Dickie's quickies

Last week I made a simple pasta dish for dinner. To the pasta, I added some collard greens cooked in garlic and oil, a can of white beans, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, a little paprika, some grated Parmesan cheese and some bleu cheese that I threw in at the last minute because it was lying around. The impetus for this recipe was the fact that I had collard greens lying around and needed to use them. I was also looking for something simple.

We really enjoyed the dish. One thing though: I got a particularly strong head of garlic. I mean, mind blowingly strong. Though I only used 2 cloves, minced, we could taste it on our breath for the entire next day. I swear I can still smell garlic in the house. Don't get me wrong: we love garlic, but whew! Last time I had this problem was several year's ago when my friend Ellen and I made a garlic bread for dinner. We just put some butter and some chopped garlic on a rustic loaf split in half. I remember waking up the next morning on Ellen's couch tasting the garlic. When she came out of her bedroom and went to the bathroom, I swore I could smell garlic as she walked. My brother and sister told me later that they could smell the garlic sweating from my pores. I wasn't very popular that day. :-)

Hey, Google video says, why let the Chinese have all of the fun? Let's censor content going to the U.S. audiences, too. (according to the Register).

Riverbend, she of the Iraq based blog, Baghdad Burning, has this to say about the recent civil strife:

Yesterday they were showing Sunni and Shia clerics praying together in a mosque and while it looked encouraging, I couldn’t help but feel angry. Why don’t they simply tell their militias to step down- to stop attacking mosques and husseiniyas- to stop terrorizing people? It’s so deceptive and empty on television- like a peaceful vision from another land. The Iraqi government is pretending dismay, but it's doing nothing to curb the violence and the bloodshed beyond a curfew. And where are the Americans in all of this? They are sitting back and letting things happen- sometimes flying a helicopter here or there- but generally not getting involved.

I’m reading, and hearing, about the possibility of civil war. The possibility. Yet I’m sitting here wondering if this is actually what civil war is like. Has it become a reality? Will we look back at this in one year, two years… ten… and say, “It began in February 2006…”? It is like a nightmare in that you don’t realise it’s a nightmare while having it- only later, after waking up with your heart throbbing, and your eyes searching the dark for a pinpoint of light, do you realise it was a nightmare…