parents have paid for it, are going to pay for it, and will keep paying for it as long as there’s a political movement that actively courts the bigotry and intolerence of Dr. Dobson.
Enjoy it, Mary.
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:31 PM UTC
A weird sort of news item caught my eye today – Jim Gray, database legend, is missing at sea:
The search continued today for the pioneering Bay Area computer scientist who went missing after he left Sunday morning for what he told family was a day sailing trip to the Farallon Islands to dispose of his mother’s ashes.
There still are no sign of Jim Gray or his boat, a 40-foot C&C yacht named Tenacious, Coast Guard Petty Officer Jonathan Cole said.
The Coast Guard continued its search overnight of 4,000 square miles of area surrounding the Farallon Islands, which are located 27 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. A C-130 fixed wing aircraft, a helicopter and several patrol boats are involved in today’s operation.
[...]
An award-winning computer scientist, Gray holds the distinction of being the first recipient of a Ph. D from the University of California-Berkeley’s computer-science Department. That was 1969.
Recently Gray had been working to create a worldwide telescope — a distributed database of astronomy information. He also was helping to build a digital library that would include all the world’s scientific literature and data.
It was Slashdot that brought it to my attention, of course. There I found more or less what I expected: some morbidly clever database humor (The Pacific isn’t indexed for searching, something else about performing accidental Cartesian joins with the sea, and so on), some needlessly cruel, knee-jerk Microsoft bashing (since Gray worked for Microsoft Research), some extremely foolish comments about how ‘very old’ people shouldn’t be doing ‘extreme sports’ tempered by remarks by people who actually knew what they were talking about – in short a pretty typical /. mix.
I didn’t know Gray except by reputation, some articles he’d written, and a lecture I saw on TV – but I found him inspiring. He had a passion for data, for understanding data, and how to organize it. He was passionate about turning mind-boggling quantities of data into information, and he wanted others to feel that passion as well.
I hope that he’s okay – but odds are that he isn’t. The sea is an unforgiving place, quick to point out with oft-fatal accuracy any shortcomings, oversights, carelessness, or overconfidence. And even when you do everything right, things can still go sideways in an instant.
Today I got a letter from these asshats about, among other things, this domain name. The letter states in part:
You must renew your domain name to retain exclusive rights to it on the Web, and now is the time to transfer and renew your names from your current registrar to the Domain Registry of America.
All true – except for the ‘now is the time to transfer’ part. You see, the entire letter is set up to make you think a.) that you are about to lose your domain names and b.) that you have to pay these bastards in order to keep it. In addition, they were offering to sell me variations on my domain name – at US$50 per domain for a two year registration.
Of course, one of the other things that they don’t tell you is that many registrars charge you to switch domains from one registrar to another, so you could be facing costs from your old registrar on top of the high prices these guys charge for domains.
So what do these frauds offer? Registration. You don’t even get bare-bones hosting for your $30 or $50. Oh yeah – they resell SSL certificates, too. Big fscking deal. And they’ll generously submit your site for search engine inclusion for another $40/yr.
As the song goes, “You make my heart sing./You make everything…”
Well, okay – this thing doesn’t make everything – but still… If you’ve got US$2400 lying around, maybe you could make your own desktop fabricator:
Rapid prototyping machines are already used by designers, engineers and scientists to create one-off mechanical parts and models. These create objects by depositing layer upon layer of liquid or powdered material.
These machines typically cost from $20,000 to $1.5 million, says Hod Lipson from Cornell University, US, who launched the Fab@Home project with PhD student Evan Malone in October 2006.
The standard version of their Freeform fabricator – or “fabber” – is about the size of a microwave oven and can be assembled for around $2400 (£1200). It can generate 3D objects from plastic and various other materials. Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free.
A desktop fabricator – how cool is that? Then you could sing your own version of the song – You make everything? Groovy.
(Oh yeah, the article mentions a similar project at Bath University in the UK, but their website doesn’t appear to have survived being slashdotted a couple of days ago…)
We are also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies (emphasis added).
Last I checked, the insurgents in Iraq didn’t have an air force. So, we’re ‘reassur[ing] our friends and allies’ about their (and our) capabilities to defend against… what exactly? It’ll be interesting to see where exactly these Patriot batteries get deployed. (For varying values of ‘interesting’, that is.)
Posted by protected static as politics at 9:14 AM UTC
So, the remaining charges against Saddam Hussein have been dropped “[by] virtue of the confirmation of the death of [the] defendant [...] according to the Iraqi Penal Procedures Law.” Um, you think? Too bad his hanging couldn’t have been carried out “according to the Iraqi Penal Procedures Law” as well.
Hussein’s hanging may yet prove to be among our biggest blunders in Iraq – and that’s saying something.
Posted by protected static as politics at 9:06 AM UTC
No video this week – instead (with their kind permission) an MP3 of “Lies Lies Lies” by Seattle band, The Hands. Give ‘em a listen; they’ve released their debut EP So Sweet on local label Basement Empire.
This particular track is what convinced me to purchase the EP after hearing it on KEXP… I suppose I should say something like “they’re aware of rock ‘n roll’s history without being derivative” or some such pretentious nonsense, but I won’t – okay, I will: So Sweet consists of 7 tracks of smart, straight-forward, kick-ass, hard-edged rock with a sound that pays homage to rock’s past without sounding derivative; the result is quite enjoyable, and well worth the $8.
Enjoy!
Posted by protected static as random at 7:53 AM UTC
Eh. (fidgets with mike stand) Sorry ’bout that. Better?
Yeah, it’s been a nice break – three weeks offline, plus another week or so to get back into the swing of things (and boy, it didn’t take long for things to start swinging back). But I think it’s time to get back onto the bloggy horse.
As I said, things are swinging: there’s weird stuff afoot at The Boy’s school (more about that anon), work’s fluctuating oddly (if seasonally appropriately), the house is in total disarray, and there’s a modicum of personal drama at work (which appears to be resolving nicely – the short version is: pregnant co-worker, scary test results, emergency C-section 2 months-ish early, mom & baby seem to be fine). Oh yeah, and I also found most of my notes from our trip, so I’m not exactly lacking for material…
So while I compose myself and my thoughts (such as they are), I’ll leave you with this taste of our trip: a two-story-tall Technicolor Monkey God!
(click on image for full-size)
Posted by protected static as blogging, random at 10:59 PM UTC
