happy birthday.

he turned 28 on the 28th. aww.

i have baked him a cheesecake. it is cooling on the kitchen counter.

8 oz cream cheese
8 oz part-skim ricotta cheese
2 eggs
1 t vanilla extract
1/4 scant c white sugar

beat the cream cheese and eggs together. scrape down the bowl. beat in the ricotta and vanilla. keep beating until it's as smooth as you can get it. beat in the sugar.

put a layer of berries on the bottom of a prepared crust (he likes the nabisco oreo cookie crusts. this is an 8" crust, so i had some extra batter). pour the batter on top.

bake at 325 F for 1 hour. you can use a water bath if you're worried about it cracking. the neat thing about this cake is that the berries are a surprise. you can't see them until it's cut.

redundant irritation.

i'm sure this had been said before, but it's irritating me.

we recently switched cars. after plugging numbers into excel, it turns out that we actually save abut $20 a month if he drives the diesel and i drive the regular car. the higher miles-per-gallon efficiency of the diesel actually offsets the higher cost in fuel.

this higher efficiency is further enhanced by the fact that most (if not all) gasoline sold today is up to 10% ethanol. now. it's stupid to begin with to turn food into fuel for vehicles. but this stupidity is compounded by the fact that ethanol is actually less energy efficient than pure gasoline, causing your car to actually burn more fuel than it would if they weren't putting ethanol in it. which means more gas in general, as well as more corn going into our cars' engines and not into people's bellies. at least biodiesel doesn't affect the efficiency of diesel engines.

what load of brain surgeons thought this one up?

for discussion.

barak obama's successful call for change would not have succeeded without the howard dean's presidential campaign of 2004.

think about it: both men successfully mobilized a huge mass of internet-enabled young people to start a grassroots swelling.

since dean's seemingly radical campaign, we've had four years of bush, four more years of war, and a tanking economy. obama, wearing a similar claim to being a washington outsider, comes along. he's got a similar message. this time people listen.

besides timing, what is the main difference? obama is much less emotional, he is a better speaker (both of which translate to more media savvy), and in general, a career politician from midwest has more widespread appeal than a doctor turned politician from new england.

discuss.