So, my bermuda-grass lawn is getting overwhelmed by crabgrass :(

It's entirely too late for any pre-emergent strategy, I need something that'll kill vigorously growing crab grass. I sprayed Image herbicide about 6 weeks ago and am going to spray again tomorrow, but that's not specifically a crab-grass solution, it just claims that it may eventually work with repeated sprayings. Anybody have any ideas on crab-grass specific solutions?

Also, I have this potted rose bush that I bought a month ago and it is just about done flowering. The leaves, however, are growing like crazy so I thought if this little rose bush wants so much to live and grow, I should replant it from the pot to a suitable spot outside. Anybody have any tips on planting rose bushes?

Sol was asking about tofu recipes. It's a good question, since I have yet to encounter any american ways of cooking tofu that produce any sort of edible result. If you want add tofu to your diet, you have to look to Asia, primarily to China, although Korea also has some good tofu recipes. So I've decided to expand my Slashdot Cookbook to include a chapter of exclusively tofu recipes.

I've posted some in the past:
Spicy Fried Tofu - deep fried, uses egg, but very tasty if you are ok with those things
Five Spice Tofu - A simple, vegetarian tofu dish
Tofu in Oyster Sauce
Mapo Tofu recipe #1 - includes meat
Mapo Tofu recipe #2 - meat here, too

But Sol is allergic to peppers, so not all of those are available to her, and she's a vegetarian and some of those have meat in them. I wrote a few days ago ideas for cooking tofu that would yield basic tofu and leafy green vegetable kind of stir-fries. They won't be the most exciting dishes you'll ever meat, but it should be decent enough to get into the menu cycle.

Over the next week or so I'm going to list some additional tofu recipes. I'm going to post them in the original format and then make some commentary on them to help out Sol, since many of them include things she is allergic to, but which might not be important to the dish or for which there are good substitutes.

So, on to the first tofu dish of this new cookbook chapter: Sweet and Sour Tofu

1/2 cup drained canned unsweetened pineapple chunks (reserve 1/3 cup juice)
1 tablespoon ketchup (or just plain old tomato sauce or paste, or you can probably safely drop it altogether if tomatoes are a problem)
2 teaspoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons white vinegar (or rice vinegar)
1/2 teaspoon of honey (or you can use plain old sugar)
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger (I usually mince fresh ginger, either way is fine)
2 teaspoons cooking oil
1 pound of firm tofu
8 scallions, sliced

The recipe calls for a green bell pepper and a red bell pepper, but that's hardly a necessity - there are lots of vegetables you could use here: baby corn, carrots, bok choy, bamboo, water chestnuts, snow peas. I'm thinking snow peas, baby corn and either bamboo or water chestnuts are the winning combination here, but just make your own picks and have fun :)

The recipe also calls for 1/2 cup of canned cannellini beans, but I've never used them, so that's your call.

In a medium bowl, whisk the pineapple juice, ketchup, cornstarch, soy sauce, vinegar, honey and ginger until smooth.

Heat the oil in a wok. Add the tofu and cook until lightly browned, 3-4 minutes, stirring as needed.

Add the scallion and vegetables, and cook until the vegetables are softened.

Stir in the pineapple chunks, beans and the juice mixture. Stir constantly until the sauce thickens and coats the tofu, 3-4 minutes.

Serve :)

Turns out the gear shaft just needed to be lubricated. Then give it a good old reset from the menus, et voila, working tape drive. Or at least, it processed a cleaning tape just fine. Haven't tried a real data tape yet, but it should be fine.

So, the democrats have finally issued a plan to end our occupation of Iraq.
*cough*

Perhaps they can also offer up timetables for pulling out our troops from other occupied countries.

Hey Pelosi, when are you going to get us out of Korea? Guam? The Philippines? Puerto Rico? That little bit of Cuba we still occupy? American Samoa? The Virgin Islands? How about your time table for Germany and Japan? Heck, let's go whole hog here and plan a pull-out from Hawaii, Florida, Texas, California and Utah while we're at it. Maybe you could even plan for the entire evacuation of every European descended person from the whole North American continent altogether?

*rolls eyes*

I've said it before, I'll say it again - the countries we've occupied for the long-term have all turned out fairly good for the natives, while those we abandoned turned into complete and utter disasters. The only one that has even remotely recovered is Vietnam, and the years immediately after the US withdrawal were indeed catastrophic for the country, it's take 30 years to be able to say they've even REMOTELY recovered, but North Korea, Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Columbia, Ecuador, Somalia, Lebanon, all these other countries where we just up and left like the Democrats are proposing we do in Iraq, they're all basket cases now.

But this historical reality is lost on the left. They just don't seem to care about the consequences of our withdrawal to those being abandoned.

The REAL bloodbath in Vietnam began AFTER we left. Expect the same thing in Iraq.

