Monday, July 30, 2007
English Lessons
Biscuit or Cookie. Well, which is it?
Okay, both, to tell the truth. According to a quick and dirty article in Wikipedia, the concept of what we call a cookie goes back maybe all the way to ancient Persia. (No word if they used nuclear ovens.) Biscuit is the French term for the thing, and Cookie is the Dutch term. For some reason, in the United States, biscuit has lost all of that association, and now is a sort of quickbread, what the English call a scone. Of course, you can buy scones in America, too, so don’t think I’m writing this to ease your confusion.
I once had a job in a factory that molded things out of phenolic plastic. The plastic comes in bags full of small pellets, which are smashed together in a compression machine and made into a thing that looks a lot like a grey cake of soap. They called these things cookies. In England today, the term cookie is used for things that are smashed and molded in this way, such as ‘dog cookies’, which we call ‘dog biscuits’, which means exactly the same thing in most English speaking countries. I didn’t know that. So, biscuit or cookie, it doesn’t matter, just so you get to dip it in milk and have at it.
In the beginning were Hydrox chocolate crème biscuits, which gave rise to Oreo chocolate crème biscuits, which stayed just that until, apparently after World War Two, when both became cookies, not biscuits. My theory is that, having done time, so to speak, in England, a lot of American soldiers took to calling compression molded items “cookies.” The wafers outside of an Oreo are, by that definition, cookies. Since, in fact, most commercially available cookies in America fit that definition, the term is apt, from an English point of view, if you are referring to American-style cookies that used to be called biscuits.
I was reminded of all this when I decided to make a batch of a childhood favorite: Gertrude’s Drop Cookies. I have not the foggiest idea who Gertrude was. “Some friend of my mothers,” is all mom would say. But, the thing is, these cookies are a lot less short than Toll House cookies, they have baking powder in them, and they rise a lot on a greased baking sheet. (Pammed is okay, I’m sure.) They even look more like American biscuits than American cookies when they come out, and they stay soft for, well as long as it take me to eat several dozen. A day or two, at least. Less short, for the uninformed, means less greasy, which is why you need to do something to keep them from sticking to the baking sheet. If Gertrude was a friend of my mother’s mother, I’m sure she thought she was inventing “drop biscuits.” But of course my recipe calls them “cookies,” and that’s how I’ve always thought of them.
Just in case you’re curious, here’s the recipe. Just remember to spray Pam on or otherwise grease the baking sheets. Normal bake time is ten minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
1 cup shortening
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 and ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
Chocolate chips (I use most of a ¾ pound bag)
Mix it all together, drop it out of a teaspoon onto the baking sheet, and pop it in the oven. They cool quickly, and taste pretty good.
Okay, both, to tell the truth. According to a quick and dirty article in Wikipedia, the concept of what we call a cookie goes back maybe all the way to ancient Persia. (No word if they used nuclear ovens.) Biscuit is the French term for the thing, and Cookie is the Dutch term. For some reason, in the United States, biscuit has lost all of that association, and now is a sort of quickbread, what the English call a scone. Of course, you can buy scones in America, too, so don’t think I’m writing this to ease your confusion.
I once had a job in a factory that molded things out of phenolic plastic. The plastic comes in bags full of small pellets, which are smashed together in a compression machine and made into a thing that looks a lot like a grey cake of soap. They called these things cookies. In England today, the term cookie is used for things that are smashed and molded in this way, such as ‘dog cookies’, which we call ‘dog biscuits’, which means exactly the same thing in most English speaking countries. I didn’t know that. So, biscuit or cookie, it doesn’t matter, just so you get to dip it in milk and have at it.
In the beginning were Hydrox chocolate crème biscuits, which gave rise to Oreo chocolate crème biscuits, which stayed just that until, apparently after World War Two, when both became cookies, not biscuits. My theory is that, having done time, so to speak, in England, a lot of American soldiers took to calling compression molded items “cookies.” The wafers outside of an Oreo are, by that definition, cookies. Since, in fact, most commercially available cookies in America fit that definition, the term is apt, from an English point of view, if you are referring to American-style cookies that used to be called biscuits.
