Blackmoor Vituperative

"Because nothing says 'privilege' quite like offering unsolicited advice to an entire generation."

Most of the time, the brand doesn’t matter. Don’t waste your money. Buy store brands when you can.

However, no one makes English muffins like Thomas’ English Muffins. They are the English muffins to buy.

Bays are also quite good.

• 1 Thomas English muffin
• 1 slice Canadian bacon
• 1 egg
• 2 tbsp butter

Microwave egg at 50% for 2:30.

Season to taste.

Elevator pitch: Doughy old white dude (DOWD ?) offers useful advice to young people, based on things that he learned while living this long — with the disclaimer that at any moment, what he suggests might be rendered distasteful, ludicrous, or simply impossible by the passage of time.

I’d call it ADVICE FROM THE PATRIARCHY.

Today’s advice: Sardines are the best fish for you. They are sustainably harvested, full of healthy stuff (one of the few natural foods with Vitamin D, just for example), and no risk of bad stuff that may come with larger fish (no risk of ciguatera, for example). And King Oscar has the best sardines.

They are not good for you if you have gout, sadly. But if you are so afflicted, I suspect that you already knew this.

Later…

“Advice From The Patriarchy … Because nothing says ‘privilege’ quite like offering unsolicited advice to an entire generation.”

See, I think that’s hilarious. But I suspect that the desired audience would not appreciate the joke.

If you are like me (and I know I am), you buy juice mainly to mix it with alcohol. FUN FACT! Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix has 19 times as much juice as V8 Splash Berry Blend, and 8 times as much juice as Ocean Spray Cran-Blackberry.

• 95% – Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix
• 5% — V8 Splash Berry Blend
• 12% – Ocean Spray Cran-Blackberry

Et tu, Ocean Spray?

On the other hand, Mr & Mrs T Pina Colada Mix is literally just sugar water. “Natural and artificial flavors” comes after “titanium dioxide, potassium sorbate, sodium citrate” in the ingredients. Pineapple juice is not expensive (around $0.06 an ounce). Cream of coconut is not cheap, but it’s not that expensive (around $0.25 an ounce). Mr & Mrs T Pina Colada Mix costs about $0.10 an ounce.

Buying good rum or good vodka and then mixing it with sugar water is OFFENSIVE to me, on a deep and personal level.

The moral of this story is: READ THE LABEL. But if you want me to read them for you, here is what you should buy:

• Mr. & Mrs. T Spicy Bloody Bold & Mary Mix
• V8 Original 100% Vegetable Juice
• V8 Spicy Hot 100% Vegetable Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Kiwi Strawberry
• Juicy Juice Mango Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Strawberry Watermelon Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Apple
• Juicy Juice 100% Juice, Tropical
• Juicy Juice 100% Orange Tangerine Juice
• Juicy Juice 100% Berry Juice
• Great Value 100% Lemon Juice
• Realemon 100% Lemon Juice
• Great Value Lime 100% Juice
• Realime 100% Lime Juice
• Libby’s 100% Pineapple Juice
• Great Value Orange 100% Juice
• Simply Orange Pulp Free Orange Juice
• Coco Lopez Real Cream of Coconut

I make my own taco seasoning mix. The stuff that comes in packets always has sugar and silicon dioxide (and sometimes sawdust — cellulose). I am going to start mixing up my own creole seasoning, too (once my current can of premixed creole seasoning runs out).

Creole Seasoning

Update (2020-03-27): I reduced the salt by 1/3 and tripled the cayenne. I was happy with the result.

This is the recipe I plan to use for creole seasoning.

• 4 teaspoons garlic powder
• 4 teaspoons onion powder
• 2 tablespoons sweet paprika powder
• 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1 tablespoon dried thyme
• 2 teaspoons dried oregano
• 2 teaspoons dried basil
• 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper (or less if you don’t want it as hot)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt (I use kosher salt for this)
• 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Grind it up in a coffee grinder, put it in a jar, and you’re done.

Taco Seasoning

This is the recipe I use for taco seasoning.

• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/4 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
• 1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1/2 teaspoon salt (I use kosher salt for this)
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

Same deal: grind it up, put it in a jar.

