Progress Has Been Made.

It wasn't all that long ago that most men (and quite a few women) thought this was how most women thought:

Oww.

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A Christmas Tail.

Luciya's cousins, Zoe and Eva, got a wonderful present this Christmas called "Doggie Doo." 

Basically, you force-feed a plastic dog a play-doh-like substance.

Then you squeeze the leash to force the food through the dog's body. 

This process is accompanied by loud farting noises.

Eventually, a large, luminous turd emerges. Luciya observed: "He poops what he ate!"

A valuable life lesson, to be sure.

Here's the commercial for the toy.

No Christmas is complete without one.

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Happy Tamale Day!

It starts with the happy blare of Mexican brass and the rattle of margaritas being shaken, not blended, and ends with a towering pile of savory corn-meal encased spicy porky treats. It's Tamale Day, a beloved tradition in our family--the mass manufacture of pork tamales leading up to the mass consumption of same on Christmas Day.

 O cooks four pork butts in various spices, then shreds them. I make the dark red sauce,
roasting dried pasilla, negro, mulate, and guajillo chiles, then blending and cooking
them with garlic and cumin. I also add a few blocks of unsweetened chocolate
to add further depth and richness.

 Meanwhile, the corn husk wrappers soften in the sink.

 We buy our masa at a local Mexican store, then add lots of pork broth and spices.

Then the assembly line begins. John and Eryn spread the masa 

on the corn husks.

Then O and I add the meat and roll them up for the steamer.

A woman and her progeny.

They steam. It takes many steamersfuls before we're done.

The first batch is done! But the steaming continues for most of the day. Can't wait for Christmas!

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Driving To San Francisco For Chinese Food And Chairs.

A couple weeks ago, Adrienne Parker, who was a AE at PK Advertising in San Jose way back when, mentioned on Facebook that she had two lobby chairs that she had aquired when we liquidated the agency. She said that the chairs no longer fit in her place and she was looking for a good home for them.

O replied that we remembered the chairs fondly, and Adrienne generously offered them to us if we'd pay for the shipping. We said great, until we found out it would cost about $500. Sentimental value is only so valuable, after all.

Then I saw the opportunity for a road trip. O had to work, but I had the time off, so I rented a small hatchback and drove to San Francisco where I was able to enjoy pre-holiday merriment with friends and family. I also stocked up on many commodities, like good andouille sausage and cheap tequila, that are either unavailable or ridiculously expensive in Boise.

Thanks, Adrienne!

Good Chinese food is also unavailable in Boise, so every visit to the Bay Area must include as many favorite Chinese meals as possible. This trip I managed two, and with a bit of ingenuity, three.

First, one of my favorite meals of all time: house-smoked ham with whole cloves of garlic at

Brandy Ho. Scorchingly spicy, deliciously smoky, and mouth-wateringly garlicky. Sheer bliss.

Next: curried chicken over rice at Hunan Taste in San Jose. When we had the agency here, I ate

at Hunan Taste at least three or four times a week for almost 15 years. It was (and is) that
addictive. I would always have either the curried chicken, the shredded chicken with cold
noodles and peanut sauce, or their version of smoked ham with garlic. Not as good as Brandy
Ho's version, but an acceptable substitute. But it is the curried chicken that still haunts my taste
buds. The secret (which I recently figured out): lots of tumeric. I can now almost reproduce it,
to my delight. But there's nothing like the original.

My dilemma at Hunan Taste was always this: which do I want more, curried chicken or 

shredded chicken with cold noodles and peanut sauce? This time I decided not to choose, 

but to get both and eat the noodles for lunch on my drive home. It may have been below 

freezing and windy outside, but as I gazed at the desolate tundra north of Winnemucca, 

my belly was warmed by thick, spicy, vinegary peanut sauce and soothing noodles.

The chairs that made it all possible, safe in their new home.

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Money Purrs.

This just about sums it up, doesn't it.

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Looking For A Nice Apt? Call 911.

From BBC Asia:

An apartment complex design in Seoul, South Korea, has attracted criticism for its similarity to the World Trade Center's final moments after the 9/11 attacks.
The towers, one with 54 floors and the other with 60, are designed by Dutch architects MVRDV and will be built at the entrance to Seoul's redeveloped Yongsan business district by 2016.

 Built by the Bin Laden Construction Company?

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You Know You Want One!

Ingenuity in the service of ridiculousness.

I am so there.

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The Best Of The Worst!

The 56 best worst analogies  by high-school students. Only not actually by high-school students, but still hilarious.

A sample:

1. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
2. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.
3. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
4. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame. Maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

Click the link!

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Heads Ripped Off At Sunrise.

Last week witnessed a huge step forward for Boise's cultural scene: the opening of the Sunrise Puppet Theatre--Only For Cold Winter Days!

Built by Emily, the Theatre is under the artistic direction of Luciya, 

which means Boiseans can look forward to many dramatic performances 

featuring heads being ripped off and eyeballs pulled out and eaten.

