Author: Philip Weiss

Snowpocalypse: setting the record straight

The neologism making the rounds this winter is snowpocalypse referring to the big snowstorm that hit the east coast. The Lede a blog at the New York Times, attempted to track down the origins of the word snowpocalypse. They tracked it back to Seattle last year, and a few other places in 2007 and 2006.

But they didn’t really find the origins.

Someone on the Seattle Livejournal Community wants that community given credit for Snowpocalypse. And they certainly have a case for popularizing it during last year’s snow storm, though the Stranger’s Slog and other popular local blogs had a lot to do with it. But the term goes further back than that.

DCist claims they first used it. In 2005.

But they are wrong. Searching even further back I found a post by sea_colleen at Seattle Metblogs that used the term Snowpocalypse a couple weeks before DCist did. I didn’t use Google to find that. I knew it where it was because the origins of the term have come up before, and I know the term had currency in one Seattle group before 2005.

Seattle Metblogs sea_colleen is Leenerella on Livejournal, and she was an active participant on the old Seattle Gothic message boards, hosted on ezboard. The word was used there a lot in the 2002 to 2004 time frame to refer to the local media’s hyperbolic coverage of various snow events. They’d imply that the city would shut down, but then we’d get ¼ inch of snow and life would go on. If we did get any snow, King 5 would send Danger Jim Forman outside to report from the most blustery location he could find.

I don’t know who first used the term on Seattle Gothic. I don’t know where they stole it from or if that person coined it herself. But the folks there have a better claim than the other pretenders.

Sadly, little remains of that message board. The moderators pruned message threads, particularly little content ones like Snowpocalypse!. Ezboard moved it from server to server, and lost oodles of discussion threads in various crashes. Versions of it were hosted by members both before and after it was on Ezboard. Ezboard became Yuku and some archives are there. The Wayback Machine has a few posts archived.

Edited to add: Found a couple other references from Sea-Gothers that pre-date DCist’s claim. Here’s Prince of Happiness, another Sea-Gother, using snowpocalypse in December 2005 as well. And a snapshot from the Wayback machine of forum topics on Seattle Gothic from January 2005, one of which is SNOWPOCALYPSE 2005!!1ONE!!!ELEVEN!1!!.

Acelmo’s Spanish Rice

In my quest to find more rice recipes (cause I have a giant bag of rice and it’s cheap), I tried this recipe for Spanish rice from Greg Atkinson’s West Coast Cooking. Really easy, fresh ingredients, pretty tasty.

  • 2 cups long grain white rice
  • 1 medium onion
  • 2 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 1 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 2 large tomatoes
  • 2 teaspoons sea salt
  • 1 bay leaf
  1. Rinse the rice several times in cold water
  2. Let rice drain in strainer
  3. Chop the onion
  4. Cut the tomato up
  5. Put tomato, onion, garlic and oregano in a blender
  6. Puree
  7. Remove mixture from blender when the blade just spins through the tomato chunks
  8. Put mixture in food processor and/or chop stuff by hand until the chunks are much smaller
  9. Put mixture back into blender
  10. Puree vegetables until they are liquefied
  11. Add water to make 4 cups total liquid
  12. Pour vegetable liquid into 3 quart saucepan
  13. Add salt and bay leaf
  14. Bring liquid to boil
  15. Add rice to saucepan
  16. Reduce heat to low and cover
  17. Simmer 20 to 30 minutes until liquid is absorbed
  18. Remove lid, stir, and let stand

Carmelized Onion Pie

I took this recipe for a carmelized onion tart from The Pie and Pastry Bible and modified it a bit to make it a bit easier. I don’t own a tart shell, so I just used a shallow pie plate. I also didn’t use any of the fancier pie crust recipes the author suggested. Just a plain old whole wheat pastry flour, unsalted butter, and chilled water pie crust. As always, recipe below is what I did, not exactly what’s in the cookbook.

  • Single shell pie crust
  • 1 egg white
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
  • 6 medium sweet onions
  • ½ teaspoon sugar
  • ½ teaspoon salt
  • ¼ teaspoon black pepper
  • 3 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 2 teaspoons fresh thyme
  • ½ ounce Gruyère cheese
  • pitted Manzanilla olives
  1. Pre-bake the pie crust
  2. Lightly beat egg white
  3. While still warm, brush the crust with egg white
  4. Peel and thinly slice onions
  5. In skillet, heat the olive oil and butter over low heat
  6. Add onions
  7. Sprinkle onions with sugar, salt, and pepper
  8. Cover and cook without stirring on lowest possible heat 45 minutes
  9. Shred Gruyère cheese finely
  10. Preheat oven to 400°
  11. Raise heat on onions to medium
  12. Stir and cook onions until all liquid has evaporated and they are golden
  13. Turn heat to low
  14. Add garlic and thyme
  15. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes
  16. Fill pie shell with onion mixture
  17. Sprinkle with Gruyère cheese
  18. Place olives on top
  19. Bake for 20 minutes or so (until cheese is melted and top is brown)

The result was heavenly. Several folks told me it was the best of the 20 or so pies we had at the last Pie Night. It might become one of my staple pies. Easy to make and so very very tasty.



