Pizza bake-off day 4 Part II

As mentioned in Part I, there are health consequences to a diet of pizza. So beware!

Today's pizza is an old friend, the first frozen pizza ever produced that was actually edible. Before this, there was processed "food-like" pizzas that were soggy and limp and tasted ick. But for a time, this was the best of the best. Today it's sold as "Red Baron Premium Quality Classic Crust Pepperoni Pizza" and is at the low end of the Schwan Food Company's line of "premium" pizzas. So how does it fare today, all these years later, against more modern competition?

The first thing I noticed is that this is the first pizza thus far which calls for a cookie sheet. So now a little digression about pizza equipment:

My "cookie sheet" for pizza baking purposes is a heavy-duty non-stick pizza pan. Not a stone, not a sheet, a pan. The other equipment used is a large glass cutting board, a typical disc-type pizza cutter, and a metal pie spatula used to actually serve the pizza. Note that the pizza cutter never comes near the pizza pan, and the pizza pan never goes near the dishwasher -- it is handwashed after it cools down.

Now, back to the pizza: How does it fare? Well, fairly well. This is clearly now the budget entry in the Schwan Food pizza line, and the quantities of the toppings bear that out, but it holds up quite well compared to ringer #1 (the Little Caesar's $5 Pepperoni) and is still quite edible, compared to, say, the icky Totinos that I covered earlier.

Crust: The crust recipe shows its age but still does the job. It is not outstanding in any way, but it does not overwhelm the toppings and it adds a reasonable crunch and taste to the preceedings.

Sauce: The sauce is somewhat on the weak side, but the quantity is good. I would call the sauce "adequate".

Cheese: The cheese on this pizza performs its job of providing a base flavor underneath the pepperoni and sauce flavors quite well. The quantity is sufficient to provide a well balanced mix of flavors.

Pepperoni: This is where Schwan skimps a little bit to hit their price point. The quality of the pepperoni is nowhere as good as what's on the "Ultimate Pepperoni" mentioned earlier. However, the pepperoni is satisfyingly greasy and provides sufficient tang to balance out the cheese and crust flavors reasonably well.

All in all, this is a well balanced mid-range pizza. If you have $3.50 in your pocket and need pizza, you will not regret this choice. However, I do definitely prefer the "Ultimate Pepperoni" thin crust version, which provides a richer taste palate and has better-quality pepperoni on it.

And BTW, I tasted one of the pieces of yesterday's pizza just in case my taste buds were having an off day yesterday. Nope. Still tastes like library paste with vegetable oil, completely overwhelming the taste of the toppings.

So, tune in tommorrow for the *next* exciting pizza in the Badtux Frozen Pizza Bake-off!

-- Badtux the Pizza Penguin

Prison State USA: Round up the kids!

Now they're coming for the children. And I'm not talking about teenagers. Read some of the links Jurassic Pork's commenters helpfully rounded up for us.

I have absolutely no respect for adults who cannot handle a six year old child without calling the cops. None. This is a complete and utter failure in training. A child seeking attention has been rewarded for misbehavior with a *lot* of attention, and thus will misbehave more in the future. This is the dumbest, stupidest, most ignorant thing I've ever heard of -- and it is rampant today, apparently, from the links at Jurassic Pork's site.

The solution isn't the paddle. As I pointed out in my post "On Violence":

When it comes to the raising of children, or disciplining of children, much the same applies -- violence is never moral. The problem isn't that we've banned the paddle or whatever other rot the tighty righties want to trot out. The problem is that we have a very punitive and violent society that views punishment -- violence -- as the solution to all problems. But while violence can *stop* a behavior, that is all it can do -- it can never add something to a child's understanding of the world. It can never add something to society. Love, encouragement, setting clear goals and expectations and rewards (note I say rewards, not bribes, there's a difference), making life a pleasant and rewarding experience rather than something harsh and punitive... what works for raising a happy child, also works for raising a happy society. Alas, our punishment and violence addicted society seems to have forgotten this, thus why our society is so unhappy, violent, and prone to addictions such as crack cocaine, black tar heroin, and neo-conservative politics.

