Posted 10:17 AM by Angie Schultz

Worthwhile EU Initiative

The EU seems to have finally discovered Europe's towering strength: pastries.

Europe has been searching for years for something to inspire a new generation of citizens - a generation unimpressed by 60 years of peace and the ending of the continent's Cold War divisions.

And so the Austrians, to celebrate their ascendancy to the EU presidency, are touting Europe's cakes. There's a nifty poster, which has writing too small to read, and an even niftier pamphlet, which has recipes.

Here are the cakes:

Austria	Gugelhupf	Chocolate-swirled bundt cake
Finland	Laskiaispulla	Cream-filled bun
Ireland	Scones	Known to Americans as biscuits
Portugal	Pasteis de nata	Looks like custard-filled cups
Slovakia	Orecovy Zavin	Roll filled with nuts and raisins
Estonia	Kaerahelbekupsise	Oatmeal cookies
Italy	Tiramisu	Sponge cake with coffee, chocolate, and cheese
Malta	Imqaret	Deep-fried date sandwiches
Greece	Vasilopita	Spice cake covered in almonds
France	Madeleines	Plain little cakes shaped like shells. Dip in tea to experience hallucinations.
Slovenia	Prekmurska gibanica	Cake layered with poppy, apple, cheese, and nut fillings
Spain	Tarta de Santiago	Religiously-insensitive cake with custard(?) filling
Luxembourg	Apfeltorte	Apple cake
Hungary	Dobos torta	Many-layered cake with cream filling
Denmark	Wienerbrod	"Vienna bread" -- known to Americans as Danish
Sweden	Kanelbulle	Cinnamon roll
Netherlands	Tompoezen	Cream-filled cake
Cyprus	Baklava	Sticky nut cake
Britain	Shortbread	What? Shortbread
Latvia	Rupjmaizes kartojums	A parfait of rye bread layered with whipped cream. No, really.
Czech Republic	Kolach	Cheese-filled sweet rolls. Picture bears no relation to recipe.
Poland	Mazurek	Cake with butter filling
Romania	Cozonac moldovenesc	Chocolate-swirled bread. Calls for fresh pig lard.
Germany	Streuselkuchen	Cake with crumbly butter-sugar topping
Belgium	Waffeln	Waffles. Insert joke here.
Lithuania	Sakotis	The Cake from Another Dimension
Bulgaria	Mliako s oriz	Rice pudding

Several of these call for the peel of an "untreated" lemon or orange. I don't know what that means, but I'm surprised anything is allowed to go "untreated" in the EU.

Other recipes hark back to the days when skilled European cooks would slave for days over their time machines, so that they might journey into the future to purchase prepared filo dough and sponge cake. Has anyone ever seen a recipe that requires you to prepare your own filo dough? NO. Filo dough was unknown before it started showing up pre-made in the grocery store. So where does it come from? Think about it.

From the spiritual residue of blood-sucking insects.

Posted 9:45 PM by Angie Schultz

Totally Rad!

The Day of the Short Knives has come and gone, leaving me with one wicked body piercing. No, there will not be photos.

On another topic, events of the last few years have arranged themselves so that I -- despite having a brain the size of a planet -- am stuck with doing the cooking and other household chores while Niles gads about in the wild world, pretending to be a man of affairs. Let it be noted, then, that he could not be left alone for 24 hours without giving himself food poisoning.

Posted 2:08 PM by Angie Schultz

Famous Last Words

"Well, I'm back."

Posted 11:53 AM by Angie Schultz

What's the "netroots" equivalent of Astroturf?

I don't have a lot of time to comment on this today, but the sinister side of the blogosphere is inflating itself in an attempt to fool its enemies. This item in the Houston Chronicle quotes Markos Moulitsas (his Zuniga having fallen off somewhere en route):

"No longer would D.C. insiders impose their candidates on us without our input; those of us in the netroots could demand a say in our political fortunes," Moulitsas said. "Today, however, Hillary Clinton seems unable to recognize this new reality. She seems ill-equipped to tap into the Net-energized wing of her party. ... She may be the establishment's choice, but real power in the party has shifted."

I laughed out loud at that one. Thank you, Kos, Destroyer of Worlds! How does this sort of stuff become news? Is this someone's press release, re-written and gussied up with quotes from Jonah Goldberg?

Arianna Huffington is singing the same song. (Via Protein Wisdom.)

Posted 7:35 AM by Angie Schultz

The Age of Innocence

A high school student has been suspended from school for singing a threatening song:

Beth Anne Cox says she meant no harm.

