News You Can Bruise for 2005 December 6

I made a batch of peanut brittle yesterday and it turned out pretty well. However I still have many peanuts left, and I have gotten no requests for peanut brittle except for the one from Susanna, who is already going to get peanut brittle from Brian. If this keeps up I will have to start foisting peanut brittle on people. Foist!

More things I thought of, in decreasing order of me actively wanting them rather than them just being nice to have. The top one is a lot more important now that I've finally set up recording on my computer. Last night I made up a song about House for Sumana and we recorded it w/Audacity, just like that.

• Cheap MIDI keyboard. Though one with a plain 1/4" output jack would probably work too.
• Small cheap digital camera (so it's not a big deal when I drop it and break it), or small hardy digital camera (so it won't break when I drop it).
• Small pressure cooker
• Noise-cancelling headphones
• Small deep fryer

A couple things about eggnog. I found out from John that the eggnog you buy at the store is supposed to be diluted. Specifically it's supposed to be diluted with booze, but you can dilute it with milk, so long as you dilute it with something. My whole life I've been drinking concentrated eggnog. This explains a lot about my relationship with eggnog.

Before I learned the truth about eggnog I was planning to make some homemade eggnog to see if that was any better (I still am, actually). One thing that occured to me when looking at the recipes is that the ingredients for eggnog are exactly the same as the ingredients for ice cream. So you could make the eggnog ice cream that John loves so much just by pouring eggnog into an ice cream maker. But then I saw an episode of Good Eats where the exact same thing happened, so I can't take the credit for that idea.

I redid the House song mentioned yesterday with a drum track, and got Sumana to lay down some backup vocals. Here it is: House, M.D.. Includes bonus Stacy's Mom backup vocals joke, because we're still in love with Stacy's Mom (I like songs where people try to justify their unethical or socially frowned-upon behavior, which actually explains this song too). It sounds better than any song I've produced to date, but don't let that fool you; it's actually sillier and more pointless than the majority of my songs.

Incidentally, the drum machine I'm using is Hydrogen, which is wonderful. All it's missing is a cursor that shows you what part of the song it's playing. Also it would be nice to have a little tool that shoves all your note events over one sixteenth note because you designed the whole measure a little bit off.