I might tone it down when my vision returns after staring at my screen for the last few hours trying to figure out the css declarations.

I read some food blogs recently and I noticed they all have extreme close-up pictures of their food. So here I am, carrying my coffee and muffins into the backyard with my camera. Then waiting for JT Dancer to walk past the barn so I can get him in the background. But instead of a gray horse, I only saw this mud monster.

The trick is to get the food in focus, but have a portion of it out of focus, preferably in the corner of the frame.

By the way, the muffins were delicious.

Strawberry Muffins Forever

First you put on some Beatles. Despite the name of these muffins, pre-psychedelic Beatles are best for baking. I'm thinking Rubber Soul or Revolver.

Adapted from Pillsbury Best Muffins and Quick Breads.

Ingredients

• 2 cups flour


• 1/2 cup sugar (note: I've been using 1/2 sugar 1/2 Splenda with no problems)


• 3 teaspoons baking powder


• 1/2 teaspoon salt


• 3/4 cup soymilk


• 1/3 cup oil


• 1 egg, beaten


• 1 cup chopped strawberries (chop them small; I reckon I'm getting 16-24 pieces per strawberry)


• 2 tablespoons sugar (this is to sprinkle on top. I used regular sugar rather than my 1/2 1/2 mix mentioned above. It seems like it would crust and caramelize better)

Heat the oven to 400 Spray muffin tins with cooking spray. Get two bowls. Sift the dry ingredients together in one bowl. Mix the wet ingredients together in the other bowl and add to the dry ingredients. Mix together lightly until the ingredients are just moistened. Do not overmix. Add the chopped strawberries and stir them in gently. Using an ice cream scooper fill up the muffin cups with the batter. Sprinkle the sugar over the tops.

Bake at 400 for 20-24 minutes until a knife poked in the middle comes out clean. Let them cool for a minute. I usually pull out the bottoms so that each muffin rests on their side while they cool. Otherwise they might get soggy in spots.

I was pleasantly surprised when I finished the installation because

1. The whole works didn't crash like last time.


2. The Media Manager plugin I had painstakingly installed and tinkered with just two months ago is now fully functional and seems to be automatically included with the MT4.1 package.


3. Spell checking is enabled, even in my asset descriptions.

If you are interested in Movable Type and template code for using Amazon assets, read on. If not, then just enjoy my witty and insightful mini-reviews.

What to order:

Veggie lasagna: it's made with that tangy sauce. It will fill you up. Fill up on the complimentary bread and you'll have enough lasagna to bring home.

Veggie muffaletta: eggplant and roasted red pepper. I like it with either the pasta salad or the house lettuce and olive salad mix. Great for lunch. I get the quarter muff, the half is still too big for me.

Eggplant parmesan poboy: good for something different if you've burned out on the above two.

Another Broken Egg is the newest in a long line of brunch places that Baton Rougeans flock to like impatient geese. You would think there would be a saturation point for the brunch market. How can it be that every eggery in the city has 30 minute waits on Sunday morning?

Well unlike most places that depend on their bloody marys and mimosas to keep the masses satiated, Another Broken Egg does it with good food. Here's a concept: they actually can cook eggs--none of them over-cooked smells-like-a-wet-dog omelets here. The menu is huge, so you are sure to find something to your liking, even if it is all a variation on the same theme. Bach did it with Goldberg! Why not with eggs?

What to order:

huevos rancheros: eggs, tortillas, and refried beans with salsa and guacalole. filling and well executed.

hey ricky! omelet: a veggie spanish omelet

veggie benedict: a hollandaise themed variation for us vegetarians. There's also a veggie benedict involving hollandaise, spinach and fried artichoke hearts that was good, but I can't find it on the online menu, which is probably outdated.

blackberry grits: grits that come with a side of blackberries. spoon them on top for a sweet and savory treat

What not to order:

grits and grillades: yeuck!

Through the years, other albums provoked similar astoundment. But as I grew older, it seemed these treasures were fewer and fewer between. Perhaps the problem is I don't have buddies pointing me toward new music like I used to...nobody's storming into my room with a new album he heard about from someone down the hall.

It's easy to think that as we age, we will never find any good new music. So we fill our mp3 players with the same music that we remember we liked. But all it takes is sense of curiosity and a willingness to explore. Eventually the joy of discovery will return.

Thank goodness for the internet: custom playlists, internet radio, recommendations and what-not. The tools are there for us.

Here are some recent gems I brought back from the wilds:

• Gogol Bordello: Gypsy punk. Eastern European cousin of The Pogues.
• Ted Leo + the Pharmacists: Great jogging music.
• The National (Alligator): A little moody but not too dark. The lyrics keep it interesting.
• Levon Helm (Dirt Farmer): Levon might be setting up a Johnny Cash style comeback.
• The Decemberists: That "baroque" indie pop I've been reading about.

I hope I'm not leaving anyone out. Oh wait. I guess you're wondering about that album cover.

I made a playlist with some music I thought sounded like Vampire Weekend: selections from Paul Simon's Graceland; some Talking Heads; David Byrne; the "riddim" experiments of The Clash, King Sunny Ade. I guess that explains the world music part. But there's also a bit of that baroque pop thing I keep reading about (see above).

This band seems to cause extreme reaction one way or the other. Even though they hardly have their first album out, there's already some Vampire Weekend backlash. My boss saw them on Saturday night Live last week and told me they were terrible. "They don't have any testosterone! They don't even have any estrogen!" I admit that they are not winning over any fans playing live with their weekend-at-the-Hamptons threads. But being that I've listened to the album nearly everyday this month, I've got to give them some credit.

