Breached Menu

Mustard-Bussel Sprouts -- Spice up an already good thing

It's good that nobody likes these veggies because that makes them cheaper. Here in Bamberg, the prices on sprouts went way down after the third frost.(1) Since then, I've been eating about one-and-a-half kilos of sprouts per week.

-Cut off sprout bases, rinse and drain.
-Boil a pot of water. A big pot.
-Put sprouts in a strainer and steam over the pot. Do not cook all the way through, but get the outside layers pretty damp. Time varies based on the size of sprouts.
-Dump some pasta and salt into the boiling water.
-Lightly sauteé a chopped onion (a ringed onion works very well, too) and garlic. Add the brussel sprouts. Increase from low to medium-high heat. Add salt, black pepper, and cayenne to taste.
-Add between 1/3 and 1/4 cup of yellow mustard. Use something besides French's, you cheap jerk. Add about 2-4 tbsp. water, depending on the amount of mustard and whether you want a sauce-y or drier dish. Add some butter, mix all so that the sprouts are evenly coated.

Serve sprouts and onions over the pasta.

-----Endnotes-----
1. Which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I would have figured that the frost would have come well after the sprouts' season.

Launch Party

For You (sing., no doubt) that reads this

Parallel blog, three weeks in the making, finally launched. Go check out my new (short-term?) obsession! Technology! Fun!

Idle Morons are the Devil's Playthings

Breaking my short publishing moratorium to bring you the abortion debate

"Despite what disingenuous proponents of abortion would like women to think, evidence shows that there are significant physical and mental health risks associated with having an abortion. Far from being safe, abortion is, in fact, an extremely risky procedure that can not only cause substantial harm to the patient and any future pregnancies, but can also lead to agonizing psychological trauma as well. The fact is that the pro-abortion left does not have women's best interests in mind. Until Planned Parenthood and its supporters decide to start telling the truth, thousands of women will continue to be the ignored and forgotten victims of legally induced abortion."
-- Scott "Alex" Harper, "Abortion poses serious health risks to mothers"The (USC) Daily Gamecock [20. Jan, 2005]. (1)

My response

In response to Alex Harper's Commentary on abortion (20 Jan., 2005), I would suggest that if women are facing psychological trauma from abortions, the Christian Right and other anti-abortion groups share much of the responsibility. By photographing women who visit clinics where abortions are performed, by publishing the personal information of clinic employees, by advocating (and in some cases executing) the murder of doctors and nurses who perform abortions, and by mounting national media campaigns against the practice, these groups seek to intimidate and shame women. No wonder women suffer mental anguish! This intimidation (as well as the subsequent clamor that the resulting mental stress is a reason to continue intimidating women) is nothing more than a bullying tactic.

No responsible person on either side of this issue would recommend that women have an abortion without first considering the consequences: physical, mental and spiritual. However, a more enlightened approach includes providing help and support for those women who decide that their circumstances warrant such a difficult choice. Instead of increasing the trauma, pro-life organizations could better spend their money caring for these victims and reducing the conditions that lead them to choose abortions in the first place. While not the ultimate factor, poverty and its consequent circumstances, such as domestic abuse, depression, sexual abuse, homelessness and a lack of education often lead women to choose abortions. Reducing the effects of poverty, especially among racial minorities (who are one of the main focuses of WorldNetDaily's sources on the reproductive effects of abortion), would in the long run decrease the rate of abortions.

Furthermore, as with all medical proceedures, abortions entail certain risks. However, rather than outlawing the proceedure, this is a primary reason to keep abortions "above the boards." If the underlying causes of abortion (poverty, lack of affordable contraception, a lack of accurate sexual education in schools, etc.) are not addressed, abortions will continue to be performed, regardless of their legality. Better to keep the circumstances as safe, clean and controlled as possible; in the long run, a return to the unenlightened, Victorian-era back-alley abortion proceedures would be devastating. If today's women face possible birth defects in their future children as a consequence, the alternative would be certain sterility or death.
-- Submitted to The Daily Gamecock, 21. Jan., 2005. (not yet published)

To this, I'll add something that occurred to me last night.

If social and pyschological pressures can influence a woman to choose abortion, then Harper's argument seems to come from the wrong direction. In other words, women who face stressful circumstances (especially because of poverty) might simply be more likely to need psychiatric care. Regardless of whether or not these women (2) have abortions, they might need more psychiatric care, due to the circumstances (largely povert-influenced), which I cite above. If these causes also drive the women to terminate their pregnancies, then that may be a contributing factor, but it would not mean that abortions necessarily sent them screaming and crying into the arms of pyschiatric professionals. In other words, I do not see any definite causal link, as suggested by Harper.