Gwinnett County school officials see it differently: They say the 16-year-old threatened her teacher when she sang a parody of the folk song "On Top of Ol' Smokey" in class.

Administrators on Monday suspended the Peachtree Ridge High School junior for five days. School officials say she disrupted the class with a threatening and inappropriate twist on the familiar lyrics, ending with, "I shot my poor teacher with a .44 slug."

My goodness, how things have changed when I was in school, and we sang this little ditty:

From the halls of the principal's office
to the shores of Bubblegum Bay.
We will fight our teachers' battle
with bricks and sticks and clay.
First to fight for lunch and recess,
then to keep our desks a mess.
We are proud to claim the title
of Teacher's Number One Best Pest.

And this one:
Mine eyes have seen the glory
of the burning of the school
We have tortured every teacher,
we have broken every rule.
We're going to hang the principal
tomorrow after school.
Our school is burning down!

Now, the chorus begins:
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler!

But I couldn't remember the rest of it, until I found this wonderful site, and it all came back to me:

Glory, glory hallelujah!
Teacher hit me with a ruler!
I met her at the door
With a loaded .44
And she ain't my teacher no more!

(You'll see that the versions aren't quite the same. There's also one for the Marines' Hymn.)

Now, we sang these songs in elementary school, circa 1970. And when my teacher caught us singing the songs on the playground...she made us stand up and sing them in class!

She thought we were cute.

We showed her cute, when we roasted her over a spit with her own apple in her mouth! Ha ha ha ha ha!

Well, OK, no.

Still, kids today are all brainwashed and hopped up on goofballs and stockpiling homemade atomic bombs, so you can't be too careful.

The site linked above has a different version of the song young Ms. Cox was singing.

It also has many other simple, innocent songs of childhood, such as "Found a Peanut", "The Worms", and "A Place in France", which somehow does not contain the canonical lyrics:

There's a place in France
where the ladies wear no pants,
but the men don't care
'cause they don't wear underwear.

And speaking of underwear:

McDonald's is your kind of place
They serve you rattlesnakes
French fries between your toes
Hamburgers up your nose
Next time you go there
They'll steal your underwear
McDonald's is your kind of place!

That's not on the site. Probably afraid of being sued.

In addition, there are the poems of childhood, such as the beloved Beans. My dad taught us that one. Maybe he found it in a Louis Untermeyer book -- along with this golden oldie.

And finally, we have to go all the way to Japan to enjoy this little nugget of Dad's.

Mom never taught us cool songs like this. She was a former cheerleader, so she taught us to twirl the baton, and this cheer, directed toward students at a rival school:

If you're from Decker,
Show your pecker!

That probably constitutes sexual harrassment these days.

It's important that parents take the time to impart their values to their children. I wonder if young Beth Anne's parents sang these songs when they were in school.


This inane post brought to you as part of the Fleck War.

FleckWar! The. new. novel. by. William. Shatner.

Posted 7:25 AM by Angie Schultz

The Challenge Has Been Offered!

Ha! I accept, sir!

Anyway, --- where was I? By Schultz's Law[1], it is time to activate the blog. Stay tuned. I guess.


[1]Schultz's Law: This blog must be updated at least as often as Angie Schultz's blog is.

Niles suggests that we honor this law by creating blog posts that say nothing more than, in essence, "Tag! You're it!"

I had always hoped there'd be a Schultz's Law, but I was thinking more in terms of things like how many protons can dance in an atomic nucleus, or how long it takes to get to the center of a molecular cloud. I never dreamed the word "blog" would enter into it. Ah, well.

Though David will be off the hook starting next Tuesday, when I am scheduled to be engaged in a spot of bother involving blood and sharp knives. Stay tuned.

Now let's see if we can get that Solent woman back to work.

Posted 10:21 AM by Angie Schultz

Fair and Balanced at the Beeb

Here's a nice little story about a Canada-based Iranian blogger. The BBC describes him thusly:

Hossein Derakhshan is a 31-year-old Iranian internet activist, based in Canada, who writes the bilingual weblog Editor: Myself. Here he writes about his first visit to Israel, which he undertook to challenge the stereotypes of both Iran and Israel.

Challenging stereotypes! Way to be! Let's hear all about it.

I had a mission, though, which would make the risk worthwhile. I wanted to break the stereotypical images both governments use to advance their radical policies.

Ah, yes, the radical policies of both governments -- tit for tat, cycle of violence, faults on both sides, that sort of thing. Well, let's hear these stereotypes:

Having been born and raised in a religious, pro-revolution atmosphere in Tehran, like many others from my generation, I knew nothing about Israel except that they were "a declining group of Jews who constantly conspire to kill Muslim and forcefully capture their lands".

