I made some chicken parmagiana for the first time…I’ve done veal before, but never correctly. This came out pretty good, if I do say so myself. I paired it with my favorite table wine (Concha y Toro Frontera Cabernet Sauvignon/Merlot).

For future reference:

Chicken breasts or tenderloins (I used the latter)
Eggs (beaten and salted)
Bread crumbs
Marinara or spaghetti sauce
Mozzarella cheese
Olive Oil

Beat the eggs and add salt for egg wash. Pour into a medium-sized bowl. Spread some bread crumbs into a bowl or plate. Dip the chicken pieces into the egg wash, turning over once. Place piece in bread crumbs, thoroughly coating.

Brown the chicken pieces on both sides in a pan containing heated olive oil for 3-4 minutes each side.

Place the browned chicken pieces into a pan or casserole dish. Cover with marinara or spaghetti sauce (Mezzetta^® Napa Valley Bistro – Roasted Garlic Pasta Sauce is a good one). Top with a moderate portion of mozzarella cheese. Add additional cheeses (asiago, provolone, etc.) as desired.

Bake in a 375° oven for 20-25 minutes. Serve with pasta.

Today is the solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God. This title, Mother of God, is important to all Christians to recall, because of what it tells us about Christ. Many Protestants and Evangelicals are uncomfortable with this title. I think this is because they misunderstand its background and importance. While we ought to give proper honor to the Blessed Virgin, the title “Mother of God” developed out of a desire to protect teaching about Jesus.

In the 4th century, Nestorius, Archbishop of Constantinople, promoted the concept of Christotokos (“Christ-bearer”), in opposition to the popular title Theotokos (“God-bearer”) often applied at that time to Mary.

Nestorius taught that Jesus’ two natures were actually two distinct persons. This heresy developed into a schism, splitting the Assyrian Church from the rest of the Church. In recent years, this schism has largely healed.

Theotokos has been (loosely) translated into English as “Mother of God,” and it is through this title that we remind ourselves that when the Blessed Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, she gave birth to a single Person, fully human and fully divine. She truly is the God-bearer.

+A.M.D.G.+

Pepsi Throwback and Mountain Dew Throwback, with real sugar, are back for a limited time. The packaging this time is more distinct, making it easier to spot.

If your local grocer doesn’t carry it, ask him to do so, won’t you?

Do-gooders are a tiresome lot, and their knack for overlooking the consequences of their initiatives makes them even more irritating.

It’s January 1st, so many new laws go into effect around the country. In Oregon, we have a number of new laws, and two in particular which I think ought not to have been enacted.

One law expands the already-enacted “move over” law to include other types of emergency vehicles. The original law, however, was a bad idea. Don’t get me wrong; I think it is a fine idea to give emergency vehicles, or for that matter, any vehicle on the side of the road some extra room by changing lanes whenever it is safe to do so.

The problem with this law is that by enacting a good thought into law, it causes unintended consquences. with the threat of legal penalties, unwitting drivers who come upon a police car or other emergency vehicle on the shoulder will likely do one of two things: slam on the brakes, or swerve into the lane to the left. Either of these two actions will result in an increase of high-speed rear-end collisions.

The second law is the requirement for a “hands-free” device for cell phones. This sounds, on the surface, like a reasonable law, and I certainly sympathize with those who are tired of dealing with inattentive drives. But what will likely occur is 1) people will simply ignore the law, as they do in other states with similar laws (because they are hard to enforce), or 2) fumble with trying to turn on their earpiece to answer calls, leading to more, not less, unsafe conditions.

In both cases, I’m afraid that the the solution is worse than the problem. Beyond that, we have more than enough laws as it is. How about repealing a law or two for every new one passed?

Now, the aforementioned safety advocates can perhaps be excused for their enthusiasm, as they presumably have good intentions. To assume the same for the legislature is, I think, going too far. Our esteemed representatives certainly know that they could fund a safety campaign, if it was really safety that is the goal. The true goal, however, is revenue…and safety is merely a cover.

The news media, racing blogosphere and some drivers and crew chiefs have just about gone mad wringing their hands over Sunday’s race at Talladega, at the end of which Carl Edwards’ car was nearly flung into the stands. Carl and the other driver involved in the wreck, Ryan Newman, are OK, but some fans were injured.

So, all sorts of ideas are being tossed out: smaller restrictor plate, bulldoze the embankments, stop guys from blocking, etc.

