Busy, busy, busy

My apologies for the dearth of posting, but the holidays and preparations for the upcoming cruise have gotten in the way. I have no idea whether I'll be able to post from the boat...is there internet service on cruise lines?
Checking off the list (since this helps me too) we have:
*airline tickets purchased
*cruise tickets purchased
*tanning undertaken
*luggage purchased
*tuzedo secured (and Speedo)
*underwater camera purchased - Nikonos V
*Ft. Lauderdale hotel reserved
*qualifying open water dives arranged for the scuba trainees
*horse sitters arranged
*ferret sitter arranged
*Virgin Islands dives reserved
Still to do:
*letters to school explaining absence
*reserve kennel for dogs
*book additional dives
*mail remaining Ebay items which were sold
*pack
This is the first real vacation we'll have taken in some time. Maybe it'll be the start of a new (and welcome) tradition.

World is round says study; Moonbats faint...Bush blamed

A UCLA study assigning a numerical value to legislators based on their voting records and then comparing that to media coverage has uncovered...gasp!...evidence of bias in the media. And no, Karl Rove was NOT one of the study investigators.

The three-year study found that the news pages of the Wall Street Journal, CBS Evening News, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times received the most liberal rating among news outlets. Sounds about right to me. Of the 20 major media outlets, 18 scored to the left of the average American voter. The only two to the right were Special Report with Brit Hume on FOX, which was only slightly to the right and, in fact, made the list as fourth most centrist show, and the Washington Times.

The study focused on news stories, omitting opinion/editorial pieces. That's one of the reasons the Wall Street Journal made the liberal list.

The study provides no new insights for the majority of Americans...bias in the news is a given. It will be ignored or criticized by liberals who have their own fantasy worldview and are unshakable in their faith that it's true.

And the countdown has begun...

It's T-minus-one-day and counting until the release of the Serenity DVD.

Serenity will definitely be under our Christmas tree this year, and will probably be gifted to a few of our other friends. I just checked the Amazon.com sales rank and it's at number 2 in DVD sales. For those who haven't seen Serenity and are unfamiliar with its parent, the tragically-cancelled Firely TV series, the show has been called a western set in space. It's funny, smart and character driven, written and directed by Joss Whedon, the creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer empire. I never watched Firefly when it was originally aired on FOX, but became a huge fan after impulsively buying the series thanks to an Amazon recommendation. I just saw that Firefly is still hanging strong at number 7 in DVD sales.

I hope the post-movie release success translates into additional life for the Serenity and its crew - it's the best sci-fi in years and deserves to continue on the big screen.

Scuba classes for the clan members

Members of the Nielsen clan, sans Big Daddy (who's already certified through IDEA), headed to the pool this weekend to finish their pool work for their PADI open water scuba certification. The clan finished all their classwork and passed the written test this summer, but ran out of time for all the in-pool skills due to the large size of their class. This time, there are just six students to two teachers, and everyone reported the experience as being much better. They're taking their class through Just Add Water in Willoughby.

There are some open water certification dives offered on our upcoming cruise to the Caribbean, which should be very nice.

Smile for the camera...

Dog blogging...I finally got a picture of my Gordon Setter, Yeager, after several tries. He thinks the camera is some kind of living thing...maybe he thinks it's going to steal his soul?

Morgan Freeman gets it right

I'm glad to see I'm not alone in thinking our insistence on defining our culture based on the labels of black and white is one of the biggest obstacles to putting racism behind us.

Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman, of "Driving Miss Daisy," "The Shawshank Redemption" and "Million Dollar Baby" fame, said in an AP story yesterday the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it." I couldn't agree more.

There should be no Black History Month or Women's History Month or Hispanic Awareness Month. There is only history - American history - any any comprehensive study of that must include contributions and milestones from all members of our society. I am proud to be an American and I am proud of the brilliant succeess of this country. I am hugely proud of our military heroes of all ethnicities, proud of our inventors and innovators, proud of our cultural optimism and generosity and proud of the drive to succeed which is the hallmark of Americans. I'm as proud of George Washington Carver as I am of Thomas Edison. I salute the Tuskegee Airmen and the Flying Tigers.

