Pot, that is.
Over the past year, we have rediscovered the joys of cooking with a Crock-Pot. Today, I made a Weight Watchers Chili Mac recipe in ours, and it was really good. (A little on the tomato-ey side, but I think I can cut that taste down a bit next time by not draining the red beans as much.)
I highly recommend the use of a Crock-Pot, especially for the cooking disadvantaged. In the morning, throw in your ingredients, set your time (4, 6, 8, or 10 hours), and when you get home later in the day, voila!, dinner is served.
We’ve also been making a mean chicken chili dish, though I seriously doubt it’s on the new Weight Watcher-friendly menus we’re looking through. (Missus Phisch is back on the program, which means I’m back on the program, too, and could use the weight loss myself.)
The Crock-Pot is extraordinarily versatile. My sister-in-law has cooked spare ribs in hers, and says the meat is so tender, you can pick it cleanly from the bones with your fingers. As someone who really doesn’t like having to tear the meat from the bones with my teeth, this is something I’m going to have to try.
Month: February 2005
See Napster’s Super Bowl ads? Think you’ll remember them three weeks from now? Right.
Ashlee Vance dissects Napster’s supposed costs, which do not take in to account the fact that most people’s songs on their iPods are not from the iTunes Music Store:
From where we sit, the math doesn’t break down terribly well in Napster’s favor.
Let’s take a look at consumer A. This consumer goes to Amazon.com and does a search for Creative – one of the Napster supported music device makers – and picks up a 20GB player for $249.99. Let’s assume he keeps the device for three years, paying Napster all the time. That’s $538 for the Napster service, bringing the three-year total to $788.19.
Consumer B types iPod into the Amazon.com search engine and finds a 20GB device for $299. Apple doesn’t offer a subscription service, so this customer has to buy songs at the 99 cent rate or at $9.99 per album. Subtracting the price of the iPod from the $788, consumer B would have $489 left over for music. That’s roughly worth 489 songs or 49 albums.
We posit that during this three-year period both Consumer A and Consumer B will actually end up with close to the same number of songs on their devices. Customers do not, as Napster suggests, pay $10,000 to fill their iPods with 10,000 songs just because the capacity is there. They take their existing music, CDs and MP3s, and put that onto the device first, then later add iTunes songs as they go along. A Napster customer would have a similar mix of old music and new downloads.
The big difference here is that after the three years are up, Consumer B has something to show for his investment. He still owns the music. If the Napster customer stops paying for the service, his music is all gone. He’s paying $179 per year to rent music. This isn’t high quality stuff either. It’s DRM (digital rights management)-laced, low bitrate slop.
You could once buy a CD and then play that music on your computer or in your car at will. Hell, you still can. You own it. You can burn an extra copy of the disc in case it gets scratched or pass along the disc to a friend to see if they like it – just like you would with a good book. Five years from now, you will still own the CD. No one can tell you where and when you can play it.
This is not the case in the Napster subscription world. After six years, you’ve tossed away $1,076 for something that barely exists. Forget to pay for a month and watch your music collection disappear. (Not to mention, you’re betting on the fact that Napster will even exist two years from now. At least you know that a year’s subscription to the Wall Street Journal will still work in 12 months time.)
I’m a CD man, myself. I like the versatility of being able to do whatever the heck I want to with the music I purchase. I know it will run aghast of some, but I still use CDs in my Pilot. Most of the time, however, the CD arrives at the phisch bowl, gets opened, ripped to MP3 format in iTunes, and is loaded in to the music library (tunaphisch) and on to the iPod (phischpod). The only tunes I’ve downloaded from the iTMS are the free ones I occasionally will like. That may change a bit with the new Pepsi-iTunes promo, but other than that, I do not see myself purchasing digital music directly from Apple, much less from Napster.
[Via DF.]
While the Honda Ridgeline remains the practical object of my truck-lust, the concept Jeep Gladiator has vaulted to the top of my “if money and practically were no objects” wish list. As one can see from the photos, there’s no getting a baby/toddler car seat in to this thing, and the canvas roof would be impractical in the dry, 100-degree-plus heat of summer in north Texas. Still, I love the simple lines of the interior, as well as the retro-yet-modern utilitarian lines of the exterior. It’s a great-looking truck.
In his Daily Devotional for February 1st (free registration required), Pastor Greg Laurie talks about a homesickness for heaven.
