Attack Cat
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
A Man with Dream that Came True
Bottle Island is dream or a vision that came true with a bit of ingenuity and some hard work. Creating an island is an amazing human feat!
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Beware the Revenge of the Idle Retired Folks
I found this on another blog and was startled to read the 'pumchline'.
What Do Retired People Do All Day?
Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting.
Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and went into a shop.
We were only in there for about 5 minutes. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.
We went up to him and said, 'Come on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?'
He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a Nazi turd. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tyres.
So my wife called him a ####-head. He finished the second ticket and put it on the wind-shield with the first. Then he started writing a third ticket. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.
Personally, we didn't care. We came into town by bus. We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.
What Do Retired People Do All Day?
Working people frequently ask retired people what they do to make their days interesting.
Well, for example, the other day my wife and I went into town and went into a shop.
We were only in there for about 5 minutes. When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.
We went up to him and said, 'Come on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?'
He ignored us and continued writing the ticket. I called him a Nazi turd. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tyres.
So my wife called him a ####-head. He finished the second ticket and put it on the wind-shield with the first. Then he started writing a third ticket. This went on for about 20 minutes. The more we abused him, the more tickets he wrote.
Personally, we didn't care. We came into town by bus. We try to have a little fun each day now that we're retired. It's important at our age.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Friday, July 23, 2010
To go with ricotta recipe (Below)
I have no plans to post more recipes but I wanted to offer one to go with the home made ricotta below.
Creamy Spinach Enchiladas
1 10 oz. can green enchilada sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons butter/margarine
1/2 cup sliced green onions
5 oz. frozen chopped spinach thawed and well drained
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
1 cup (divided) shredded Monterrey Jack or Mexican mix cheese
6 (6 inch) flour tortillas
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray a 7x9'' baking dish with cooking spray.
Melt butter in skillet over medium-high heat. Add 1/4 cup of green onions. Cook and stir 2 minutes or until tender-crisp. Add thawed spinach; cook 1 minute until heated. Remove from heat. Stir in ricotta cheese, sour cream, and 1/2 cup of Monterrey Jack cheese.
Spoon 1/4 cup filling down center of each tortilla, then roll up. Place tortillas seam-side down in baking dish. Pour sauce over enchiladas and sprinkle with remaining 1/2 cup of cheese. Bake 15-20 minutes. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup of green onions.
Note - I often use lower fat sour cream and ricotta, and sometimes buy 2% milk cheese to save on calories and fat
Creamy Spinach Enchiladas
1 10 oz. can green enchilada sauce
1 1/2 teaspoons butter/margarine
1/2 cup sliced green onions
5 oz. frozen chopped spinach thawed and well drained
1/2 cup ricotta cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
1 cup (divided) shredded Monterrey Jack or Mexican mix cheese
6 (6 inch) flour tortillas
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Spray a 7x9'' baking dish with cooking spray.
Melt butter in skillet over medium-high heat. Add 1/4 cup of green onions. Cook and stir 2 minutes or until tender-crisp. Add thawed spinach; cook 1 minute until heated. Remove from heat. Stir in ricotta cheese, sour cream, and 1/2 cup of Monterrey Jack cheese.
Spoon 1/4 cup filling down center of each tortilla, then roll up. Place tortillas seam-side down in baking dish. Pour sauce over enchiladas and sprinkle with remaining 1/2 cup of cheese. Bake 15-20 minutes. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup of green onions.
Note - I often use lower fat sour cream and ricotta, and sometimes buy 2% milk cheese to save on calories and fat
Ever made Ricotta Cheese?
In the past I have posted recipes for playdough and for flubber but never a recipe that ends up with a product that you can eat. Eating and recipes is certainly one of the things that human beings love to do. I never thought about making something like cheese before. Perhaps you will enjoy this form of play as well. Enjoy!
How to make Riccota cheese
You'll need:
1/2 gallon whole milk
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbs lemon juice
Bring the first three ingredients to a boil. Add lemon juice and simmer for two minutes. Then strain over cheese cloth into a bowl, and let drain for an hour. You can either use it immediately like we did to make a ricotta cheese cake, or you can refrigerate it for a few days and use it in your favorite recipe like lasagna or stuffed shells. Try it, it is easy, and the best ricotta I have ever had.
