I am very thankful for the fact that I have a husband who enjoys clothes shopping with me. He is much better at eyeing up pants and determining whether they're likely to fit me than I am, and he likes browsing through shirts and skirts and suggesting things for me to try. Since, as I noted in a recent post, I am unlikely to buy anything that he's not keen on, unless I really like it, having him pick out things for me to try on essentially cuts out the middle man -- I don't waste too much time trying things on that he doesn't think will look good at me, at least in the abstract.

A few weeks ago our friend Martijn introduced us to one of the Goodwill/St. Vinny's type stores in Amsterdam, the Juttersdock, of which there's a branch just a few blocks from our place. We first went there with him for book shopping, but today I took Joel back there to go clothes shopping. I tried on every single pair of pants that was either a size 34 or smaller or wasn't labelled but looked like it might fit, and success, I came away with one new pair of pants! This is better than our last attempt where we went to more than half a dozen stores and tried on multiple pairs at each store and came away with nothing.

He also bought himself what he calls a "real" couch pillow: A stuffed red heart with arms. It's about the only impulse purchase I've ever seen him make in the time that we've known each other, and I think he'll get his 2EUR worth of happiness out of it. I also picked up a skirt with butterflies and beading along the hem. Sparkly! You can't go wrong with sparkly. No shoes this time, but that's okay.

Not that I think anyone on my friendslist can actually afford any of this, it is worth perusing and drooling.

Online Auction

Offerings include textiles, paintings, and carvings, primarily from later-period England, Spain, and Germany, with some Italian and Russin material.

In particular, rezansky , you should go take a look - there are some Russian embroideries, the most impressive of which is on the first page.

I went out to dinner with Mr S tonight since I was craving a fish fry. I grew up in Milwaukee in a Catholic neighborhood, so Fridays mean an innate craving for fishy goodness. We tried out the little family restaurant at Milwaukee and Stoughton Road (the one that used to be a Country Kitchen and hosted Social Practice for awhile years back). I had not yet been there since it looked like the sort of place that was mostly frequented little blue-haired grannies, but they advertised a fish fry and were close by the house.

It turns out I was right in my suspicions about the clientele - Mr S and I perceptibly dropped the average age of the location by walking through the door. However, the fish was really very tasty and reasonably priced. The hot buffet had a lot of fish and non-fish offerings, which included fried cod, baked cod, fried Alaskan pollack, fried chicken, fried shrimp, fried smelt, BBQ ribs, mashed potatoes, corn, and fries. We each had the Fish Buffet - soup, salad bar, the hot buffet, and a beer or wine for $10. All you can eat perch was $8 and the single servings of fish ran around $7 for the soup and salad bar, a potato, and four pieces of fish. And the fish was very, very good. Happiness.

Next time folks want to go for a fish fry, I now have a good recommendation. :)

This week's Resolution Recipe: Hard Sauce.
( Special bonus points for identifying the source of the subject header. )

Ran into this show today, and it occurred to me that using his list would be a great idea if we do any traveling.

This is the list of the places he's done shows on:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/shows/guys-diners-drive-ins-and-dives/index.html

"Join Guy Fieri as he visits classic "greasy spoon" spots, from a roadside shack in Tarpley, Texas to a Las Vegas sports bar with stellar stromboli."

I wandered down to the Mission on a ramble today, and decided to stop in at Tartine for a Morning Bun. They are indeed quite good - orange, sugar, & a bit of spice - but they aren't worth waiting twenty minutes in line good.
But the rest of the ramble was nice. I worked off a bit of the lovely dinner last night at B&R's, which was fun. Low-key chattage with lots of people, as well as watching Bloodsport with the sound off. Due to a miscommunication both etaine_pommier and I brought pecan pies, but hers was chocolate and mine was plain, so it worked out.
Now I should do some homework.

Lois McMaster-Bujold's reaction to finally seeing the newest Star Trek movie. She discusses plot points, so if you haven't seen it yet and care, don't read it.

http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=164952151&blogId=520145013

I can see her points -- but I still liked it. Fluffy fun.

http://blogs.wsj.com/numbersguy/turkeys-travel-and-other-thanksgiving-myths-845/

"My column this week considers oft-reported claims that Thanksgiving spurs the consumption of 46 million turkeys and the busiest travel period of the year. Both claims appear to be contradicted by government data."

About three weeks ago, Joel and I talked about doing our traditional Thanksgiving dinner and inviting friends over to share it with us. Two weeks ago I had gotten the mistaken impression that Thanksgiving was the third Thursday of the month, not the fourth, and suddenly it was the third Tuesday of the month and we hadn't made any plans so I figured "oh well, we'll just let it slide this year". Then a few days later I found out that in fact Thanksgiving was this week, not last week, and thus there was still theoretically time to plan everything, prep it, and have friends over. However, that didn't happen. I was at an event over the weekend and Joel didn't go out shopping on Saturday as we would have had to to get everything we needed; Tuesday came around again and we admitted to each other that we weren't going to do the whole shebang. But he'd bought cranberries and we'd at least make his favorite cranberry salad. And yesterday I thought, "Surely we can make a pie too", but that quickly revised itself to "how about apple crisp instead -- just as tasty, less work, and we haven't made it in a long time." The cranberry salad has to be made a day in advance for the gelatin to set, so Joel put that together last night, and then today when it came time to think about dinner I tried to think of something that (a) involved meat, (b) we hadn't done in awhile, and (c) was moderately special (i.e., not just pasta + stuff or soup, our stands-by). It occurred to me that we hadn't had chicken marsala, which used to be one of our stock dishes, in quite some time, and we had two chicken breasts waiting to be used up, conveniently. Add to that some canned corn, and we managed to pull together a four course meal that actually involved cooking rather than just heating things up for our Thanksgiving dinner. I'm glad we were able to do something a bit special even though we didn't have much effort to put into it.

