Category: Ministrivia

OK – so I made up a word. Just a catch all category for off-the-wall and weird stuff

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UncleLar’s Mundane Website of the Week…

from here on out known as mWow.

Since things have been a little slow here, I thought I’d start something new to keep folk entertained. With the free time that I have on my hands I regularly stumble across interesting websites on the net, so I thought I’d start sharing them with you. Some of them you may have heard of, many of them I will guarantee that you never have, and I’ve no doubt that some of them you will wish you never had, but I hope at least a few of them you find enjoyable.

The only criteria that I’m am going to put on the selections is that they will all be something that I found quite intriguing. One week I might turn you onto something that is immensely practical, the next week you could get something totally absurd, it’s all going to depend on the mood I’m in.

The honor of the first UncleLar’s mWow goes to Pandora. Pandora is the result of the Music Genome Project, which is an effort to break music down into it’s “genes” or essential elements. The creators have analyzed over 300,000 songs and 10,000 artists and broken them down into over 400 different attributes such as tempo, rhythm, harmonies, lyrics, etc.

Now, I can already hear you saying “so what?” Here’s where the fun begins.

You simply give Pandora the name of a favorite artist or a favorite song of yours. Pandora creates a personal “radio station” based on that artist or song and begins playing music based on your choice. That’s it (well almost, after about 5 songs it asks that you register with the site).

What blew my mind was how right on Pandora’s selections seemed. Not from the perspective that the songs sounded like my pick but how much I enjoyed them.
In addition to playing songs that I’ve always liked and enjoyed, Pandora regularly picks out an artist or song that I’ve never heard of, or never would have considered listening to, and plugs it into my mix – and I pretty much like all of them. It’s infinitely better than listening to your same old collection of songs (Gary – not all of us have a music collection as extensive as yours).

Here’s a little example of what Pandora can do. I picked one of Gary’s favorites (and one he turned me onto) and created a Marcia Ball radio station. Here’s what Pandora played for me.

“How I wish” by Keith Richards
“Quicksand” by Tracy Nelson
“So Many Rivers to Cross” by Marcia Ball
“Wonder” by Natalie Merchant (from Tiger Lily an album I own)
“Living Proof” by Cat Power (who? never heard of them but liked the song)
“Quicksand” by Tracy Nelson
“That’s Enough of That Stuff” by Marcia Ball

When I put in what I considered one of the greatest Rock and Roll songs ever “Gloria” by Van Morrison I got:

“I Want Your Love” by the Pretty Things (who?)
“Boom Boom” by The Animals (kind of freaky since one version of Gloria that Van Morrison does has John Lee Hooker singing “Boom Boom” in accompanyment with Van)
“My Way of Giving” by Rod Stewart
“Too Many Fish in the Sea” by the Young Rascals (always liked the Rascals)
“Mickey’s Monkey/Love Things” by the Rascals again
“I’m Down” by Aerosmith
“Honey Are You Straight or Are You Blind” by Elvis Costello
“Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution” by AC/DC
“Wrap It Up” by the Fabulous Thunderbirds (an much underrated group in my mind)

You get the idea, now try it out yourself.

UncleLar’s mWow #1: Pandora

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Wall of Flame

Quaker Steak and Lube has just opened a new restuarant in town so I went there to celebrate my birthday last night. One of their gimmicks is a “Wall of Flame” where you can get your name posted if you eat six of their “atomic” wings. Naturally I had to step up to the challenge. The first wing had a definite bite to it. After I finished the second I had to take off my glasses because my eyes were tearing up. By the fourth my nose was running and I was having difficulty swallowing. I did manage to eat all six but I might not have been able to handle eight.

I did learn a little secret though. After I finished the wings, the bartender gave me a shot of Hershey’s chocolate syrup which substantially helped clear up the burning sensation in my mouth. I obviously couldn’t spread chocolate all over my face but the wetnap he gave me helped somewhat (still left a residual sting however). But I really didn’t realize that I hadn’t gotten it all off my hands. On the way out, I stopped in the bathroom to take care of all the Rolling Rocks I had had. Fortunately, this was about an hour after I finished the wings so most of the sauce had worn off my hands but there was definitely enough left to leave an uncomfortable tingling down there.

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UncleLar’s Food Specialties

Ok – here’s another side of me that you all have probably never seen. I have a couple of legendary (pun intended) recipes that I usually break out for special occasions (usually called football tailgates) but that I am willing to share here.