Visa auctions

So I’m reading Nariman Behravesh’s Spin-Free Economics (which isn’t). In particular, I’m reading the section on immigration. Behravesh is decidedly pro-immigration. I tend to be middle of the road here, neither falling in with the conservative camp railing against immigrants stealing jobs, nor with the liberal camp that bemoans the poor treatment we give illegal immigrants. Put it another way, I don’t have enough information really to come to any really good opinions about immigration.

I guess the way I’ve been trending in my political thought in the last few years is towards a sort of free-market liberalism. In other words, finding market based solutions for problems that the country faces. I still favor government intervention, but in such a way as to align that intervention with how people naturally behave. I don’t believe markets are magic. Any serious look at the economics of health insurance shows there’s a huge disincentive to that market working properly. But using the free market can have huge benefits. Carbon taxes or an auction based cap and trade system for reducing greenhouse gases, for instance.

Back to the immigration thing. Our current immigration policy essentially allows large numbers of low-skilled immigrants and very few high skilled immigrants. While there’s lots and lots of bloviating about illegal immigrants, there’s very little that’s done about it in comparison to the number of people that are illegally here, though what’s done is fairly harsh. Illegal immigration is largely composed of low skilled immigrants.

High skilled immigrants, like doctors and economists and journalists and programmers, is very limited. Illegal immigration for these kinds of people is much lower. Legal immigration is also limited. But if we put high skilled employees in direct competition with people who are willing to work for less, the benefits to the average American would be much greater than low skilled immigrants. Bringing in one doctor who is willing to work for 10% less than American doctors will help the average American far more than 10 additional minimum wage landscapers.

So how to do that? The thought that occurred to me as I was reading was an auction. Set the number of people allowed to enter the country legally at a fairly high, but limited number, say 250,000 or 300,000 per year. Then auction off those slots. Use the money to help fund job training for those displaced, and for additional safety net protections that conservatives complain about. I.e., they complain about immigrants using welfare. Well, use these visa auctions to fund welfare for immigrants.

The economics of it would favor high skilled immigration, but not cut off low skilled immigration if the number allowed in is set high enough.

At the same time, I would drastically reduce the paperwork necessary to immigrate this way.

Obviously, I can’t have been the first person to think of this. On returning home, a quick search brought up some academic papers relating to the idea. And something on the Becker-Posner Blog, which I generally avoid because Richard Posner is annoyingly a hack in areas outside his expertise. But nothing I could find that was written for a non-economist that discusses both pros and cons.

Hump 5

Yesterday, I went to Hump 5, The Stranger’s annual amateur porn festival. I missed the first year, but have gone every year since. This year was the awesomest! The best in terms of entries overall compared to other years. And also awesomest because because I took my girlfriend. Sharon’s awesome for going with me (and for lots of other reasons). But enough mushy stuff, porn!

