corn pancakes

This is one tin of corn and one small tin of hot jalapeño peppers.

With the usual things added to make it a pancake.

Mum made them with creamed corn. Hers were thin and lacy. Flour is added in increments do desired thickness. A small amount of corn meal and formed a little more stiffly for hushpuppies they can be deep fried. 

These are a lot better than I imagined. I made them a little bit too sweet.

KLEM TV

The most famous unmasking scene in film history:*

linkage

Who knew it was John McCain under the mask?
______________________________
*Universal Pictures (1925) forbade any pre-release stills of Lon Chaney and his make-up.

"Marvel executive says emphasis on diversity may have alienated readers"

Via Reddit:  Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”.

Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.

But speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio’s falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” he said. “They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”

Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”.

Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.

But speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio’s falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” he said. “They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”

(Link for more of the story)

Life behind the falls, Kvernufoss, Iceland

Link to pan and zoom source

Don Surber: Investigate Obamagate

Via Instapundit:  The abuse of presidential power by Barack Obama and his minions is Watergate on Steroids.

• The Obama administration openly shared classified information with political appointees about Donald Trump in the summer of 2015, and likely earlier. The citation.
• Obama's attorney general sought warrants to spy on President Trump's campaign team last June, and was denied last June by a federal judge. The citation.
• Obama's attorney general sought warrants to spy on a server at Trump Tower last October and was granted one by a federal judge. Ibid.
• The Obama administration spied on President Trump's transition team. The citation.
  
  This information alone — supported by mass media news reports — is enough to warrant a criminal investigation by the Department of Justice, as well as a civil rights investigation into Barack Obama's possible violation of Donald Trump's right to seek the presidency.

(Link to the whole article)

Susan Rice Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel

Via Twitter:  White House lawyers last month learned that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

The pattern of Rice's requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government's policy on "unmasking" the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like "U.S. Person One."

Rice herself has not spoken directly on the issue of unmasking. Last month when she was asked on the "PBS NewsHour" about reports that Trump transition officials, including Trump himself, were swept up in incidental intelligence collection, Rice said: "I know nothing about this," adding, "I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that account today."

(Link to the entire story)

"You're not a serial killer, you're just a serial inconveniencer. What do you do to people?"

Reddit top voted comments...

Ask questions during movies while said questions are being answered by the movie, so the person you're watching it with has to rewind. Endless loop

Unplug peoples cell phones in the early of the night after they have fallen asleep.

I take a really long time taking pictures of famous paintings...with an iPad held above head height.

Press every button I come across.

I would purchase everything in pennies

Walk really slow on a narrow sidewalk

"Minimum wage activists call tipping racist"

Via Instapundit:  That's the argument being forwarded by some liberal activists and politicians as a way of stigmatizing laws that exempt certain professions, mainly restaurant workers, from the federal minimum wage.

However, there is little historical evidence for the argument.

"I don't think tipping was particularly racial … It was more a matter of customers showing off their wealth," said Gerald Friedman, professor of economics and history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and associate editor of the scholarly journal Labor History.

Nevertheless, activists pushing for a higher minimum wage have pushed the argument now that their movement has gained ground. Nineteen states are set to phase in higher minimum rates this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That has brought more attention to the exception for tipped employees in most minimum wage laws. Those employees, mostly in the service industry, can legally be paid less the standard minimum on the grounds that their tips make up for it.

Minimum wage fans have argued that that's not merely wrong but a vestige of 19th racism...

(Link to the whole Washington Examiner article)

"A man dies and goes to hell"

Via Reddit:

There he finds that there is a different hell for each country.

He goes to the German hell and asks,

"What do they do there?"

He told, "First they put you in an electric chair♨ for an hour.

Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour.

Then the German devil comes in and beats you for the rest of the day."

The man doesn't like it, so he moves on and checks out the American hell, the Russian hell and hells of other countries.

He finds that they're all more or less the same as the German hell.

Then he comes to the Indian hell and finds that there is a long queue of people waiting to get in.

Amazed, he asks, "What do they do here?"

He told, "First they put you in an electric chair for an hour.

Then they lay you on a bed of nails for another hour.

Then the Indian devil comes in and beats you for the rest of the day."

"But that is exactly the same as all the other hells; so why are so many people waiting to get in here?" wonders the man.

He is told, "Because the maintenance here is so bad that the electric chair does not work.

Someone has stolen all the nails from the bed

and the Indian devil is a former government servant,

So he just comes, signs the attendance register and then goes to the canteen."

Arizona Aquascape

There are parts of this recording that I watched like this: skip, skip, skipskipskip skip. James Findley somehow gets his hands on a few pieces of Arizona petrified forest and just holding the things and imagining them being trees 225 million years ago that grew two hundred feet tall. Just thinking about it blows them away. Even though they're not American it begins a fascination with Arizona so they dedicate a whole tank to the rocks that they have. To Arizona.

How thoughtful.

If you stuck with it, and as seen in the key frame, this doesn't look like the Petrified Forest.

We can say inspired by the petrified forest. Inspired by Arizona. The choice of red palette, textures, plant height all inspired by imaginings of how an idealized Arizona could be and all that applied through a Nature Aquarium style. 

By studying these three Takashi Amano books. There's more than three, but a set of books are numbered to 3.  

In wich I learn that I share the same birthday. Same year too, as the author. And ages ten through twelve we lived some ten miles apart. I was especially interested in what he wrote about that age. We both had an interest in aquariums at that time. He experimented with tossing soda water into his small aquariums and doing water changes every day so his difficulty was keeping up with soda water demand. That was his way of increasing CO2. He observed the affects on fish. He increased light and began planting local plants, experimenting with extending what he can get away with. He changed the entire industry. Over time. The products that James Findley is spreading in the aquarium above are all worked out by Takashi Amano's company. 

