Blog Business

I hope some of our other contributors will post now and again. Since it has been a lot of Sixty and Me I think we are reaching our full complement of curmudgeon. So maybe Chickie or MamaM can bring a little light and airy to the premises. To get away from the Dark Side.

Eddie and the Cruisers is an interesting little movie. It had some good songs and was a riff on Jim Morrison and other rock stars who died before their time. It had several hit original songs including the "Dark Side." All of them were written and performed by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band.

Of course I always enjoy a film with a brown beaver.

"Democrats Dismiss Voter-Fraud Worries, but Reality Intrudes"

NR:  Three federal courts have thrown out voter-ID laws in North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin in recent days. Left-wing judges accepted spurious evidence that such laws were racially discriminatory, and they also insisted there is little voter fraud to worry about. Last April, United States District Judge Lynn Adelman of Wisconsin claimed that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs” in Wisconsin and that “no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future.”

Despite such sweeping statements, polls show that the general public is worried about fraud and bureaucratic incompetence in voting. According to a Pew Research Center survey, only 31 percent of Americans were confident that “the votes across the country were accurately counted” in the 2012 election. Small wonder. A separate Pew survey in 2012 found that one out of eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date, or a duplicate. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead.

A really thoughtful restaurant. (Link to source)

restaurant labels their brownies based on what part of the pan it was baked on.

center, edge or corner

brownies

These are the first things I recall watching through the oven door as if it were a t.v., sitting there patiently watching the wonder of transformation of food develop by extreme heat. Brownies are also the first thing I made by following instructions on a box. That trick of marketing pre-mixed ingredients in a box with instructions to include something unboxable like eggs or butter and leaving the impression the product is not just convenient but all too much for you, beyond regular students and non-specialists, had me fooled for decades.

But that changed overnight.

One time a girlfriend invited me to a party arranged by one of her co-working friends. I was her date. I didn't know anyone there. I was good for that sort of thing. I shine right up and actually can behave acceptably polite and put on an act kindness and consideration for periods. For some reason she said to the whole group outside on the patio, "Oh, Chip can make brownies with household ingredients" and everyone looked at me like some kind of wizard and suddenly I was somehow dared to prove it.

The only chocolate I saw at the house was the Hershey's cocoa powder in a tin. (Sad. Teenage boys were fake/wrestling through the whole thing, and that is the only chocolate around. A wealthy and lively energetic suburban home, yet such stark chocolate-poverty.)

The chocolate powder is red. Weird.

The cocoa is not Dutched. That is, not processed with lye. This mild treatment done with lye called "Dutching" in regard to chocolate is one of the few processing procedures that actually does make the product better. Corn treated similarly is better too. But Chocolate cocoa tastes a lot better when Dutched. It's milder. The Hershey's cocoa powder is not unless it specifically says so. The kind her friend had was not. Nevertheless I used what they had, produced a failed chocolate cake, for that is what brownies are, and in very short order, no problem at all, no break in the tempo of partying outside, brownies were produced as if by incantation and I won the admiration of somebody else's peers who I never saw again.

Except for one lady I sold two paintings. A pair. Two relatively small paintings, easy as heck, etudes as far as I was concerned, motifs I'd done dozens of times by age twelve, Tut and his wife, easiest $600.00 I ever made. Toni told me the woman intimated, he really needs to raise his prices.

True. Those sacks of plaster at Home Depot aren't getting any cheaper, neither are the children's watercolor sets with 8 separate colors.

These brownies here are made with dark chocolate, not cocoa powder. I have no idea what they taste like, they're still too hot, but the batter is superb.