Beautiful World

Apple Blueberry Crisp

2 apples, peeled, cored and chopped
1 can of blueberries or 1 cup fresh blueberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup oats, rolled (raw)
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/3 cup butter

Put apples & blueberries in shell baking dish and sprinkle with lemon juice. Combine dry ingredients, add melted butter and mix until crumbly.

Do not sample the sugar/oats/cinnamon mixture. it is the most heavenly stuff in the world, and you’ll eat the whole thing, leaving nothing for the crisp. Resist.

Sprinkle crumb mixture over apples.

Bake at 375 F for 30 minutes or until apples are tender.

..I first tried this recipe in Britain, and there are many yummy variations. You can use apricots, peaches, pears, just about any fruit that you fancy. To make it properly English, top it off with Bird’s Custard.

If there’s no Bird’s available, Cool Whip or Whipped Cream are fine. If you want to be a total Yank, top it off with ice cream.

Makes six servings

This is the right sunny weekend to learn more about our new D70

Done so far: light studies

Orange crush lite

Orange crush noir

..and yes, I will be a good citizen of the blogosphere and post my list of books that mean a lot to me. I was making up the list, trying to remember which specific parts meant a lot to me, and I started rereading them. Be done, soon.

Hariri’s Son Gets Majority in Lebanese Parliament:

Lebanon’s anti-Syrian opposition won all 28 seats contested in the fourth and final round of the country’s parliamentary elections, giving it an eight-seat majority in the 128-seat parliament.

Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa announced the results in a news conference broadcast live by al-Jazeera television.
Opposition leader Saad Hariri, the son of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, killed in a Feb. 14 bombing that the opposition blamed on Syria and its allies, said the victory was “a present for the soul of the country’s martyrs.”

As Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

I just saw Jon Stewart, and tonight Ed Helms targeted my ex-home town of Cape May, NJ. Helms was covering Cape May’s repeal of a Speedo Ban (yes, they banned a bathing suit) and he covered the story wearing a speedo and a ‘nut cam’ (a camera supposedly placed in the nether regions of Ed’s genital area)

I can barely speak right now, I was laughing so hard. We’re not just talking about a random shore town,
we’re talking Victorian Cape May of the famous horse-drawn carriages; it’s a town where teenagers are forbidden to skateboard, hang out or make loud noises on the boardwalk. Often, it seems as if teenagers are forbidden altogether. In Cape May, little old ladies write letters to the editor complaining about men who don’t walk on the outside of the sidewalk when accompanying a lady. Where did all the ‘gentlemen’ go?

God bless the very ungentlemanly Ed Helms, his speedo and his nut cam. Gotta record that.

We may have a transporter soon, but it’ll be less like Star Trek and more like Wallace and Gromit:

Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic “atoms”. ..

…Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.

They came up with the idea based on “claytronics,” the animation technique which involves slightly moving a model per frame to animate it.

“We thought that a good analogy for what we were going to do was claymation – something like the Wallace and Gromit shows,” Dr Mowry told BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

“When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like it’s moving itself. That’s something like the idea we’re doing… in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the ‘clay’, as though the clay can move itself.

Professor Goldstein has envisioned that, eventually, the objects will be built with “nano-dust” – tiny objects that can be programmed to bind to each other and move – but currently they are trying to build at a much larger scale, working with objects the size of table-tennis balls.

..and if you have to ask who Wallace and Gromit are, you are not a true nerd.

[Thanks to Fausta of the Bad Hair Blog]

Brandon Joyce of the Jupiter Blog Rollerbladed from South Philly to New York City – a one hundred mile + trip. I get tired after 3 miles!

Jesse James of the Monster Garage built a flying car. Basically, he stuck some wings and an elevator on a sportscar, a Panoz Esperante GT. I just saw ‘Flight of the Phoenix (bad movie, interesting idea) and it seems that you can build a plane out of anything.

Karol of Alarming News has been blogging for three years. She has lots of thanks for fellow bloggers (including Dean Esmay) and for her commenters. A nice group of commenters always makes blogging more fun.

Canadians taking pictures – Kate of Small Dead Animals and Double Plus Ungood have some beautiful photos up.