Tag: Meta

“Liberals have to stop gloating about Sarah Palin getting dumped by Fox News,” Maher began, “even though it happened less than a day after Bobby Jindal told his fellow Republicans to ‘stop being the stupid party.’ That’s just a coincidence. A wonderful, hilarious coincidence.”

It’s the big game, the grand finale to the all the American version of football, Super Bowl XLVII which will determine the NFL champion. This year it’s  the American Football Conference (AFC) champion Baltimore Ravens and the National Football Conference (NFC) champion San Francisco 49ers who will meet tomorrow in New Orleans  at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

But, you know all that. The big thing is what to feed those exuberant fans gathered around the TV. I have some new recipes and some old favorites.

For the new:

Bacon-Wrapped Pig Wings

To quote epicurious, where these recipes are from, “Who says pigs can’t fly? Take a few boneless pork chops, add some bacon and a little creativity, and Pig Wings are on the menu!”

If cooking indoors, start in a “slow” oven  235°F for 90 minutes, or until the bacon is cooked. Finish under the broiler to crisp the bacon.

Salt-and-Pepper Shrimp with Blue Cheese and Celery

This shrimp recipe is a close seafood version of Buffalo Chicken Wings. I reduced the salt to two teaspoons with excellent results and the blue cheese dip can be made two days ahead which enhances the flavor.

Garlic Roasted Potato Skins served with Onion and Spinach Dip.

Save the scooped out flesh for other uses. Potato skins can be scooped out and spread with garlic paste, but not baked, 1 day ahead and chilled, loosely covered with foil. Bring them to room temperature before baking.

Pretzel Bites with Quick Cheddar Dip

For a quick recipe, you can buy frozen pretzels in the snack section of the supermarket. Just cut them into bite size nuggets before cooking.

Meatball Sliders

You can substitute your favorite ready made meatballs and sauce but, trust me, if you have time, this recipe is well worth making from “scratch.”

Crispy Baked Chicken Wings

For the health conscious, baking yields really crispy wings without the mess and time watching. For the less healthy conscious these are our past favorites:

Buffalo Chicken Wings and Blue Cheese Dip and Spicy Laquered Chicken Wings

Peanut Butter and Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies

Heavens forbid we should forget desert. Nummm

If you aren’t watching the game, eat your heart out.

The wheel of the seasons keep turning.

All around the house tonight there are candles lit. There is a warm fire in the fireplace in the family room and, despite the cold wind and occasional snow shower, there is a blazing fire in the backyard fire pit. Each winter is different, this one like the last has been warm until last week when it seemed Mother Nature was having her way with us and sent a blast of Arctic cold. Once again, I look forward to the early signs of spring, no different from last year with tips of early spring flowers ready poking up, getting ready to add a happy splash color to the dark mulch. The Winter is shorter and milder than the ones just 10 years ago. According the NOAA, they are.

The winter of 2011, we were snowed in here in NYC with a six foot wall of snow down the drive way and along the side walk. It a way the mild winter has been a blessing for the victims of Hurricane Sandy who are still without heat and struggling to rebuild their homes and lives.

I can’t say I miss the snow, I don’t, but I know this is not a good sign for our dear Earth, our home.

I read this great post on the Days of Imbolc from Beth Owl’s Daughter that I would like to share:

The Sun’s path has returned to where it was at Samhain. Take some time to notice the quality of the light, for it is the same now as that shimmering magical glow of late October. But instead of the season of dark and silence before us, in the Northern Hemisphere, the season of light and growth lies ahead.

And so we prepare ourselves with rites of renewal, cleansing, and commitment. We celebrate the first stirrings of Spring.

The days are noticeably longer, and life awakens all around us. While some of the fiercest Winter weather may still lie ahead, listen! The birds are already beginning their courtships.

Look – cold-hardy sprouts are poking from the earth, and the first lambs are being born (hence the name Imbolc, which means “ewe’s milk,” referring to the nursing mothers). For our ancestors not so long ago, having lived on only the stored food of Winter, the first fresh milk returning was a tremendous blessing, often meaning the difference between survival or death.

h/t Hecatedemeter

Reposted from January 31, 2011

Although you’d never know it if you looked out your window here in the Northeast and throughout a good part of the northern hemisphere, we are nearing the midpoint between winter solstice and the vernal equinox. The Sun is noticeably rising earlier and setting later. It is a pleasure to take my early morning shower in daylight and start dinner preparation with daylight still illuminating the kitchen. There are seed catalogs arriving in the mail which has me contemplating the flower beds, the herb garden and maybe this year some vegetables.

