It was 75F most of yesterday at the BOL, in the shade anyway. Hotter in the sun and there was more sun than in Houston. Should be another fine day here today.
Yesterday I spent the morning getting ready to head up here, then the afternoon getting here. Details of after that are in yesterday’s comments.
Today I’ll unload the truck and do some minor chores. I might do my Spring maintenance on the mower, if I feel like I have time. And if I can find the supplies I need. It’s desperately in need of pressure washing, and new sharp blades. A smart man would change the oil and filters too.
Otherwise, there is a list of things that need doing, but I want to be home earlier than usual. I might find some small things to fill the day. And some of my choices will depend on when I wake up.
Always be working, always stack.
nick
Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for Denis
2 ½ c all-purpose flour, sifted
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ c butter
½ c shortening
1 c brown sugar, packed
2 eggs
1 ½ tsp vanilla
12 oz semisweet chocolate chips
1 c chopped walnuts or pecans, optional
Mix all dry ingredients together.
Beat butter and shortening together. Add the sugars and beat until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and beat well. Slowly add dry ingredients, beating until well combined. Mix in chips and nuts.
Drop in balls an inch or so across on a cooking sheet. Bake at 375F for 8-10 minutes. I always go for exactly 9 minutes in a preheated oven and they come out consistently good.
Alternatively, lay aluminum foil on the cooking sheet and press a large amount of dough into a rectangle or circle about ¼” thick. Bake at 350F for 11-12 minutes. Be very careful lifting it off the sheet unless you can wait until it’s completely cooled, as it will be fragile. Decorate after it’s cooled. I helped the girls come up with this when they wanted to draw cartoons on the cookies, bring them to school, and eat at lunch to torment their classmates.
Variation: Press cookie dough into a baking dish to make a layer ½ to ¾” thick. Pour brownie batter over it, half as much batter as you’d normally use for that size dish. Bake as you would the brownies as if you’d made a regular batch in that dish. This is extremely popular with teens and preteens, moreso than regular cookies or regular brownies, though that might simply have been from the novelty.
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The basic recipe is from the 1981 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book.
I realize that most Europeans measure flour by weight rather than by volume. I don’t know the conversion ratio. English/metric conversions are straightforward.
As noted in a previous comment, the cookies can be made with 1 cup of butter instead of a mix of butter and shortening, or with butter and lard.
It is 75 F outside at 7 am. Summer is coming.
The love bugs are horrendous this year. I do not remember them being this bad is several years so it must be a cyclical thing. At least they do not bite like mosqitoes.
I am going to see Mom after church and probably eat lunch with her and her tablemates. My son reported that Mom could not finish sentences last Tuesday night so I am hoping that was a transient thing. My brother tried to take her Friday to get her new glasses and she would not go which I also found unusual.
One of her tablemates is 92 and has had several strokes. She rarely finishes a sentence. The other lady is late 80s and very mentally aware but her body is failing her, just like Moms. Mom is 84 and both her body and mind are failing. I hesitate to do anything to extend her life as she is very unhappy about things. Mom agrees with this and is a proponent of it.
“White House correspondents’ dinner shooting suspect worked as California teacher”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/white-house-correspondents-dinner-shooting-suspect-worked-as-california-teacher/ar-AA21JAlK
Just another dumbrocrat trying to assasinate the President. Nothing to see here.
How in the world did he get a shotgun through security ? Sounds very strange to me.
Canada is only a flight away. And you’ll need only one return ticket.
(Here ya go. Have some dark humor with your morning coffee.)
“Teacher” at a test prep center.
Torrance. Fancy Lad. Family money.
Modern butter has a smaller proportion of fat in it I am told, by a signicant amount. Not sure about shortening. I have heard modern chocolate is ensh*ttified as well.
On the other hand the proof of the cooking is in the eating, and it seems to have passed that test!
After a converstion at work Friday with a co-worker about Michael Mann’s career, Pluto TV “helpfully” recommended “The Keep” for me this morning.
I just had the flick streaming in the section where the SS officer tells Ian McKellan that there were only two openings at the “relocation center” that the prisoners go through – the entrance door and the chimney.
Yes, the conversation happened in front of the laptops.
“The Keep” is a trainwreck, but it was important for multiple careers, including Mann’s.
Thank you from the bottom of my cardiologist’s wallet!
I will investigate what the conversion factor from hogsheads and furlongs to grams is…
We saw “Project Hail Mary” Friday night.
The film was well made. I have a lot of respect for Lord and Miller after “21 Jump Street” and believe that they were probably fired from “Solo” for PC reasons.
