Picked up a “new” game this week…

Yep, an actual roll-the-dice D&D-style role-playing game, for the very first time. Whereas a normal person would move from a text-based BBS game over to a graphic MMORPG, I on the other hand, regress to archaic handwritten role-playing… Go figure.

Sarcastic self-flagellation aside - IT’S FUN!

September 15th, 2004

We all know I’m a big Frank fan, so it should come as no surprise that when Uncle Phil sent me this link, I found it doubly amusing. Help yourself to a free chuckle by clicking on the image above.

September 14th, 2004

Preparing 50 water balloons: 27 minutes

Summer memories: Timeless

September 12th, 2004

Who would have thought I’d find a kindred spirit in a tree-hugging transcendentalist like Henry David Thoreau.

Here are some of my favorite quotes…

Love is the profoundest of secrets. Divulged, even to the beloved, it is no longer Love. As if it were merely I that loved you. When love ceases, then it is divulged.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

Things do not change; we change.

We do not live our life out and full… We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion?

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.

Only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea… News which I seriously think a ready wit might write a twelvemonth or twelve years beforehand with sufficient accuracy.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.

My life is like a stroll upon the beach, As near the ocean’s edge as I can go.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

That man is rich whose pleasures are the cheapest.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

Goodness is the only investment that never fails.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Nothing makes the earth seem so spacious as to have friends at a distance: they make the latitudes and longitudes.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

I am sorry to think that you do not get a man’s most effective criticism until you provoke him. Severe truth is expressed with some bitterness.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

I love you not as something private and personal, which is my own, but as something universal and worthy of love which I have found.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

When it is time to die, let us not discover that we never lived.

What you get by achieving your goals is to as important as what you become by achieving your goals.

Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.

September 10th, 2004

September 9th, 2004

Speaking of favorite childhood reading
what was YOUR favorite picture book?

September 8th, 2004

Went to see Vanity Fair yesterday, and it reminded me (not that I ever forget) of how much I love all things Indian… Eastern Indian, that is. Although I’ve never traveled physically to India, my imagination has wandered there often.

It started as a child, when I chose my first chapter book - A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Its pink cover so enticing, the story of a girl, not unlike myself, who coped with life’s cruelty by transporting her thoughts to a better place.

Sara Crewe’s tales of her earlier life in India… The delicious smell of spices in the air, the fantastic mythology, yards of brightly-colored flowing silk… They made my Miss Minchin (aka Mom) seem more bearable, too - helping me retain hope for a better future.

And today I find the seeds planted in my heart then have flowered into a real love of Indian culture. Everything from Mehandi to Ravi Shankar. I enjoy the music, the artwork, even the proliferation of really bad movies.

As for this movie, it wasn’t bad… But it’s tough to buy Reese Witherspoon as anything other than Elle Woods …Even though she was legally auburn this time.

September 7th, 2004

I have discovered a way to accurately predict heat waves. When folks put in a request for my chili, I know the weather is about to change. For some strange reason, seconds before the heat turns unbearable, people crave my chili. Al Roker should add me to his contact list.

So on Friday afternoon, although it was a perfect seventy-five degrees out, when my brother told me how much he wants some of my chili, I knew we were on the threshold of a scorching Labor Day weekend… And I was right.

Why people want to eat something fire hot when the weather is fire hot is beyond me, but they do. Therefore, it has officially become tradition for me to cook chili while wearing a bikini. Now there’s an idea for Hefner, Bikini-clad chili cook-offs!

If you promise to keep the tradition alive, I will share my chili recipe with you (since no two cooks make it the same). A good pot of chili has a heck of a lot in common with DNA… It’s easy to get the idea, but complex to decipher, and when done right, uniquely your own.

KIKI’S BIKINI CHILI

Ingredients:

3# ground beef, 15% fat
1# ground pork, lean

1 large can crushed tomatoes, garlic flavor
1 large can diced tomatoes, italian style

Herbs and Spices:

2 cloves garlic, minced
hot red pepper flakes
chili pepper powder
dried garlic powder
dried onion powder
dried cumin powder
ground oregano
ground paprika
rooster paste
masa flour

Instructions:

While browning all the ground meats in a large skillet, warm the tomato in a large crock pot set to high heat. Add seasoned salt to the browning meat as it cooks. Stir herbs and spices in with the tomato, measuring according to your preference - see tips below. Finally, add meat to crock pot on low heat, and simmer for up to six hours.