In the traditions of Pagan and Wiccan religions, we celebrate this changing season as Imbolc, or Candlemas, which begins on January 31st, February Eve, and ends on February 2nd, a time of rebirth and healing. Imbolc is one of the eight Wiccan Sabbats of the Wheel of the Year, one of the four cross-quarter fire festivals. Brighid, the patroness of poetry and healing, is the Pagan Goddess associated with Imbolc.

Some of the traditions are the lighting of fires, decorating with red and white symbolizing the snow and the rising sun and green for new growth. Candles are lit in all the rooms of the house. Fires places and hearths are cleaned out of ashes and fires are lit. Since there is still snow drifts in my backyard, the fireplace will be just fine.

The symbols are ewes and lambs since Imbolc is derived from a Celtic word, “oimelc”, meaning ewe’s milk. Many of the foods that are serves are lamb, cheese, poppyseed muffins, cakes and breads. Dishes are seasoned with bay leaves and dried basil.

In rural places where farming is still a way of life, ploughs are decorated with flowers and then doused with whiskey. I know most of us have better things to do with whiskey. Sometimes the plough is dragged from door to door by costumed children asking for food and money, a kind of wintry “trick or treat”. Some traditional gifts, if your going to a friends house to celebrate, are garden tools, seeds and bulbs.

The Maiden is also honored as the “Bride” on this Sabbat. Straw corn dollies are created from oat or wheat straw and placed in baskets with white flower bedding. The older women make special acorn wands for the dollies to hold. The wands are sometimes burned in the fireplace and in the morning, the ashes in the hearth are examined to see if the magic wands left marks as a good omen. A new corn broom is place by the front door to symbolize sweeping out the old and welcoming the new.

Non-Pagans celebrate February 2nd as Ground Hog’s Day, a day to predict the coming weather, telling us that if the Groundhog sees his shadow, there will be ‘six more weeks’ of bad weather. It actually has ancient roots, weather divination was common to Imbolc, and the weather of early February was long held to be a harbinger of spring. On Imbolc, the crone Cailleach‘s grip of winter begins to loosen. She goes forth in search of kindling so that she may keep her fires burning and extend the winter a little longer. If Imbolc is rainy and cloudy, she will find nothing but twigs unsuitable for burning and will be unable to prolong the winter. If the day is dry and kindling is abundant, she will have plenty of fuel to feed her fire and prolong the cold of winter. Spring will be very far away. As an old British rhyme tells us that, “If Candlemas Day be bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year.”

Whatever you celebrate or believe, let us all hope that that the local groundhog doesn’t see his shadow and there is only one winter this year. I have nowhere else to pile the snow.

Blessed Be.

New Rule: Someone has to tell America’s gun nuts to stop wetting their Army surplus pants about losing the 2nd Amendment. It’s not not your 2nd Amendments rights that are under attack it’s all the other ones.

It used to be that law enforcement couldn’t search you without probable cause. But now we are becoming a quasi-police state, where one minute you’re home quietly reading Fifty Shades of Gray, and suddenly, there’s a SWAT team in your living room waving guns. And you’re goiong “no, no! Kat Williams lives next door.”

Now, last month when no one was taking anyone’s guns from anybody, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to reauthorized a program where they can collect data on any American citizen and hold on to it forever. They can look at your e-mails, your texts, your Skypes …. and not a peep out of the crowd that’s always birching about what the framers intended. In fact the answer from almost everyone seems to be, “oh, what the hell the airport screeners have already seen  my ass anyway.”

The Facebook generation especially doesn’t seem to care that Big Brother knows everything about you. What books you read; what movies you watch; your Match.com account; your other Match.com account when you’re feeling a little freaky and want to meet the sortnof woman your other Match.com account wouldn’t approve of.

