Angry Men, Grillin’ and the 4th of July: Making the Perfect Burger

There’s nothing that says “God Bless America” like firing up the ol’ grill, making some thick, juicy, burgers and watching some fireworks. After all, it’s how we celebrate all our secular holidays in America — Grilling! But not those stupid hockey pucks of frozen, pre-formed meat one buys in a sleave at the local WalMart. The Angry Men know how to grill… and this 4th of July, we’re throwing on our angry chef hats and revealing our BBQ secrets for you, our loyal readers.

Angry New Mexican

The New Mexibuger is best made by mixing a little green chile (or red chile salsa, if you prefer that way) into the ground beef during prep, as well as an egg for binder. You’ll need something to soak up some of the fluids from the chile, so breadcrumbs or oatmeal are de rigeur. Melt a bit of Monterrey Jack cheese on top during the last few minutes of cooking and serve on a warm, toasted bun topped with some salsa and freshly made guacamole. Now that’s eating New Mexico style!

Angry Diesel Engineer

My burger of choice is made as follows:

Mix 2 parts ground beef with 1 part ground turkey.  Yes, I know, turkey is less manly than beef, but it is Americanized by being put through a food grinder.  Besides, the turkey helps to maintain the lightness of the patty.  Mix your dead animal together in a mixing bowl together with the secret ingredient – 1 packet of Lipton’s (or similar) onion soup mix powder per 2 pounds of meat.

Form 1/4 to 3/8 pound patties, and press your thumb into the middle to get a little dimple to collect the delicious dead animal juice which will ooze out upon cooking.

Charcoal grills are superior in all aspects to propane if you have the patience and know-how to use them.  Keep the charcoal piled mostly in the middle.  Put the patties on the hot part of the grill for about 3 minutes on each side to sear the outside, then transfer them to a cooler part of the grill, and put the lid on!  The lid is crucial, as it helps cook the meat through radiant heat transfer rather than just the convection from the coals, and it prevents grease fires from turning your delicious meat patties into little scorched fritters.

These burgers cooked to your done-ness preference can then be served on french freedom bread to bring out the lightness in the meat and the oniony goodness.

Enjoy!

Angry Political Optimist

I thought I’d chime in here with a little something for those who abhor red meet (not me). The APO salmon burger. You will need:

• Salmon fillets
• Cucumber
• 1 c Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise
• 1/4 c Kalamatta olives
• 2 tsp capers
• fennel, rosemary, marjoram
• olive oil
• Old Bay seasoning
• Some fresh burger rolls/buns
• Slices of pepperjack cheese

First prepare the condiment. Use about 3/4 to 1 cup Miracle Whip or Mayonnaise. Place in mixing bowl. Take some Kalamatta olives (without pits, or remove the pits) and chop them up – about 1/4 cup will do. Fold into the Mayonnaise until evenly distributed. Add some capers. Use the smaller kind. Blend these in. Add pinches of the spices (fennel, marjoram and rosemary). Set aside.

Peel and slice up a cucumber into 1/8-3/16 inch slices. Set aside.

Start with a nice fillet of salmon. I always broil the fillet first with the skin side against the heat, or up if you are using an oven broiler, for about 3 minutes. Remove from the heat and gently peel the skin from the meat. Use a fork to separate it. Broiling it makes this easy. Then using a fillet knife, slice the section of salmon so as to reduce the thickness in half. You want the resultant fillet to be even and about 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick. Place the thinned fillets on some foil and apply olive oil over the salmon rubbing it evenly over the fish. Then sprinkle Old Bay seasoning and rub that in. Place them over the fire and cook evenly. After the edges turn from bright pink to white-ish, remove from the heat and flip over. Rub olive oil and Old Bay on that side also. Place back on the fire. After a couple of minutes, lay the slices of pepperjack cheese over the fillets so that they begin to melt. Do this at the end of the cooking so that the cheese is soft but not melted. (For those who can’t tell, the cheese should look like a limp slice, not a lava flow).

The trick here is to get the salmon cooked just enough. The olive oil helps preserve the juice. Under-cooking is not that bad (think sushi). I always split the rolls and throw them on the grill to toast them. By the time you place the last roll on the grill the first one can come off.

Now take your toasty rolls and slab on some condiment. Place the salmon fillet and cheese on the prepared roll and add three or four slices of cucumber. Close that sucker up and present them warm to your friends.

Warning: These can easily lead to you being the designated cook for your next get together.