I don't give a rat's ass what color or sex someone is..I judge people by their acts and contributions to society. If someone performs an action bringing credit on themselves and America, I think we should raise them on high and rejoice.

Recognizing people for their accomplishments based on their color is divisive - while bringing perhaps well-deserved praise to an individual, it isolates much of the society from sharing in the pride of a citizens' accomplishments. It says "you're not invited to share our pride in this. You're not a member of this exclusive club, so keep out."

I think some of the blame for continuing national racial friction also lies in the efforts of race panderers such as Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan to keep themselves relevent. Absent the admitted big challenges of the civil rights era, Jackson finds himself a Don Quixote with no windmills at which to tilt. And so he makes the windmills - he drives a wedge between the races so he can preen, posture and pontificate about the injustice the one ethnic group faces, while ignoring the fact other parts of society face similar problems every day.

Politicians also bear their share of the blame, insisting as they do on tailoring their campaign message to each ethnic group in their electorate. Checklist: "Elect me and I'll do this for blacks, this for women, this for Hispanics" - what ever happened to what's best for my voters?

Freeman is absolutely right that the key is to quit couching our view of our society in terms of color.

Paying the price for living here

It looks like Mother Nature is getting herself all revved up to take a giant dump on Northeast Ohio. The doomsayers of the weather cult are promising freezing rain and snow with its accompanying death, destruction and mayhem. This is all supposed to arrive this afternoon and evening.

I shoulda gone to Disney World.

It sounds like a good day to continue holiday baking (six dozen peanut butter cookies and two loaves of rye bread baked so far today), have the children put the horses in the barn and avoid the nastiness outside.

Carpentry time

My project this afternoon will be the installation of a half-door between our kitchen and dining room to help us confine the dogs to half the house.

I found a door which matches the others in the house in one of our outbuildings yesterday and spent some time salvaging some nice, period, decorative hinges from a door in the same building. The blog-daughter washed the chicken poop from the door. I cut down the door yesterday to the right dimensions and will take chisel and mallet in hand this afternoon to mortise in the hinges and hang the half-door, which is complete with a period lockset. I found a nice slab of oak in my off cuts to make a sill at the top of the door. Stay tuned for pics...

Look in the mirror, Hollywood

I keep reading in the news media that the motion picture industry is in trouble. Aside from the blockbuster Harry Potter and King Kong efforts, moviegoers are staying away from the theaters in droves. Hollywood’s beating upon its breast, tearing at its hair and screaming “why?!?”

My response to them: Look in the mirror, folks. People aren’t going to the theater because you’re not producing movies that people want to see. Your lockstep adherence to an ideology alien to most of the country handicaps your efforts. You’re the bluest of the blue, we’re the reddest of the red; you make the movies, but we consumers have the right to decide whether we want to see them.

People go to the movies for entertainment. They want to see something funny, entrancing, exciting or thought provoking. They do not go to the movies to see Hollywood’s version of the “world as it should be through our enlightened liberal glasses.” If they want to see that, they can turn on CNN or read the New York Times.

Hollywood has become sensitive to social concerns which are foreign to the average American. I suspect this is because overseas ticket sales are becoming increasingly important to a movie’s bottom line. But in pandering to the international crowd, moviemakers have lost their connection with domestic audiences. Let’s see…”Kingdom of Heaven” where Hollywood rewrote Muslim conquest? Bombed. “The Sum of All Fears” where Hollywood rewrote a gripping Tom Clancy novel about Mideast terrorism into a confused movie about eastern European terrorism? Bombed. How about “War of the Worlds” in which the screenwriter opined that the aliens were a metaphor for the United States and the poor people of Earth mirrored the Iraqi populace? Bombed.

********Warning...gratuitous "Serenity" promo*********

A lone bright spot in the dreck emerging from Hollywood in 2005, Joss Whedon’s “Serenity,” tanked because Hollywood gave it no backing – confining its promotion largely to free screenings for bloggers. Prediction: Watch the DVD sales go through the roof, as they did for its parent series, “Firefly.”

