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Entries in Diary (34)

Saturday

06Feb2010

Heath Bar Cookies

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Heath Bar Cookies made by Miss Jamie Brod

Since all I’m doing is spinning my wheels as of late, why not link to a blog post from March of 2009 about making Heath Bar cookies?

I decided that before spring break I wanted to revert back to my old baking ways: the cookie. Toffee has never been a must-have for me but it did make an excellent addition to a normal butter cookie. I found a simple recipe for heath bar cookies online and decided to just add a few more things (added nuts, etc). The cookies turned out great, but the recipe makes about 5 dozen cookies; luckily I have a lot of friends who love sweets.

Miss Jamie Brod has an excellent recipe there. Enjoy. Some goofball once said that the Heath Bar is woefully underappreciated in a Snickers kind of world.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Sunday

31Jan2010

I'd Love to Attend, But Weirdos Are a Big Drawback

Sunday, January 31, 2010

I once started a WordPress blog called “perturbed owls and the hobos they kill” but they deleted it because it was too weird…

The nice thing about WordPress is, you can panic and set up a blog over there in about three minutes. You can always tell someone did this when the tag line “Just Another WordPress.com Weblog” is still there after they’ve set it up.

I’ve done this twenty or thirty times in the last few weeks. I always end up relaxing and deleting the panicked blogs I’ve created. One, called The Man Who Stood Close to Me in Line at Wal-Mart, got 86,000 hits in three hours, and I had to delete it because, well, that’s how I roll, sir.

This blog, over where WordPress lives and breathes, is so poorly executed, the text refuses to justify. You may read it with some disdain. Apparently, someone is trying to position themselves for a profitable turnout:

Judson and I have stayed silent in the face of intense media scrutiny
and attacks by former members. As a wife and a mother, I have stood
by my husband and family and stayed strong in the face of many baseless
accusations and criticism. We have refrained from responding to many of the attacks that have been thrown at us from other “Tea Party” groups, in the belief we did not want to spread the divisions that are already hurting this movement even though that does not seem to be the consideration of some others involved in this movement. Because of the many TPN members’ requests and encouragement, I have decided to provide comment about Tea Party
Nation and the National Tea Party Convention. We will stay silent no longer. I hope my comments and the issues I deal with in this note will provide some clarity.

Yes, yes. We get that you’re under siege and the whole thing is flying apart. My question is this. Will they make money?

We fully expect to break even during this event. We may even make
a few thousand dollars to cover local operating costs of TPN.
We have made the best of a tight budget and scaled back the price of
attending this convention as much as we could without putting TPN into
bankruptcy. The convention is sold out and we have a waiting list of
over five hundred people. We never did this to make us rich or
famous. Quite the contrary, we are patriots who love our country, our
members and the people who are coming to Nashville to attend this great
event.

For all of you who will be attending, we look forward to meeting you
this upcoming week and we thank everyone for the support and patriotism
in this fight against liberalism. God bless you all and I thank
you for your prayers and words of encouragement.

My reaction?

Norman Rogers Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
January 31, 2010 at 6:12 am

I’d love to attend, but I don’t know if donating $5,000 would be enough. I could go as high as $10,000, but I would like some assurances as to where I might sit and who I might sit near. No weirdos, please.

Heavens, when will that moderator show up and do their job? Left, align, kids. Left align.

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Tuesday

15Dec2009

Blogging and Begging or Blegging

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Have you heard of people who ask for money to keep blogging or to sustain their blogging? I run across things like this, on occasion, and this is one that was featured prominently on a thing that I like to call “memeorandum,” which ignores me because I am too fabulous:

Time for another blogger bailout

I apologize for this, but I need to do some serious begging here. The car’s making noises like it can’t decide which of three potential problems it wants to develop and my settle on all three. The laptop desperately needs an upgrade and a new power cord. And Art the Wonder Dog ate my glasses.

I’m not kidding.

He jumped up and snatched them right off my head. One quick chomp and they were lens-less.

So, if you can spare a couple of bucks, please hit the PayPal button in the tip jar over at the top of the left hand side bar or send a donation to the PO address listed there. (Make checks or money orders payable to my bookkeeper, D. Reilly.)

I went to Lance Mannion’s site, and Here’s my comment, since these things are often deleted:

You know, Lance. This post speaks to a question that I have about blogging and ethics in general.

