In answer to the question: Does today's New York Times crossword pass muster?

Does it have all of the required elements?

• A rare, often extremely rare, spelling of a word. Yes: Gaea
• Baseball. Hells yes. Five of them today.
• Jewish/Hebrew/Israel. One Hebrew, two combined Jewish and Israel. Bases well covered.
• A word or phrase that no one in the real ( Read more... )

• find and thaw green garlic
• make strawberries in strawberry sauce (FP)
• make duck spice rub
• freeze extra duck legs
• trim and rub duck legs

In the late spring of 1977, my redneck cajun friend Will said that I had to go to dance classes with him. And they weren't just any dance classes. They were disco dance classes ( Read more... )

Today I played golf with The Sandbagger, The Spitter, and my partner/teammate, The Choker. The format was the historically and misleadingly named four ball. Teams of two players each. On each hole, each player plays their own ball, then the best net score is the score for the team for that hole. It is sometimes called by the more cumbersome yet apt ( Read more... )

To give you an idea, when Top Shot finally got down to only 2 contestants (Googler Chris Cheng and military firearms instructor Greg Littlejohn), this was the final challenge in which they went head-to-head to determine the winner. To add to the drama they ran this course simultaneously, not timed one by one as is often done on the show. There were ( Read more... )

So I made 4 cups of dry roux, aka oil-less roux, aka browned flour ( Read more... )

It can be challenging cooking sometimes-elaborate meals by myself. The facts that I have a smallish stovetop without enough room to hold 2 large pans simultaneously, and only 1 oven, contribute to the difficulty. And if I have to resort to medicine for my back, there is a certain muzziness overlaid on the whole thing. So I tend to get all anal- ( Read more... )

Despite the nanny car "features", despite the much-loathed car alarm, I am really loving my new Honda Fit Sport with navigation. I could go on at length about how fun it is to drive, how comfortable the seats are, how roomy and flexible the cargo area is, etc. etc. And someday soon I probably will. But yesterday I tried entering a navigation ( Read more... )

Harry Potter caused me severe eyestrain after only a few chapters; that much concentrated eyerolling and groaning is contraindicated. The very idea of sparkly vampires kept me from even thinking about reading Twilight. Hence my trepidation re Hunger Games -- once bored twice shy ( Read more... )

My lovely otherwise-intelligent wife has a big thing for certain of the recent evil tidal wave of books in the vastly-profitable genre known as Young Adult. No, she was not stupid enough to fall for the Twilight "saga", but she did exhibit an unhealthy fascination with the Harry Potter books/movies ( Read more... )