Breaching The Web

I’ve never head of watermelon molasses before, and neither had Rachel Robinson before she ran across it in an old Lutheran cookbook and decided to try it. It doesn’t sound like anything I’ll be experimenting with anytime soon though:

Once cooled and in the jar (a one-quart yield exactly), the stuff had the purple-red depth of a massive garnet. The stink of the whole operation still clung to the air, a puzzling approximation of the invisible cloud of scent a big field of squash, beans, and tomatoes give off when baking in the August sun.

The watermelon molasses confounded me. It was highly sweet and didn’t taste or smell of watermelon but of overcooked monster patty-pan squash.

Burgerville (recently spotlighted by Girlhacker) rocks. One of the things I miss about Oregon is Burgerville’s marionberry shakes and walla walla sweet onion rings. Oddly enough, I’ve never eaten one of their burgers, but memories of those shakes and rings make me sweat.

Here’s something I really don’t understand: why are the same conservatives who reviled Clinton for his non-normative sexual behavior so enamoured of Schwarzenegger, in spite of his non-normative sexual past?

In Foul and Unbalanced Brian Morton takes on Bill O’Reilly, Fox News [sic] pundit.

Fox News Channel pundit Bill O’Reilly, unlike King, has become legendary not for the awards he has received, but for an award he hasn’t. O’Reilly is now notorious for publicly bragging about a journalism prize he never won on a program that aired after he left. What’s worse, now he’s on a rampage to either insist that he never made the original claim–but it’s a bitch when transcripts are all over the Internet–or to admit the truth while modestly correcting what he says was an error. Except there was no error–O’Reilly made a blanket claim that his show, Inside Edition, won the prestigious George Foster Peabody award for broadcast journalism, even though that claim was a flat-out lie. Inside Edition did win a George Polk award–but not until a year after O’Reilly left his spot as host of the show.

I really don’t understand the appeal this guy holds for people — he’s a mean, biased, creepy, nasty liar who is all flash and no content. What does he add to public debate that people like? I don’t get it.