Best Buy, Samsung, and Sony

ByJohn Brown

I am not an early adopter. I do not rush out to buy the latest and greatest of anything. If I have something that works, then I keep using it until it absolutely won’t work anymore.

For example, Nellie and I bought a Honda Accord when we were first married. Fourteen years later, we had put almost 300,000 miles on that car and would have tried to put on another 300,000. Unfortunately, it met an early demise when it encountered a herd of black Angus cattle on a very dark country road at one a.m. in the morning. So long, brave companion.

We have a computer we purchased thirteen years ago which is still running Windows 98. Computers evolve about as quickly as fruit flies, which means that in human years our computer is like 450 years old. This is like going to war with first-generation muskets while everyone else is using Predator drones. And we’re okay with that, even though it appears we’re going to have to retire the old fellow this year.  Alas.

I have these fine olive green dress pants that are fifteen years old. When the rise finally wore out, I had Nellie fix it.  She put in a bright Kermit-The-Frog green patch, which draws a lot of attention to an area that’s been down-played ever since the codpiece went out of fashion in the late 1500’s. Was this sweet revenge for eating her stash of chocolate? Or a cleverly planned source of constant enjoyment? I do not know. But as a result, I do not wear these pants to church and important business meetings. I wear them hiking. They protect me from bushes and mosquitoes, yet breathe with perfection. Why would I ever get rid of them?

As you can see, I’m not a buy buy buy guy. Which means that when I get something it better darn well be a fine product because I know I’m likely to be using it for a very long time. And this brings me to our recent television and blu-ray player purchase. Two years ago some friends who had just purchased a big flat screen TV saw that we were still using our twenty-three year old 15″ RCA, took pity on us and gave us the 21″ TV they were replacing. It is one of those big suckers that weighs 475 pounds, but still a fine TV, and we watched it with joy.

However, a few weeks ago our antenna converter box broke. Our church’s semi-annual worldwide conference was coming up, which is a feast we love to watch, and so we were faced with choice: buy another converter box or pay a few more dollars and move into the twenty-first century with a flat screen. Now, while it’s true I’m not a buy buy buy guy, it is also true that I have been longing for a manly TV lo these many years. This was my chance. When Nellie agreed we should look for a new TV, I went into immediate action.

We started our search at Best Buy. The sales guys there were incredibly helpful. But we wanted to shop a bit more. So we went to a discount club, and thinking we’d save thirty bucks, purchased our TV there. We took it home, and I did not like it. I looked up the reviews on Consumer Reports and liked it even less. So I took it back. Sam’s has a great return policy, and gave us a full refund. Good bye, piece of crap.

I went to Best Buy again. After talking with the floor guy there for some time, I purchased a 32″ Samsung LN32D Series 4. No, it’s not 60 inches of gorilla manliness, but a 32″ TV does have a bit of hair on its chest. And it was bigger than what we’d been using. And it was only a few hundred bucks. I found this TV’s picture much better. Excellent, in fact, with the TV stations. However, my DVDs didn’t play so well on it.

I took it back to Best Buy. The folks there spent an hour testing other TVs and demonstrating that the issue was not the TV but my old Sony DVD player which could only use RCA cables. I needed a new player with the new HDMI cable, which is able to deliver much better quality. So I purchased one, a blu-ray player, brought it home, and found that the picture was indeed much better, but I hated the player’s remote controls. For example, I want to push one button to bring up the disc menu. I do not want to click options, over, down, down, down to do this each time.

I took it back. The folks at Best Buy were as friendly and helpful as ever. There was no hassle returning it. We spent another thirty minutes test driving different players and their remotes. I finally settled on a Sony BDP-5390 which is fabulous, not only because the remote and on-screen controls were helpful and it remembers where I was with movies I don’t finish, but also because it has a number of apps that allow me to connect to my wi-fi and watch things like YouTube, listen to internet radio, and pipe music all through my house.  There are so many cool features that I’m going to be enjoying discovering them all for a number of weeks. In all of this, the folks at Best Buy were cheerful, helpful, knowledgeable, and willing to work with someone who was very particular in what he wanted. I am now a Best Buy believer. If you want excellent customer service and good prices, go to Best Buy. I’ll be going back there for my next TV . . . when this one has racked up two gajillion viewing hours and at last gives up the ghost.

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  • 2 Great Cook’s Country Recipes

    ByJohn Brown

    Yeah, I know–I should be writing. But I promised you two wonderful recipes from my experiments with the Cook’s Country June/July 2011 issue. There were a whole bunch of other recipes we tried that worked out well, but these were our favorites and good enough to get me to subscribe.

