8 pounds of meat (5 of stew meat, 3 of kielbasa)
8 pound bag of red onions
8 cups of beef stock
8 ounces dark rum
8 ounces Coca Cola or Coke Zero
8 rounded tablespoons of flour
8 teaspoons of Old Bay seasoning mix
8 tablespoons of spice mix

• 2 parts madras curry powder
• 2 parts ground coriander
• 1 part ground black pepper
• 1 part ground cumin
• 1 part ground smoked paprika
• 1 part celery seed

8 cloves of garlic - crushed
8 slices of thick-sliced bacon

Take all but two of your red onions, cut off the ends, halve them, peel them, and cut them into 1/4-3/8 inch slices. Set aside.

Put the stock, rum, and Coke in your stew pot over low heat and let warm up.

Cut the bacon into small strips and begin sauteeing it in a large skillet over medium heat. Medium heat will help it render out a lot of grease while becoming crispy without burning.

While the bacon sautees (this will take a while), mix the flour and Old Bay seasoning. Take your chunks of stew meat and lightly coat them in the flour, making sure to tap off excess. Save any leftover flour mixture for later. We'll use some to thicken the stew near the end.

When the bacon is crispy, remove it from the pan with a slotted spoon. Reserve most of the drippings in a bowl off to the side, leaving enough to coat the bottom of the pan. Raise the heat to high and when the grease starts smoking, start browning off the floured meat. There's a lot of meat and you don't want to overload the pan, so it will take around 4-5 batches depending on the size of your pan.

As each batch finishes, put it in the stew pot with the hot liquid. After each batch, spoon in enough of the reserved drippings to coat the pan and bring the pan back up to smoking hot before browning the next batch.

When all the meat has been browned, pour the remaining bacon drippings back into the pan and add the onions (all of them). They'll nearly overflow the pan, but as the heat does its magic and softens them, they'll become a lot more manageable.

Toss a bit to spread the bacon drippings around, and cover the pan for 3 minutes. After three minutes, remove the cover, use a pair of tongs to move the onions around (bringing the ones from the bottom up to the top) and cover again. Repeat this process 4-5 times until all the onions have softened. They will release a good amount of liquid which will pick up any good flavors left on the bottom of the pan from the cooking of the meats.

While the onions are cooking down, get out your 8 cloves of garlic, crush them with a garlic press, and add to the stew pot.

Transfer the onions and all the liquid in the pan into the stew pot, bring to a simmer, cover, and let stew for about 3-and-a-quarter hours, stirring periodically.

Around 3 hours into the 3-and-a-quarter, rough chop the remaining two red onions and put aside. Cut your kielbasa lengths in half, then cut half moons about 1/2-5/8 inches thick. Bring out your sautee pan, and begin browning the kielbasa in batches over a medium high heat. As they brown, transfer into the stew pot.

Bring the stew back to a low boil. In the sautee pan where you browned the sausage, you should have about 1-2 tablespoons of rendered grease from browning the sausage. Add enough butter to bring it to about three tablespoons, melt it, and then add three tablespoons of the leftover flour mixture, cooking it into a roux. Add about a cup of the stew broth. Stir the mixture to combine, then pour into the stew pot. Stir well, then cover and let cook for another 20 minutes. Remove from heat and add the diced onion. Stir, cover, and let the residual heat cook the stew for another 30 minutes.

By bringing in the sausage near the end, it stays firm, and the onions added in right after the stew is removed from the heat get a little mellowed by the residual heat, but retain some texture and a little bite (while the sliced onions that stewed for 4 hours are extremely soft and mellow).

Serve sprinkled with some of the crispy bacon (if you haven't nibbled it all while waiting for the stew).

For an experiment, it came out well. It's a hearty stew with good flavor. I might add more vegetables next time (perhaps 8 large carrots and 8 tablespoons of tomato paste), and go with some cream sherry instead of the rum and coke.

It makes 20-25 hearty servings with a lot of meat in them at a cost of about $2 a serving. Add a couple of pieces of good bread, some rice or some pasta, and you can cut down the portion to stretch it even farther while keeping it a comforting stick-to-your-ribs meal.

I decided to do some math on how much a french fry tax might raise. For a back-of-envelope calculation, I found an article from 2002 that put annual per-capita consumption of french fries in the United States at 28 pounds, with 90% of that being at fast food restaurants.

