Athletic Scholarships

The New York Times has a good piece today on scholarships and youth athletes, pointing out how great the odds are against a kid getting a decent sports scholarship in college. It mentions, but not enough, in my opinion, the extreme demands on college athletes--really, how much value does a $2,000 scholarship have if a kid is playing a sport virtually full time for a college? And why are high schools holding "signing ceremonies" for students signing letters of intent? When did that baloney start? And why are high schools demanding kids spend so much time--practicies six days a week, for example--to play even jayvee ball?

A Waldbaum's Closing?

This could be interesting: there are rumors that the Waldbaum's, on Jericho in Huntington Station, might be closing and turning into a Hispanic-oriented market. More--but not a lot-- here.

Proposal on Parade

OK, I've been really neglecting this blog. Got too busy with other things.

I just got back from the Huntington St. Patrick's Day parade (Go Wildcats marching band!). The best part may have been the young firefighter who jumped out of line, dropped to a knee and proposed to his girlfriend, to applause. She spent a long time kissing and hugging him, so I'm guessing the answer was yes.

It was pretty cold to be outside for any length of time, when the wind was whipping around. But the weather could have been worse. Like Saturday's.

There were lots of soldiers and vets. It was very tempting, when Congressman Steve Israel went by with his bullhorn and asking for cheers for the soldiers with him (from the famous 69th) to shout back, "Bring them home, Steve." I bit my tongue but man, it's getting harder and harder.

Another amusing moment was the older veteran in a car bearing the sign from the Jewish Veterans organization. He was merrily waving an Irish flag.

I felt a little sorry for one little pipes band stuck on the march between a very long and loud line of firetrucks and a Civil War group that kept firing their weapons. And was it my imagination or were those guys wearing Confederate gray?

Here's a tip. If you're a company sending people down the street to hand out promotional materials, maybe you ought to make sure they're dressed at least a little decently. I saw one guy go by, touting a major Long Island company, who looked as if he and his clothes had just been rousted out of a Dumpster.

Post Office Passport Hell

I really hate my local (Huntington Station) Post Office and its lack of customer service. This is aside from the worst-designed parking lot in history; the removal of stamp machines so that you either have to buy them from the APC--which takes only credit cards and doesn't sell individual stamps--and including the elimination of outdoor machines; the surly attitudes of a number of workers, etc.

It is hard to describe how awful getting into this lot can be. One of these days, I'll try drawing a map of the one-way entrances, the one-way exit that puts cars directly into the path of people entering and leaving the main lot; the narrow space left for cars to pass each other around the one-way traffic lanes, etc. It is horrible.

The latest stunt is a small note posted on the passport room announcing that appointments are required on Saturdays in order to get any passport assistance. Of course, there's no phone number to help you do that. Good luck getting the attention of anyone working there to find out, short of standing in the long lines that literally reach the exit many days. I was standing in a fortunately shorter version of that line this morning watching as the passport line grew; none of the first three people realized they needed an appointment but one of the clerks took it upon himself to yell over to them that they needed appointments; when a few indicated surprise, he marched into the room to point it out to the passport crew.

As far as passports, there are new requirements and new fees as of yesterday. Some days it seems as if the system is designed to keep people from traveling rather than helping them. There are new rules involving minors--it used to be that one parent could show up with a notarized letter from the other parent saying it was okay for the kid to travel. Now apparently both have to show up. Don't know how divorced parents or people separated by thousands of miles handle this. As far as the federal passport system itself--good luck. I sent for some certified copies of documents I'd submitted earlier; the check was cashed Nov.1. Still no papers.

And Oakwood, Too

The Oakwood Primary Center is taking over the Barnes and Noble store on Rt. 110 in Huntington on Feb. 8 for its after-school "fun"draiser.

A percentage of all books and food sold during this time will go to the PTA to benefit the children of Oakwood.

Fun activities include a Valentine's Day craft, story time with some of our favorite teachers, stickers, games and prizes. Plus there will be a children's art show and the Oakwood Chorus will sing.

Please join us between 3:30 pm and 7:30 pm and support the Oakwood Primary Center.

Whitman Fund-Raiser

South Asia Fundraiser Night is scheduled for the Performing Arts Center on Friday from 7:30 - 9:30 p.m. There will be henna tattoos, delicious South Asian food, gorgeous South Asian jewelry for sale, raffle prizes including gift cards worth over $200, a fashion show, and much, much more. Tickets are only $4 in advance and $5 at the door. All proceeds will be donated to Mercy Corps to help to rebuild a school in South Asia destroyed by the 2005 earthquake.