When is it acceptable to beg for money? Is it acceptable when things are a bit down, as they appear to be for you right now. Or is it acceptable when you’re living under a bridge and you don’t have any food to eat? Is it acceptable to beg when you’re seeing a little adversity or when things have really hit the fan? Where I live, here in Maryland, people routinely beg by the side of the road, and then go buy hooch. I know this because they hold up signs that say “why lie? I need a damned drink?”

Don’t get me wrong—I’ve never been generous or understanding. I’ve always been terrified of asking for help. That’s why I don’t ask for help, ever. Granted, I inherited quite a bit of money, and then, when I pushed my Father out as chairman of the family business, I became fairly well off, almost by default, since he had really botched the ownership structure, leaving my brothers and I to carve up things as we saw fit.

Ever since I started blogging, I’ve asked myself—how can anyone ask strangers for money, as they do on pretty much any blog there is out there? Is it because there’s an unspoken bond between reader and writer, allowing the reader to say, “hey, I’m getting quality stuff here for free, and I have no issues with kicking in a few bucks” or is it the guilt trip aspect at work? Is it an East Coast thing? What few Midwestern people I have known wouldn’t ask for a donut in a hail storm where nothing but donuts were falling in heaps on the ground. Is it a West Coast Offense thing, where the quarterback maintains different options so that he can find inside and outside receivers, based on the shift that the defense uses against the…hold on, I was working on something else and it got away from me.

What’s the deal with asking for money? Are you prevented from earning extra money doing side jobs by a health condition? Are you an older fellow like me, and would see no use in trying to work another job? Is there something that holds itself up and says, “nah, I’m an artist, and artists can ask for patronage because they deliver value to society” or is this just a shakedown? I’ve seen shakedown artists beg for money. They’re called Congressmen, and I used to donate quite a bit of money to politicians. I don’t anymore, since their begging has gotten so shameless I can’t stand to look at their pleading, pathetic eyes and tell them no. I suppose I should admit that, yes, I do donate money to food pantries and to things like that, but always in my real name so I can write it off at the end of the year and continue screwing someone that I like to call the Internal Revenue Service.

If you can give me a fairly good answer, I’ll come back and kick in a few bucks. Bah! No, I don’t even know what PenPal is. But you get my drift.

I doubt I’ll get a reply, but I know this—I’m certain to be vilified for having asked such an impertinent question.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Thursday

10Dec2009

Whatever You Do, Don't Bomb Iran Just Yet

Thursday, December 10, 2009

This is an encouraging sign:

The circle around Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is hardening and shrinking — and more and more, his former allies are turning against him. The regime seems determined to pursue a policy of dictatorship at home and isolation abroad, whatever the cost. Iran’s snub of Western attempts to negotiate a deal over its nuclear program — and the added insult of its recently announced plans to expand its uranium enrichment program tenfold — are clear signs that cooler conservative heads in Tehran and Qom have lost ground to Ahmadinejad’s hard-liners. Many religious Iranians and some conservative clerics, for example, have begun to increasingly feel that the theocratic system has become un-Islamic.

The demonstrations that erupted on Dec. 7 in cities across Iran included not only Westernized students but conservative Iranians as well. The Islamic Republic attempted to thwart the rally by shutting down Internet access, but thousands of Iranians nevertheless marched in the streets. The protests included not only Westernized students, but religious and conservative Iranians as well — evidence that conservative Iranians are becoming more and more opposed to the state, even if their response is not usually to participate in social unrest.

If conservative Iranians are unhappy with their government, imagine how desperately everyone else wants it to change. We should not bomb the Iranians now, nor ever. It would unite them against the West and solidify the regime’s hold on power. We have to hold back and let it crumble, and let the Iranian people have their own revolution, preferably a peaceful, non-violent, velvet revolution that sweeps the fundamentalists from power and puts something more egalitarian in its place.

Here’s where public opinion might actually matter:

It’s not just protesters, either. A groundbreaking Iranian survey, first published on insideIRAN.org, shows that, in provinces where Ahmadinejad once held widespread support, Iranians now say they wished they had not voted for him.

