RandySmiley.COM ???

I wish I were Samuel Clemens.
I wish I were Will Rodgers.
I wish I were Michael Maltese.
I wish I were George Carlin.
I wish? I wish? I wish I were a fish. NO!
From Douglas Adams to P.G. Wodehouse, these are all such funny personalities of men I admire, and hope to be just a little bit like.  I wish, honestly now, that I was a professional humorist/writer, that you actually could enjoyed reading.

Now thanks to the Obama Party Crashers, we’re having to examine our own narcissism today, or at least we should. I joke frequently about myself and my own narcissism, that I sure hope that I’m not Daffy Duck! But I know I do this (blogging), I am Daffy Duck, in many more ways than I want to admit. Still from Balloon Boy to Party Crashers, it’s a heck of a year for the narcissists, and their dreams of reality show bliss?   What?

I don’t know why anybody would want celebrity today, I really don’t?  I love being a nobody!  I love being invisible, like some  magic super hero.  I hate when people run me down, and bump into me, just for forgetting and going shopping while invisible.  I do that every once in a while, I don’t know why?

“Stealth Man goes to Home Depot, to get jabbed by 2×4′s, and screw drivers; Is it his guilty pleasure, or just bad timing?  He’s retained renown power attorney Glorpy Teabag, so it is believe to be a secret obsession; TMz reports.”   See, there is why I wouldn’t want celebrity today- at all, for any reason.  But history teaches us, that most writers need not loose sleep over that.  It’s never going to happen!  Yeah right, somebody noticing the writer, and making a fuss over them; only in their screenplays.

Throw all these nutball wannabes in JAIL!  Except me, of coarse: I’m too pretty for jail!

PS: Holy CRAP, all these guys are dead- Suddenly, I want my wish back!

I suddenly realized that I really, really, have to preface this: This blog is driven by WordPress, and you are looking at one of the “Themes” right now, that I’m about to complain about. I know; Bitch, bitch, bitch! I try not to, but sometimes they make it too hard.

WordPress Themes are frustrating and annoying.  I have yet to install a theme that worked perfect right off the download.  This is a HUGE SETBACK, to a really great blog system!  It’s not the blogs fault, it’s the  independent theme makers.  How can I recommend this for you, when I as a programmer have to dig in elbow deep, and fix every (theme) I download?

Here we are in heart of the holidays, and most of the best themes for Christmas don’t even show up.   How do you find them then?  I found most of them searching for ‘Red’ themes- no kidding Red themes.

The one I settled on here, is a Victorian Christmas Theme.  Still though, I had to get rid of the code that pulls up TAGS (at the top of the page), one of the most useless features of WordPress, once they are rarely used.  Categories are far more important, and Pages even more so.  To converting that box area for those was going to take some research time, I just was not willing to invest right now, so I just did away with all that code.  Just deleted it.  Then the description of the blog was in the body of the blog, and that’s just so wrong, I had to move it up into the header where it belongs, which took a lot of tweaking.  Half these themes leave it completely out, which is even more annoying.  Next Pages can have comments, but not the way the theme was written, so that had to be tweaked too.  This is far from a perfect theme.  I see that the side-bar is screwin the pooch too, and basically ignoring my setup, but I just don’t have time to learn everything about WordPress right now, so I can live with it.

Well, if it’s so screwed up, then why am I using it?  Because it was the best looking one I found, in spite of it’s faults.  Still I will be happy to get back to my altered version of Redline again.  Redline was almost perfect, but needed to be widened.   It’s just not the most stylish theme, I’ve ever seen.  But it is the one, that seems to understand the engine software best, and takes as much advantage of it as it should.

I think what it is that really grinds my bones is that it’s like; Merry Forkin Christmas to you hack!  I ain’t Jesus, you gotta earn it.  Oh, just so fitting to the season in this age, ya know? And it’s way to girly, but what you gonna do for something seasonal?

UPDATE: When I noticed my Donate button was gone, that was the last straw! Maybe Christmas week, you’ll see that theme again- not before!

Alright, alright, alright! This is part of my on going series about blogging. And making your own good blogs, that people will want to visit and read.

Every professional cartoonist complains, that the very hardest thing to teach students is the most important thing to teach art students- damnit! You must convey character. Take for example a role call. Everybody stands up right, while one guys must lean on a stick, while another is late to get in line, another crosses his feet and dips his head. A prime example is Disney’s Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, where each dwarf had a personality to match their name. Doing this visually, is actually easier than doing it with words. Still it is a GRAND ART that you must master for your entertainment to be, well, er, ah, pardon the redundancy, entertaining.

Following the Crowd Art Print 24 in. x 18 in.
Buy at AllPosters.com
Framed   Mounted

Saturday Night Live, spends a lot of time on stupid recurrent character development, and formula time fillers, before you get to the bands, and Weekend Update- the only real reason you watch. Ironically the Blues Brothers were not a feature, but a pre-show warm up act, that they made a movie about, which then became a feature to promote the movie. This was the foundation of the Saturday Night Live formula, along with Rosanna Rosanna Danna, and the Coneheads.

You must bring this same sort of thing to your Blogging. Your opinions are not that interesting, without some pizzazz! Here before the world at large, you must be a showman. So the very fist thing to remember is that pure YOU is dull boring stuff. That doesn’t mean that you have to be disingenuous to your reader, and totally fake it all. It just means that you must make it it it it it it, ah, colorful.

