Silflay Hraka

Ought-two what?
Ought two go outside and take a look at the flood.

Kyle has hit the state a bit harder than expected. A high school teacher friend who lives Down East called tonight to say that he had confirmed that a 1990 Wagoneer can take three and half feet of water without cutting off. For those of you counting at home, that’s water up to the top of the front grill, without the Matttracks, of course. I told him he’d just signed his death warrant for the time when he decides he can take four foot water. I can understand why he decided to push it, though. he’d just spent two hours under a tornado warning in a girl’s locker room with 180 kids and their teachers, and the man needed to be away from that school.

The flooding in the Triangle was pretty bad as well. Certainly not the worst we’ve ever seen, though Here’s some pics. I knew it was bad when I saw someone inspecting the bridge over Crooked Creek just outside the neighborhood. Two more inches, and they’d of had to close it. The bottomland behind my house was covered. I could have thrown a biscuit off the back porch and hit river. Normally even when it is in flood that would take a golf ball and a heavy slingshot, but it was lapping at the bottom of the hill behind the house. It would have to rise about 8 more feet before it threatened us, so seeing it was a pleasing diversion rather than a worrisome event. I threw corn shucks into it from the top of the hill before Ngnat and the wife returned from daycare and watched them float away.

“Boat!” I said for her. “Water!”

Then I went in and made dinner. Steak, corn on the cob and Parker House rolls, the thank god the week is finally over dinner, with pineapple fruit pie from what the wife calls the “Nicely browned” cookbook. It’s a printout my mother made of family recipes, almost none of which have actual baking times recorded. It’s always’ “bake until nicely browned”, as if the recipe was secretly a sorority girl in search of a tan.

Corn bread - Bake in an cast-iron skillet until bread is nicely browned on top and very brown on bottom and sides.

Not to Fisk my own mother here, but how does one tell if the bottom is very brown when you have to look through a quarter inch of metal that’s been heated to 425 degrees to tell?

Macaroni and Cheese - bake at 350 degrees until mixture is bubbly and bread crumbs are nicely browned.

But what if you started with brown bread, you might ask? Well, we don’t. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as brown bread until I was approaching my teenage years, and we refused to eat it then.

Salad - leave out on counter while everyone eats the cornbread, macaroni and cheese and fruit pie. Throw away once it turns nicely brown.

The fruit pie is the oldest recipe, handed down from my great grandmother, Jolee Harris, who must have been a woman ahead of her time, as it calls for a Pyrex baking dish. (That statement is demonstrably false, as a quick Google on “Pyrex history” informs me that Pyrex glassware has been around for 80+ years. Given that Jolee was having kids about the same time Pyrex was born, she could have easily come into contact with a dish of the necessary type.) It was one of my favorites as a kid, so I’ve started to make it more often, in the hope that Ngnat will continue the tradition if and when she begins to cook one day. This is done it the face of fair to middling opposition from the wife, who breaks out into a cold sweat when she sees me starting off the recipe with an entire stick of butter. Her family has genetic cholesterol issues. My family could each lard and bacon sandwiches with extra mayo three times and day and not go above 170 on our LDL count. It kind of pisses her off. Hopefully Ngnat will inherit our low cholesterol genes, without getting tagged with the ones for baldness, pot bellies and crazy teeth. And when I say crazy teeth, I don’t mean crooked teeth. I mean teeth that start to develop offshoots, like small elephant tusks, yearning to break free. We’re a pretty bunch to have around.

Jolee Harris’ Fruit Pie

1. Use about 2 cups of any fresh or canned fruit. If necessary, sweeten the fruit. Some of the fruits we have used are;

Fresh peaches, peeled, slice and and sweetened to taste, (You can tell Jolee picked her own fruit. It’s all fresh this and fresh that. I use a can, it’s much quicker. I start attempting to peel peaches, and before you know it there’s blood everywhere.)
Blackberries (Tastes good, but the seeds will drive you insane)
Sour pitted cherries, mixed with 1/2 cup sugar

I like pineapple the best, but I assume that that might have been hard to get in Alabama in the 1920’s.