Regents Heck

Teenager survived her first Regents exam, ever, in an honors class. Did pretty well, actually. She doesn't do really well with tests--there's always some sort of sloppiness that cuts into her grade, for reasons I can't fathom since she has, as her teachers always say, an organized mind. I really think she doesn't know how to study for a big test and that's something she has to work on. Talking with a co-worker with a daughter going through exactly the same thing at Huntington High, we realized we were more worried for them than they were.

'Idol' Contest at Whitman

"Whitman Idol Contest" on Friday
The Whitman High School Lamplighters and the Junior class of 07-08 will are presenting a “Whitman Idol Contest” on Friday at 7 p.m. at the Walt Whitman Performing Arts Center.

Finalist performers in three age categories who auditioned earlier will compete for a $100 cash prize. The finalists were notified Friday, and the age groups are:

Newsday has more.

Oil Heat

Interesting: look at how much higher gas prices are in Huntington.

Also, I've been chatting with someone about home-heating oil prices. He, and others have recommended keeping a little kerosene as a backup for emergencies, such as when you run out and need a little fuel while waiting for a delivery. It started with a question about using diesel fuel as an alternative to home heating oil--apparently it stinks to high heaven. Here's the explanation about kerosene:

Just 2 comments on the diesel/heating oil etc. Diesel is heating oil -- only a different grade (No. 1 through No. 6 -- with No. 1 cleanest, No .2 the typically delivered home heating oil down to No. 6 for large industrial oil furnaces with "scrubbers" to preclean and precondition before it will actually burn). In fact, the same filters are used in large trucks as are (or at least should be) on your burner.

If you run out, you're better off to get kerosene instead of diesel and add it to your heating oil tank. It works the same -- only much, much cleaner. And, you save money because you do not have to pay as much in the taxes on the kero. Diesel is $00.185 cents per galls (CPG) in federal tax and typcially another 30+ cpg in State taxes THEN add the sales and gross receipts tax. WHereas kero pays only the sales/gross receipt tax. Personally, we keep 10 gallons of kero stored in the garage through the winter -- that way if the we run out unexpectedly, I can get through 2-3 days with the kero. But more importantly, if the electric goes out for any long period, we can drain the heating pipes and use the kero in our old reliable kero heater. If all goes well through the winter, we just use up all the oil and add the kero to the tank to clean and condition the system in the Spring.

Shopped at Sears?

If you have shopped at Sears and signed up for its "community" online, you might want to get hire someone to clear away the spyware. Like, now.

Security guru Bruce Schneier reports on Sears and its very disturbing spyware.
Is Sears Engaging in Criminal Hacking Behavior?
Join "My SHC Community" on Sears.com, and the company will install some pretty impressive spyware on your computer:

Sears.com is distributing spyware that tracks all your Internet usage - including banking logins, email, and all other forms of Internet usage - all in the name of "community participation." Every website visitor that joins the Sears community installs software that acts as a proxy to every web transaction made on the compromised computer. In other words, if you have installed Sears software ("the proxy") on your system, all data transmitted to and from your system will be intercepted. This extreme level of user tracking is done with little and inconspicuous notice about the true nature of the software. In fact, while registering to join the "community," very little mention is made of software or tracking. Furthermore, after the software is installed, there is no indication on the desktop that the proxy exists on the system, so users are tracked silently.
Here is a summary of what the software does and how it is used. The proxy:

Monitors and transmits a copy of all Internet traffic going from and coming to the compromised system.

Monitors secure sessions (websites beginning with ‘https'), which may include shopping or banking sites.
Records and transmits "the pace and style with which you enter information online..."
Parses the header section of personal emails.
May combine any data intercepted with additional information like "select credit bureau information" and other sources like "consumer preference reporting companies or credit reporting agencies".
If a kid with a scary hacker name did this sort of thing, he'd be arrested. But this is Sears, so who knows what will happen to them. But what should happen is that the anti-spyware companies should treat this as the malware it is, and not ignore it because it's done by a Fortune 500 company.

Here's some more:
CA Security Advisor Research Blog
Managemyhome.com: Another privacy issue for Sears

"Hey Dad, did you guys by any chance buy a new sewing machine from Sears on September 30th?"

"We did. How did you know that?"

"I just found it listed on a Sears web site. It looks like they have another privacy problem."

We were informed about managemyhome.com by Heather, who left the following comment on Benjamin Googins' last blog entry:

OMG. It gets worse! check out a sears site managemyhome.com. Once you register, you can look up major purchases for ANY address. All you need to do is enter a name address and phone number and if the person attached to that info has made a major purchase at sears you get that info!! They have no real controls in place -- you have to enter an onscreen code and they say that keeps your info safe, but that does not stop someone from entering other people's contact info to see their product purchases. This brings casing someone's house to a whole new level.

