Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Register For Free Food at Chick-fil-A!

Register For Free Food!

Register for your free Chicken sandwich and medium Coke.

How to Freeze Corn - wikiHow

How to Freeze Corn - wikiHow

I'm a huge fan of corn. Here's nice little "How To" for storing corn for an entire year...

Steps

1. Find the ears that are just right. A farmer only has a short period of time between when the corn is too small to be edible and when it's too big to be edible. Of course, everybody's got their own definition of what's too big to be edible! You can determine if it's just right by shaking hands with the corn. If the corn cob fills your hand nicely and the silk on the top is brown, it's ready to pick. If it feels too scrawny, leave it for another day.
2. Have a seat and take all the husks off the corn once you've picked enough corn to keep you busy all day - a couple of hundred ears of corn should do it.
3. Put the corn in containers or in a spot where you can keep an eye on your newly harvested bounty -- there are always critters (whether on the farm or in your backyard) that are looking for the easy mark and they will take your fresh corn away from you if you're not looking.
4. Clean the corn--unless of course you're the type of person who doesn't mind a bit of silky natural floss stuck between your teeth when you're done eating. It's best when you get the corn all clean and shiny with none of the little silky hairs sticking to it. This is kind of a painstaking and sticky job. It helps to keep a bowl of water on the table while working to dip your hands into, otherwise you end up acting like Spiderman with everything you touch sticking to your hands.
5. Move into the kitchen once the corn's all cleaned up. Shown here is one day's harvest (about 500 ears) all ready to be cooked.
6. Blanch the corn. There are other methods of preparing and cooking the corn, but many believe this method gives the best taste. Blanching means you put the corn in the water, put the lid on, then you look the other way while bringing the water to a rolling boil. You have to look the other way because (as everybody knows) a watched pot never boils.
7. Take the corn out when the water's boiling and cool it down as quickly as you can. Once you take out one batch and put in the next, the fresh corn cools the water down a bit and you have to start over again, so it takes about 5-10 minutes to boil each batch. Now comes the hard part. You've got to cool the corn quickly, which is easy if you're doing 10 ears of corn. But how do you cool 500 ears of corn in a row? If you just put it in the water, the water gets warm and loses its cooling ability. You can put ice in the water, or you can keep changing the water, but both of those methods are for small batches.
* Here's the farmer's solution to this problem. Use the right side of the sink to cool the hot ears just off the stove, then move the lukewarm ears to the left side of the sink to finish up the cooling. Cold water trickles in from the faucet into the left hand side of the sink (1). The magic happens in part 2, which is just a simple upside-down U-shaped pipe that acts as a siphon to move the cold water from the left side to the right side. You start by dunking these pipes under the water to get all the air bubbles out of them, putting your thumbs over the ends of the pipes to hold the water in, then put it over the divider in the sink. If you've done it right, the pipes are still full of water. When the water in the left side is higher than the right side, it will flow through the pipes and into the right hand side.
* The second little bit of magic is the overflow pipe in the right hand sink. It's an S-shaped piece of copper tubing which stands up in the sink just short of the top and it runs down into the drain. When the water gets higher than the top of the pipe, it spills down into the pipe and goes down the drain. So now we've created a waterfall type of system where cold water enters a point 1, moves through the pipes in point 2, then exits at point 3. By the time it exits in point 3, it's actually pretty warm water because you keep dumping the boiling corn into that side.
* When you remove the boiling corn from the stove, you'll want to dump it in the right hand side of the sink. The water on the right will be warm, but you'll have a continuous trickle of cool water coming through the siphon pipes. Give someone the job of agitating the corn by stirring it around in the sink. That's a job that the kids love to do, so it's usually that's the youngest person, although sometimes it's just most tired person.
* When the person cooking on the stove is ready to remove their corn, the agitator removes the cold corn from the left side of the sink and sends that on to the next step, then they move the warm corn from the right side to the left side of the sink. The hot corn from the stove is then dumped in to the lukewarm water on the right side of the sink.
8. Cut the corn off the cob once the corn has been blanched and cooled so that the ears are cool to the touch. This takes a little feel so that you get enough corn without getting too much of the cob. This one is probably the most highly skilled of positions in the process and takes some practice.
9. Chill the corn. Once the corn is off the cob, put it into cake pans for a good chilling. Cake pans work well because they spread out the corn and transfer the heat nicely.
* To do this right, you'll need about 6-8 cake pans and a completely empty refrigerator. Put the pans into the freezer of an old refrigerator, then move them from the freezer down on to the shelves of the refrigerator as you get new pans filled. The warmest ones go in the freezer, and the cooler ones get moved into the refrigerator until you're ready to bag it.
10. Bag the corn. Once the pans of corn are completely cooled, you're almost done - all that's left is to package the corn up for final freezing. Use quart and pint Ziploc baggies. You don't want them totally full, just enough so you can close them easily and then flatten them out so they store easily. A quart baggie is about enough for one meal for 4-5 people, and a pint baggie works well for 2 people.
11. Clean up. Take out the garbage and mop that floor. Send the cobs to the compost pile and look forward to eating corn whenever you want.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Warren Buffet's portfolio



Warren Buffet's company, Berkshire Hathaway, just released its stockholdings as of June 30, 2007. Whenever Berkshire releases it's holdings, all investors listen. Why wouldn't you copy the most successful investor of our era?

