It involves an argument over what to have for dinner. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it involves my favorite type of meat.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYisz-LQHPQ

Matt Blum of the Geek Dad blog, had a post about his recent experience making bacon pancakes and, since I’m a bacon aficionado, I thought I’d give it a try. My daughter was game, too, but we had to leave for a horse show at 7:45, so I had no choice but to get started early… on a Saturday, no less!

So I fried up a pound of brown sugar cured bacon. We didn’t eat the whole pound, but hey… I opened the package, so it might as well get cooked, huh? …there are worse things…

Having filled the kitchen with the spectacular aroma of bacony goodness, I went to work on the pancake batter. I will admit that I skimped on this part, as I used some Crusteaz pancake mix. Matt Blum made his from scratch and I will acknowledge his batter superiority, but hey… I was on a timeline here. I did, however, add a bit of the bacon grease to the batter for some extra flavor.

All that was left to do was griddle me up some pancakes! Taking Matt’s advice, and taking into consideration the ease of griddle cake flipping, I decided to tear a piece of bacon in half for each pancake instead of making a long, bacon-shaped pancake. It worked fairly well. I did three combinations.

1. Batter then bacon then more batter on top of the bacon
2. Bacon directly on the griddle topped with batter
3. At Megan’s suggestion, the inverse of the first version – Bacon on the griddle, topped with batter, topped with more bacon. (!!!)

Here is version #2 about to come off the griddle.

Megan got the first batch of two pancakes. She ate both of those and a small part of a third. I ate four of the #2 version. Nobody ate the one pancake that was version #3. We were both way too stuffed at that point.

Of course, pancakes aren’t complete without butter (real butter) and maple syrup (real maple syrup). Yes, Yes. I know there was already bacon in the pancakes and bacon grease in the batter (we added more for the second batch, by the way, because the batter didn’t have enough of a bacony flavor), but that doesn’t preclude adding butter. It’s a different category of fat. Now move along.

In retrospect, I think that they would be easier to eat if the bacon were cut into smaller pieces… perhaps squares. A more even distribution of bacon within the pancake would be a definite enhancement. That said, they were still awesome. Megan gave them a thumbs up.

After eating four of the pancakes, it was a long time before I was ready for lunch.

…and there is some bacon left over. Hmmm…

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

Denier Claim #1: Global warming isn’t happening. In fact, temperatures have been declining for the last 30 years.

Denier Claim #2: The temperature record is too unreliable to conclude that global warming is happening.

That’s classic denialism and a good example of how deniers will just parrot arguments they’ve heard without really giving them much thought or taking the time to get more in-depth information.

Of course, if they did that, they might not be deniers.

I had added the movie Waiting for Armageddon, a documentary about evangelical Christians who believe the end times are near. The resulting screen led me to add Fall from Grace, a documentary about the Westboro Baptist Church, Fred Phelps’ vehicle for spreading bigotry and hatred.

The resulting recommendation screen can be seen below. I scanned the results, paused, and laughed out loud when I got to the third movie in the second row (click to embiggen).

Yeah. If I was putting together a list of movies in the "More like Fall from Grace" category, I don’t think Brokeback Mountain would be on it.

I’m fairly certain it’s not a documentary, either.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qpUTNPsSUQ

(h/t to Thundy for the rotoscoping tips)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnB1KbioRlA

Since it’s summer, all my felt hats have been put away in storage and (almost) all my straw hats are out for the wearing. Montecristi Panama hats are my preferred headwear in the summer since they provide sun protection, are lightweight, and look good whether the situation calls for casual or dressy.

They are, however, not good in the rain. Since the weather forecast in Florida at this time generally includes an afternoon rainshower, I decided to take my Tilley T4 hat instead of one of my Montecristi Panamas because it can get soaking wet with no ill effects.

Other than its water indifference, the Tilley also provides better back-of-the-neck sun protection than most of my Montecristis, so overall, it was probably a pretty good choice. What I did notice, however, is that the Montecristis are signficantly cooler (from a temperature standpoint) than the Tilley. Cotton duck versus toquilla straw evidently makes a big difference.

Not that the Tilley didn’t serve me well, but as it turns out, we didn’t get caught in a single rainstorm the entire trip, so my concern about ruining a hat ended up being a moot point. So I sweated a bit more, but got better sun protection on my neck.

Generally speaking, I’ll pick a Montecristi over any other hat in the summer unless I’m doing something that will potentially beat the crap out of it. The Tilley is perfect for just such cases.

It’s all about the tradeoffs.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AAa0gd7ClM

Megan has been riding around the neighborhood a lot lately, up and down our hills… for hours with her friends. I, on the other hand, have not. We went about nine miles and she would have gone farther, but after we hit the 4.5 mile marker on our way out and she said, “Should we go to the next one?” I declined, so we turned around and headed back to our starting point to complete our nine-mile “out and back” ride.

For those who know me, nine miles of bike riding is practically unthinkable for me… at least for the past decade or so. For Megan, it seems that it’s no longer a big deal.

I think that’ll be good for me.