  • Dance Belt – Two very cute girls and one guy do a naked spoof of Beyonce’s Single Ladies. Awesome part was the naked guy running the camera was visible in the mirrors at the dance studio where they filmed it. I voted this one the funniest, but it was close.
  • Citizen Came – Total A for effort here. Documentary of a guy who attempts to masturbate 10 times in one 24 hour period. This is what happens when your girlfriend is in rehab for 28 days.
  • Full Swap – Fuzzy security cam action of a swinger apartment. Boring actually.
  • Boys Beware – After the success of Getting a Leg Up In Porn a few years ago, a couple of people this year did their own 50s style documentary porno. This one, about the dangers of homosexuals didn’t inspire me. To cliché
  • Read My Lips – You’d think porn and books would be an automatic winner for me, but this wasn’t the most inspired.
  • I’m Hard – Animation of a rapping dick. Dumb.
  • The Good Book – Very bad porn plot about a nun who reads the book of Mormon and gets punished by her priest. They were enthusiastic though.
  • How to Please Your Man – Larry King hosts a blow job expert on Larry King Live. With clips from Larry King artfully spliced in. Another A for effort.
  • Beyond Gay – Lynn Shelton’s entry, not starring Lynn Shelton. She’s the director who made Humpday, a documentary about two straight guys who made a gay porn for a previous Hump. Dan Savage challenged her to make an actual entry for Hump, and she did. The best dialog of all the entrants, but the decidedly unsexy topic of a lesbian and a fag trying and failing to get each other off but failing because they are not into each other.
  • Incubus – Every year there’s one of these types of entries, something that looks really good and really like someone’s film school project that they decided to enter into Hump. Maybe I just have a bias against entries that don’t look amateur enough for my view of an amateur porn festival.
  • Dumpster Humpster – Sex in a dumpster. Kind of a magical dumpster like the Narnia wardrobe, that’s bigger inside than outside. They overplayed loaves of bread in a faux-sexy way, and the bread dough was bad. A for creativity though!
  • Sex Moves 102 – I think the only entry this year that had both gay and straight sex. Just some made up sex moves with accompanying demonstrations. Really liked this one and up there for both funny and sexy categories.
  • Violet Uprising – Really really creepy puppet sex. Really well done, but since the categories were funny and sexy, and not creepy, I couldn’t in good conscious vote it for either.
  • Maximum Overload – Cliche plot. Surprising actually, since the porn in Hump is usually kinda creative in ways that real porn isn’t. Guy goes into virtual reality to have sex with V.R. girl. Roommate bumps the power cord, and the girl comes out of V.R. and the guy is stuck inside it. Cute participants. Pretty well put together.
  • Trolley Tryst – Dan Savage’s short version: Sluts ride the SLUT. It’s exactly what you’d think it is. Someone had the guts to have sex on the SLUT, with several helpful people to film (at least one on the streetcar and one in a vehicle alongside). Those streetcars aren’t that big. You can’t go to the back of the train to do this and hide, though the streetcar did appear empty except for the driver. Gutsiest entry this year. Top 3 for sexiest.
  • Guess Who’s Cumming to Dinner – Eh. Delivery boy. I need say no more.
  • The Password – Tell me the password or I will torture you with S&M. With lines even more wooden than actual porn. I had to look away when the needles made an appearance.
  • The Modern Housewife – The second 50s style documentary this year. Susie goes next door to borrow some Saran Wrap while her husband is away. Lots of creative uses of Dow Chemical products. Totally hot lesbians. Really pretty funny.
  • I Went To a Party and Had a Dream – Guy falls asleep on the couch at a party while multiple other couples have sex on the other end of the couch. Kinda boring except the last scene, which was an outtake of the girl on the other end of the couch projectile cumming on the pretend asleep guy (and thus had his eyes closed so he didn’t see it coming).
  • Our Ruinous Love – Clips of various things I would never ever try. Kitchen implements. Traffic cones. Anal hook. Saran wrap. Here’s the thing, either you got to turn me on, or you really need to show how turned on you are. This did neither.
  • Fuck – The absolute worst entry this year. Only entry that I thought nothing positive of. At least all the others had something going for them, funny, creative, gutsy, sexy, etc. These guys took a creative idea and made it bad. Evil nemesis poisons two cops johnsons so that if they lose their erections they die. No one gets naked. No style to the dialogue. Hated this so much.
  • Cyclust – Sorta stop motion photography style. Two cyclists meet riding and then go have sex. I love the pictures where the two were just smiling at each other, totally into each other. Voted this one for Sexiest just for that. I love seeing two people into each other.
  • ET2: Dark Territory – Animation. ET returns. Elliot’s all grown up. Shocking. And diabolical.

Pietoberfest! October 17th!

I’ve been remiss in not posting some promotional/reminder stuff for the upcoming Pie Night. So here’s the scoop:

Long Slice of Pie Ala Mode
Doesn't pie look tasty?

Pietoberfest, the next Pie Night is October 17th, officially from 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.

What is Pie Night? It is a celebration of pie! People come over, and then we eat pie. Sometimes before the sugar crash hits, we converse. There are fruit pies, cream pies, chocolate pies, and meat pies. There are all sorts of pies.

This time I am going to post the rules in the the form of frequently asked questions, because people never seem to read them if they are rules.

