It's Very Cold And I Feel Lousy

     Off to soak in hot water.  Maybe content later.

Outsiders Inside

     The HuffPo has gone schizty:

     Yeppers, those socialistic, xenophobic New Hamsters are a-gonna break out into decidedly uncivil war any day now.

     Or not.

     You'll probably hate me for saying this, but those Donald and Bernie voters are, in many ways, voting for the same thing: they want the "Washington insiders" out.  What wafts from D.C. these days is anything but inspirational and no matter which totemic animal you follow, waddling pachyderm or braying jackass, it doesn't have your best interests at heart.  We've got, mostly, King Hog rather than King Log and its troughs are overflowing.  Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump are both very much King Stork -- and in the end, the voters may well get what the froggies got.*  Nevertheless, they're darned sure they don't like what they have now, so promises of more of the same with a different arrangement of deck chairs and going-under music† don't hold much appeal at the ballot box.

     Votors often prefer "outsider" candidates for President, especially if they're not too outside.  And there's nothing they'd like more than to see the waters turn in the nation's capitol.  As a cautionary note for both sides, I will note the last times voters went for a new face at the helm, we got Presidents Carter, Reagan -- and Obama, sweeping in with "hope" and "change."   How are you liking those odds?

     Alas, the odds are odder and lower-grade than ever this time.  Those three had their flaws (pick your least fave and there's plenty to loathe!) but none of them was Mussolini with no style or Lenin with no brain.  Brace for King Stork!
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* Aesop told the tale -- and please note he lists not two but three kinds of rule.  Alas, once you've opted for kings, you lose the first and best option: self-rule.
 
† Your choice of "Autumn" or "Nearer My God To Thee."

Cold-Weather Food

     There's maybe a half-inch of fine, powder snow on the ground -- and the streets and sidewalks, the kind of stuff any self-respecting skiing outfit longs for.  Here on the flatlands, it does us no earthly good.  It turns the streets as slick as a greased weasel.  It's too thin to plow and too cold for road salt to do much.  Traffic slows to a crawl, except for the occasional optimist with a 4WD, fancy tires, and a soon-to-be-updated appreciation of classical physics, not to mention insurance.

     Weather like this, you need food that goes the distance -- hydration, fuel and maybe a little comfort.  I made leftover-chicken stew last night and here it is:

     1 medium onion
     3 or 4 carrots (or twice as many of those bagged-up washed & tumbled carrot sections)
     3 or 4 stalks of celery
     1 tomato or a little left-over chili.  You could try a small can of tomato sauce if you have neither.
     1 package of fresh mushrooms, rinsed
     About a pound of leftover chicken (I bought a couple of precooked chicken breast halves from the deli.  Leave the skin on or not, as suits you.)
     32 ounces of chicken broth or stock, home-made or store-bought (the low-sodium kind tastes just as good and allows you to salt you bowl to taste.  The low-fat versions are usually good, too, though some are too salty -- check the label.)

     In a good-sized pot over medium heat, put a little olive oil and butter, maybe a teaspoon each.  Have the onion chopped (about 3/8", you want spoon-sized chunks) and ready to go in as soon as the butter is melted and before it browns. Stir occasionally.   Mind the heat through this, you just want to gently saute the veggies. Chop up the carrot to similar size, and toss it in.  Stir that up and then chop the celery and add it.  If you went with a tomato, cut it up and add it now.  Cut up the chicken while watching/stirring the vegetables and when their colors start to get intense, add the mushrooms.  Finish cutting up the chicken (bribing cats if necessary) and stir it in.  A minute or two will get the chicken heated up, at which point you pour in the broth.  If you are using leftover chili or tomato paste or sauce, add it now.  (I had a cup or less of three-meat, no-beans chili from yesterday).  Cover and let simmer, stirring occasionally -- 20 minutes is about the minimum, an hour would be fine.  The broth will be a rich, deep red-gold.  The steam carries the distinct aromas of the main ingredients and should call diners to the table all by itself.  Salt and pepper to taste.

     You can add spices to this, though my version picked up all it needed from the chili.  Fresh garlic would be good if you don't mind it; paprika (hot or sweet) and/or thyme would work, as would some basil.  If you're anticipating a busy day of snow-shoveling and the like, you might want to add noodles, either good old egg noodles or some kind of pasta (rotini?  Elbow macaroni? Broken spaghetti?).  This will thicken the broth a little, too.  Just get the broth near boiling and add the pasta to cook for seven minutes or so.  You may need to punch up the spices a bit if you do this.

