A Blog Entry?!?

Ah yes, there is this blog thing. With readers who are probably feeling neglected. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Is Erik struggling with some hardship? Sickness? No. And no. Melanie and Amalia have slight colds, but all is well here in Sacramento (where we are hanging out until Monday). Today was a gloriously clear day, with a brisk wind to remind us that it is, indeed, winter. We have been to the Crocker Art Museum, where Amalia got to do a crafts event (and painted two watercolors that make her Babbo very proud), and Babbo got to look at some fantastic paintings. We saw our friend off at the station. We cooked another big dinner for some other old friends.

After everyone went to bed (I am the lone night owl here), I got to sip espresso and read a hundred pages of Eugenides' Middlesex, which is a fascinating book. I will report more on it when I am finished. Tonight I was planning on getting back to work, but the reality is that when I go to bed, there will probably not be a speck more pigment on any paper than there is now. It is all I can do to break out of vacation mode to update the blog.

Tomorrow is another day, and I will have to do some painting, or at least drawing. And then I will probably bore you with an art post (does anyone read those anyway?), or maybe a rant.

Recipe? Goose pancetta? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, please continue to have a Blessed and Merry Christmas season!

A change in the links

Since Jeff Culbreath has recently quit blogging (again), his blog has been taken over by a "traditionalist" who links to SSPX. Sorry, but that won't do. Instead, I am replacing this link with Meg Quinn, who is living in the great frozen waste known as Canada. Or Kanada, since it always seems vaguely sinister to replace "c" with "k" (now you know a little bit about why I am so sinister). Check her out.

Oops!

In my mad purge of spam, I accidentally deleted a comment from the Curt Jester (see sidebar), who points out that "I Really Do Hate Bumper Stickers" would make a fine bumper sticker. I agree.

Also, I want to point out that I have nothing against emblems on cars: University affiliations, NRA lifetime member sticker, Falange Yoke with Arrows, Knights of Columbus, etc. There is a problem with the Christian Fish, in that it is so frequently used by Protestants that it can be seen as ambiguous. How about surrounding it with a Rosary? OK. Then I can buy it.

I suppose that I ought to say, "let's reclaim it." Perhaps. But distinctions between us and them have to be made. Separate and unequal, I say.

Speaking of segregation, I have to go do some more segregating, keeping the whites and coloreds apart. Even worse, I am going to dunk the coloreds in cold water! Along the way I encounter a couple of whites that, upon closer examination, reveal that they aren't true whites: into the cold water with them, too.

"Look," they say, "we are as white as snow!"

"I only go by what the label says"

"How can you so callously label us?"

"Calm down, or I will put you in with the 'delicates.'"

"Stop! This is...."

wait.

wait.

wait.

wait.

"Ethnic Cleansing!"

Har har har. Of course, due to the fact that I never check pockets enough, it is also money laundering.

I don't get it.

I just got an email from a longtime reader that he has not been able to post comments for the past few days. However, some people have been able to, and the spam still flows in at about 400-500 per day.

I am going to re-enable commenting, so if you have been blocked, this should fix that.

And if any of you know any clever ways to attack websites, please let me know. The spammers are at the point where if they were people in front of me, I would be smashing in noses about now.

No, scratch that. I was at that point two months ago. I am probably more at the lead pipe to the side of the head level.

I was thinking of making an application fee for advertising on the blog, and then billing the spammers. However, my guess is that most of these freaks are in Russia, so I would never really collect.

So that leaves guerilla war. I remember when I would hear about these "denial of service" attacks. How is that done? I would like to try it on the next spammer to send me 100 posts in one day.

I am back...

I was going to step up to the plate and take up my duty of entertaining, informing, amusing, commanding, leading, haranguing, and otherwise taking the role of Beloved Leader to you people, but my attempts to ban all comments failed, so I had hundreds of spam comments to delete, and by the time I finished I realized that it is cold, late, and I was driving for four hours this afternoon.

Oh, that, and we have a new AV receiver for me to play with.

So, tomorrow I will be back with your regular programming. Meanwhile, keep yourselves amused.

You could always search YouTube for interesting stuff.

Comments

Since I am going to be away for four days, and I have been fighting off spam at a rapid rate (about 400 comments a day), I am attempting to close the comments in my absence. So far it is not working. I do not know why.

But if I figure it out, and you are trying to comment, and it won't let you, just wait until Monday.

Really Bad Blog Spam

As many of you know, I fight a daily battle against spam robots who attempt to post an average of about 150 spam comments on the site. Most of them, these days, are for ringtones. Free ringtones. I don't get it, but there seems to be no offense beyond the nuisance factor of spam itself (unless there is something behind it that is nefarious, but I am not about to click on the thing to find out).

However, once in awhile I will get a slew of really raunchy, nasty things, things which, were they to actually be available, would be illegal. I am guessing that the majority of these sites are coming out of Russia and other third world places where there is not much regulation of these matters.

So, do any of my internet whizz readers know if there is any point in alerting any law enforcement authorities of this stuff, or would I be wasting my time. Also, which agency would be the ones to handle this sort of thing? FTC?

