Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

In my day, never was longer.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The willow is too close to the house.

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

You cannot shame the shameless.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

I’d try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

The words do not have to be perfect.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

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Open Thread

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Had my hands full with things all day, and am finally going to settle down on the couch after taking a cold shower and have a nice mojito. Because I can.

Got a real score at the town yard sale today. Bought a brand new, never used Breville electric wok for 25 bucks that someone had been given for Christmas, but the lid was broken. Breville just sent them an entire replacement unit, so they sold the other one. Went to the Breville website, and for 20 bucks bought a replacement lid. So- 100 dollar wok for 45 bucks. Not bad!

Reader Interactions

80Comments

  1. 1.

    c u n d gulag

    John, Dude, I hate to tell ya, but when cooking with a wok, I don’t think I’ve ever used the lid in 20 years. Not once.
    Sorry….
    Love ya, though!!!

  4. 4.

    Mnemosyne

    It is 3:41 in the afternoon and I’m still in my bathrobe. I did at least shower.

    It was just that kind of week.

  5. 5.

    stuckinred

    Any of you nerds help me? I have a netgear wireless router and it will not allow me to connect to BJ. When I hit my neighbors wireless or connect directly to the cable modem I can connect. Any swell ideas?

  6. 6.

    Comrade Mary

    YOU’RE HERE! I’ve been chasing you all over the place.

    Did you already restart the router? I had to restart my modem, then restart the router to get back here.

    Can you get to the admin panel of your router?

  8. 8.

    stuckinred

    @Comrade Mary: Yea, I’ve restarted numerous times, called Charter tech support to figure out I could connect from the cable modem but they weren’t any help with the wireless. Oh, the admin panel, I think so, I have a link on my pc laptop that seems to take the there.

  9. 9.

    Violet

    I’m patching walls in preparation for painting. Got a couple of damn metal anchors for drywall screws that simply won’t come out. I’m about to take a sledgehammer to them. This is taking far more time than I had expected and I think I’ve emptied half the garage in search of various tools that might work for this job.

    Taking a breather and I think I might have a cup of coffee before heading back to it.

  10. 10.

    Comrade Mary

    When you run ipconfig from cmd, it should give you the IP address for your default gateway. Putting this in your browser at http://, followed by the IP address, should give you access to your router admin panel, if you can remember the username and password or find the right placeholder values.

  12. 12.

    General Stuck

    stuckinred

    I been locked out too. Called Comcast tech support out west here, and they were locked out as well and said the problem was with the source website server or platform. I have no router just a direct broadband connection. So the siege seems to be nationwide. Finally, just out of curiosity, I brought up the cache of bj, which was a lesson in patience itself, and read a comment that proxy servers work, so this comment is over a proxy server. Anyways, I got nothing else to say other than the peace is growing on me and politics be damned. GO Reds!!

  13. 13.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @stuckinred: There is a little round hole in the back of the netgear router; using a paperclip or pencil press the button inside the hole and hold it down for at least 15 seconds. It should reset the modem. When you reconnect, it should give you a new IP and Bob’s your uncle. I have the same equipment and it worked for me about an hour or two ago. Otherwise, use a proxy for a while.

  15. 15.

    Comrade Mary

    ARGH! I don’t think I can take you much further as I can’t remember my password to my router, so I can’t remember what settings to tell you to look for.

    Can you try a proxy server, as Stuck did?

  20. 20.

    Violet

    @stuckinred:
    Have you cleared your cache recently? From here:

    A Web site or other server was offline when you last visited it (hopefully a rare occurence) but since has come back online. The cache will normally keep a record that the server is offline for 5 minutes afer your last visit. You may need to clear your cache to access the server sooner.

    Maybe you tried to visit BJ during that virus incident and your cached copy is corrupted?

  25. 25.

    geg6

    Good deal on the wok, Cole, but I’m afraid you wasted your money on the lid. I have never once used my wok lid and am pretty sure I tossed it years ago when the ex and I broke up and I moved to a smaller abode with less storage space.

    As for my own personal Wingnut Christmas celebration, my John and I decided that the best way to mark the holiday was to prepare and eat some FRENCH food. And to cleanse my palate of the terrible taste of wingnuts fapping all over the country today, I pulled out my copy of “Undaunted Courage” to re-read. It’s nice read about truly brave Americans who had a reverence for science (such as it was at the time), had intellectual curiosity, and who were able to meet, live among, and even befriend the “Other” without violence and with respect. And a little dollop of Thomas Jefferson on top.

  27. 27.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @stuckinred: Google ip proxies. Or use Stuck’s link. I had never used proxies before this but I found that hidemyass.com worked reasonably well.

  29. 29.

    General Stuck

    with this proxy, I have no formatting tabs, reply button, or edit feature. Plus I don’t feel all that comfy using a proxy server, never know where it’s been.

  34. 34.

    Yutsano

    @geg6:

    my John and I decided that the best way to mark the holiday was to prepare and eat some FRENCH food

    My favoritest French dish evah: Poulet aux Quarante Gousses d’Ail. My favorite version is of course by the lady I wish was my Jewish aunt. Unfortunately she’s no relation.

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I will be going with Mexican; homemade burritos.

    Kitchen duty while wifey crunches numbers?

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @General Stuck: Hidemyass.com gave me reasonable access to features on the site. The reset of my router brought me all the way back. I am not particularly comfortable with the idea of proxies either.

  40. 40.

