Pizza

My pizzaIn need of a challenge, I decided that tonight I would attempt a culinary feat that has set cooks a-trembling since the Dawn of Man: making my own homemade pizza from scratch. Armed only with the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook and the memories of watching my mom do it a bazillion times, I proceeded to make a large, floury mess of my kitchen. The kneading part was enjoyable, though I proceeded to get goo all through my hair. Once the yeast beast was “resting” in a covered dish, I suddenly remembered that I had only one pan suitable for baking a pie on. “Oh well,” I thought. “There isn’t that much dough, really. I’ll just use it all on one pizza.” (Take a note, kids. Never double up on your pizza dough.) Strike one. While that monstrous slab was baking in the oven, I turned my attention to the toppings. Wanting to be professional, I sliced my onions very thin. Thin to the point of shriveling into tiny charred strands of nothingness after being baked. Strike two. (Always remember to cut veggies into substantial chunks to avoid oven disintegration.) And lastly, as I was spreading the cheese over the top of this aberration (the dough had formed a lovely dome in the center, so everything slid towards the crust), I realized that simply picking the “white” shredded cheese doesn’t guarantee mozzarella in this country, but instead nine times out of ten you’ve got low-fat cheddar. Which kinda sucked. Strike three, I’m out.

Actually it was edible. As someone once said, “Pizza is like sex. Even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.” (I’m paraphrasing.) This was edible, though the ratio of crust-to-topping was off by about a factor of four. The Snook, bless him, politely praised it and only revealed his true feelings when he let slip a tiny “Were you supposed to put salt in this?” Ouch. Well, there’s always Papa.

Hey, looks like there’s another remotely-hosted weblog commenting system on the market. It’s called BlogBack and it seems a little more customizable than Reblogger. You might wanna give it a try. Or maybe you wanna just wait until I finally release my homegrown blogging system to the world. Now there’s something I could do to occupy my time…

Remarkably popular with the British unemployed, it seemsIf you experienced any temporal weirdness this afternoon, sorry about that. I seem to have created a rift in the space-time continuum. I had just finished watching Buffy (yeah, another hard day for the unemployed bum) and I switched over to BBC1 to see what the latest war news was. Instead I found myself staring at the insipid faces of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, all tween-ified up and starring in their very own ‘Saved by the Bell’ knockoff. Horrified, I flailed wildly at the remote and managed to change it to ITV… where I was confronted with Mary-Kate and Ashley age seven! What are the freakin’ odds that they’d be on two channels at the same time? Two British channels at that? I guess the BBC has woken up to the fact that those of us at home during the day aren’t exactly a lucrative demographic and they needn’t go to the expense of putting on anything more entertaining than… *shudder*… the Olsen twins.

Everybody’s doin’ the Which Friend Are You? quiz, right? Well, let me just tell you how psychotically WRONG it was. It said I was RACHEL. Seriously. I was expecting Ross, since I’m kind of a nerd, but definitely one of the Gellers at any rate. Why Rachel? I’m not high-maintenance! I’m not self-centered! I’m not superficial! Or… am I? Jeez, now I’m starting to think that raving about something like this is such a Rachel thing to do. OH GOD! Maybe Snookums is Ross, and I AM Rachel! AHHHHHHHHHH!

LINUXformat

Are you a U.K. computer nerd? If you are, dig out your September issue of LINUXformat magazine and turn to page 15. Who is that handsome man pictured at LinuxExpo2001? Why yes, it’s my very own Snookums! There he is skipping work and kissing up to the SuSE man. He’s becoming quite the celebrity, isn’t he?

My famous Snookums