First of all:

UncleLar’s Killer Kreole Kornbread Sausage Stuffing
(served when we deep fry a turkey at our tailgate)

Ingredients:

  • box of cornbread mix
  • 1 cup minced onion
  • 2 tablespoons chopped green basil
  • 4 teaspoons cayenne powder (or cajun seasoning)
  • 2 teaspoons onion powder
  • 2 teaspoons ground white pepper
  • 2 teaspoons ground black pepper
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 4 teaspoons dried oregano
  • 2 teaspoons dried thyme
  • 1 chopped green onion
  • 1 cup chopped parsley
  • 2 cups chopped red bell pepper
  • 2 green chili peppers, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 1 tablespoon hot pepper sauce (Tabasco)
  • 8 oz butter
  • 2 cups chicken broth
  • 1/2 lb spicy Italian sausage (casing removed)
  • 2 cups evaporated milk
  • 7 eggs, beaten

Directions:

  1. Make the cornbread following the recipe on the box.
  2. In a small bowl combine the salt with the white pepper, black pepper, cayenne pepper, onion powder, oregano, thyme, basik, and bay leaves.
  3. In another bowl, combine the minced onions, green onions, parsley, red/green peppers, chili peppers, and garlic
  4. Melt the cup of butter in a large fry pan. Add the spices and cook for a few minutes. Add the vegetables and cook about 5 minutes. Do not allow the vegetables to brown.
  5. Place the sausage in the skillet, crumble and cook over medium high heat until evenly brown. Drain.
  6. Add the chicken broth and the Tabasco. Stir and cook 5 minutes more.
  7. Crumble the cornbread into the skillet and mix.
  8. Add the evaporated milk and eggs off the heat. Make sure to stir when adding the eggs. Return to a low heat and cook, stirring, for about 2 minuts.
  9. Remove the bay leaves. Place the stuffing in a bowl and cover. Cool before stuffing turkey (the stuffing will be plenty HOT without needing any external heat) if serving with regular turkey or serve on the side with a deep fried turkey.

If you like spicy food, this recipe is a killer (hence the name). It’s great for tailgates because it warms the body.

Next Recipe:

UncleLar’s Chili Extraordinaire
(haven’t tried this in the crockpot yet)

Ingredients:

  • 3.5 lbs sirloin steak
  • 1 lb pork sausage
  • 3 medium white onions
  • 4 dried red New Mexico chiles
  • 4 chilpotle chiles
  • 2 7-oz cans chopped green chiles (optional)
  • 3 cloves garlic
  • 1 tsp ground comino (cumin seed)
  • 1 tsp Mexican oregano
  • Mesquite seasoning
  • steak rub/lime juice/soy sauce
  • 4 10-oz cans diced tomatoes
  • 1 tsp paprika
  • 3 fresh chopped sage leafs
  • 1/4 cup chopped celery
  • 1 tsp thyme
  • 6 pack of beer

Directions:

  1. Cut off the tops of the dried New Mexico chiles to remove the stems and seed and to expose the interior, leaving them as whole as possible. Cut the tops off of the Chipotles and cut them lengthwise to extract the seeds. Set all of the chiles aside steeping on a small saucer in hot water (just enough to cover).
  2. Dust the steaks with the Mesquite seasoning, then marinade in the lime juice and soy sauce after a little fork-poking. Pop a beer and grill the steaks over hot goals until medium, then set aside. Set aside a 1/2 lb to snack on while you finish the cooking.
  3. Get a big oven ready pot. Add the pork sausage, onion, garlic, and saute until the onion is soft.
  4. Chop the steaks into 1/2 inch cubes and add to pot. Add a beer of your choice (and probably time for another one for yourself).
  5. Back to the chiles. Remove the New Mexicos from the hot water and cut them in half, length-wise. For each half, carefully scrape off the inner pulp with a flat knife, angled away from the scraping direction. Then scrape the pulp off the knife into a blender. Add the water and the chilpotles, and blend into a sauce. Keep your face away from the sauce DO NOT try to smell it, it’s deadly on the eyes. BTW – if you have to go to the bathroom at any point in time I suggest using gloves – eyes aren’t the only thing that’s sensitive to the sauce.
  6. Add the ground comino, oregano, paprika, sage, celery, thyme, and the optional green chiles to the pot and add about half of the sauce. Pour in a bottle of beer and pop another for yourself.
  7. Put in a 300 degree oven for an hour. After an hour test for spice and moisture. Add more or all of the sauce, if you like. Consider adding another bottle of beer if the things appear to be drying out too much. Put back in the over for another hour.
  8. After the second hour, check for doneness. The sirloin should come apart easily and the gravy should be thick not water. Cooking another hour is not out of the question.
  9. Serve in bowls with cheese or use as a dip for tortillas.
  10. You might consider having milk, sherbet, ice cream, and/or cold cucumber slices handy because someone will need them. The chili has an extraordinary afterbite – hence the name.

