Beware the frilly dress, but mosquitos are awesome?

 Do you know what a 'trad wife' is?  Yeah, me neither.  But apparently it is a very dangerous and repressive social phenomenon practiced by thoroughly primitive and ignorant human cultures for most of time.  Yes, there is nothing more dangerous to women than traditional gender roles.  If you are of the female persuasion and married to a male human organism, especially if you have biological offspring and you spend more than 51% of your time caring for anyone's welfare other than your own, witting or not, you are in the middle of an existential crisis!  This terrifying phenomenon is apparently trending right now on certain far left and ultra progressive media and social outlets as the worst thing to happen to humanity since the domestication of wheat and holsteins (that would be gluten and dairy type products for you far urbanites).  So the real threat to women is not entire societies declaring that there is no such thing and saying that a man can be a woman if he really feels he is one but rather an XX chromosome possessor acting out traditional gender roles?  Can this get any stranger...wait, PETA just came out in defense of mosquitos...I give up!  Mosquitos are okay but being a mother who actually raises her own kids is bad?

I've noticed the 'raising your own kids is bad' phenomenon for a decade or more, at least if you are a female professional who chooses to stay home and raise her kids versus work so you can pay someone else to do it.  But then most of the people complaining about it are people who are only concerned about their own convenience, ie. I need to work not just full time but every evening, holiday, and weekend because they might just need something on a whim, but then I also can't charge whatever it would cost me personally to make such astounding sacrifice or they'll complain about that too. I think the main issue here is an innate tendency towards selfishness and the thought of someone doing something selfless makes one uncomfortable ergo we must shame the selfless individual into selfishness too so we can feel better about ourselves!  Do you have any idea what sort of a world that would beget, oh, you've noticed all the cultural shifts in the last decade too, okay, nuff said!

Moms are bad.  Dads are bad.  Marriage is bad.  Family is bad.  Police are bad.  Kids are bad. Church is bad.  Parents are bad.  Traditional gender roles are bad.  Jobs are bad.  Personal responsibility is bad. Math is bad.  Everything is bad except mosquitos and men who wear dresses?  Yep, welcome to a progressive utopia!  I actually got the idea for this little post from an article about an article proclaiming that 'trad wives' and their frilly dresses are racist, but I wonder if the writer of said article thinks men in frilly dresses are racist, probably not.  Nothing like sitting at the apex of western culture and chipping away at the foundations of the society that gave you the prosperity and education to do just that!  The worst part is that people like this can't laugh, they should be rolling on the floor, clutching at their bellies at such absurdity, but all they can do is frown and glower and complain about all the things that make life worth living (most especially cows!).  Would a cow in a frilly dress be racist?  Are cows or white people the worser evil?  Are mosquitos okay because they carry diseases that kill people?  If so, why are we not celebrating anaplasmosis or some other bovid bane? Do mosquitos ever wear frilly dresses?  What about the gender roles innate within dipteran societies?  Only the females bite, aren't we supporting 'trad flies' by supporting mosquitos?  Preposterous yes, but there are people out there that take this sort of stuff seriously!  Like the chick who wrote the original anti-frilly dress opinion piece.

I love how you can go from being just a 'normal' human being, doing life like we've done it since before recorded history (albeit with varying levels of technology) and all of a sudden you are a nazi evil racist homophobe just for living your life the way you think you should and not really caring what the ultraliberal end of society and the academic think tanks are musing upon these days.  I thought their whole thing was 'we want to live like we want to live' and the vast majority of humanity is like 'sure, you do you just leave me out of it' but that isn't enough.  Now it is 'you need to celebrate and approve what I do or you're evil' and it looks like soon we'll be entering 'live like we say you have to or you're evil.'  What happened to all that 'live and let live' and tolerance mumbo jumbo?  How come I can't live the way I want but I'm supposed to not only let you do whatever you want but celebrate it and not only celebrate but I can't embrace a different lifestyle because you find it offensive?  Noticing a trend here?  You can live any way you want as long as it is the way they want you to live.  Even reality itself must bend to their perception of it, and woe betide anyone who has a different worldview or accepts life as we know it to be!