    By the way, I found these recipes were not only tasty, but they were great to do on a date (in this case, with my daughters). Why just eat when you can enjoy the time together as well?  Besides, two people working together make these recipes a breeze.

    Chocolate Eclair Cake

    Chocolate, vanilla pudding, whipped cream, and graham crackers–baby, is this good!  I found I liked the cake best with HALF of the pudding and whip cream mixture. You’ll see the half amounts in parentheses. That way I got a taste of the pudding, graham, and ganache in every bite. The directions make it look like there’s a lot of steps, but they all go quickly.

    INGREDIENTS

    Pudding Mixture

    • 1 ¼ C sugar (1/2 + 1/8 C)
    • 6 T cornstarch (3 T)
    • 1 tsp salt (1/2 tsp)
    • 5 C whole milk (2.5 C)
    • 4 T unsalted butter cut into chunks (2 T)
    • 5 tsp vanilla (2.5 tsp)

     Whip Cream Mixture

    • 2 T water (1 T)
    • 1 ¼  tsp unflavored gelatin (1/2 + 1/8 tsp)
    • 2 C heavy cream (1 + ¼ +1/8 C)

    Graham Crackers

    14 ounces of Nabisco Honey Maid graham crackers

    Ganache topping

    • ¾ C  heavy cream
    • 1 C semisweet chocolate chips
    • 5 T light corn syrup

     DIRECTIONS

     Make Pudding

    1. Combine sugar, cornstarch, and salt in large saucepan
    2. Wisk milk into sugar mixture and bring to boil over medium-high heat, scraping bottom with rubber spatula.
    3. Immediately reduce heat to medium-low and continue to cook and scrape until thick bubbles appear on surface, about 4-6 minutes
    4. Take off heat and wisk in butter and vanilla.
    5. Transfer hot pudding to large bowl and place plastic wrap directly on surface.
    6. Refrigerate for about 2 hours until cool.

     Make Whip Cream Mixture

    1. Stir water and gelatin together and let sit for 5 minutes.
    2. Microwave until gelatin dissolves and mixture gets bubbly around the edges, 15-30 seconds
    3. Whip 2 cups of cream on medium-low for about 1 minute, until foamy.
    4. Increase to high and whip for 2 minutes, until soft peaks form
    5. Add gelatin mixture and whip for 1 minute, until stiff peaks form

     Combine Pudding and Whip Cream Mixture

    1. Wisk one-third of whipped cream into chilled pudding.
    2. Fold remaining whipped cream into pudding.

     Layer Pudding Whip Cream Mixture with Graham Crackers

    1. Line bottom of 13 x 9 inch baking dish with a layer of graham crackers. Break and cut crackers if you have to.
    2. Top the bottom layer of crackers with ½ of the pudding whip cream mixture
    3. Place another layer of crackers over the pudding.
    4. Top that layer with the rest of the pudding whip cream mixture
    5. Place one last layer of crackers over the second layer of pudding whip cream mixture

     Make Ganache and Pour Over

    1. Microwave chocolate chips, ¾ C cream, and corn syrup in bowl 1-2 minutes, stirring occasionally.
    2. Cool for 10 minutes to room temperature
    3. Cover top layer of graham crackers with glaze
    4. Refrigerate cake for 6 – 24 hours. Then serve.

     

    Dill Potato Salad

    A potato salad with a perfect dill zing. Everybody in the Brown household loved this. Super wife especially loved it because she does not like eggs. Please note that there’s fresh dill used in all three parts. So when you shop, make sure you get enough for all three.

     INGREDIENTS

     Dill Vinegar

    • ¼ C white wine vinegar
    • 1 T minced fresh dill

     Boiling Mixture

    • 1 disposable coffee filter
    • ½ C coarsely chopped dill leaves and stems
    • 3 pounds Yukon Gold potatoes (don’t get any other type), peeled and cut into ¾ inch pieces
    • 1 T salt

     Dressing

    • ½ C mayonnaise
    • ¼ C sour cream
    • 1 T Dijon mustard
    • ½ tsp salt
    • ¼ tsp pepper
    • 2 T minced fresh dill
    • 3 scallions (green onions) green parts only sliced thin

     DIRECTIONS

     Make Dill Vinegar

    1. Combine vinegar and 1 T minced dill in bowl and microwave until steaming, 30-60 seconds
    2. Cool at room temperature for 15-20 minutes

     Boil Potatoes

    1. Place chopped dill inside disposable coffee filter and time with thread.
    2. Put potatoes, dill sachet, and salt into large pot with enough water to cover the potatoes by 1 inch.
    3. Bring to boil on high heat then reduce heat to medium and simmer until potatoes are tender, 10 minutes

     Cool and Soak Potatoes

    1. Drain potatoes thoroughly and throw away dill sachet
    2. Drizzle 2 T of the dill vinegar over hot potatoes and gently toss until evenly coated
    3. Refrigerate until cooled, 30 minutes. This allows the Yukon potatoes to suck up the dill vinegar.