In The Wall, two aging rock climbers return to the site of their biggest glory, Yosemite's El Capitan, to reclimb a route they first pioneered in their youth. Both are hounded by the wreckage of their personal lives: one is a widower and the other is on the verge of divorce. They think that on this multi-day climb up 3000 feet, on the knife's edge of life and death, they will rediscover the meaning in their shattered lives.

Of course, things start off badly before they even get off the ground. A group of women climbers on a neighboring route have an accident, and the men's mission is threatened with being caught up in the rescue.

Long does a good job with the intricacies and technique of rock climbing. Some passages virtually made me dizzy with vertigo while others left me white-knuckled and clutching my steering wheel. The plot is well suited to the setting, with the tension ratcheting tighter as the climb progresses. Just about everything that could go wrong happens, often in unexpected ways, the way good thrillers should.

But ultimately, the ending is a bit of a let down. As what happened when I read one of Long's earliest novels (The Ascent, which is set on Mount Everest), the ending seemed to come out of nowhere, betraying the potential of what was being set up. I wondered if I missed a CD.

Even given that, I would still recommend The Wall to any fans of adventure sports, just so they don't mind being left hanging at the end.

"Shoot the gap!"

"Zoom zoom zoom"

"Go go gadget copter!"

"Get your motor running, head out on the highway..."

"I'm bringing home a baby bumblebee."

"When you can drive a truck, you got a job my friend"

1. Who is ultimately to blame for the Newlywed Game debacle?


2. Do delusions of grandeur suppress the narrator's ability to freely admit to finding pleasure in "low-brow" delights?


3. What does the narrator learn?


4. In what ways does the narrator differ from the songwriter, Mike Waugh?


5. Does the song require more verses or is it perfect as is, like a snapshot into the soul of mankind?


6. Is it possible to sing of a "furrowed brow" without actually furrowing one's brow?

Lyrics:

I couldn't believe what you said,
When we were on that game show for newlyweds.
You got every question about me oh so wrong.

You guessed (quite incorrectly)
That Superfreak was my favorite song
And my favorite junk food was chili dogs.

I couldn't understand.
I thought you were thinking of another man.
And I scowled with a furrowed brow on the flight back home.

But it was only after two weeks
I found myself dancing to Superfreak
And happily enjoying a sloppy chili dog.

So now I think I see
That you understand me
More than I think I know myself.

Infoblog has three main features:

• Website of the month


• Search hint of the month (how to find something using a website or database)


• Online resource of the month (like a new database)

I used Wordpress's free hosting service to put it together, which I chose over Blogger. I like Wordpress's interface better. Also, you don't have to wait for Wordpress to publish its pages. The biggest trade-off is not being able to edit the style sheets. Someone posted this handy comparison chart: Blogger vs. Wordpress.

It was in this spirit that I accepted my brother-in-law's invitation to ride bikes on the Tammany Trace. The Tammany Trace is a rails-to-trails conversion on the north shore of Lake Pontratrain--31 miles of car-free pavement that connects Covington and Abita Springs to Slidell.

I had a cruiser type bike with plastic pedals, while my brother and his wife took turns shunning their old persnickety mountain bike in favor of their new bike, a Christmas gift. We started in the middle of the trail at Mandeville Trailhead (which had a little Saturday morning arts and crafts market going on) and headed north toward Abita Springs and Covington. The scenery was mostly pine trees with people's backyards just beyond them. But what the scenery lacked, the blue sky and mild weather made up for. We were going fast enough to pass the joggers and some of more leisurely bikers, while the hard-core lycra bikers shot past us as if the hellhounds of Lance Armstrong were chasing them.

We did the 11.5 miles in an hour. We retraced our path back to the Abita Brew Pub, where I ate a hearty portabello sandwich. We wandered around Abita Springs to let the food settle. The public park there was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, nearly two and half years later, with trees blocking what looked to be a former nature walk, and the Abita Springs gazebo still under construction. But Abita Springs still has a lot of charm. In another life, it would be a good place for Mike Waugh's World Music Cafe.

Our pace back to Mandeville was a bit more leisurely, and we made the whole trip in four hours.

Bikes are available for rent at the Mandeville Trailhead. I'll definitely be returning this spring to check out the other half of the trail going toward Slidell.

I threw together this quick test to see if I too can join the YouTube generation. And before you criticize me, let me point out this video's shortcomings:

1: My head is partially cut-off.
2. I'm shooting right into the bright light of the morning sun thus obscuring the rest of my body. In good lighting the camcorder shoots a surprisingly clear image.
3. My voice launches into a falsetto twice briefly.

Problems 1 and 2 I will fix in the future. As far as the falsetto...although it was unexpected, I have come to terms with it.

I've recently been intrigued with the concept of digiscoping, wherein you slap a digital camera onto the end of a scope's viewfinder. I don't think my camera is quite up to snuff on this one, but I tried anyway.

I spotted a great blue heron in a tree above the pond just beyond the horse pasture. The focus was terrible, but one of them is so bad that it came out like an impressionist painting.

I decided to upgrade the behind-the-scenes software here, and it pretty much broke everything. All the templates didn't match up and the archives were completely fubar. So I let it sit for a month until I finally had a whole day to devote to its revival. Things still aren't like I'd like, but it's enough for me to start posting again, just in time for the New Year. Hopefully over time I'll be able to move the furniture around and find some fresh window treatments. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get the book and media reviews back on track in the near future.