And now back to the posting...

People are tired of the false picture presented by Hollywood of the United States as the source of evil in the world. They’re tired of all white men being presented as bumbling, incompetent, corrupt or evil; they’re tired of movies with a liberal social agenda; they’re tired of movies which portray religious people as superstitious zealots; they’re tired of movies in which criminal behavior is excused or deified; they’re tired of Michael Moore; they’re tired of movies in which flash, nudity and eye candy substitute for substance.

I think Hollywood, and other large urban areas, are truly unaware there is a different school of thought from that which is mouthed by their friends and sycophants. They’d better become aware before the entire motion picture industry follows its crappy products down the toilet.

Pretty, but glacial

A cold, rosy morning here at the Nielsen hacienda. Temperature was at 3 degrees and it was a definite red sky at morning...uh oh. Doc wife said yesterday she had heard we would have to have high temperatures of 55 degrees for the rest of the month to hit our average (not gonna happen here in NE Ohio.) Global warming? Yeah, right. I got yer global warming right here, bubba!

Nice smackdown

Reading this morning about the post-Tookie Williams posturing and came across a nice smackdown administered by Baldilocks to a fuzzy-thinking young commenter on her blog. Read it all...it details a lot of what's wrong with society's differing views of its component people.

My short and sweet take..."Tookie" is a murdering hood who got caught. The people of California decided they want to have the death penalty available when they voted to reinstate it in 1977; Tookie committed some murders after its reinstatement and became eligible. Bye, bye Tookie. It's too bad justice couldn't have been more timely and no amount of mythical jailhouse conversion hijinks should excuse his crimes.

I'm with Willie Nelson and Toby Keith on this one..."Round up all of those bad boys, hang 'em high in the street. For all the people to see."

Bet y'all in South Carolina don't have these!

The blog-daughter sizes up a sizable icicle near the side door of our home...a sure indication the weather's cold and we live in a 140-year-old house.

I'm not shoveling snow if it's vacant

Our guest house has not been getting much use with the advent of all the white stuff hitting the ground up here. We're still in the throes of the late fall Lake Effect snows, when storms speed across a still-warm Lake Erie, pick up lots of moisture, and then dump it on the lakeshore area residents.

Hey, what happened to summer?!?

Snowy horsey goodness.

Some of our horses in the snow behind the barn. These youngsters include, let to right, Sunny (dun APHA breeding stock filly), Skylar (APHA cremello mare), Petey, a 2-year old tovero mare and Tony, yearling APHA colt. We are getting a nice soft fluffy snow today - much nicer than the blowing stuff we've had for the last week. Hint, hint - Petey and Sunny are for sale!

Recipe blogging: Corn chowder

Just when you thought I couldn't possibly get any more damn metrosexual...it's time for Recipe Blogging!

I made some killer corn chowder yesterday, drawing wild raves from family, friends and passersby, so I thought I'd pass along the recipe. Well, to be truthful, as much as I remember of the recipe - I don't use recipes, just start out with a general idea of what I want and keep adding things until I get there. So without further ado:

Corn chowder

1- 15 to 16 ounce can whole kernal corn
1 - 20 ounce bag frozen corn
1 pound bacon
2 medium yellow onions
12 medium potatoes
4 cubes chicken bouiillion
1 - 15 to 16 ounce can chicken broth
4 medium carrots
2 tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp poulty seasoning
About 48 ounces of milk - preferably whole
2/3 to 1 cup flour

Cook bacon in large dutch oven over medium heat until lightly brown. Remove from pan, dice and return to pan. Dice onions and saute in bacon fat with bacon until slightly softened. Use food processor to coarsely chop up canned corn...add to bacon and onion. Add frozen corn, bouillion (I like to grind it up), chicken broth, pepper and poultry seasoning at this time...reduce heat to medium low. Peel and cube potatoes, slice carrots and combine in a stock pot with water. Boil until the potatoes just start to soften. Drain and add softened potatoes and carrots to dutch oven. Stir. Add milk. Keep at medium low for 10 minutes, then increase to medium. Place the flour in a large measuring cup. Add a cup or so of the warmed white chowder broth to the flour and mix well with whisk. Pour back into the chowder while stirring until chowder is thickened. Reduce heat to low and allow to simmer for at least 30 minutes. Enjoy!

