Category: Friday Fives

1. What is your favorite food?
Pizza.  But I am trying to ratchet down the carbs due to blood sugar concerns.  So I am working on a less” carby” dough.  For great, amazing and easy homemade pizza, get Jim Lahey’s book “My Pizza”  He has this thing figured out – better than anything you will have delivered.

2. What is your favorite food preparation method?
Basted eggs. Take two eggs, crack them open in a non-stick frying pan  warm.and the pan with some olive oil. (For the fry and the flavor. ) put about a tablespoon of water in a lid for the pan and toss the water into the pan and cover. The eggs will be done in about 90 seconds and the whites will be light and plumpy and the yolks will be perfect.

3. What is your favorite cuisine or style of cooking?
Cuisine – probably Tex-Mex. Ole. Viva. Tacos.

4. Do you have any dietary restrictions and if so what are they?
Carbs, sugar and I am a vegetarian (really more of a flexa-tarian (I eat cheese, eggs, fish but no “meats” ), so there is that.

5. If you could introduce the whole world to one ingredient to improve their culinary experience, what would that be and why?
Fresh roasted, purchased from a roadside stand, Hatch or Pueblo green chilis – mmm. (Put them in the skillet with the eggs detailed above and you have a yummy spicy breakfast.)

1. What mildly annoying curse do you wish you could curse people with?
Those that don’t use their blinkers in traffic lose their right foot and the ability to push down the gas pedal.

2. It’s almost 2020, what futurist thing did you seriously think we’d have by now?
Clean, cheap nuclear power. Growing up in the 1970s, the idea of clean nuclear energy was part of the promise. Why can’t we solve the scourge of nuclear waste in order to make this feasible? I read an article a number of years ago that nuclear waste was posited to be a solution for fuel for battery cells in electronic devices such as electric cars, with a battery that could hold a charge for months. But “Big Battery” and “Big Oil,” I think shut the whole thing down. (Plus this scheme didn’t seem to be safe in the case of a battery-related accident – tons of nuclear waste leaks on the highway. Alas . . . )

3. It is the year 1800. What would have killed you by now (that actually happened in your life)?
Definitely my heart attack. No way could they have solved it with an angioplasty and stent as they can easily do these days.

4. What was the name of the smelly kid in class?
Dwayne M. Jeebus did he smell and sometimes my mother would pick him up and give him a ride home from school as they lived down the block and sitting in the back seat with him was a odorific challenge.

5. What’s the worst snack food you’ve ever seen in a store?
Most of the recreations from any of the state fair food booths – frozen fried Snicker bars and things of that ilk.

1. What was that cool thing/brand that everyone wanted when you were growing up, but now you’d get laughed at for having?
Canned tamales. Everyone, simply everyone was eating them as a child but no, alas, I am the only one.

2. What website do you no longer go to, but was once a favorite?
Talking Points Memo. I read it a lot during the early days of the Bush administration but I have wandered off and now simply play in traffic.

3. What food did you love as a child but hate it now?
Farm fresh cream (the consistency of really thick yogurt) ladled over Cap’n Crunch cereal. I don’t think that sweet rich concoction could ever be eaten today without putting me in a cardiac/diabetic stroke.

4. What’s a scam that people throw money at without knowing it’s stupid?
Where to start – megachurches, psychics, MAGA.

5. Pigs have sprouted wings and can now fly. How does this affect life as we know it?
A flying pig would change the food-esphere as we know it – Pigs would be revered and bacon and ribs, pork roast would be mere whims of the past, spoken about it in whispers.

1. If you were an alien visiting Earth where would you visit first
Wow, I get to play a role of an alien visiting Earth! Cool. Where would I go? From space, there are all these areas of large densities of light – visiting one of those, perhaps one of the densely populated areas in Asia, probably South Korea which looked at from space is very lit up.

2. How would you get here and how long would it take?
Well, I am an alien in space – I suppose I can now invent whatever kind of transportation conveyance that I want – I would fly down in a UFO that looks mysteriously a lot like the flying car used on the Jetsons.

3. What would you do or say when you got here?
I would attempt to understand the reason for all of the glowing orbs.

4. What would be your best judgment about Earth and what would be your worst judgment about Earth?
We tend to ignore the ocean. There is only so much land – but these creatures exist above all this water. What is down there that is so scary.

5. What would you look like?
See the picture above.

1. What do you feel like you’re missing out on?
I generally have a pretty good life and don’t feel like I am missing much. There are parts of the social sphere that I don’t understand and may be missing things. Recently I went down to the area behind Union Station in Denver, the RINO area and I think I missed this – that area is unrecognizable. I think I missed the message that seems to have been sent to nearly everyone in the country to move to Denver about three years ago. The growth I get, but what is feeding it, I think I am missing out on that.

2. What are some interesting life hacks for saving money?
Cook at home and take your lunch to work based on leftovers – you will save a fortune. Cooking is so easy and keeping a pantry of staples so you can just reach in and start cooking is easy too.

