Enchiladas verdes

She's speaking a fer'ner language but the thing says "facil" and that means you can follow along. Plus she's cute.

I'm a bit surprised she skips roasting the jalapeños as Mexican like to do. They're unripe and they need that singe and blistering.

Obviously you can make a milder version by using poblanos instead of jalapeños or serranos as she suggests. Both of those are mid range on the Scoville scale but with so many you might find them uncomfortably hot.

And there's nothing worse than a mild jalapeño. Those vapid things have no reason for being.

I thought of this because someone from Essex England likes Mexican food and posted a video he made, calling himself Essexican. 

It makes me sad.

Some restaurants really do need to die

Because the fading away is taking too long.

The article on Instapundit caught my attention because the place is named King Tut. Come on, who can resist? The Instapundit piece is about EPA killing another small business and it refers to this article on Knox news. The story is about EPA requiring a grease interceptor for a struggling small business down on its luck that already has a grease trap. All the discussion is about that. Commenters are mostly unsympathetic. A surprising number of them have experience with grease disposal.

But I'm disgusted with the restaurant by the photos posted to Yelp. You'd have to drag me into a place like this. I'd have to be starving and too weak to resist.

First, I'd be disappointed upon entry because the only thing King Tut related is the few 2 dimensional representations of Tut's burial mask, arguably the most recognizable thing about Tut. After that, nothing else about the place refers to Tut, to Egypt, or even to the Middle East. All the interior decoration is junk collected over a decade or so. Things you can pick up in any second hand shop, any Goodwill, any auction in just a few hours. Christmas lights strung around. Framed pictures that are not Egypt related.

I could do a lot better with just a few objects around my apartment.

This is not somebody's vision. This is crap collected thoughtlessly here and there. One reviewer said, "eclectic" but that hardly describes the result of a hopelessly disordered mind.

And that shows in the food. Commenters to both articles said that they went here and liked this place. That's admitting they don't mind being served very bad food.

The menu is miserable. And the food even worse. Not a single photograph can make this place look good.

The owners brag "best Greek salad."

Good Lord.

Greeks should sue and put the place out of its misery. That is so far from a Greek salad that it isn't even funny. Greeks know salads. People come back from Greece and say uniformly, "Oh man, the salads they serve are incredible. "They're things of real beauty. Garden fresh, lovely and appealing. Generally simple and definitely NOT a sopping drooping pile of miscellaneous slop pouring over its edges. 

Greek salads are perfect balances of color and textures with pleasant fragrances and simple appealing olive oil vinaigrette with fresh feta cheese. Look at images, here's one randomly selected. 

Tomato, cucumber, purple onion, the best olives not from restaurant cans, green or red bell pepper, torn lettuce, feta cheese, fresh herbs, all light and fresh, nothing piled up, nothing processed, nothing from jars or tins, nothing dense or heavy. A light filling salad to have outside in warm weather. When you travel through Greece you see this salad form everywhere and everyone does it better than this Knoxville restaurant that really must close to business and not just because of a grease interceptor. Anything that comes after this restaurant will be an improvement. 

Dog reacts to man crying

MIgardener, how to get nearly !00% fruit set on tomato plants

tldw: Shake the plants to self-pollenate.

This is common advice for chile plants too, so Migardener says in the video.

It's a total bummer when your chile plant's flowers are so touchy they all fall off. I have shaken the indoor plants and the tiny flowers went flying off all over the place. When you research why they keep doing that the answer is too much water. Or not enough water. Then you get all paranoid and neurotic about the exact right amount of water.

[I mistakenly posted two things that don't belong here. Sorry about that.]

Planet Earth, The Swamp

Dedicated to Igor Moiseyev, rehearsals for Blizzard, Clowning Games, and Day on the Ship

Colorado avalanche

Not the hockey team. Current Denver temp 11°. Hey, it's warming up.

When you drive to Breckenridge from Denver and go by way of incredibly scenic Loveland Pass instead of Eisenhower tunnel, a literal bore, then you will hear cannons firing right near the roadside. This is to induce avalanches for the protection of off-trail skiers and other hikers. Making the choice for the pass adds considerably to your time, but who's in a hurry? The photo opportunities are astounding. And they're right there.  Elevation 11,990 feet on the Continental Divide. It is truly spectacular.  Obviously take chains, duh. The tunnel speeds you past the best points of interest.

A couple of avalanches closed down parts of Interstate 70 in Colorado on Sunday. Luckily, authorities say, no one was trapped or injured. https://t.co/Qq53AGVmKK pic.twitter.com/zOD8SqtgAQ

— ABC News (@ABC) March 4, 2019

AOC

@AOC is awesome! pic.twitter.com/U1Fs9JPrdz

— Sepp (@Wilburforce8) March 3, 2019

Peter Pepper

You know that Peter Piper nursery rhyme doesn't make sense because the peppers would be pickling peppers not pickled peppers. Pickled peppers would already be picked and processed. Peter wouldn't pick a peck of pickled peppers off the bushes, rather, he'd pick a jar off a grocery store shelf.