How to make Riccota cheese
You'll need:
1/2 gallon whole milk
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 tsp salt
3 tbs lemon juice
Bring the first three ingredients to a boil. Add lemon juice and simmer for two minutes. Then strain over cheese cloth into a bowl, and let drain for an hour. You can either use it immediately like we did to make a ricotta cheese cake, or you can refrigerate it for a few days and use it in your favorite recipe like lasagna or stuffed shells. Try it, it is easy, and the best ricotta I have ever had.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Joy of Eating
When people take the mundane and fill it with joy, it really makes me smile. Human joy and creativity are part of the goodness of the world. I hope you smile at this too!
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Poetry and its sounds
Alliteration - "field and fountain, moor and mountain." Alliteration is very common in Anglo Saxon poetry, and in English poetry in general. What isn't always emphasized is that alliteration is really a likeness between consonants. When two vowels sound alike, you have assonance. Even if they are both initial vowels. (ex: "angels' age" - Herbert) As many have pointed out, Pope's line "And apt alliteration's artful aid" misses both alliteration and assonance.
Assonance. This is where you get two words with the same vowel sounds. Assonance is even more powerful, to my ear, than alliteration; vowels are the body of speech, as singers know. Some kinds of Spanish poetry use assonance the way we use end rhyme in English. The Song of Roland uses it - check out Dorothy Sayers' translation to get an idea of the effect. And if you listen to any kind of popular music or rap or spoken word poetry, you will notice (maybe to your irritation) that assonance, rather than perfect rhyme, joins one verse to the next. (I'm not really bothered by it myself. Blame my Lorca addiction.)
Skothending. I would have had to call it "final alliteration" if I hadn't come across this fantastic Norse word in some of Hopkins' lecture notes. Skothending apparently means "glancing blow," and that is the effect it gives: a very subtle one. One poem which uses it to great effect is Horace's "Carpe diem" ode. In it, Horace keeps ending words with 's' right where there is a metrical pause: "Tu ne quaesieris - scire nefas; "numeros. ut melius"; "sapias, vina liques". Somehow this enhances the haunting, waltz-like feeling of the meter. A subtle effect, and not very well-known.
Rhyme. For perfect rhyme you need the final stressed syllables to match up in both vowels and consonants. Final assonance can also count as rhyme. Slant rhymes would take a whole other post! A lot of prosody writers put three of my categories under the heading of "slant rhyme," but I think it's more useful to distinguish things like pararhyme and save the term "slant rhyme" for really distant cousins like "brick" and "blink," while allowing that someone who mixes up assonance and pararhyme and such in his line endings is, well, slant-rhyming. Seamus Heaney is a modern master of both kinds of slant-rhyme, the more and the less blurry.
Front-Rhyme. Instead of keeping the end of the word and changing the consonant at the beginning, you keep all of the word from the beginning and change the final consonant. This gives power to "The Wreck of the Deutschland" - "giver of breath and bread" - and to "The Hollow Men" ("shape without shade...").
Pararhyme. For pararhyme, you keep the hard consonantal shell of the word but change the vowel. Wilfred Owen kind of owns this one: "Courage was mine, and I had mystery; / Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery." He commonly used it in place of end rhyme, and it was his signature technique. WH Auden has a nightmarish little poem in which a good 50% of the fear is generated merely by the pararyhmes: "reader/rider," "midden/madden," "fearer/farer," and finally - well, read it yourself! Brrr.
Homophone. "Rein/rain/reign," "rose/rose/rows," etc. It's unseldom that you would see "rows" and "rose" together in a line: usually homophones are more powerful, not as puns, but as echoes within a single word. To make up a lame example, "rain of fire," when spoken, could also be heard as "reign of fire."
Assonance. This is where you get two words with the same vowel sounds. Assonance is even more powerful, to my ear, than alliteration; vowels are the body of speech, as singers know. Some kinds of Spanish poetry use assonance the way we use end rhyme in English. The Song of Roland uses it - check out Dorothy Sayers' translation to get an idea of the effect. And if you listen to any kind of popular music or rap or spoken word poetry, you will notice (maybe to your irritation) that assonance, rather than perfect rhyme, joins one verse to the next. (I'm not really bothered by it myself. Blame my Lorca addiction.)
Skothending. I would have had to call it "final alliteration" if I hadn't come across this fantastic Norse word in some of Hopkins' lecture notes. Skothending apparently means "glancing blow," and that is the effect it gives: a very subtle one. One poem which uses it to great effect is Horace's "Carpe diem" ode. In it, Horace keeps ending words with 's' right where there is a metrical pause: "Tu ne quaesieris - scire nefas; "numeros. ut melius"; "sapias, vina liques". Somehow this enhances the haunting, waltz-like feeling of the meter. A subtle effect, and not very well-known.