Also, make sure to read Brandy's response (which did get published) here.

----Endnotes-----
1. Emphasis mine. Registration required to view old articles. However, it's free.
2. And the "25% percent" he quotes from the Canadian government study (which I haven't been able to find -- surprise, surprise) still seems like a fairly low number. I would assume that the n for the study was fairly low, perhaps only in the hundreds.

--edited to remove bad page breaks; bold added; -W. 23.01.05

Hiatus

Breached Unity will be taking a brief sabbatical while my attention is distracted by another project. Check out the new technology-themed blog, coming in the next few days (hopefully). Breached Unity will be back full-time by early February, at the latest (although much sooner, I hope).

When Things Happen

An Italian frend of mine saw a huge cucumber in somebody's produce basket in the kitchen the other night. How did she react? By picking it up and holding it out in front of her. By telling me that it was "huge." By declaiming sodomizado! at the top of her lungs, for emphasis.(1)


I have run afoul of the Bamberg University's computer geeks. Apparently, I've disabled my account due to excessive incorrect logins, which probably means that I set my password to something screwey last year and my attempts to guess it locked out the account. This is stupid, because I can't think of a reason why I would have set an unusual password. Of course, it might have been something else that set it off. Like when I tried to access my email account 27 times, then realized that I didn't have an account on their servers because I had never requested one. Or the time I typed in the wrong password in the VPN manager 13 times in a row. Who knows? The point is -- no study guides for me this week.


-------Endnotes--------
1. This word is, of course, quite fun to hear in Italian.

"Ag" Might Stand for "Aggravation"

Wonderful new tidbit in the USDA Food Plan Guide for 2004.

Note that the top spending bracket is referred to as "liberal."

I'm not trying to instigate some sort of Congressional investigation, now, but wouldn't it seem to be common sense to remove words used for political labeling from government reports? Things like this are the reason liberal Democrats distrust the "bipartisan" efforts of the Administration. They'll bring you to the table, then serve you bullshit, call it steak, and ignore your complaints.(2)

But more to the point, the meaning of the word "liberal" is undergoing a change for the worse. We saw during the campaign that the Republican party has been able to browbeat their own interpretation of "liberal" into the party base, with Guliani, Schwarzenegger (3), and Cheney all using it to protray the Democrats as weak, elitist, and evil. This connotation is a long way from the days of the Depression-era meaning of the word. But even the Democratic leadership is swallowing this cock-bluster and trying to back off from the word, rather than fighting this portrayal.

"Does it make your blood boil? Well, I should say...."

For the record, given the weakness of the Dollar, although I would fall in the Thrifty ("Republican") - Low-cost end of the plans, I'm currently blowing out the top end of Moderate-cost. Trade policy does affect even the smallest among us, Mr. President.


---------Endnotes--------
1. File in PDF form. You'll need Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free.
2. OK, so Tom Daschle was somewhat responsible for that, seeing as how he had no balls, but still....
3. I hate that he's now a "politician." It makes life almost unbearable. He's been described as a "condom stuffed with walnuts," yet he's a governor....

Replacement Post

I had a cool political piece I was working on, but in the middle of it I decided to do this instead...

When was the last time you reformatted?

January is a good month to do so. In some ways, it fits the gestalt of "out with the old...."

1) Reformatting gets rid of crap that piles up on your harddrive. It releases space that can be used for new and interesting things, like music, downloads, and new documents, rather than six-month old documents, boring spam emails, and dead bookmarks.
2) Reformatting speeds up your system noticeably. You have more space for swap, the fifteen programs in your registry that used to demand processor cycles at startup (traditionally the most processor-intensive part of your computer's "day") are gone, and your registry/libraries are all squeaky, straight-from-the-coder's-desk clean.
3) It makes you feel good to shake off that pack-rat vibe. Even if you just cheat and move everything to a DVD, it still feels good!

Be careful when doing backups before your reformat, though. In general, if a virus is driving your desire for a new installation, don't backup your hard drive! Instead, rely on an old, un-virused backup. (Because you have been backing up regularly, now, haven't you?) Restoring virused backups just makes You grumpy. Then I get phone calls with You on the other end, and You are just no fun when You are grumpy.

Also, be somewhat flexible with your backup. Don't put critical data in just one place or on just one type of media. Be a data spendthrift, too. Backup superfluous items -- who knows what you may need later? Data storage is really cheap these days -- an external hard drive makes a great gift for a birthday, and a 200GB model is pretty affordable. Trust me, when you delete your Annual Report from 2002 because it saves 600 kB and $75, you will be screaming mad when Your Boss's computer crashes and he needs the hard copy ASAP! (Because Your Boss never makes backups. Why? Bosses never make backups!)