Big Fat Ostrich

The original plan was hot dogs. Yeah, good old BBQ hot dogs in buns. But then we started thinking about Chiabatta bread and soon after merguez followed. And then somehow hot dogs became Fuck You Dogs and I can’t remember how we came to that conclusion since we had a few beers with some Campari and Whisky chasers. But not all at once.

In the end, the ingredients were Ciabatta bread, merguez sausages, Sauerkraut, dijonnaise, jalapeño cheeze whiz (believe it!) and some almond stuffed olives to top it off.

Step one: Boil the sausages until they look like big fat disgusting fingers. Here’s the pre-boil. Sausages in a pan full of water. If you fuck up this part, you’re not allowed to cook. Ever. Just give up.

When they’re boiled, throw in the sauerkraut.Use olive oil. Do not burn it. If you burn it, throw it out and go to McDonald’s.

In a separate pan, cook the ciabatta. Make sure to lightly coat both sides of the bread with butter or margarine. But mostly butter. Margarine is one molecule away from plastic you know. Also, don’t forget to lightly burn the bread by mistake. It makes you look hardcore.

Slice the bread and Cheez Whiz it along with the dijonnaise. Put in the sauerkraut and sausages and make a sandwich. Tie the whole deal together with the olives so that it looks like one creepy fuck. Christ, look at that thing!

Take another picture with better lighting. Here yo go, the friendly Fuck You dog sandwich. Ain’t he something?

The verdict: Pretty tasty. Actually very tasty.I won’t be buying any Cheez Whiz anytime soon, but in this recipe, it worked. It did. Thanks, I’m going to pass out now.

Requisite Spoiler Alert: Fuck it. It’s about alternate universes and shit.

Overall, it was pretty good. With sexy red-orange titles!

The Season 3 finale was a total game changer. No more beating around the bush now that both worlds have a permanently open portal to each other. Pretty much everyone worth talking about has now met their doppelgangers face to face. Except for Peter who doesn’t have one. Which is why he vanished!

So: Where the fuck is Peter?! I mean, he’s on the poster which means that he’s coming back…just…where is he?!

Also: That bald dude who has some human feelings is up to his old tricks! He’s sentimental so it looks like he’s going to go against the will of September. Or is it August? I keep forgetting because these hot sauce eating guys are all named for months of the year and it’s confusing.

And: Will we find out more about the bald dude society?

Will: Walter finally go completely crazy? Can he go crazier that he was before? Is it possible?! Will Walternate form his own ISP called Walternet? Man, I’d sign up if he did.

More: Fight scenes between Olivia and Fauxlivia. Preferably in a cage. With Jello. That’d be hawt.

What: Do we call Astrid’s doppelganger? Fakestrid? Otherstrid? Diffstrid? Come on, help me out guys, I’m dyin’ up here!

I’m hoping for a decent season without too many throwaway episodes like the one with Mole Boy (you knew I’d mention him). Seriously, Night of Desirable Objects was pretty bad. And laughable. Fringe is a lot like X-Files in many respects but that episode was really trying too hard.

Fringe can be downloaded every Friday night.

It seems like 20 years since my school mate came raving at me that he’d just seen the most awesome show at Foufs. Nirvana. Who? Nirvana! Yeah, whatever.

Well ‘whatever’ turned into ‘holy wow’ there’s something real special about this band after I heard Bleach and Nevermind back to back at a buddies place. Soon after you were seeing babies swimming naked in every record store window. Yes, back then there was more than one record store. More so, there were still records. Even more so, we called them records.

My best memory of listening to Nevermind is the one where me and a friend would play pool until 4am at that shithole in Laval, chain smoking and just throwing the butts on the floor, while choosing songs from the CD juke box. We’d put on a bunch of random tracks including Something In The Way, which had 10 minutes of blank space at the end of it. We knew that there was a hidden track at around the 13 minute mark, but the owners of the pool hall didn’t. While the dead space played, they’d be putting in quarters and shaking the machine. “Why won’t nothin’ play goddamit! I put my quarters in and everything!”

