Monday, October 14, 2013

Monday: Columbus Day!

This appears to the be the fourth year in a row I've made the traditional Columbus Day Spaghetti Tacos (the Overcompensating archive has changed, and that's the first in the series that I found).  You're welcome, America.  I'm single-handedly saving you from bags of syphilis being shot at you by Ghost Christopher Columbus.


This year's worked much better than the previous years.  First, that lazy sauce works well, although I did add some garlic and some red pepper flakes to make it a bit more interesting.  Second, tiny mini-meatballs of Italian sausage pan-fried and then added to the sauce at the end.  Third, WF brand taco shells have at least twice the structural integrity of the national brand ones I've gotten before.  Plus, these come in blue.  Finally, some smoked provolone to add a creamy note.

Not that these are easy to eat.  I can't imagine how these could be "kid food."  First, you have to fill the shells immediately out of the oven, when they're flaming hot.  Next, you fill them with boiling hot spaghetti and sauce.  Finally, you have to eat them fast enough that the liquid doesn't make the shells soggy.  Basically, you're holding a tiny inferno which at any moment will either shatter into a billion pieces, dumping the hot spaghetti into your lap, while simultaneously trying to keep the drips from travelling much further than your elbow.

Final note: ramekins have yet another use.  Holding your assembled tacos upright.

  • I don't know how this was a surprise.  Sunkist is the best orange soda, no contest.
  • Adjunct faculty is a disgrace.
  • MM suffers from the "basically Superman, but less well known than Superman."  See also: Captain Marvel.  I also want to add Big Barda here, as she's basically an invincible face-pounder as well.
  • What an asshole.  See, my theory on blogging can be summed up like this:
    • Things I made, I post first.
    • Things I found randomly, I put them next.  If there's an obvious source, I try to stick that in the links.  If there's a clear theme or something, I do the google image search thing.
    • Links go last, and for tumblr stuff, I try to click back through to the initial post, unless I'm lazy, or there's a comment, or I'm making some other point.  I try not to have more than one link to a given site, because that seems weird. 
    • Post link math goes last-last.
  • I'm making a point on this link, so that's why I'm not tracing back.  This is going to be my last link to sigma7.tumblr.com.  Why?  Because over the weekend I had like six links to it that I had to cull down to a single one.  Go follow him directly, and if you don't, fine.  You probably drown puppies too, don't you, fun-hater?
  • WTF?  If LAX looked like that, I'd actually want to fly through it.
  • I saw this image retweeted by LSJ on twitter.  The point they make is that 44% of people surveyed age 18+ think that children should contribute to their parents' retirement.  36% disagreed.  Prepare for math.
Let's ignore the aspects of Social Security/Medicare/government programs that use current receipts to redeem Treasury bonds issued previously to pay for current benefit payments.  That's a higher order thing that I'm pretty sure most people don't immediately think of when confronted with a question like this.  Instead, let's curse the heavens above for the incompetent Congress that has led to the government shutdown preventing me from accessing the cohort demographics data compiled by the census go hack out data from a wikipedia plot by eye to generate the following plot:


The red line shows the rough CDF for all ages, with the blue line showing a similar thing for everyone older than 20 (which we'll use as a similar group as the 18+ in the USAToday survey.  Next, let's over plot the 36% and (1 - .44) = 0.56 lines.  So, the oldest 44% of the country are basically people 50 and older, and the youngest 36% (blah blah 18+) are those under about 40.  Now, imagine two hypothetical people.  One is quickly approaching retirement and beginning to realize that they maybe didn't save enough to sustain their lifestyle.  The other sees retirement as far off in the future, and is struggling with a shitty job market, huge student loan bills, probably also isn't saving enough for retirement, and considers being asked to carve out more of their income as kind of a bad deal. 

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