 

Shipping Blackmail: Amazon Prime

Amazon.com, the world’s most popular on-line retailer has unveiled a new subscription service known as “Amazon Prime”. For just $79 a year Amazon.com is offering free two day shipping on all of your orders (except those which Amazon deems ineligible for the service). Sounds like a pretty good idea right? Especially if you make a lot of Amazon.com purchases. I’m certainly behind businesses trying to find that new competitive edge it takes to stay on top. Ordinarily I would just see something like Amazon Prime as a nice piece of new business strategy. The one problem is now that Prime is out Amazon is blackmailing users into using it.

You see recently my wife and I put in an order to Amazon.com for a guide book we wanted for a trip to Europe. We’re leaving in three weeks, so we wanted to be sure we’d get it on time. The book was in stock and was eligible for Free Shipping, with a listed shipping time of 3-5 days. We purchased it and checked out with no problems, all very routine. Imagine our surprise that evening when we got an e-mail estimating the delivery date at three weeks. We decided to call Amazon to see what the issue was. Maybe the guide was out of stock and their system had been incorrect? No problem there we’d just select another one, so we dialed in prepared to switch our order. The explanation we got blew our minds.

Evidently in the Amazon terms of service they have the right to hold your items for later shipping, and the 3-5 days is just the time it takes from leaving the warehouse. We’d never had this kind of delay before so we were a bit surprised, was there a problem? No. Amazon is just trying to get folks to sign up for Amazon Prime (which we were offered an upgrade to, one month free trial). In fact if we upgraded today our book would ship immediately.

How sneaky and dishonest! All of my respect for Amazon.com has just been flushed down the drain. We bit the bullet and upgraded, not to prime, but two day delivery as we couldn’t chance it with the guide given our travel date, but we will be thinking long and hard before buying from Amazon.com again in their future. Their sneaky little game may have just cost them two customers.

-Angry Midwesterner

 

All your Passwords are belong to Bozeman

For the geographically challenged, or (in the cast of Coasties) purposefully obtuse and arrogant, Bozeman isn’t a new computer virus, or a demon summoned from the 77th layer of the Abyss by Bill Gates. It’s a city in Montana, actually one of the largest in the state. Montana is normally a champion for personal liberties, but in a bizarre turn of events the city of Bozeman is asking all applicants for city jobs to turn over not just those sites on the internet for which they have accounts, but also the user names and passwords that go along with them.

City attorney Greg Sullivan had this to say about the decision:

“So, we have positions ranging from fire and police, which require people of high integrity for those positions, all the way down to the lifeguards and the folks that work in city hall here. So we do those types of investigations to make sure the people that we hire have the highest moral character and are a good fit for the City,”

While one can’t fault him for his motives, it certainly is important for the city to have a good reputation and it is reasonable for them to want folks of good repute representing them, they’re going to frightening and drastic measures to do so. In essence asking applicants to turn over all shreds of privacy to the city, allowing people from the city to read their e-mail, private sections of facebook, and even access their bank accounts. Now maybe my situation has been unique, but I’ve never had a potential employer ask for permission to read my mail or tap my phone before hiring me. If they did, I’d tell them to take a hike. That kind of invasion of privacy is unheard of, and is unconscionable.

The worst thing is, I don’t know which I find more absurd and frightening, that a US city would ask this of potential employees, or the fact that so far not a single employee has withdrawn their application in protest when asked to tender their accounts and passwords.

-Angry Midwesterner

 

Microsoft gets off it’s Soapbox

So have you ever heard of Microsoft Soapbox? Yeah, me neither. Planned to be Microsoft’s answer to YouTube, this isn’t some flashy new service Microsoft is rolling out with Bing, but the stillborn project which first debuted over three years ago. Now, with the obvious market dominance of YouTube, Microsoft is going to be cutting the chaff from the wheat. In a market where the money is on the web, and not the OS, Microsoft has consistently failed to reinvent itself into something dynamic, new, or cutting edge.

The death of Soapbox isn’t important because of the failure itself. It instead represents a mental change at Microsoft, as they retreat from ground they had originally intended to fight for. Bing is likely their last stand for relevance in the internet world, and one which they will likely lose to Google.

-Angry Midwesterner

 

Obama’s first good decision: Cutting off California

The White House today rebuffed pleas from California for cash. California, as anyone not living under a rock knows by now, carries an estimated $24 billion deficit and is in dire economic peril. Now they expect the rest of us to bear the penalty of their excess for them, and pay for the irresponsible behavior for which they reaped all of the rewards. Something must have hit Obama in the head this morning because for once he made the right choice.

He told those lazy, good for nothing, deadbeat, pot smoking, California Hippie Losers to bug off. Three cheers for Obama!

