while commiserating with my housemate, james, about the current state of american politics, it occurred to me that my dog, snuffy, is just like john mccain. observe:

• john mccain spent five years in captivity in north vietnam.
• snuffy has spent the better part of every day for the last five years in a crate.
• john mccain can’t raise his arms over his head without difficulty.
• snuffy has no arms.
• john mccain has flip-flopped on issues from taxes to reproductive rights to the iraq war.
• as a puppy, snuffy chewed on flip flops.
• john mccain worked to increase traffic at national airport, thereby insuring area residents wouldn’t get a good night’s sleep.
• snuffy barks a lot, thereby insuring neighbors don’t get a good night’s sleep.
• john mccain made nice with bush, hugging the man who f*cked him up the ass in the 2000 republican primaries.
• snuffy licked his vet on the nose after she expressed his anal glands last month.
• john mccain snuffy was neutered, and now has no balls.

uncanny, isn’t it?

oh, and as for courage - she’s the yowling image of sarah palin. look for yourself:

see? i bet you didn’t know palin had so much gray.

the right side of my face is numb from my cheekbone to my jawline, courtesy of my dentist who did some drilling this morning. consequently, i’ve got nothing much of interest for the blog today. so i’ll share two things.

1. beautiful photos of the decay of an abandoned railway station in abkhazia. the railway station - which appears to be nestled between the ocean and a small mountain range - looks like it was stunning while it was still in use; now the encroachment of nature gives it a vaguely logan’s run feel. (hat tip: bryan)

2. the omnivore’s 100, originally posted here, coming to bc4 via collecting tokens.

Here’s the deal:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp (an unfortunately bony fish)
9. Borscht (best ever: in a casino on a sunday in st. petersburg, when nothing else was open)
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart (mmm. garbage dogs. sometimes it’s what you need.)
16. Epoisses (i’m assuming this refers to the cheese, not the place)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream (once. never, ever again.)
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras (probably my favorite politically incorrect foodstuff of all time)
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn or Head Cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam Chowder in Sourdough Bowl
33. Salted Lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted Cream Tea
38. Vodka Jelly/Jell-O (jello shots, eh?)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (and it wasn’t on purpose. eew.)
43. Phaal (er… maybe?)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth $120 or more
46. Fugu (aka pufferfish)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel (in elementary school i’d gross out my classmates when i brought smoked eel to school for lunch. you just peel ‘em like a banana.)
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin (i wouldn’t recommend it. it’s like chewing on wet, iodine-soaked toilet paper.)
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle (i still have a recipe for spaetzle tacked up on a kitchen cabinet from the last time i made it.)
57. Dirty gin martini (is there any other kind?)
58. Beer above 8% ABV (delirium tremens. yum.)
59. Poutine (i haven’t had this, but after looking it up, i want to!)
60. Carob chips (quite possibly the worst culinary fraud ever perpetrated on a child.)
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs (all those poor little frogs on crutches…)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (there’s a place in alexandria that makes good beignets; i make churros occasionally; and i had an elephant ear yesterday and a funnel cake not more than a month ago. i love me some fried pastry.)
68. Haggis (when in scotland…)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snails
79. Lapsang Souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom Yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (a box of them is sitting on my desk)
84. 3 Michelin Star Tasting Menu
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare (does domestic rabbit count?)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (nasturtiums are particularly tasty - peppery and sweet, if picked when the nectar is still wet.)
89. Horse (i won’t say never, but damn, those french are strange.)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam (you can’t live on guam and avoid it for long)
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose Harissa (i’m claiming yes, although it’s really a “probably.”)
94. Catfish (a smoked lunchbox addition when we ran out of eel.)
95. Mole Poblano
96. Bagel and Lox
97. Lobster Thermidor (waste of perfectly good lobster)
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

this seems like a fairly narrow selection of foods, but that might be due to my ethnic background and having been dragged around the world, from pillar to post, as a child.

alejna also added these, for geographical variety:

101. poi
102. kimchi
103. vegemite
104. guaraná

and i would add

105. balut (for the sheer gross-out factor)
106. lumpia (a guam favorite)
107. kelleguin
108. anticuchos de corazón
109. knedlik
110. svíčková
111. pajsl (with beef heart, rather than lung)

safe(?) in oakland

i’ll get back to work in a moment.

my thoughts on NBC’s coverage of the equestrian sports: it sucks. even online, you can’t watch the full competition unless you do so live - and that means 7:15 wednesday morning for the dressage competition. NBC’s prerecorded video feed for the dressage portion of the 3-day event seems limited to two or three highlighted riders.

pff.

