NACHA, The Electronic Payments Association, has released an alert today about a new phishing scam targeting people and businesses who use direct deposit/ACH transfers.

There's an e-mail being sent out to individuals and businesses claiming to be from NACHA, saying that a transaction failed. According to the NACHA website,

NACHA itself does not process nor touch the ACH transactions that flow to and from organizations and financial institutions. NACHA does not send communications to individuals or organizations about individual ACH transactions that they originate or receive.

If you get an e-mail that claims to be from NACHA.org saying that one of your transactions failed, do not follow the link in the e-mail. It is a phishing scam, and your computer will be infected with a virus and/or malware.

That's the license plate one of the teachers at my high school had. Schneider. He was also on Naperville's city council. I always wondered if his wife had I BE BACK 1, but I never asked. He and Bennett, another teacher, were from Cicero, so they only used people's last names. At least, that's the excuse Bennett gave.

Anyway, this is it. Friends list dumping is about to commence.

I'm goin', but I be back.

I just wrote a huge post, and then my keyboard slipped, and I have no idea what key I hit, but it all went away. CTRL+Z did nothing. Does that not work on IE8?

I'll try again.

1. Tomorrow I'm dumping the friends list. I say this now so that hopefully alice_bunnie will know what's happening before she gets the e-mail notification. About once a year, I need an LJ vacation, and that time is now. I dump the friends list instead of deleting my journal, because I've learned that really freaks people out.

I'm feeling angsty. Everything is getting under my skin. It's time to back off. In a couple of weeks, I'll decide I can't stand it anymore, and I'll add back everyone who's still got me on their friends list. Some of you have (for who knows what reason) kept with me through several of these. Some of you haven't seen me do this before. Some of you won't wait to see the end, I'm sure. That's okay. I've said before that I won't hang around your journal and harrass you or badmouth you to people just because you dropped me. If I have other reasons, all bets are off, but if I did, you wouldn't be on my list right now.

2. I'm quite certain I'll be back before the baby's born.

I have a confession to make. I like "This Is It," the posthumous Michael Jackson release. I liked it the first time I heard it, when I had no idea there was a posthumous release and thought maybe it was something old I'd never heard or hadn't heard in so long I'd forgotten it. If the voice tracks were recorded back in the 80s, I guess it is kind of old. I continue to like it, even though I've heard it several times now.

Does anyone know if the orchestration and backup vocals and stuff were added after he died? Is it like that awful, awful "Beatles" song whose name I can't remember and you don't need to remind me because I'd rather forget it, except that this one is good? On Wikipedia, Jackson is listed as the producer, so that would make me think not, but I don't trust Wikipedia, and being listed as the producer doesn't mean much. Apparently he's also listed as the sole writer of the song in the liner notes, but by now most people know Paul Anka wrote it with him.

The song has soul, which I think a lot of Jackson's music was missing, particularly the later stuff. It's like Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On," except, you know, not sexy. Romantic, touching, soulful, yes, but not sexy. Which is fine. It doesn't need to be. That's why the world has "Let's Get It On." But it makes me want to snap my fingers along with it, and it makes me wonder if he was still capable of doing music like that (since the vocal tracks are twenty-five years old). If he was — if that was the direction he was going to take — his death really was a tragedy for the music world.

This past weekend I made Thomas Keller Oreos (AKA TKOs). They're apparently from some fancy schmancy east coast bakery. Being a loyal Midwesterner, I don't generally have a lot of use for fancy schmancy east coast anything (yes, in fact, I do still call it Marshall Fields), but these looked good when they showed them (as bats!) on The Kitchn, so I thought I'd give them a try. I was going to do black cats instead of bats, though.

Unfortunately, the recipe they gave was all in ounces, but it didn't specify whether they were by weight or volume, so the recipe was really not much use. The people who commented on the post after having made them said it was not a good recipe, so I guess I'm glad I didn't just go ahead and figure it was by volume (which seemed to make the most sense to me of the two, given what the measurements would have come out to be).

Luckily, it turns out that lots of people have a recipe for them. The one I chose was from Curiously Ravenous, who apparently got it from a cookbook called The Essence of Chocolate, by John Scharffenberger. (Whatever else, that cookbook has a killer title.)