Unfortunately, the weather's been relatively warm, and now John, Emily, and the girls have gone to Maui for a week, so the decapitations are on hiatus.

Can't wait for winter to come!

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Meeting Old Friends.

Last Monday, the movers brought to the new house all our things that have been in storage for the last two-and-a-half years.

By the time they finished unloading, the place was so filled boxes that we thought we'd never be able to fit everything in. And we had sold and given away so much stuff before we left for Vietnam!

As nice as it is to have all our possessions back with us, though, the best part is rediscovering all our favorite pieces of art and falling in love with them all over again.

It's been like meeting old friends:

 Our magic dog, who seems to have acquired some new friends.

Hanuman, still with the same old girlfriend.

A royal elephant.

Our cook. She's looking a little anorexic, 

but she still makes a mean margarita 

in our favorite margarita glasses.

Baby Ganesh and his big, blue buddy.

His grown-up, slightly demented Balinese incarnation.

And so many more. 

We're in heaven.

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Meet Princess Dragon Mermaid. Next Year...Tooting Fairy Barbie!

At Halloween, Luciya realized her dream (with the help of her very creative Mom) of dressing as a princess dragon mermaid.

How can she possibly surpass this triumph? Well, when we asked what she wanted to be next year, she answered without hesitation: a Tooting Fairy Barbie!

What would a Tooting Fairy Barbie wear?

"Clothes with lots of holes so the toots can come out."

Of course. Can't wait for next year.

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Hypocrisy Alert: $250,000/year Isn't High Income, But $30,000 Is.

Cutting Social Security benefits for "high income" seniors may sound like a good idea, but as always, the devil's in the details. From Dean Baker:

Wnen it Comes to Cutting Medicare and Social Security High Income Ain't What It Used to Be

Wednesday, 09 November 2011 05:51

In an article on the deliberations of the supercommittee the NYT told readers that a Republican plan would raise money by charging "higher Medicare premiums for high-income people." While the article does not give exact cutoff for high income, it is likely that is no higher than $80,000 and possibly as low as $40,000. (Many proposals for reducing Social Security benefits for "high income" beneficiaries would lower benefits for people with incomes of just $30,000.) It is worth noting that "high income" can mean something very different when the topic is the benefits that workers get in retirement than when the topic is income taxes. Most major media outlets have run pieces questioning whether $250,000 (the floor set by President Obama for people subject to tax increases) is really wealthy. The reason that the cutoffs for benefits cuts are fairly low is that there are few elderly households with high incomes and per person benefits are not very different for the highest income household and the lowest income household. If $250,000 were set as a floor for subjecting seniors to benefit cuts, it would save almost no money. The only way to save substantial money from this sort of means-testing is by cutting benefits for seniors that anyone would view as middle class.

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Move That Money!

Mitt Romney has unveiled his plan to overhaul Social Security and Medicare. Unsurprisingly, it involves cutting benefits to the greedy geezers, orphaned children, and the disabled who depend on it. As Matt Taibbi sarcastically observes:

Actually, it makes sense. If we don’t cut health care and retirement benefits for old people, how can we pay for the carried-interest tax break that allows private equity guys like, well, Mitt Romney to keep paying 15 percent tax rates?

And, naturally, another major part of his "reform plan" is to privatize the two programs. Because Wall Street has done such an awesome job with your 401k.

Taibbi points out the truth about the so-called "Masters of the Universe:"

...they’ve all proven their complete and utter incompetence to do their ostensible jobs, i.e. the care and stewardship of money.

For instance, the top five investment banks in the country sought to remove capital requirements in the middle of the last decade, and all of them instantly jacked their debt-to-equity ratios above 20-1, some of them going as high as 33-1 or 35-1. Of those five investment banks, three (Bear, Lehman, and Merrill) went out of business during the crash, and the other two (Goldman and Morgan Stanley) required massive government aid to survive.

And here's why O and I decided to celebrate "Move Your Money" Day by transferring our vast fortune from Wells Fargo to a local credit union.

The commercial banks have not been much better, with two of the biggest (Wachovia and Washington Mutual) imploding thanks to bad investment decisions and three of the biggest survivors (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup) recently facing downgrades.

The recent downgrades, incidentally, were widely seen as Wall Street’s way of making two interlocking judgments about these big banks. One is that their accounting is so fucked up and dishonest that it simply cannot be believed, leading to widespread expectation that one or more of them will ultimately collapse. The other is that when they collapse, the government may no longer be able or willing to completely bail these companies out. The downgrades were spurred by vague fears that implementation of new reforms via Dodd-Frank will make it harder to get bailouts.

So the mere hint that these banks might be denied future bailouts caused a company as massive as Bank of America to be downgraded to just above junk status. That means, in other words, that without the implicit promise of government aid, Wall Street considers these banks to be junk or below-junk businesses. Evaluated purely on their own merits, without the implicit attachment to the taxpayer, these companies actually have negative trustworthiness.

And these are the people we want managing the nation’s Social Security accounts?

