Unqualified Offerings

I want to extend best holiday wishes to Loyal Readers everywhere, and especially to my co-bloggers: Thoreau and Mona of course, but also our prodigals like Bruce Baugh, Neel Krishnaswami, Jennifer Abel and Nell Lancaster. I love and admire you all and, whether you choose to post or not, consider you part of the UO [...]

Much as I loved the video of Julia Child and Jacques Pepin that max pointed us to in a late comment on the original roast post, in the end I decided to go with the low-heat method detailed at Cooking for Engineers. So I got up at 4am to take the roast out of the [...]

By Thoreau
I’ll start with gifts I received from those nearest and dearest to this blog:
-Commenter Idi Amin’s Last Meal (aka my younger brother) got me a couple of books off my wishlist:  “The Zoroastrian Faith” by Nigosian and “The Drunkard’s Walk” (about random phenomena).  He also got me Johnny Cash’s Fulsom Prison CD (to remind [...]

In honor of Stanley’s post, an excerpt from a dialog with The Littlest Offering this evening at dinner:
"Anyway, it’s true that there’s no Santa Claus, sweetie, sure. But the Easter Bunny? Totally real."
"Right, Daddy."
And she rolled her eyes in a very Christmas-y way.

By Thoreau
Dear Readers,
It is with a heavy heart that I urge you to temper your Christmas festivities with watchfulness.  It has come to my attention that tonight a Turkish religious radical will attempt to enter US airspace and leave suspicious packages in American homes.  It is believed that the timing of this attack was chosen [...]

By Thoreau
A philosophy professor’s daughter makes a diagram of the North Pole.  The professor interprets the diagram.  Hilarity ensues.
The part about gladiator contests at the North Pole is the best, IMHO.

By Thoreau
$550 for 100 reprints?  I mean, yeah, it’s nice glossy paper, but I can go to Kinkos and get a dozen prints on really nice paper (which is more than I’m likely to need in this era of the pdf) for, um, whatever it is, a hell of a lot less than $550.

By Mona
[When 'Doctor' Prager declares: " It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband," what does Prager think the "remedy" ought to be, if the "axiom" is wrong"? I leave that to readers to surmise.]

 
Put out a lot married [...]

By Thoreau
Optics Express (a completely open-access, non-subscription journal funded entirely by exorbitant author fees*, grrrrrr….) has several articles on energy in its latest issue.  Might be interesting.
*Actually, this is probably the fairest way to fund a journal.  The most immediate benefit of most articles is to the author, who gets to list a publication on [...]

By Thoreau
My favorite issue of the Economist is the Christmas issue, because it includes a bunch of long articles on all sorts of random topics that one writer or another took an interest in but couldn’t into the regular issues because the articles are (1) too long and (2) frequenlty a historical overview of a [...]