Playing Hive at Graze.

Here's the game we were playing. Here's the restaurant.

"Susan had a reputation, fairly or not, as someone who could run a little hot and shoot from the hip."

"If someone had told me that the biggest knock on her was going to be that she too slavishly followed the talking points on Benghazi, I would have been shocked."

"Democrats Unlikely to Regain House in 2014."

Nate Silver explains.

I know this kind of humor is too easy to do.

In fact, I once had a job reading magazines — pre- law school, post- art school — and we used to crack each other up all the time mostly just reading items that were intended to be taken seriously by were just begging to be declared ridiculous. But "The Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog" got me laughing so hysterically that it pained me to continue to the next item. And yet I continued.

The only thing that's made me laugh more in the last couple months is the best of "Damn You Auto-Correct."

I mean... that... and this other thing I can't tell you about.

"Subsurface insanity."

In Tokyo.

100 greatest video games (by decade).

So TIME thinks. Do you agree?

Reader poll here.

Taliban spokesperson sends email with the bcc addresses on the cc line.

400 addressees revealed:

The list, made up of more than 400 recipients, consists mostly of journalists, but also includes an address appearing to belong to a provincial governor, an Afghan legislator, several academics and activists, an[d] l Afghan consultative committee, and a representative of Gulbuddein Hekmatar, an Afghan warlord whose outlawed group Hezb-i-Islami is believed to be behind several attacks against coalition troops.

At the Compost Concept Café...

... follow your own path.

Cutting off the land line.

I finally did it, ended non-mobile phone service. I'd been thinking about doing it for quite a while, because we make all our calls and talk to everyone we care about from our cell phones. The land line mostly only brought in robocalls, but in the last couple weeks it was getting calls from people — different people — who believed that we had called them. We were getting dozens of messages from people saying things like "Stop calling me unless you're going to leave your name." We picked up a couple of these calls and they seemed to be from genuinely confused people who seemed to have pushed "call back" buttons after they received a call. It seemed like when you get email with a friend's name on it, but it's been hacked on to some spam email. Ever heard of that with a phone line? Well, it's not my problem anymore, it's AT&T's, and it was the incentive for me to cut them off after all these years. Cut them off on the land line, that is. They're still my mobile phone company, my cable TV company, and my internet company.

Land lines... Twinkies... all these building blocks of American life are evanescing.

Earth...

... Angel.

"[T]he hypocrisy of pillorying a guy for using his employer’s equipment to grow marijuana..."

"... while his employer offers training in how to create a pair of substances — including one with its own mind-altering properties — that together probably do more damage to the state’s health and well-being than marijuana ever could."

Wisconsin State Journal columnist purports to detect "hypocrisy" after a University of Wisconsin researcher is arrested for growing marijuana in his university lab, when the university teaches beer brewery and has a big ice cream making plant.

Fat-choked dairy products in general are a focus of much study at the university, which regularly provides technical assistance to Dairy State dairy producers.

Given its status as the drunken-driving capital of the United States, and federal statistics that put its obesity rate of 27.7 percent, Wisconsin’s love affair with beer and ice cream might be far bigger threats than a couple joints.

Care to think about the Wisconsin economy without beer and dairy products? And the notion that more marijuana would help us out of our obesity... I'm having trouble with that line of reasoning. Wouldn't you keep eating or eat even more? Seems like your argument demands a focus on the drugs that make you skinny....

What drugs make those skinny rocks stars dreadfully skinny?...  I've always assumed that the drugs make them forget to eat, or maybe they can't afford food or the drug drives down appetite. What drugs do this?...  I want to add some authentic detail into a play I'm involved with....

The classic rock hard drug is heroin, which would definitely cause that gaunt look, and coke would be the 2nd choice. I would research those drugs...

Google "coke bloat". Makes you skinny, except in the face and tummy....

Heroin. If you're talking about the standard Janis-Joplin-oh-my-god-she-looks-like-a-skeleton-but-damn-she's-still-kinda-hot thing, it's heroin. If you're going for the where-are-her-teeth-and-what's-that-purple-thing-on-her-lip thing, methamphetamine.

So, there you have it. What you want is: heroin. Bonus: You'll be growing a very pretty flower!



Okay, all you nonhypocritical University of Wisconsinites: Cultivate your gardens!

"Petraeus Says U.S. Tried to Avoid Tipping Off Terrorists After Libya Attack."

Here's the NYT article to pick through.