The solution, rather, is to have adults behave as adults. Physical intervention was necessary in this case because the child was behaving in a way that interfered with the education of other children and refused to leave the classroom, but violence against a child was completely and utterly unwarranted, unnecessary, and totally counter-productive. All that this child has learned is that by behaving like a complete ass, she can get lots of the adult attention that she apparently craves. She should have been gently physically restrained for as long as it took to round up her mother or bring herself under control, then removed to the custody of her mother for several days' suspension, or to emergency foster care if her mother or some other relative was not available to take custody. Then she should not have been allowed back into class without a behavior plan in place, preferably one based upon a "levels" system where she had to earn her way back into the good graces of the school via exhibiting clearly defined and observed desirable behaviors and receiving a specified set of priviliges back. This is how I was trained by the Houston Independent School District to handle this situation fifteen years ago, and H.I.S.D. isn't particularly known for excellence in education or discipline, but this is what worked and it worked even for the mentally ill children that I was charged with teaching.

But that conflicts with the violent and ignorant nature of our society, so these Florida crackers think that "being tough" is the solution. Violence against children is never the solution. Never. Some very limited violence may be necessary in order to stop a behavior that presents a danger to herself or others, but as I have previously pointed out, violence never adds anything to the world. It only takes away. You have to fill a child with something to fill that hole, with joy and love and doing things together and making life a pleasant place for that child the majority of the time, or all you end up with is a child that is unhappy, misbehaving, and violent. We have decades -- yes, *DECADES* -- of behavioral research confirming this. Yet as a violent and ignorant society, we still insist upon violence as the solution to all societal problems...

-- Badtux the Behavioral Psychology Penguin

Pizza bake-off day 4

Before we get to today's pizza, first, a slight health message from the Penguin:

One of the downsides of the all-pizza diet is roughage, or lack thereof. If you're curious about why that is a downside, eat pizza for three days straight then you will know exactly what I mean. Your, uhm, eliminatory functionality, shuts down entirely, clogged solid.

What this says is that you need to add roughage to your diet if you wish to retain normal elimination. It may seem strange to see a penguin wolfing down a salad (a very low calorie food) at the same time he is wolfing down pizza. But believe me, the alternative is far, far more painful. Thus as a true bachelor, I buy pre-mixed salad greens from the grocer and add a fine vinaigrette and, if available, a few shakes of Parmesan cheese. The result is normal lower intestinal tract functioning. The other alternative, which I employ whenever I'm not doing pizza taste testing, is to simply pile jalapeno chilis on top of the pizza. While that produces a fire at the other end the next day, lower intestinal tract functioning is NOT an issue at that point.

With that health message interlude finished, we now resume our frozen pizza testing. Check back this evening for the *next* pizza in our bake-off! What kind of pizza will it be? Well, you'll just have to wait and see, hmm?

-- Badtux the Gourmet Penguin

It's a kitty pile!

Or at least it was until I pulled my camera out, at which point Mencken pulled out of the pile and started looking at me as if I were the epitomy of evil before setting his head back down. Sigh. Why does Mencken run and hide when I pull out my camera? Curious penguins want to know!

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Johnny Cash - Hurt

Johnny Cash's former home in Henderson, Tennessee, featured in this video that was shot only a few months before his death, burned down today.

Also see: The Johnny Cash rules. I especially like the one about how Rick Rubin's producing Johnny Cash's last albums meant he could even be forgiven for anything, even if he put together a supergroup consisting of Britney Speares, John Ashcroft, and the William twins (Shatner and Hung) singing the collected works of Wayne Newton. Ouch, my ears hurt just thinking about that supergroup (heh!).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Frozen pizza bake-off: Day 3

Today's pizza is the DiGiorno Garlic Bread Pizza - Pepperoni.

I must admit that I am largely not a fan of thick-crust pizzas. It is very difficult to get them right. The toppings must be provided in extravagant quantities in order to balance the weight of the dough, and the dough and crust must provide a fine bready/yeasty taste, not heavy and dense and lardy. This pizza fails on all accounts.

The "thud" as this slid out onto my kitchen counter was the first warning that this was not going to be a lightweight experience. This pizza is nearly two pounds of, well, mostly dough. The toppings are scarce and there are wide margins on all four sides of the pizza.

Eating the pizza, you basically cannot taste the pepperoni, or the cheese, or the sauce. None of those are in sufficient quantity to even begin assessing their quality. What you have is the crust, which purports to be "garlic bread". The crust is infused with grease (supposed to be butter, I suppose, but it tastes like plain old vegetable oil to me), and there's garlic somewhere because I can taste it on my breath, but it isn't enough to overcome the heavy density of the doughy taste of the crust.