Back in the floodlights

Doc-wife and I will be back treading the boards at the Geauga Lyric Theater Guild in February, appearing, ironically enough, as a doctor and his wife in "Blithe Spirit." The director said she liked us best at the auditions and wanted to cast us as the leads, but our scheduled 10-day absence during rehearsals for a cruise made her think twice.

It's been awhile since I've had a small part. We'll see if there's any truth to the axiom "there are no small parts, only small actors." First read-through is tomorrow night.

Confessions of a journalist

I was reading Betsy Newmark's blog last week and she linked to a story in the New York Post by Ralph Peters. The story, Journalism's Moral Collapse, describes the reality behind the facade presented by the media's supposed holy guardians of the flame of truth.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain...prostrate yourselves in supplication before the flaming image of a pure and impartial media. Heretics, apostates and doubters of the holy word shall be cast down to the hellish realms of the Blue States and shall spend eternity wallowing in their ignorance and staring, glassy-eyed, at FOX News.

Hyperbole? Perhaps. But it is no exaggeration to say that media people view their pronouncements as sacrosanct. They know the truth about everything and HOW DARE you question their learned rendering of events?!?

You see I know a little about this because I was a journalist once, before I made the jump to the corner office at Stay At Home Dad/Farmer Inc. I was a reporter, then editor at several daily and weekly newspapers of varying sizes. I also interacted closely with members of the television media at any number of events in large and small markets. I've interviewed senators, representatives, governors, sports stars and even managed to get in a question at a press conference with President Bush 1.

By virtue of their job, even the most well-intentioned media professional can be seduced by the job. Write a feature on a soup kitchen around the holidays and the donations reliably start pouring in..."See what I have created!!" The accolades from the public are even more intoxicating to some. I've seen many reporters make the jump from careful scribes of current events to undisguised advocates in a matter of short months. Criticism can also result in skewed coverage ..."how dare you point out before the levy election that the school district pays its administration 30 percent more than neighboring districts!" Result: The reporter bypasses the financial analysis, and its accompanying controversy, in favor of a feel-good feature about Bob the Frog in the science lab. Absent checks and balances laid down by a no-nonsense editor, the well-intentioned advocacy of the reporter nullifies traditional journalism's roles as an impartial chronicler of daily events.

It doesn't matter that the media professional has the highest intentions; by slanting/slewing/skewing coverage the media violates its compact with the public. If the traditional media cannot be trusted to present a fair picture of current events, its usefulness is eroded.

I mainly talk about the print media, because the other media professionals, in my experience, are useless idiots. Pretty sometimes, pretty useless at all times.

I dropped my subscription to the Cleveland Plain Dealer last year because their coverage of national news was nothing less than yellow journalism. Most of the coverage come from the New York Times, that unabashed liberal cesspool, and that which didn't came from reporters doing their time in the minors in hopes of a shot writing for the Times.

The problem for big media is that people can now peruse the internet for worldwide information. Read a story in the Times and want to learn more? Google it, man! You might find yourself checking the dates and datelines to be sure the media sources are reporting the same story. How the hell did people get an unvarnished view of the world before the internet and the advent of easy fact checking? Short and sweet: They probably didn't. I will add a caveat, however: I think biased and advocacy journalism got a bid boost from Watergate and All The President's Men.

I think the era of Big Media is dead - someone send a Xerox copy of a post-it to Mary Mapes. The MSM is irrelevent with internet usage and computer literacy on the rise. The future will be community-based websites for trading of information - a virtual village marketplace with its own town criers. The world has become both a bigger and smalerl place thanks to the internet: Bigger because we now have access to information on the entire world, not just the small slice our former big media guards allowed through the gates. The world has become smaller, because now every story in every part of the world has a human, personal component and most have multiple voices passing along current events through their blogs.

