Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

Mmmm -- Smells Good

There has been much baking the last couple of weeks. The latest projects have been for us:


Over on Facebook, Mrs. Dr. Phil had posted:

It's been a busy morning, and I'm liking the results! -- Mother-in-law's poppyseed coffee cake recipe, mince pie with pastry made with vodka, and an entire stollen just for us!

and

Plenty to share -- c'mon over!

Naturally I had to reply:

No, no! It's way too crowded here. No room. And, uh, the roads are going to be icy. You'll slide off the road trying to get here. Really. And, uh,you'd never make it up our LONG ICY TERRIFYING driveway. Yeah. You, uh, better stay home. And leave the poppyseed, mince pie and stollen for me... for us, I mean! -- Dr. Phil

The cats, however, get nothing, NOTHING I tell you, of our lovely holiday baked goods.

I've suspected our well water as part of the reason why Mrs. Dr. Phil has had problems with pie crust the last few years. So the vodka pie crust trick probably provides a solvent suitable to getting everything to line up right.

The Usual Updates

The coming weather hasn't yet arrived. The temp is hovering around 31°F, but it feels icy cold outside -- must be damp. And with the oven on earlier, the thermostat is just sure the house is warm enough... not.

Gas, which I haven't ranted about in a while, has had fairly steady prices the last month, staying around $2.57.9/gal for regular -- no sudden jump for Christmas. Maybe they'll save it for a New Year's increase. (grin)

Dr. Santa

You Will Not Believe This

via Crossed Genres homepage:

The Darth Vader toaster, as shown at ComicCon.

$54.99 at shop.starwars.com .

This is at least as good as the Hello Kitty! toaster that I heard about from Patrick Rothfuss at WOTF XXIV last year.

Dr. Phil

Every Sunday

... the Grand Rapids Press runs all the major obits of the week. For some reason the top three this Sunday got me to thinking.

The Controversial Celeb Death

Leading off was the death of David Carradine, 72. Nearly all the radio and TV pieces I ran across talked about Kung Fu. Only the out-of-town TV talked about Kill Bill. But this one will be in the tabloids for a while. Found in hotel room! Hanged! Suicide! In Bangkok! Then the details get murkier. Maybe not suicide. Maybe involving kinky behavior.

My first thought: Never, especially if you are any kind of a celebrity or role model, get yourself involved in any kind of behind closed doors activity that you would hate to be revealed in public as the first paragraph of your obituary. Just sayin'. After that, though, this is less than Earth shattering news, especially as we don't know what really was going on. Yet. Or ever.

The Interesting But...

Millvina Dean, 97, the last Titanic survivor. As much as I love the movie Titanic and the whole real story and technological issues of the RMS Titanic herself, this is but a historical footnote. Unlike the impending moment where the last two U.K. World War I vets die and Britain loses its eyewitnesses to history, Ms. Dean was a baby on 15 April 1912 -- hardly a participant or observer to disaster.

The Most Important Obit Of The Week

Paul Haney, 80. Who? Well Paul Haney went to work in 1958 as an information officer for a new government agency, NASA. By 1962 he was working at Houston's Manned Spaceflight Center and became known as "the voice of Mission Control." Yup, through many of the years of the U.S. space program, up until Apollo 9, the calm, reassuring and informative voice you heard was Paul Haney. And the style of reporting he gave the space program continued on.

This is the voice I grew up on, as I watched every Mercury, Gemini and Apollo mission. Ironically, as a "grown up", both the news media and my own work life have kept me from following every moment of the Shuttle program with as much dedication.

Mr. Haney not only witnessed history as it was being made, he announced it. Walter and all the other news commentators could report the news or write the poetry of how we felt about these amazing times, or even just weep on air with joy or sadness. But all of the networks used Mr. Haney's voice to give us the official NASA reports. It was all such a part of everything, I remember being struck twice by surprise -- once when I heard another voice announcing part of a space mission, as if there could never be but one voice of the space program, and again when one of the networks, ABC I think it was, actually captioned not as something authoritative like "The Voice of Mission Control" but someone's name followed by Mission Control.

As an interesting footnote, Googling "wikipedia paul haney" pulls up as the first Wikipedia entry, only one on The Ancient Order of Turtles.

Maybe you had to have been there...

Dr. Phil

NOTE: An unfortunate typo was fixed 6-15-09 Mon.

Sounds Like A Science Fiction Plot

Twelve years ago a man gets a heart transplant. Two years ago he goes and visits the donor. She passed away last year.

Brr-up!!!! (Skips track)

Uh, say what? Run that math by me again?

But It's True

Richard DeVos, 83, was interviewed in The Grand Rapids Press yesterday. The multi-billionaire is one of the two founders of Amway, celebrating its fiftieth birthday and hence the article.

The donor, a woman in England, received a heart-lung transplant. Presumably she needed lungs, her heart was okay, and DeVos had the money to fly to England and make the transplant happen.

Huh. Neat in a weird way.

Just thought you'd be interested.

Dr. Phil