Gone Fishin'

Well, we aren't going to do any fishing, but drawing, hiking, dining at the Awanhee, and enjoying the sites of Yosemite are definitely on the table for the next three days.

No blogging until after Wednesday!

Really Sick of Blog Spam

There are now 2075 ISP numbers banned from commenting. Only a handful are actually people who were banned for things they wrote. The rest are my futile attempt to stop blog spam. I have to delete at least a hundred comments a day just to keep up. I am sick and tired of it.

I will probably start turning off the comments function for some of the old posts, which is too bad, because old posts sometimes keep generating discussion. I will certainly keep the post on Pink Popcorn going, because it is interesting how the stuff has a powerful resonance for people who grew up in the Bay Area, Sacramento, or some of the few other places where pink popcorn was a staple at the zoo or the circus.

If I can talk Ann into doing it, I would ideally have one of those things where you have to type in the characters you see on a graphic.

It is either that or go the way of Don Jim Tucker and not have comments at all.

Search Engine Madness...

Someone found this here site with "Recipes from the 1980's."

Whoa, mack. That was the era of white zinfandel and insufferable Boomer yuppies strutting their Reagan-fueled egos. Wolfgang Puck rose to fame in the 1980's. Jeremiah Towers rose to fame in the 1980's. Restaurants were painted pink and green in earnest. Or black and gold. They thought that was a real class act, sort of like the 1920's, but with shoulder pads and big hair on the women.

Sure, there were some rumblings of good things to come: mainstream acceptance of sushi, ever increasing availability of decent patisserie and espresso, etc. But half the time if you found a decent restaurant they blew it by playing smooth jazz (still parading around as jazz fusion, like Miles would ever have tolerated that pap).

The best thing to come out of the 1980's, culturally, was John Chowning's frequency modulation synthesis (the DX-7, a great instrument whose potential was usually only scratched in spite of the fact that you can hardly escape it in music of that era). Foodwise, things were emerging, but you had to wait for things to really get going.

So, sorry, no 1980's recipes here.

Good luck.

More Techno Distractions...

You know, I tend to ignore new technologies until the bugs are worked out, then when I discover them I don't have all of the irritation and disappointment of half-functioning technology. Podcasting, for instance. I knew about them when they first popped out, but I never bothered with listening to them (one, I hate books on tape, and this seemed at first to be an extension of that. Two, I never have time to listen to anything of any lenght except at home, when I am usually writing). So, today I downloaded the most recent version of iTunes, and explored the iTunes store.

Not wanting to spend any money, I was elated to find all of the free stuff in the podcast section. Cardinal Arinze. Classic radio drama. Videos of invasive bull frogs. This is almost as dangerous as when I discovered the Internet Archive.

So, instead of blogging I have been listening and watching neat stuff from iTunes.

Sorry.

Housekeeping in Cyberspace

I was looking for a recipe that I thought I had posted on the blog years ago. I could not find it, but did notice that every post from the old blogspot blog was still uncategorized. Oops. So I am slowly going through and titling them (the old blogger software did not have a title slot for posts, and when they were moved over here MT just took the first line. Dorky titles).

Not fun, but it should make the blog easier to do.

Don't say I don't do nothin' for youse people.

Art, music, food, blah, blah, blah...

Yeah, all of those topics are supposed to be covered here. The thing is, we have been out a lot this summer, taking advantage of having more time to spend together than we may ever have again, and the fact that we are both sick and tired of the summer weather (or lack thereof) in the Bay Area.

Today was a great example. No sun. Fog in the morning. Fog in the afternoon. Fog in the evening.

Tomorrow we are back to Sacramento. Family reunion (that's a lot of Wops), the last warm days of the season, etc.

Art.

I know. I am an artist. I lecture about art. I write about art (rarely, it would seem). So, why have I not posted anything of substance about it for many a moon? Because I have been putting my energies into lectures, painting, and...well, here's part of the problem: I have not been getting out to see art that much recently, and it is not because there is nothing good to see. It has to do with running around volcanoes and fishing and all that.

When it comes down to it, I would rather look at volcanoes than paintings. Nothing against paintings, but when was the last time you saw a Rembrandt spew a fifteen mile long pumice and obsidian flow? Ever see one of those? It is like the moon with cool melted black glass and the occasional tree or wildflower. Better than Death Valley. Almost. You get a thirty year wildflower bloom in Death Valley, and nothing beats that.

Music.

No writing about music, except for the newspaper. Check out Arhoolie's latest old-timey offering. I will be reviewing it soon in a paper near you, if you live near one of the papers I write for.

Food.

Covered that. Kind of.

Fall is here. It is the best season for food, hands down. Tomatoes are great, squash and persimmons are just around the corner. Figs are great. Corn is good. Freestone peaches are good. Capsicum and eggplant are great. The weather is cool enough in the evenings (or bitterly, miserably damp and chilly for those of us suckers who live in the Bay Area) to enjoy a hearty cabernet...