Aside from the sugar and sawdust you find in store-bought taco seasoning packets, it also does not include the corn meal that is always in those packets. If you want to add corn meal (to thicken the sauce for burritos, for example), get a small bag of masa harina (like, a 1 pound bag — it looks like a small bag of sugar or flour — it’s actually corn flour). A little masa harina goes a long way, so keep it in the fridge in a 1 gallon ziploc bag (put the whole masa harina bag in the ziploc bag, don’t dump it out) and it will last for ages.

Don’t just use regular corn meal, by the way. That’s fine for making corn bread, but not Mexican food. You want “masa harina”. It’s different.

Watching a documentary about sugar, called “Sugar Coated” (2015). Briefly, obesity has doubled in the past 30 years, and diabetes has tripled, and it’s because sugar is in literally everything and we eat way too much of it. We eat twice as much processed food, and at least twice as much sugar, as we did 30 years ago. And make no mistake: our sugar consumption 30 years ago was enormous, compared to 30 years before that. It was already far too much sugar.

The people who made the video keep saying that this is a controversial issue.

How is this controversial? It’s obvious. Look at the ingredients in spaghetti sauce, hot dogs, barbecue sauce, ketchup, cereal, pizza sauce, even bread. Bread! Have you seen the cereal aisle at the grocery store? It’s literally boxes of candy. Grocery stores have become candy stores — and that’s not even touching on actual candy and cakes, of which we consume vast quantities.

We are a stupid, stupid species.

This is worth watching, too.

Tipping is bullshit. American “tipping” has created a whole class of beggars. People who work on my car work just as hard as the people who bring me food, but they’re not dependent on the kindness of strangers to pay their damned bills. And how much my mechanics get paid doesn’t depend on the cost of the part I have them install, or whether they’re young and cute.

I tip well, because I can (this was not always so), but I would much prefer that businesses actually pay their employees to do the job they were hired to do, so that the price I am quoted when I place my order is the price I actually pay.

“Tipping” should be abolished. It’s unfair to the people who pay, and it’s insulting and unfair to the people who receive.

But with the current political trends in this country, I suspect that most Americans will be depending on “tips” to survive before too long.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! Much like Columbus Day, this day has very little to do with the actual historical St. Patrick. What we are actually celebrating are the good things that we Americans have gained thanks to Irish immigrants and (if we’re lucky) our Irish ancestors: an appreciation of good food, good friends, and good beer. These are things worth celebrating. If you want to go deeper with it, and celebrate more complex aspects of Irish culture and what we’ve gained from it, that’s great, too.

If you use this as an excuse to complain about St. Patrick, the Catholic Church, or cultural stereotypes, you are missing the point.

Exactly one year ago, I held a rum-tasting at the Midnight Frights​ party at RavenCon​. The best one we tried was the 12-year rum from Trinidad, followed closely by the 5-year rum from Barbados. The 8-year rum from Haiti was a distant third. The New Orleans rum and the Cruzan 5-to-12-year rum were not very good, but perfectly serviceable when mixed with orange/pineapple/banana juice and ginger ale.

(I am posting this here so that I can easily find it when I am at the liquor store. If you find it useful, that’s a bonus.)

This is an official National Security Agency (NSA) coffee mug. Nowadays, this isn’t anything special. Everyone knows who the NSA is and what they do.

Back in the 1980s, it was a different story. NSA agents were my favorite government “spooks” to use in modern-day role-playing games, because not many people knew they existed, and many people who did know weren’t quite sure what they did. So if I needed a couple of “top men” to show up under the flag of government authority without revealing exactly who they were or what they were authorized to do, the NSA was my go-to organization.

Those were the good old days.

One of the great things about my company is that they send me to conferences every so often. This mug came from php|tek 2012, which was a great convention held at a terrible hotel located an hour away from Chicago. It was a horrible location for a conference, honestly. However, the conference itself was really good.

This mug came from Mashery, which was one of the sponsors of the conferences. They provide API management for third parties. But what I think is neat is that the mug changes when you put something hot in it.