So that makes 25.2 pounds of french fries eaten at fast food restaurants per person per year. A large fries at McDonalds is approximately 1/3 of a pound. So that makes 75.6 orders of fries per person per year, or a little less than 1.5 per week. At a "quarter per order," that means $18.90 per person in taxes.

Now, that's a "per capita" figure which is an average among all people, from babies to senior citizens. So if the average person ate 75.6 orders of fries and paid $18.90 in "quarter per order" taxes on them, a population of 300 million would generate $5,670,000,000 in new taxes.

Now, $5.6 billion is just a drop in the bucket considering our national debt and all the other things we're facing, but it's a start. Consider California's budget crisis. They have 10% of the population. If they did "quarter an order" on french fries, they could conceivably generate over a half-billion in new tax revenues, and in a state that has been so welcoming of sin taxes on tobacco, when heart disease and obesity related illnesses are such huge health issues, why wouldn't the taxpayers welcome a sin tax on french fries?

I eat fries, though not nearly as much as I used to. But I'd welcome a quarter per order tax in Washington rather than a gasoline tax or a sales tax increase. If I don't want to pay the tax, I can have a salad or some fruit or sliced veggies.

'Course, if they try to tax bacon, there's gona be a revolt up in this motherf... but I digress. If we're going to tax cigarettes, we might as well tax french fries. It's only fair, and right now state governments need to find revenues where they can. "Quarter per order." It's an idea whose time has come.

I haven't had time to try to track down a press release from when they first opened their wireless store, but all I had to do was check my list of reviews on the Amazon site to find wireless phone/plan reviews from February 2003 and June 2007. I can't link to the 2003 one because the item has been removed from the site and there's no product page to link to. It's just in my review history which is part of my account (and I'm not giving out the password for that). But the 2007 review is still on the site.

As you can see by the 2007 review, their pricing was terrible and it really seemed they'd been neglecting their wireless store. It's nice to see that they're giving it a revamp and clearing out the cobwebs, but it's not a new retailing area for them.

Another quibble of mine is where the analyst quoted at the end of the article says that you probably won't get better pricing or selection than you'd get directly from the cellular provider. That may or may not be true, at least on pricing. The resellers can make $200-300 or more when they sell the phone and plan at the same price the cellular provider is selling the phone and plan. Often they'll put part of that commission into undercutting the cellular provider's price. If you shop around for cell phones, you'll regularly find resellers offering lower prices (either directly or by rebate) than you'll find at the cellular provider's direct sales site. It's one of the few times when the middle man actually gets you a better deal.

Will Amazon follow the example of their competitors and use part of their commission to provide consumers with better pricing than they can get directly from the cellular providers? That remains to be seen. Where they seem to be touting their advantage is in the ease of their selection and purchasing processes. If there's any company that has invested in and perfected those processes, it's Amazon, so that claim may have some weight to it.

All in all, though, if Amazon's history is any indicator, the cell phone store will have to get some serious traction or they'll let it wither on the vine, becoming more and more unattractive in its pricing and selection until they have to drop it... or reinvent it yet again.

So he promised them he'd write three songs, make three music videos, and offer them for free download to tell his story far and wide. This is the first of the songs, posted on Monday. It was already up to 169,000 views on YouTube (about 1,000 times more than my reasons to be happy video has scored so far - darnit). It's a catchy tune and a decent video, and after the way the airlines have treated people, it feels a bit cathartic to watch it... a sort of vicarious joy of sharing in this smack against the airlines. They've tapped into a wave of zeitgeist and it will be interesting to see how far they can ride it.

So, tonight's MegaMillions jackpot is $113 million with a "cash option" payout of $70 million.

The odds are against it. Odds of scoring a jackpot lottery ticket are 1 in around 175,711,536. But the cash option is $70 million. If my little prophetic intuition is going to come true, tonight is a good night for it to happen. I could sure as heck use the money.

So, I bought a ticket. I can always hope.

And if I'm not a millionaire tomorrow, I still get to go to a party and and watch fireworks.

UPDATE - post drawing: Bupkis!

Part of the concept of the site is that I invite people to submit reasons to be happy. My mom did it and she provided an interesting insight on it that I wasn't expecting: it made her think about what makes her happy and just added to her happiness because it brought all those good thoughts to mind. Bonus!