Call me old school but I don’t want the Feds googling what I’m googling. It’s bad enough when NetFlix pries into my private life: “If you watched “The Walking Dead” in zombieland, you might also like this interview with John McCain.”

I don’t want the government doing that: “You downloaded this article favoring the legalization of marijuana, you mght also like being incarcerated.”

You know they always say these programs are just to catch terrorists, heh, the next thing you know they’re using them to shut down the pot dispensaries. And that place was right on my way home. Now I’ve gotta go to Valley Village.

Doesn’t anyone care that this is the new normal? I guess not because gun nuts don’t care and neither do liberals. When Bush did warantless wiretapping. oh, he was wiping his ass with the Constitution. But when Obama does it, oh well, whatever helps Jessica Chastain find bun Laden, we’re good with that.

Yeah, both parties compete mightily to appear to be the greater champions of out our freedoms but the only the only thing that has bipartisan support in Washington. is not giving a shit about privacy. And when you talk to the NRA types, as I like to do down at my local Moose Lodge, they actually believe that what protects their rights isn’t laws, or courts, it’s if they have a gun. They think that’s what keeps the government from going too far. Without guns Obama would become an emperor and force everyone to gay marry, but he can’t because a guy in Kentucky named Skeeter has a .22.

Except that, you know while you guys were buying guns to protect your other guns, sittin’ up on the porch there waiting for Obama’s negro army, to come confiscate your weapons and go all Django Unchained on your ass, that’s when we lost all the stuff in the Bill of Rights about trials and juries and warrants.

You see the Red Coats they never wanted your guns, they wanted your liberty and that’s why the Founding Fathers said you could have the gun, dumb ass. And now the only right we have left is the guns and left nothing left to use the guns to protect. We’re like a strip club with a million bouncers and no strippers.

To all of our friends and families may we all have a very happy, healthy and prosperous New Year.

The 2012 has already arrived in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Russia and most of Europe. Join us as we count down to midnight across the United States.

For those who are sitting comfortably at home and in need of entertainment.

New Year’s Eve TV Specials

8 pm

• ABC– New Year’s Rockin’ Eve Celebrates Dick Clark
• Nick– Full House (New Year Special, until 11 pm)
• Turner Classic– After the Thin Man

10 pm

• ABC– Dick Clark’s Primetime New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2013
• NBC– NBC’s New Year’s Eve With Carson Daly

11 pm

• Fox– New Year’s Eve Live! (until 12:30 am)
• Disney– Austin & Jessie & Ally All Star New Year
• Disney XD– Phineas and Ferb For Your Ice Only, Happy New Year!)
• ESPN2– SportsNation (New Year’s Jeers)
• Faux Noise– All American New Year (until 12:30 am)
• MSNBC– The Ed Show (Middle Class Heroes 2012)
• MTV– MTV’s Club NYE 2013 (until 1 am)
• National Geographic– Maya Underworld: The Real Doomsday
• Nick– Friends (New Year Special, until 1 am)

11:30 pm

• ABC– Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2013 (until 2 am)
• NBC– NBC’s New Year’s Eve With Carson Daly
• Toon– The Eric Andre New Year’s Eve Spooktacular! (until 12:15 am)
• VH1– 11:59 pm New Year’s Eve 2013 (7 minute New Year Special)

midnight

• Disney– Phineas and Ferb (For Your Ice Only, Happy New Year!)

After Fogelberg’s death from prostate cancer in 2007, the woman who he wrote the song about came forward with her story. Her name is Jill Greulich, and she and Fogelberg dated in high school when she was Jill Anderson. As she explained to the Peoria Journal Star in a December 22, 2007 article, they were part of the Woodruff High School class of 1969, but went to different colleges. After college, Jill got married and moved to Chicago, and Dan went to Colorado to pursue music. On Christmas Eve, they were each back in Peoria with their families when Jill went out for egg nog and Dan was dispatched to find whipping cream for Irish coffee. The only place open was a convenience store at the top of Abington Hill, at Frye Avenue and Prospect Road, and that’s where they had their encounter. They bought a six pack of beer and drank it in her car for 2 hours while they talked.

When you see a wrong there is only one way to right it, shout it to the skies.

Break the silence. Silence Kills.

May there yet be Peace On Earth.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate the day. Merry Day to those who don’t.