That's why for us Israel never existed except when Friday prayers would finish their "death to" chants with Israel. Everywhere else, even on maps, Tel Aviv was the capital of the "Zionist Regime" or "Occupied Palestine".

OK. And the Israelis?

On the other side, I could imagine how Israelis' perception of Iran was being formed by their own government, as a big country with millions of angry Muslims, all look-alikes of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, bent on destroying Israel with nuclear weapons.

Drat that Israeli government! I mean, you finish off your Friday prayers with "Death to Israel!" and those blackguards tell people that! Honestly, have you ever heard such perfidy? Stirring up people and frightening with absolutely true stories like that.

Now some people thought Robert Fisk was "relaxing" over lunch the other day when he gave a little Moebius strip of an interview to the Australian ABC. In this interview he says, in essence, that harmless bad man Zarqawi, who absolutely exists and really did issue a recent videotape, is completely a creation of American propaganda. That is to say, by broadcasting (or, rather, allowing news agencies to broadcast) Zarqawi's statements on how he wants to kill Americans and stuff, the US government has created a puppet for us to hate because he wants to, um, kill Americans and stuff.

Maybe Fisk wasn't drinking anything stronger than the water over there.

Anyhow, back to the Israelis who've been brainwashed by their government actually repeating Ahmadinejad's statements. Derakhshan is especially concerned for the young Israelis, who don't remember a time when Iran was not ruled by a vicious, repressive regime, but by the Shah[*].

Therefore:

Obviously, they couldn't understand the significant differences between competing political ideologies and rival sources of power inside the current Iranian system...I believed that Israelis saw no distinction between Mr Ahmadinejad and the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami of Iran, in the same way that Iranians could not differentiate Shimon Peres from Binyamin Netanyahu.

In other words, Israelis can't determine the difference between Ahmadinejad, who has famously called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and Khatami, who merely says that Israel is an "illegal state", and a "parasite in the heart of the Muslim world".

I'm probably being a little hard on Derakshan here, since the rest of this article details the surprises he found in Israel, especially the surprise that there were a heck of a lot Iranians there, including Israel's President and Defense Minister. He's now thinking about organizing a tour of Israel for young Iranian ex-pats. I'm really more amused at the BBC's lede, in which they reassure their readers that he's challenging the stereotypes of both sides, in total fairness.

(Although, I have to wonder about something. Young Iranians in Iran probably don't have a lot of choice in their news outlets, so it's not surprising that they might believe a lot of nonsense about what Israelis believe. So what's Derakhshan's excuse? He lives in Canada. Maybe he doesn't have internet access.)

UPDATE: And here's a late entry in the Ahmadinejad Apologetics Sweepstakes:
according to Christopher Hitchens, Juan Cole says that Ahmadinejad did not actually say that Israel must be wiped off the map (contrary to what some other pesky, war-mongering translators think). Cole responds to Hitchens here, mustering all the grace and dignity at the disposal of a cranky toddler with a messy didy. In particular, he says this:

What is really going on here is an old trick of the warmongers. Which is that you equate hurtful statements of your enemy with an actual military threat, and make a weak and vulnerable enemy look like a strong, menacing foe. Then no one can complain when you pounce on the enemy and reduce his country to flames and rubble.

It is obvious that powerful political forces in Washington are fishing for a pretext to launch a war on Iran, and that they are just delighted to have Ahmadinejad as cartoon villain and pretext.

This is virtually identical to Fisk's droolings. If your demonstrably-batshit neighbors utter hysterical pronouncements of DOOM, and you figure maybe they're serious, then you're just an old warmonger groping for a cartoon villain. Why, you probably said the same thing about Rafsanjani.

[*]The question of whether this is a joke is left as an exercise for the reader.

Fair and balanced Beeb article via Jeff Jarvis.

Posted 10:07 PM by Angie Schultz

Journalist Cries, Wets Self

Puffy girly-man Austro-Kiwi journalist Bruce Hill admits to fear during a piddling 7.8 quake:

Radio Australia journalist Bruce Hill said from Nuku'Alofa that locals told him they had never experienced an earthquake of such intensity.

"Honestly, it was like being on a ship at sea in a heavy storm. The whole building was rocking back and forth and I was really quite scared and a lot of people don't mind admitting they're really quite afraid," he said.

Why, that sounds quite restful, ya pansy. What's yer dear old dad the swabbie going to say about all this mincing and flailing, eh?

Via Murray "the tough brother" Hill, who's been known to hide under the cat during a mere 6.0.

UPDATE: A somewhat less formal report. Wetness confirmed.