So being a married mother who doesn't have a full-time job makes me evil and radical and countercultural and bigoted and racist and homophobic and ten thousand other pejoratives?  I'm evil just for being me.  The sad thing is they won't like me any better if I conformed, because the person they are actually unhappy with is really themselves but it is somehow my fault, so I guess I'll just go on being me and enjoy my wretched little life whereby I offend so many!  But unable to comprehend their own unhappiness and accept responsibility for changing it, instead they will destroy everyone else's.  I really wish I could laugh, but really, I want to cry.

Update on the 'zipetty chrome thing' aka the ninja foodi

 So I absolutely love my new kitchen assistant.  I wrote previously that I didn't like it for rice or pasta, the caveat being cooking either with some sort of meat or veggie at the same time.  I do like it for a noodle casserole, it cooks the pasta fairly quickly but you have to watch it closely to make sure you don't have too much or too little water and adjust accordingly.  The pressure cooker is also fun, I can make applesauce from little scrubby apples that aren't worth peeling, I can just core them and toss them in then run the resulting mush through the blender and have nice smooth applesauce without the work and with the most nutritious part of the apple intact.  I love it for homemade French fries (the air fryer) and pressure cooking a whole chicken and then browning it under the air fryer makes it very rotisserie like at home!  I don't need to bread chicken any longer, you can make juicy inside, crispy outside chicken tenders with the steam and crisp function.  You can do bone broth in an hour with the pressure cooker instead of overnight. It also does great things to baby carrots (and undoubtedly other strange and exotic veggies we don't eat!).  I also love it for croutons, much less tedious than doing it in the oven.  Overall, whatever  your dietary needs/preferences or your kitchen skills, this thing has something for everyone.

Gluten Free Hard Pretzel Recipe, updated with honey mustard (Snyder of Hanover) version!

 Nothing has been sadder on this gluten free journey than discovering even Snyder of Hanover can't make a decent gluten free pretzel.  I love their honey mustard real pretzels but the gluten free version is basically crunchy, tasteless potato starch.  There is no bite, no flavor, no depth.  Just a brief crunch and the flavored coating doesn't stick to the surface.  I've made soft pretzels and bagels, both wheat and gluten free, but never thought to make a hard pretzel, could it even be done?  I found a promising looking wheat recipe but nothing real great in the gluten free department, so I thought I'd try modifying the wheat recipe and see what happened.  It works!  These aren't going to be Snyder of Hanover Pretzels, rather you get a nice crusty shell and a chewy interior, think of a good French baguette crossed with a soft pretzel but a little more crunchy and without the bready interior.  Feel free to add salt to the outside, I can't ever keep it on so I just put it inside, if you salt them, decrease the recipe salt to 1/2 tsp.  Feel free to substitute flour for flour and starch for starch but not flour for starch.

1 1/4 c oat flour

3/4c corn flour

1/2c brown rice flour

1/2c tapioca starch

3/4 tsp salt

1 tsp instant yeast

2 tsp xanthin gum

4 tbsp psyllium husk

1 tbsp brown sugar

1 egg white (save the yolk for the egg wash)

1 1/2 cups hot water

Whisk together the dry ingredients then mix in the wet with a high power mixer or a danish dough whisk.  Cover and let rise in a warm, moist place for 45 minutes.  Meanwhile, bake 1/2 cup baking soda at 250 degrees for one hour.  Once the dough has risen, divide into 24 balls and roll into thin, long ropes (1/2 inch by 6 inches or so) and place on a greased cookie sheet.  Cover and let rise for 1/2 hour.  Meanwhile preheat oven to 425 degrees and bring a large pot containing 8 cups of water, 1/4 cup brown sugar, and the baked baking soda to a boil.  Drop 4-6 pretzels in the boiling water for 20 seconds and then remove to a greased baking sheet, repeat with remaining pretzels.  Brush each boiled pretzel with egg wash (egg yolk plus a tablespoon of water).  Salt or top as desired.  I used two large cookie sheets with 12 pretzels each and rotated them top and bottom during the baking process, don't crowd the pretzels on the pans.  You also want to flip each pretzel halfway through baking as well.  Once you place the pans in the oven, reduce the temperature to 325 and bake for 45 minutes plus or minus 20 or so, rotating as necessary.  You want them to be hard on the outside, not squishy, and they will be darker than wheat pretzels thanks to the psyllium husk.  Cool completely on a wire rack before serving and freeze any extras.

