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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Thursday, May 22, 2003

First Fruit 1. Loaded 2. The cherry guillotine mid-stroke 3. Pitless cherry, reasonably unscarred.   Discussion: It hung up on the plunger and that's a bad sign - but how many can do that until they start becoming part of an involuntary "ejector mechanism?" I'll know tomorrow. Got a duck too. Duck glazed with cherry sauce comes to mind...crispy cherry coating. Sweetness. Duck fat bubbled through. Mmmmm. Maybe a cherry sorbet for Memorial Day? 7:32:34 PM    comment []

This morning I walked over to the break area, to the Ritazza vending machine for a little cappuccino, and discovered that the! food vending machine now has Au Bon Pain New England clam chowder, with a little package of oyster crackers. Things have kicked up a bit from the days when "soup" meant a can of Hormel chili. Still not quite good enough to suck me in, however. Now the really good news. I checked out the Lowes' Foods insert from yesterday's paper (I had left it on a table here at work) and they have new crop California cherries on sale. Think I'll take the long way home just to get some. Lowes recently introduced a shop-on-the-web service, BTW. Just fill out your order online (or fax or phone it in) and set up your pickup time. They'll even load your groceries for you. I enjoy shopping too much to do it that way (more fun to select the produce and meats), but it's a nice service. 1:53:27 PM    comment []

Christopher Ranch whole peeled garlic cloves. What a great idea! These are bulk-packed - not in water. Looks as though you have about two months to use them after buying, similar to fresh garlic. So, if you think you can use a pound of garlic in a 2 months (that's 2 ounces per week), this is a pretty good deal for about 4 bucks. Christopher Ranch has their own fleet of trucks! Christopher Ranch has been shipping garlic coast to coast since 1956. Over the years we've built our fleet up to 21 trucks to ship Gilroy's Finest Garlic and produce to our divisions in Los Angeles, New Jersey, Florida and Chicago for distribution in the surrounding ares. Christopher Ranch also contracts with selected trucking companies for shipping and backhauls to areas outside the scope of our divisions. So if you wanna ship anything to LA in a garlic truck, give them a call! (Hey, backhauling cuts the cost of the garlic) 5:43:23 AM    comment []

This story broke in US News yesterday. It appeared April 19 here. Seems the CIA bought off the Republican Guard:   Republican Guard generals betrayed Saddam Hussein in return for huge payments in cash and gold, it emerged last night. In so doing, they allowed the Allies to seize Baghdad virtually without a fight.   It probably would have been “too premature” to debut the story over here in April. Why taint a glorious military victory celebration with “untidy”, maybe even “unsettling”, news?   Of course, bribes are preferable to force and cause fewer casualties, so how could any humanitarian disapprove? That reminds me, Harris Teeter has pork butt on sale for 77 cents a pound – I think I’ll be making some sausage this weekend.   Hmmm...something still bothers me. We spent an $80 billion "supplemental", at a time when we're running record deficits, to invade. I wonder if, for maybe $40 billion, we coulda just bought off the whole lot of them, including Saddam and his two charming sons. That woulda saved us, or our children, $40 billion in debt and we wouldn't have had to hire Halliburton, MCI, et al to rebuild the infrastucture we blew up. 4:24:34 AM    comment []

Ahoy There, Captains!   No one expects democracy in Texas, but the bizarre phone calls to the customs control center by Republican House Speaker Tom Craddick and the Texas Department of Public Safety, to track the plane of State Representative Pete Laney, now seem destined to remain shrouded in mystery:   An e-mail addressed to "Captains" says "any notes, correspondence, photo's etc that were obtained pursuant to the absconded House of Representative members shall be destroyed immediately. No copies are to be kept."   Kinda reminiscent of the standard business practices at another Texan entity, Enron Corporation, ain’t it? If you’re looking for a stock market angle on this – after all, when you see a trend, there’s a chance to grab a quick buck – check out Allegheny Paper Shredders, “quality paper shredders for document security”. Tell ‘em Ollie sent ‘cha. 3:55:48 AM    comment []

“Too Premature”   Just a day after agreeing to pay a record $500 million fine for fraud, WorldCom, er, MCI has landed a $30 million contract to supply telecommunications to military aid workers in Baghdad. That still leaves them in the hole to the tune of $470 million for the week, but things could be looking up:   The US government has said a much larger contract to rebuild Iraq's telecoms infrastructure will be awarded by an incoming Iraqi administration. An MCI spokeswoman said it would "not necessarily rule out" bidding for such a contract. But she said it was it was "too premature to determine one way or another" whether that would happen. Some analysts believe the contract could be worth up to $900m. This was announced on the same day that a Florida appeals court overturned the penalty against 5 tobacco companies because the 700,000 plaintiffs were too diverse, having in common only the fact that the companies’ products made them deathly ill.   Is it too premature to say we’re entering a new era of corporate responsibility? 3:12:04 AM    comment []