    Mnemosyne

    @Nylund:

    IIRC, Alton Brown’s claim is that you can control the temperature more closely than you can with a pan on the stove, but I can’t remember if that was only for an electric skillet.

  44. 44.

    stuckinred

    Hand hammered wok’s allow you to hold ingredients up on the side while stir-frying additional stuff. A lid allows you to immerse partially cooked stuff like chicken breast in sauce to complete the cooking.

  49. 49.

    Yutsano

    @Mnemosyne: Electric woks just don’t get hot enough to do the high temperatures necessary for a proper stir-fry. If they could get that hot they would be terribly unsafe. As far as I can tell JC just bought himself a conical parabolic (h/t stuckinred, may that light change for you soon!) shaped electric skillet.

    @Omnes Omnibus: Yum!

  53. 53.

    Commish

    My wife, who’s Chinese, uses the lid on her wok a lot. Every time she does a vegetable with any thickness to the stem, like broccoli, for one. Stir fry in almost-smoking garlicky oil for a minute or so, then add a few tablespoons of stock and cover to steam through.

    But…..an electric wok? I can’t imagine it.

    The easiest way for many Murricans to get the feel of real wokking is to get a decent iron or carbon steel wok 19″ or larger ($20 or so at the restaurant supply. Preferably one that caters to Asian restaurants…..if you have Chinese restaurants around you probably have one of these somewhere, too.)

    Set your wok outside on one of those freestanding, outdoor, gas-fired burners that people use for turkey fryers, chili cookoffs and etc. They’ll be on sale all over the place in coming weeks for Thanksgiving. Season the wok as you would a cast iron skillet, then crank the gas up to full and wok away!

    The hint of charred taste you get from well-wokked food comes from what Chinese cooks call “the breath of the dragon,” which translates roughly as “BTUs muchos.”

  54. 54.

    Ross Hershberger

    Real Americans make foreigners cook foreign food for them. I had sushi for lunch. In Michigan this involves 5 or 6 vast laminated sheets of color pictures. You point at stuff and two guys with very sharp implements prepare it while calling you names you’ll never understand.

  55. 55.

    Psychobroad

    I use the lid on my wok, too, especially if I’ve got carrots/broccoli in the stir-fry–I put a little water in the lid, upend the lid over the wok & put the lid on for a few minutes. Gets longer–cooking veggies there quicker.

  56. 56.

    Yutsano

    @Ross Hershberger: Oh mah kah say oh neh guy shee mass. Say that the next time you’re in there. If they’re Japanese anyway. If they’re Korean head for the exits because the cleavers might start flying.

  58. 58.

    stuckinred

    @Ross Hershberger: I don’t know if this is everywhere but Kroger and Publix here in Georgia use Asian folks in their little “sushi” booths. Pretty stupid and it must violate some kind of law??

  61. 61.

    Comrade Mary

    Ahn-Nyeong Hah-Seh-Yo to you too, sweetie. (I worked for a lovely Korean family in my teens, but that’s about all I can remember of the language.)

    Wish I knew the Korean for “Give up and buy a cheap new router from Craigslist.”

  62. 62.

    stuckinred

    @Yutsano: Ah, you know it’s been 43 years since my 13 months in the Land of the Morning Calm. Most of the stuff I recall would bring out the cleavers.

  65. 65.

    Betsy

    @geg6:
    I stayed with my all-American elitist cuisine: amazing sandwich of fresh crusty bread, local cheddar, St. Nicholas peppers, and sundried tomato tapanade. All but the latter were bought at a DFH farmer’s market this morning; the tapenade was from pseudo-DFH Whole Foods.

    Funny how wholesome, salt-of-the-earth farmers turn into DFH’s when they reach the farmer’s market.

  70. 70.

    Violet

    @stuckinred:
    Have you tried unplugging the router and leaving it unplugged for a longer time, like overnight or a weekend while you’re gone or something?

  72. 72.

    Anne Laurie

    Apropos of Korea (and open thread), we are watching a fansubbed version of Emperor of the Sea, and now I totally understand why Korean historical dramas / soap operas are so popular elsewhere. Imagine a 900AD Robin-Hood-Sir-Francis-Drake saga, with an Arthurian love triangle in the middle, plus ninjas. Lovingly detailed, high-budget all the way, although the character actors run rings around the “star” cast in the first half. (Total of 51 ‘hour-long’ episodes, we’re up through #30.)

  76. 76.

    roly

    So I’m playing golf with this guy. He’s not very good (neither am I), but he’s enthusiastic. I notice he’s got this Scotty Cameron Studio putter (About $300). I say, Geez, that’s a nice putter. He says, Yeah, I got it at a yard sale last week for $10. I wept for the remainder of the round.

  77. 77.

    roly

    Heh. I went to the Emperor of The Sea wiki page and found, at the bottom:

    Emperor of The Sea Official Iranian Fans link.

  78. 78.

    Violet

    @stuckinred:
    Well, you could try unplugging it at night unless you need to keep it on for some reason. If you haven’t tried it, might be worth a shot.

    I think it’s got something to do with your IP address(es). If you can get the modem and/or router to re-set the IP address you’ll probably be okay.

  79. 79.

    New Yorker

    Went for a walk around Manhattan today for no particular reason except that the weather was fantastic. It’s so completely normal in New York on this day, which makes me happy. It takes loons and charlatans from other parts of the country to come here and fuck with stuff that’s not their business.

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