271

Food / Egg Casserole

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:57:07 AM »

Egg Casserole

Ingredients

1 lb bacon, cooked & crumbled
1 dozen extra lg eggs
2 c Pepperidge Farm seasoned croutons
3 1/2 c milk (skim is okay)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp thyme
6 oz shredded cheddar cheese

Directions

Butter a 10"x14" pan layer croutons first, cheese next.  Mix eggs with milk and spices and pour over top.  Add crumbled bacon.  Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour.  Done when knife comes out clean.  Can mix night before and let set for next day.

Homemade croutons

272

Food / Re: Chinese honey

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:49:29 AM »

Here, you can never be sure what you are buying is actually real honey. That is unless you go to the bee keeper to get it. In fact it's something of a scandal over it.

Honey is processed here. In many cases, the pollens that are buried in the honey are removed so that those allergic to them don't get a reaction (and therefore a legal liability from the producer of the product). However, taking out the pollens also affects the taste of the honey. There are also now ways to create artifical honey, which is then sold as the real m^ccoy. You wind up paying a premium price for a product you are not getting.

Then too, much of our food supply has politics involved. Sugar is a prime example of that. Here sugar prices are held artificially high. Other sources could supply sugar at much cheaper prices than what we as a nation pay for it but it is done to keep the sugar farmers from loosing their farms.

In the same way, some countries are not allowed to sell products in the US due to the same political intervention. Removing the pollen out of the honey often removes the traces that could identify where the source of the honey came from.

273

Social network | SEO - Social network / Re: Users active in past 1440 minutes

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:40:10 AM »

I must have noticed this right after you made the change. Odd that... it's sort of the way I am.

274

Other topics / Re: Those who have questions about the USA...

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:37:34 AM »

I really can't imagine what kind of logic is using one, who thinks the hospitals are safe.

I should have answered this in the same post as above. Somehow I forgot there was something to be addressed and proofread and then posted.

From personal experience, during my working years, if a school came down with the flu, the parents would inevitably catch what ever their kids brought home. They would in turn bring that to work as the big thing with many work environments is to be at work when you are supposed to be there if you want to keep the job. At one point your working commitment was used as a yardstick to determine who would be laid off and who would keep their jobs. This in turn meant people were coming to work with all sorts of communicable diseases which then get passed around the work crew. Every year, what ever was going through the school system would show up at work later.

Then came the day I no longer worked. I got laid off due to automation on the job site. As a result, I was no longer rubbing elbows with others who had kids in school. When shopping for things like groceries I tend to like to go late at night. Less crowds, less crap to put up with. I went from catching stuff seasonally to never getting a cold, the flu, or anything else. After 12 years, I recently last year came down with a cold. It's that lack of public exposure that is the reason for this, is my firm belief.

275

Other topics / Re: Those who have questions about the USA...

« on: March 13, 2016, 07:22:30 AM »

US-Americans are staying with shoes at home?!

This varies by local and custom. In the home where I grew up, shoes were never taken off until you went into the shower or laid on a bed. One of the reasons for that was livestock. You never knew what might be on the bottoms of your shoes, so you scraped them before coming in. That was my childhood reality.

Today, in my home, you take your shoes off because we all walk barefoot around inside. The only time this is ignored is if some work inside requires a repairman or the like. It's too much of a pain to be toting an arm full of replacement parts and try to untie your shoes. Doing this requires a lot of extra housework to ensure your floors are clean enough to eat off of, so to say. Many people just do not have the extra time to do this in today's working requirements. There are times when shoes of a nature are worn inside; they are called house slippers. Some times in the winter we do wear these but they never go outside as they are strictly inside wear.

As far as seeing shoes on the legs of some one propping up their legs, this again is a sort of by the region, by the individual as if this is just a rude reaction or if it is acceptable behavior. Mostly if it is rude, you will be told in no uncertain terms by the household head.

In movies much you see, is like my art; it's not real. It's done a certain way to give you an impression. Nothing you see in a movie is unplanned for, unless it works for the advantage of telling the tale. Once in a great while you find a movie set where things didn't go right, the actor was skilled enough to pull it off and make it look real, and the director/producer decided to keep it rather than scrap it. That's the rarity, not the norm.

276

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 13, 2016, 06:50:36 AM »

I've only given names to two of them. The one with the jug in the ocean with a cyclops and the one with the tsunami wave in it.

The one with the statue was done for a background but never used it. The idea was to have the actor/model in front so that the statue served as background fill in.

277

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 13, 2016, 05:37:11 AM »

I'm slowly coming around to this idea that I need to use both preview panes before posting and am having to break a life time habit with on line posting to forums. Given time I'll succeed at this. ...err I hope.

278

Other topics / Re: Those who have questions about the USA...

« on: March 13, 2016, 05:06:32 AM »

As far as it goes you have a point in your hygiene. You are doing what you can with what you have. Where this falls down at, is you can't wash the insides of veggies and other products, because you can't reach them to do so.

Traditionally cooking to X temperature is expected to take care of that. Many do not think of the cross contamination of utensils in say the cooking of raw meat. It's one of the aspects I watch meticulously when grilling outside. Once the utensils are used to move raw meat, they are sent inside for cleaning before use again.

You mention money as being a strong carrier of infection sources. That's true. Many a time has been that law enforcement has taken money to a lab to determine what's on the surface of it. Not just counting diseases it is often found to have been in association with drugs such as cocaine, just to name one.

