William grew up on a farm. Did you know that?
Well, you’ll know it tonight. William tells you everything you ever wanted to know about farming, but were afraid to ask.
Don’t worry, though, Tony gets his time, too. Later, we talk about meat… and William don’t know NOTHING about meat.
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I think it’s demi-sequitentennial… or something like that…
When I moved into my last appartment (in California) I was surrounded by strawberry and artichoke fields.
They built houses and a school on them. You can tell the areas in Irvine that used to be farm land and where the grazing land used to be based on the trees.
Annoying to think we’re building stupid, too-close-together, houses on soil good for GROWING FOOD…
On the subject of futures, it’s pretty amusing. When you buy Futures, you’re buying the right to buy a certain amount of corn for a certain price. Buying the future, locks in the price. So you’re trying to lock in the price low and sell those futures later when the price goes up.
You just have to remember to sell those futures before delivery day. Otherwise, you’ll make what you think is a pedestrian investment in agriculture but later you’ll get a call asking where you want your corn delivered.
D&D 3e/3.5e lends itself to farming characters with “knowladge” and “profession” skills.
I once had a character who came from a long line of Beekeepers and grown up keeping bees, moving hives around to various farms, and harvesting honey and wax. Like ya do. So she had knowladge agriculture and profession beekeeping skills
When I lived in California, there was a place in Thousand Oaks called “T.O. Smokehouse” which closed between the time I graduated university and the time my parents moved there. Made me very sad.
There’s a chain called Lucille’s with BBQ and I LOVED that place.
Before I moved to Texas.
What I’ve lost in Sushi, I’ve made up for in spades in BBQ.
As far as BBQ sauce goes, I believe this is a misnomer quite frankly.
You do not cook BBQ with the BBQ sauce on it. The sauce is usually applied later.
Now my mother will occasionally bake chicken with the sauce on it. But that’s not BBQ quite frankly.
I rarely have BBQ sauce on my BBQ. Though I have been known to dip my mashed potato nugget bisquet in BBQ sauce. (Yum yum gimme.)
I don’t like food that’s spicey for the sake of being spicey.
I like flavor, and spicey can be part of it. But it has to contribute to the thing and not be just about causing maximum pain.
For some companies “spicy” means “boatloads of black pepper”…
In one case (Nutrisystem), “Cajun” ment “black pepper extravaganza”.
Don’t get me wrong. Black pepper is the king of spices, and it’s got heat… But… Yeah.
I have an iPhone. Previously, I had a Treo (Palm) and a Blackberry… I never had an Android phone…
I like my iPhone, but Tony is right about the limitations. I tried to use my iPhone to control a robot dog I built through Bluetooth but Apple will not work with just any bluetooth device. (Not without paying a metric butt-ton of money to be part of a bluetooth program.)
I did contribute to the Ouya Kickstarter, so I’ll have an Android device soon.
Couch to 5K! Go Producer!
POSSIBLY?
…Okay, that’s fair. I get that.
William: Not eating food at the state fair? Really? Jeez, I always knew you were weird but that’s just out of bounds weird. I’ve not been to the state fair in years, and I can remember only 3 things from that last trip. Of which the best memory by far was of food. đŸ™‚
Producer: I have to agree with Tony; you’ve not really been to a state fair if that’s your only experience.
I kind of wanted to play the flute, but had no aptitude for it. What I did have aptitude for was the trombone and to a much lessor extant the clarinet; since members of my family already played trombone, I decided to take the saxophone (same sort of mouthpiece as the clarinet). I later learned: a) I’ve got a tin-ear b) I didn’t have the patience for practicing an instrument. I got good enough to either blow through the sax properly or to do the fingerwork properly with never being able to do them both at the same time.
County fairs, meh. I’ve never been to a county fair that had anything of interest to me.
Dresden Files game: My favorite comment about your game was the Producer asking you if Lisa got shot again. *smirk* It rather makes me want to start shooting at her in one of our games.
What to read next: Have you read any of the Wild Cards anthologies (edited by GRRM)? These are rather fun superhero stories.
BBQ, meh. Though I do, once in a while, like Jimmy Jack’s in Iowa City, specifically their smoked turkey with the “cowboy” (smokey, sweet) sauce.