I didn't find this out until November first, and I didn't feel like making black cats anymore, so I just made round cookies. I used a very special cookie cutter, AKA Thing Two's Buzz Lightyear cup. I bet they don't have one of those at the fancy schmancy east coast bakery!

Now, my cookie cutter was probably larger than whatever most people would use (except, I imagine, when they make them as bats), and I didn't use parchment paper on my cookie trays (I hate how wasteful that is, and I don't think I would have had any less breakage if I'd used it), but other than that I followed the recipe pretty faithfully. Okay, so I was impatient and didn't let the filling sit for six hours. I followed the cookie recipe faithfully.

I don't think they were a total knockout (AKA TKO). They weren't really much like Oreos at all. They're good, just not so fantastic as I had hoped. (I'm using past tense here because while they weren't utterly fantastic, they're all gone.)

Some things I would do differently if I felt like making them again (and I might): refrigerate the dough for a half hour to an hour; use a quarter-cup less flour and then flour the rolling surface instead of using parchment paper (again, more ridiculous waste); don't roll them out so thin, go for closer to 1/4" than 1/8"; use a smaller cookie cutter, like the juice glasses (AKA the little four ounce glass jars that Kraft cheese spreads come in); use something other than the filling in the recipe, maybe seven minute frosting instead, or even just buttercream.

There's a game called Cheese or Font? where you have to decide if a name is that of a cheese or a font.

Very silly.

Please check your emau] ASAP and write me or call.

I'm wearing the same costume to work as last year, except with black tights, and my loafers this year don't have blue beads, although these do have beigish stitching.

And I didn't do it on purpose, either.

*"Halloween," Ministry

Bob Dylan is playing the Rockford Metro Centre tonight. There are still tickets available.

I wouldn't have wanted to see him twenty years ago, but these days he's intelligible again, from what I understand.

Pampered Chef has a proper (mostly) cookie press. It's plastic/plexiglass instead of aluminum and copper like a good old Mirro press, but it's not a gun! You turn the top to work the press! It doesn't have all the right disks (meaning the ones that used to come with the good old Mirro press), but maybe the ones from my icky gun-press would fit.

Of course, it's $30, and I don't know that I really want to pay $30 for a cookie press right now, when the icky gun-press works almost okay. But that's a lot less than you'd pay for a vintage Mirro, even one that didn't have all the disks. I've gotten a few things from Pampered Chef, and I have to say that even though their prices are a little higher than I really usually want to spend, their stuff is good, so it's been worth the extra money.

If I could just convince my mom to look the other way while I took her Mirro press . . .


ETA: Erm, it behooves me to mention this is not a thinly veiled request for a gift from people who don't actually know me. I hate feeling like that's necessary, but I do.

First, there was Schrödinger's Rapist: or a guy's guide to approaching strange women without being maced. In my opinion, the woman who wrote it is letting fear rule her life and is treating men unfairly.

Now, there's a response on another 'blog, this one written by a man who is, himself, a rape victim. I think he brings up many good points. My particular favorite is this one, "I wish Starling and everyone else good luck on their search for companions who will understand them and love them for who they are. But unless we try, not just to be understood, but to understand, we aren’t likely to have much success."

The Illinois State Senate voted today to put a constitutional amendment on the 2010 ballot to allow the recall of governors.

I'm not entirely certain what I think of the idea. It seems good. But then, remember California's recall of Gray Davis? That was a farce. Of course, it was California.

for reminding me that today is National Grouch Day. That link gives five suggestions for how to celebrate, if you're so lame you need them.

I have so many things to be grouchy about today that it would take all day to list them, and then I wouldn't be able to properly be grouchy, so I'm not going to. You can suffer in your ignorance.

Blah.

Prices at the grocery store could go up as much as five percent in the next year. That's bad enough, but if you read the article, it uses the example of a person who now spends $300 a week on groceries.

Who the fuck spends that much money on groceries? We are a family of five, plus three cats, and we're trying to cut back on the $150 we spend!

What kind of food, and how much of it, must people be buying if they're spending that much?

Not when we let the insurance companies control health care. This woman is being told she can't deliver her baby at the hospital of her choice, unless it's by C-section. Why? Really? Because health and malpractice insurers don't like vaginal births, particularly VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarean).