Only this time, it won't just be a humanitarian disaster, it will also be an economic disaster for the whole world too, due to the massive oil and gas reserves there which will become untouchable, and as the conflict spreads and becomes a general shiite vs. sunni civil war across the whole of the middle east and north africa, the total loss of access to middle eastern oil and gas will devastate economies the world over.

Good going there, Pelosi Squad! Way to show leadership and foresight and strategic planning!

I can't believe people so unserious and incompetent ever got voted into power. Speaks volumes about the american public. Let's hope the conservative democrats who gave the party their majority are smart enough to block Pelosi's idiotic plan. They haven't exactly been toeing the Pelosi line all along, so there's still some hope yet.

I have a shell script with the following lines in it:

#!/bin/bash
 
DATE="$(date +%Y%m)"
DATE="${1:-$DATE}"
 
IMAGE="${2:-/dev/dvd}"

I entered these in a command line and echoed back the variables and it just returns:

$ echo $DATE
200703
$ echo $IMAGE
/dev/dvd

So what's with the 1 and the 2 and the colon and the dash and all that? I've never seen anything like it before.

While you can always peruse my slashdot cookbook for tofu recipes, I find that I typically just wing it when it comes to cooking tofu. Here are some ideas based on my experience.

First of all, you need to pick a vegetable to cook with it. Bok choy or napa would be ideal, spinach also works quite nicely. Swiss chard would probably be good but I've never tried it. Kale is ok, but not great. You can experiment with various leafy greens here, but bok choy, napa or spinach should be your baseline against which to experiment.

To cook: start with some minced garlic and ginger, maybe some scallion or shallot or just plain old chopped onion. Stir fry until the onion begins to soften, then add your green vegetable. Cook until it starts to wilt, then add the tofu.

Next comes the spices, which obviously will be very personal. I tend to pick two or three from the following list on any given day: soy sauce, hoisin sauce, brown or yellow bean sauce, rice vinegar (or white vinegar), chili garlic paste, sugar. Add salt and pepper to taste. You may need to add a little bit of water, not more than 1/4 cup, less if you used soy sauce or vinegar.

Mix it all up real good, cover, and let cook for a couple of minutes.

Some other things you might want to try adding: sliced water chestnuts, snow peas, chopped carrot, mushrooms, bamboo.

As to which type of tofu, soft, firm, silky, I personally prefer firm purely because it tends to stay together better. Silky tofu always totally breaks apart on me so I avoid it, but other people can cook very successfully with silky. Soft is somewhere in between - I lose some chunks to disintegration, but others survive. Try each in turn to decide which one is for you.

If you find yourself with the option of getting dried, spiced tofu, that can be cooked in a very similar way, but you have more vegetable options to cook with it besides just leafy greens, particularly various Chinese gourds and squashes like opo. I've seen "oiler tofu" available but never tried it - you're on your own if you want to buy that.

Good luck :)

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Yo ho, it's hot
The sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth there'd be no life
Without the light it gives

We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun,
Without a doubt,
There'd be no you and me

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas.
Iron, copper, aluminium, and many others.
The sun is large.
If the sun were hollow, a million Earths could fit inside,
and yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About ninety-three million miles away! And that's why it looks so small.
And even when it's out of sight, the sun shines night and day.

The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's atomic energy

Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine.
The heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of
hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=39945&in_page_id=2

Brothel owners in Bulgaria are blaming global warming for staff shortages.

Ok, since everything that is happening in the world today is a direct result of global warming, we must conclude therefore that islamic terrorism is a result of global warming. Anybody care to take a stab at making that connection?

Since we are assuming the connection exists and only merely needs to be clarified, that's all you "liberals" out there need to get the "conservatives", especially the "neocons", to join Algore in fighting Global Warming - by thwarting global warming, you'd be defeating the terrorists!
BWAHAHAHAHA!!!

Seriously. The world needs a LOT more of this:

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54570

Muslims try to change Islamic killing machine
'To live in the Middle East and say what we're saying is a death sentence'
Posted: March 6, 2007
2:10 a.m. Eastern

By Art Moore
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - A group of reformists from Muslim societies who have become accustomed to death threats upped the ante yesterday with a declaration they hope will spark a popular movement across the Islamic world to "fight back" against fundamentalist interpreters of the faith.

Secularists such as Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish and Irshad Manji helped formulate the "St. Petersburg Declaration," which seeks to do no less than eliminate traditional understandings and practices of Islam that conflict with universally accepted human rights.

Clicky link for full story.

It is common to point out how first-world countries with socialized medicine spend less and have better health compared to US health care spending. Couple of questions in this:

1) Are you confusing cause and effect? Might it not be that other countries people live healthier lifestyles and thus require less health care spending? I would expect (not going to take the time to look it up at this very second) that the US has the highest rate of obesity, and with that comes extra health problems that non-obese people rarely have. More health problems per person means more health care spending per person, the source of health care funding doesn't enter into it.