But Arizona does not look like this. Arizona is not this lush. Even when the desert experiences a flush following a drought, like now, and the whole desert suddenly blooms it's still not so lush as this aquarium. 

No, vegetation is sparse in the Petrified Forest. This is where the stones really have center stage to themselves. 

February Arizona Highways dedicated a few essays to Arizona Petrified Forest. This is where I thought that I read how they were formed but now I cannot find it.

So instead, from Wikipedia:

Petrified Forest National Park is known for its fossils, especially of fallen trees that lived in the Late Triassic period of the Mesozoic era, about 225 million years ago. During this period, the region that is now the park was near the equator on the southwestern edge of the supercontinent Pangaea, and its climate was humid and sub-tropical.[12] What later became northeastern Arizona was a low plain flanked by mountains to the south and southeast and a sea to the west.

That part was for fun. See, to enjoy it we must hold two disparate inconsistent things in mind as if they are not contrasting and not discordant. Entire continents can break up and shift around the climate experience repeated periods of extremes, giant species that reigned supreme for a million years eliminated. While on the other hand ... forget it. I don't want to give the argument any oxygen.

Here's the real part. 

Streams flowing across the plain from the highlands deposited inorganic sediment and organic matter, including trees as well as other plants and animals that had entered or fallen into the water. Although most organic matter decays rapidly or is eaten by other organisms, some is buried so quickly that it remains intact and may become fossilized. Within the park, the sediments containing the fossil logs for which the park is named are part of the Chinle Formation.

That's a lot more passive than where I read elsewhere nearby eruptions coated entire forests of incredibly tall trees with silica that was taken up into the cells and compressed to crystallization and then over vast time the whole scene eroded so the ground literally dissolves from under the crystalized trees. 

And hardly anything grows on the surface. 

Duckduckgo.com images, [petrified forest]. The photos are stunning. They're inspiring. It makes the hobbyist want to paint the picture with plants while pictures of the actual place show very sparse plant growth. You could say the place is a proper desert. 

I enjoyed the Arizona Highways article. The concept for them is obviously recycled. The photographs especially are outstanding. Flipping through and reading with a magnifying glass, the whole time I was reminded of a friend a long time ago whose family drove there. I watched their dog. Lady. This took me back decades. He told me way back then that they didn't bring any rocks back because if people did then the place would be stripped. That made sense. Too bad. 

It's not just me thinking the Arizona Highways article is great. This month letters to the editor are published from readers recalling their own childhood trips to the petrified forest. Some wonder why the segments look like they're sawn into pieces. 

While national forests aren't the only places that petrified wood is found.

Our own aquarium ode to Arizona's petrified forest, and named that, will have a lot less plants and very low ones, and the whole thing will resemble more closely a Japanese rock garden. Most of these examples are inauthentic it appears to me. Too garish. Too involved. Too much stuff. Real ones are characterized as sparse. Spartan in esthetic. 

It's weird to call genuine real Japanese work inauthentic but I do. I had the real ones explained to me at the real places, shrines, actually not that great an experience at the time. I wasn't into it then. And they weren't all Zen gardens either. They say the idea of the rock garden is like expressing the concept of Japan itself. The garden is water with islands. Sometimes the gardiners rake waves through the little stones around islands of larger stones. To do that you have to stand on the islands.

That idea is close to what the real Arizona petrified forest is like. And it would make a great tank interior. And without all those pesky demands of increased CO2 and intensified light.

Matt Drudge: I suspect Congress deliberately sabotaging Trump

Via Instapundit:  "I suspect there's a sabotage," Drudge said on Michael Savage's radio show.

"Do you know Obama had the stimulus package on his desk before Inauguration Day? What did this Congress give this great man. Nothing."

Drudge said that Trump’s young administration is in “crisis on many fronts,” describing a Congress intent on undermining his presidency and ungrateful media coalescing in a campaign against the real estate mogul.

He also argued that Trump “saved the media,” pointing to rising newspaper subscriptions and increasing viewership for television news networks since he began his presidential campaign.

“His personality is not being totally used here. The charm, the guy who ran the hotel, the guy that had a No. 1 TV show with ‘The Apprentice,’” Drudge said. “This is part of charisma. Charisma is needed in this job.”

“This isn’t just getting a bill through Congress. This is also charisma,” he added. “So I wish they would let him return to the full Donald Trump.”

Cow Milk is a symbol?

Via Instapundit:  Actual tweet by PETA: “Did you know that milk has long been a symbol used by white supremacists?”

Back in 2001, Reason’s Ronald Bailey noted how the fear of Fluoride, once parodied so brilliantly by Sterling Hayden’s Bircher-esque general in Dr. Strangelove, was, by the late 1990s, an obsession of the anti-science left. But hey, as Hayden’s character warned back in 1964, “Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk… ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children’s ice cream.”

Congratulations PETA, you went full General Jack D. Ripper. Never go full General Jack D. Ripper.

Link to video

"Obama Officials Made List of Russia Probe Documents to Keep Them Safe"

From the people who spent $36 million in 2016 fighting Freedom of Information Requests.

Obama administration officials were so concerned about what would happen to key classified documents related to the Russia probe once President Trump took office that they created a list of document serial numbers to give to senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a former Obama official told NBC News.

The official said that after the list of documents related to the probe into Russian interference in the U.S. election was created in early January, he hand-carried it to the committee members. The numbers themselves were not classified, said the official.

The ends justify the means... you see? God forbid Tillerson should put these documents in an unsecured homebrew server and Russian hackers... use it to hack the election. Yea, that's it.

Just in case you haven't heard, Pence loves his wife

Link to video