Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

food festival and liver sashimi.

My mom’s New England version of cheese souffle

And in conclusion, may I just say food is not trivial–any more than love is, or sex is trivial. Any more than you, dear reader, are trivial.

I, of course, do reserve the right to be trivial when I want to.

Advance preparation: (can be done hours before)

Cheese–Swiss and cheddar– grate 1 1/2 cup. Toss with 1/2 tsp cornstarch and 1/2 tsp flour.

Cream sauce–Melt 3 T butter, stir in 3 T flour. Slowly stir in 1 cup milk. Season to taste with pinch salt, 1/4 tsp basil or garlic or both. Stir in grated cheeses, then let sauce cool.

One hour before serving, preheat oven to 425.

Then, butter 2-quart soufflé dish or straight-sided casserole.

Separate 4 eggs. Beat whites until stiff. Beat yolks until thick. Stir yolks into cream sauce first.* Then, gently fold in whites. Pour mixture into buttered casserole.

Bake at 425 for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 until done, about 20 more minutes. Serve immediately.

* The fluffy, stiff egg whites are the last thing you add to your soufflé. So why do you beat the whites first, just to set them aside while you mix and add the yolks? Because, after you use your mixer on the yolks, you’d have to wash the beaters with care before trying to whip up egg whites. But, you can take your beaters right out of the whites and use them to froth up the yolks without any problem.

“If blogs are printing presses, and if Big Media is the Catholic Church, then clearly Dave Winer must be Martin Luther!”

Footnote: Buzz Bruggeman blogged this remark from a recent chat with Steve Garrity.

Footnote on previous footnote:
My previous footnote is nothing compared to Gary Turner’s quote of Frank Paynter’s quote of my quote of an unblogged remark by Kevin Marks.

“…no matter how bad and bloody things got on the streets of Blackhill, it was pretty much on par with the rest of Scottish history…

I still remember the blood-spattered walls of the house where several dozen [wedding] guests fought, and the verse that sprung to my mind from The Hunting of the Cheviot,
when Earls Percy and Douglas got into a ding-dong battle around 1424.

They closed full fast on every side,
No slackness there was found.

And many a gallant gentleman,

Lay gasping on the ground…”

John Nolan, a Scotsman now living in Farmington, NH, recently finished his series on “Poets Who Matter” with praise of Anonymous.

Nolan’s ostensible subject is the ongoing search of Rochester, NH for a local Poet Laureate. Between the lines, he recalls how poetry helped him make sense of life as a young Glasgow policeman. Nolan treats both Glasgow and Rochester with humanity and humor,

Recently, the Perseus Project compared our blogworld to an iceberg, with most of its bulk invisible to outsiders. Under the mass of almost-invisible bloggers, I think there’s a much larger group of bloggers-to-be. John Nolan–and I blogged about this before–ought to be up here blogging with the rest of us.

Read the whole series, and see if you don’t agree.

• Poets Who Matter: 1. Omar Khayyam
• Poets Who Matter: 2. John Clare
• Poets Who Matter: 3. John Keats
• Poets Who Matter: 4. Robert Garioch
• Poets Who Matter: 5. Walt Whitman
• Poets Who Matter: 6. Anonymous

This morning, I’ve got bad Amazon remorse.

That’s sort of like buyer’s remorse, but a whole lot worse.

It’s the feeling you get after the doorbell rings, when you see the delightful cardboard box from Amazon–and all of a sudden you think of another book, something you didn’t order, that you really, really wish was inside that box.

Sigh.

Then again, the book I want may not be out yet. It’s:

If you observe these signs, please let me know!

1. I use IM mostly to chat with FeedBot.
2. I read more blogs in rss than John Scoble does. (The Scobleizer claims he reads 618.)
3. I tack “-ster” onto names to show approval–e.g. calling my colleagues “The Scottster and “The Rafester.”
4. At parties, I make notes on cocktail napkins of words I want to do Feedster search on later.
5. I talk, with a straight face, about Bookmarklets and Drill Me.”
6. In IRC, I also hang out with Feedbot.
7. I try to find my lost car keys with indexed search.
8. I start giving “normal” friends nicknames like “The Davester“–or calling my favorite candidate “The Deanster.”
9. I go Christmas shopping and come home with presents for Feedbot.
10. Even my kids refer to me as “The Bets-ter.”

If you hope to make money and more-a
you ought to imbibe Marks’s lore-a.
In media res
may be a nice place
but the money’s in Mediagora.

C’mon, you know you love Jeneane Sessum over at allied.

Or if you don’t, you must not know her–then I have just done you a favor.

I love Jeneane because Jeneane really gets it. grief

This just in, from the same group of brilliant minds who brought me StrongBad, the muffin joke, and Snoop Doggy Dizzle…..

Some wonderfully crazy LiveJournal dude has assembled the IM logs of
Kim Jong Il.

I blushingly admit to enjoying his conversations with a certain former Iraqi leader who now goes by handles like “TheSaddamizer”, “SunniSideUp”, and “WeaponsOfAssDestruction”–not to mention Kim’s earlier chats with “Bush43” and “BreakTheseCheneysOfLove”.

The humor is neither gentle nor PC. It’s kid stuff, and I freely admit I loved it.