2) Also, we have tens of millions of people coming from Central and South America and SE Asia and Southern China, bringing with them diseases that otherwise wouldn't exist in the US, adding to our health problems beyond what would normally be the case. And many of these diseases are very expensive to treat, including the drug-resistant stains of common disease, like TB, that are becoming increasingly common in the third world. We have as many immigrants in the US from these areas as some countries have their entire population! Something like 25 million ILLEGALS from Mexico alone, millions more from Asia, who knows how many from South America, to say nothing of the legal immigrants. Canada has a population of, what, 33 million? Our entire illegal population is probably larger than the entire population of Canada. Do any of the health care cost studies normalize for this?

3) Also, what about psychological problems and addictions? Are these numbers consistent across countries when looking at reported health care costs? Are they consistently included or not included? If included, at what level of treatment are they included and can that be normalized meaningfully?

4) Even more troublesome is cosmetic surgery, particularly elective vs. reconstructive, and to what extent one or the other or none or both is or is not included. Is this accounted for in comparative analyses?

5) Also, are you considering ONLY the cost of treatment, or also the cost of health insurance? I'm not entirely certain it's intellectually honest to add into the comparison the cost of private insurance versus government paid insurance when examining the total cost of health care, but I am having trouble putting into words exactly why that is. It just doesn't compute to my mind.

6) Are pharmaceuticals included? While only a relatively small portion of the total cost of health care (maybe around 5% in the US), our drugs here in the US cost a lot more, both because our government doesn't just dictate the price companies are allowed to charge (as is the case in Canada, for example), and also to support our research industry (which is non-existent in most other countries, and even German firms, a country historically noted for its pharmaceutical industry, has moved most of their research to the US since the research laws in Germany are far more highly regulated and restrictive and more costly). How are these factors incorporated into cost comparison studies, if at all?

I don't want to get into the question of whether it is "right" or "wrong" or "morally imperative" or what not to have a nationalized health care. We've already had that discussion in my journal in the past, so I consider that totally out of bounds for this JE. I'm purely looking to the question of how "normalized" are the cost comparison studies that exist.

There are no doubt many other areas I missed that require normalization, but let's just start with the above six. Inquiring minds want to know!

"If all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you will accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature."

Was he ever right about that...

Or as Voltaire said: "It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books."

I keep wanting to write a novel, but every time I start I feel like what I've written is so cheesy bad that I stop. Then I read some other published novel and I'm like "My work is waaaay better than this piece of crap!" Of course, when I worry about my own writings, the kinds of novelists I'm comparing my own work against is among the likes of Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Goethe, Kafka, et al. Perhaps not very fair, but then again, if I can't write that well then what's the point of publishing an inferior piece of crap? There is a remote chance it could make me some money, but it wouldn't be anything I'd be proud of. Bleh.

So, we have this IBM 3590 enterprise tape drive that was giving me a "FID1 95" error. Of course, IBM stopped supporting this drive in September 2006. And just to be doubly annoying, the upgrade path is the TS1120, which is NOT backwards compatible, i.e. it can't read tapes written by 3590.

Anybody have any experience with these 3590 drives that might be able to give me a pointer as to what this error code could mean? The only documentation I found that mentioned this code said only that you need to contact the service department to get it repaired, but gave no hint as what the possible cause of the error might be.

So, I'm driving to work when the story comes over the news about a bus falling of an overpass over on the other side of town:
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N02374944.htm

I'm listening to WSB and they get a reporter on-site pretty quickly, but the reporter literally had to go off-air because the scene was so distressing to him he just couldn't continue.

Reminded me of Herb Morrison's reporting of the Hindenburg crash.
http://www.otr.com/hindenburg.html

So, http://helium.com/. Scam? Legit but not worth the effort? Or actually worthy of a few hours a week?

I'm trying it out myself, fiddling with different channels to see which ones generate the most interest, since I have no idea yet just what kind of crowd reads helium, if any.

In the food and cuisine channel I have an article posted: Chinese foods - Ever wonder about where certain foods come from? What food is native to which part of the world? This article explores foods native to China and Southeast Asia.

Over in politics and government I posted: The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy - Comparing the VLWC to the VRWC we've heard so much about in recent years.

In the history channel there's my article: America's Warrior Kings - A look at generals turned presidents in US history.

And finally, in the role-playing games channel I've got up: Character generation tips for Fading Suns

There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom!

Being disintegrated makes me angry! Very angry, indeed!

The Earth? Oh, the Earth will be gone in just a few seconds.

Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex, I could pinch them.

Oh goody! Another Illudium PU-38 Explosive Space Modulator! Isn't that lovely? Now we can blow up the Earth!