Ok, what is the most embarrassed you’ve been by your child in public?
Deb and my oldest were in Wal Mart when he was about 4. Had to point out that the lady next to them had a mustache.
Loudly. Repeatedly.
“MOMMA, that woman has a mustache! Look momma!! Ladies are not supposed to have a mustache momma! Why does she have a mustache momma? Momma!”
So, what is your story parents?
I am posting this as a favor to someone who asked for the recipe. I am not responsible for any pounds gained from consumption of this awesome pie.
Debbie got the recipe from her aunt years ago. I added the coffee and some other modifications. I think the coffee adds a deep, richer flavor to the chocolate.
WARNING: This stuff is like crack. You won’t stop at one slice.
First:
2 pie crusts, pre-baked or you can use those Oreo cookie crust pie shells.
The Dry Goods:
The Wet Stuff:
Bake pie shells. Combine all dry ingredients in large saucepan and stir till mixed. In a seperate bowl, combine evaporated milk, milk, egg yolks and coffee. Mix with a whisk until well combined. Add liquid to dry ingredients in sauce pan and whisk until well mixed.
Cook over medium heat while stirring constantly until mixture comes to a boil. Reduce heat and cook and stir until thickened (about a minute).
Remove from heat and add butter and stir until melted and blended in the filling. Finally, stir in the vanilla.
Pour into pie shells and let cool at room temp for one hour on a wire rack then chill in the refrigerator covered loosely with foil until completely chilled. May top with whipped cream if desired or bake up a meringue on top. Me? I just eat it like it is!
Bonus: There is always a bit more than can fit in the two shells. Put it in a bowl and eat it. Try not to think about all the calories.
I was on the way to work and just turning onto the Broadway Bridge when I heard of the first plane hitting the Word Trade Center. I walked into the newsroom to see everyone staring at the coverage and saw the second plane hit.
We all knew then, that this was something bigger than we had seen in our lifetimes happening right in front of our eyes.
I went to my office and started updating todaysthv.com with what information we had.
The small sever and database that was hosting our site was brought down by the online traffic. I had to post every story and update in old-school html just to keep the site up. That morning, I posted about the towers being hit, the towers falling, the Pentagon being attacked, and the downing of flight 93.
The one sound I will never forget, was the sound on the broadcast news reports of the sound of the hundreds of fireman’s locators beeping from the rubble of the downed towers.
It was late in the afternoon before I finally had time to stop and to respond to what had happened. I was so busy, that I had no time to process any of it. I was doing all I could to post reports and photos. When it finally hit me, I closed the door to my office, and prayed. And I cried.
The Hogs lost tonight and the Internet is melting down with cries of “Rehire Bobby Petrino”
Some people will justify winning over anything else. Over character, over morals, and over simple right and wrong. I have to wonder about the character, morals and simple understanding of right and wrong those people possess who think that way.
This kind of thinking is what got Penn State in the fix they are in today and got SMU the death penalty in the 80’s.
A fact of life is that while we might get forgiveness for trespasses, we still have to face the consequences of those trespasses. This holds true for me, you and Bobby Petrino.
Bobby ain’t coming back. Deal with it. Move on.
I stand a good chance of stepping on the toes of many people who I consider friends.
We live in a country that is vastly more politically polarized than it was twenty-years ago. Nowhere is this more evident than in the national media, especially on the various cable news outlets. Many of these national news and information outlets still carry a pretty good news product, but much of their airtime is filled with opinionated talk shows
Maybe I am naïve, but I think viewers should be totally ignorant of the anchors and reporters political leanings. I think viewers should expect it and I think they deserve it. National news has been straying into biased territory for a long while, but I always thought local news outlets were a little more mindful of staying in neutral territory.
When I worked in television, I cringed when I saw political bumper stickers on the vehicles in the TV station parking lot. Even if they are on the cars of non-on-air employees, I believe it sends a bad message to the public who trusts you for unbiased news reporting.
However, I think we have a bigger problem than a bumper sticker on a car in the parking lot that is creeping in at the local television news level. That problem is the use of social media outlets by employees of local media outlets and the inability to keep quiet about some things. And by “some things”, I mean biased political posts on Facebook and Twitter from local journalists and station employees.
Actual post from an employee of a local news outlet in Florida who had been at the Republican National Convention: (name withheld) – “juuuuust about finished washing all of the Republican off of me…” Is that the message you want to send to your viewers?
I am not going to out any of my friends here in the Little Rock television market, but some of the political comments I have seen the past few days are really on the edge of what I would expect from anyone who calls themselves a journalist.
And I don’t just mean the on-air people. Everyone from the salespeople and producers and operations folks should be mindful about your station’s image and reputation.
Yes, you have the right as an American to say whatever you want to say, but you have a responsibility to the public to uphold as well.
Back in the early days of my web development career, I went to a web conference in Little Rock. I don’t remember any other speakers that day except this one gentleman.
This was 1997 and not a lot was understood about behavior of people using the Internet and World Wide Web. This is especially true of the people in the print media. This guy had his fool proof plan for making money on the web: Don’t put content online unless it is sponsored. This guy was a newspaper guy. Not a web guy. He didn’t get it.
I asked him if he worried about people going to another source to get their information if the content they wanted was in a section that did not happen to be sponsored. He looked at me and asked “Well, who else is going to put it online?”