And Lego Batman. True, improvisation from Wil Arnett was probably a huge part of that character, but, as with all great improv, the directors just let the cameras roll.
Or rendering farms generate frames, in the case of “The Lego Movie”.
Still. Meh.
Some Crazy Cat/Dog Ladies sat behind us in the audience, and they were audibly into the “Project Hail Mary”, probably for the same reasons that I wasn’t thrilled with the flick.
I still hope it does well. Theaters should survive even if it means dealing with people who usually spend way too much time with their cats.
We were watching Night Court last night and my wife asked if one of the guest stars was Brent Spiner. I said it seems like it, but check imdb to be sure. She started typing the search on her phone and she only got Brent Spiner typed and google auto completed Night Court. I’ve told her hundreds of times the phone is listening, but she was still surprised. Story of my life…
He didn’t. It’s been confirmed that he had a room at the hotel, so he may well have checked in before the outside perimeter was set up. The outside perimeter was just officers watching the protesters, etc. If he brought his weapons in to the hotel in luggage while the perimeter was set up, there would have been nothing seen by security or perhaps he checked in before it was set up.
He then rushed the magnetometers, which was the secure area perimeter, and was stopped.
A propos chocolate chip cookies.
Flour comes from plants. Sugar comes from plants. Chocolate comes from plants.
Chocolate chip cookies are basically a salad.
The interesting question is where he got the handgun.
The shooter seems to be a typical Democrat man, so I assume he wandered around town, found a sleezy looking guy with a gun, and traded “personal services” for the gun. As I say, typical Democrat man.
I just looked into it and that seems not to be the case. USDA regs state that the butter must be at least 80% butterfat, and that has been the case for decades. I couldn’t easily find how many, but it’s at least since I was a kid.
There is, however, a difference in European butter. This typically has slightly higher fat and slightly less water. More importantly, European butter apparently is commonly cultured with bacteria. I had no idea.
Denis, I think you’re going to have to experiment, or compare the Better Homes and Gardens recipe with a recipe from a European cookbook.
Govt Cover Up Inconvenient Winter Excess Deaths Data
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/25/govt-cover-up-inconvenient-winter-excess-deaths-data/
An example from the UK of how governments cannot be trusted to objectively report inconvenient data.
Suddenly, afte 60 years of data reporting, they quit citing “limitations of the methodology:
and turned it over to another department , which produced the desired result:
The UK government is about as trustworthy as the Iranians, and our own with Democrats and Deep State embedded and in charge and is not far behind.
Blue cities and states have corrupted the FBI crime statistics by under-reporting serious crimes. The immediate cure is to make federal matching funds dependent on statistics using standard methodology, but the larger question is why federal money goes to such well-run enclaves of Democratic control in the first place?
The USDA standard for butterfat in butter is minimum 80% by weight, but butter is graded AA, A, and B, and comes unsalted and salted. In addition, butter can be made from milk produced by cows fed different diets. All of these affect cooking results.
https://www.ams.usda.gov/grades-standards/butter-grades-and-standards
Kerrygold* Irish butter is 82% butterfat and many cooks conside it the gold standard. Coincidentally, they have a chocolate chip cookie recipe:
https://www.kerrygoldusa.com/recipes/chocolate-chip-cookies/
The balance of butter content is residual milk solids, which can be removed by clarifying the butter. The result is nearly 100% butterfat, so the means is at hand to experiment.
I was gifted with some experimental coffeecake cookies and had them with coffee this morning. Two thumbs up.
*their Reserve Cheddar is very good also
Murder Chicken:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivLCHtzahjA
🙂
The Wheelers?
Yes, before “Star Trek”, that was Spiner’s most famous role.
The reboot of “Night Court” also brought back Bob and June.
funny stuff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WOP9dW-F78
Problems
I step away from teh intarwebs for ONE DAY and someone makes a run at the President. Looks like he didn’t even get close.
@greg, I lived in Torrence and have family there still. It’s a refinery town going way back, and skilled trade aerospace for decades. That said, it’s been 30 years and if trends were ongoing, it’s now a violent shitehole overrun by amish from nearby communities. (or maybe you’re right because it went thru a whole cycle in that time…)
Redondo Beach is right next door and is undoubtedly fancy lad. Lived there too.
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Currently 80F and overcast with a weird color to the light. Don’t know how much work I’ll actually do.
Ground some coffee beans with BB of Oct 25, kept in the fridge, and they were fine. Starbucks cafe verona dark roast. They don’t glisten with oil, but the taste is good.