Rhyme. For perfect rhyme you need the final stressed syllables to match up in both vowels and consonants. Final assonance can also count as rhyme. Slant rhymes would take a whole other post! A lot of prosody writers put three of my categories under the heading of "slant rhyme," but I think it's more useful to distinguish things like pararhyme and save the term "slant rhyme" for really distant cousins like "brick" and "blink," while allowing that someone who mixes up assonance and pararhyme and such in his line endings is, well, slant-rhyming. Seamus Heaney is a modern master of both kinds of slant-rhyme, the more and the less blurry.
Front-Rhyme. Instead of keeping the end of the word and changing the consonant at the beginning, you keep all of the word from the beginning and change the final consonant. This gives power to "The Wreck of the Deutschland" - "giver of breath and bread" - and to "The Hollow Men" ("shape without shade...").
Pararhyme. For pararhyme, you keep the hard consonantal shell of the word but change the vowel. Wilfred Owen kind of owns this one: "Courage was mine, and I had mystery; / Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery." He commonly used it in place of end rhyme, and it was his signature technique. WH Auden has a nightmarish little poem in which a good 50% of the fear is generated merely by the pararyhmes: "reader/rider," "midden/madden," "fearer/farer," and finally - well, read it yourself! Brrr.
Homophone. "Rein/rain/reign," "rose/rose/rows," etc. It's unseldom that you would see "rows" and "rose" together in a line: usually homophones are more powerful, not as puns, but as echoes within a single word. To make up a lame example, "rain of fire," when spoken, could also be heard as "reign of fire."
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Wonderwoman
One reason that I love to explore the 'next blog' function is that it brings me into contact with worlds of thought that I did not know existed. I have become aware of the popularity of graphic novels and I wanted to pay homage to that talented group of people in this blog. Below you will find a woman explaining the history of Wonder Woman.
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Top 20 movies based on number of tickets sold, not dollar revenues
1 "Gone With the Wind" (1939) 202,044,600
2 "Star Wars" (1977) 178,119,600
3 "The Sound of Music" (1965) 142,415,400
4 "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) 141,854,300
5 "The Ten Commandments" (1956) 131,000,000
6 "Titanic" (1997) 128,345,900
7 "Jaws" (1975) 128,078,800
8 "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) 124,135,500
9 "The Exorcist" (1973) 110,568,700
10 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) 109,000,000
11 "101 Dalmatians" (1961) 99,917,300
12 "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) 98,180,600
13 "Ben-Hur" (1959) 98,000,000
14 "Return of the Jedi" (1983) 94,059,400
15 "The Sting" (1973) 89,142,900
16 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) 88,141,900
17 "Jurassic Park" (1993) 86,205,800
18 "The Graduate" (1967) 85,571,400
19 "Star Wars: Episode I" (1999) 84,825,800
20 "Fantasia" (1941) 83,043,500
"Avatar" would be #26 on this list.
The Hollywood Reporter
2 "Star Wars" (1977) 178,119,600
3 "The Sound of Music" (1965) 142,415,400
4 "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" (1982) 141,854,300
5 "The Ten Commandments" (1956) 131,000,000
6 "Titanic" (1997) 128,345,900
7 "Jaws" (1975) 128,078,800
8 "Doctor Zhivago" (1965) 124,135,500
9 "The Exorcist" (1973) 110,568,700
10 "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) 109,000,000
11 "101 Dalmatians" (1961) 99,917,300
12 "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980) 98,180,600
13 "Ben-Hur" (1959) 98,000,000
14 "Return of the Jedi" (1983) 94,059,400
15 "The Sting" (1973) 89,142,900
16 "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981) 88,141,900
17 "Jurassic Park" (1993) 86,205,800
18 "The Graduate" (1967) 85,571,400
19 "Star Wars: Episode I" (1999) 84,825,800
20 "Fantasia" (1941) 83,043,500
"Avatar" would be #26 on this list.
The Hollywood Reporter
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Friday, July 9, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Make Flubber
recipe for Flubber
Just a few simple ingredients can make some kids happy for a couple of hours or reconnect you to your experiencing self:
Just mix together!
2 cups of white glue
1 1/2 cups hot water
1 cup warm water
3 tablespoons of borax
food coloring
Just a few simple ingredients can make some kids happy for a couple of hours or reconnect you to your experiencing self:
Just mix together!
2 cups of white glue
1 1/2 cups hot water
1 cup warm water
3 tablespoons of borax
food coloring
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Thursday, July 1, 2010
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