2. Place one stick of butter into a small rectangular Pyrex baking dish and place it into an 350 degree oven and let it melt. I don’t know why you have to do this. I do it religiously anyway.

3. Mix 1 cup each of sugar, milk and sifted self-rising flour together. Mom included directions on how to make your own self-rising flour should you not have any, or in my case, when I first started making this, even know what it was. Add 1 and 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/4 teaspoon of salt to the flour.

4. Pour batter into Pyrex dish over melted butter. Add fruit over batter. I always mix it up at this point, as I don’t like the way the fruit just sits there in the middle of the dish, smugly refusing to spread out.

5. Bake at 350 until nicely browned. In my experience, nicely browned here is between 30 and 45 minutes.

Something less than The Truth

Pravda is turning into the Weekly World News. Among the highlights in this story on the moon;

Is there any form of life on the Moon? The Moon?s surface is not inhabitable. Maybe, there are some creatures living under the thick layers of moon soil?
…
Most likely, there is no life on the Moon. If there is, then the Moon is something like a space station. The few people that had the chance to walk on the moon?s surface saw very strange things, such as traces of tanks and little orange glass figures.
…
NASA has a lot of impressive photographs on the subject. They are all secret photos, but even the few that have been released prove that the moon?s landscape is very different from the desolated landscape of a cold, uninhabited planet. It turns out that there are constructions on the Moon: bridges, towers, buildings, and huge domes.

Speaking of the WWN, they seem to have gotten a camera into Laurence’s bedroom.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Spam has mutated once again. A large number of people signed onto their computers here Wednesday and had what appeared to be a system message waiting for them. It must have been a test, as most of the messages were fairly nonsensical. Today we found their source.

These messages are completely anonymous and virtually untraceable. Bulk email will cause you trouble with your ISP if you are not using special software to hide your IP address. With this program your IP address never shows up anywhere.

It’s similar to IM spam, but it appears as if Windows is sending you the messages. We’ve prevented most of them from showing up by blocking port 445.

Cracking Open the Vent

You know what’s annoying? Having flesh out vague ideas into posts is annoying. Take the post below about the presumable U.S. occupation of Iraq after the war. I’m reading the NYT article about it, and I’m thinking “That’s nice, that’s pretty exactly what I want, something along the lines of what we did post WW II.”

I’ve already read about the “golden age” of the Kurds living under the no-fly zone, so I figure the economy at a minimum will look like that after a few years, and would look even better if we put a little effort in it. Thinking about the economy reminds me that Turkey has been bitch-slapped by the E.U. once again, and there ought to be a way we can turn that to our advantage. I pull up a map of the Near East and figure that, if Glenn Frazier is right and Iran is about erupt into revolution, then in about three years we will have effectively flanked Saudi Arabia geographically, especially if you count Oman. That would be nice if we were worried about them militarily, but we’re not. The only force projection S.A. has is via religion. The only way to counter that is with freedom and prosperity, neither of which we can guarantee with military force, even if we do have to use military force to establish a base in the region first.

The problem is that I can’t just say “Hey, look at the map!. Ten years from now this will be fastest growing economic area on the planet if we have half a brain!” I’ve gotta explain it and find links that support my position, and put it in some sort of structure that makes sense, and of of this interrupts the flow of words every minute or so, and I do occasionally have work to do. The whole damned process turns whatever voice I have into sand. It reads like someone put Charlie Rose on sedatives, and he then dictated the entire thing to a zombie typist. I look at it and hate it, because the interesting idea that I had is now buried by all the buttressing I put in to address potential arguments, even though it says pretty much what I want it to say. So I publish it and bitch at it, and wonder if another hour’s tweaking would help it even though I am almighty sick of it and want to read the rest of the news, and maybe write something about the kid, even though all she’s done today is get up and choose an outfit to wear before I drove her to daycare.

I need a beer and a weekend.

The New Fertile Crescent

So it appears that the structure of post-war Iraq is going to be one modeled on the post WW II occupation of Japan and Germany. Time to pull out the books* on MacArthur and …….Lucius Dubignon Clay? Learn something new everyday, I suppose.