Are there risks involved with vaginal birth, particularly VBAC? Yes! There are! Life is full of risks!

A C-section is major surgery. Are there risks involved with that? Yes! There are! Life is full of risks!

Why can't we make the decisions about which risks we are willing to take? When you go to the hospital, even for minor tests, you sign a disclaimer. What's wrong with signing a disclaimer absolving the hospital and doctor of guilt if you choose a supposedly riskier procedure?

As we give more control to the insurance companies, we lose it for ourselves.

(Just a warning, I take this particular issue very personally. I seriously believe there's a good chance Little Cat Z would not have the problems she has if it weren't for my doctor deciding early in my pregnancy that there was no way I could have a vaginal birth because the baby would be too big. Never mind that I'd already had two nine-pounders with no tearing and no episiotomy.)

I am designing a dress for Thing One. She really liked the sundresses I made for Little Cat Z this summer, and kept saying things like, "I wish I had a dress like that." Subtlety isn't her strong suit.

The dress will have a knitted bodice and a woven fabric skirt. My original plan was to have the bodice close in the back with buttons. Now I'm thinking that might not be the best way to go. I'm thinking a zipper on the side would be better. I'm not very trusting when it comes to knitted buttonholes actually holding the buttons. This isn't so bad when it's on a four-year-old who's home most of the time, but if sixth grader is wearing a dress that won't stay shut . . . that's a problem. Also, if it's on the side, it would be easier for her to get on and off by herself. I think buttons on the side would be worse than on the back, because she'd be brushing against them all the time, making it more likely they'd come undone, and also it could be pretty annoying to feel the lumps from the buttons there.

Of course, I'm kind of thinking this might not be a bad pattern to try to sell, too, if it works. So while I would have little problem putting in a double-lapped zipper on the skirt and bodice (I've been sewing about as long as I've been knitting), I don't know how other knitters would feel about that. And I'd have to be really good at explaining it in my directions, too.

To top it all off, I'm at least a third of the way done knitting the bodice, with the back buttons in mind, and I'd have to rip out most of it to do it with the zipper in the side.

So, what'd y'all think?

(Crossposting to sosoclever knits!)

But, luckily for me, someone else has written something very similar. This lovely lady at Stacked actually read Mein Kampf, and wrote about why even books as horrible as this should not be banned.

to seeing a dead body lying on the side of the road. (There are no pictures with that story, don't worry.)

I witnessed that accident and stopped to help. I stayed with the 10-year old because I couldn't bring myself to go over to where the driver was laying. It was bad. If the driver of the other car hadn't already gone over to him and said he was "gurgling," I'd have thought he was certainly dead.

Okay, so there's a new book out by a speechwriter who worked in the Bush administration, claiming that the Harry Potter books encourage the use of witchcraft, and this is why Bush never awarded J.K. Rowling the Presidential Medal of Freedom. And you know what people are doing now? Taking that book — or at least the little bit of it they've heard about — at its word.

I have to agree with the Entertainment Weekly article on it (it's just disturbing to see an actual voice of reason in an entertainment rag):

Latimer is your classic disgruntled former employee, and his allegation is oddly light on details — When did this happen? Who exactly expressed these objections? — so take it with a grain of salt.

Of course, then they go on to ask who "disapproves of Harry Potter?" Well, personally, I don't disapprove of the books, but I don't think they're all that wonderful. The writing is on the mediocre side, and Harry is a lying little brat. He lies constantly, and when he's actually caught at it, he's rewarded for it.

Yes, I understand that most kids will lie about things rather than admit the truth and risk getting in trouble. But why do Harry Potter's lies always seem to wind up saving the day, at least in some small way?

I don't even have to answer the question, because David Gibson answered it quite handily for me. Just . . . don't read the comments on that editorial. I warned you. You should probably know better, anyway (I know I do, even if I can't help myself sometimes).

*Being brought to justice does not mean being convicted (aside from the fact that he pled guilty to sex with a minor). It means going going through the legal system as he should have done thirty years ago.


ETA: I realize this might be troubling for some, so if you go reading in the comments, be warned that the comments from lorien_johnson starting with the one with the link to The Smoking Gun, have the victim's testimony from the original trial, and it is disturbing. You might want to scroll right past that.