Daily Archives: Sunday, 10 February 2008

Granola thumbprints

Posted on
2

It’s been a wasted weekend. Work and sleeping off the effects of a cold have fettered my precious free time. That and 285 posts on the RSS reader. Must streamline. First to go will be the Scotsman feed; too much repetition. I’d already thrown out the right-of-centre blogs a few months ago, but was sucked into reading their recent froths about the COE’s archbishop’s radio interview. Bad idea; even worse, I read some of the comments.

And to top it all, we are out of biscuits/cookies in the house. This is never a good state at the weekend. What exactly am I supposed to have with my tea if not a biscuit? And I was craving jammy dodgers. So it made sense to bake thumbprint cookies, which are just cookies in which you stick your thumb and fill the resulting indentation with jam. No recipe this time; it just wasn’t good enough. Note to self: putting granola in baking only makes it all taste like health food1.

Jammy Thumbprints

Oh, they weren’t awful per se. Just chunky when what I wanted were slightly crisper biscuits, not chewy cookies.

1 Might as well eat one of these.

Pesky pre-primary pussyfooting

Posted on
6

Any semi-regular reader (that’s you, you and you over there who reads the food posts) can guess on which arm of the political spectrum I lie. (Or quadrant, if left and right are too simple for you.) So you must have been rather pleased that I haven’t been inundating these pages1 with posts about the current drive to select the US presidential candidates who will be duking it out in the final contest this November. It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just that, as a foreigner, I can’t vote. But I can tell you who I would have voted for last Tuesday if I could have. Or would have wanted to vote for if s|he existed.

Quite simply, I would have voted for someone who is/was opposed to invading Iraq, has plans for getting Iraq back to civility, is pro-Social Security, can keep an open mind on stem cell research, supports choice in schools, leans towards fair trade, is pro-labour (the workers, not the UK party), is pro-choice, pro-gay partnership/marriage, anti-death penalty, will bring in gun-control legislation, will act on environmental concerns, fix the crazy US health care system, and isn’t a complete nutjob.

According to one of the very many presidential selection tools out there2, such a candidate DOES NOT EXIST. Hmm, funny that. If this were the UK, quite a few possibilities would have flagged up on all issues except that most important qualifier of not being a nutjob. But, of the US contenders, Dennis Kuchinich came up tops, followed closely by Barack Obama, then Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. No need to even ask where any of the Republican candidates came in. If akatsukira ran the world, those guys would be given a small island in the middle of nowhere3 and told to just get on with it.

So, now you know. Wish you hadn’t started reading, eh?


1 Quite unlike the blog diarrhoea I subjected you to in 2005 then.

2 Ones that compare policy and not hair styles.

3 Kiribati, anyone?