Driver's Ed

If you're a parent of a dying-to-learn-to-drive teenager at Walt Whitman High, here's some driver-ed info:

Registration forms are currently available in the Main Office. Please read instructions carefully. Returned forms will be accepted from seniors only tomorrow. If more than 80 registrations are received by 3:00 PM, participants will selected by lottery. If less than 80 registrations are received, forms will be accepted from seniors and juniors on Monday. Remaining participants will be selected by lottery, with seniors receiving preference. Juniors will be accepted only if openings have not been completely filled by seniors by 3:00 PM on Monday.

Disenfranchisement

The Times notes that the Iowa caucuses disenfranchise night workers by not requiring employers to give them time off to vote. But guess what? So does the South Huntington school district. Budget votes are held in late afternoon to evening; good luck if you work nights.

Got a Night Job? Then No Caucus for You
DES MOINES — Jason Huffman has lived in Iowa his whole life. Lately he has been watching presidential debates on the Internet, discussing what he sees with friends and relatives. But when fellow Iowans choose their presidential nominees Thursday night, he will not be able to vote, because he is serving with the Iowa National Guard in western Afghanistan.“Shouldn’t we at least have as much influence in this as any other citizen?” Captain Huffman wrote in an e-mail message.

He is far from the only Iowan who will not be able to participate.

Because the caucuses, held in the early evening, do not allow absentee voting, they tend to leave out near-entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have babysitting, and many others who work in retail, at gas stations and in other jobs that require evening duty.

As in years past, voters must present themselves in person, at a specific hour, and stay for as long as two. And if this caucus is anything like previous ones, only a tiny percentage of Iowans will participate. In 2000, the last year in which both parties held caucuses, 59,000 Democrats and 87,000 Republicans voted, out of a state with 2.9 million people. In the 2004, 124,000 people turned out for the Democratic caucuses.

The rules are so demanding that even Ray Hoffman, the chair of the Iowa State Republican Party and a resident of Sioux City, cannot caucus on Thursday night, because he has to be in Des Moines on party business.

Iowans begin the presidential nomination process, making choices that can heavily influence how the race unfolds. Now some are starting to ask why the first, crucial step in the presidential nominating process is also one that discourages so many people, especially working-class ones, from participating.

“It disenfranchises certain voters or makes them make choices between putting food on the table and caucusing,” said Tom Lindsey, a high school teacher in Iowa City. He plans to attend this year, but his neighbors include a cook who cannot slip away from his restaurant job on Thursday night and a mother who must care for her autistic child.

Review: Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker

Author Beth Hensperger is not kidding: "Not Your Mother's Slow Cooker Recipes for Two" stands out as a practical, highly informative cookbook with a very different collection of tasty recipes from the standard chicken roast or beef stew that so often dominate other books of the genre.

And it's loaded with bits of information I've not read elsewhere.

For example, we get an explanation of what slow cooking is and isn't, how a crockpot operates, the best sized cooker for single or two-person use, a time conversion chart between regular oven and crockpots, and, my favorite, "panic proof pantry," a guide to ingredients and foods to have on hand for any occasion and to head off a last-minute rush to the store.

She explains the basics of cooking, noting that there are two ways to heat: moist or dry; dry heat includes roasting, baking, broiling, girlling, toasting, pany frying and deep frying, using microwaves, toasters and conventional ovens.

Moist-heat cooking means stewing, braising, steaming or poaching and uses appliances such as microwaves ovens and stovetops. But the crockpot trumps all the other moist-heat methods and allows for tasty food preparation on a smaller scale. Not to mention that it can be a huge time saver.

It does certainly add time to the cooking process--it's not called slow-cooking for nothing-- but it's the perfect way to prepare a meal while doing something else: start the cooking before you head out the door to work or have other projects to tackle; and voila, when you return, the meal is ready.

The slower process translates like this:
conventional oven: 15 minutes-crockpot: 1 1/2 to 2 hours
conventional: 60 minutes-crockpot: 6 to 8 hours

and so on, to 12 hours or more. I remember my then-little one freaking when we got our first crockpot--"you mean it's going to take LONGER??," fearing, I suppose, she'd starve to death in an afternoon. But she quickly got over it when she realized delicious meals were ready when she wanted them, and now we live off our two pots. Her recipes range in time from 3 hours to 10.

Hensperger explains the workings of a crockpot, while noting newer ones are better than those made even just five years ago:
"The slow-cooker's low wattage, wrap-around heating coils are sandwiched between inner and outer metal walls for indirect heat; the heat source never makes direct contact with the stoneware crock; the coils inside the walls heat up and the space between the base wall and the crock heats, transferring that heat to the stoneware insert. Food cooks at a temperature between 200 and 300 degrees."



The recipes are outstanding:
For main-dish soups, she walks readers through ways to create tasty broths, then moves on to such delights as zucchini soup croutons, butternut squash soup, fennel potato leek soup and chipotle black bean vegetable soup.