Really, this crust tastes like someone mixed up school paste with vegetable oil. I've tasted fine garlic breads, and this crust doesn't taste anything like them. There is no fluffiness to it, no yeasty flavor. Just flour paste and vegetable oil. Sadly, I must give this pizza an utterly failing grade. The fact that I could only eat three pieces before I quit eating in disgust is no surprise. Eating this pizza is like being back in the 1st grade again and sticking stupid stuff in your mouth. It's not as utterly disgusting as the Totino's Party Pizza that I tasted a few month's back (which was downright barf-inducing), but definitely this pizza gets two flippers down. Don't buy it!

-- Badtux the Paste-eating Penguin

Another enemy of the people spotted!

Why, if we can't keep ex-Marine distinguished Constitutional law scholars from boarding planes, why, why... they might KILL US ALL with their Law Textbooks of Mass Destruction!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Taxes

Guess I better do'em and get the check in the mail, eh?

-- Badtux the Taxed Penguin

Culture of self-entitlement

Is it any wonder that the ranks of the morbidly obese are exploding in the United States? Delayed gratification is seen as an evil by the average American. It's all me, me, me, now, now, now. Stuffing a half dozen Big Macs down your gullet just because you like how they taste? No problem!

This is just a symptom of a basic sickness in American culture, which is that we've become shallow, immature, self-indulgent, and incapable of logical thinking. Logical thinking sez if you're overweight enough to cause health problems, then, duh, DON'T EAT SO MUCH! Instead, fat slobs make excuses -- "oh, it's just my hormones!" "Oh there's nothing wrong with being fat!" blah blah blah. Sigh. Even this pizza lovin' penguin knows better than that...

-- Badtux the Not-morbidly-obese Penguin
(Just pleasantly rotund, mind you!).

Evil Lurks

The Mighty Fang lurks under the comforter at the foot of my bed...

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Where's today's political post?!

I just took a double dose of the above medicine and am quietly reading a novel while cuddled with my kitties. Sorry, the snark is taking a couple days break.

-- Badtux the FIA Penguin

Frozen pizza bake-off day 2

Today's pizza: Red Baron Gold Edition Italian Style Thin Crust Ultimate Pepperoni Pizza. (Yes, that unweildy name is its true actual name as printed on the box).

This is a round medium-sized pizza. The directions instructed me to preheat the oven to 400 degrees, then remove the pizza from the freezer and place it directly upon the center rack of the oven and bake for 15 minutes. I did so.

First, let us start with its reason for existing: Pepperoni. This pizza has a lot of pepperoni, both round disks and diced chunks. According to the label, this is beef and pork pepperoni. The result is suitably tangy and greasy, requiring very little crushed red pepper to make it palatable to Cajun penguin tastes. The quality seems slightly less than that of the preceding day's Digiorno pizza, but it makes up in quantity what it might lack in quality.

Next, the weakest part: the cheese. Folks, there just isn't enough cheese on this pizza. It is completely overpowered by the tangy pepperoni and sauce. Unfortunately, I suspect that an amount of cheese sufficient to cope with this much pepperoni would be altogether too much for the light crust to cope with.

The sauce is suitably tangy and in sufficient quantity to nicely complement the tangy pepperoni.

The crust is rather puzzling. It is crisp and has a somewhat toasty taste. Still, I will rate it one star above the preceding day's DiGiorno, in that its taste manages to complement the rest of the pizza nicely.

All in all, a good pizza, with no rancid or stale taste and good ingredients. I will give the DiGiorno a slightly higher rating because of the DiGiorno's excellent balancing of the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni equation, but for $3.65 (on sale at Safeway), this pizza certainly presents a fine meal or two for the discerning bachelor. The only disappointment is the poor showing of the cheese. You might consider a bit of shredded mild chedder in addition to the mozzarella that comes with this pizza to give the cheese just a touch more presence to deal with all that sauce and pepperoni.

