Note: If you want to keep up with this blog (and why wouldn’t you) and get almost daily not-so-exclusive yet interesting content that doesn’t appear here, please check out the blog’s Facebook page. Many photos and links that don’t make it here due to my laziness and procrastination, frequently appear on Facebook, where you can just as easily comment and like what you see.

Now let’s finish up with my vacation report.

After visiting Seattle, taking the Coast Starlight and then driving the most scenic of the American roads, we returned to San Francisco for the last three days of our vacation.

San Francisco is the city where the War on Drugs was lost. Many times throughout the day, in different parts of town, one walks through a cloud of the familiar yet unusual in the streets of Kansas City smell and immediately takes another whiff just to make sure it’s not a mistake. In the middle of the day in the touristiest of the tourist areas, next to expensive stores and restaurants, a nicely dressed woman produced a mini-bong out of her pricey purse and turning her face ,to the wall, proceeded to treat her glaucoma (if you know what I mean). When my kid came out of the store, I started to recount that mind-blowing event, but then realized that she may not know the meaning of the word bong. She knew. Thank you, O-e School District for taking care of that awkward conversation!

San Francisco is beautiful city, with many different faces, amazing food of a mind-blowing variety, endless number of things to do, enough weather changes to keep an army of meteorologists busy, and more homeless people than an average resident of Midwest will encounter in a lifetime. My only advice is that if you are not in the greatest of shapes, visiting the Crookedest Street in the World is better done on a bus. It’s not that exciting and you almost need a  Sherpa to get up on the damn hill. If you have time, check out SF Playhouse, we really enjoyed My Fair Lady, much better choice than a magician we originally set out to see.

And now we move to the visual part of this post.

Continue reading →

About a month ago I posted my views on the “social media” and it became the most discussed post I ever wrote. Several people replied with comments and their own posts with their takes on the subject. So I thought it was only fitting that I write a short follow-up to the discussion.

The opinions split and I was happy that I am not alone in my dislike of the further intrusion of the annoying marketing into our lives. I realize that in the age when the dream of manned space flight an ability to skip TV commercials became our everyday reality, the businesses still need to find a way to influence consumers: product placement, sponsorships, online ads, viral infomercials and other venues are constantly being tested for their legitimacy and effectiveness. I feel that my responsibility as a consumer is to avoid these things as much as I can and, while enjoying the entertaining parts, completely ignore the marketing message. After all, the marketing people are not well-known for being concerned with the consumers, their job is to make any product look good from cigarettes, to fattening foods, to medicines that cause anal leakage and sleep-driving; I don’t feel the need or obligation to tolerate any marketing in my life.

After my post and the follow-up discussions I thought about the reasons why the social media marketing annoys me so much. Long time ago when my daughter was a toddler I used to take her to a nearby playground. On one of these days another guy was watching his kid play with mine and we had a usual playground conversation parents have – about the kids, about the weather, etc. Then for no particular reason® he started pitching some shady MLM business to me. I had to cut it short, tell him I wasn’t interested and leave to avoid further uncomfortable silence. That guy was not carrying a sign or handing out fliers, he created a personal connection with me and attempted to use it to sell something unwanted to me. This, in essence, is what’s wrong with the social media marketing: they catch you when you don’t expect it, they barge into a conversation, they pretend to be your friend while trying to influence your behavior; you have to cut your activities short and leave, unfollow, unsubscribe, add a spam filter, etc. Just to show that I am not making this up here is a quote from an email I got inviting me to a “free marketing webinar”.

Businesses now have the power to leverage the Internet – search engines, blogs, social media – to reach customers more effectively. This includes connecting with customers where they hang out online and engaging in conversations about the topics most important to them. Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is all about joining the ongoing conversations our customers and prospects are already having and not trying to control them. It’s realizing that people like doing business with people they like and love doing business with people they trust.

In other words: find people having conversations, barge in, sell, force the people to prevent you from intruding in the future. It was all fun when people just shared opinions online, now it’s all a “Social CRM”, the key word is “management”. To quote the rant-master himself:

Then the Marketing (bleep)tards catch up to us. They see all of this free and open communication occurring. And, being Marketing (bleep)tards, their first thought is “How can we piggyback on this (bleep) and manipulate it, without people knowing we are manipulating it, and use it to sell our useless (bleep) to people for $19.95 (But wait! There’s more!) so as to make the rich (bleep)ers we work for even richer?”*

*censored.
I am not saying that everyone is doing it, there are still plenty of independent and honest opinions to be found on the internet, but this trend casts a shade of distrust on many. Not that I was very trusting before.
In conclusion, here are some immortal words from George Carlin:

UPDATE: After this was written, I found another post (apparently private so it was an accident) on the subject discussing how my (and other’s) blogging caused at least one organization to try and become more transparent with their social media promotions. My issue was not with overall transparency or lack thereof; what I don’t like is a trend of creating positive coverage by stroking the “social media’s” ego, whether by preferential treatment, creating a feeling of exclusivity or giving away free stuff. I do realize that for many people being a part of an exclusive group is worth more than a free ticket or a drink.