I was reminded of all this when I decided to make a batch of a childhood favorite: Gertrude’s Drop Cookies. I have not the foggiest idea who Gertrude was. “Some friend of my mothers,” is all mom would say. But, the thing is, these cookies are a lot less short than Toll House cookies, they have baking powder in them, and they rise a lot on a greased baking sheet. (Pammed is okay, I’m sure.) They even look more like American biscuits than American cookies when they come out, and they stay soft for, well as long as it take me to eat several dozen. A day or two, at least. Less short, for the uninformed, means less greasy, which is why you need to do something to keep them from sticking to the baking sheet. If Gertrude was a friend of my mother’s mother, I’m sure she thought she was inventing “drop biscuits.” But of course my recipe calls them “cookies,” and that’s how I’ve always thought of them.
Just in case you’re curious, here’s the recipe. Just remember to spray Pam on or otherwise grease the baking sheets. Normal bake time is ten minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
1 cup shortening
1 teaspoon salt
2 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup water
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 and ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
Chocolate chips (I use most of a ¾ pound bag)
Mix it all together, drop it out of a teaspoon onto the baking sheet, and pop it in the oven. They cool quickly, and taste pretty good.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Goodbye, Mister Potter
A while ago I wrote that I would miss Captain Sparrow if they didn’t make another sequel. Well, for no bad reason at all, the same isn’t true of old Harry. Rowling deserves the Joseph Campbell award for best spot-on depiction of mythological archetypes, except that there isn’t such a thing. Still, all the loose ends are tied up, the future is glimpsed into, the bad guy is not ever coming back, and while there are some characters who deserved better than they got, all in all the ending is pretty satisfying.
I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t yet read it, but I will say that the elbow who posted the “spoiler” in an effort to ruin the fun for people who aren’t broomstick (non-magical) up the rectum religious idiots (hey, John Paul himself liked the books, so how sacrilegious can they be?) got it wrong. Not one-hundred percent, but in fact he had not read the ending when he wrote his little spoiler page. Too bad for him. Sales have really been hurting, too. A measly 72 million copies the first weekend of release. Gee, I hope Rowling can make the rent on all of her houses next month. Gabriel (that’s him), go sit on a tack!
Back to the book, the entire series is pretty good reading. There are times that I thought she really needed an editor. She breaks the cardinal rule of fiction by telling us stuff at times, but overall it’s such a good story, much better than you’d think if you’ve only seen the movies, that it’s okay anyway. And don’t worry about who lives and dies in the end. The bad guy dies (that can’t be a spoiler for anyone, surely) so the rest works itself out all right, even if it isn’t ideal. So what is, huh? If you’re a fan, you’ll be interested to know that you will learn everything interesting there is to know about Snape and Dumbledore in this volume.
If by some chance you’ve never started the series, go ahead. The books are all out now, there’s no waiting. It’s all a fine tale, and worth the price of a used book or seven. Besides, as Dumbledore tells Harry at one point, just because it’s happening in your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real. (Now there’s a Boomer-like thought, huh?)
I won’t spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t yet read it, but I will say that the elbow who posted the “spoiler” in an effort to ruin the fun for people who aren’t broomstick (non-magical) up the rectum religious idiots (hey, John Paul himself liked the books, so how sacrilegious can they be?) got it wrong. Not one-hundred percent, but in fact he had not read the ending when he wrote his little spoiler page. Too bad for him. Sales have really been hurting, too. A measly 72 million copies the first weekend of release. Gee, I hope Rowling can make the rent on all of her houses next month. Gabriel (that’s him), go sit on a tack!
Back to the book, the entire series is pretty good reading. There are times that I thought she really needed an editor. She breaks the cardinal rule of fiction by telling us stuff at times, but overall it’s such a good story, much better than you’d think if you’ve only seen the movies, that it’s okay anyway. And don’t worry about who lives and dies in the end. The bad guy dies (that can’t be a spoiler for anyone, surely) so the rest works itself out all right, even if it isn’t ideal. So what is, huh? If you’re a fan, you’ll be interested to know that you will learn everything interesting there is to know about Snape and Dumbledore in this volume.
If by some chance you’ve never started the series, go ahead. The books are all out now, there’s no waiting. It’s all a fine tale, and worth the price of a used book or seven. Besides, as Dumbledore tells Harry at one point, just because it’s happening in your head doesn’t mean it isn’t real. (Now there’s a Boomer-like thought, huh?)
Thursday, July 19, 2007
The Kwik-E-Mart
I've put together a page of Kwik-E-Mart pictures with which to torture the unfortunate. So, if that covers your situation, please click here and visit my new page! Thanks!Labels: Social Commentary
Friday, July 06, 2007
In Case You Missed Me
There was an as yet unexplained outage at my web hosting service yesterday. I could send mail and surf using my ISP, but I got no mail nor could anyone see my website. If this happened to you, I'm sorry. I truly hope it doesn't happen again.
