LOTR Frodo Goblet

I just made one of my famous fruit smoothies this evening, and am enjoying it from my LOTR Frodo Goblet (circa 2001). And then had a thought that I would post it as my Facebook status, along with the recipe.

And then I had another thought: Go ahead and post it on your blog that no one reads so you can keep it handy for archival purposes and later reference when you have forgotten how to make it again at the beginning of next summer.

Thus, the topic of this blog post. Here we go.

First off, get your blender ready. Make sure its clean from all the pancake gook that was sitting in it three days ago from your roommate’s experiments in the kitchen.

Next, fill the blender with precisely six (6) ice cubes of medium density. It must not be four(4)  or five (5), but six (6) shall be the number of ice cubes you fill the blender. Seven (7) is one (1) ice cube too many, thus the number shall be six (6), and six (6) alone.

Now you must get a banana. Be sure to peel the banana the right way, from the bottom up. I would not recommend making the smoothie without following this crucial step. Put the innards of the banana in the blender with the six (6) ice cubes.

Grab an apple. Doesn’t matter if its red or green, or yellow or a mixture of both. Just as long as its not brown. Or wormy. No one likes worms in their famous fruit smoothies. Here, you have a choice on how you do this, but I would recommend putting the apple in the blender in pieces as opposed to just throwing the whole thing in there. I prefer to use my handy dandy knock off apple wedger (here’s the real original product from years ago) to cut the apple into eight (8) nifty wedges without the core. Or you can just use a regular knife and cut the apple up by hand. Put the pieces in the blender with the banana innards and six (6) ice cubes.

Look in your freezer for your bag of frozen strawberries. Or if its the season, try looking in your fridge for your fresh hand-picked strawberries. Place five (5) (not six (6)!) strawberries in the blender with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, and eight (8) apple wedges.

Now open your refrigerator and take out your orange juice. At least that is where I hope you store your orange juice. That is where I store mine. I would imagine if might taste pretty nasty if you kept it anywhere else for any length of time. Pour the orange juice into the blender with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries until it fills about three-fourths (3/4) the amount of blender already filled. Note: this is not three-fourths (3/4) of the entire blender, but instead three-fourths (3/4) the amount of space already taken up in the blender by the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries.

Put the blender on its stand, ensuring that it is fully situated in its base and ready for operation.

Lastly, turn on the blender. If your blender has an Ice Crush feature, I would recommend using it at this point to crush up the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice. At some point when you feel that the blender is ready, you can try putting it on Smoothie mode, and let it run.

If the blender freezes up and does not spin the crushed six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice, turn the blender off. Try shaking the blender and put it back on its stand. Turn the blender back on again. If this continues to happen repeatedly, try adding more orange juice in the blender along with the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, and five (5) strawberries.

Let the blender run for a couple minutes on the Smoothie setting. Once the six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice seem like they are sufficiently smoothieized, get out your favorite LOTR goblet and pour the smoothie made up of six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries and orange juice into the awesome collectable.

Finally, sit back, kick up your feet and enjoy this awesome and famous fruit smoothie made up of six (6) ice cubes, banana innards, eight (8) apple wedges, five (5) strawberries, and orange juice in a LOTR goblet. You’ll be thanking me all summer long.

P.S. A LOTR goblet is purely optional, if you have another drinking recepticle you would prefer to use, you have my permission to utilize such a lower form of recipticles if you so choose.

Tonight I decided to update my Wordpress plugins. So, each of my plugins are now officially compatible with Wordpress 2.7(.1). Please take a look at some of the new features and such of each of them.

• p2pConverter (0.8)
• Status Press Widget (1.11 1.12)
• Customizable Search Widget (1.2.1)

(Author’s Note: This post was inspired by a comment on Lifehacker asking which was better when it came to Facebook friends: Quanity or Quality? I personally prefer quality, however, you can’t always enforce that easily)

If you are like me, then you have a Facebook profile (along with most everyone else on the internet in the world) and you have Add as a Friend request from people that you either don’t know, or do not care about. It is these requests that caused me at one point to think twice about adding them. Why? Because I am a quality type of guy when it comes to Facebook friends, and I did not necessarily want everyone who wanted to be my virtual friend to have access to personal information about me (cell phone number, address, current employer, etc).

But I have been burned by people who were offended for denying their request or, doing like I used to do and just keep their request in limbo and not make a decision (which Facebook still allowed them to see your basic profile anyway, and of course they will know eventually if you are not ever among their friends). However, I discovered a way to not offend these people and eat my cake too. Its all about combining the Friends List feature and customizing your Privacy Settings.

1. Login to Facebook if you have not done so already
2. Click Friends in the Top Menu (left side)
3. Create a New Friends List (left sidebar) called Acquaintances (or whatever you want)
4. Add any current friends you do not want to be able to see all the info on your profile
5. Click Privacy Settings under the Settings tab in the Top Menu (right side)
6. Click Profile
7. Click the drop-down of any of the groups you don’t want these people to see (i.e. Personal Info, Photos Tagged of You, Status updates, etc)
8. Click Customize
9. In the “Except These People” textbox, type Acquaintances (or whatever your new friends list name is)
10. Now any of the sections that you don’t want these people to have access to, they will not be able to see
11. From now on, whenever you get an Add Friend request from a person you don’t really know, quickly add them to the Acquaintances list before confirming them.

If you ever want one of these persons to have access to your info, go back to your friends list and remove them.

This technique is extremely useful for limiting what those people see about you, however, it does not limit what you see about them. Remember, they can still message you, chat with you, and interact with you via certain third part Facebook applications. However, I have found that it is annoying to still see status and news feed updates about these people that I don’t really care about. I do wish that Facebook allowed you to exempt Friends Lists from the News Feeds.

I hope this little tutorial has helped keep your frienders happy and eat your cake too!

While reading Mere Christianity, I came across this quote which reminded me of our current state in the nation.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended–civilisations are built up–excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. In fact, the machine conks. It seems to start up all right and runs a few yards, and then it breaks down. They are trying to run it on the wrong juice.

-Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis.

CERN is testing their 17-mile long Large Hadron Collider on Wednesday, an experiment that could destroy earth from the inside out in four years. Hmm… four years… 2008 + 4 = 2012 which also happens to be the last year on the Mayan Calendar, a year many traditions hold to be the end of life as we know it. Could the two be correlated? Could Doomsday really be up us?