Politics and Pork Chops

[ase]

Dear summer: thank you for giving me peaches and fresh corn. Also, thank you for going away. Sincerely, the loyal opposition.

Tonight's cooking experiment: baked pork chops with crushed garlic, rosemary and thyme in olive oil. 350 F, 15 minutes, flipped at 10 minutes. I used a regrettably heavy hand with the spices, so it may be salvage-or-toss time. K. recommended making pork chops into pork-pasta salad, which might actually work. The side dishes - couscous and tomato-ish salad - came out nicely. The couscous just got olive oil and basil. The salad was one cucumber, seeds removed; a green pepper, a red pepper, half a vidalia onion, and several heirloom tomatoes, with a little olive oil and basil and a lemon squeezed over everything. I think I will have a light lunch tomorrow (couscous and salad), or maybe I will declare Culinary Oops Day and see who I can sweet-talk into a sushi run.

September is apparently my month for good intentions. I'm trying to cook, I'm trying to exercise (not 90 degrees every day! I can bike more than five minutes without dying! Awesome!) and I'm trying be mindful of that whole lactose intolerance thing*. Fortunately, Nabisco has removed every remnant of unprocessed ingredients from Oreos, so now they're milk free, hah! That's one junk food snack back on the list.

*Lactase: there are limits, and I still get dehydrated even when the pills are in the right bag and I remember to look for them. Finally, they're kind of expensive on the per diem.

I finally ate my pork chop of dubious character while listening to C-SPAN radio (what's the difference between NPR and C-SPAN? Not that much, when the boombox is on top of the fridge), and decided it's a good day to be me: not in a hurricane recovery zone, secure job, income exceeding expenditures. Health care! If the banks don't collapse under me and my fellow Americans, because some of my fellow Americans are thoughtless people who vote sub-par hooting primates underqualified individuals into national office, I'm going to hang on until the upturn. There's a lot of people who don't have that confidence right now. I was going somewhere with that, but it's, um, really late, so I'll just plug the Red Cross and your local food bank and remind people that when you vote for out of touch and underqualified people, you're voting for recessions.

Yeah, no rage there. Cough.

Comments

[nwl.livejournal.com]

I would suggest you do some independent reading on the various economic and business models if you want to get a handle on much of this. Getting info from blog comments is less than optimum. They should act as a stimulus for you to increase your knowledge.

I got into economics when I took accounting and statistics classes. Totally fascinating. I then had a job in the 401(k) field, which is connected with banking. I never realized there were regular people who kept track of every penny on a daily basis and talked about stocks and bonds. Again, totally fascinating. So I researched to get up to speed on 401(k)s (buying and selling stocks) and banking. I've got stories, but only off line.

I've also been following the various columnists in The Washington Post for years. I highly recommend Michelle Singletary - her The Color of Money column should be required reading, period. Go to the paper's website and read all her past columns and buy all the books she recommends - well, maybe not all the books if they don't apply to your situation.

Then check out some of the other columnists. I can't recall who, but someone in the first section of the paper had a list of missteps by Greenspan. I think it was around a month - month and a half- ago.

For insight in the stock market, I recommend Jane Bryant Quinn. Well written and informative.

The info is out there.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Hmm, sorry, I think I wasn't being clear because I jumped to conclusions -- I thought you were linking Greenspan's interest-rate behavior to objectivism, but on second thought I reckon you were talking in general about his de-regulatory views (which are clearly free-market/Rand-ish). I'm not a total stranger to economics, though it is true that as you can see, nowadays I tend to look at things through a residential-housing-shaped lens, as that's been the focus of most of my obsessive economics-related reading lately, and sometimes that colors my responses to things. I agree, it's pretty fascinating stuff.