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via (tim_mcmahan > worldsofwayne)

(transcription after the leap)

Frosted Creams

1 c shortening and 1.5 c sugar, creamed

Add:
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 c raisins (cooked in water)

Save 1 c warm water and dissolve 1 tsp soda.

Sift together:
2.5 c sifted flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

Add to 1st mixture alternately with raisins’ liquid.
Add raisins. Bake in greased & floured cookie pan. Cool. Frost if desired and cut in squares

(Can use more than 1 pan. Spread dough with knife or spatula).

* I am going to assume the baking is at 350 until a toothpick comes dry. ~ 20 minutes to start checking?

Cadbury Creme Eggs My all-time favorite candy. I long for the days following Easter when they can be had for pennies on the dollar. Getting harder to find the “real” ones because of all the caramel/snickers versions. Speaking of which(not exactly) does anybody remember the SCTV skit that lampoons Grapes of Wrath (the movie, specifically) — instead of peaches, the grandpa is obsessed with chicken fried steak? I’m almost afraid to youtube it for fear it won’t live up to the memory.

Slim Jim. I have only tried them once – in high school – and am afraid to ever try again. Perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.

Best (storebought) cookie: This is a tie between:
1. Archway Vanilla Wafers (screw ‘Nilla Wafers)
2. Archway Windmill cookies (with the little nuts)

further … i think storebought is officially a single word in Perez family lingo. Growing up, we’d often get our school clothes from a combination of
1. hand me downs
2. garage sales
3. thrift stores
Over anything else, (royal) we would often choose garments based mostly on how “storebought” it looked as opposed to such silly things as:
1. “Fit”
2. “Style”
nowadays, I still catch myself commenting “looks storebought”

* this may be the last time I ever associate anything with my “real” name. I’m considering taking on an internet persona, but have yet to decide on my name. Early contenders are
1. Sparkle Motion
Ok, that’s as far as I got.

One that I set up for a yahoo! fantasy baseball league in my early twenties has stuck with me through all the years (not unlike the league itself), so much so that its user ID has even become my last.fm profile.

I’m not proud of the y and z twist, a choice driven by immediacy, flippancy, and ecstasy, but the overall concept was one that was big in my world view at the time — accident implied a normative otherness — and I appreciate the historic guidepost it provides for me to this day, not unlike a tattoo I suppose.

That, and yahoo! has been very good about minimizing spam.

So by a bit of happenstance (teehee) I lept from this friend’s enjoyable journey, to a link, to another that brought me to a kindred spirit: Koinzidenz. I’ll chalk it up to the wisdom of 51 years that gave him the konfidenz to leave out the Y.

It also has to do with the fact that I find history so much more interesting now than I did as a child. Youth is wasted on the young I suppose.

It was intriguing to learn that the Upper East Side of Manhattan was replete with coal-belching locomotives in the late 20th Century, and fun to be reminded that the man who founded my alma mater was one of the original robber barons.

Most compelling, though, was the ramifications of a fatal mishap in 1902, that was likely inevitable given the congestion of heavy steel running into the old terminal. The deaths led to a public outcry over safety, which fanned the dissent over the pollution spit out by the coal engines. The New York legislature acted quickly to ban coal engines’ entry into New York City, and forced the majors to go electric or to die. They went electric, and the new beautiful Grand Central was born, and the train service was never disrupted in the process.

I was amazed to see how quickly the captains of industry were forced to modify their bread and butter in the name of the public welfare–such a stark contrast to the tepid environmental regulations that have slodged through Congress in more recent history. One of the show’s historians said that it was useless for them to resist the teeming public sentiment, the socialist and populism clamor was a force too large to be reckoned with, and the railroad was lucky to get out with what it got.

This made me feel a bit envious, I’ll admit. Not since that gilded age have the wealthy and elite been so far removed from the rest of society as they are in this part of the 21st century. But where is our public outrage, our populist movement, and where is our yellow journalism calling for reform? Have the Rupert Murdochs simply done better than their forebears by convincing 5 x more Americans to pay more attention to last night’s American Idol than to its Super Tuesday results? Why is it that slightly better than half the voters, far from outraged or disgusted, buy into the notion that the free market will sort it all out?

Beats me. All I know is that this righteous indignation has made me hungry. I’m off to lunch at Grand Central, with other yuppies who get paid well doing the Man’s dirty work.

But, still, the algorithm works like magic–nary a request for cash from the NRA arrives, but rather far nobler requests for cash. The most recent delight spawned by its prescient demographic-tapping is the bargain rate offer for a National Geographic subscription. Best dollar-a-month purchase I’d made in some time. Until recently, my only experience with the magazine was as a porn-proxy back in grade school.

That grade school, incidentally, was recently the latest victim in a series of razings in my 800 person and counting prairie hometown that I may well never revisit. But this month’s issue of National Geographic provided a new kind of porn, a window into the world that I and countless others like me have left behind, for better or worse:

That’s the rub in rural North Dakota, a sense of things ebbing, of churches being abandoned, schools shutting down, towns becoming ruins. And all this decline exists amid a seeming statistical prosperity: Oil is booming, wheat prices are at record highs, and, as the average farm size grows, the land is studded with paper millionaires living in the lonely sweep of the plains, with surrounding community gone to the wind.

Mix in above order.
350° 1 hour + 10 minutes