He had the illusion of control that the rules of online were the same as the rules of the print media. Back then, newspaper and other media outlets controlled the distribution of content. Especially small town publishers like the person who came up with this fool-proof plan. When you were the only news outlet in town, you can get by with that plan. And they DID have control. If it happened, they were the ones trusted to tell you about it.
What happened is that now everyone could be a publisher. Everyone could share information as it happened. Not only that, big names like Google and Yahoo started to infringe on the local media outlets’ turf.
He, and many others in the media world, did not know that they no longer had total control. They were like Wile E. Coyote when he would run off the edge of the cliff and for a moment, he would stand there suspended in air because he didn’t know gravity was about to take over and put a hurtin’ on him!
Many of those publishers and media outlets adapted quickly to the new order of things and leveraged their good brand name towards a solid online plan and many of them have survived. Many others became a casualty of the new order of things.
A friend of mine who used to be in the newspaper business confided in me not long ago, that he once said that the Internet would never replace the newspaper. He then went on to say, “Man, were we ever wrong. We weren’t in control anymore. We never were from that point on.”
I recently turned another year older. As I barrel headlong into being a grouchy, old curmudgeon, I want to point out something that bugs me to no end:
YOU PEOPLE ARE WAY TOO GULLIBLE!
And when I say YOU PEOPLE, I mean you people that will believe anything that is sent to your inbox or is posted on Facebook or Twitter.
For example,you get sent an email that informs you about some restaurant chain that is not serving veterans and your first response is “Well how dare they! I will boycott these dastardly, un-American pigs!”
You then feel the need to share your righteous anger with the rest of the world via e-mail or a social network of your choosing.
Stop it. Seriously. Take a breath and pump the brakes a little bit, Sparky.
Just because your momma, or some other trusted soul, sent you this e-mail does not make it so.
Commit this website to memory kids: www.snopes.com
Snopes has a pretty good track record at exposing Internet hoaxes, scams and photo-shopped pictures of Elvis working as an oil changer at Jiffy Lube.
What about Wikipedia you say? Be careful. Almost anyone can post anything on Wikipedia. You might even think Abraham Lincoln went around dispatching the un-dead in his spare time if you catch Wikipedia at the right moment after some joker updates Mr. Lincoln’s entry.
And this stuff is nothing new. I remember in the 70’s and 80’s there was a scam that used to be photocopied and passed around about how the Procter & Gamble Company was a super-duper, undercover Satanist organization, and every time you bought a tube of Crest toothpaste you were funding the devil.
We just got faster at spreading the lies.
Snopes.com. Use it.
The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
Mark Twain- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888
In 1998 I saw first hand how much of an uproar that the lack of one letter could stir up while working at the Log Cabin Democrat. The Log Cabin Democrat is a venerable old newspaper published in Conway, Arkansas. It has for a good many years been a trusted source of information for the good people of Conway and Faulkner County.
But, even the best of news publications occasionally have a gaffe or misspelled word here or there. If they are lucky, the mistake will be buried deep in the copy.
But this was not that sort of mistake. No, this was the worst sort of misspelling. The kind on the front page of the paper. Oh, did I mention that the mistake happened in a headline? Yeah. It did.
You might remember in 1998 the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal was breaking big. Of course, this was front page stuff, so a story goes right on the front page of the paper. Now, I do not remember the headline verbatim, but I do remember it should have, and was intended to, read something like this:
Clinton Rocked By Public Scandal
Well, we had our own little public scandal when our entire newsroom, the reporters, editors and publishers, failed to notice the rather glaring blunder in the headline. So, it went to press. And it got sent out the door.
That was about the time that someone in the Log Cabin Democrat newsroom made a sound like they had been punched in the gut.
See, the headline was missing one little letter. Just one.
The missing symbol was the letter “L” from the word “Public”. So our newspaper announce to the fine citizens of our fair community… many of whom are fine, upstanding, moral folks…that indeed:
Clinton Rocked By Pubic Scandal
Of course, we had many calls and complaints. Editors and publishers were apologetic and embarrassed. I think it might have made Leno. I tried not to laugh too hard around the editors and proof readers. But I did laugh.
After a short while, the fervor died down over the headline debacle.
But, I came away with two thoughts from the experience:
Great article on npr.com about how kids with autism spectrum disorders are particularly vulnerable to bullying. In other news, water is also wet.
or Listen
In the article, it points out that autism spectrum kids who are more outgoing are more likely to be targets for bullies than the more aloof children with autism.
Debbie and I can testify to this. Our two sons both have autism spectrum disorders. Brad, our oldest has Asperger’s and Ryan, the youngest, has more of a ‘classic’ case of autism.
Like many Asperger’s kids, Brad wanted very much to be a part of the crowd and accepted. His lack of understanding of social cues and how to interact with others made him an easy target for every jerk kid out there who was looking for someone to push around.
I won’t go into all the particulars here, but we had a devil of a time with Brad’s trip through high school.
Ryan, on the other hand, was more introverted and quiet and had a totally different experience in school. His classmates were very understanding and went out of their way to include Ryan and protect him.
With so much focused on the causes and ramifications of bullying in schools today, maybe we can reach a point where more kids have a great school experience like Ryan and not a bad one like Brad had.
It is going to take a concerted effort of parents, teachers and administrators out there to make this happen.
Right now there is a movie out there called “Bully”. It is in theaters now. I plan to see it.
[youtube_sc url=jQV4HHmuRv4 width=430]
C.S. Lewis basically puts it all in a nutshell with this quote from Mere Christianity:
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.
He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)