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n
1 hogshead = 6 firkins
Torrence was pretty high end when we visited exactly a year ago. Upper middle class, and if it is moving down in socio-economic terms, that process is just starting.
To be fair, that weekend, we spent time in Bellflower, Carson, and Redondo, hitting the important places in the history of the “Emergency” TV show. We only passed through Torrence twice, once on the freeway and again on surface streets.
Carson was heavily Hispanic. We ate a late lunch at Spires, just down from the firehouse and refinery, and at around 2 PM, we started to get the stink eye from both management and the other customers as we noticed a low rider show setting up in the parking lot to start at 4PM, running until late that evening.
The perp in the shooting last night worked in Torrence at a test prep center.
I think I posted last year about the surprise family connections we found in Redondo driving in to stay at the Portofino for the night. My aunt’s second husband was Czuleger, as in the namesake for Czugleger Park.
The upside of the shooting is that the spotlight will once again shine on this generation’s Fancy Lads.
Why is a 31 year old with a MechE degree from CalTech and a Masters in CS from one of the mid tier state schools teaching at a test prep center?
Educational resources have been misspent for the last 20 years. Some hard questions need to be answered about why.
But one beaver can yield several dozen merkins.
As suggested by the trillions of dollars spent over 50 years and the accompanying halving of literacy and numeracy among the American public.
“Halving” is just an estimate. I don’t know of any recent widespread testing of school children, recent graduates, or the general public using the tests from the 1960s or 70s to establish the amount of decline. Even the “recalibrated” tests used today show a decline, though.
JEP once posted a sample Eighth grade graduation test from the turn of the 20th century. A simple internet search shows many such examples.
I will go out on a limb and say it’s easier to get into Harvard today than to pass that test.
After all, David Hogg got in. Harvard teaches remedial algebra to freshmen now, and it’s clear they graduate people who can’t read or write English well.
I may be misreading my packaging, but one pound of grade AA Challenge Butter is 454g.
It says 32 servings at 11g/serving, for 352g of fat.
352/454 = 77%.
Yes, but I don’t know of any attempts to have a large number of people take any of these tests. I did see something about an 8th-grade (?) teacher giving her class the test, but that was only a few dozen students at most and IIRC a lot of the students gave up after the first “unfair” question, something that isn’t relevant today.
it’s clear they graduate people who can’t read or write English
wellAT ALLFTFY.
My daughter’s college, which is by no means top-tier* requires all freshmen to take what I consider to be remedial math and remedial English classes, first semester. There doesn’t seem to be a means for testing out, though she didn’t look too hard for that.
A significant fraction of the freshman year was unable to pass the remedial classes and needed to retake them in the Spring semester.
* She’s plenty bright and went to a good school but she had medical problems throughout high school, to the extent that we weren’t sure she’d be able to graduate. Docs finally identified the problem and she got better, but by that point it was well into senior year and she had to work very hard to catch up in order to pass her classes. Wasn’t able to think about college until around last April, by which point “safety” schools were all that were available.
We taught remedial C to the mostly Colonist demographic enrolled in my non-thesis Masters in CS program.
I was a TA with faculty status mostly because the Colonists could not produce sealed transcripts as part of the job application process, fortunately required under state law in Texas.
My boss would have much rather had Colonist girls in skin tight jeans in the TA role (cough) instead of me and the skinny Vietnamese girl who went to the CS program in undergrad and could get a sealed transcript with a 15 minute walk.
The standards haven’t declined everywhere. If you think your education and experience is first rate, try your hand at the University of Central Florida’s test to enter the upper division of the undergrad program.
Even TAMU with Stroustrup as Chair (cough again) wasn’t that tough on the undergrads.
After sitting through a “Theory of Computation” lecture at MIT, I’ll conceded they are tough on those students, but that is an elective IIRC.
@EdH
rounding error
(0.80 x 454)/32 = 11.35, rounds to 11
Work it in English as God intended:
0.80 x 16/32 = 0.40 oz
I went back to university about 20 years ago, just for one semester. I don’t seem to do well in academia. All students were required to take a basic / remedial English course, and my professor was in my age group. She mentioned to me once that I was the only student she had that year that she was assessing content versus structure. Everyone else was a recent high school graduate, and she was working on grammar and spelling with most of them.
Harvard is a money fund with a school attached. The endowment is the driver.
IIRC they don’t even need to collect tuition for the next few decades if they didn’t want to.
n
Along the same lines, the Wikemedia Foundation has money in the bank to fund operations (mainly server costs) for decades. The donations that they receive fund the foundation’s activism.
Even if you use Wikipedia regularly, don’t donate money if you do not support the activism.
