AdamSmith

Happy to oblige.

Well, a little more dirty-minded here. If an "Oreo" is someone accused of being "black outside, white inside," then what kind of person is a Crookie: several Oreos stuffed inside a BIG FAT white thing -- topped by another Oreo!?

Maybe take a life mask of your favorite escort? Doesn't necessarily have to be his face!

The gentleman finds his four-fingered hands a boon to diverting attention on those bad-toupee days.

(1) Intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? There has to be. See the Drake Equation. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation And of course the old crack "They must be intelligent -- you don't see them looking for intelligent life down here." (2) Have we had a visit yet? No way. As Arthur Clarke said, "If I came 2 billion light-years to see you, believe I wouldn't spend another 200 years lurking around in the shadows trying to find a parking spot." I know Erich Von Daniken proved it had to have been extraterrestrials who set up the Easter Island statues. But as Thor Heyerdahl went and saw, if no aliens are handy that day, then a couple dozen men with ropes and log rollers will have to do.

Pimp him out!

Seems obvious once you hear it explained. (Obviously. ) It occurs especially that, seated facing rear, the headrest would help guard against neck injuries from the head otherwise being thrown forward on deceleration.

Fascinating! Would plane accidents in general be likely to cause less harm if seats faced rear? Never heard that discussed before. I once sat in a rear-facing seat, with my back to the bulkhead, on a commuter flight somewhere or other. Takeoff felt a little disconcerting, leaning forward and "down," but I don't recall any other part of the flight feeling unusual at all.

Enjoy! If you make one, post a picture of it here.

Oh my! We know what an "Oreo" means in racial speak. What on earth could the "Crookie" come to represent?

Oh God. I want one. Lord save us all!

Aw! Blancmange is really easy to make, if you avoid the complications shown above. Here is a nice recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/blanc-mange-english-style/ Although forget that the Brits with their usual culinary flair used to call it "a cold shape." Or just "shape." "Oh, yum, we're having shape tonight!" Also by all means let pass from memory the impressively ghastly "congealed salads" that appeared just about every time you went to table growing up here in the South, so it seemed.

LOL Sort of like farm-raised Asian carp.

Oh dear! Well, find a 'safe house' for your shoes, lie low and carry on.

Notice hitoall pretending that he didn't see my question about what country he is in now.