Another excellent tailgate recipe, the chili keeps you warm just like the stuffing.

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Anyone have CSTV?

College Sport TV that is. CSTV is an all college sports TV cable network founded by a friend of mine, Chris Bevilacqua. I have some legend stories to tell about Bevi such as why Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza’s high school gym coach was named Mr Bevilacqua or how I met William Baldwin through Bevi, but they will have to wait for another day because this story is about – surprise – an UncleLar niece, Stacey Wild (just an FYI, I didn’t take the photo, it came from her Facebook profile – unfortunately, I think the link will only work for my Facebook buds, Chris and Elliot)

Stacey is a Penn State freshman who is majoring in journalism – she also swims for Penn State’s water polo team. About two months ago, CSTV canvassed Penn State’s journalism department looking for students to co-host a TV show that CSTV broadcasts called Total Access. Total Access is weekly show that takes place on various college campuses around the country (this month the show features Penn State, Ohio State, Notre Dame, and Stanford). It’s a TV magazine style show that tries to show you a little bit of the personal side of college athletics. While the show has a studio host most of the on campus segments are hosted by a local student (usually an athlete). Stacey was fortunate enough to be selected to be the host for CSTV Total Access Penn State Orange Bowl special. So she got to travel all over South Florida in the days leading up to the Orange Bowl showing folk all the normal pre-game hype that precedes a bowl game – pep rallies, night life, beach bashes, tailgateing, etc. (worked out to be a pretty nice gig for a kid just a few months out of high school). The show will broadcast on CSTV on Thursday night at 10PM EST (9PM CST time – the Utah folk will have to check their local listings) and I thought she did a very nice job.

Stacey relationship with me is similar to Natalie Berrena’s (they’re not just any old UncleLar nieces). I have a special affection for Natalie because I used to date her mother. And I have a special affection for Stacey because I used to live with her mother. She loves to introduce me to people with the comment “Larry could have been my father”.

When I moved from State College to Pittsburgh in 1977, I moved into a two bedroom apartment in Monroeville, a suburb of Pittsburgh (13 miles closer to State College – I lived there so the trips back to Happy Valley would be shorter). I had only been in Pittsburgh for a few weeks when I ran into an old acquaintance, Pat Fagan. Pat had been a member of the Pi Beta Phi sororiety at PSU and I had gone out with a few Pi Phis (actually too many – it seems a friend of mine and I once made a bet about how many Pi Phis we could get a date with – unfortunately, they found out and we paid a bit of a price for our little indiscretion, but that’s another story for another day).

Pat was getting her MBA at Pitt and was due to graduate soon. She was lamenting to me that she had just gotten a job with IBM in Pittsburgh and would be going through six months of training to sell copiers and typewriters (for you next generation Falls who have never seen a typewriter this is what one looks like – think of it as your computer keyboard attached to your computer printer minus the middlemen of the computer processor and display 🙂 ).

Pat was a little frustrated because she was going to have to move out of her apartment in Oakland (where Pitt is located) and find a new place to live yet she had no idea where her territory would be once she finished training (it could have been as far south as West Virginia). She said she was having an impossible time trying to find a place with just a six month lease. Since I had an extra bedroom, I just suggested that she move in with me – which she obviously did.

Pat lived with me for about a year and, while Stacey likes to joke about me being her father, there wasn’t much chance of that because Pat and I had a very much platonic relationship. We did sometimes have trouble convincing people of that because in that day and age guys and girls didn’t live together platonically very often (for that matter, they didn’t live together non-platonically that much either then).

The reality of the situation was that there wasn’t much opportunity for us to get involved anyway. I had a girlfriend that I would see almost every weekend (Joanie, the girl I mentioned in a previous thread – she was still in school and I would spend most weekends back in State College). And Pat, well she had TWO boyfriends, so there was definitely no time for me. I have to give Pat credit for ingenuity the way she juggled the two guys. Eric, the one in Pittsburgh, didn’t know about Fritz, the one back in State College. Fritz, however, did know about Eric. Pat was from State College so she simply convinced Eric that she was homesick and had to go back and visit her family all the time.

I could never understand why Fritz would put up with the arrangement but I guess he knew what he was doing. After about a year of living this dual life, Pat dumped Eric, quit her job with IBM and moved back to State College and married Fritz. They’ve been married for well over 25 years now so I suppose things worked out well in the long run.

That’s my Legend story for today. Hope it was mundane enough.