-- Badtux the Rotund Test Penguin

Pizza bake-off day 1

Today's pizza: DiGiorno Thin Crispy Crust Pepperoni Pizza

The directions give you two ways to prepare this pizza -- on the rack, or on a pizza pan. I chose the rack, in order to give the crust the best chance for carmelization and thus the best chance to contribute to the taste of the pizza. As directed on the label, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees, then removed the pizza from the freezer and placed on the rack using an oven mitt. I baked for 17 minutes as directed then removed and let stand for 5 minutes. Then ate. Here is what it was like:

Pepperoni: While the cover mentions that chicken is used in the pepperoni, the pepperoni is still the strength of this pizza. It is suitably tangy and greasy and there is a relatively large amount of it.

Cheese: There is enough of it and it doesn't overpower anything. Not much more to say there.

Sauce: Suitably tangy but not overpowering. Quantity is a bit low though.

Crust: Meh. The crust on a thin crust pizza has a hard row to hoe. There is not much of it, so it must step forth and contribute its taste boldly. This crust, on the other hand, simply lies there. In greater quantity it would provide a good bready base to the pizza, but apparently DiGiorno simply rolled their dough thinner rather than reformulate it for this new application. What works quite well for their thicker pizzas simply isn't adequate for the task of supporting this thinner pizza. On the other hand, it is not greasy or rancid or stale or soggy or otherwise nasty. It just lies there not contributing much.

Cold pizza: Unfortunately, none of the pizza survived to be eaten for lunch the next day. Perhaps I need to re-think that review criteria, especially for thin-crust pizzas which are more likely to be gobbled down in one sitting.

General conclusion: This is a workmanlike thin crust pizza. Given a choice between this and ringer #1 (Little Caesars Hot'n'Ready $5 Pizza), I would definitely choose this one even though it is generally more expensive (I paid $5.50 for this pizza). On the other hand, the lack of contribution from the crust and the somewhat scarce sauce mean that it has some ways to go before meeting my criteria for an "ideal" pizza. We shall see what other pizzas bring to the table in this regard...

Next up: Red Baron "Italian Style" Thin Crust "Ultimate Pepperoni" pizza...

-- Badtux the Pizza Penguin

The pizza-orgie is on!

Okay, here is the test plan for the frozen pizza bake-off:

1. All pizzas shall be purchased at the local supermarket, in order to insure that this penguin has not been subverted by the frozen pizza conspiracy
2. Each pizza shall be a pepperoni pizza, with the exception of the California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizza (they do not offer a pepperoni). Pizzas shall be enhanced slightly with some crushed red peppers but not to the extent that it interferes with ability to taste the ingredients.
3. For comparison purposes, two ringers shall be brought in: A Little Caesars $5 pizza, and a Premier Pizza gourmet pizza.
4. For comparison purposes, a "home-made" pizza will be created based upon a pizza "kit" provided by a notorious "Italian" chef
5. All pizzas shall be prepared according to the directions upon the carton. If the directions give a choice between baking it on the rack and baking it on a cookie sheet or pizza pan, the pizza shall be baked directly upon the rack.
6. Pizza shall be tested in two modes: 1) Hot out of the oven, and 2) cold for lunch the next day.

The following criteria will be used to judge each pizza:

1. Crust: Thick-crust pizzas should have a crust that tastes like a fine loaf of Italian bread. It should be relatively light and firm, not soggy or heavy, i.e. throwing flour at the problem is not allowed to make up for lack of adequate rising time. Medium-crust pizzas are allowed to have a denser crust but it still must taste like a flatbread, not like the crust of an apple pie. Thin-crust pizzas should have a crust that is firm, not soggy, and somewhat crisp and are allowed to have a sharper taste to compensate for the lack of volume. In no case shall a pizza with a crust redolent of lard or vegetable oils receive a passing grade. This is pizza, not peach cobbler.
2. Sauce: The amount of sauce must be appropriate for the amount of crust and other toppings. The sauce should have a firm distinct taste with spices rather than taste like watered-down tomato sauce, but should not be so sharp as to overpower the flavors of the rest of the ingredients.
3. Cheese: The cheese should be a mild mozzarella that provides a stable base of flavor beneath the flavors of the other ingredients, rather than stepping out in front and overpowering everything. The amount of cheese provided should provide ample coverage for the entire pizza, but not to the extent that it is allowed to overpower any other ingredient.
4. Pepperoni: Pepperoni is of course the main reason for a pepperoni pizza. There should be ample sliced pepperoni to cover a significant percentage of the surface of the pizza. Diced pepperoni is allowed only to fill in between the sliced pepperoni, not in place of sliced pepperoni. Pepperoni must be geniuine pepperoni i.e. an Italian sausage, not a "pepperoni-like food product" that is "enhanced" with fillers. It should be nicely spicy and a bit greasy.