     Make dressing and Combine with Potatoes

    1. Wisk mayonnaise, sour cream, remaining dill vinegar, mustard, salt, and pepper until smooth
    2. Add dressing to cooled potatoes
    3. Stir in scallions and 2 T minced dill.
    4. Cover and refrigerate to let flavors meld, 30 minutes.
    5. Serve with salt and pepper to taste.

     EDIT 9/7: Somehow I deleted four of the dressing ingredients when I posted. They’ve been added back 🙂

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    Good Stuff! The actual Christmas story

    ByJohn Brown

    It’s interesting how many things we’ve added to the accounts we have in the Bible.

    For example, nowhere does the Bible say that Mary rode a donkey. Mary might have walked. Or rode in a cart. Or gotten piggy back rides. We don’t know. We do know that there is no donkey mentioned in the record.

    It also doesn’t say she had the child the night they arrived.

    It only says she was “great with child” when they made the roughly 80-mile journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. And that “while they were there” in Bethlehem “the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.”

    So she had the baby sometime while they were there. That could have been during the first hour. But it could have also been a week or month later. We just don’t know.

    It doesn’t mention anywhere the word stable.

    Christ might have been born in a stable, or he might have been born in a cave, or inside the house, or out on the porch, or on the roof (lots of those places had flat roofs where they hung out). We just don’t know. What we do know is that he wasn’t born in a palace. And that they laid him in a manger because there wasn’t any room in the inn. An odd circumstance for a king.  

    Notice as well that there weren’t multiple inns.

    It just says “the inn.” And if you look up that word in the Greek, it’s translated as “guest chamber” in the other spots where it’s used in Luke. So they could have been talking about the one guest room in the house where they were staying. Either way, we don’t have anything that says there was a mean innkeeper who later regretted turning the couple away or that Joseph went door-to-door looking for a place.

    We have no record in the account of three wisemen.

    It just says “wisemen.” So there might have been two of them. Or twelve. We don’t know. And it appears they came sometime after Jesus had been born because they first saw the star of his birth in the east and only then set out to find him. They might have been coming from Persia, hundreds of miles away. Or they could have been living in Bethphage, a mile to the east of Jerusalem. Either way, they didn’t know they should travel to Bethlehem because it says they went and talked to Herod first, in Jerusalem, and asked “where is he that is born King of the Jews?”

    The question freaked Herod out (if you’re the current king, you kind of want to know who else is claiming your throne), and so he gathered all the chief priests and scribes to discuss it, and those guys said the prophecies said it would be Bethlehem. And so Herod met with the wisemen again and told them to go there. And only then did they go down to Bethlehem. So it doesn’t appear the wisemen were there the night of the birth.  

    There’s no record of camels hanging out with the baby either. Or sheep. Or goats. There’s not a lot there. But what is there is interesting.

    Now, I want to go on record stating I have no problem speculating about the event and imagining what it might have been like. I love to do it. Good grief, I write fiction.

    In fact, for many years I figured I needed to get in on the Christmas noun gig. You know what I mean. Every year we get heart-warming books about new Christmas nouns. We’ve had Christmas sweaters, Christmas jars, Christmas boxes, Christmas candles, Christmas carols. This year I see there’s one about Christmas fudge and other about a Christmas train. So I figured I’d do one. Mine would be about the Christmas rat. A little fellow who decided to snuggle up with the babe instead of giving him a nibble. One of these days I will get that hungry rat story written.  

    In the meantime, while there’s a lot of good stuff we’ve added to make the event special, it’s also nice to know what the record actually does say. Whether you’re Christian or not, it’s helpful when dealing with others to know what was recorded about this event that is so significant to the largest religion in the world.

    And so the last bit of good stuff I recommend this month are the two brief accounts we have. The first one is in Matthew 2:1-16 and tells the story of the wisemen. The other is in Luke 2:1-20 and features some shepherds.

    Merry Christmas!

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  • You want your kids to succeed in school? There’s one thing you can do…

    ByJohn Brown

    Did you know that there is one thing that kids can do outside of school that’s been proven, over and over, to lead to them doing significantly better in all other subjects?

    And I mean all subjects. Math, history, science, criminology, psychology—you name it.

