Reassembler

This one’s for Matt P: IT in San Quentin. How do you set up a network when the buildings have three-foot-thick concrete walls reinforced by steel? (Drop ceilings are very unfashionable in prison design.)

I have spent a good deal of time in various prisons in Massachusetts (yes really) and my general observation is: Ick.

I come home from work and my wife serves dinner. It’s pork tenderloin with brown rice and snap peas.

Me: The pork is nicely done but your flavor profiles are off.

Her: That’s the way I cook it and your palate is weak.

Me: Oh? Well these peas are like Culinary School 101.

Her: It is what it is.

Me: Stand by your dish!

Her: It’s better than your lasagna yesterday, which lacked acid and could have been cleverly done as a ceviche.

Me: Oh yeah? Well you have immunity so you should be taking a back seat.

Her: So take your fat butt and your two teeth back to your double-wide and fry something.

Me: Okay but I’m taking the rice with me. You layered your flavors there and the truffle at the bottom of the dish there was such a luxurious surprise. Whose idea was that?

Her: That was me.

Me: So you win a box of kitchen-size Glad stretchware and a lifetime supply of hot & sour soup from The Lotus Flower in Framingham.

Cook 1lb of a nice funky pasta (gemelli works); set aside

Cut up bacon slices and cook til reasonably crisp; set aside

In clean skillet, melt 1/2 stick of butter. Add cooking sherry roughly equal to the melted butter. Add lots of fresh basil leaves cut in ribbons.

Toss the pasta in this sauce. Salt and pepper to taste.

Toss in the bacon. Sprinkle with lots of grated Romano. Serve.

I call this dish “Another Excuse to Eat Bacon”. People like it.

From my former colleague Scott Berinato (who dumped us like a mortgage stock as soon as Harvard came calling): What a Botnet Looks Like.

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So there’s this, like, fungus, right?

And it’s called Botrytis and it grows on grapes and stuff. And most fungus ruins grapes, especially wine grapes. Right? But some like French dude figured out that Botrytis cinerea sucks all the water out of grapes and actually like concentrates their flavor, and Botrytis wines sometimes are like better and more expensive. And stuff.

So winemakers call this fungus “noble rot”. 

But it still looks gnarly.

A co-worker and I agreed this week that neither of us knows anyone who *doesn’t* describe himself as “a fiscal conservative”, no matter how liberal his general politics may be.

I would interpret that as a widespread desire among the general populace to stop running a billion-dollar deficit.

Any other interpretations?

You’ve undoubtedly burned this post into your mind, pointing out the eternal tension between prescriptivism (”You spelled that wrong!”) and, um, promiscuity (”However you want to spell it is cool by me!”).

Toss commerical considerations into the discussion and the tension is gone - linguists win, three sets to nil. Businesses that want to sell stuff are hastening the grammarians’ demise by including every possible mispelling on their website (thus legitimizing typos, bad grammar and so on) to make sure they capture every possible sales lead. 

(Any spelling or grammar errors in this post are intentional and supposed to be funny. I swear.)

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