Seasoning Tips:

If you’re gonna cook up some chili, make it hot and spicy - or don’t bother making it at all. If it doesn’t burn your mouth out it’s called spaghetti sauce, not chili. To test for proper seasoning, find an old man and give him a taste. If he chokes and falls on the floor, it’s almost spicy enough.

What about the beans, you say? Save them for your next burrito.

September 5th, 2004

Favorite quotes from Aiden Wilson Tozer, author of Pursuit of God…

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

One of the most stinging criticisms made against Christians is that their minds are narrow and their hearts small.

We must do something about the cross… flee it or die upon it.

God may allow His servant to succeed when He has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy.

Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.

Man is bored because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him. God has made him too great, his potential too mighty.

Whatever a man wants persistently enough will determine his character.

Our pursuit of God is successful because He is forever seeking to manifest Himself to us.

Modern civilization is so complex as to make the devotional life all but impossible. It wears us out by multiplying distractions and beats us down by destroying our solitude, where otherwise we might drink and renew our strength before going out to face the world again.

To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.

Let a man set his heart only on doing the will of God and he is instantly free. No one can hinder him.

An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.

Faith, as Paul saw it, was a living, flaming thing leading to surrender and obedience to the commandments of Christ.

If God gives you a watch, are you honoring Him more by asking Him what time it is or by simply consulting the watch?

In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we’re pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker’s praise without anxiety.

Complacency is the deadly enemy of spiritual progress. The contented soul is the stagnant soul.

No man should desire to be happy who is not at the same time holy. He should spend his efforts in seeking to know and do the will of God, leaving to Christ the matter of how happy he should be.

The vague and tenuous hope that God is too kind to punish the ungodly has become a deadly opiate for the consciences of millions.

If there’s anything necessary to your eternal happiness but God, you’re not the kind of Christian that you ought to be.

The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.

The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.

Faith never means gullibility. The man who believes everything is as far from God as the man who refuses to believe anything.

The only fear I have is to fear to get out of the will of God. Outside of the will of God, there’s nothing I want, and in the will of God there’s nothing I fear.

Men who refuse to worship the true God now worship themselves with tender devotion.

The Bible recognizes no faith that does not lead to obedience, nor does it recognize any obedience that does not spring from faith.

The man or woman who is wholly or joyously surrendered to Christ can’t make a wrong choice. Any choice will be the right one.

Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.

Much of our difficulty as seeking Christians stems from our unwillingness to take God as He is and adjust our lives accordingly. We insist upon trying to modify Him and to bring Him nearer to our own image.

Truth is a glorious but hard mistress. She never consults, bargains or compromises.

Every man is as holy as he really wants to be.

September 4th, 2004

A collection of quotes from famous punsters…

Fred Allen: “Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted.”

Ambrose Bierce: “A form of wit, to which wise men stoop and fools aspire.”

James Boswell: “Among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.”

Anthony Burgess: “Plurality of reference is in the very nature of language, and its management and exploitation is one of the joys of writing.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: “May be the lowest, but is the most harmless kind of wit, because it never excites envy.”

John Dryden: “To torture one poor word ten thousand ways.”

Henry Erskine: “It is the very lowest form, and therefore the foundation of all wit.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes: “There is no such thing as a female punster.” [Ahem... I beg to differ.]

Victor Hugo: “Le calembour est la fiente de l’esprit qui vole.”

Samuel Johnson: “If I were punished for every pun I shed, there would not be left a puny shred of my punnish head.”

Charles Lamb: “It fills the mind, it is as perfect as a sonnet… better.”

Leonard L. Levinson: “A joke based on the infirmities of language.”

Christopher Morley: “Language on vacation.”

Edgar Allen Poe: “Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.” Also: “The goodness of the true pun is in direct ratio to its intolerability.”

Sydney Smith: “The wit of words. They are exactly the same to words which wit is to ideas, and consist in the sudden discovery of relations in language.”

Jonathan Swift: “A talent which no man effects to despise, but he that is without it.”

Louis Untermeyer: “Something every person belittles and everyone attempts.”

September 2nd, 2004