Under "The Great American Chili Pot," she offers "Pushpa's chili," old-fashioned beef and mushroom chili, overnight chicken and bean, texas chili, Steve's Poker Night Chili, turkey chili mac, hominy and zucchini chili and turkey chili with baby white beans.

For grains, pasta casseroles and sauces, she gives us 20 recipes, including steelcut oatmeal with raisins, risotto with pancetta and potatoes, slow-baked macaroni and cheese, vegetable polenta with mascarpone cheese and marinara and mozzarella lasagna.

We also are offered plenty of the scrumptious meals involving crockpot standards chicken and turkey, beef and veal, and, with an extra dash of flavor, recipes from around the world for pork and lamb, such as braised pork chops with turnips and apples; lamb korma; country pork ribs with suaerkruat and pears, tagine of lamb, tomato, green beans and sesame; lamb stew agrodolce and Mexican pork chops.

Cooking times and recommended pot size are clearly stated at the beginning of each recipe. And while some of the recipes call for some rather unusual ingredients, most rely on items found in a well-stocked kitchen. This book includes no photos of foods or anything else, except on the cover, so food junkies who love to pore over those pictures may be disappointed. But for the rest of us, this book is a true gem, spilling over with great information and ideas.

In addition to the kid and me, we've switched over to preparing food for our Labrador, because of the pet-food mess. A dog breeder and pet columnist I know uses her second crockpot to prepare foods for her dogs, which I think we'll do, too, as some of the recipes include ingredients, such as onions, that are bad for dogs.

First published at epinions.com

Where Leaded Toys Die

So those toys we didn't buy, or returned, had to go somewhere:

Chinese town where old presents go to die

By Richard Spencer in Guiyu
27/12/2007
The Chinese town of Guiyu is the graveyard of Christmas past.
It is where presents - game consoles, laptops, mobile phones - come to die.
It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, melted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.

Let Kids be Kids

Fingered by the Feds

I've been stewing about this since Christmas Eve, when I first read this story. Among other things--the employer/database connection--I am deeply bothered by the discovery that I could be in the Department of Homeland Security database because I adopted a child from overseas 11 years ago.

The United States requires Americans who are planning to adopt overseas to have a thorough police check, which includes, among many other requirements, submitting fingerprints to the FBI. I always figured the fingerprints were sitting somewhere, unused but if I should, say, turn up dead on federal property, someone might think to look me up. But that's a different matter from having moved, wholesale, everyone's fingerprints into a database used to run down terrorists. It is, I fear, yet another step into the collecting of vast amounts of personal information by the feds, to be used who knows how and by whom. We can't catch Osama bin Laden but, by God, we know about those adoptive parents!

Two elements, in particular, bother me:
the adoptive parents angle:

The DHS already has a database of millions of sets of fingerprints, which includes records collected from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at borders for criminal violations, from U.S. citizens adopting children overseas, and from visa applicants abroad. There could be multiple records of one person's prints.

and this:

The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

What? Where's the line between corporations and the government? And what constitutes "Brushes with the law"? A protest? So someone notifies your boss? What kind of nonsense is this? For people who bitch about the Democrats' and their alleged "Nanny State" some people sure are interested in trading it in for a police state.

Teen Reflexes

Just in case you wondered, a 14-year-old athletic girl has better, MUCH BETTER, reflexes on video games than I do. Like 12 different Wii wins to 0. I particularly enjoy how teenager, who controls the settings, created my character as a gray-haired, slightly decrepit old lady.
Oh, wait.

Cold at Christmas

I was in a Home Depot earlier today, looking for materials to temporarily repair a leaky shower pan and saw several notes saying that the store had few if any generators because they'd been shipped out to the Midwest families who were without power because of the recent snowstorms.

What a shame and what a commentary it is that while we all run around freaking out about terrorism, we're really unprepared in this country for even the most routine natural disaster. How close are we to a real breakdown, again, in this country, if multiple disasters hit simultaneously? I don't know. I just have this feeling that, years ago, people weren't left without power for weeks at a time because of weather. The infrastructure is not strong. We are not ready for much of anything.

Maybe I'm wrong. At any rate, I hope all those without power bounce back soon and manage to still have a decent holiday.

Counterfeits

No matter how tough your holiday schedule may be, it's probably not as stressful as what these families are going through.

Three Suffolk teens snared in counterfeit scheme

BY JONATHAN STARKEY
Newsday
Three Walt Whitman High School students and a Huntington Station man made bogus cash in the back of a pickup truck and circulated it through Huntington-area businesses for about two years before the counterfeiting ring was broken up, Suffolk police said yesterday.

Green in All Directions

The Los Angeles Times' green blog has some good information on LED holiday lights:
Why they are safer--they're cooler

They are popular

They make the best lights

Throw away the old ones