Labels: Info
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
My Review of "Live Free or Die Hard"
You'll need to suspend a whole boatload of disbelief for this one, but it's entertaining.
Labels: Reviews, Social Commentary
Great Googley-Moogley!
I know I used that title before, but this time for sure. The feeds are working! The feeds are working!
Thank you very much.
Elvis will now leave the building.
For a while.
Thank you very much.
Elvis will now leave the building.
For a while.
Labels: Info
231 Years and Counting
Heck, like I'm gonna write two articles for one day? Click Here and read today's funny page!
Labels: Holidays, Politics, Social Commentary
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Squishee, Anyone?
And while I'm at it, Nyah Nyah!
There are, until August 1st, a dozen Kwik-E-Marts in the world. One's in Canada. More important, one is about three miles from my house. I don't know how many readers I actually have. A few, for sure. Some of them are not even in the USA. Maybe one is in Canada. Well, who cares, because my point is that all of them know Kwik-E-Mart. Everybody knows Kwik-E-Mart. I stopped off today to get a Coke Squishee. Sure, you say. Sure I did. Well, look at this:
There are, until August 1st, a dozen Kwik-E-Marts in the world. One's in Canada. More important, one is about three miles from my house. I don't know how many readers I actually have. A few, for sure. Some of them are not even in the USA. Maybe one is in Canada. Well, who cares, because my point is that all of them know Kwik-E-Mart. Everybody knows Kwik-E-Mart. I stopped off today to get a Coke Squishee. Sure, you say. Sure I did. Well, look at this:
That's an unretouched photo, taken in my kitchen, of the Squishee cup after I finished it off. It was good Squishee, too, let me tell you. They sell Krusty's cereal, Chief Wiggum's favorite pink-iced donuts with sprinkles, and Buzz cola. My Squishee had Coke in it, though. Why mess with the Real Thing, I say.
So, all of you who are not fortunate enough to live near one, eat yer hearts out because the Kwik-E-Mart's just down the road from where I sit. Sometimes, life is good . . .
Labels: Social Commentary, Writing
Monday, July 02, 2007
Science
If there's one thing that the ideologues in charge of promoting everything from the old "Moral Majority" to the curreint fracas in Iraq can't stand, it's science. And that's no wonder at all. You can't drag people into a bogus war with scientific reasoning. You can't scare the hell out of people and get them to go against their own best interests with scientific reasoning. You can't justify being almost the exact opposite of what you pretend you're being using scientific reasoning. But you don't need scientific reasoning to put together a campaign debunking scientific reasoning. The real beauty of debunking scientific reasoning is that, if it works, then you destroy the only thing capable of defending scientific reason, and that would be scientific reason. But, what, pray tell us, you say, is scientific reasoning?
Glad you asked. Because I've noticed some glimmers of hope lately in that the poliltics of fear finally went too damned far, and I think that maybe a semblance of "reasoned discourse" might be coming back. So, in the hopes of making that more likely, here's a quick lesson on what it means to reason scientifically.
Science is based on a couple of old schools of philosophy. One is rationalism. One is empericism. Together they are called rational-empericism, which makes sense. Okay so far?
The only real "belief", or "faith" of science itself is that the world is theoretically understandable. That means that even though we may never see the day, we are capable of understanding everything if we study long enough. Everything. That's the only leap of faith required to be a scientist.
But, how do we understand anything? Are we God? No, we're not. But, to use a Jewish metaphor, we ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and got kicked out of the garden. There's not much else to do but go ahead and try to become like a god. We can't, you know, ever go back. To understand anything, we use the scientific method.
The scientific method is based on the idea that the best way to learn something about the world is to ask it a question. Asking the world a question means to set up an experiment to see what happens. Galileo one day went up the tower of Pisa and dropped a grape and an orange off at the same time. The twin splats on the plaza below happened at the same instant. Up until then, everyone thought that they knew that light objects fell more slowly than heavy objects. As it turns out, wind resistance slows light things down more than heavy things. Now we can drop a feather in a vacuum and it clanks to the floor.
What Galileo did was ask if objects really fall at different rates, and devised an experiment to find out. His theory was that they did not. He proved his theory right.
If you see something happen and think you have an explanation for why it happened, you have what a scientist calls a theory. Isaac Newton had a theory that any two objects attract each other. He even came up with a formula to find out how much the force of attraction was. [G*m1*m2/r squared] Since there isn't yet any practical way to go measure the force of attraction between every set of objects that there is, Newton's theory of gravity is still a theory.
