Tag: marriage equality

In which we played bones, and I’m yellin domino

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Teaching6 Comments

UnknownToday was the following:  1) A Friday; 2) Valentine’s Day; 3) A dress-down day; 4) a full moon; 5) the day before a three-day weekend.  Today had no right to be anything other than a god damn disaster.  And yet it was the second of two uncommonly good days.  A few highlights of the last 48 hours and a few other random things that I feel like talking about:

    • First and foremost: There will be no gay marriage ban on Indiana’s ballot this fall.  While, unfortunately, this isn’t as big of a deal as actual marriage equality, it basically means that the gay marriage ban is dead, because even if the bigots behind it keep bringing it up it now can’t be on the ballot before 2016 due to Indiana’s nicely complicated constitutional amendment laws.  “Can’t be on the ballot before 2016” is a nice way of saying “will never, ever be on the ballot” at this point.  Marriage equality advocates have won; this debate is over, it’s just that the dinosaur is taking a while to die.  If fucking Indiana can’t pass a gay marriage ban anymore, it’s over.  Judges nationwide are starting to wake up to the fact that “Eew! Icky” and “But JEEEEEZUS!” aren’t actually legal arguments, and that once you lay those aside there is nothing left.  By 2016 this is a dead issue.
    • Somewhat less important but still way awesome:  De La Soul is celebrating the 25th anniversary (jesusold) of Three Feet High and Rising by making their entire record catalog available for free on their website.  The catch: you’ve got until, like, tomorrow afternoon sometime.  Go forth and download.
    • Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, so we got to go out with a couple of friends for dinner, which was nice.  We didn’t make it into our first choice restaurant (a bizarre spike in business that had the normally bitchy owner incredibly apologetic kept us from getting a table) but we were fed well at our second choice so no worries.  We’ve kinda ignored Valentine’s Day because our 6th anniversary (damn) is in two weeks.
    • On the other hand, wife’s birthday means I got to watch the boy eat cake tonight.  Which is always fun.
    • I stayed after school a bit today to watch a wrestling meet.  I like watching middle school wrestling; I like watching amateur wrestling in general and unlike virtually every middle school sport you don’t get the occasional burst of cringeworthy incompetence that has you trying your damnedest not to laugh at your students behind a hand.  Basketball in particular is prone to this.  We won big, too, against our biggest local rival, which is awesome.
    • I commented to someone this morning that Jihad had had a decent week in my class (only two fifteen-minute ISS timeouts) and that he was dangerously close to making it through an entire week of school without being suspended, which would be the first time all year.  I almost complimented the kid.  He was in the office by lunchtime (I had nothing to do with it) and was suspended for five days.  I know why but I’m not going to go into it here.  This and the next item don’t count as good news and kinda spoil the tone of the rest of the piece a bit but the musical number at the end will make up for it.
    • We also busted a kid today for snorting vicodin in the restroom– five pills!– and put another one up for expulsion for bringing a BB gun and a knife to school.  That last one was sort of my fault; the kid told me that he’d gotten punched at the bus stop after school yesterday (right thing to do!) but neglected to mention that he had brought weapons to defend himself in the future (wrong thing to do!).  I let the office know about the fight and apparently he told them about the BB gun and the knife.  Sigh.
    • Good school news:  The blind kid is not nearly as blind as I’d been led to believe although he is extremely nearsighted, and while I’m still not completely up to speed in terms of providing him with the accommodations he needs to succeed it’s not going to be as onerous as I’d initially thought.  It hit me today that this means I have a kid with major vision issues and a kid with major hearing issues in the same classroom.
    • More good school news: I’ve gotten two days of consistent paying attention/doing work/in school for a reason type behavior out of both of my most consistent low-IQ-but-also-legitimately-insanely-lazy kids.  One of them actually volunteered to do work at the board today!  It’s normally like pulling teeth to get either of these kids to do anything at all so seeing consistent compliance and even the occasional right answer once in a while has been awesome.
    • I’ve got the DC trip ironed out.  Bad news: no Monticello; we just can’t make the scheduling work to a degree that I’m comfortable with.  Good news: we get to go to the national zoo!  ZOOOOOOOOOO!!!  I think my tour director was legitimately startled by the vehemence of my positive response when she mentioned this was a possible replacement.  I love zoos, and I’ve never been to the National Zoo before.  Woohoo!  The trip is in six weeks.  Getting excited.
    • Speaking of things that are soon… one week until I find out about the grant.  Still keeping my fingers crossed.
    • The good thing about it being both Friday and Valentine’s Day: I have divine sanction to listen to this song over and over again:

Three day weekend, so I’m planning on spending tomorrow alternately grading and writing; expect a thousand blog posts and hopefully a few thousand words of fiction, which you probably won’t see here.

How’re y’all?

Equality chicken!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking10 Comments

2014-02-04 18.13.05If you are a sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you already recognize Chick-fil-A as the king of the chicken sandwich, serving chicken that is much like unto God in deliciousness and tastiness.  (What’s that you say?  God isn’t delicious?  To which I respond:  have you ever eaten God?  I thought not.  And then I respond again: Catholics, shuddup.)(*)

Unfortunately, if you are a good sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you recognize that Chick-fil-A serves their delicious chicken with a side order of bigotry and discrimination, and you don’t ‘specially want to give bigotry any of your money.  Even if the chicken is delicious, chicken fried in the hate-oil of intolerance ain’t edible.  Or some such overwrought figure of speech, I dunno.

This puts us decent folk in a bit of a quandary.  Chick-fil-A is delicious.  But we can’t have the delicious, no, we must deny the delicious, like Christ thrice denied Satan, or something like that.

