Bored at Home

I have a cold.

Maybe it's an alergy, or bronchitis.
All I know is I feel crummy, can't sleep, I've got a hoarse throat (think "Mister Ed") and I can't be around other people for a while.

That's not all bad. I've been surfing the net, and again I'm amazed at the stuff you can find there.

Since I haven't done a BLOGMEAT post for a long time, here's The Geek's Stuff To See When You Really Need A Timewaster.

Thanks to Jason at Jason's Blog, I found a really swell Rube Goldberg advertisement for the Toyota Accord.

Also, my friend Gary T. sent me a video which is so weird I created an entire new album on my Photo Gallery for Weird Stuff. Here's the Kosovo song (apologies to The Beach Boys).

Speaking of music, I'm always on the lookout for music to dub into IPSC Videos. (Okay, this works. It's continues the ISPC theme of the blog.) Lately I've been looking for "Holding Out For A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler. I tried Napster, but the download had some weird code inserted that prevented me from using Windows Movie Maker to add it to a project.

Fortunately, I did find a wonderfully terrible video she made (sometime in the 80's?) which was so badly staged it was hillarious. Can you believe Google Videos?

[sigh!] I suppose I'll have to find a cd in the used-cd store that has the song on it. I was planning to hold it out for a particularly spectacular stage, such as Yong Lee's performance on Stage 5: "The Doors", in the 2005 Croc Match. I would have liked to use "Hero" as the theme song, but I was lucky to have a copy of "Ballroom Bash" and the timing was right even though I couldn't really get a sense of the energy of the effort.

I had loaded the video I DID make to YouTube, which allows me to present it here (The same video is available for display from YouTube elsewhere on this website. But I'm bored .)

Yong Lee: 2005 Banzaii Ballistic "You Got Bullets?" Croc Match, September 2005. Stage 5: "The Doors":


What else?

While I was uploading the Kosovo video to my photo gallery, I decided it was time to reorganize it. There's no content there yet that you haven't already seen, but this is the Official Announcement of the "Geek House of Weird".

Watch this space. I get bored quite often.

I'm getting hungry, too. Here's a recipe for a Drunkards Lunch.

Take a quarter-pound (whatever size it comes in that will fit) of Edam or Brie cheese, wrap it in a Pillsbury Croissant Dough package. That stuff comes in the blue tube, it's already rolled out and triangularly perforated to make the croissants. Sqeeze the dough together where it's perforated, so it's one sheet. Wrap up the cheese. You got dough left over? cut it off, cut in into triangles, and make mini-croissants. Put the 'cheese in broulle' (pastry-wrapped cheese) in a shallow glass pan, surround it with the mini-croissants, and bake it in the oven @ 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until it's brown on the top. It helps if you put butter on the top, it browns better.

While that's cooking, core and thin-slice a couple of apples, put the slices in a bowl of cold water so it doesn't turn brown.

Then slice a quarter pound of smoked salmon ... I prefer the peppered smoked salmon, but it's your choice ... in bite-size pieces on a small cutting board.

Open a bottle of your favorite wine, preferably a white or rose but Boone's Farm will serve. Or open a beer. You probably have one open already; forget I mentioned it, I'm an idiot.

Put the sliced smoked salmon, apples, and a couple of plates with forks on the coffee table in front of the couch. You know you have one. Just sit on the couch, look at the TV, and that cluttered surface between you and the TV is the coffee table. Put the plates there, put the salmon there, put the apples there, put a couple of pot-holders in the middle and take the browned cheese boule on it. Serve it in the glass pan you cooked it in.

Slice up the cheese thingie, serve eighths portions of it with that triangle-shaped thing you got as a wedding gift from your uncle in Alaska that your wife uses to put pie slices on those dinky saucers.

The cheese, you should eat with a fork because it's hot. Everything else (except the beer/wine, dummy) is finger food. Eat a slice of apple. Fork in some cheese stuff. Nibble on the salmon. Don't swallow until you can't stand it any more, because the combination of flavors and textures is, as Martha Stewert is too wussy to say, "to die for". Especially when you wash it all down with the wine/beer whatever.

BTW, don't drink 'lite beer". You may think it's your choice, but it's my recipe and I'm telling you, the whole idea is to have strong, contrasting flavors that somehow compliment each other. You start pouring week horse-piss down your pie-hole, you've ruined the whole thing. Get outta here, I don't even want to talk to you, you moron!

Okay, you guys who are nodding your heads, you get it. You can stay.

There's enough food there for two people to snack on for a quarter of a football game, if you aren't both guys. There's a hint in there for you. Whip this up for your sweetie on a dull evening. She'll be impressed that you can cook (you DID remember to set the timer to 20 minutes for the cheese, right? Do NOT burn the cheeze, you wuss!) and it's fun to play for five or ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the dough to wrap around the odd-shaped chunk of cheese.

Here's a hint: when you slice the apples? Don't peel them, okay? And slice them under the kitchen faucet, so when you invariably SLICE YOUR THUMB you can hold it under the water and nobody will ever know. (Elegant hosts will dispose of the bloody apple parts in the kitchen-sink garbage diosposal. You yobs will want to make sure you eat the gory apple parts before they get to the table, okay?)

When you're done, here's how to make EXTRA big points with your sweetie.

Pick up the cheezy glass pan, the bowl full of water, the cutting board, the plates and forks and silver pie-server and napkins and dispose of them properly in the kitchen sink. Don't run water on the napkins, it's a mess when your sweetie cleans up after you. You got the TIVO thingie, you can pause the ball game for thirty seconds.

On your way back out to the living room, bring the wine bottle with you and top of her glass.

Several times.

You cook, you clean, you pour wine like a sommelier (which I can't spell and you can't pronounce). That's pretty impresive to your sweetie.

Who knows, you just might get lucky.

At least, in the morning she may not remember that you can cook and you can clean.

Whew! Dodged that one, Partner!