Do I have to bring pie?
No. You do not have to bring a pie. I will make enough pie.
Can I bring pie?
Yes, you can bring pie.
Can I bring a cake?
No.
What about cookies? What about cake-pie?
The concept is Pie Night. Every time there’s some joker who thinks it’s funny to ask these questions. It’s about as funny as Jay Leno. If you ask these questions I will revoke your license to breed.
My pie didn’t turn out. I forgot. I ran out of time. What’s the nearest store so I can pick up a pie?
The nearest store for approved Pie Night store-purchased pies is in Chaiten, Chile, which is currently evacuated due to volcano eruption. In other words, do not bring a pie from a store! This is to encourage people to attempt their own pies. If you don’t make a pie, just come and eat pie.
Can I bring anything?
Ice cream and beverages are always welcome, particularly alcoholic beverages. I do not drink, so you don’t want me picking out your alcohol.
Can I bring friends?
Yes.
Can I bring my kids?
If you don’t mind your kids hearing ribald discussion, yes.
Should I R.S.V.P.?
Yes yes yes! Please let me know in the comments or on the Pietoberfest Facebook event if you intend to come, how many friends you plan to bring, and whether you intend to bring pie. I need to know how much pie to make. I don’t mind a few last minute additions or cancellations, but if I end up with 50 people when I expected 25, you may not get pie.
When is it again?
Saturday, October 17th, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m. (come early if you want, though)
Where is it?
My condo. It’s small but we’re all friends, right? 2301 Fairview Ave E. Ring WEISS on the call box out front.

Image Long Slice of Pie Ala Mode 4 of 4 by cobalt123 used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 license.

Iran and additional protocols to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty

Remember in 2002 when the U.S. went to war with Iraq because the U.S. government said Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, and then it turned out that Iraq wasn’t? Me too.

Because of that I’ve been skeptical about U.S. government claims about Iran‘s nuclear program for the last couple of years. Having a Democratic President hasn’t lessened my skepticism. Here’s an example.

In an A.P. story on Iran’s obligations to the I.A.E.A. this morning, Iran claims it revealed it’s new secret nuclear facility early. According to them, they don’t need to reveal anything about it until 6 months prior to it going operational. According to the I.A.E.A., the additional protocols to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty require disclosure as soon as Iran started planning. Iran claims they aren’t party to those additional protocols (they voluntarily followed them for a couple of years) anymore, and Mohamed El Baradei (the head of the I.A.E.A.) claims that Iran can’t back out of them.

What are these additional protocols to the N.N.P.T.? Follow that link to read them. What I find interesting is that the I.A.E.A.’s own web site says that the agreement with Iran on those protocols was never in force. And the additional protocols document itself explicitly refers to the date the protocols come into force in the section on when a state has to disclose a facility. It does not refer to the ratification date or the date the I.A.E.A. approves the protocols with that state.

So who’s right? I don’t know. But it’s certainly much more ambiguous than the U.S. government and the I.A.E.A. claim. And my own personal idea of open and forthcoming requires much more than following the legal requirements.

The So-Called “Fringe” Right

Elephant in the room

some Black Caucus members said that Wilson’s outburst is but the latest in a long string of ugly events rooted in racism, such as last week’s flap over Obama addressing the nation’s schoolchildren …

I agree that there’s a large element of racism behind the anger and attacks on Barack Obama, but I don’t think the anger or attacks would disappear if racism wasn’t present (magically). A vocal and more-or-less-in-charge-of-the-party section of the Republican party would proffer idiotic baseless attacks that in previous generations would be laughed as paranoid delusions no matter which Democrat was President. And the media would be a primary legitimizer of those attacks no matter who was President.

Remember Bill Clinton? He was accused of murdering Vince Foster, running drugs, raping women, and having the Arkansas State Patrol kill opponents.

How about Al Gore? He got branded as a liar and an environmental lunatic. Of course, he turned out to be right on the money for his concerns about global warming. Every major case of his lies weren’t things he said. They were things Republicans and journalists said he said, but when quotes were checked he hadn’t said them.

Just a little over four years ago John Kerry helped coin the term Swift-Boating as it’s first subject. The so-called fringe right turned John Kerry’s war service from one of honor and valor to one of lying and cowardice. Their claims were all false.

And now Barack Obama gets the beat-down from the right wing. Racism is changing the substance of their attacks, and perhaps the number of them. But since 1994’s Contract With America, the trend has been towards a Republican party dominated by right wing lunatics with little grasp of the truth. Had we elected Hillary Clinton these attacks would have been anti-woman in nature, rather than racially focused. Even if we elected someone like Dennis Kucinich, we were bound to get crazy falsehoods.

The simple fact is that those who control the Republican party are by and large people who don’t believe anyone but the far right has a legitimate claim to power. And they will believe whatever it takes to confirm their view of the world.

But they are also racists.

Why sensible people remain Republicans I do not understand.