If you haven't visited Tweeted Blessings yet, do it. If you haven't told your friends about it yet... do you hate your friends and not want them to be happy? Go, enjoy some reasons to be happy and then share them. Help start a happiness pandemic.

Some of you may remember my post on counting your blessings last month. That incident sparked something in me. Besides helping reverse a descent into a dark place, it made me want to share that insight... that there are all these reasons to be happy all around us.

So I built Tweeted Blessings to find and share those reasons... in small, bite-sized pieces. Right now, I'm generating all the reasons because it just went public today, but hopefully people will tweet in or mail in their reasons, and it will become a little juggernaut of happiness.

I'm having a hard enough time finding work right now, so I decided to make some... this site. What better way to spend some of my time than working on something intended to spread happiness.

So, please, copy the video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVh1T3I4TiQ

Send it to your friends, tell them to send it to their friends. Help me snowball this into an avalanche of joy. As an added benefit, you help keep me indoors working on positive projects.

Thanks!

One part of the project was to add "Tweet This" links to certain items on the site, where clicking on the link would send the user to Twitter and fill in the suggested text of the tweet for them.

It's actually a lot simpler than you think. The format is: http://twitter.com/?status=[URL encoded tweet text].

Now many of you are asking how you "URL encode" the tweet text. Well, if you're using PHP, you use urlencode('text'); where "text" is the text of your tweet. If you want to do it in JavaScript, the PHP.js library has a javascript equivalent for PHP's urlencode.

But here's a little trick I didn't know about until I made this mistake. Make sure your link goes to twitter.com, not www.twitter.com. If it goes to www.twitter.com, the text doesn't get properly decoded. So, trying to tweet Creating a "Tweet This" Link - http://www.brainhandles.com would look like Creating a %22Tweet This%22 link - http%3A%2F%2Fwww.brainhandles.com, and nobody wants that.

The main one... well, I should be soft launching in the next week, so some of you may be among the select friends I invite to beta test the new site. It's going to have a fun viral video to lure people in and ongoing fun bits they can subscribe to via RSS, e-mail, or Twitter. I'm hoping to be ready for previews by Thursday and officially launch after the 4th of July holiday weekend.

Hope you're all doing good. Back to the grind.

When I posted Hell on $5 a Day I came in with a lot of it already written, so much so that I was never writing a new chapter less than 2-3 weeks before it went live on the site. Once a chapter was done, I had at least 2-3 weeks if not more to tighten it up and make it right. Part of this was because I had that huge bunch of it already writtten.

This time, I gave myself a month to not only plot and get writing, but to even decide which of many story ideas I was going to go with. And while I've been having a good time with the writing, I'd have loved to tuck those chapters away for a while so I could really tweak them.

So, I figure a novel a year is a good goal when you're trying to raise two kids, deal with a job (or job hunt) and deal with another stressful situation I'm not at liberty to discuss (legal, not medical). I'll come back and re-start Sodom All Over Again after Thanksgiving, a year from when I started running Hell on $5 a Day.

I'd rather give you a good novel in 6 months than a mediocre one now. This has been a hard decision, but right now, it's the one I have to go with.

Thanks for reading. Hope you'll still read the blog.

If you're trying to find out more about Tagged.com, you probably got a mail like this:

If you can't see the image, I've blurred out the name of the innocent person Tagged used as an unwitting accomplice. It says "[Name] sent you photos on Tagged - Want to see the photos? Please respond or [Name] may think you said no "

If you click through, it makes you start an account to see the photos. It doesn't seem so bad, but it's not just a matter of providing a name, e-mail address, and password. They also ask you to reject a bunch of sponsor offers (like the ones you have to complete at the sites that "give away" iPods for "free") then they ask you to provide access information to your webmail account (for me it was my gmail account) and make it look like the only way to continue is to do it (though if you hunt around, you'll find a small "skip" button on the page).

When you FINALLY get through the registration process, guess what... there are no photos. Yes, they told you that this person sent you photos on their site, but there are no photos from that person. I might think that the person in question deleted the photos before I got to them, but I've talked to other people who have had the exact same thing happen to them.