In the same vein, one of the best places to catch something you didn't have before is hospitals. One would think they would be among the most sterilized places in the world but such is not the case. Because cleaning hasn't paid meticulous attention to detail, many of the bacteria and viri of opportunity are mutating to accept small amounts of bleach and survive. Same with the use of drugs such as penicillin. Both bacteria and viri are developing resistance to these antibacterials and they are no longer effective. The list of drugs that work is growing shorter and shorter as drug companies aren't developing new drugs at the pace that these drug resistant particles of life are replicating.

Or the fact there is now a new one that eats human flesh and is mostly found in hospitals as to where you get exposure to it.

So no matter what your level of care and prevention, you can't reach it all to shield yourself. I could carry this further with GMO and it's problems but I'll let the matter rest here.

279

Social network | SEO - Social network / Re: Useful code (BBCode) information for our new members

« on: March 13, 2016, 04:48:18 AM »

I probably have the answer for you on why the lack of editing on the smiley grin. Usually in unicode you get something that is slightly smaller than the one used for the display so that you can see the details earlier. In this case I used the display, not the actual unicode because it was larger. What I didn't think about was the forum software capturing all the default code from the source site that does so. I simply didn't think of it and proceeded to type the rest of the post. I suspect the final tag kept moving with the text but didn't display this.

Along you come, try to edit it, and again it doesn't show the tags that bind the text to the symbol.

280

Other topics / Re: Art

« on: March 13, 2016, 03:31:39 AM »

Thank you for the edits. I am the world's worst at not proof reading what I've texted. Most of the time I have the habit of posting and then reading for mistakes, not before. But without the edit function I can't do that and must do the proof read; a personal failing. I'm learning but sometimes the auto capture by the forum software of the original format throws me off if I don't take a look at the finished post as it will look and just go ahead and post it.

It's not that I don't know better, it's that often I don't take the time before hitting the post button, that creates these lacks of ending tags in my posts.

Again, my thanks for the edit; no complaints here.

281

Other topics / Re: Those who have questions about the USA...

« on: March 13, 2016, 03:17:06 AM »

Is it a good thing in the current situation or it's not good?

It's a two edged sword, one which the government takes advantage of. For every one but the government, you have to live within your means. If your bills take all your money, there is none left over for buying a loaf of bread. Only the government can operate outside reality day in and day out.

For the government, it makes a debt, then later prints money to pay for it out of thin air. Doesn't work like that for any one else. All the rest have to invest some sort of value given to get money, be that hours of labor or some product others want to buy. It was how the TARP program was paid for to bail out the banks. Right at a trillion dollars.

Endless printing of money will eventually make the money value the same as the Zimbabwe money is today. Where you can actually see a one million dollar note.

There is a reason to print more money but it's not endless. In order to participate in the global market every country in the past has been required to hold dollars in reserve as the global currency, to pay their bills. That is everyone but the US, who can print more.

If you are a Saudi prince and want to buy a new yacht, then you must have that price in hand to pay the bill. In order to pay the bill there has to be enough money in circulation to be able to gather that much, globally by whoever wants to spend say millions. So some printing is necessary at all times.

But unrestrained printing, day in and day out, benefits no one but the government. Since it has been uncoupled from the gold standard, the price you pay for items has increased over the years as the value of money has plummeted.

282

Psychology / Re: Lucid dreams

« on: March 12, 2016, 07:39:56 PM »

There's a difference between unlearning and getting rusty at something from lack of practice. Much of our learning, especially the physical part, comes from muscle memory. The brain learns to use muscles in a certain pattern. Then when it is no longer needed, they fade over time.

When you try it one time after years of neglect, you find out it no longer works as mindlessly as it did before. You actually have to concentrate going through the motions. But the difference here between having learned it once before and approaching something brand new you've never done, is that you have an intimate understanding of how to achieve that skill again. If you pay attention to it, the advancement back to the state you lost is far more quick than having never learned something.

I took typing in high school. I really didn't have any interest in typing, I went to the class because that's where all the girls were. This was long before computers made it into the education system. We learned typing on typewriters. Never used a typewriter again after that was over. 20 or 30 years later along comes the computer with the same qwerty layout but I had lost all the skills for typing from non-use. It took me about a month or two to change from 'two finger flying on the keyboard' to full two handed use of the keyboard because I knew the basics of how to go about typing. This you don't forget. You don't unlearn it; it just lays dormant until you need it.

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Social network | SEO - Social network / Re: Useful code (BBCode) information for our new members

« on: March 12, 2016, 07:20:36 PM »

I'm sort of the oddball I guess. I'll take the extra time to add stuff, like unicode or other items to add a differing touch to a post to make it a unique style.

As you say, mostly 10 or 15 cover most usages. Never really did care for the buttons all that much. I long ago got used to typing tags on the fly and once you do that for a while, it's hard to go back to mousing tags. Guess that's just me or for folks such as yourself that are on a software for a while. Most of the basics are the same such as bold and italics. Some of the others I'll be switching views between the plain text and autotag to get them down.

284

Social network | SEO - Social network / Re: Useful code (BBCode) information for our new members

« on: March 12, 2016, 04:35:42 PM »

No matter how much you know, it seems you never learn it all. I'll be picking at this from time to time when I hit something I want to know more about. I've one or two I've been meaning to pick up from these for occasional usage.

285

Social network | SEO - Social network / Re: Lanterns, Lantern festival, China

« on: March 12, 2016, 04:30:36 PM »

Thank you for sharing. Beautifully done.