Macedoine and Other Eccentric Jellies A Jelly made using a macedoine mould in my collection By Ivan Day http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com I am an independent social historian of food culture and also a professional chef and confectioner. I run practical courses on all aspects of British and Italian food history at my home in the English Lake District. I am also the author of a number of books and many papers on the history of food and have curated many major exhibitions on food history in the UK, US and Europe. The main aim of this blog is to attempt to expose and correct many of the fairy stories that are written about the history of our food. I am assisted in this task by the Food History Jottings researcher Plumcake. Perhaps the most singular culinary expression of the advance of the Industrial Revolution in Victorian Britain was the extraordinary popularity of mass-produced copper jelly moulds. By the middle of the nineteenth century the fashion for this kind of kitchen kit had accelerated into a gastronomic craze. This was the result of the convergence of two emerging phenomena - the availability of cheap factory made gelatine and the increasing use of powerful pneumatic presses to stamp out copper into ever more intricate shapes. After a hundred years of being an unloved, even despised children's party food, a jelly revival has once again recently hit the fashionable food sector. This was started about twenty years ago by my dear genius friend Peter Brears and to a lesser extent by myself, when both of us started running country house events where we recreated jellies and other moulded foods for the public using original period moulds. I also started running courses on the subject in the early 1990s. More recently, Sam Bompas and Harry Parr, both attendees of my courses who have always kindly acknowledged the debt they owe to Peter and myself, have made a career for themselves out of the genre. However, despite modern computer 3D printing technology, the moulds available to the contemporary aspiring jelly maker just cannot compete with those of the Victorian kitchen. Just look at these! A few nineteenth manufacturers designed and produced highly specialised multi-part moulds for creating very unusual jellies with mysterious internal components, such as spiral columns and pyramids of fruit. Some of these striking British designs were even admired from afar by important chefs on the other side of the English Channel. In Cosmopolitan Cookery (London: 1870), the great Second Empire French chef Felix Urbain Dubois illustrated two of these extraordinary English inventions together with recipes he designed for them. He probably encountered them in London when he was exiled there during the Franco-Prussian War. One he illustrated was the macedoine mould, a fancy copper mould with a dome shaped internal liner, both clipped together with three metal pins. Here is Dubois's illustration - This mould was utilised by pouring a transparent jelly into the gap between the mould and the liner. Once the jelly had set, warm water was poured into the liner, which enabled it to be removed. Small pieces of fruit (the 'macedoine') and more jelly could then be used to fill up the resulting cavity. The finished dish was a striking hollow jelly containing a mosaic of coloured fruit, which distorted into an abstract pattern because of the effects of refraction caused by the flutings on the mould. I am fortunate enough to own a complete macedoine mould and used it to make the jelly at the top of this posting. However, my example is a different design from that which Dubois illustrates, though in principle it functions in exactly the same way. Although macedoine moulds are extremely rare - I have only ever seen two others, which lacked their liners. My example is the only one I have ever encountered which is complete. Here are some photographs. Macedoine Jelly from above Another Macedoine Jelly made with this mould The chained pins ensure that the inner liner is kept stable and at an equal distance from the outer mould. Macedoine jellies were also be made in plain moulds. The striking example above is from Jules Gouffé, The Royal Book of Pastry and Confectionery (London: 1874). A large plain charlotte mould would have been used to make this. It has been garnished with jelly croutons to create the crest around the top and is surmounted by a gum paste or nougat tazza filled with real or ice cream strawberries. Although a very weak jelly with a light 'mouth feel' was used to make a macedoine, the fruit inside acted as a very strong armature which could support a decorative structure like the tazza above. Even rarer than the macedoine mould illustrated by Dubois is this remarkable and lovely version, which reminds me of a Maya pyramid or ziggurat. It has a liner very similar to the other one and makes the most wonderful jelly filled with a pyramid of fruit. I have never ever seen another in this design. A Jelly containing a pyranid of apricots made in the stepped macedoine mould above The second English mould illustrated by Dubois in Cosmopolitan Cookery (1870) is a version of a very popular novelty mould first marketed by Temple and Reynolds of Belgravia in 1850. The location of their shop gave the name to this particular dish, the most extraordinary of all Victorian novelty jellies, the Belgrave. The outer copper moulds are quite common, but a complete set with a full compliment of pewter spiral liners is a rare find. Two versions were made, the round and the oval, the latter being very scarce now, especially with liners. The liners were placed into a jelly mould which was filled with clear jelly. When the jelly had set, the liners were literally 'screwed' out of the jelly by pouring hot water into them. This resulted in a number of spiral cavities which could then be filled with a coloured jelly or blancmange. Urbain Dubois's 1870 illustrations of the Belgrave Mould An illustration and instructions for making a Belgrave Jelly from a very late edition of Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery (London: 1905) My very rare oval Belgrave mould with pewter liners Oval Belgrave Jelly made with the mould above The more orthodox round Belgrave Jelly The two most common jelly moulds which included liners to create striking internal features were the Alexandra Cross and Brunswick Star. These were designed to celebrate the wedding of Queen Victoria's eldest son Edward Prince of Wales to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The Alexandra Cross jelly had the Danish Flag running all the way through it, while the Brunswick Star had a white Garter Star running through it, both rather like a stick of rock. Here is an advertisement from the 1890s published by the cookery teacher and mould retailer Mrs Agnes Marshall. Surviving liners are almost unknown. To make both, coloured jellies were poured into the mould in a particular order and then the liners were inserted. The rest of the jelly was poured in around the liner, which was removed by pouring hot water into it. The cavity was then filled with white blancmange. A finished Alexandra Cross jelly A finished Brunswick Star jelly Slices of Brunswick Star jelly Jelly extravaganza in Harewood House. There is an oval Belgrave jelly in the centre of the table About three years ago I manned the wonderful period kitchen at Harewood House and demonstrated period jelly making to the general public. As the jellies came from the moulds, I dressed the dining room with a typical Victorian entremet course using Princess Mary's priceless Venetian glass dessert service. Last week I was at Harewood again, this time dressing the kitchen and gallery (the most wonderful room in England) with Regency period food for a major forthcoming BBC drama production, which I will tell you more about after it has been transmitted at Christmas. I made a large number of jellies and blancmanges for this production using Staffordshire ceramic moulds made in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To whet your appetite, here are a few photos. As you can see, the Victorians were not the only ones to have beautiful moulded foods - the late Georgians could give them (and Bompas and Parr) a real run for their money... Still more at http://foodhistorjottings.blogspot.com/2013/06/macedoine-and-other-eccentric-victorian.html

Q: Where are the most anal warts? A: When was the War of 1812? Could you tell us what country you're in, O Man of Mystery?

I think I am with hoover here. I would risk Bolivian health care sooner than Marine Base Quantico's.

Michelin Tire Men Celebrate DOMA Demise?

Rainbow hazmat suits!