PS – check Stacey out if you get the chance Thursday at 10 EST (or set your TiVo – you all do have a TiVo don’t you?)

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I’m Losing Weight!

In an effort to continue with the truly mundane postings, I’d thought I’d let everyone know of my recent weight loss. It’ll also help to keep me motivated in continuing to lose weight.

Every year from Thanksgiving through New Year’s, I just pig out way too much. I just go nuts at all the big meals and with the holiday cookies. So I was at home New Year’s day, having just had steak and lobster tail (actually two and a half lobster tails) the night before, feeling uncomfortable because my pants were too tight. The kids were watching “The Biggest Loser” on some cable channel where these people were losing 40% or more of their body weight over many months. So I felt a little guilty and figured, “If these people can lose over a hundred pounds, I could show a little will power and knock off twenty pounds or so.”

So Eric challenged me to lose twenty pounds by the Ides of March. (He just read “Julius Ceasar” at school.) So I decided too take him up on the challange!

I got on the scale and I’m was 190 pounds. I’m not really sure how accurate our scale is, so I’ll re-phrase that and say it indicated 190 pounds. I thought it was going to be more than that! When I graduated college 25 years ago, I was 155, just to give you an idea.

So I pretty much just stopped pigging out. Didn’t really starve myself, just ate more sensibly. Veronica has limited me to only one box of Peanut Butter Tandy Takes a week (six packs of two in each box). Mary Ann got me a case of 24 for Christmas, so I still have a lot of those I can eat. Veronica has hidden the case somewhere in the house, I’m not sure where!

So after one week, I lost 6 pounds. Sunday morning is my official weigh-in time.

Yesterday, another 3 pounds. 9 out of 20 pounds in two weeks is making me feel pretty good about things with another 2 months until the Ides of March!

I haven’t even begun exercising yet. I hope to throw that into the mix this week.

I’ll update the blog on a weekly basis to let you know how it’s going. I hope everyone finds this mundane enough.

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Look Familiar?


Got this at a flea-market years ago. Just had my 2nd toaster-oven break in less than a year so I dug it out of storage. I knew it worked, and y’know what? It makes toast better and faster than any toaster-oven I’ve ever had.

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First Night State College

Like many communities around the country, State College likes to offer a family oriented alcohol free alternative to New Year’s Eve partying (personally I consider it a supplement to my alcohol based celebrating 🙂 ) called First Night State College. The centerpiece of the celebration is a bunch of ice sculptures throughout the town. This afternoon, I went out and took some photos of the ice carvers at work to give you a feel for some of the cool (no pun intended) stuff that they have.

Most of the main large sculptures are on Allen Street, in the very heart of downtown State College just across from the main entrance to the University. The town fathers have closed off a block of Allen Street to house the sculptures. At the head of the block stands this sculpture of William Penn.

This shot it taken from the other end of the street. The ice artist here is working on a sculpture of a continental soldier. If you click on the photo a couple of times, it will blow up in your browser and you can get a good look at the some of the other sculptures spread down the street all in various stages of completion (just for a historical reference, the five story building in the distance behind the sculptor is the Metzger building where Pat Daugherty and I lived from 1966 to 1968).

Here’s another shot of an ice guy working on a sculpture of jockey Jeremy Rose riding Kentucky Derby winner Afleet Alex. Jeremy is a local kid from nearby Bellefonte.

I’ve uploaded a bunch of shots of the dozen or so sculptures on Allen Street. Click here to see them.

I’ll be downtown tonight and will get some more shots of the sculptures. I expect that they will look quite unique in the night lighting.

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I’ve added a calendar

If you’ll look to the sidebar on the right, you’ll notice that I have added a calendar. You can move forward and backward a month or year at a time by clicking on the > and > and
At the moment that’s about all you can do, but in the future I plan on adding more function to it. Eventually, we should be able to use it to navigate to all posts made on a specific date simply by clicking on the appropriate date in the calendar. I will also probably find a way to highlight everyone’s birthday in the calendar too.

Hope it adds to the blog.

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A New Goody – "On This Day"

While doing research for the Upcoming Birthdays Countdown, I found a website called New Links, which had this post on how to add an “On This Day” function to your blog. The code to do so was fairly simple so I’ve decided to add it to our Blog.

What the code generates is a series of links to web resources (I’ve chosen to implement just the BBC, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, NY Times, and the History Channel links) that publish historical information on what happened on any date in history. The links are located just after the dateline that appears before the lead post of the day (look just above the title of this post). Try clicking on any of the links above to see what historical events happened on December 23rd.

The links should be repopulated back through the archives so he should be able to check out dates on any of Legends of the Fall blog entries.

Have a go at it.