It's my guess that if you give them access to your mail account, they'll go in, collect your address book, and send all of the people in it an e-mail saying that you sent them photos well before you ever get to a stage where you could even upload photos. So while many people do not upload photos, much less specifically target their friends for receipt, their friends are getting them.

Furthermore, once you've signed up, they'll e-mail you and tell you that you've got a private message from the person who supposedly sent you the photos, though the message is an auto-generated welcome message from them that your friend never wrote.

They've sent me a number of e-mails since I signed up, even though I went through their help system and requested a membership cancellation immediately after I found out they were full of crap.

Whatever mail service you're on, if you get mail from them, report it as spam. Furthermore, I've filed a complaint about their deceptive practices at www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov. If the FTC gets enough complaints about Tagged.com, perhaps they'll fine those guys and force them to clean up their acts.

One last thing... are their mails spam? Since a friend gave them your e-mail address and permission to mail you on their behalf and they seem to follow the rules under CAN-SPAM for that initial contact, it's unlikely that they can strictly be considered spam. The problem instead is that they use deception to draw you to the site, to get you to go through their arduous registration process (which could cause you to give them permission to e-mail your friends and business associates along with the addresses), send you more bogus e-mails, then don't stop mailing you when you ask them to cancel your account.

So, are they spam? Legally, I don't think so (though I'd leave the definite judgement on that to a lawyer). Are they committing fraud? Is it a scam? I believe so and I hope the FTC will agree.

UPDATE: Time did an article on the Tagged scam. Tagged's CTO said it was merely a mistake that was being made by users who accidentally told them to spam their contacts. That's beside the point. These e-mails were sent with the claim that Person X sent you photos before Person X ever uploaded any photos. Then they send you a bogus e-mail about the person sending you a private message, but it's just an auto-generated welcome from Tagged with the person's name attached. That's not a simple mistake. In my opinion, these actions constitute fraud. Why isn't the FTC doing anything about this?

Which is it, "Royal Pains" with Mark Feuerstein or the 1997 David Duchovny film Playing God?

"Royal Pains" seems like someone tried to put a "feel-good" twist on Playing God, as well as building a cast of loveable and quirky characters who could stand up to weeks of medical crises, emotional sturm und drang, and various schemes by that irrepressible Paulo Costanzo (last seen on "Friends" spin-off "Joey").

I'm not going to say I didn't like it. It had some promise for a diverting summer series. It also has some promise to be a carnival of cliché that batters our heads around like a frozen wiffle bat. It walked this fine line between bad camp and good dramedy, and I really have to credit that to the writers, because just about everyone in it except Feuerstein was playing it a bit over the top. But Feuerstein's generally subdued tones just made the scenery chewing by his co-stars all that much more obvious.

Sadly, my DVR cut off the last 15 minutes of the 90-minute pilot (thanks Verizon!), but even if there is some amazing saving grace in that last 15 minutes (which I'll catch on Saturday if the DVR behaves itself), I don't think it's going to be enough to save the show. I'm going to give it one more episode next week, but if it doesn't impress me, I'll likely abandon it.

On a separate note, though I never watched "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (mostly because it was on Fox and I grow ever more philosophically opposed to patronizing anything owned by Rupert Murdoch), I really enjoyed show-runner Josh Friedman's blog post about being on a cancellation bubble when it pops.

All I have to do is "kindly reconfirm to us, your genuine bank account details, to avoid making payment to a wrong person, attempt to divert your payment to a new account without your knowledge may have been done by your local representative with the assistance of some (CBN) Officials, of whom most of them are presently under our custody and will face prosecution under section 35A sub section 1-2-4 of the criminal code of United Kingdon Of Great Britain, pending on when we finish with our investigation."

Yup, just gotta fax over my bank details, and that thieving Peter Woo will get busted while I'll get my ten million bucks from Togo.

Too bad I don't have a fax machine. Oh well. Maybe I'll have better luck with that Nigerian prince.

Bing is lumped in with referring sites, not search engines, even though the links are coming from the "/search" page. Now, it's worth noting that Google also considers images.google.com a referrer instead of a search engine.

But I wonder if the listing of Bing as a referral source instead of a search engine source is just that Google Analytics hasn't been updated to treat Bing that way, but it will soon, or if it's an intentional slight where Google is calling out Bing as something not worthy of recognition as a search engine? What do you think?