     Serves four easily -- or two people for a couple of days.  Frozen and reheated, it's even better.

Happy Monday!

     ...It's as easy to be happy about it as not.  So why not pick the better option?

     Man, with all this evidence of one, there has got to be a pony in here somewhere.

The Horrible-Awful Whatever-It-Is

     No, no, not the Presidential candidate pool -- the cold or flu Tam is fighting.  If I have it, it's a mild case and has mainly triggered my headaches to flip from "dull" to "sharp"* along with sinus congestion and drainage.

     Maybe that flu shot helped.
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* Because "agonizing" sounds whiny.

We Aten't Ded

     Tam has a really awful cold and I'm playing nursemaid while trying not to catch it.  Just fed her chicken soup, rye toast and a blood orange.  (Plus a strip of bacon and an olive, as a treat.)

     Looks like she's gonna make it.

     Edited-To-Add, much later: I'm probably coming down with it, too.  Well, that was inevitable.

Nightmare In Glue

     Most of the past week has been a nightmare of swimming in glue, everything going ...tooooo....slooooowly... while the world lept by like lightning.  The completion of tasks receded at at crawl only barely faster than the glacial pace I was moving at, yet slipping farther and farther away the harder I tried.

     Why?  I don't know.  Swing shift weeks have always suffered from this and I try to go into them with plenty of sleep.  Maybe my "big excitement" of walking a small gun show last Saturday was too much exertion.  Sunday went well enough and I was in bed in time to get up rested Monday -- but I fought to stay awake Monday and the transition from an 0300 start Monday to my usual midmorning-start was hard.  I didn't sleep well until last night and at that, I am only just now out of bed.


     But hey, I am out of bed now.  Might as well get to doing something.

Low Blow

     Rick Santorum has dropped out of the Presidential race -- and here I'd forgotten he'd dropped in this time around.  He's given his support to Marco Rubio.

     Sheesh, Mr. S, what'd the kid ever do to you?  

Swing Shifts

     The older I get, the more difficult working a swing shift becomes.  I only have to do so one week in three, but even that takes a toll.  There's a seven hour swing for me, with the fist day starting five hours earlier than normal, the second seven hours earlier, and three on my usual day shift.  You'd think it would be easy, one slightly short night, one very long night, then back to normal--

     It's not.  Somehow, "normal" never quite returns.  I have trouble sleeping all week and trouble staying awake.  The weekend comes and I'm wiped out; things often aren't back to normal until Sunday or Monday.

     Whine, whine -- there are starving children in Africa who don't even have jobs.  But my sleep suffers and so do my moods.  Cue the tiny violins!

Manh(A)ttan: A Smallerizing Mirror

     Watched the last episode of the TV series Manh(A)ttan last night.  As TV drama goes, especially as night time soaps go, it was good.  Despite a few weak episodes, at times it was great.

     But it fails to give a clear or consistent sense of the scope of the Manhattan Project; it glosses over the chasm between theoretical science and nuts-and-bolts engineering and misses the vast sweep of the thousands who turned wet-behind-the-ears science into best-guess engineering not once but over and over again, in an interlocking network of efforts that ultimately worked out like a Fermi Estimate: a series of best guesses that staggered their way to a working end product.

     In place of a huge group of brilliant minds and distinctly different personalities, the TV series gave viewers a handful of Physics Gods and a few dozen platoons of presumably Ph.D. spear-carriers.  Facing down one of the most fascinating stories of desperate science, they blinked.

     It's good entertainment; it's just not how science works, it's not how engineering works and it is most assuredly not how the Manhattan Project worked.  The science parts of the TV series are too small, and too concentrated in too few individuals. 

     I'll give them a B+ nevertheless.  If the series had been dreamed up in a world where the A-bomb had never been developed, it would have been first-rate drama.  Alas, it was a mere flashbulb against the glare of Trinity.  A good flashbulb, a well-made one, but still--

Caucus Results

     On the Right, Elmer Gantry edged out Mussolini and the handsome guy from Sears & Roebuck menswear catalogs ran a close third.

     For the Left, Beria squeaked past Trotsky but Nikolai Yezhov sank without a ripple.

     Yessirree, any color of future you want -- as long as you wanted "bleak."  But at least they're narrowing down the choices, right?

     Today's vocabulary word: "sharashka." Remember, that's what you want, not the regular gulag, so be sure and eat all your calculus!

Information Matters

     'Cos this is funnier if you only have one meaning for "groin:"

By Clem Rutter, Rochester Kent - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, $3

     Words to live by, no matter how you read them.  Well, unless invited, of course.