New Stakes:
Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) 8,700,000 shares
Dow Jones (NYSE: DJ) 2,781,800 shares

Raised Stakes:
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. (NYSE: BNI)
Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)
Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) from 4,000,000 shares to 8,000,000 shares
Proctor & Gamble (NYSE: PG)
Sanofi-Aventis (NYSE: SNY)
US Bancorp (NYSE: USB)
WellPoint Inc. (NYSE: WLP) from 979,700 shares to 4,200,000 shares
Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE: WFC)

Lowered Stakes:
Ameriprise Financial (NYSE: AMP)
Block H & R (NYSE: HRB) from 1,246,800 shares to 0
Norfolk Southern Corp. (NYSE: NSC) from 6,362,800 shares to 0
Pier 1 Imports (NYSE: PIR) from 1,483,400 shares to 0
Tyco International Ltd. (NYSE: TYC) from 10,000,000 shares to 6,310,200
Union Pacific (NYSE: UNP) from 10,513,100 shares to 0
Western Union Co. (NYSE: WU) from 9,868,000 shares to 3,200,000 shares

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Pentagon Paid $999,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers to Texas - Yahoo! News

Pentagon Paid $999,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers to Texas - Yahoo! News

Tony Capaccio Thu Aug 16, 11:59 AM ET

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) -- A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to a Texas base, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

The owners of C&D Distributors in Lexington, South Carolina -- twin sisters -- exploited a flaw in an automated Defense Department purchasing system: bills for shipping to combat areas or U.S. bases that were labeled ``priority'' were usually paid automatically, said Cynthia Stroot, a Pentagon investigator.

C&D's fraudulent billing started in 2000, Stroot, the Defense Criminal Investigative Service's chief agent in Raleigh, North Carolina, said in an interview. ``As time went on they got more aggressive in the amounts they put in.''

The price the military paid for each item shipped rarely reached $100 and totaled just $68,000 over the six years in contrast to the $20.5 million paid for shipping, she said.

``The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas -- that's why they got paid,'' Stroot said. If the item was earmarked ``priority,'' destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, ``there was no oversight.''

Scheme Detected

The scheme unraveled in September after a purchasing agent noticed a bill for shipping two more 19-cent washers: $969,000. That order was rejected and a review turned up the $998,798 payment earlier that month for shipping two 19-cent washers to Fort Bliss, Texas, Stroot said.

The Pentagon Defense Logistics Agency orders millions of parts a year. Stroot said the agency and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, which pays contractors, have made major changes, including thorough evaluations of the priciest shipping charges.

A review of paid shipping invoices showed that fraudulent billing is ``is not a widespread problem,'' she said.

``C&D was a rogue contractor,'' Stroot said. While other questionable billing has been uncovered, nothing came close to C&D's, she said. The next-highest contractor billed $2 million in questionable transport costs, she said.

Guilty Pleas

C&D and two of its officials were barred in December from receiving federal contracts. A federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, today accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Corley, 46, faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced in the near future, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.

Corley didn't immediately return a phone message left on her answering machine at her office in Lexington. Her attorney, Gregory Harris, didn't immediately a phone call placed to his office in Columbia.

Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and ``high- end automobiles'' that the sisters spent the money on.

``They took a lot of vacations,'' she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Tony Capaccio at acapaccio@bloomberg.net .

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Accused says he was just milking goat - Yahoo! News

Accused says he was just milking goat - Yahoo! News

Fri Aug 10, 9:54 PM ET

TACOMA, Wash. - A man accused of having sex with a goat is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday on a animal cruelty charge. Charging papers say a witness saw 63-year-old Arthur Lawton having sex with a goat May 8th in a barn at Eatonville's Pioneer Farm Museum where he worked.
ADVERTISEMENT

Lawton said he was trying to milk the goat.

Lawton missed a scheduled arraignment on August 3rd but turned himself in last night to Pierce County sheriff's deputies.

He's the second person charged in the county since the Legislature made bestiality a crime in response to the fatal injury to a man having sex with a horse in Enumclaw.

A man accused of having sex with the family pit bull dog was acquitted in May.

___

Information from: The News Tribune, http://www.thenewstribune.com

Man sues flower company, saying it ruined his marriage by revealing affair - Yahoo! News

A Texas man is suing 1-800-Flowers for $1 million, saying the company is to blame for his pending divorce.

After Leroy Greer's wife filed for divorce in January 2006, he began seeing another woman and sent his new girlfriend a dozen long-stemmed roses. But a few months after the flowers were sent, Greer reconciled with his wife, and she moved back in to his Missouri City home, according to Greer's lawyer, Kennitra Foote.

That was, until his wife received a thank-you note from 1-800-Flowers.

Confused about the purchase, Bernice Greer called the company, and they faxed her the receipt.

"Just wanted to say that I love you and you mean the world to me!" read the greeting from Greer to his girlfriend, whose name and address were included in the receipt for more than $100 in roses.

Bernice Greer promptly moved out again, continued with the divorce and is now asking a court to give her more money because of her husband's now-documented infidelity, according to the lawyer.

Along the bottom of the fax, Greer's wife apparently added her own comment, according to a copy included in the suit. "Be a man!" it began. "If you got caught red handed then don't still lie. Your tmobile has her number so why still lie."

Greer filed suit Aug. 6 in Texas Southern District Court, accusing the company of breaching their contract with him. Greer claims a sales representative promised him before his purchase that the company would not send notice of the transaction to his home or business.

As a result of the infidelity claims, Greer's wife is now asking for an additional $300,000, as well as $4,000 to $5,000 a month in child support for the boy the couple had together.

"Infidelity is one of the things that would qualify as a pendulum-swinger in a divorce case," Foote said. "And now the wife has cold, hard evidence, and it is solely because of 1-800-Flowers."

A spokesperson for 1-800-Flowers, Steven Jarmon, declined to answer questions about the case, but e-mailed this statement:

"At 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, we take pride in creating relationships with our customers by recognizing and thanking them for their business," the statement said. "We take all matters relating to our customers seriously; however, we are not responsible for an individual's personal conduct. Beyond this, it is the company's policy not to comment on pending litigation and legal matters."

Thursday, August 09, 2007