3. What’s the worst purchase you ever made?
The eight-track tape player I bought last year? Kidding aside, I can’t think of any major big purchase things. Things I buy that I find I don’t want or perhaps even regret I tend to give to my sister or my parents as hand me downs – usually techy stuff.

4. What’s the best purchase you ever made?
My 2008 Hyundai. Going on 11 years old – all paid for and runs like a dream with low miles still on it. Love that thing.

5. What products/services are extremely overpriced but we pay for anyway?
Apple products. Like Bose, they are mostly marketing. My laptop runs Linux and works and looks so much like an Apple Air you could be fooled if it weren’t for the branding. The Android operating system has matured to such a point that there is nothing an iPhone can do that an Android can’t.

1. Do you remember the first time you used a computer?
Yes, 1979, it was the fall of my junior year in high school. Our math teacher, Mr. Tonso had set up a series of networked IBM computers using BASIC and attached to a dot matrix printer with those all to familiar years later, 7″ floppy disks to save documents and manage the operating system. Pretty ahead of the times stuff and a great learning experience.

2. Do you remember the first time you used the internet?
It was in college after my time in the army, using an AOL startup disk and cruising along on the nascent web through AOL in 1988.

3. Do you remember the first time you used a word processor?
Yes, it was in the army, using the Wang word processor. (See the picture above to look at my Wang.)

4. Do you remember the first time you used a spreadsheet?
That would be at my first major job after college at the newspaper in Craig using Excel on a Macintosh to build out a chart for some dates and locations of hunting season stuff.

5. what is the next big thing in computers/telecom/technology?
They keep saying that laptops are going away, that phones are going away and the cloud providers like Amazon and Google are obsessed with voice search and “listening in on your needs” to offer their perceived solutions to issues. But I think the rubberband may bounce back to self rather then cloud and a return to owning data is a backlash I would like to see, but perhaps that genie is already out of the bottle. What’s nex? I think something like Google glass and/or a Star Trek like communicator that can read texts, send texts, mobilize social media and communicate with others. That is possibly closer than we think to becoming a reality.

Friday Potpourri

1. What would you tell people you did for a living if you won the lottery?
Vice president of Imagination

2. What are your best ways to shut down a conversation?
“Was that your fart? Jesus, man!”

3. What is a feature on a newer car that you never realized you were missing out on because you didn’t have it before?
Heated steering wheels. Wow – it comes from the future for today.

4. What is a cruel name to pick for your children?
Something from the medieval period or 18th-century literature. My son: D’artanian. My daughter: Broomhilda.

5 What is the worst gift you’ve ever received?
One year for Christmas the parents gave my sister tires. That was pretty bad. My grandmother always gave me underwear.

1. What was the best compliment you ever received?
I recently returned from a college reunion and everyone said I looked great – I’ll take it.

2. What are your five best talents?
I am a great left-hander
I can usually craft a pretty quick witty punchline
I make great homemade bread,
I don’t get lost
I write pretty good introductions to stories – no real story but intros, I got those nailed. I once said that my dream job would have been to write that opening scene at the beginning “Law and Order” where random strangers usually find a dead body and then Lenny shows up and delivers a zinger and then the the opening sequence rolls.

3. What do you wish most people knew about you, and why?
I am clumsy and yet quite nimble.

4. What has been your biggest accomplishment so far, and why does it mean so much to you?
I have many I am proud of. Graduating college, completing my army service and being a first runner-up in the Miss Sweden contest.

5. If you could achieve anything in your life, what would it be?
Solve global climate change and environmental warming. It would be cool to make the earth cool-er.

I’m off to my alma mater to hang with old college radio friends.

1. What’s your favorite song from the 90s?
“Walk on the Ocean” by Toad the Wet Sprocket

2. What’s your favorite song from the 80s?
“Burning Down the House” by Talking Heads

3. What’s your favorite song from the 00s?
“The Rising” by Bruce Springsteen

4. What song can you listen to over and over?
“Jersey Girl” by Bruce Springsteen, via Tom Waits

5. What song needs to just go away forever?
“Macarena” by Los Del Rio

1. It’s the end of banned book week. What banned book have you read?
“Lolita” Don’t let the skeevy premise of the book make you avoid it. This is one tome of the cannon of “Great American Novels,” an allegory for the pursuit of the great American dream bounced against the improbable hint of evil beyond every horizon. And the sentences are fantastically crafted. Nabokov is an exceptional writer.

2. What famous book do you think is overrated?
The easy answer is the bible but I am going to go with “The Hunger Games” Sure it’s an ok movie but I tried to read the drivel until I realized: “Hey, I’m not a 12-year-old girl, and put it down. Not a well-written book.

3. What is your ultimate must-read book?
Never ask a literature major to name just one book! Not fair. I will go with a book I have read several times and still enjoy – “The Stand” by Stephen King.

4. What would a famous book be called if their titles were just summaries of their plots?
“Huckleberry Finn”
-or-
“The Boy Who Went Down The River And Met A Runaway Slave.”

5. What should I read next?
I am re-reading “Moby-Dick” for the third or so time and still enjoying it and taking something new away from it. I highly recommend.