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/why-mitt-romneys-entitlement-privatization-plan-is-crazy-20111108#ixzz1dAxhK5n9

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A Place We Can Call Home.

We have a new house! It's a sweet 3br place just south of downtown Boise.

Front porch complete with swing.

Back deck.

 Complete with hot tub.

 Just off the back deck, a little-used park.

 In the warmer months, the door to the back deck opens to become a sliding glass door.

 For the colder months, there's a gas fireplace with blower.

 Big kitchen. Unfortunately, the stove is electric.

 Family room and dining area.

 Large master suite. 

We are so looking forward to leaving our cozy, but cramped 400 sq.ft. apt. for a place over four times as big. And most of all, we're looking forward to seeing all the artwork we put in storage nearly two and a half years ago!

We plan to be in by the 25th or 26th.

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Soggy No More. Leaving Seattle.

Our journey back to Boise was truly beautiful.

It started with an early morning ferry trip. The sky was filled with massive banks of clouds,

still tinged with the pink of the sunrise.

It was raining again in Seattle, where we stopped to load up on fresh crab and smoked salmon.

Unfortunately it's difficult to get good fresh seafood in Boise. The clouds began to lift as we

climbed through the Cascade range, whose lower peaks were already lightly dusted with snow.

 We paused at Cle Elum to gawk for a while at the spectacular
fall foliage, then resumed the long drive home.

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A Ponzi Scheme Built On Meaningless IOUs.

Unfortunately, that's how too many people see Social Security, because they've bought into a thirty-year campaign of disinformation funded by right-wing think tanks bankrolled mainly by people who stand to make a lot of money if Social Security is ever privatized.

"Meaningless IOUs?" Those would be U.S. Treasury bonds, also known as the safest investment in the world. The same Treasury bonds held by the Chinese government and all the biggest players on Wall Street.

The Social Security trust fund has always been invested in T-bills, and for good reason. They're safe, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government (granted, that looks less reliable all the time, but what are the alternatives?) If they are "meaningless IOUs," then so is your 401K and your bank account.

But think of the money that could be made if the trust fund was turned over to Wall Street! A lot of people have, and that's why they've invested in propaganda designed to convince voters that Social Security is bankrupt.

Let me quote from this article by Gene Lyons from Salon:

In fact, the law’s working precisely as intended. After 28 years of generating huge payroll tax surpluses to cover the baby boomers’ retirement benefits, the system must now begin to draw upon those funds to help pay current benefits—the vast majority still covered by current payroll tax receipts.

“Rather than posing any sort of crisis,” explains Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “this is exactly what had been planned when Congress last made major changes to the program in 1983 based on the recommendations of the Greenspan commission.”

Again, this is the beneficiaries’ money, invested by the Social Security trustees in U.S. Treasury bonds drawn upon “the full faith and credit of the United States.” Far from being “meaningless IOUs” as right-wing cant has it, they represent the same legally binding promise between the U.S. government and its people that it makes with Wall Street banks and the Chinese government, which also hold Treasury Bonds.

A promise not very different, the Daily Howler’s Bob Somerby points out, from the one implicit in your bank statement or 401K (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you think the money was buried in earthen jars filled with gold bullion and precious stones?...

So is Social Security a “Ponzi scheme”? No, it’s group insurance, not an investment... Do fewer workers support each beneficiary? Sure, but who cares? It’s denominated in dollars, not a head count. The boomers were nearing 40 when the Reagan administration fixed the actuarial tables. No surprises there.

Are longer life expectancies screwing up the numbers? Not really. Most of the rise is explained by lower infant and child mortality, not by old-timers overstaying their welcome. Kevin Drum points out that gradually raising the payroll tax 1 percent and doubling the earnings cap over 20 years would make Social Security solvent forever.

We've heard a lot of crap from interested parties and ignorant tools about this issue. It's time to push back.

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Soggy In Seattle. Day 3: Now With 40% Less Sog!

When we woke up Sunday, the sidewalks were actually dry! Giddy with the prospect of walking around unencumbered by umbrellas, we strolled through downtown to the Pike Street Market.

Myriads of multicolored vegetables.

 The view over Puget Sound was enlivened by shafts of sunlight and glimpses of vivid blue.

 Locals crowded to enjoy one of the rare patches of sun.

 Seeing the blue skies was a visceral delight after days of gray. 

We decided that, as beautiful as it is in many ways, Seattle is not 

high on our list of possible future habitations.

 We had a stellar brunch at a French bistro, complete with birthday champagne. They had just
introduced their fall menu with one of my favorite dishes: cassoulet, so I walked away with
taste buds abuzz with bliss. We parted from the Pereiras and drove north about
thirty miles, where we took the ferry to Whidbey Island to visit another set of dear friends.

Whidbey is quite a large island, mostly rural and quite lovely.

Our friends live on the southwest side amid rolling green pastures.

Just a five minute walk to this beautiful beach. We watched a lone seal swim by,

then hiked back to the house for a delightful evening with our friends.

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