bewitched, bothered, bewildered

Cooking is a science: you can, should, and even must fuck around to find out, as even if you end up making something terrible, you have now learned what happens if you do that. You have gained valuable information. And sometimes, you accidentally strike gold and have invented something tasty and awesome.

I’m gonna use chocolate chip cookies as an example.

Adding more flour or reducing the sugar will make your cookies puffier. Conversely reducing the flour and adding more sugar will make the cookies flatter and crispier. This is really useful to know if your baking at different altitudes, most recipes have a sugar: flour ratio that works best at sea level and if your baking at higher altitudes you typically want less sugar: more flour because it’s harder for baked goods to get fluffy at high altitude. You can adjust these levels by about 1/4 cup without really changing the taste of the cookies

Melted butter vs softened butter will also change the texture of the cookies. Softened butter will give the cookies a more consistent texture while melted butter will give them more of a glazed cracked outside and a chewy inside

Adding oats to the cookies will also make them softer and chewier without effecting too much else

Once you’re done messing with the composition of the cookies you can basically fuck around with flavorings all you like. Vanilla extract can be replaced with any other extract you can find in the baking isle if you want to change the flavor of your cookies. You can also use other liquids like coffee to flavor the cookies, just keep an eye on the consistency of the dough and add small amounts of flour if it starts to get too runny

You don’t even need to use chocolate chips! Theres tons of alternative sweet shops in the baking isle if that’s not your thing. If you don’t want to use chocolate at all you can easily substitute these with dried fruits and/or nuts. You can mix and match any of these add ins to get the cookies you really want

refseek.com

www.worldcat.org/

link.springer.com

http://bioline.org.br/

repec.org

science.gov

1. Living Stones

these plants imitate rocks. who does that?

imagine deciding to straight up evolve into rocks as a defense mechanism. i had a whole rant planned but now i’m remembering that i have, in the past, on multiple occasions, daydreamed about being a rock. like that has been a recurring theme in my rich inner fantasy life. i would not forsake the opportunity to evolve into a stone.

2. Hooker’s Lips

ostentatious. flamboyant. vulgar. garish. randy. dare i say whorish? yes. this plant is whorish.

pucker up you hussy

3. Hoya Hearts

overused trope. lacks subtlety and creativity. truly, they just went with the first thought to pop in their head, no brainstorming involved. “ho ho ho i’m just gonna grow into a fucking HEART, that’ll show em!” Needy & basic bitch. looks cute on a desk

4. Lifesaver Plants

manages to be both psychedelic and disapproving. reminiscent of a prudish great aunt–but like, one who did a lot of LSD in the 70s. evidence of an alien lifeform who crash landed and then decided, fuck it, i’m gonna rent a one-story in the midwest and decorate it with vintage wood paneling & floral upholstery. probably smells like stale weed and glass ashtrays

5. Happy Alien Flowers

yes that is their NAME. sort of anticlimactic, but take a gander:

they are absolute sluts for drama, as demonstrated by the little hussies pictured above are YELLING AT ME. they bring to mind seagulls engaged in a Shakespearean blood feud. this flowers have committed aggravated manslaughter and probably got away with it too.

6. Bat Plant 

aka Cat’s Whiskers aka Devil Flower. how fucking emo is that??? this plant listens to mcr and is probably the gay cousin. they never got the hang of eyeliner but that doesn’t stop them from trying, bless em. their impetuous devil-may-care persona is hindered by their crippling social anxiety. i’m immensely fond of this plant. they’ll come into their own once they graduate and move away from college, but in the mean time they sit with the tech crew at lunch. you go little Bat Plant! 

 7. Dancing Plants

total band kids. also called Semaphore Plants, bc they look like they’re trying to flag down a plane. nifty fuckers 

"If only I had an element with 22 electrons in each of its orbitals combined...."

Hi! Yes:

This is just a relatively brief excerpt from Ivan Vaughan's book, which, for the most part, focuses on his life with Parkinson's disease. (From what I can tell so far, it's absolutely fascinating: far more than 'simply' a memoir, it's a reflection on illness, the mind-body connection, science, psychotropic drugs, patients' autonomy...and much more.)

But since this blog is climbing the drainpipe to the John & Paul business, and there's been some recent discussion of Mark Lewisohn's claim that John was such a bad boy Ivan's mother sent her son to a different grammar school to separate the two, I thought the following might be interesting.

And the ending of this chapter also gives some context to Paul's reaction to John's murder—another topic about which ML has interesting opinions.

This isn't to pile on ML, but more...as words from someone who was there.