Coincidentally, via The Food Section another thread discussing the conflict of interest and conflict in general between the wine industry, wine bloggers and professional wine critics. Many of the same sentiments expressed and the reactions range from agreement to ridicule, pretty much in the same way the opinions split in this case.

Continue reading →

The singer “was a virtual skeleton – barely eating and with only pills in his stomach at the time he died”, the paper said.

Imagine you are a coroner, crappy profession that it already is, your days are filled with horrible, bloody, disgustingly smelling, disfigured things that no one in the right state of mind would even want to be in the same building with, and instead of enjoying a nice sunny LA day you have to dissect a skeleton-looking, hairless, needle-ridden body of a weird celebrity. Not only do you have to chisel off the layers of plaster and artificial prosthetic parts, you for some ungodly reason have to cut his stomach open to see what he was eating before he croaked. It’s in the times like this that you must feel that you should’ve picked another specialty like a podiatrist or a proctologist, albeit their worldview is somewhat constricted.

That’s why I think every person should carry a card at all times with the contents of their stomach for the past 48 hours as a way to make the job of forensic pathologists just a little bit easier.

Let’s see, today my stomach contains:

• a cup of coffee
• cheese and turkey sandwich
• a orange/apricot jelly (from Bermuda) and toast
• cherries
• persimmon
• apple
• some frozen yogurt from Yummo (mix of 3 flavors) because they don’t sell Korean tacos on Monday
• chicken patty
• a piece of dried banana
• salad (Caesar dressing)
• cheese quesadilla
• corn
• some lemonade
• a piece of Tippins coconut-creme pie

I think that’s it. There maybe some leftovers of this cinnamon roll from Barb’s Kolache Bakery in Shawnee from a couple of days ago
and just a little bit of the cherry kolache ( I gave the other ones away)

but that’s just being too thorough.

See this is not so hard.
Maybe your coroner will be grateful for not having to dig through your rotting guts and will not “leak” embarrassing details of your autopsy to the media. In my book, that’s just paying it forward.

Continue reading →

For thousands of years alcoholic beverages drastically improved countless holiday parties on every continent in every political and social system. Here is an appropriate illustration from the Life Magazine Archives taken in Leningrad in 1956.

Before:

After:

Caption reads:A party at the home of a so-called “typical Soviet worker”, the Dmitriev family. The father, a skilled metal worker, is actually a member of the Communist Party & does much side work for it, so they live far above working class average. (the line about side work for the Communist Party doesn’t make any sense to me, not sure what it means).

Continue reading →

The Jewish Holiday of Passover is coming up and many of you are seeing boxes of matzos piled somewhere in a more visible location than usual in your grocery store.

The truth is, matzos are sold year round in most stores and despite having only two ingredients they are as delicious as any plain crackers, made in a clean controlled environment by the guys who wash their hands and don’t masturbate on Saturdays (maybe not at all, but not on Saturdays for sure).

I wrote before how my Dad went to buy matzos at the only remaining synagogue in our city and we ate them for the rest of the year. Now that synagogue looks like this (photos taken from here):

There is no reason why you, my non-Jewish readers, should be deprived of matzos and tasty things you can make out of them. By the way, the alternate title of this post was “What would Jesus eat?”, because Jesus was Jewish, he celebrated Passover and ate matzos.

In this post you will learn how to make a matzo omelet, or matzo-brei or, as we call it, matzo-babka. For this recipe you will need 3-4 sheets of matzos, 2 eggs, pinch of salt and a small amount of butter.

Boil some water, you will need less than a cup. Break matzo in small pieces, it crumbles and breaks easily. Don’t try to pulverize it, just break it up.

Pour some hot water over it, just enough to soften up the matzo pieces so they are not crunchy. All the water should ideally soak in, so don’t pour too much, there shouldn’t be any standing water on the bottom of the bowl, toss the matzos until all the water is absorbed. Let it sit for a few minutes.
Mix up a couple of eggs with a fork.

Pour of the matzos and mix, add salt to taste.

Melt a tablespoon of butter in the skillet. Pour the mixture into the skillet, spread it out evenly and cover.

Cook on medium-low for 4-5 minutes. Now if you think you are the next Food Network star you can try to flip the whole thing, I just cut it in four pieces with a spatula and flip each piece individually.

Cook for another 3-4 minutes uncovered, for the first few times (and I know there will be many more) keep an eye on the babka to make sure it doesn’t burn.
You can serve it as savory dish, side dish or breakfast…

…but it also tastes great with honey, syrup and jelly.

There are multiple other recipes with onions, mushrooms and other additions, but just like the matzos are made only with flour and water, I don’t feel anything else is necessary here. It’s hard to improve on perfection.
Matzos can stay on your counter forever, or close to it. They might get a little stale but I guarantee you will eat the whole box before it ever happens. They are good in soups, or as a snack and in always popular with women matzo-babka.

Enjoy!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og1pdFGMUMg

Continue reading →