The first pizza is in the oven. Let the bake-off begin!

- Badtux the Soon-to-be-more-rotund Penguin

Note: click on the 'pizza' link below for the latest results!

Rant: dyed lubricants

So you get a little of that Mobil 1 synthetic grease on your shirt. No big deal, you say? It'll wash out in the laundry? *WRONG!*. That shit is dyed red, and it just dyed your shirt red!

So you get a little of that Royal Purple synthetic gear oil on your jeans. No big deal, you say? It'll wash out in the laundry? *WRONG!*. Royal Purple just *LOVES* that purple dye shit, and your jeans are gonna be purple until the day they fall apart!

Now, I don't wear good clothes to wrench my Jeep or KLR, for obvious reasons. The jeans I'm wearing right now have a rip just below the passenger side front pocket, for example, where they caught on a piece of sheetmetal and the only way I could get out of there was to pull until it gave. But still, it'd be nice if these a-holes realized that I really don't feel like lookin' like a clown every time I go down to wrench my vehicles. I mean, c'mon. Blue and purple and red and grey? Might as well stick a freakin' red nose on my face!

-- Badtux the Wrenchin' Penguin

Service outage resolved...

Sorry about the outage. My web host rebooted the server while there was still some open files, and then ext2fs barfed on the next boot. I had to manually run ext2fs from the console to get things cleaned up and working again. Sigh. Linux sucks. It just sucks less than the alternatives...

-- Badtux the Linux Geek Penguin

Bachelor's Cookbook: Kraft Easy Mac

Macaroni and cheese is of course a staple in the bachelor's diet, but one which does not get made as often as it should because (gasp) it requires DIRTYING A POT! Oh the horrors! So anyhow, I was in Safeway and noticed this new product: Kraft Easy Mac.

It comes bundled two ways: In a styrofoam cup similar to a ramen noodle cup for around 99 cents apiece, or in a box of six requiring you to dirty a microwave-safe bowl. But since microwave-safe disposable bowls are around the corner, do not let the fact that you own no bowls stop you from the latter.

I have tried both ways. They taste identical, and are prepared identically once you set aside the packet of cheese sauce and poured the macaroni into the bowl (if not the styrofoam version). You place a specified amount of room temperature tap water into the bowl, either to a line in the styrofoam bowl or 2/3rds cup into your own bowl. You place the uncovered bowl into your microwave, and nuke it for 3 minutes and 45 seconds. You remove bowl from microwave (it may help to place it on a saucer before nuking to make this operation painless). You pour the cheese sauce powder in and mix well until it is all disolved. Wait about 30 seconds, the cheese sauce stiffens up a bit, stir again. Eat.

And that is it. That's all to it. It tastes exactly like, well, Kraft macaroni and cheese. It's as perfect a food for the dorm or for bachelors or bachelorettes as ramen noodles. Accompany with a can of tuna for necessary protein, and multivitamins and calcium tablets for necessary vitamins and minerals, and you will at least survive. It is recommended, however, that you occasionally branch out to other foods, such as the home-made cheese and bean burritos previously discussed here, and of course frozen pizzas. (Note: The first batch of pizzas will be baking next week! I am currently developing the test plan and will present it to you sometime this weekend for comment and enhancement).

- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

Granny's got a gun...

Old people these days. They're just no good. Whatever happened to just stayin' home and bakin' cookies and bouncing the grandbabies on your knees and shit? Nowdays old farts are robbin' banks and gettin' 21 innocent people killed while doing a campaign op while runnin' fer President and such. And they're even pirating music, sometimes even after they're dead. Now, you know what this penguin thinks of baby boomers (what have baby boomers born after 1950 ever accomplished, other than scoring a ton of hash during the early 70's and managing to ruin America's economy with their unwarranted sense of self-entitlement?), but sheesh. If this is what old farts are like 'nowdays, I ain't so sure I like old people either. Why, soon 'nuff, we're gonna have to build yet more prisons to house their wrinkled old butts. Ick!

