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However, recipes for most of my dinners would be stunningly uninteresting, because they're just variations on stir-fry, or sausage, pork chops, chicken legs, or chicken breast with some kind of vegetable. My procedure for the latter is:
As for stir-fry, after several years of trial and error, I've come up with the same general method as outlined in any ordinary cookbook, except that I use an ordinary skillet instead of a wok, because the proliferation of special-purpose kitchen gadgets fills me with rage. Also I'm cheap. I notice that the ordinary people pictured in 101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions don't seem to use woks very much either.
The main trouble with stir-frying with a skillet is that stuff spills over the edge rather easily, unless you cook only one serving at a time, which is madness. I've developed a method which is fairly effective, where I do a careful tour of the edge of the pan, spreading the contents, and when I get to the back, I turn over some reasonable quantity toward the centre of the pan, which in practice tends to send any spillover to the sides instead of over the front of the stove and onto the floor. A few repetitions of this eventually exposes even the most high-piled ingredients to the hot oil at the bottom. The same goes for adding soy sauce or other stuff at the end; the chaotic properties of the stretching-and-folding operation ensure that things get thoroughly mixed.
Lately, it's been seeming to me that learning anything about the support libraries at a software company is like joining the AV club in elementary school. You go a to a special class for an hour or so one day, and ever afterwards, years later, there you are, threading the film into the projector. Similarly, show up for one presentation on a memory allocator, and you're marked for life.
I got there in plenty of time, and while the theatre was filling up I saw a substantial fraction of The Mysterians, in which plucky Earth soldiers and scientists must combat sinister aliens who can scratch the film negative and thus destroy nearly anything. It isn't until the defenders figure out how to shift to another layer of optical processing that the tide begins to turn.
I was braced to sit through 3 or four bad-movie classics of the '50s and '60s, but the organizers realized that that would be an exercise in masochism, and the main program was all short subjects or excerpts, including not just science fiction but news clips, training films, and the now-freakishly unpersuasive advertising of the 16-millimetre era. It reminded me of some Reg Hartt shows I went to in Toronto, except that they don't take it nearly as seriously.
Most memorable for me were the cartoons. Ub Iwerks's "Balloonland" (or something like that) had its inflatable main characters and their inflatable home town menaced by the Pincushion Man. Max Fleischer's "Betty Boop for President" ended with a shot of a beer glass that seemed to come out of nowhere until the presenter explained in the break that this might have been created during Prohibition. An unusual Popeye cartoon featured Bluto and Popeye trying to injure themselves to secure the attentions of nurse Olive Oyl, in which effort Popeye finally succeeds by feeding Bluto spinach.
These were actually good cartoons, and it's worth mentioning that they were created with the expectation that adults would get something out of them. I think even the Popeye cartoons started out that way. Other cartoons were memorable for... other reasons.
There was an episode of Space Angel, which had the basic problem that the character designs were simply not practical to animate. I'm pretty sure about this, because as soon as Scott McCloud, Crystal, and Taurus are off the screen, there's a perfectly normally-animated sequence where a goofy-looking bad guy sneaks in and replaces the Macguffin with a fake one. The main characters had essentially no animation whatsoever, aside from paper-doll-like manipulations of cut-outs, and the infamous Synchro-Vox. I remember seeing an episode of this on TV and thinking, "You know, I don't think much of this, and I'm only 8, so this must be really bad."
Before that there was a mind-blowingly dumb episode of Milton the Monster, in which Milton and other monsters look for a sunken treasure in Professor Weirdo's moat. There is some actually half-decent dialogue, but the plot is nearly non-existent. But if you needed to be persuaded that your fond memories of Saturday morning were coloured by nostalgia, supplemented by imagination, and distorted by youthful lack of experience, you've never watched Cartoon Network.
There seems to be more to say about bad cartoons than good ones, I guess because there are more defects to pick at.
There was an episode of Howdy Doody, a TV series I don't think I'd ever seen before. It was actually just a frame story around another piece of animation, stop-motion puppets at an amusement park. Actually this may have been one of George Pal's "Puppetoons", but I'm not sure.
On the live-action side, there were several "Scopitone" clips, essentially music videos on film that played in jukebox-style machines in the '60s, featuring girls! girls! girls! "Queen of the House" was my favourite of those, largely because it was less frenetic than the standard.
I was surprised to have seen one item before, "The Haunted Mouth", a film by the American Dental Association, where the anonymous "you" confronts the sinister invisible B. Plaque, who has gotten bored with how easy it is to decay people's teeth, and so to make it more interesting, teaches them how to brush and floss.
Afterwards I picked up DVDs of Ernie Fosselius's "Hardware Wars" and "Porklips Now", which the creator was selling at a table outside the theatre, and made my way home, rather thankful for the Headlight of Doom since a fair percentage of roads in that part of Los Altos don't have any streetlights.