    There’s one thing, and numerous research studies have proven it, that kids do that leads to them getting better jobs later in life.

    This one thing, proven by research, leads them to grow up to make more money.

    And it doesn’t matter if they start in a rich or poor family. This one thing leads them to greater opportunity. Over and over again.

    It’s a thing that kids actually can learn to love. For some it becomes as delicious as eating ice cream.

    The kids are back in school. Parents want them to do well. They want them to succeed. How wonderful that there’s one thing that parents can focus on that will so dramatically change their child’s life.

    And it doesn’t take long. Even just twenty minutes per day of this activity can change everything.

    Twenty minutes.

    Is there a parent anywhere that can’t find twenty minutes?

    So what is this one thing?

    Reading for pleasure.

    Notice I didn’t say reading for academic purposes. I didn’t say reading to finish homework. I said reading for pleasure. For the enjoyment it brings.

    And it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is. It can be fiction—fantasy, love stories, horror, action. It can be non-fiction—like material on bugs, robots, horses, motocross. It can be fairy stories or funny anecdotes. It can be short or long. The key is that they’re reading for pleasure.

    I know some of you might be saying, “But John, my kid doesn’t like to read.”

    That’s okay. You can change that.

    If you want to find out how to help your child learn to enjoy reading, let me recommend Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do by Daniel T. Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia whose research has focused on the brain and learning. In the book, Willingham debunks the myths about literary instruction and provides practical, engaging, research-based tips for sharing the joy of reading with kids of all ages.

    You can get a used copy for $13 bucks on Amazon.

    RaisingKidsWhoReadByWillingham

    While you’re waiting for the book to come, here are some things you can do start doing right now to help your child read for pleasure.

    First, start reading something fun or interesting with or to them every day. For little kids, this can be picture books. For older kids, this can be anything–an article from a magazine, funny stories online, or books large and small. If you want to start with a joke book, that’s okay. If you want to start by listening to a book on tape, that’s great too.

    Wait a minute? A book on tape? Isn’t that cheating?

    No.

    There are four keys to helping your child read for pleasure. They need to learn to:

    1. Decode the sounds letters make.
    2. Comprehend what’s meant, which is driven by their general knowledge of the subject they’re reading about.
    3. Enjoy reading.
    4. Identify themselves as a person who likes to read books

    When you listen to a book on tape, you’re doing numbers 2-4.

    Remember: the goal is not to improve the child. It’s not to get them a better job ten years from now. It’s not to make them wealthy. It’s to simply help them enjoy reading. Because once they enjoy reading, once reading for pleasure is something they see as one of the things they do, they will begin to read more and more. And as they read, they become better at reading, which leads to more enjoyment, which leads to more reading. Which leads to all of those other awesome benefits. It’s a virtuous cycle.

    So the first thing you need to do is simply start having a good time reading with them. You can read to them at bedtime, after dinner, on weekends. You can have them read articles to you while you’re making dinner or washing the dishes. You can have them read to your or themselves while you’re on the road driving somewhere.

    You can make a rule that they have to read with you for twenty minutes before they go play with friends or watch TV or play video games.

    And above all, you need to let your child’s interests drive most of the topics you read about. If they want to read about spiders and dinosaurs, then read about spiders and dinosaurs. If they want to read horror stories, then read horror. If they’re into skiing or horses or guns, then help them find interesting stuff on the topics they’re already interested in. And if they don’t like a book, teach them they can abandon it and go find another.

    And if you yourself are not someone who reads for pleasure, well, now’s the time to start. You can make reading for pleasure something your family does, just like families make enjoying boating or hunting or riding horses or eating Mexican food part of what they do.

    It’s never too late to start.

    And seeing that this is the one thing that has such an impact on your child’s success, is there really anything else that would be a better use of those twenty minutes per day?

    Reading for pleasure—who knew that having a great time could have so many wonderful effects? Start today. Don’t wait.

    It might take a little work. You and your child might run into a few unpleasant spots. But that’s true of anything. How many times do kids fall when learning to water ski or snow ski? How many times do they experience something unpleasant when practicing football or basketball or volleyball?

    So start right now. Figure out a time with your child. And begin learning to read for pleasure.

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  • The Avengers & The Paris Grill

    ByJohn Brown

    Edit: I wrote this like a month ago and thought I posted it. But there is was in my drafts. Somebody give me some Ginko extract.

    The Avengers

    The Avengers is Marvel’s latest installment of the films in the Avenger world—Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), and Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). 

