OK, I've released the BME Personals into the wild. Let's hope it survives the night… What's the expression? If you love something, kill it. If it comes back to you, you own it forever. …Or something like that. Oh, and for those that are wondering, vampy is the current cover model.
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So you've heard me talk here about what a good idea I think cattail whiskey is — cattails are more productive per acre than corn, and it's an idea that I don't think anyone has capitalized on yet.
Anyway, even though cattails used to be eaten very commonly in North America, I've never actually tried them before so I figured, hey, today is a good day to die, right? I realize they're not really “in season” right now, but I took a short walk and dug up a few roots. As I understand it the leaves should be eaten pretty green, and the “flower” can either be eaten when it's young, or turned into flour once its dry… I was more interested in experimenting with the roots themselves, so I peeled them (using just the spongy part on the inside) and cooked them in garlic, peppers, and olive oil along with a few rougly chopped lower leaves. The taste was great (but subtle), although the leaves were definitely too fibrous to eat as is; I don't know if steaming them or something might help. The roots were the gem of it though — prepared like this they tasted somewhere between a normal potato and a yam… Definitely something I'll try again, so if anyone has any experience cooking these sorts of things, please let me know your secrets. |
OK, whoever did this is pretty sharp. That's the sneakiest method ever! :-)
OK, this thing is really cool… If anyone else out there is toying with the notion of doing an online radio station, the JK Audio Inline Patch is the unit to get. I also have a much higher-end Genter unit, but this is better, and really simple to use.
It plugs inbetween the wall and the phone. On the back it has in and out jacks as both 1/8″ and XLR for feeding signals both to the phoneline and from the phoneline (so if you don't want to talk into the phone, you can use your computer's mic instead). The out signal can be a mixed mono signal, or you can send a stereo signal with each person on a different channel (ie. so if you're listening, I'd be in one speaker, and the person being interviewed would be in the other speaker). You can control the volume of each side of the conversation separately as well.
And yes, this means I start recording all my phonecalls. The quality is really good. I'm not getting any hum or background noise, and the separation is really clean.
| 1996 | The Nintendo 64 is released in the US, selling half a million systems on the first day. |
| 1995 | US troops indicted on child rape charges in Japan. |
| 1992 | Magic Johnson announces his (short-lived) comeback. |
| 1989 | Jeffrey Petkovich and Peter DeBernardi become the first people in history to go over the Canadian side of Niagara Falls (and survive) |
| 1989 | A.A. Busch Jr (of Busch Beer fame) died. |
| 1988 | UN peacekeeping forces win the Nobel Peace prize. |
| 1988 | The first shuttle mission after the Challenger disaster is launched successfully. |
| 1984 | Prince has the number one single, album, and movie all at once, the first artist to do so since the Beatles. |
| 1983 | US Congress invokes the War Powers Act for the first time ever (to keep US troops in Lebanon). |
| 1982 | Seven people killed by cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. |
| 1978 | Pope John Paul I died. |
| 1977 | Muhammad Ali beats Ernie Shavers and claims the heavyweight crown in the most watched prize-fight in history. (Also, this fight was the first to be officiated by a woman). |
| 1977 | Salyut 6 (Soviet space station) launched. |
| 1973 | Soyuz 12 (experimental Russian flight) returns to Earth. |
| 1973 | BME's Shannon Larratt born in Victoria, BC. |
| 1963 | The Rolling Stones start their first tour, opening for Bo Diddley and The Everly Brothers. |
| 1963 | Les Claypool (of Primus) born. |
| 1962 | Canada launches its first orbiting satellite. Alouette 1 studies the ionosphere from 1000km up. |
| 1957 | Andrew Dice Clay (the “actor”) born. |
| 1951 | First color television broadcast of a football game. |
| 1948 | Bryant Gumble (the news host) born. |
| 1943 | Lech Walesa (Polish solidarity leader) born. |
| 1940 | First US merchant ship (the “Booker T Washington”) launched under a black captain (Hugh Mulzac). |
| 1936 | First use of radio in a US Presidential campaign. |
| 1935 | Jerry Lee Lewis (the musician) born. |
| 1930 | First Canadian football game played under lights, UBC vs. Hamilton. |
| 1929 | Bob Newhart (the actor) born. |
| 1922 | Canada declares that it is not automatically at war just because Britain is. |
| 1901 | Enrico Fermi (the physicist) is born. |
| 1895 | Louis Pasteur died. |
| 1890 | First pro-baseball game, in which NY beats Washington 4-2 in NYC. |
| 1829 | Scotland Yard formed in London, England. |
| 1789 | The United States officially establish a military. |
Thanks to MisterV for sending me this ad from today's Boston Globe for Kleenex. If you can't read it in the picture, it reads, “sixty seconds of anticipation plus two soft favorites equals one brave little big girl”, and at the bottom it calls this a “grown up moment”.
Not only is an old-style piercing gun shown (which even the piercing gun industry at this point largely accepts is dangerous), but it's being used without gloves or anything… You ever get the feeling that people are just getting stupider and stupider, or that society is stratifying into a small number that are “with it” and a giant number that are “extremely not with it”?