Pope's Reform Path: Francis Shakes Up Church Establishment By Hans-Jürgen Schlamp in Rome, SPIEGEL July 6, 2013 It appears Pope Francis truly wants to change the Catholic Church. He's reforming the Vatican Bank first, but he's also circumventing the old guard wherever he can. The establishment is up in arms. A cardinal in Rome earns about ?3,000 ($3,888) a month, even less than a pastor in Germany. But a cardinal's life in Rome is a lot more expensive -- with visits to restaurants and shopping at boutiques for the upscale clothing men of the church are expected to wear, not to mention their jewelry and the antiques they display in their apartments. So it's good to have friends who can treat you or otherwise provide support now and then. Friends are also happy to give a cardinal a hand -- and not just out of religious considerations. A cardinal can be helpful in both political and business terms. So it's not surprising that a symbiotic relationship between parts of the Curia and the upper class around the world has formed -- one that brings together the establishment, luxury and power. It's a nice little tradition that new Pope Francis would like to put an end to. For the Catholic establishment, though, it is nothing less than a catastrophe. A 'Sick' Church of 'Theological Narcissism' Even before his enthronement as pope, when he was still a cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio had spoken clearly about this. During his speech to the cardinal conclave, he warned that, "When the church does not emerge from itself to evangalize, it becomes self-referential and therefore becomes sick." He warned of "self-referentiality" and "theological narcissism." He also criticized a "mundane church that lives within itself, of itself and for itself." And it appears the Argentinian pope meant this criticism seriously. In fact, he demonstrates that every day. Instead of wearing a gold cross, he has one of steel. And he lives in a sparsely furnished apartment in the Santa Marta guest house rather than in the Apostolic Palace. Instead of taking his seat in the Vatican concert hall to listen to classical music, he recently remained at his desk working on the final version of his decree for the church-state's own Institute for Religious Works (IOR) bank. With his signature, he created a powerful special papal commission to review the bank's activities. He also said the new commission must change everything at the Vatican Bank, as it is also known. He said the Vatican certainly needed a bank, but its areas of business should only reach a "certain point." A Papal Bank with Mafia Contacts For decades now, the IOR has been in the headlines for one scandal after the other. At the beginning of the 1980s, it was at the center of one of the darkest crime thrillers in postwar Italian history. The scandal surrounded billions in business with the mafia, and a Vatican banker was hanged from a London bridge by a killer commando. But the chain of scandals never let up. When, in autumn 2010, fresh suspicions of money laundering to the tune of triple-digit millions emerged, then Pope Benedict XVI promised stricter rules for his financial managers. In fact, though, nothing changed. In the so-called Vatileaks scandal, secret documents that had been smuggled out of the Vatican shed light on bizarre intrigues inside the papal state. Often, the Vatican Bank played a role in those intrigues. Benedict XVI was appalled, but also overwhelmed. He failed to prevail over the powerful cardinals who backed the IOR. His resignation was the logical outcome. German Baron Takes Helm of Bank His successor is taking more decisive action. First, he fired Nunzio Scarano, the top accountant in the Vatican office that oversees Vatican property and investments, after he was accused of money laundering and corruption and arrested. Then, practically overnight, he forced out IOR Director Paulo Cipriani and his deputy. Now the bank will be led by Ernst von Freyberg, a German baron and former consultant, member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the president of the IOR supervisory board since mid-February. Between now and October, Pope Francis wants to ensure clarity and also determine how the financial institute will handle its duties in harmony with the "church's mission" in the future. A that point, a new structure will be created for the bank and a new boss will be appointed. "Did we actually vote for someone who really believes in what he preaches?" some within the Curia are now whispering. Once again, Francis has taken them fully by surprise. In an almost demonstrative manner, he has been excluding the Vatican apparatus in every way he can. Most recently, this happened with the trip the pope announced he would take on Monday to the island of Lampedusa in southern Italy. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, first learned of the planned trip through a papal press release. And instead of the kind of months of advance-team work used by heads of the Catholic Church for trips in the past, Francis has dispensed with that. Instead, the eccentric Argentinian pope ordered his staff to prepare a plane so that he could fly there in the morning and be back by midday. Thousands of refugees have arrived at Lamedusa each year in desperation after making the journey across the Mediterranean from North Africa in small, dangerous boats. Francis wants to pray together with them and also throw a wreath into the sea to commemorate those who have lost their lives trying to make it to Europe. The pope has announced that he doesn't want to meet with the mayor or other authorities. He also also ordered church officials to stay away. http://abcnews.go.com/International/popes-reform-path-francis-shakes-church-establishment/story?id=19573297&page=2#.Udg-u212mTo