Update: They are pretty good fresh, chewy, slightly crunchy, but still reminiscent of a soft pretzel.  I really wasn't excited to eat the thawed ones, so thought I'd try getting a real hard pretzel by 'twice baking' them.  To get a true 'hard' pretzel you'll want to treat them like homemade croutons: cut them into 1 inch lengths, mix with desired flavoring, and either bake on a cookie sheet at 325 or I used my ninja foodi with the crisping plate on bake/roast at 325 for about 15 minutes for a single layer batch (the whole batch of pretzels took 3 batches in the foodi), stirring occasionally and cooling on a wire rack.  I wanted a honey mustard pretzel so I mixed a couple tablespoons yellow and dijon mustard with a couple table spoons brown sugar, a little salt, and garlic pepper and a couple tablespoons of canola oil.  I mixed each foodi batch with the mixture, stirred to coat and cooked them in the foodi.  You get excellent flavor, great chew, and a nice crunch!  Feel free to try barbecue, salsa, cheese, ranch, terriyaki or whatever your heart desires or just a little oil and salt.  These totally blow Snyder of Hanover Gluten Free pretzels out of the water, they are real pretzels not just potato starch!

AI art generators and their actual impact on art and life

 By now we all assume the robots are taking over, jobs and perhaps even human life are likely doomed, so I'm not sure why you're even reading this, but then again this sort of complaint and end-of-the-world prediction has been bandied about with most every new invention since fire came into vogue.  I remember life before the internet, I was in college when the internet actually became a normal part of life, and now I'm watching the same sort of cultural acceptance of AI, AI art generators in particular.  And from the little experience I've had, I can assure you that as cool and interesting as this technology is, it isn't poised to destroy either art or life as we know it.  It is just another tool in our creativity kit, much like adding the camera to our skillset didn't destroy but rather expanded our concept and understanding of art.

The computer can only assess millions of known images, it can't think, it doesn't have an aesthetic sense, it doesn't even really care if a hand has five fingers or ten.  It doesn't care if you want a picture of a screw or a vivid scene out of a fantasy novel, it is all the same to the generator.  You still need a human artist directing the production of the image, selecting which images to edit, and then doing the necessary editing.  The results can be astounding, but it takes a lot of work, patience, and luck to get there.  I'm not sure it is all that different from taking a picture, in theory all I do is push a button and bam I have art, but I need the right equipment, the knowledge to use that equipment, something to take a picture of, and an eye to see how it is worth picturing, and then the discernment to edit and select the final image.  AI is the same, but instead you come up with an image in your head and turn it into a descriptive phrase the computer can understand and then hit the button and hope you aren't ending up with something completely strange.

I've been using Leonardo.ai and it has been a blast, if occasionally grotesque.  The images are beautiful but they do have their quirks.  If you are an artist, a writer, or a connoisseur of either, I think you will be ahead of the game because you already have a vocabulary and an eye for good art, so you only have to learn to translate that into something the computer can use to make it real, but if you have neither, you have to learn what makes a good image and then how to translate that into words the computer can understand.  I think it is a great tool existing artists can add to their toolkit and something, that if diligently  used, may even help develop a whole new generation of artists.  Instead of just being consumers of art, it is now very approachable for anyone to become a creator of art.  Just like the ubiquitous phone camera has birthed many an amateur photographer, so too does this have the potential to create more creators!