Nobrainer’s Think Tank

Ramon Gerard Antonio Estevez is the father of Carlos Irwin Estévez and Emilio Estévez.

You may better recognize them as Martin Sheen, Charlie Sheen, and that guy who was in the Brat Pack back in, like, the 80’s.

So I really didn’t have any reason to bring up the family because this post is about Emilio, but I just wanted to throw out that last punch line. Honestly, it sometimes seems like Emilio is the brother who died in the gutter of either a drug overdose or a severe case of some new sexually transmitted disease that seemed destined for Charlie. But no, he is still alive and clearly not working much.

It seems that in his abundant free time, he took to googling himself.

“Hollywood is guilty of turning out s**t. I’ve turned it out myself, but what the journalists don’t do is take a moment to think that maybe this actor has got a family and he has got to feed them.”

If the only way he can feed his family is through acting, I’m surprised they’re not dead already.

UPDATE: As if his whole family wasn’t hurting for cash before:

After two months of negotiations, “Two and a Half Men” star Charlie Sheen is close to finalizing a new salary pact that would make him the highest-paid comedy star in television today.

I post this as a warning to you, my loyal readers, as well as a reminder to myself about trusting… well anyone really. (It turns out I have very little trust in individuals. Chalk it up to experience.)

We often hear “experts” warn of $200/barrel oil, or $5/gallon gasoline, or peak oil, or global temperature increases of 10ºF, or oceans rising by 1 meter, or blah blah blah.

I’m sure there are plenty of experts who do good, solid work. Those people are probably the ones you never hear from, however. Perhaps the people who are good enough to actually make money with their expertise don’t feel the need to spout off about their superiority. For example I’m almost broke. Look at me rant and rave.

As you should have noticed, I spend a fair amount of my time tracking energy markets and energy technology (Allah willing I’ll be an energy trader in 9 months and an “expert” to some degree.) At least daily I check the price of crude, NYMEX gasoline futures, etc.

Bloomberg always has little articles about recent market developments which explain recent price movements (as I’m sure all financial news networks do). On Wednesdays the Energy Department releases data on energy stockpiles. Usually on Tuesdays they publish average anaylst predictions of the change in those stockpiles. For about a month I have paid attention to these forecasts and I have noticed they tend to be horribly, horribly wrong over and over and over again. Today:

Crude oil supplies slipped 109,000 barrels to 324.8 million last week, the report showed. A decline of 1.7 million barrels was expected, according to the median of 13 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg News. The drop left supplies 6.3 percent higher than the five-year average for the date.

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Nothing amusing happened until after 5 PM. So I’ll start there:

Just past 5 I left to attend a case interview workshop. The reminder email I received said it started at 5:15 even though previous emails said 5.

I was late. Oh well, I learned some stuff and there was free pizza. There was enough pizza, we were told, to give each of the 38 people who had sent an RSVP two slices. Well there were 5 big pizzas and they didn’t have 16 slices each. And there were 10 extra people in attendance. I got one piece, and while enjoying it my friend observed that all of the tiny, Asian girls had gotten two pieces. Moments later one of the tiny Asian girls threw a whole piece in the trash.

UVA students are superior!

Later I attended an 8PM recruiting presentation for a consulting firm. Here’s what I noticed:
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Maybe I’ve seen seasons 1 through 3 way too many times. Maybe I’m getting mature. Maybe the South Park episode about why Family Guy sucks flipped a switch. Or maybe Seth MacFarlane traded humor for trying to preach about the wonderful benefits of gay marriage and the evils of Wal-Mart, errr I mean Superstore USA or whatever.

I still think that matricidal infant geniuses are funny. I still think that alcoholic dog geniuses are funny. But how often does Stewie try to kill Lois these days? And Brian seems to have traded the bottle for saving the world.

In other words, I’m not laughing. Family Guy is approaching the comedic level of Saturday Night Live. The current SNL. I watch not because I expect to see funny things. I watch because I wonder if they’ve righted the ship.

Through most of season 4 I didn’t laugh much. Although once I saw the episodes repeated I appreciated them a bit more. Maybe I just have to give the new season more time.

Maybe I need to try to take the show less seriously. But this is becoming more difficult, because the creators obviously want to be taken seriously. If they want me to seriously believe that Wal-Mart is destroying the world, by literally sucking the energy out of a community, then I have to point out they don’t understand energy or economics or dynamics or really much of anything of importance.

(By the way they’d like to thank you for going to your local big-box store and buying enough DVDs that the show got brought back on the air.)

The sad thing for the show is that they are now not preaching well nor being funny.

The sad thing for me is that I’m taking cartoons seriously.

Since I have thus far managed to not kill my 3 pepper plants, I have from time-to-time become inundated with bastardly little peppers. Stuffing them seemed like an excellent idea. However it was new to me and I had no recipe. Opting for ease, I found on on the Food Network website. Titled Turkey Stuffed Peppers, I now cannot even find the recipe listed on the site.

I have a printout, so here goes:

• 4 red, green or yellow bell peppers, tops sliced off and chopped up
• 2 cups leftover rice or couscous
• 1 cup leftover chopped turkey
• 1 teaspoon dried basil
• 1 tablespoon fresh chopped parsley
• 1/2 cup chicken stock
• 2 scallions, chopped

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Slice off tops of bell peppers, remove seeds and discard. Chop up the bel pepper tops and place into a large bowl. Add rice or couscous, chopped meat, dried basil, parsley, chopped pepper tops, chicken stock and scallions. Toss to combine and season with salt and pepper. Stuff each pepper with filling and place in a square baking dish. Bake 45 minutes or until tender.

Like I said, this one looked easy.

But I modified it to make it easier. Why cook rice and track down the herbs and scallions? Instead of rice, parsley, basil, and scallions, I broke out some bags of premixed rice/vermicelli/seasoning. I also used chicken instead of turkey, and for good measure added some bacon.

I swear the bags of seasoned rice mix said they made 1 cup of prepared food. I used 3 bags of the stuff and had 4 cups of the stuff leftover. Anyway I cooked it per package instructions. It can be a little soupy right after you take it off the heat, but that might be a good thing.

I added about 2 cups of the rice mix to about 1/2 cups of chopped chicken with about 5 chopped up pieces of the store-bought, pre-cooked bacon. I mixed it all up and put it into 6 smallish peppers. They cooked for about 40 minutes. Then I grated a little bit of cheddar cheese on top.

All things considered it wasn’t a bad first run.

Here’s what I’ll change the next time:

• add a little bit more of the “broth” to the mix to keep the chicken from drying out
• keep some bacon out of the mix (or have extra) that is put on top of the mixture that has been stuffed into the peppers. Since it is on top it will cook and crisp up (or at least it should).
• add the cheese with about 5 minutes of cook time left to let it melt in. It may also be good to add the cheese to the stuffing, but I fear that the hot rice will melt it too early.
• cook it about 5 minutes longer. The smaller peppers were ok because the walls were thinner, but the larger ones could have used a few more minutes

That’s pretty much it. The peppers are just little, edible cups. In the future I’ll probably also put grilled steak, sauteed onions, and provolone cheese in them.

… supply and demand work the same way.

Ethanol averaged $1.9966 a gallon today, down from $2.2266 Sept. 15 and the lowest since Jan. 23, based on data from distributors in Des Moines, Iowa, and almost 30 other Midwest locations.

The latest average was down 50 percent from a record $3.9757 on July 5 and down from $2.655 a year ago.

I blame the President. And Republicans. And that goddamned agricultural cartel!