... in response to Meryl Streep's gorgeous speech last night:

“We are going to have an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout for the inauguration, and there will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars,” Mr. Trump said. “All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

I can't wait until January 20th rolls around and nobody comes to his party (except maybe The Nuge). Maybe that's what it'll take to show this clown that no really dude, nobody likes you, and nobody wants to come to your party, no matter how many moon bounces and ice cream flavors you're gonna have.

With everyone's luck, there will be a horrible nor'easter hitting the whole DC area from the 19-21st, making that the reason in Donald's orange little head why people couldn't come.

Anyway, that's what I'm thinkin' about here in my folks' spare bedroom in north Jersey at 7:40am. Back to sleep.

So a topic keeps coming up with a boy I like (probably boyfriend? Mostly?) -- he keeps telling me things are lifestyle choices... like how I live (currently a little chaotic) and how I parent (possibly, same --but sorry, parenting a 15 year old girl is never not chaotic, to a degree, or you're a lying sack of poop; add in copatenting with a megaDick ex, and... yeah, chaos)...  

I don't intentionally choose chaos; I yearn for the zen kind of minimalist lifestyle that the whole KonMari lifestyle is all about.  But maybe I'm more of a hygge person. Definitely more that than minimalist. Thing is, life happens.  

Life is messy.  Finances are messy. Anxiety and depression are messy.  I think I'm kinda doing okay, all things considered. 

And yet! Right now what I want, really really want, is a more streamlined and simple existence.  I want a house organized how I like things. I want a healthy eating and moving lifestyle that has me two degrees more active than a sloth. I could totally be all over making some of that happen, sorting through twenty years of household shit and making some kind of sense of it all, purging shit like a good flu does...

so why why am I resisting?

Hello. Nice to be here. Have a cat photo: I introduce Mr. Pants, King of the dirty laundry bin.

Some things are new on One Post Wonder today:

1. Follow Fridays! This is very simple: on Friday, the "suggested topic" is always "who else should your friends follow on One Post Wonder?" and there's a little "Follow Friday" indicator. When posting, consider using the little-person icon, which is a handy way to mention someone in your post. It is my hope that this will help people who show up with just one or two connections and never really get "plugged in" beyond that. 
2. By popular request, the header bar now stays with you as you scroll, even on phones. But I am interested in feedback from folks who may have been happier the other way. Let's see how this goes.
3. Numbered lists (as you may be noticing).
4. Strikethrough (as you may be noticing).
5. The plaintext versions of important emails like account confirmation emails have working URLs in them. This is important to my fellow nerds people who for various valid reasons loathe HTML email, and possibly other corner cases.
6. When you paste a URL into your text and OPW makes a nice little presentation block out of it, the URL field gets populated right away.
7. The "bug report" icon is only available to logged-in users now. Which means no more spam for me to sort through. Which means I will pay better attention to your bug reports. w00t.

What would you like to see? What do you think would help the platform reach more people for the right reasons?

• 2 cups white flour
  
• ½ cup whole wheat flour
• ½ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ⅔ can coconut milk
• Italian seasoning to taste
• ¼ cup coarsely chopped walnuts (I just crush a handful of pre-shelled walnuts in my fist as I’m dropping them in)
• Enough almond milk

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the coconut milk, then enough almond milk to get to a slightly sticky but rollable consistency. Roll out with a rolling pin, not too thin, keep it maybe half an inch even. If there's leftover dough, you can roll it out again who am I kidding you ate it.

Use a small glass as a biscuit cutter, who has biscuit cutters?

Bake for 12 minutes at 350. Awesome as-is or with your spreadable fat of choice.

This recipe happens to be vegan. I would have put in an egg if I'd had one. Glad I didn't, I think they are perfect as-is.

They are on the salty side, but these are biscuits. Biscuits are not health food. They are snowy-day warm belly food.

In Minneapolis for 36 hours.  Just got off the light rail and was walking 3 blocks to my hotel and a homeless guy stopped me.

"Pleeeeeeeeease can I have money for something to eat? I haven't eaten since yesterday, I'm sooooooo hungry, they kicked me out of the shelter, I'm so hungry... hungry hungry starving starving..."

And I said, "Dude, I have no cash. All I have is plastic... I'm here on work. If I had something, I would give it to you."

He wouldn't let it go. He figured if he pleaded with me more, money would magically appear in my wallet for me to give him.  "Pleeeeeeeease! Anything! I'm so hungry hungry! SOOOO hungry! Aaaaaggggh!!"

Then I remembered, "Oh wait! I have a fresh sandwich in my bag. It's turkey and swiss. Here." And he changed 180 degrees and said in a totally different voice, "nah, forget it."  

Hahahaha. Idiot.

PS: No need to tell me the millions of things I should see and do while I'm here. I literally just got here (it's almost 9pm) and I teach a full day tomorrow and then I go straight back to the airport. 

My current no-knead recipe, boiled down to even less effort than the official New York Times version, which includes some unnecessary steps on baking day IMHO:

3 1/2 cups white flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup rolled oats
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt (*)
1/2 teaspoon active dry bread yeast (I use Red Star from the supermarket)
2 cups water, and a splash more

Mix the dry ingredients. Add the water. With a fork just combine it well; don't knead; this takes less than a minute. It should be a little too wet to knead.