*Here’s one ;
The U.S. Occupation of Germany: Educational Reform, 1945?1949

In Germany, the U.S. military government faced serious shortages of qualified teachers, textbooks, and school buildings. It also encountered educational traditions rooted in a class-based social structure and firm church control. For the United States, educational reform was vital to denazification, to the development of a democratic political culture, and to Germany?s reintegration as a peaceful partner into Europe?s intellectual and cultural life.

Fortunately Iraq already has a tradition of secular education, so we shouldn’t have to do much other than infrastructure repair and funding for the educational system. Other than that, the most important thing we can promote is trade. There’s a democratic Turkey to the north, newly snubbed by the E.U., and a friendly monarchy to the south in Jordan. We don’t have to set up a free trade zone in order for the Iraqis to benefit. As the Kurds in Northern Iraq have shown, just removing Saddam is a great impetus for trade, but we’re interested in more than just removing Saddam. Unless America suffers through another 9/11, we’re probably not going to launch another major military effort any time soon. We’ll have shot our wad politically and diplomatically for a good while.

It’s time for containment. We’re good at that, it doesn’t require active continuous military effort, and we’ve got 50 years of experience at it. It’s a different kind of containment, in that militarily we’re not facing off with an equal or near-equal opponent, but the principle is the same. Isolate the source by building up the countries around it. In 1960 that was the U.S.S.R. Today it’s Saudi Arabia, with maybe Egypt, Syria and Iran thrown in for good measure. I would have added Afghanistan and Pakistan to the list if I were making it a year ago. There are certainly elements within each country that oppose us, but I sincerely doubt we’ll stand idly by while they regain power. We’re not going to let the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal take control of the Pakistani nuclear bombs, no matter how many seats they are elected to, and a modicum of support from us for the Afghani people will keep the Taliban from regaining power.

Iran will probably come off the list next, as it already has a population in ferment, with the fundie Muslim leadership slowly losing their grip on the country. A U.S. force basically sitting on their border ought to go a long way towards restricting the movements of the Iranian military, so their use in population control will be increasingly limited. If the population of Iran can break the hold of the mullahs, we will be sitting in the middle of a swath of territory stretching from Turkey to India where we have more influence than we have had in decades.

All prosperity needs to flourish in the Near East is a lack of oppression, a market supported by us rather than strangled, as it has been for the past few centuries, by autocratic government. We deliver that, and improve the infrastructure in the area, and we won’t need to spend trillions to bring these countries into the modern age. They’ll be able to do it themsleves. A single four lane highway from Istanbul to New Dehli would be the biggest boom to the economies of the region since the Spice Trade vanished. Ten or twenty years of free trade in that area and the Fertile Crescent would bloom again. This time, instead of wheat, it will grow a viable alternative to the hatred spread by the Wahabists and their ilk.

Containtment in the coming cold war with the Islamists will not come because of our might at arms in the front line of nations we set against it, but it can come by making the citizens of those nations prosperous and free.

Update: Tonecluster also posits a economic rebirth along the fertile crescent, anchored by Israel, India, Iran and Turkey.

Thoughts on the D.C. Sniper

So I am just discussing the D.C. sniper with a fellow employee. He agrees with Bigwig and thinks it’s teenagers. I don’t believe this. I believe that after one day or two days, your average teenager would become remorseful and cease. Most of your teen shooters are doing it as a cry for help as much as anything else. Maybe the Columbine shooters were different. I dunno.

I do have some thoughts about the case, however. It seems to me that there are a lot of comparisons being made between the killer(s) and the Son of Sam killings. I begin to wonder if maybe the killer(s) haven’t done some research on David Berkowitz at some point. Maybe it would be useful to go back a month or two in the D.C. area bookstores to see if any Son of Sam books might have been sold to this individual? Just a thought. Probably difficult or impossible and maybe not useful, but a thought. A lot of bookstores also sell Tarot cards. Maybe this individual purchased both decks and books through the same store?

Also, I suspect I would stakeout most gas stations in the future. Especially those close to an Interstate or major throughway. Maybe especially in the surrounding counties that haven’t been struck as of yet. Maybe Northeast or Southeast. I also suspect that I would drive miles out of the way to get gas which is a long way away from the Interstate.

For my money, I still think it’s terrorists.