There are some people who just don’t get it, on why what I say in one blog might not even be close to what I actually believe. It’s about writing in character. Creating a personality and a persona. And wearing another’s lice infested hat for a while. Here at RandySmiley.com, I’m a nice guy, that I’m certainly not in person. I don’t know why, but I like to trip young athletic guys with my cane? However on my political blog, I let it rip, and let evil Randy tear it up, with fighting words not fit to print. It’s all in the hat your wearing at the time.

Class? Class! Now that we are done ignoring my lecture, here’s your assignment: First write a couple of paragraphs exaggerating your own shyness and fear of speaking in pub-blic! Then, do it again as the extrovert class clown- you know, like that’s going to happen? That’s your assignment in becoming a better blogger this week. Who are you, and what are your really trying to say, when and where? Now does any body know where I left my damn reading glasses, so I can proof read this before postering-ating-ating? Oh silly me, here they are on the top of my head.

So what happened to Software and Services, that I promised you? Frankly, this was more important at the moment. I get the feeling that Software and Services is still 2 lectures off, but we’ll see? Do your assignment, and think about how to exaggerate who and what you are, to be MORE entertaining. Be expressive. Be SOMEBODY!

Focaccia is a German bread, pronounced FuknFieldRation.  Ok, I’ll admit that did that to tease Atalian Mothers everywhere!  Atalia, which is right next to Sydney.  And if your thinking linguistically, you will get that joke, when nobody else does (x3 nerd humor).

What is ‘Foc-a-chi-a’?  Quite simply, it’s flat olive oil bread.  And therefore a lot of people think pizza, but no, this is a totally different product than a simple pizza crust.  Pizza crust is actually made with a CHEAP bread.  Olive Oil is hardly cheap.  It is frequently used to serve herbs, like with a Pesto Sauce with olives, nuts, and dry cheeses.  See, totally different than pizza. 

My Focaccia is not exactly pure, either.  I realized a long time ago, that oregano makes the bread better, not the suace.  So, I make mine with the oregano in the bread.  A pure Focaccia would be a big white cracker!

• 1 C water
• 3 C flour
• 1 1/2 t salt
• 2 Tbl extra virgin olive oil (this can be as much as 1/4 C, but with more oil, increase yeast)
• 1 t dried oregano (optional)
• 1 1/2 t Yeast

Set bread machine for dough only.

A basic Focaccia sauce:

• 1 oz exta virgin
• 1 tbl basil
• 2 tbl parsely
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 t kosher salt
• 2 t black pepper
• 1/4 C Parmesan Cheese
• olives

Divide dough in 2.  Roll out to 12 inch rounds.  Finger poke over and over to make moon like creators.  Cover with a towel and let rise a while.  Brush with olive oil, and topping.  Bake 400 degrees for 30 minutes, is the expert instructions. Personally, I prefer it a little shorter, so it’s not a giant hardened cracker, and still a little bread like.

Once you cook that Turkey carcass down to soup, you’ll want some focaccia to go with it, after a cold winter’s shopping run.

I have joked in the past about having to prove yourself to the bread gods before you are allowed to make good Artisan Breads, that don’t fail to rise or fall flat. The truth is that if cookies and cakes are your thing, most likely you will want to use too much moisture in your bread dough, or not provide enough heat. There is balance between water, salt, and yeast that is critical, and until you get the feel for it, things will go wrong, no matter how close you follow the recipe. So if your first loafs of bread are a failure, start tweaking, you’ll figure it out. And even faster if you make notes.

Because of my heart disease, I had to watch the amount of moisture I got, so I became educated in all the hidden sources around me. That’s why I bring it up as an issue. Bread is all about controlling moisture. Fruits, including raisins have to be viewed as moisture. Nuts are very oil rich. These are the thing that you have to develop a sense (almost an instinct) with. It comes with time, and experience. Making good artisan bread is worth all the time and investment in failure, that you more than likely will have when you first start.

Why I learned to cook. I grew up in a restaurant, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was cook. But once I got out on my own in the world, and starting missing my family’s cooking. Not that that was a problem, just a run home for the weekend, and I could get my fix. But while making the drive one day, I realized that if anything ever happened (God forbid), but if it did, I would loose my favorite foods- FOREVER! On that trip, I started reading all my mother’s favorite cook books, and became a cook, for all of those very selfish reasons.

I never cared much about bread. Making bread was my mother’s thing, that she never did in a cold mountain home. Until she got her hands on a bread machine. Then she did some toying around, but once bread machines are so much smaller than most antiquated old recipes, she quit using it. Which is where number cruncher son comes in, to figure out how to make 6-8 cups into 4 cups tops. But I have to admit that the bread machine is just the greatest robot invented so far, and today, you can get plenty of bread recipes scaled down to fit them, unlike a decade ago. So far I’ve worn out 3 machines. They really work very hard, and will even shake a table to pieces, kneading the dough with a mixer paddle.

lol! Something that just came to mind; We call them flashlights here. So why isn’t the expression; I’m passing the flashlight on to my son?

We call that secret special family recipe, Betty Crocker’s, at my house.