California has the largest GDP in the US, at over $1.8 trillion, one of the highest levels of taxation in the country, an annual tax revenue of over $114 billion, and one of the highest levels of tax revenue per capita. They have all the resources necessary to solve their own problems. The reason they cannot pay their bill is that, much like a bunch of trailer trash Wal-mart shoppers, they’ve lived beyond their means and run up a debt funding ridiculous programs, propositions, and other such folly to a point that no one in the damnable state even knows where or how the money is being spent. A full 50% of their yearly tax revenue is earmarked for propositions even before the budget is set, that’s more revenue than the total taxes brought in by 48 of the 50 states. And yet visit California and you’ll find a third world nightmare of poorly paved roads, one of the worst school systems in the nation (ranked 48th of 50), no public transportation worthy of the name, scant police coverage, and a wash of crime and poverty that stretches 800 miles from north to south.

California isn’t too big to fail. It’s too irresponsible, stupid, and mismanaged to succeed. Its practices, culture, and above all the arrogance of its people make it one of the largest threats to the American way of life in the world. So now California, we’re cutting you off and it’s time for you to reap what you have sown. Obama should strip your state of its sovereignty and readmit it as a federal territory.

-Angry Midwesterner

 

Workplace Discrimination: You’re Doing it Wrong!

Someone might want to contact the heads of Abercrombie & Fitch and teach them how to get away with work place discrimination. Not that it is ever a good thing to discriminate against your employees. We here at the 12 Angry Men don’t endorse such behavior at all. But if you’re going to treat your workers unfairly it is generally best to do so with uneducated minorities who are disenfranchised and don’t garner much sympathy with the popular media.

It’s pretty clear that Abercrombie and Fitch are going to learn this lesson the hard way, because really, what do you think is going to happen if you discriminate against a young attractive white female with a prosthetic arm who, just by the way, happens to have finished sitting her law exams and is nearly a practicing lawyer? Does that really sound like a great idea? To me it just sounds like a recipe for getting publicly humiliated and shelling out £25,000 in settlement to a budding lawyer who is sure to become a darling of the press. Say it with me everyone, “Abercrombie & Fitch, you’re DOING IT WRONG!”

-Angry Midwesterner

 

Removing the Blindfold from Justice

There is a statue in Dublin Ireland that stands atop the gates of the castle. It was meant to represent justice, but has a number of peculiar things about it. The first is that in Dublin, Justice wears no blindfold. Instead she is admiring a sword which she carries. Second, she has turned her back on the city and faces instead the castle. Lastly she carries a set of real scales that normally are perfectly balanced. Yet when the rains come in (as they often do in Dublin), one of the ends of the scales is sheltered by her arm, causing the scales of justice to tilt unfairly.

All of these facts were disturbing to the people of Dublin, and Ireland as a whole, as Dublin Castle, and the justice it represented, was made by their British oppressors. To them this statue represented the sort of “justice” they received from the crown. When Ireland won its independence one of the first things they did was to drill a hole in both sides of the scales, so they would never be unbalanced again. They could not reblind justice, nor make her face the people, but they made what changes they could.

In America we have long prided ourselves on the nature of our justice. In America Lady Justice has always been blind. Our constitution itself attempts to secure equality for all, and while we have not always achieved it, we have always strived for it. Until now. Now we have a President who wishes to do an abominable thing. Obama wants to remove the blindfold from Justice.

Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor is nothing less than this. He has even stated openly that he wants to appoint a Supreme Court Justice on the basis of “empathy”. This is a weasel term as much as calling attaching the label of “Patriot” to a well known and unjust act. Empathy has no place in our courts. Justice should be blind to empathy, and should be applied fairly to everyone regardless of their race, class, or situation. Empathy in the courts is just another way of saying “a different standard of justice for differing types of people”. While I will always support mercy in our law, when we apply our law it should be in a fair manner that is blind to circumstances. Everyone, low or high, should be treated the same. This standard for justice is one that has defined America for centuries.

But now we have a President who so hates America and our way of life that he wants justice to be applied unfairly. Make no mistake he has selected the right justice for the role. Sotomayor is a self avowed racist and sexist who believes latina women are endowed with more wisdom and grace than white men. For her a certain sort of “empathy” (better known as bigotry) is assured.

In the end, however, we should not be surprised by Obama, or his actions. After all he has already shown us that he would rather give our tax money with no strings attached to rich business men, than loan it with interest to blue collar workers. Why should we be surprised that he wants to apply justice unfairly as well?

-Angry Midwesterner

 

Troll of the Week: Adopt-a-Rabbi

“I hate Missouri Nazis” edition.

What do you do when a stupid hate group adopts-a-highway and you have to put its name on the signs?

Why, rename that stretch of highway after someone they hate, of course…

Rep. Sara Lampe, D-Springfield, got an amendment added to a transportation bill to rename [the road] the “Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel Memorial Highway.” Heschel marched with Martin Luther King Jr. at the Selma, Ala., Civil Rights march in 1965.