Cover the bowl and allow to sit for 18-24 hours.

Shove an empty pyrex casserole pan (or similar) in the oven, with the lid on, and preheat to 450 degrees.

Remove pan carefully. Toss a little corn meal in the bottom. Take the dough out of the pan; it'll be sticky but manageable. Fold it over on itself (*). Drop it in the pan.

Shove your sticky hands back in your oven mitts and stick the pan in the oven for 30 minutes with the lid on.

Remove the lid and bake another 15 minutes. (**)

Remove and allow to cool a few minutes before devouring.

I was a latecomer to the no-knead party but I think I've got this down.

(*) Salt is a leavening agent and does add a little air to the bread which is nice when there's whole wheat in there. This was a key improvement for me.

(**) This step is optional. The results are a little prettier, but it does take a whole second, and I did say this was zero-effort bread.

(***) If you bake it in an uncovered loaf pan, you'll get a very hard crust. You can cover a loaf pan with aluminum foil if you haven't got a nice pyrex with a lid. The latter is worth finding because you get a very pretty peasant loaf.

Lots of hubbub about Russia "hacking" or "rigging" our elections lately.

But those words aren't quite accurate, are they. Even if the allegations are correct, the Russians didn't alter the results, or install malware on our machines. (If they did, the only sane thing to do is a do-over, a heavily audited one on paper ballots.) It's more accurate to say the Russians "influenced" our voters, by publishing hacked DNC emails and creating false narratives about one of the contenders, among other tactics.

And while it's no trick to temporarily stir up infochaos, it really shouldn't stick. Not against an informed populace, anyway. Fortunately for Russia, they didn't choose an informed populace. They chose us.

If one thing has become clear to me, it's that Americans - on all sides - don't want information. Information is hard. It has no feelings. It holds our hearts up the the mirror and forces us to look, to reassess how we feel. We don't like that.

We want ammunition. We don't care if news is "fake" if it supports our narrative. We don't learn facts to challenge our bias and increase our knowledge base - we learn "factoids" we can trot out to make ourselves appear, and feel, "right." Even when we're wrong.

And we certainly don't mind being shown hard evidence that we were duped. If cognative dissonance doesn't kick in, allowing us to deny the reality we see before us, we'll simply blame our gullibility on the victim, claiming we were only duped because the person being smeared is so bad that the false bit could have been true. Rational people, of course, would wonder what other false narratives have skewed their perceptions. That ain't us - we give ourselves a hug and - to work a terribly overworked word even harder - double-down.

That's the American way. Whether or not it's a by-product of the Age of Internet is beside the point; it's our way of life now. And it has consequences.

Look, it makes sense for people to be angry when a guy cons them. But when they willingly hand him their wallets - and another $20 on top of that - you have to conclude that they want to be conned. They enjoy it.

And it isn't going to stop. 

A wise man once said "be it heaven or hell, the Christmas we get we deserve." Trust this guy - he was so wise he chose to die before his time rather than live one more second in this brave new world. (What a lucky man he was.)

OK.  We're recording tonight, and while Matt is recording some guitars and keys, I sat back and played with my phone and let the Internet happen.

I'm not sure how it happened, but I wound up on YouTube, and a video popped up in my "Hey, this video might appeal to you" List... which is always interesting because I told Google and YouTube that I didn't want it keeping track of my YouTube video watching history or my search history... so I'm not sure what it bases its suggestions on.  But either way, it suggested this quickie compilation of the dance numbers from a movie I'd never heard of (The Rich Man's Frug?) that Bob Fosse choreographed.  So I watched it.

AND GOOD GOD, this very well may be one of the top 20 most amazing things my eyeballs have EVER seen, and I've seen some cool shit.  This here is a miracle and the pinnacle of what humans can accomplish.

Behold:

RIGHT!??!?!

WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL WAS THAT?!? OK, yeah, it was from Sweet Charity. But other than that, WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT??

(And am I the only one who was looking for Jenn Rice in that video?)

So I then read the comments, and miraculously, many were positive, and not the usual mouth-breathing lose-all-faith-in-humanity comments. Many people kept talking about "Emma" Something-or-Other and "Maybe" and even mentioning Beyonce, I didn't know what any of that meant, but enough people were talking about these things as if some person named Emma had a song called Maybe and that the video was inspired by the Fosse thing.

I'm a curious chick, so I entered those words into YouTube's search bar and I was expecting to be taken to some Arianna Grande bullshit (not that I could pick an Arianna Grande out of a lineup)... but the next thing I know I was watching a video that looked like it was directly ripped off/inspired by the Fosse thing indeed, and the lead singer looked like a 10-years-older Baby Spice maybe... and hey what do you know, that's exactly who/what this is. And HOLY SHIT, what is this song?! It has... genuinely interesting and challenging chord progressions! A really interesting melody! Damn fine production! It isn't auto-tuned to hell! It was created with genuine fucks given! 

Apparently this song "Maybe" by Emma "Please Don't Call Me Baby Spice Anymore" Bunton was a hit 10+ years ago, but I guess I stopped listening to Top 40 radio long before that so it never made it into my ears even once.

Hot damn, I love this little song!

And the video is cute, too.  It ain't no Fosse, but the nod is appreciated. If you're gonna steal an idea, steal from a great one, I guess.

Anyway, that's all I have to report.

Enjoy.