It's the holidays, so expect at least some items about food...
This was passed on to my wife, she made it for us, and now (while I ponder the effects on my arteries, waistline, and longevity) I shall pass it on to you, dear reader:
Candied Maple Bacon
Line a rimmed baking sheet with heavy foil.
Cover with thick cut bacon. Do not overlap but get as much as possible on the sheet because it shrinks a lot.
Mix together 2 cups brown sugar and 2 tablespoons of dry mustard. Press it onto the bacon, covering it thoroughly.
Put the pan of bacon in a 275 degree oven for 45 to 60 minutes.
The bacon is done when it's very brown and shiny. Be careful so it doesn't burn.
Drain bacon on a brown paper bag or cookie rack, turning once. Blot with a towel if necessary.
Serve cold or room temp.
You can actually cook this at a little higher temp if you watch it very carefully, but it needs a long time to thoroughly caramelize.
This stuff is awesome. I'd even consider cutting up the bacon into two-inch lengths so it could be eaten like popcorn (though that's probably not the healthiest thing in the world). Cristi had to cook ours for an extra 20 minutes at 300 degrees, but she thinks that's because we wound up with too much glaze. On the plus side, if you wind up with excess glaze, it's delicious as well after it cools and sets up. If we make it again, we might try pouring it into candy molds and see if we can't make Maple Bacon "heart attack lozenges" or something. And need I remind you that eating unhealthy doesn't count if you do it over the holidays? True fact, look it up. :)
The Supernatural Anime has a new trailer, and it looks goooood. There aren't many anime I look forward to, as most of the time it's the narrative and dialogue that gets under my skin. But in this case, I think it works, and it's kind of counter-intuitive as to why, since it's an anime that involves demons. One of the biggest things I keep seeing in anime that even has a hint of magic in it is demons. It almost seemed a joke someone was pulling, since it looked like 99% of all monsters in anime are demons, half-demons (especially main characters), and even the cute chibi sidekick was actually some kind of minor demon. I suspect this is partially due to some lazy translation, that all mythical creatures generally get lumped into the big tent marked "demon." It's like watching fifty sci-fi movies and all but three of them call every alien race "Klingon."
I guess what this removes is the mythology a given story may (or may not) have. With "Supernatural," I'm already familiar with the setups and tools of the trade (salt, glyphs, the Colt .45, etc.) so, assuming they'll keep the same framework. What I'm hoping for is a tighter window of actions and solutions for the characters (and I realize how odd saying that about a series involving magic is) to help build suspense along with the super-crazy-scary visuals that anime does so well. And I may be a bit of a killjoy for this, but I really hope there are no cuts to a cartoony-looking Dean taking a thump to the head from a woman he's hitting on who happened to pull a club out of hammerspace.
It's finally here, the Steam holiday sale. Every 24 hours, some new temptation for your time and computer cycles comes up in a big ol' pile, and there's usually something for everyone. I got the wife hooked on Lumines (part of a five dollar pack that was on sale 'till noon on Tuesday) and, under the heavy advice of a friend of mine, for myself, I bought Deus Ex for three bucks. This game is still touted as the cyberpunk first-person shooter role-playing game, and it does feel like a William Gibson novel from the word go. It's quite complicated, offering multiple solutions to problems, and I get the impression that I'm shooting a lot more bad guys than I should for some tastes (your brother is a believer in non-lethal methods of dealing with evildoers). And this is just the first few missions in for me (having never played it before, in spite of all the signs that it's quite the well-made diversion). It's a little hard getting used to everyone looking like they're related to Kryten from Red Dwarf, but the writers get points for having a character deride you wearing the standard-issue cyberpunk black trenchcoat.
I guess that was a long way to say "Steam is after your money and they'll probably get it."
Turning to video games and (American) football, I had never heard of a thing called "The Madden Curse." It's apparently well-known enough that Electronic Arts wants to make a movie about it. Legend has it that if you appear on a Madden video game cover, you're doomed (kind of like the Superman Curse that abounded after the Man of Steel ran through a string of actors who met with misfortune).
There's also a movie in the works based on the Bakugan game. Or perhaps it's based on the anime based on the game. It looks like a fusion of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh to me, and appears to be one of those toy commercials concepts that really only makes even an iota of sense in animation. At least it's not Beyblade, right? What I find weird about these dueling games is that they always have the fate of the universe at stake, if not death/evil on a grand scale. Why are the governments of the world not securing these cards in decommissioned nuclear silos or in Antarctic vaults? It seems it'd be a safer course of action.
The basement is drying out, though there's still a smell of "musty" in the air. We've still got presents to wrap, even though Josh will probably just dive into the discarded paper and ribbon. I'm going to enjoy that, since it'll probably be the last Christmas I can't get his gift haul "wrong." In the future, we'll probably start fighting over who gets to play with his gifts first, especially if they need batteries and have flashing lights.
For those of you who got your shopping done early or have just given up on the whole thing, have some of these:
- The Spider-Man musical is on hiatus as the Actors' Equity Association is demanding an investigation into how safe the production is after several injuries, including a 30-foot fall.
- Remember Ms. Grundy from the comic book "Archie?" She's headed to that great big comic con in the sky.
- If you crochet and remember classic LucasArts point-n-click adventures, then why not craft something from 'Day of the Tentacle?'
- It's been a while since we had a tower defense game on the site, so here's Penguins Attack 3.
- Queuing up in stores (warning: Eddie Izzard) isn't just for the British you know, so here's an engineer explaining how to pick stores with faster moving lines at the registers.
- Here's a scary thought: ten percent of Warcraft players account for more than half of its playing time. Conversely, 90 percent of Warcraft players aren't getting their money's worth. :)
- First off, I have a copy of the issue they have pictured in this article about some of the weirder 'Sage Advice' questions Dragon Magazine has answered over time. I'm also betting a lot of these were from their April issues.
- Torrentfreak has compiled the most pirated films of 2010. I wonder if "The Hurt Locker" made the list by winning an Oscar, or if pirates were downloading it to spite them for all the lawsuits they've been filing over said piracy?
- A special Saul Bass-inspired Thor poster was given out to the cast and crew of the new Marvel movie.
- Stephen Moffat says a Doctor Who/Sherlock crossover will never happen. Well, of course not, since Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, unlike Davros.
- ControlCraft is kind of a side-scrolling military capture game. Each barracks you hold generates soldiers over time; send them out to capture more buildings to generate more soldiers while your opponent does the same.