Over the course of the evening I finished sewing the first length of a gore into my dress. I still have to sew the lining to the wool of the other three gores, and then set them and the other half of this gore...so that's about 13 seams left to go. It took me three movies to sew together the lining and wool of this gore, and to sew up the one side seam. That means I've got about 13 movies left until the dress (minus the sleeves) is completed; at three movies per week I can probably get this done before Christmas, but it will be tough. Good thing the UK snooker championship is coming up soon -- that will give me plenty of material to sew to for at least one week!

Can anyone with a Wii give me the scoop on some stuff? I'm trying to hit the BF sales, but could really use some more intel! Thank you, and Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Does the console come with a Nunchuk? Does the nunchuk plug into the wiimote? Does it get its power from the wiimote, or does it need its own charger? Does the plus thingy make it so you can't plug in the nunchuks? Dumb questions, but I'm a complete noob at this stuff, so take pity on me. ;)

Chargers:
I am interested in the induction chargers, if they work well. We're only going to have two remotes to start with, but might want to expand to four later, since there are five of us. We are getting a Wii Fit as well. Do I need to buy a charger for that too? If I don't buy chargers, does everything take batteries, or what? Is the standing charger for the Wii Fit better than the plug in battery pack? How long do things take to charge? Are there charging brands that are good, or which suck?

Silicone: How about silicone skins for everything - do I need them? For comfort, so they don't slip, or to protect them from kids and chaos? I heard that the new wiimotes come with skins. Anyone know?

Stand/coolers: Does the main console fall over a lot, or are the stands just for looks? Does it really overheat? How far away can you use just the base console before you need the extra sensor to pick up signals?

Memory: Do I need to by SD cards for it? I keep seeing them being sold, but don't really understand what for other than to save RPG game stuff... we're getting Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus software initially; do we need them?

Wiimote add-ons for sports stuff: anyone use these? I tried Sports Resort in the store without them, and it was fine, but then I've done most of those sports in RL before. Do kids get it better with the add-ons?

I'm not someone who would buy clothing, particularly shoes, from an online store, since I really want to be able to try things on and make sure they fit and are comfortable before I buy them.

I'm also not someone who generally pays any attention to ads on websites.

Which makes the following doubly atypical for me: There's one on-line clothing and shoes store that advertises on Go Fug Yourself, and I'll confess to being totally tempted by some of the things they picture. The first item that caught my eye some months ago were these peacock tights. (Tights! With peacock feathers on them! Awesome!) They also come in brown, teal, and black backgrounds, and I don't know which I like the best. However, Joel is not convinced. About any of them. And even if I did buy clothing online, sight-unseen, and body-untried-on, it's rare that I buy something that I know he doesn't like. And then today, they had a dress/shoes pair that I really like: a flowery girlie dress that 10 years ago you wouldn't have caught me dead in and a pair of unicorn heels. How cute are these?? Except for the price, and the fact that I don't buy clothing over the internet, and the fact that I don't succumb to webpage ads, I'd be very tempted.

Please design a logo for me. With pie charts.
For free.

Occasionally profane, but funny.

Similar to what happens with a Ouija board:

the researchers were perhaps under the influence of the Clever Hans Effect [CHE], also known as the "ideomotor effect," in which the trainer - the facilitator in this case - was unconsciously transmitting the information to the subject .... The Clever Hans Effect is notorious in psychology. Early in the last century, a horse named Clever Hans - in German, der Kluge Hans - was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other simple intellectual tasks. In 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst showed conclusively that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was reacting to cues provided by his trainer.

This is relevant today because people strongly suspect that "A man [in Belgium] has emerged from what doctors thought was a vegetative state to say he was fully conscious for 23 years but could not respond because he was paralyzed" is in fact still in a coma and the person doing the typing for him is scamming the desperate family and doing all the work.

The article is here This Cruel Farce Has To Stop!

Here's an article about the man in the coma: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34109227/

If this is what's going on, it should be relatively easy to prove or disprove. None of the articles have covered if the situation has been evaluated for the ideomotor effect.

Edit Friday: An interview with the doctor on just this topic, who gets very evasive: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18209

This happened to come up on the rotation today: Is liver full of pesticides? at The Straight Dope -- this is the final paragraph:

The World Health Organization recommends a maximum daily intake of 70 micrograms; the typical daily intake in the U.S. and Canada is 50 to 100 micrograms. The concentration of cadmium in beef liver is two and a half times that in beef muscle tissue, and in kidneys nearly seven times as high. Accordingly, some researchers have suggested the two foods be avoided. While you're at it, you may as well knock off the oysters, too (no problem for Cecil, frankly), which have the highest concentration of cadmium of any commonly available food, some 35 to 50 times the concentration in beef muscle tissue.

So if you avoid liver because you are concerned about the heavy metals, you darn well better be avoiding oysters much more energetically.

Poll #1490448 Regional Variations
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 21

What fills a turkey: stuffing or dressing?

A few weeks ago it was "Acid head!" "Base head!"

Tonight it's "you fecal coliform!"

Edit: and then it mutated into "legal cauliflower!"