Iowa cuisine tends to be about subtle, natural flavors (not bland!) rather than highly spiced foods and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
iOS/Android: For such a useless topic, it still seems to have got you talking.
I like to think I’m an equal opportunity insulter.
It does not sound like William and the Producer are having an affair; but to to be open & transparent I’m on Team Producer. :p
Gosh, I didn’t even know I had a team. Although in retrospect, we should all be on Team Ezzie, if we wanted to be safe.
Word.
I looked it up – 75 is the Diamond anniversary. I tried to find a semi-sesquicentennial type reference and was unsuccessful. That said, I did not try overly hard.
Producer: I grew up in Illinois, until last month, I had yet to meet anyone who could confirm that Illinois does have a state fair and that this person had actually attended. I think IL needs to do a much better job advertizing the fair, since I know a whole lot more about both Iowa’s and Wisconsin’s and I’ve never lived in Wisconsin.
Olympic runner Lolo Jones was born in Iowa.
Thanks for the thought and appreciation put into the BBQ sauce question. I understand that authentic BBQ is about the smokey cooking process, but I didn’t know what else to call the sauce part. The bottle says BBQ…
Producer: Way to go on Couch to 5K. Where do I find more information? I was thinking it would be good if I was able to run a 5K…
Illinois suffers from some pretty severe issues centering around a bunch of “us v. them” feeling between Chicago and the rest of the state. It makes things like having a statewide celebration more complicated than it should be. Also, geography – Iowa’s smaller and more square, and our capital is centrally located. But yeah, here it seems like everyone knows when the state fair is, and lots of people go, if not every year, then every few. When I lived in Illinois it was not like that at all. It was one of the things that weirded me out when I moved here because I hadn’t expected the difference – see also Iowa’s obsession with wrestling and women’s basketball (6-on-6, which they sadly don’t play anymore).
As for the 5K, we’re using this plan: http://www.coolrunning.com/engine/2/2_3/181.shtml
We’re on the last day of Week 2 tonight. So far it’s been pretty accessible. It’s not always easy in the moment, and we’ve all had some aches and pains, but so far we’ve been able to power through. I’m a little scared of next week, but I figure I’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
If you’re doing it alone, there’s several podcasts out there that will talk you through each run in real-time and provide encouragement. The one time I had to go out by myself, I picked one that the British NHS put together and liked it pretty well.
Thanks Producer for the 5K info.
I’ll give you that Iowa is more square than Illinois, but I think they rank 25th and 26th in square area of US states, so I do not buy your “smaller” argument.
I think Illinois does have a big “us” vs “them” problem. Not sure how they should approach it solving it. I know the Lake County Fair (the county between Chicago proper and the Wisconsin state line) was in the end of July. We went to/competed at that several times, but I still never heard anything about the state fair. Even something as simple as the state fair website: http://www.agr.state.il.us/isf/general.htm vs. http://www.iowastatefair.org/
Illinois isn’t easy to remember the address, and once you see the site itself, you want to forget it. It looks like it was put together in 1999, and only the content has been modified since. Seems to me like Iowa says “This is our state fair, everyone in the state should come so they can see what makes us great and take pride in it.” Whereas Illinois seems to say “No one is going to want to come to this, it’s outdated, old-fashioned and boring.”
Why??
Here’s another thing I didn’t remember last week – when I *did* hear about the state fair in Illinois, it was usually in the context of what bands were headlining on the stage at night. Here I get the impression it tends to be more about the fair itself, although to be fair I’m twenty years older now and hang out with arts & crafts geeks, so there’s other shifts besides geography muddying the water.
Nice catch on the URL – it’s definitely a symptom of what’s going on here.
Eh, I think I was as “up to date” with the arts/crafts circuit when I lived in IL, probably more so since my mom belonged to a few crafter groups, whereas I do most of my crafting sans group membership. I’m not sure that in particular is why we are more familiar with the IA fair. In Iowa, I see commercials, I hear people talking about it, I hear about it on the radio (both in commentator conversation and in commercials), it just is more places. Plus, I think IA gets bigger headliner names which helps draw people and boost advertizing.
Apparently IL also has a butter cow. I don’t hear people talking about it at all, much less with the same wonder and awe that accompany the annual Iowa discussion.