You were created to know God. You were created to go to heaven. God has put this homing instinct in you, and it will only be satisfied when you see Him face to face. Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to go home?
From the “Religion of Peace” Department, Jeff Jacoby:
In which country are Muslims being taught the following lessons?
“Everyone who does not embrace Islam is an unbeliever and must be called an unbeliever… . One who does not call the Jews and the Christians unbelievers is himself an unbeliever.”
“Whoever believes that churches are houses of God…or that what Jews and Christians do constitutes the worship of God…is an infidel.”
To offer greetings to a Christian at Christmas — even to wish “Happy holidays” — is “a practice more loathsome to God…than imbibing liquor, or murder, or fornication.”
Jews “are worse than donkeys.” They are the corrupting force “”behind materialism, bestiality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society.”
Muslims who convert to another religion “should be killed because [they] have denied the Koran.”
Democracy is “responsible for all the horrible wars” of the 20th century, and for spreading “ignorance, moral decadence, and drugs.”
If you guessed Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, or any host of Muslim nations, well, you’d probably be right. But the point of the article is that it’s happening here in the States.
Today would have been President Ronald Reagan’s 94th birthday.
Jeff Harrell:
President Reagan meant a lot to me. I never met the man, nor did I ever vote for him; I was two weeks shy of my eighth birthday when he was first elected to the White House. But growing up in the Reagan era, I couldn’t help but be influenced by his policies, his philosophies and most of all his presence. He was just there, like a permanent fixture, and I grew up around him.
Likewise with me. I vividly remember President Reagan’s first inauguration, watching the coverage on television the afternoon and evening after I got home from school. First, at the sitter who take care of several children after school while their parents were still working, and later, with my parents, over dinner.
As with Jeff, President Reagan has influenced me even more as I got older, and took more of an interest in politics. Many consider FDR the greatest president of the 20th century, but I would have to disagree. FDR offered shorter-term solutions to short-term problems that have blossomed in to a monster federal bureaucracy. FDR may have done most of the work toward winning the Second World War, but he did so while allowing the evil influence of communism to spread throughout Asia, Eastern Europe, and even within the ranks of his own administration. He left us the Cold War.
Which Reagan won. The left called Reagan crazy, a cowboy (sound familiar?), one who would get us in to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Instead, Reagan won victory after victory after victory against the Soviets, without a missile ever being launched. At the same time, he oversaw the greatest eight-year period of growth our nation has ever enjoyed. For me, and many others, it’s Ronald Wilson Reagan who stands on the shoulders of giants in the 20th century.
Hispanic-Americans, take note. The party which claims to have your interests at heart, the party which claims to be the tolerant one, the party which claims to be racially-inclusive: only 6 of 42 Democrat Senators voted for the first-ever Hispanic Attorney General of the United States.
But the Republican President who nominated him is a racist.
John Fund, in today’s Political Diary:
Republican members of Congress have a ready response for Democrats crying foul over President Bush’s constant references to Franklin Roosevelt and other icons of liberalism to bolster his call for Social Security reform.
They note that in an address to Congress on January 17, 1935, President Roosevelt foresaw the need to move beyond the pay-as-you-go financing of the current Social Security system. “For perhaps 30 years to come funds will have to be provided by the States and the Federal Government to meet these pensions,” the president allowed. But after that, he explained, it would be necessary to move to what he called “voluntary contributory annuities by which individual initiative can increase the annual amounts received in old age.” In other words, his call for the establishment of Social Security directly anticipated today’s reform agenda: “It is proposed that the Federal Government assume one-half of the cost of the old-age pension plan, which ought ultimately to be supplanted by self-supporting annuity plans,” FDR explained.
“What Roosevelt was talking about is the need to update Social Security sometime around 1965 with what today we would call personal accounts,” says one top GOP member of the Ways and Means Committee. “By my reckoning we are only about 40 years late in addressing his concerns on how make Social Security solvent.”
In the Beginning
“How did life, in its infinite complexity, come to be?” asks Newsweek in a subheadline. “A controversial new theory called ‘intelligent design’ asserts a supernatural agent was at work.”Apparently the Old Testament isn’t on Lexis-Nexis, or Newsweek’s fact-checkers would have realized this isn’t actually a new theory.
Based on this photo, should I ever get Down Under, I’m making a mental note to not go swimming in the Bondi Icebergs pool…