(CC: @mythserene, @anotherkindofmindpod) I met John when I was three or four years old. One wet morning there was a knock at the front door. My mother opened it, and looking down, found a boy a bit older than me, smiling, but preoccupied with the effort of remembering what he had been rehearsed to say.

‘I believe a little boy lives here. I wondered if you might like to come out and play.’ He stood there in the porch, rain pouring down behind him, with a pair of slippers under his arm.

‘Come on in. What’s your name? You live round the corner don’t you?’

Next day I went around to the house where he lived with his aunt and uncle. We played with Dinky cars. I was surprised by his generosity and willingness to share his toys; he was happy even for me to take some of them home. When his Uncle George came home with some sweets John readily shared them. There was an immediate bond between us. He was older, read books, and his great intelligence and experience were apparent. I accepted his leadership but I was determined to preserve my independence. From the warm security of Aunt Mimi’s control, John accepted me into his life.

John was a member of his local library and immersed himself in books so that by the age of five he was already a fluent reader. I was still in the infant school when he started at Dovedale Road Primary School, but we played together after school and weekends. There were numerous parks, a golf course, and fields full of tangled growth and trees — just right for playing cowboys and Indians. In one barren area with large lumps of hard earth we played football and cricket. We spent hours digging all tracks to race our Dinky cars. Our most exciting game, though, was ‘fires’. We would go to a large area of waste ground and simply set fire to the straw and watch the place. I have never understood why nobody stopped us.

John’s gang comprised, besides himself, Pete Shotton, Nigel Wally and me. I was the youngest and was constantly having to prove my worth. I feel privileged to be John’s friend since he was nearly two years older. He protected me against Timmy Tarbuck and his gang on the rare occasions when I made the mistake of confronting one of them.

John and I went to different grammar schools, but I used to hear about the chaos and riots that seem to be a daily feature of his schooling. I’d rather lost touch with him when I went to university, and did not see him again until sometime after I was married. Then one day, as I was playing with my little boy Jus on the steps of our house in London, white Rolls Royce turned into the road. John jumped out followed by a woman I have not met before.

‘Hello, Ivy! This is Yoko.’ (…)

My attachment to both John and Paul ran deep and occasionally I would go to great lengths in order to see them at a moment’s notice. Maybe Paul saw our continuing friendship as a way of maintaining simple values he held dear. Jan liked Paul, though she did not see much of John. She was not the least bit mesmerized by their fame. She enjoyed eating at expensive restaurants in sampling London’s nightlife, into which Paul took us from time to time. But, should the effort to come to great, she was willing to let the relationship fade.

A month after telephoning John in New York [with the news of the Parkinson’s diagnosis; their first conversation in years], a heavy parcel was delivered. It was not until I was reading the titles of the books it contained that I realized they had been sent by John and Yoko. There was one by Arthur Janov, author of the Primal Scream, and one entitled Mind Magic. How to Get Well had on the fly-leaf a message from John that read ‘to start looking’, and The Snow Leopard had a note saying ‘to relax’. This last book gave me the greatest pleasure and I frequently re-read passages from it. Its author, Peter Matthiesen, lost his son through illness and journeyed in Nepal and in Inner Dolpo on a completely pointless journey to catch sight of a snow leopard. The peace he found travels across to the reader from each page.

John’s accompanying letter urged me, in punning language, to keep my spirits high and strongly suggested that it was up to me whether I sank or swam. I must not lose faith in myself.

Ten weeks later he was shot dead. Paul and I did not contact each other about it; in fact, we never brought it up in conversation. I hardly reacted outwardly at all. The day after John’s death, however, a colleague said that he supposed I was very upset at what it happened. I heard myself say: ‘I don’t know what I feel. I don’t know that I feel much at all’. As soon as he had gone, I instinctively made my way to a room where I knew I could be alone, and I wept profusely.

-- from Ivan-Living with Parkinson's Disease by Ivan Vaughan. 1986.

Disabled Person: YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER FOOL!

The United States Government:

In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.

It doesn’t matter what it’s for.

You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?

For college?

To put a downpayment on a house?

Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?

Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.

And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.

So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.

“What if I spend the money that day?”

Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.

before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.

Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.

And here’s the funnest part of the story!

One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.

The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.

He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.

Also, the rules about what is and is not exempt from being counted against your resource limit are incredibly vague and deliberately open to interpretation. Even things that are normally exempted like clothing or furniture could be deemed non-exempt if a capricious bureaucrat decides that it’s actually worth too much money and thus counts as an ‘investment.’

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel's show off the air. This is the last thing he said.

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak."

It's why Joe Biden was both "a sleepy old man" and "head of a crime family"