    Iron Man is, by far, the BEST of all of them.  I thought Captain America might be just as good, but the movie lost its way about half way through.  The others are okay, not anything to jump up and down on the couch about. So while I was looking forward to seeing The Avengers, I wasn’t expecting anything special. I’m happy to tell you that The Avengers is good. Not as good as Iron Man, but much better than all the others.  And certainly well-worth the price of admission.

    The earth is in possession of an artifact of immense power called the Tesseract, which isn’t a made-up name. In geometry a tesseract is a cubic prism—some four-dimensional thing which boggles the mind. But in this movie and Captain America, the tesseract is a blue cube that can open portals to different parts of the universe or run Nazi war machines.  The problem is that there are other beings in the universe.  Some of these would like to be able to run their own Nazi machines and subjugate all species on every planet.  So they get Loki, Thor’s adopted brother, to lead an army to raze the earth and retrieve the artifact.   

    Of course, earth’s forces aren’t strong enough to repel this alien force. That is, unless you call upon the Avengers—Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. As well as Avengers who haven’t had their own movies yet like Black Widow, Hawk, and Nick Fury.

    It all sounds a bit much, and in the hands of a lesser writer it might have been. But Joss Whedon (Serenity, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) wrote the script and directed the movie. And he did a fantastic job. Instead of thinking we came for a barrage of special effects, he takes time to build the characters and relationships so we care about the action when it arrives. He does use the idiot chaos cinema technique for some of the action, but not nearly as much as was in Hunger Games. More importantly, he makes up for the error of his ways with a number of laugh-out-loud moments. Hilarious moments.  In fact, the humor is one of the main reasons why this movie was so good.

    If you like super hero movies, you’ll love The Avengers. Maybe not as much as you like Iron Man or Spider Man 2 or the Nolan Batman series. But close enough to have a great night out.

    The Paris Grill

    The Paris (Idaho) Grill has opened another restaurant in what used to be the Bear Lake Motor Lodge Cafe.  The cafe was okay. Nothing to write home about.  So I didn’t know what to expect with the new grill.  However, I took two of my daughters out last night for dinner.

    The Paris Grill has four menus. I don’t know why they keep them separate, but they do. One for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and another for their pizzas.  We opted for the “Burgers n Pastas n Salads” menu which I guess is the lunch menu, but was what we ordered our dinner off of.

    Confused yet?

    Luckily, the food’s good enough that the menu business doesn’t matter. The lunch menu features a number of regular sandwiches—BLT, chicken cordon bleu, French dip.  But it also offers some signature sandwiches like a kielbasa and pepper sandwich, something called the Hobo Deli (which is tasty sounding combo of sour dough bread with pepper cheese, roasted turkey, bacon, grilled tomatoes, and cilantro dressing), as well as the Monster Grill—roast beef topped with caramelized onions and peppers, mushrooms, and provolone cheese.  I opted for the Monster Grill. My girls skipped the salads and ordered a hamburger and the chicken cordon bleu with mashed potatoes.

    The first words out of my daughters’ mouth when eating the mashed potatoes were “ooh” and “yum.”  That was followed by another “ooh” and “yum.”  The potatoes were good.  And they were made from scratch.  The sandwiches were tasty as well.  Good enough that I’m going to go back to the grill to try their dinner menu with my wife.  

    We topped the dinner off by splitting one of the grill’s big, hot cinnamon rolls.  The prices for the lunch items were reasonable—around seven or eight bucks—and they were big enough that the girls took half their meal home.  

    If you’re in Garden City, Utah and looking for something besides burgers and shakes, try the grill.  I think you’ll be quite satisfied when you walk out the door.

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    Jon Ronson, mild-mannered pal of extremists

    ByJohn Brown

    Take a guy who does humorous journalism, but not in the sneering sort of way, and send him out to find out more about extremists (KKK, Islamicists, etc.) and conspiracy theories (he didn’t really believe in the Bildeburgers…until he was followed), and what do you get?

    Well, you get British journalist Jon Ronson.

    I just listened to a wonderful interview with him on Radio West.

    Don’t miss it.

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  • If you want to work with publishers, you need this. Right now.

    ByJohn Brown

    thenineworstprovisionsinyourpublishingcontract-by-vandagriffWriters who want to deal with publishers need this book: The Nine Worse Provisions in Your Publishing Contract by David P. Vandagriff. And it’s currently free!

    Vandagriff is a lawyer whose business involves high-stakes intellectual property litigation. He has negotiated major contracts with a wide range of opposing parties, some of which include Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Intel, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity Investments, AOL, Disney, Hallmark, plus other large publishers, agents and etailers.

    He’s also publishes The Passive Voice, a news blog on the publishing business that includes many posts from his lawyer perspective.

    Don’t fall for contract terms that turn you into a slave.

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