Nazis

Why we need to tone down the rhetoric on health care. Because the memory of those who died at their hands shouldn't be cheapened by using the term to mean "someone I disagree with politically."

Go read.

[H/T: GottaLaff]

No life? Hardly...

There's a how-many-movies-have-you-seen meme floating around Facebook at the moment that begins with the declaration:

SUPPOSEDLY if you've seen over 85 films, you have no life.

Note that we're never told who's supposing this...

But at any rate. Let's test that assumption.

Assume that you see 85 movies. Further assume that the movies you see average 2 1/2 hours, about as long as the latest Harry Potter installment. (Mini-review: It was good, but as a friend of mine put it, I really don't see what there is about this that inspires such fanaticism...).

Further assume you spend 8 hours per night sleeping, 40 hours per week working, and 3 hours per day in other stuff (eating, commuting, etc), leaving 51 hours per week potential movie-watching time.

Let us further assume your movie-watching career began at age 10, and you are 35 when you take the quiz.

51 hours per week * 52 weeks per year * 25 years = 66,300 potential movie-watching hours.
85 movies * 2.5 hours each = 212.5 hours.

So if you've seen 85 movies, you've spent 212.5/66,300 = 0.321% (rounding up) of your time watching movies.

Hardly into "you have no life" territory.

As an aside, it's amazing what you can distract yourself with when you don't want to work....

The Not-Me-And-Julia Project: Status report

It's possible that seeing Julie & Julia triggered the final snap, but I've been in a culinary rut with the same few easy-to-fix things for quite a while. And, well, frankly, I'm getting darn tired of my own cooking, and how limited it is.

So, something snapped, and I says to myself, I says, "Self, either buy a damn cookbook or stop griping!"

So, I bought a damn cookbook.

No, not Julia's. The French cuisine I've had, eh. About half of it has been really good, about half inedible. (Yes, that may, probably does, say more about me than about French cuisine. Big deal. My point is, why master making food I don't care for?)

No, I'm not working my way through it systematically. I have no particular timetable, no "X recipes by this date" obsession. And as classes haven't started yet, I've got more time to cook that I do during the semester.

So far: Six days, seven recipes, only one failure, and I figured out what I did wrong with that one and tried again, with better results.

So, I may not have all my assignments and lecture notes written up, but at least I'm not sick of my own cooking.