Freedom Loaf

Mrs Finch was out of town for a week and I was left to hunt and/or gather my own food. For six out of seven days, I subsisted mostly on packets of unsweetened Kool-Aid mix and potpourri, but on day seven -- glorious day seven! -- I reached deep into the pantry and created a meal. Gentle readers, I give you... The Freedom Loaf*:

1 lb ground beef
1 egg, beaten like Gordon Brown
1/2 cup O'Charley's honey mustard
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup Frank's Red Hot sauce
1 tbsp Dale's Steak Seasoning
1 tsp chipotle chile powder
2 cups garlic and onion croutons, pummeled angrily to dust
salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mush everything into a big pale greyish lump and plop into any pan with sides (1" or deeper). Cook uncovered for one hour. Remove from oven using clean(ish) bathmat since you can't find a potholder. Scrape the fat drippings from the edges to give to your dogs, then slice meatloaf and serve with Cool Ranch Doritos or Nutter Butters.

*That's right. Scotticus Finch's milestone 100th post is a meatloaf recipe. Deal.

Banks Collapse, Kleenex and Jergens See Record Profits

Most people wouldn't say they "enjoy" their jobs. That is to say, most people wouldn't continue filing TPS reports, fielding customer-complaint calls, inseminating mares, or whatever if there were no compensation involved. Add to that reality the fact that most people plug away at their jobs for at least forty hours every week, and it's no wonder folks occasionally find themselves seeking out cubicle-based diversions. A quick mission sweeping mines, pithy social-networking updates, riveting and hilarious cultural observations -- you get the picture.

But what kind of job must one have that enables him to -- ahem -- jerk around for eight hours a day? Why, a government job, of course!

A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. [emphasis added]

Eight hours a day?! I know pornographers who don't see eight hours of porn in a day. Fortunately for the hoarding horndog, there were plenty of other locked office doors in the building:

The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained by the Associated Press.

The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.

One amorous accountant attempted (and failed) to access restricted sites more than 16,000 times in a single month, then -- displaying that never-say-die government moxie that won the War on Drugs in the '80s -- the accountant settled for changing his Google Images search settings and "managed to amass a collection of 'very graphic' material on his hard drive" that way instead.

The report surfaced on Thursday, but the story seemed to suffocate quickly, practically dismissed as novelty News of the Weird. But before the sordid tale of the Bishop-Bopping Beltway Boys dies off completely, keep a figure in mind:

$222,418

That is the salary of "senior level" SEC employees, seventeen of whom were implicated in the probe. That's $9.45 million you and I spent since mid-2007.

Talk about fiddling while Rome burned...

Also, "Scottéric Bastiat" Was Already Taken

Judging by the way several people -- upon making my personal acquaintance -- mispronounce the name of this blog, a bit of appellative exposition is in order.

The name "Scotticus Finch" is a barely-creative take on Atticus Finch, the protagonist in Harper Lee's 1960 masterpiece To Kill a Mockingbird. Finch was peerlessly portrayed in the 1962 film version by Gregory Peck, a performance that netted Peck an Oscar and (forty years later) cemented Finch as the greatest hero in 100 years of American cinema (edging out such icons as Superman, Indiana Jones, and James Bond).

Today, writing a progressive character who fights against racist ignorami is just lazy. In 1962, it was contemporary. In Mockingbird, Finch, a southern lawyer, represents a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. The book is written from the perspective of Finch's young daughter, so some of the lessons aren't exactly groundbreaking -- "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." -- but Finch was a practical idealist, a crack-shot pacifist, an eternally-patient single parent, and an anti-authoritarian agent of the state. We don't get heroes like that every day.

Finch on democracy: "The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."

Bastiat himself couldn't have said it better.

Incidentally, today would have been Peck's 94^th birthday.

Accepting the Award on Behalf of the Internets Will be Ted Stevens

According to those tea-sipping pitch-joggers over at the BBC, the Internet has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "But Finchy! The Nobel Peace Prize is an honor traditionally reserved for tempered humanitarian activists or elder global statesmen with a long history of working toward a more peaceful world!" Well, gentle reader, that attitude is so 2006.

It's 2010, and the Barack Obama GoDaddy.com™ Hope & Change© Warm Fuzzies Award® has a new reputation to uphold. Never mind those boring doctors treating rape victims in the Congo, imprisoned electricians championing Democracy in China, or mountaineers building secular schools in rural Pakistan. No one has even heard of those people. But everyone knows Perez Hilton and LOLcats.

In addition to the Internet, I say it's high time we nominate hugs. Or rainbows. Or the very concept of peace itself. Why not nominate a fictional amalgamation of Jesus, Buddha, Captain Stubing from The Love Boat, and long summer afternoons sippin' lemonade? No matter what, Nobel Committee, you've already been bested in the race to the bottom.

Enjoy your newfound irrelevance.

St Paddy's Day tip o' the hat to "Andrea" for the link.

Part-Time Athletes of the Northern Hemisphere, Unite!

[UPDATE added below]

The casual observer might have thought that everything that can be done while skiing is already an Olympic sport. Fast skiing, slow skiing, drunken skiing, weird Princess-Toadstool-from-Super-Mario-Bros-2 levitation-trick skiing, "Look-Ma!" skiing, Nordic thug life skiing -- it's all there. But somehow, somewhere between "What if we shoot rifles on skis?!" and "What if we ski on flat terrain for hours?!", no one ever thought -- until Vancouver 2010 -- "What if we race?"

And thus Ski Cross was born.

Skicross [sic?] pits four racers through a course of banked turns and washboard jumps that lends itself to close contact.

"That gives you eight poles, 12 edges, and guys are racing down a course with huge jumps up to 100 feet through the air," said Errol Kerr, a New Yorker who competed for Jamaica.

Granted, those three numbers that Kerr emphatically tossed out mean nothing to me, but I've never been anywhere with eight poles and not enjoyed myself. (See what I did there?)

Honestly, I find almost nothing about the games compelling, but the top-notch (and never-ending) network coverage with all our favorite faces could make a darning convention seem interesting, so I've watched more of these Olympics than I could possibly explain away with a just-out-of-reach remote. It's like Tool Academy is suddenly being hosted by President Clinton, or Bruce Willis is starring in a Kevin Smith "film".

It also doesn't hurt that the US is making a surprisingly good showing, or that our National Snow Bunny reminds us that Michael Phelps looked like a homeless meth addict from the neck up. Now if only we could go back to the days when the Olympic Games provided a stage for a proxy war in place of soldiers on the ground. Unfortunately, I don't see the Afghan Olympic Team giving us a Miracle on Ice opportunity any time soon.

UPDATE: In light of the hoopla surrounding the US ice-hockey team's win over Canada yesterday, I find it necessary to quote a Facebook status update:

"Miracle on Ice 1980" is to "US v CAN 2010" as "Gandalf" is to "Judge Harry T Stone".