People with brains and conscience

This has to be one of the most common sense things I've seen in a long time. Goes a long towards righting my sense of fairness in the world.

As Professor Robert Shiller says, "how many cars do you need if you can only drive one at any given time?" I would argue, if you can have one car as a backup while you drive your other very old, but still running Volvo, you're being fiscally responsible. But it's a luxury.

Americans need to stop feeling entitled to anything.

Great quotes

People have been saying some awesome things recently. Just a quick sample:

From a Washington Post article about Supreme Court Justices and technology:

This is Chief Justice John Roberts speaking to Justice Scalia as he tries to understand text-messaging in the context of a public employee privacy case before the court .

"I thought, you know, you push a button; it goes right to the other thing," Roberts said. Responded Justice Antonin Scalia: "You mean it doesn't go right to the other thing?"


From Scott Adams in the Wall Street Journal:

"The primary purpose of management is to kill any hope that staying in your current job will work out for you. ...The last thing this world needs is a bunch of dopey-happy workers who can't stop humning and grinning. The economy needs hamster-brained sociopaths in management to drive down the opportunity cost of entrepreneurship. Luckily, we're blessed with an ample supply."

I'll be looking for more to add here.

Burgers 1

I am an omnivore at heart, but a vegetarian in practice. Except...every once in a while I get a burger craving. This happened the very first time I tried being vegetarian working in New Haven years ago. I think I went about four months before I was drooling for a burger.

So tonight, despite the fact that I had a marvelous egg-lemon spinach soup waiting for me at home, I desired a burger. My workday had been proletarian to the extreme; like a dog, I dogged, grinding my millstone, dragging my albatross, holding onto the metaphorical fishing line like the old man in the sea with determination, for miles...I deserved a burger.

I went to a local Essex bar. Ordered the basic burger, cooked medium, with lettuce (romaine), tomato (beefsteak), and onion (red). I added ketchup (Heinz), and mayonnaise (some non-name brand - it's fat, ok). I bought the burger and brought it home - it was packaged in those plastic containers that are not really recyclable, but fairly handy. They must be cheap. Anyway, upon arrival at home about ten minutes after leaving the establishment, I pulled the plastic box out, and started in on the fries. They were slight soggy, but fine. The included three ketchup packages was not enough, so I supplemented with my four year old ketchup perfectly preserved at ideal conditions in my refrigerator. Fries and ketchup. It is hard to mess this up.

Onto the burger. It was thick, but smaller than the bun by about 5/8ths of an inch. That's a little over half an inch. That's kind of a lot in terms of proportion for those of us raised to believe that the burger ought to hang outside of the bun. Oh well. The vegetables were good. There was a lot of onion, and I thought I'd only eat half of it, but I ended up needing all of it. It was very tasty with all the pieces put togther. For the most part, the meat itself was decent, but I would say it was middling quality. It was slightly dry, and although cooked just medium, the juices from the pinkish meat inside weren't exactly flowing. And most unfortunately, there were pieces of gristle in the meat. Two pieces of something quite hard that I had to spit out.

The bun was toasted, good, but as previously noted, too big for the exercise at hand. And it did not have sesame seeds on it, for the record.

So, overall, I'd have to rate the Black Seal burger 2.5 stars out of 5.
A Burger King Whopper would probably be a 2 out of five.
McDonald's burgers, rubber on plastic, would be 0.5 out of 5. That's kind of generous, isn't it?

I'm looking forward to more burger escapades in the future.