These chile peppers are also called Willie Chiles and they look like little red pricks. Or yellow, or orange.

Wikipedia says they're hot but not that great for culinary use except for pickling. But what does Wikipedia know? Wikipedia also says they are rare. Grown in Texas and Louisiana and Mexico. Yet you can buy the seeds quite cheaply on eBay from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, England, Germany, Estonia, Australia, Hungary, Ukraine, all over, and they are cheap.

Wikipedia: Peter Pepper.

The pepper has often been noted for its phallic appearance when fully grown. The pepper, particularly the red variety, has been described as a "miniature replica of the uncircumcised male organ".[2] The pod of the pepper is wrinkled and has a round tip with a cleft.

Stop it, Wikipedia, you're killing me.

Caravan Palace, Rock It For Me

Kids today having fun dancing old fashion swing and with a sick mic pass.

President Trump at CPAC

At two hours, I believe this is the longest speech that Trump has ever given.

"The Washington Post Issues Editor’s Note on Covington Coverage"

"The Washington Post has issued an Editor’s Note on their initial reporting of the incident between Native American activist Nathan Phillips and a group of students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky."

Per the Post...

A Washington Post article first posted online on Jan. 19 reported on a Jan. 18 incident at the Lincoln Memorial. Subsequent reporting, a student’s statement and additional video allow for a more complete assessment of what occurred, either contradicting or failing to confirm accounts provided in that story — including that Native American activist Nathan Phillips was prevented by one student from moving on, that his group had been taunted by the students in the lead-up to the encounter, and that the students were trying to instigate a conflict. The high school student facing Phillips issued a statement contradicting his account; the bishop in Covington, Ky., apologized for the statement condemning the students; and an investigation conducted for the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School found the students’ accounts consistent with videos. Subsequent Post coverage, including video, reported these developments: “Viral standoff between a tribal elder and a high schooler is more complicated than it first seemed”; “Kentucky bishop apologizes to Covington Catholic students, says he expects their exoneration”; “Investigation finds no evidence of ‘racist or offensive statements’ in Mall incident.”

A Jan. 22 correction to the original story reads: Earlier versions of this story incorrectly said that Native American activist Nathan Phillips fought in the Vietnam War. Phillips said he served in the U.S. Marines but was never deployed to Vietnam.

Caravan Palace -- Dramophone

Has gotten

When asked which sayings, phrases, forms of locution bug them the most, British always have "gotten" on their list. It bugs them. A lot. Their past tense for "get" is "got." They view it as so wrong and it distracts them so greatly that it negatively shades everything else where they encountered it.

Knowing that now it sticks out for me too. It sounds clunky and wrong. But it's actually correct. Instapundit:

I understand that a member of the CEO’s personal staff has gotten in touch with my student Chris Davis, whose insurance troubles I blogged about yesterday ... 

Ugh. Past perfect again. Where plain past tense "got" will do just as well. Aren't we taught to always use the simplest forms?

Know what's weird? Spanish has two types of past tense. Verbs are conjugated two different ways for the type of action that began in the past and ended in the past, contrasted with the type of action that began in the past and could possibly still be going. The second type has a subjunctive quality to it for being open ended, and that allows for a type of humor depending on how you phrase something like, "We were married in 1990."

Yet they also have past perfect and pluperfect constructions the same as English with the helpers, "had" and "has had." This is how English achieves the same thing that Spanish has with two types of past tense conjugations. While Spanish has both ways. This is one of the more difficult things for English speakers to learn in Spanish. It comes near the end of the second year and by then across four semesters the packed classes have thinned out to just a few students, and the few students remaining have a bit of a struggle dealing with the distress of learning a whole new set of forms for all verbs just for that one little thing when their own language doesn't even have it.

The odd thing about "gotten" is that it's proper in the United States and in Canada but not outside North America.

It's seen as an American invention but it is not. It's part of older English and built into words such as "forgotten." It's fallen out of favor outside North America. Since they believe falsely that it's American then they also believe it's inferior. And that's what bugs them. Their wrong conclusion about its origin bugs them. American speech bugs them. But what really bugs them is its re-acceptance in their own lands. They resent American style intruding. Strongly.

British English is so f'k'd up it's not even funny, and the f ups codified, but all that's okay because it's all their own collective distortions over time, but Americans adhering to older forms sound bizarre to them and having it intrude back on their modern distortions is unacceptable because they think it's American invention.

While to Americans this complaint sounds fine when it's written, but when it's spoken the complaint sounds perfectly ridiculous, like baby-talk, because they're feeling it in their hots heyah, theyah, everywheh, noth, south, east and west.

Grammarist.com