At some point in the process — [David] Petraeus told lawmakers he was not sure where — objections were raised to naming the groups, and the less specific word “extremists” was substituted.

“The fact is, the reference to Al Qaeda was taken out somewhere along the line by someone outside the intelligence community,” Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican, said after the House hearing. “We need to find out who did it and why.”...

Democrats said Mr. Petraeus made it clear the change had not been done for political reasons to aid Mr. Obama. “The general was adamant there was no politicization of the process, no White House interference or political agenda,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California.

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said that Mr. Petraeus explained to lawmakers that the final document was put in front of all the senior agency leaders, including Mr. Petraeus, and everyone signed off on it.

Including Mr. Petraeus, who had the motivation of trying to keep his job, which he was deprived of immediately after the election. Now, he has the motivation of trying to regain his honor.

Ms. Feinstein, read the final unclassified talking points to reporters:

How to make your own Twinkies.

Chip Ahoy explains:

I have a pan made for East coast style hotdog buns. It's like a flat bread with bumps in it the shape of Twinkies. You cut through for individual hotdog buns, like cakes. So each pan makes about 10 hotdog buns.

There's also a Chicago hot dog bun pan, which seems like it might be easier.

Then squish a filling inside using a pastry bag. You poke a hole in it and like a surgeon deposit the filling by squeezing the bag while simultaneously withdrawing the fill tip through the puncture with machine like precision. 

But the chocolate cupcakes are better. With the white curly frosting on top of thin chocolate ganache. Those can be improved too.

The filling. It's like a whipped cream foam. Lemon custard would be better, or banana. But if you're stuck on white foam then real whipped cream. Or you could jab the can of spray whipped cream in there but then you couldn't control the flavor of it.

Now that I'm poking around over at Amazon, I'm seeing the Kaiser Bakeware Basic Tinplate Eclair/Lady Finger Pan and this Eclair Baking Pan and realizing that Twinkies are eclairs (with the chocolate frosting). And check out the Norpro 3964 Cream Canoe Pan With Bonus 9 Piece Decorating Set:

Old fashioned cream canoes and traditional French eclairs are simple to make with Norpro's Cream Canoe Pan. Featuring durable heavy gauge construction, the pan has 8 elongated cups that are the perfect shape for baking eclairs or cream filled sponge cakes - homemade Twinkies, anyone?

Cream canoes! I Google that term and come up with a recipe for "twinkling good vanilla snack cakes" made in your "a filled cake pan (aka cream canoe pan)." The fall of Hostess is a wake-up call: Get twinkling!

ADDED: You can still buy Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets, which is what we ate in Delaware in the 1950s and 60s. And here are the Tastykake cream-filled cupcakes, which I think you might find similar to the Hostess cupcakes. No white curlicue on top, but I think you might find they taste better.

"Americans who remember the student protests of the 1960s tend to assume that U.S. colleges are still some of the freest places on earth."

Says Greg Lukianoff:

But that idealized university no longer exists. It was wiped out in the 1990s by administrators, diversity hustlers and liability-management professionals, who were often abetted by professors committed to political agendas.

"What's disappointing and rightfully scorned," Mr. Lukianoff says, "is that in some cases the very professors who were benefiting from the free-speech movement turned around to advocate speech codes and speech zones in the 1980s and '90s."

Today, university bureaucrats suppress debate with anti-harassment policies that function as de facto speech codes....

At Western Michigan University, it is considered harassment to hold a "condescending sex-based attitude." That just about sums up the line "I think of all Harvard men as sissies" (from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 novel "This Side of Paradise"), a quote that was banned at Yale when students put it on a T-shirt. 

More examples like that at the link — which goes to the Wall Street Journal — and in Lukianoff's book "Unlearning Liberty." There's video too at the link, displayed with this unintended freeze-frame humor:

"A drunk guy vomited over the railing onto about a dozen audience members seated in the orchestra..."

"... right in the middle of one of [Paul] Rudd’s big monologues on Wednesday... There was mass chaos for several minutes, but the cast played right on through, ignoring the disruption."

"Given the severity of the situation, and the number of people affected, it’s pretty amazing that the show was able to go on uninterrupted...."

I guess the show, called "Grace," wasn't much about what happens to other people. Carry on! Don't notice the troubles that fall upon your fellow human being. That tends to be the message of great art, I think. Or do I have it backwards?

At the Elephant Ear Café...

... bring it all in here.