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All posts for the month January, 2015

I find a lot of people who don’t like guacamole, but then eat gobs of the guac I make. So, here is my dirty, secret recipe.

2-3 mostly ripe avacados
2T dehydrated chopped onions (I prefer the McCormick ones)
1.5oz lemon juice
salt to taste, ~1/2tsp

Halve and scrape out the avacados, them mash them up. Mostly ripe is key – better not quite ripe than overly ripe.

Put the dehydrated chopped onions and lemon juice in a microwave-proof cup and microwave them for about 20 seconds, twice. This will reconstitute them – puff them back up. They need to be fully puffed, so hit them again if necessary.

Mix reconstituted onion flakes into mashed avacados and mix well.

Add salt to taste.

There you go. Basic, Mexican guacamole. No fancy flavors, no tomatoes (yikes, tomatoes always turn me off), nothing. The big secret is using the lemon juice to reconstitute the onions. I don’t even remember when I first started making it this way, but it works.

I guarantee you will like it. Add whatever you want, if you are one of those TexMex types. We Mexico-Mexican types will enjoy it plain, thank you.

The trend to moving content away from text and toward video is exploding, and it’s been driving me crazy for a while. Last night, I finally realized why.

I am a reader, but that isn’t it.

I’m not a watcher, but that isn’t it.

What it is a control thing. When I read a report or news story, I control how I internalize the content. I control the rate, the flow, and many other factors. I can gloss over parts that I deem unimportant or fluffy and reread the parts I want to dive into. I can process the prose and get it. I can jump ahead when I want to and pick out the bits that really make the piece work and enjoy them. It’s fun and involving to read a story. Time flies.

With video, I have to wait. First, the splash screen. Then the intro. Then the obligatory introduction of the host. Then who knows what else. And the story? Well, good luck with that. The presenter has control, and I don’t have the chance to internalize it, just to watch it and hope I can get what I need from it. I figure that out of every two-minute news clip on (news site of your choice), less than half of the time is actual reporting. The credits are always at the end, too. I like the credits and they are important to me.

But more important to me is my time. And I’m wasting it when I try to watch video news.

That’s it. Just a random musing about how I process content. I guess it’s also why I have trouble with internet news lately. Everything is a link to time-wasting video.