That's the thing about a scientific theory. It doesn't mean that it's somebody's half-cocked idea, like a lot of people use the word 'theory.' It means it's the best explanation you have at the time. Maybe Newton was wrong, but we get to Mars by assuming he's right, and it works, so the theory looks pretty solid. The theory of evolution, for the record, is considered by scientists to be just about as solid as the theory of gravity. Our president expressed public doubts about global warming because it ran counter to his ideological bent. Global warming is not even a theory, it's an observed fact. The theory is that human activity is making it go faster. As with all theories, it's the best explanation we have at the time, but you can't expect an idealogue to support something reasonable.
Any scientific theory has to be disprovable. That means that it has to be possible to design an experiment to prove that the theory is wrong. You can't prove that there is no God, to use a quick religious example. That's why science is not, in spite of what critics say, a religion. You can, in theory, disprove evolution, gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, or any other scientific theory. Unfortunately for some people, so far every experiment designed to disprove any of those has tended to reinforce the thing it was trying to disprove. (This is especially hard to take in the case of relativity, but it's true.)
So, there it is in a nutshell. Science believe that the world can be understood. Science uses the scientific method to find out about the world. And, most importantly, science is always hanging out waiting for someone to prove it wrong. That's not ideologically satisfying, but it is reasonable.
'Kay?
Glad you asked. Because I've noticed some glimmers of hope lately in that the poliltics of fear finally went too damned far, and I think that maybe a semblance of "reasoned discourse" might be coming back. So, in the hopes of making that more likely, here's a quick lesson on what it means to reason scientifically.
Science is based on a couple of old schools of philosophy. One is rationalism. One is empericism. Together they are called rational-empericism, which makes sense. Okay so far?
The only real "belief", or "faith" of science itself is that the world is theoretically understandable. That means that even though we may never see the day, we are capable of understanding everything if we study long enough. Everything. That's the only leap of faith required to be a scientist.
But, how do we understand anything? Are we God? No, we're not. But, to use a Jewish metaphor, we ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and got kicked out of the garden. There's not much else to do but go ahead and try to become like a god. We can't, you know, ever go back. To understand anything, we use the scientific method.
The scientific method is based on the idea that the best way to learn something about the world is to ask it a question. Asking the world a question means to set up an experiment to see what happens. Galileo one day went up the tower of Pisa and dropped a grape and an orange off at the same time. The twin splats on the plaza below happened at the same instant. Up until then, everyone thought that they knew that light objects fell more slowly than heavy objects. As it turns out, wind resistance slows light things down more than heavy things. Now we can drop a feather in a vacuum and it clanks to the floor.
What Galileo did was ask if objects really fall at different rates, and devised an experiment to find out. His theory was that they did not. He proved his theory right.
If you see something happen and think you have an explanation for why it happened, you have what a scientist calls a theory. Isaac Newton had a theory that any two objects attract each other. He even came up with a formula to find out how much the force of attraction was. [G*m1*m2/r squared] Since there isn't yet any practical way to go measure the force of attraction between every set of objects that there is, Newton's theory of gravity is still a theory.
That's the thing about a scientific theory. It doesn't mean that it's somebody's half-cocked idea, like a lot of people use the word 'theory.' It means it's the best explanation you have at the time. Maybe Newton was wrong, but we get to Mars by assuming he's right, and it works, so the theory looks pretty solid. The theory of evolution, for the record, is considered by scientists to be just about as solid as the theory of gravity. Our president expressed public doubts about global warming because it ran counter to his ideological bent. Global warming is not even a theory, it's an observed fact. The theory is that human activity is making it go faster. As with all theories, it's the best explanation we have at the time, but you can't expect an idealogue to support something reasonable.
Any scientific theory has to be disprovable. That means that it has to be possible to design an experiment to prove that the theory is wrong. You can't prove that there is no God, to use a quick religious example. That's why science is not, in spite of what critics say, a religion. You can, in theory, disprove evolution, gravity, Einstein's theory of relativity, or any other scientific theory. Unfortunately for some people, so far every experiment designed to disprove any of those has tended to reinforce the thing it was trying to disprove. (This is especially hard to take in the case of relativity, but it's true.)
So, there it is in a nutshell. Science believe that the world can be understood. Science uses the scientific method to find out about the world. And, most importantly, science is always hanging out waiting for someone to prove it wrong. That's not ideologically satisfying, but it is reasonable.
'Kay?
Labels: Politics, Social Commentary