Home, at last. 2,800 miles of driving, 50+ hours in the driver’s seat according to the truck trip log.
I-40 from Little Rock to Memphis has more trucks than cars on Sunday morning. Same stunts by the truck drivers, taking 15 miles to pass two trucks, not getting over when there is space, because one more truck to pass. Bunch of jerks.
I will go to bed early tonight.
Freefall: Hood Ornaments
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff4400/fc04365.htm
Yeah, that is a really bad idea.
“Same stunts by the truck drivers, taking 15 miles to pass two trucks, not getting over when there is space, because one more truck to pass. Bunch of jerks.”
In my younger days I enjoyed finally getting to pass the jerk, getting in front of him, and then waiting for the hill where I could slow him down and bury him at the bottom shifting twelve gears.
Now the average trucker doesn’t have the skills to cope and would end up in the ditch or taking out a family in a minivan in the left lane.
“Impulse (Jumper #3)” by Steven Gould
https://www.amazon.com/Impulse-Jumper-Novel-Steven-Gould/dp/0765366029?tag=ttgnet-20
Book number three of a four book science fiction young adult series. Or is it a fantasy series ? I have read this book several times, maybe five or six times now. I read the well printed and well bound MMPB published by Tor in 2013 that I just bought new from Amazon in 2014. I am now reading the fourth book, Exo, in the series.
Would you like to be able to teleport ? I have always wanted to be a teleporter. I mean, it is the ultimate for a lazy man.
David and Millie have a 16 year old daughter now, Cent, and live in a log cabin in Canada, 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Very difficult to get to for non-teleporters and kidnappers. Cent has recently put a notice on her bedroom door in butcher paper:
“HELP !”
“BEING HELD PRISONER BY TELEPORTING ALIENS !”
“KEPT FROM NORMAL LIFE.”
“SEND FRIENDS.”
“AND ICE CREAM.”
Warning: There are adult situations in this book (and in the series in general).
There is a TV series on Youtube called “Impulse” like the third book in the series. The only similarity it had to the book was its name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=holzBghWTlY
My rating: 6 out of 5 stars
Amazon rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (1,242 reviews)
Lynn
Harvard is a money fund with a school attached. The endowment is the driver.
IIRC they don’t even need to collect tuition for the next few decades if they didn’t want to.
The federal government sued Rice University in the 1960s because the tuition was free due to its endowment larger than Harvard’s endowment. The feddies won so all of the Ivy League schools starting charging tuition at that point.
Not according to some quick research:
The federal government did not sue Rice University because of its endowment; rather, Rice’s governing board sought to amend its charter to allow for tuition charges and to desegregate the university, which led to legal actions in the 1960s.
From an article in Wikipedia (and there are other references that can be found about this issue):
Perhaps you can provide links to information that confirms your statement.
So Rice’s BOD decided to change a fundamental aspect of their school, to get the sweet sweet government money?
Sounds like a betrayal to me.
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headed home
n
I was told the lawsuit story when I was a student at Rice in 1977. I assumed it was the truth.
BTW, my statement was that the Rice endowment was greater than Harvard’s endowment in the 1960s. Your statement did not contradict that as your data was for 40 years later..
I wasn’t disputing the endowment statement, just the statement that I highlighted about the lawsuit.
In fact, according to Wikipedia, your comment about endowment value is correct, according to Wikipedia:
Currently, Harvard’s endowment is much larger than Rice’s; $56.9 billion (Harvard) vs $7.9 billion (Rice), as of FY 2025, according to the same article.
not my top concern in endowments
“IEA Head Fatih Birol: UK should forego North Sea Oil Expansion Because Nobody Needs Oil and Gas”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/04/26/iea-head-fatih-birol-uk-should-forego-north-sea-oil-expansion-because-nobody-needs-oil-and-gas/
What an idiot.
“world’s leading energy economist”?
I’d guess there are at least five people who regularly post here who ar more able to pour piss out of a boot without instructions than this sorry dipshit.
He should immediately be put on a “no fossil fuel” transportation list.
Home safe. Gas was $3.99/gallon at the rural ¾ point between here and there. I filled up when I got home at HEB for $3.49/gal.
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@steve, I didn’t get the joke because I had this idea in my head that a merkin was a prosthetic sleeve… now I know the phrase “kitty carpet”. Thanks google.
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Ate a cheese burger and Buc ees chips that some kid left on the table unguarded. I’m a bad man.
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Time to do a quick survey of the internet and get ready for bed.
n
The ultimate conversion tool (NB may not be entirely suitable for cooking )
https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-converter.html