Take that, you racist jack-booted thugs! For your blatant abuse of freedom of speech and association, you are now subject to keeping the rabbi’s highway nice and spit-polished clean.

Excellent job, Rep. Lampe! I hope your bill passes into law. And for your excellent counter-troll (for all neo-nazi groups are flamers), we award you the George Takei Troll of the Week award.

 

Latin — it just isn’t good enough

Just two weeks ago at my local parish I was rather surprised when the children’s choir sang the opening hymn in Latin. I think, despite recent Papal encouragement of both Latin and the Tridentine mass, that Latin is now an inappropriate language to use for the Roman Catholic Mass.

My reasons are many, but I will boil them down here.

Primus, Latin isn’t old enough. The use of Latin is, in fact, a recent development dating to only the 6 century. Before that, Greek was used.

Secendus, although some claim virtue by using a sacred language, they can not escape the fact that Latin, in fact, uses a secular alphabet providing no sense of mystery. Consider the bilingual missal where you will see IESUS on the Latin side. Consider the mystery present in Ἰησοῦς. Be honest — aside from context who Ἰησοῦς is a mystery. See?

Tertius, and again diminishing the mystery provided by Latin, the ‘missal Latin’ commonly presented uses punctuation and spacing, a 15th century innovation. Not to mention lower case.

Quartus, although some claim that Latin unifies us across time and space with other Catholics, this in fact is not true. It deliberately excludes the Eastern Rites (to make no mention of the Chaldean).

I hope you know where this is all heading. Latin just isn’t good enough. Never settle for second best in your liturgies — demand Ancient Greek. Good enough for the Gospels, good enough for you.

 

An Era of Responsibility?

At noon on December 9th, Lt Dan Neubauer of Marine Corps Fighter Attack Training Squadron 101, a F/A-18D pilot, after a series of bad decisions all around, made a final bad decision to attempt to make the Miramar runway and crashed into a house killing three members of a family (Young Mi Yoon, who was in her mid-30s; her 2-month-old daughter, Rachel; and her mother, Suk Im Kim). The pilot, on a training mission off CVN-72, the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, ejected after the left engine failed. He was flying on one engine after being forced to shut down the right engine due to an oil leak.

On September 10, 2003, in a session of the House Financial Services Committee, Representative Barney Frank (D. Mass.), in response to concerns about the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said “I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.” On September 25, 2003, in response to the request for additional regulation on Fannie and Freddie, Frank opined “I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), speaking to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Mel Martinez said “Secretary Martinez, if it ain’t broke, why do you want to fix it? Have the GSEs [government-sponsored enterprises] ever missed their housing goals?” Senator Chris Dodd (D. Connecticut), Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee which regulates mortgage lending, has been linked to preferential mortgage terms as a friend of Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

Countrywide Financial has crashed due to management and regulatory failures. The entire mortgage banking system crashed as a result of bad loans securitized by FNMA and FHLMC. See Fit to Fail.

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So we have two crashes. One of an F/A-18D killing a family of four, and one of the entire US financial system and world banking market. What do we observe in the aftermath?

The marines, in court, brought charges and discharged four member of the Corps. The commander of the squadron, its maintenance officer and two others have been relieved of duty. Nine other Marines have received other disciplinary action. The disciplinary action cites deferred maintenance, faulty aircraft-ground communications, and bad decisions. The F/A-18D was flying on a left engine which had been logged with a faulty fuel-low sensor indicator, and rather than perform maintenance flew 146 additional missions. When the right engine was shut down on an oil leak, the left engine ran out of fuel. Poor maintenance decisions contributed to the crash. The pilot was also criticized in the report for failing to use his emergency checklist. While the Lincoln’s controllers advised of a North Island landing, the squadron officers requested the pilot to make for Miramar, a decision which relied on unrealistic assumptions about the aircraft’s condition. Collectively, the duty officer, the operations officer and commanding officer exhibited poor judgment. For all the criticism of the US Military, the US Marine Corp owned up to its mistakes and took decisive corrective action.

The US Congress has yet to own up to its role in the crises and in fact now wants us to believe that it, and more regulatory agencies, are in fact, the solution. When are we going to see an equivalent acceptance of responsibility? My suggestions:

1. Rep. Barney Frank, discharged from Congress for gross incompetence and dereliction of duty.
2. Senator Chris Dodd, discharged from the Senate, for ethics violations, conduct unbecoming, and gross dereliction of duty.
3. Rep. Maxine Waters, discharged from Congress for incompetence and gross dereliction of duty.
4. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, discharged from Congress and banned from ever holding a public office, for incompetence and gross dereliction of duty.
5. Rep. Henry Waxman, discharged for cowardice in the face of the enemy, dereliction of duty, insubordination, and conduct unbecoming.