It's actually the beans I can't get soft enough, but that was the next recipe I wanted to try.

Rolling Stone summarizes the fucking of the economy: [link]

People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

am in restaurant wathing people's court. woman is suing friend for peeing in her bed while passed out.

Gross, tommy!!

And now that I have made up my mind (well, narrowed it down...)about slow-cookers, I am obsessing over creamer/sugar combos.

Marvel's early April 1st?

(I'm referring to this, of course)

I just read that, Strega. Got my issue yesterday. I do like Taibbi's writing.

I saw Hugh Laurie on Leno/Letterman/whoever last night, shilling Monsters vs Aliens, and it's always cognitive whiplash to hear Bertie Wooster's voice coming out of Gregory House's face. I wonder how many people who only know him as House think the world is putting them on when they see him doing the comedy stuff. Hearing Dr. Cockroach gives me mental whiplash.

Heaven knows it took me several weeks to stop saying, "Is it a different Hugh Laurie?"

For veggie stock, I usually put my vegetable ends in a pot and cook/simmer them while I'm making whatever soup I was cutting them up for, and then store it in the fridge until I'm ready to use it. (We make soup a lot, so this works out well. If I'm not going to be making soup within a day or two, I throw the ends in a freezer bag until I have enough to make a stock.)

My crockpot is an inherited-from-mother one, and gets used on a regular basis.

Matt Taibbi makes me laugh. If I didn't have a fake relationship with a number of other journalists, we could have a fake affair.

Don't despair, erika! You don't know that they're not fake-poly!