The polling surveyed more than 11,000 people from 11 rural and small villages in the provinces of Fars and Isfahan. Polling was conducted in four intervals from the summer of 2008, before the contested June 12 presidential election, to the fall of 2009. In the two pre-election polls, respondents were asked to state their choice of candidate. In the two post-election polls, respondents were asked for their views on the disputed election.

Before the election, Ahmadinejad had enjoyed 58 percent support in rural areas and 44 percent support in the small urban areas. After the election, however, it was a different story. The two post-election polls showed that 39 percent of the youth and 23 percent of those over 45 who had voted for Ahmadinejad now regretted their vote. The reasons for this included the rape, murder, and torture of young men and women who participated in demonstrations after the June presidential election and the belief that Ahmadinejad was to blame for the country’s economic crisis. In fact, 57 percent of those who said they no longer supported Ahmadinejad admitted that they had received money from Ahmadinejad’s subsidy program, which was designed to solidify the president’s support among poorer segments of Iran’s population. Still, they said, even the money wasn’t enough to keep their support.

Again, if we militarily attack Iran, the Iranian people might back off the pressure on the regime and unite behind it. I don’t buy the argument that an attack would be the final crack needed to bring down the whole rotten edifice.

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Sunday

15Nov2009

A Fascinating View of Slavery

Sunday, November 15, 2009

I’ve stumbled across some good history, so here you go:

Why was 1808 a pivotal year in American history? Its significance has little to do with the fact that James Madison was elected to succeed his friend Thomas Jefferson as President, extending the Democratic-Republican party’s hold on the White House and increasing Federalist frustration, or with the new nation’s early drift toward future hostilities with the British. Instead, the signal event of the year was the end of the African slave trade. Over the subsequent decades, this ban on the importation of slaves from overseas dramatically reshaped the institution of slavery in the United States.

The end of the foreign slave trade limited forever the size of the slave population in the United States. After 1808, the size of the nation’s slave population depended on the natural increase of the slave population and the scope of slave smuggling. Hence southern slaveholders, eager to secure enough slave labor to cultivate their staples, knew that only practices which effectively encouraged slave reproduction could insure the continued growth of their workforce. Once the federal ban took effect, more lower South slaveholders accepted the idea that encouraging longevity and reproduction among slaves held the key to the future of the region’s economy. William Johnson, a United States Supreme Court Justice and a South Carolinian, summed up these views in 1815 when he told a Charleston audience that all slaveholders should “see in the propagation of their slaves the only resource for future wealth.”

Moreover, this limit on size of the southern slave population prompted white southerners to reconsider possible ways of addressing what many of them still saw, in the tradition of the founders, as the problem of slavery. After the closing off the foreign slave trade in 1808, both the upper and lower South sought answers to the slavery question in their respective regions through an internal reconfiguration of slavery.

You can read the whole article, if you’re interested, and yes, I am aware that this is filler. In blogging, filler is put up in order to show that the blogger is actively trying to find things to blog about. Filler keeps the readers moving along, but very little blogging effort has to be put towards it. In point of fact, I put a lot of effort into this piece of filler, but only insomuch as I’m admitting it is filler and as I am admitting to my occasional use of items as filler. I don’t do it more than seven or eight times a day, trust me.

Norman Rogers | tagged

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Tuesday

10Nov2009

Where's Poindexter When You Need Him?

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Squirrels hate technology, but they hate Poindexter even more

In the midst of a blog post about hating writing and hating technology, I noticed something:

Are all those markups from some weird computer programming language? Is that HTML? I have no idea.

The author clearly expresses a disdain for technology, and the editorial Poindexters left her hanging out to dry. Where were they when this blog post was put up by the author? Do they think that those of us in the creative field have all of the time in the world to sit and fuss with obscure markup languages? They intentionally “broke” this post to make a point about how technology rules our lives, and we should obey our Poindexter masters.

Not me. I fight Poindexter. I may be old, and really confused about why my blog does what it does sometimes, but I don’t let the Poindexters get to me. I stand up to them. I shake my fist at them. I get in my car and I run over those Star Trek action figures and those Macbooks for a reason—I’m in charge. I’m a businessman, a former CEO, and a man who took his family’s own company away from his own Father in just three short months of intriguing and maneuvering. That’s right, me. I’m the boss. And if Poindexter ever tried to make me look bad, I’d give him a snuggy. I’d make that Poindexter pine for the days of thongs and trash can lid hats.

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