-- Badtux the Misanthropic Penguin

Wingnuts talk up China military threat

Wingnuts are abuzz about the military threat posed by China. Apparently, having every operational combat brigade of the U.S. Army tied down in a tar pit in Iraq and Afghanistan isn't enough for them. Now we're supposed to... uhm, do what? Cringe in terror while Dear Leader "protects" us from a Chinese military that poses absolutely no (zero) threat to the United States? Fire off NUKES at the Chinese? Are these mofo's in Washington D.C. freakin' INSANE?!

China's current defensive posture is, well, defensive -- none of their current weapons other than their few dozen ICBM's are much use for offensive purposes. The Song class diesel-electric boats, for example, while quite stealthy in electric mode (U.S. forces have been embarrassed more than once by one popping in the middle of their exercises after sneaking there undetected), does not have a particularly long range and as far as we know do not have the ability to be refueled at sea, meaning that they are primarily of use for coastal defense. China does not possess any heavy bombers with intercontinental range and as far as we know has no plans to acquire any. The majority of their air force is comprised largely of short-ranged MiG-21 fighters and indigenenous variants thereof which are useless for offensive operations at any significant distance beyond their border. Their Navy is comprised of coastal defense destroyers and submarines and has no ability to sustain operations beyond a few hundred miles of China's coast, lacking tankers and support ships necessary for such purpose. Their Army is large but possesses no useful tanks (just obsolete clones of old Stalin-era Soviet tanks) and thus lacks the primary offensive weapon of modern armies, Chinese investment at the moment is going into producing anti-tank weapons capable of defending against invading M1 tanks, not into a new generation of tanks. Etc.

In the long term, China's military aspirations are something to worry about. As they develop their industrial skills by selling cheap junk to Americans, they also develop the ability to design and build modern weapons. Short term... no. China's current military posture would be hard-pressed to defend the Chinese mainland against any modern adversary, and would successfully do so only because China possesses the advantage of scale (i.e., they have so many of these short-ranged obsolete weapons and so much population base to draw upon, that any attacking military would run out of bullets and anti-aircraft missiles before killing them all).

Even their long-term goal of invading and forcibly re-uniting Taiwan is at least a decade away. Taiwan is defended by modern F-16 fighter jets, the best fighter jet in the world, as well as their own indigeneously-produced fighter jet which is roughly equivalent to the F-18 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets which are somewhat less capable but still quite well able to take out anything China has. China's MiG-21 jets cannot reach Taiwan with any useful military payload, and they have only a handful of Su-30 fighter jets purchased from Russia that are anywhere near modern enough to take on a F-16 (and I would still lay my bet on the F-16). Any invasion fleet of Chinese trawlers would swiftly end up at the bottom of the sea without any U.S. intervention at all.

In short, China's threat to America or to anybody else for at least the next decade is economic, not military. For the moment their biggest military threat is their ability to provide massive amounts of cheap weaponry to asymmetrical warfare organizations in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon and to potential adversary states such as Iran, rather than any direct military threat presented by their own military forces.

-- Badtux the Military Penguin

PS - even their new ability to take out satellites is defensive in purpose. Taking out the GPS satellites would also take out American GPS-guided "smart weapons" and significantly reduce the effectiveness of weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles (which are significantly less accurate in terrain-following mode -- e.g., during the 1st Gulf War, before being modified to use GPS, roughly half the Tomahawks fired from naval vessels in the Red Sea ended up actually crashing into our allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan rather than making it across the Arabian Peninsula into Iraq!).

Bipolar disorder

Black or white. Good or evil. Liberal or conservative. If you ain't wit us you agin' us. Ever notice that some monkeys seperate the world into two different poles and sort everything into those two poles, without ever acknowledging any shades of gray? It must be sad to have such a bipolar disorder, where you see only two poles - "us" and "them". As a black and white and yellow penguin in a world of monochromic monkeys, I can only express puzzlement at the inability of monochromic monkeys to see anything that is both black and white. Instead, they only see the color that they want to see, at which point this penguin becomes a white penguin for those who want to see white, and a black penguin for those who want to see black. Or a "liberal" penguin for those who want to see "liberal", or a "conservative" penguin for those who want to see "conservative". Sad, really. How odd, these monkeys that can see only one color at a time, and never revel in the black and white and yellow and green extravagance of the universe!

-- Badtux the Multi-colored Penguin