RSVP, and don’t forget, X marks the spot.

picked it up at a thrift store last week while looking for stuff to wear at burning man. now, what to DO with it?

for ease of arm motion, i’ve already taken off the sleeves. but i’m looking for any and all other suggestions. “get married in it” won’t fly, b/c afaik, bigamy is still illegal in these here parts.

dress back Close

dress front Close

first, the food, because that’s what i said i’d post. i started off with the chilies and yak cheese served with bhutanese rice. the red rice is the bhutanese rice; i gathered from other sources that the white rice was added as filler. all in all, it was pretty good - a bit like queso dip, actually. only somewhat runnier. i ate almost all of it, and was still hungry.

so then i meandered down to the viet-tex fusion tent (”texas noodles,” i think is the name of the place) and ordered some steamed pork buns. they were the spitting image of dim sum pork buns, but the filling was a bit more western barbecue-like. also yummy.

but what was really neat to see at the folklife festival was the buddhist monk working on a sand mandala:

so if you’re in dc, go check it out the festival. it’s pretty cool.

today’s the first day of the smithsonian folklife festival, so i headed down to the mall (america’s front yard, apparently) for a sampling of bhutanese cuisine. and i have one thing to say: yak dri¹ cheese - pretty good.

photos to follow.
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¹ i have been informed by a highschool classmate that you can’t get cheese from a yak, b/c yaks are male. the female of the species is apparently a “dri” or a “nak.” why he knows this, i have no idea.

this isn’t so much a comment on the problem with blogs, but a comment on what happens when you have access to a window into an author’s personality, and you find you don’t like what you see.

i read a few authors’ blogs. neil gaiman, warren ellis, wil wheaton, posner and becker.¹ perhaps that should read “very few,” because that’s the sum total i read regularly. (there’s a whole list of ‘em here, though, should you be curious about other authors who blog.)

some, i really like: neil gaiman, wil wheaton.
others, i read because they’re good for me: posner and becker, and, back in law school, volokh. (also not an author, except of law-school related headachiness. and it’s a group blog.)

one, i’ve decided to take off my feeds: warren ellis. i guess i’m tired of reading angry, self-involved, cooler-than-thou posts about things i don’t find that relevant. let’s face it: if i wanted to waste time with that, i’d just read the archives of baggage carousel 4.

so bye-bye, warren. i’ll probably keep reading freakangels, but maybe i’ll replace his feed with david brin.
________________
¹ okay, posner and becker aren’t really authors in non-scholarly sense, but they do write quite a bit. although for the purpose of this post, they really don’t count because they don’t write much about themselves, but use the blog as an extension of their scholarly thought. for all i know, they may have nothing but scholarly thoughts.

i explored the northern neck of virginia this past weekend. (does that mean VA has a southern neck? google suggests “no.”)

photos to follow within a reasonable time.

following my not-quite-diatribe about the ridiculous ondcp report, i began to wonder if the problem (politicized research) was being exacerbated by poor reporting skills. and while an n=2 doesn’t make for a very good sample (at least where N=the universe of washington post reports on surveys or studies), evidence for the poor reporting skills hypothesis is mounting.

take today’s wapo article covering the findings of the third annual autovantage road rage survey: for two years in a row, washington region drivers have been found to be the fifth-rudest in the nation. staff writer jonathan mummolo takes this to mean “we aren’t getting any ruder.”

wrongo, jonathan. what it means is that our relative ranking hasn’t changed. it doesn’t say squat about our actual level of rudeness. we may indeed be getting ruder, or (unlikely) we may be getting more polite. don’t you idiot uneducated moronic journalists know anything about basic research?

*sigh* at least there’s free iced coffee at dunkin’ d tomorrow. and no, they’re not related.