We’d look at each other with knowing smiles, anticipating what was to come.

Then.

GUITAR.FEEDBACK.BASS.GUITAR

7 minutes of sweet painful rhythmic torture bleeding from Curt’s Jaguar.

Sometimes they’d let it play out. Other times they’d pull the plug on the jukebox. Funny how they never noticed me and my buddy crumpling with laughter over the pool table every single time it happened.

Years later, I sold my Nevermind CD in some crazy fit of ‘I gotta sell my shit!’. I guess I needed the cash. A few days later when I casually dropped the fact that I parted ways with Nevermind, my buddy said I was nuts. He was right. I went back to the used CD place and got another copy. I might have even bought back my own CD.

Remember this guy? He’s the “Ancient Grain Whose Time Has Come”. Look how hip he is with his piercings and studded belt and everything!

Well, let me tell you. I came across these here Synergy Flakes, complete with 8 ancient grains! 8 of ‘em! How could I not pick up a box for a little cereal review? I had to give Nature’s Path another chance, since the last time I reviewed one of their cereals, I concluded that the box tasted better tan the flakes themselves. That cereal sucked.

I’m happy to say though, Nature’s Path Synergy ain’t bad. But the trick is, eat with some fruit or something. On their own, they’re a little bland. Those grainy, ancient grains need a little help in the modern world. Sort of like helping your parents with the Internet, or trying to explain the latest meme to your grandfather. What I’m getting at is, cover them in milk and fruit until they don’t taste like the box.

Here’s how:

Get a bowl
Open the box
Fill up the bowl halfway
Put in some raspberries (like I did just like on the box! Or are those strawberries? I can’t tell!)
Pour in a bunch of milk. 2%, 1%, 0%, soy. Whatever.
Drink it right from the bowl. Cause fuck spoons.

It should look like this:

When it fucking snaps:

Ok, so I decided to replace it myself because the dudes at ye olde bike shoppe said that it wouldn’t be fixed before 7pm, which is too damn late for me! It’s actually super easy to replace bike gear cables. The hard part is making the adjustments so that your gears change smoothly, so I won’t be telling you anything about that.

First, get yourself a cable. This baby set me back $2.72. Ouch.

See those two prominent screws? You’ll want to unscrew them. Maybe you don’t have the same braking/gear system as I do, but for these Shimano‘s those screws are your gateway to the innards.

There. See the cable head? Snapped just as we expected to see.

The easy part: Feed the new cable through the guide holes. You really cannot miss. Don’t forget to guide the cable through the cable sheath as well.

Now guide the cable through the rest of the guide holes until you’re at the rear wheel. Again, it’s impossible to miss if you pay attention. Guide the cable through the sheath, attach it (you’ll need an Allen Key), and adjust as needed. It’s a good idea to flip your bike upside down at this point and test that you can actually shift gears while the wheels are spinning. You’ll determine just how much slack the cable needs this way. And that’s it! Now go put your bike away until next summer.

When the sole falls off:

I don’t have a lot to say about Acidrip on Ubuntu except that I was messing around with DVD ripping to reduce my physical video collection. Also, I wanted to convert some VOB files to avi. Yes, those VOB files were just conspicuously lying around. I really have no idea where they came from!

Anyway, Acidrip is pretty straightforward. It’s really just a graphical interface for command line utilities mencoder in conjunction with mplayer. So instead of figuring out a bunch of crazy command line parameters, Acidrip gives you a nice interface to use. However:

There isn’t really an option available for merging multiple avi’s once they’ve been created from your VOBs. At least I didn’t find any. Basically, use your trusty mencoder command to merge your avi’s into one single file.

mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -idx -o output.avi video1.avi video2.avi video3.avi

So in effect, the title of this post is kind of misleading since we’re going back to basics and really just using mencoder from the command line the way it was originally intended to be used.