it's been a long time since i've posted a video of any actual cooking - it's all been about the cats.  i felt pretty bad about my diet for the past few months, so i thought that it was time to get a little more strict about what goes into the old temple.  so i researched some prominent  chili recipes and came up with something that isn't too bad - it's a little tomoato-ey, so you might want to hold off on the extra can of smashed tomatoes that i added in a panic.  it's worth noting that the cats didn't seem to want to have anything to do with all the vegetables that i had going on.  i guess if i had made tuna chili or ham chili, it would have been more to their liking.  more cats next time!

10 servings:

• 3 cups red kidney beans
  
• 2 cups white kidney beans
  
• 2 cups black beans
  
• 1 cup onion, diced
  
• 1 cup green pepper, diced
  
• 2 large celery ribs, diced
  
• 4 garlic cloves, minced
  
• 2 packages st. yves soy ground beef substitute (i used mexican and italian flavours)
  
• 1 jalapeno pepper, diced
  
• 2 cups white mushrooms, sliced
• 1 tablespoon ground cumin
  
• 1 teaspoon garlic salt
  
• 1 teaspoon onion salt
  
• 2 tablespoons Tabasco sauce (or to taste)
  
• 2 tablsepoons Worcestershire sauce
• 1 1/2 bay leaves, crumbled
  
• 2 teaspoons salt
  
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  
• 1/4 cup chili powder
  
• 3/4 cup stolichnaya vodka (the only kind)
  
• 1 (16 ounce) can diced tomatoes
  
• 1 (16 ounce) can crushed tomatoes (probably not needed)
  
• 1 (8 ounce) can tomato paste
  
• 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  
• 2 tablespoons honey stricken for not being vegan (who knew!!!)
  

 - g

song of the day for veganizing your vodka intake: havannah, dreas pres. havannah (asot 355 mix)

there was a funny email that went out about how if you did a search for our company's name in google, you would find a posting from this blog, right on the first page - within the top three results! but, really, that's no big deal, i mean, i work for my company and i'm proud of them and they're proud of me, and everything that i say about them is positive...


...unless you are google and you take one of the comments about themcompletely out of context and then remove all of the surrounding parts of the statement that speaks positively about them, leaving you with an incredibly bizarre and not entirely correct impression. it's like how tabloids turn sound bites into outrageous sensational stories that totally misrepresent the subject. except... this was accidental and... about me... and more importantly... about my job!!!


i was utterly mortified. i've always felt pretty comfortable blogging because it's about me and my opinions and what i'm comfortable sharing, right? except that now that everything is connected by the inter-googlienss of the internet, no association is left unexplored and unrevealed.



and so, that is why i have taken down this old blog site for editing, and started a new blog site for all of my more personal and intimate and now strictly anonymous musings. and on the upside of things, now each site will deliver more of what you would want - one will have more .NET/ timelapse cat/ political goodness, and the other will have more comic book/ illustration/ personal gossippy madness!!!



everyone wins!!! enjoy!!!



- g


song of the day for starting over: (just like) starting over, john lennon

i have always considered myself to be an apple evangelist.  i've been using apple computers and technology since i was a small boy playing with the apple ][ at my elementary school and in my mind, there has never been a better, more consistently successful purveyor of elegant and effective technologies in the history of computers.  that having been said i am incredibly angry over the launch of the 3G iPhone in canada.

last week, my beloved iPod Touch was lost/stolen.  i had it thursday night, and i packed it with my work gear friday morning as i always do, and by the time i travelled through the subway to work friday morning, it was gone.  i don't know if it fell out of its pocket in my bag (which has never happened to me before) or whether someone willfully liberated it, but it is gone.  so now, i am left without a lovely, fashionable, sophisticated device to browse youtube videos, check my email, or listen to music by the pool.  the absence of the Touch demands a replacement in my life.

so today, more than two weeks after the launch of the iPhone, i thought i would try again to procure one.  i waited for 20 minutes at a canadian phone company provider booth in eaton centre to see if they had any in stock.  there were about 15 other people milling about, but i was encouraged that one of them was purchasing an iPhone and i thought to myself, "this is it - i can definitely get one here."  20 minutes later, zero people had advanced through the queue, the three staff members working had not addressed anyone else's requests, and the sweat that had soaked through my t-shirt and dress shirt (from the heat, humidity and my 20 minute walk from work past two closed canadian phone company shops) was starting to really annoy and embarrass me.

i interrupted a sales representative of the canadian phone company and asked if he had any more iPhones in stock.  he said he had two, but that they were the 8GB models.  wtf am *i* going to do with a paltry 8GB iPhone, when i had just lost a 16GB iPod Touch???  i walked off in disgust, sweating and fuming in spite of the eaton centre's overworked air conditioning.

i have NEVER had problems acquiring apple products - even highly sought after ones - before.  i have NEVER seen apple do something as childish and disrespectful to a national market as diverting stock intended for a long-awaited launch to some other country to retaliate something as pernicious as monopolistic rate plans - punishing and irritating customers to the brink of madness.  i have NEVER been so dissatisfied with the management of a canadian phone company to the point where i would  totally give up on my preferred product choice and go with a competitor like research in motion JUST to deny a canadian phone company my $125 a month for an outrageous personal data plan.  i am INCREDIBLY LIVID about this... but i am still without a touch-driven iPod and that's a very difficult thing for me to deal with right now.  thank goodness that i have my cool black notebook and stylish fountain pen as a fall-back - while they don't play music or browse youtube, they never disappoint me with being out of memory or out of stock.

iPhucking hate some canadian phone companies.

- g

song of the day for seething with rage:  "hooker with a penis", tool

the painful reciprocal cost of having two beautiful cats greet you every time you return home is that you have to leave them alone every time you depart.  i often hear hans or gretel mewing for me to return as i wait for the elevator to take me on my next urban adventure, and i wonder how they deal with the departure of their source of food, water, and a slightly more tidy litterbox.  this video was shot over about a week and clearly indicates that gretel is far more co-dependent than hans.  gretel will spend... well, hours... sitting in front of the door waiting for me to come  back whereas hans will apparently take the opportunity to look for ways to get into trouble while the hooman in away.  

i had hoped to have an entire week's worth of videos, but a technical glitch killed my friday filming, and saturday, it was too morbidly humid to do anything but stay in and play videogames with the air conditioning on.  so i hope that you will be able to appreciate this statistically incomplete survey of the cats' behaviour.  in the end, i think that they were happier with me staying in than going out.

- g 

song of the day for hating to leave your precious friends at home: love you more, armin van buuren featuring racoon.