But I love you.  I love you so very much.  

And so:  I give you knockoff Chick-fil-A, courtesy of sliceofsouthernpie, who may well be horrified to see me linking to her recipe in these particular terms but I hope not because she seems like a nice lady.   I am slightly modifying her recipe, which technically is for nuggets, so I’ll reprint the version we used here:

  • Chicken tenderloins (Boneless.  Aren’t they always?)
  • 1 cup of milk
  • 1 egg
  • 1/4 cup pickle juice (we used the juice from zesty dill spears and it worked fine)
  • A cup or so of flour
  • 1/3 cup powdered sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon paprika
  • Fryin’ oil (we used vegetable; CFA’s website confirms that they use peanut oil; I doubt it matters much but let me know if I’m wrong)

First, marinate your chicken: use the egg, the milk, and the pickle juice, whisk the hell out of it and put your chicken pieces into it (you don’t need to beat the hell out of them first or anything) and leave them in the fridge, airtight, for a few hours.  Bek put ours in at lunchtime.  Once you’re ready to start cooking, mix together all of the dry ingredients in a  bowl.  She suggests dredging through once; I think I’m going to authorize the dredge, dip back in marinade, then dredge again method, as our chicken came out slightly under breaded.  Then fry ’em up.

Serve on a white bread bun, preferably heavily buttered and then slightly toasted in the oven (note that we didn’t do this), with exactly two pickle slices, preferably pickle slices dripping with pickle juice and pressed into the top bun.  And one more thing: mine didn’t quiiiite taste right until I sprinkled a couple turns of sea salt directly onto the meat.  Once I did that, other than the slight under breading, they were perfect.  And marriage-equality-friendly, too!  Wheeee!

(*) Yes, that’s a transubstantiation joke. I know, they’re not terribly common.

On boycotts

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics, ReadingLeave a comment

I’m writing this at home and in bed; my head has been swimming intermittently for a couple of days now, and I intend to spend as much time as humanly possible right here where I am before dragging my ancient carcass to OtherJob for a few hours tonight– mostly because, unlike RealJob, OtherJob doesn’t pay me if I don’t show up and I need money. But if this happens to get incoherent at some point do be aware that I’m not entirely in my right mind at the moment.

Ender’s Game comes out today. Or… soon? I think it’s today. I won’t be seeing it. Why I won’t be seeing it is an open question, really; I’d like to pretend that it’s because Orson Scott Card is a nasty bigoted asshole but the simple fact is the last movie I actually saw in theaters was… (draws blank)… shit, I know the answer to this… Christ, it wasn’t Iron Man 3, was it?

(Texts wife)

Holy hell, it was Iron Man 3. That’s ridiculous.

If I didn’t have a kid and a job that ate every Friday and Saturday night, I might see more movies– I haven’t seen Gravity or Riddick or the remake of Carrie or just to stick with the Chloe Moretz theme, Kick-Ass 2, and those are movies I want to see. So to say I’m boycotting Ender’s Game probably overstates the case, as I likely wouldn’t have seen it anyway. I want to see the new Thor movie next weekend; we’ll see if I make it or not.

Orson Scott Card doesn’t get any of my money anymore because 1) Orson Scott Card is a major-league asshole and 2) Orson Scott Card has made sure that I find out that he’s a major-league asshole. If he wasn’t a major-league asshole or if he hadn’t made sure that I knew about it, I’d very likely be climbing over things to get to go see his movie this weekend, because I loved the book. He’s on a fairly short list of business or people whose work I have stopped patronizing because of political/moral reasons but otherwise would, along with Dan Simmons, Tom Cruise, Mel Gibson, and Chik Fil-A. It doesn’t count if I was never interested in your shit in the first place; I’m not boycotting Rush Limbaugh because I never gave a damn about his show. I know Domino’s Pizza is run by Christianist lunatics; I wasn’t a fan of their pizza anyway so I can’t really pretend that I’m boycotting it now. For all I know, Jack-In-The-Box is run by Satanists, but I can’t boycott their food because there aren’t any of their restaurants near me.

Do I feel like my personal withdrawal of my patronage is making a difference? No, of course not. But it doesn’t have to. I don’t feel the need to drive CFA into bankruptcy; I just don’t want to help them have money any longer. Are there other artists or businesses whose work I do patronize that are as bad or worse than Orson Scott Card? I’m sure there are, which is where the You Don’t Want None, There Won’t Be None policy comes into effect. I don’t have time to submit the author of every book I read or the owners of every business I spend money with to some sort of personal Decency Commission to make sure that every penny I spend only ends up in the hands of Good People. But I feel like if you’re going to go to the trouble to make a stink about what an asshole you are, you probably ought not to whine when said assholery has some consequences.

I’m writing about this because, first, Card’s been in the news lately, for obvious reasons, and second, some of the arguments against not seeing the film (call it “boycotting” if you want) seem pretty intensively infested with stupid. This is manifestly not a free speech issue, for example. I am not the government, for starters, and perhaps more importantly Orson Scott Card is not entitled to my money. There’s always this deeply weird group of people who pop out of the woodwork whenever something like this happens to shriek about how Liberals Don’t Really Respect Free Speech because Look What They Do When They Disagree with People.

If you think that, kill yourself. You’re too fucking stupid to live.

Orson Scott Card is not entitled to my money. Neither is Chik-Fil-A. I will not give them my money based on any goddamn criteria I choose, regardless of the ridiculousness of said criteria, and there isn’t a drop of free speech involved. He has the right to be a public asshole, and I have the right to call him one, and I sure as shined shit have the right to decline to pay the man for his hatred.