Now's the time to roast pork. It's always time to roast pork, but right now you can stuff it with figs and balsamic onions when you roast it.

Your assignment: eat at least two BLTs a week while the tomatoes are great. Don't skimp: stick with organic, heirloom tomatoes. You can go back to eating wet styrofoam in November, if you must.

That is it for this update. Hopefully I will overdo the espresso tomorrow night and will blog up a storm. Or not.

Oops.

Have I been that negligent that the whole thing is blank?

Sorry.

Camping. Trout. More Later.

Cooking, painting, not writing on the blog...

Sorry, dear readers. I have been busy, what with Amalia turning five and all the celebrations. Also, I have been using my time painting, reading up on Renaissance Italian art, and so forth.

I will post a recipe soon, but not tonight. Too tired.

Thank you for your patience.

Art? Music? Food? Anything but Soccer? Please?

I realize that I have not been writing on the things that are supposed to be the main foci of this blog: food, music, and art.

I have been cooking and eating, I have been looking at and making art, and I have even been listening to and making music.

So what gives?

I don't know. I will be in Redding all this week, and will try to write something amusing on one of these topics.

Away for a few days...

I will be away for a few days, hiding out in one of the most beautiful places on Earth, then going to another of the most beautiful places on Earth.

I could say that I will think of all of you often, but I don't think that is really true.

I could also say "fight nicely in the comments box" but since comments require my approval, nothing will show up until I am back.

Congratulations, Russian A-Hole, or More Reasons to Mourn the End of the Cold War

Congratulations are in order to the Russian online Blackjack site that just became banned ISP #1,000! If the cold war were still on, this would never have happened.

Anyway, back to de-spamming. Dos Vedanya, Tovarishche Asholovich.

Oops. St. Anthony of Padua Institute Website

I probably should triple check everything when I write late at night. I forgot to link to the St. Anthony of Padua Institute website in the Giotto post. I do have it on the very disorganized list of links on the side, but here it is:

St. Anthony of Padua Institute

Not Fun Anymore

For those of you who are wondering where the posts are these days, the answer is simple. I spend my blogging time getting rid of spam comments. Melanie noticed this and said "it seems you spend more time deleting spam than posting."

I do not run this blog as a free advertising service to usurers, pornographers, discount jewelers, etc. and I am sick and tired of the whole dance of banning ISP numbers, selecting messages, deleting messages, etc. So, this leaves me with three options:

1. Eliminate commenting altogether. If I had the amount of comments that some of the big blogs have, I would certainly choose this option. Having an army of semi-literates (yes, I mean you, Gerard E.), spouting off half-formed opinions in sentence fragments is not the reason for this blog.

The downside to this approach is that I enjoy my commenters' comments. They often provide good information on obscure ingredients, interesting recipes, etc. that make a real conversation happen. I also like that certain posts keep attracting comments and dialog (posts on grappa, nocino, baroque recipes, etc.). I even enjoy the nitwit comments from animal rights creeps and lazy highschoolers angry that I am not doing their homework for them.

2. Add one of those things where you have to type the characters that you see in the box for the comment to go through. I am leaning towards this approach. I will have to see if the very talented Ann can do this. Did I mention that Pinkmochi offers excellent web design at very reasonable prices? (Gotta plug the designer once in awhile. After all she did this site for free, or a dish of paella).

3. Discontinuing the blog altogether. Naw. The Organ of the Central Committee of Erik Keilholtz stops for no one.

So, expect some changes soon. Hopefully.

Blog Lull...Sorry,

I realize that I have not posted any recipes recently, and it is because I have not been cooking as much as usual and that when I have, I have been using traditional recipes.

As for the lack of rants, well, they have been replaced with demented ideas, which are not fit for public consumption. At least not yet.

You see, these ideas come to me and my reaction is twofold: that's brilliant/that's just horrible. Then I have to decide if it can be made un-horrible.

My latest is an on-board device that monitors all sorts of stuff in your car. When you go over the speed limit a yellow light goes on. If you do not slow down in a certain amount of time, your bank account is debited the bail, and an onboard printer gives you a receipt/citation. If you have some mitigating circumstance, then you can set a court date. If the judge agrees, you get a refund.

Also, when the doors close, all passengers can have their thumbprint scanned, thus prequalifying the car for the diamond lane. If an unauthorized car goes into the lane: account debited, citation printed out.

Now, people will hate this. Big Brother. Violation of Civil Liberties. Blah blah blah.

I have said it before and will say it again: if you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide.

But people, being what they are, insist on their right to break good laws. So they will need a benefit for stage one of the implementation (the voluntary stage). What it is is that you can order your fast food from your car, and when you enter the parking lot of the fast food establishment, your order is prepared, your account debited, and all you have to do is pick it up.

It is a commonplace that people will give up frivolous liberties for security, but I would bank that more people would give them up for convenience.

Also, the device in stage two would be required on new cars. People could sign up for the service, which would include, in the fine print, authorization for the DMV to use the "auto-fining" feature as well as to record all information of passengers and driver and to share that information with sundry governmental agencies.

Again, repeat:

If you are doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide.