Atomic Nerds

“….why are you teaching the dog to not fear fire?”
“You make it sound so sinister when you say it.”

Having just rescued a daddy long-legs from drowning in the shower, and my general track record on spider-friendliness and rescuing and making pets out of the eight-legged little buggers, it’s going to be deeply ironic if LabRat and I are wrong on this whole atheism thing and it turns out spiders are god’s indicator of evil – those who squish on sight earn brownie points sort of thing.

Oh well. I wouldn’t want to share heaven with a bunch of arachnophobes* anyway.

*Spellcheck felt this should be Anglophobes. I don’t know why that tickled my funnybone so hard but I’ve been snickering for five minutes straight.

Oh, this thing is still on? Hey, sorry about that*. So 2012 pretty well sucked crusty green donkey whangers, we’re all on the same page there, right? Well, a whopping two weeks in, ’13 is already a mixed bag but trending positively. LabRat has unfortunately spent the majority of the year thus far sick as a dog, hence a good chunk of the lack of content, but it has now been a whole couple hours since she attempted to hack a chunk of lung across the room, so we’ll take what we can get.

I know there have been some** requests for dog pictures as easy filler content. Good news! I have dog pictures! And you can just wait patiently for them because today’s story is about a pie.

See, during the Rama-mas-zwa-inox-ukah-years down time, longtime friend and part time dogsitter Indy was spending a good chunk of her grad student winter break here at Nerd Ranch. This meant that I had Help available in the kitchen. I know it’s odd, but LabRat and I mostly just get in each other’s way, despite many years of marriage, but Indy and I dance like Fred and Ginger*** in the kitchen for reasons unknown. So with little to do and help available, a recipe was floated before me leading to the phrase “Why not? It’s not like there’s anything else going on.”

If you ever hear me say that about a recipe again, just shoot a tranq dart in my neck right then and there and be done with it, mkay?

Now the actual recipe comes from the ambitious but excellent A Girl And Her Pig. The fact that the cover of the book pisses so many crybabies off is reason enough to buy it, but despite the aftermath of this particular misadventure there’s a bunch of stuff in there that still looks awesome and will be tried later. The culprit today, however, was “Beef and Bayley Hazen Pie,” a concoction of rib meat, blue cheese, and some other strong flavors.

Cutting to the chase, this is a multi-day cook project, involving a from-scratch crust and a couple hours of stove time and still a long bake. This is not a fire-from-the-hip recipe. Regardless, Indy and I set about it and made steady progress. Right up until the final step of putting the shell together. See, in the book the final product is supposed to look like this:

I’m sorry, no. I am not making a giant asshole pie. I don’t care that the woman uses the whole pig or if she gives to charity or what, I simply will not serve a giant sphincter. But you all know what a classy motherfucker I am. And it’s pie dough, not marble, so I’m pretty sure I can figure something out. And I did.
Slightly nsfw below the jump.
(more…)

OH MY GOD THE DOCTOR DID IT! HE SAVED US ALL!

….wanker.

Little Debbie brand hot dog buns are highly fire-resistant, at least when stale.

Further experiments to follow.

Apologies for the dearth of content lately. For awhile I was legitimately too busy to post regularly, but in that time period I seem to have fallen out of the habit, and more to the point ability, to write regularly. I spend a lot of time lately staring at an article or post or comment willing myself to have something to say about it, and failing spectacularly.

Well, the way I got into that skill the first time was by posting whether I damn well had anything to say really or not, and I suppose that will be how I get it back. So for today what you get is something I found on a random image site that kicked over my gigglebox for a good minute and a half. Hopefully it will do the same to you. If not hopefully there’ll be some other bit of contentless fluff tomorrow that may.

Today I found the best thing on the internet, which are these excerpts from a letter Charles Darwin wrote to Charles Lyell in 1861.

For those who aren’t experts on Charles Darwin and can’t make out his handwriting, which appears to have been developed on the theory that if one is having difficulty forming a word one should simply press on and eventually it will all be over*, the quote is this:

“But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.”

Oh Charles. Buddy. I can so relate.

It goes on like this:

“I am going to write a little book for Murray on orchids, and today I hate them worse than everything.”

I HAVE HAD THIS MORNING. SOMETIMES IT LASTS WELL INTO EVENING.

*Which, not to bash on Darwin, everybody who’s ever had to quickly take notes develops awful handwriting regardless of how beautiful their penmanship began. Mine looks like it was written by someone who is having a seizure, or possibly jotting something down quickly during an earthquake. I worry someday someone who has to deal with my checks or credit card slips will notice my signature is never the same twice.

Continuing our recent pattern of stealing ideas, we now “borrow” from Tam, this gem got caught in the scraper and was too good not to share.

What a data of un-ambiguity and preserveness of valuable familiarity on the topic of unexpected emotions.

I’ve always aspie-ired to have a data on unexpected emotions. I almost expected the next line to be something about sharing Sharon’s outlook on the topic of disease.

Who knew you’d turn out to be our very own not-crazy Richard Dawkins?

Man, pants feel kinda weird now.