How dare we look beyond the MSM's version of events? How dare they try to pretend they present current events fairly and fully!

We've looked behind the curtain.

Cookie blogging

Tempting treats for the ravenous clan

A regular Betty Crocker

I just finished making about 8 dozen chocolate chip cookies from two different recipes. The children have been circling the finished product like pirahnas at feeding time. Am I bad because it's kinda fun to make them wait to have one of the cookies in their clutches?

I've figured out how to post pictures now via Picasa...expect many more to follow.

Hello Matthew in the sand...

A reminder of warmer days...a picture taken this summer of my nephew Matthew sprawled on the sand by the shores of Lake Erie.

Too tired to hunt

I wanted to go hunting this morning, the last day of deer gun season in Ohio, but I just couldn't make myself do it.

I was up yesterday at 4:30 a.m., drove my wife to work at the hospital, then went to my fathers house for a morning hunt. Snow and icy flooded roads made for a tough walk back to my stand. After watching 8 or 9 deer hanging out with 75 yards of me all morning, I finally decided to shoot the biggest one and get out of the 23 degree temperatures. I checked her in at the game station, came home, and saw a group of hunters, sans permission, tramping through our woods. I chased them down and sent them packing, then guided some friends who DID have permission to hunt to some good stands (miles of walking, and all this in a foot or more of snow.) I cooked for the kids, went out for the evening hunt and then (7 p.m.) went to pick up my wife from work. She had a "little thing" to do on the way home - put in an appearance at the Emergency Services party.

The little thing turned out to be 2-1/2 hours of eating and dancing (only soda for us, though...she worked this morning and I was driving.) We saw another friend at the dance who reminded us that yet another friend was hosting an event at a winery located near our house. We stopped on the way home, I had a couple glasses of their Chiffon (a fruity white) and we ended up staying for two hours at that event, too, listening to a pretty good band called Free Howie. We finally got to home around midnight...at which time I had to trudge through the snow again, out to the barn to put out some hay for the horses.

When I got a call from my father this morning at 6 asking if I'd come hunting and shoot him a deer with his muzzleloader (he's 77 and the snow and cold are just too much for him,) I just couldn't do it. It'll have to wait until regular Ohio muzzleloader season. For now, I'm just too tired.

Just finished "Forever Odd"

I picked up a copy of Dean Koontz' latest, "Forever Odd," during a trip to Sam's Club last night. I also picked up a copy for my mother, another Koontz fan. I woke today up at 4 a.m., unable to sleep, so I decided to crack my new book.

Amid putting the kids on the bus, I finished the book around 8 a.m. The book, like Koontz' earlier "Odd Thomas," revolves around the life of Odd Thomas (his real name), a young man who tries to live a quiet life despite seeing ghosts and feeling compelled to act against perceived future mishaps. Despite being a pawn in whatever game destiny plays, he accepts his fate with remarkable aplomb. I won't pass along any spoilers here, but the book gets a very high recommendation.

I love reading Koontz because he is such a fine wordsmith. He uses simple words to paint detailed pictures of his characters, their environment and their interactions. He consistently pens works in which good triumphs over evil and in which the essential nature of man includes integrity and a sense of duty. I have no patience for authors who substitute large words and complex sentence structure for readibility - the purpose of writing is to communicate, and if you can't write clearly enough to communicate to the masses, you're a failure at your job (despite winning critical praise.)

Koontz seldom disappoints and his latest release is no exception.

Horses don't need to talk

I just came in from the barn, bringing all 12 horses in from the cold, blowing snow. Normally, they stay in the pasture as much as possible, which makes for much more sane horses than being in stalls all the time. Snow combined with wind gets them some barn time, though.

They were all lined up at the gate waiting to coming in to their nice stalls, complete with hay, grain and water, and it seemed like they were trying to out-nicker each other in expressing their thanks for coming in. Despite their eagerness to get out of the howling wind and at their grain, they were surprisingly patient and respectful today.

I was reminded of Oliver approaching Mr. Bumble with his plaintive request "Please Sir, can I have some more?" It's days like this that make all the stall cleaning worth it.