The problem is: some of these solutions take away the attraction of Talladega…which is one of the most popular tracks among race fans.

I think there are a couple of things that ought to be done. One is easy, but it requires NASCAR admitting they were wrong when they ruled that Regan Smith did not win the race last fall because he went below the yellow line on the last lap: just modify the yellow line rule to allow a pass on the last lap below the line if and only if a driver is forced down there by another driver trying to block him.

This keeps the yellow line rule in place, but with an important exception. One objection to removing the yellow line rule entirely is valid: guys would just try to block all the way down to the grass. But with this proposed rule change, the blocking driver would only be able to block down to the yellow line, or he’d be penalized one lap. So, the guy trying to make the pass would have enough room to pass him without wrecking anyone.

That takes care of the short term problem, I think. For the long term, a lot of good ideas have been thrown out there. I think you have to go with what Junior said about the track not changing. He’s right; for economic and entertainment reasons, the track is not going to change.

So, how about this? Run a test race sometime in the next year or two with a few different categories of cars. One class could have the 302 engine that was tested at Daytona some years ago. Another could have a V-6 of about 3-3.5 liters. And here’s an idea that no one else is going to suggest: also test cars with diesel engines of whatever configuration (3-5 liters displacement) with up to two turbos in series.

See what kind of racing you get and how throttle response is with the various engines. The diesel idea is so that you could get back to the idea of racing providing some tangible R&D benefit to manufacturers. And Audi has proved that modern diesels can compete in auto racing with their success with the V12 TDI in LeMans.

Red Scare

Fr. Gerhard Wagner, who had been appointed to auxiliary bishop of Linz, has asked Pope Benedict XVI to withdraw his appointment in the face of hysterical opposition by liberals in the diocese. Sadly, the Holy Father has accepted his resignation.

For those unfamiliar with this diocese, it is quite possibly the least orthodox diocese in Europe, which is saying quite a bit. Gillibrand at Catholic Church Conservation has documented much of the nonsense that occurs there over the past several years.

This episode has followed a pattern similar to the Regensburg address. The Holy Father does something that offends, those offended completely overreact, and he withdraws or modifies the offending action. The chief difference is that the liberals in Linz haven’t beheaded anyone, as far as I know.

The danger is that this will embolden the liberals, and the Pope will have an increasingly difficult time taking any action with which there is any significant disagreement.

This could also endanger regularization of the Society of St. Pius X, since these same liberals definitely oppose it.

Mark Steyn, in discussing the laughable expectations the West has for the Islamic world, hits on a point which is really something about which we need to have a conversation about as a civilization.

We are gradually losing our Western identity, and losing the support of those who really ought to support it, largely because we have abandoned any pretense of believing in our principles. Western civilization has become flaccid and indecisive. We can’t even decide whether marriage consists of a man and a woman.

If we are to survive, we must again develop a muscular, vigorous Western intellectual movement. We must not be afraid to say that, yes, Western Christian civilization is better than the civilization of say, Somalia. And we ought to aim to keep it that way. That this is the case is obvious on its face, but we have shied away from saying so, for fear of offending someone. We can no longer afford to indulge in this sort of prissiness.

In order to do this, we must first act at home. Let us unashamedly defend Western tradition, and defeat the intellectual terrorists who inhabit academia. We must recognize them as domestic enemies, as they certainly recognize us. Do not cower before their Fabian tactics; throw political correctness and hypersensitivity in the trash can where it belongs.

We conservatives and traditionalists must stand together, or, as Benjamin Franklin remarked, we shall surely hang separately.

OK…this is another one of those things that I’m posting in case anyone else is trying to do this, and can’t find information on how to do so. After extensive Googling, it appears there was one German guy looking for an answer to this, but never received one.

What I was trying to do was install IPcop via PXE onto a SATA hard drive in a Soekris 5501, which is a PC in a very small form-factor. It is designed to act like a network device. Some of the things you expect in a PC are, however, not present. Like a video adapter.

The IPcop PXE install was a no-go, because there seemed to be no way to redirect the output of the install screens to the serial port (which is how you work with the system until you get networking going).

What I ended up doing was to plug in the hard drive in another machine. I installed IPcop, changed the network device type to via-rhine in /var/ipcop/ethernet/settings, changed the /dev/harddisk* links to point to /dev/hdb (which is where the hard drive shows up in one of these devices), and modified /boot/grub/grub.conf by commenting out the fancy stuff (colors, pixmap), adding terminal serial near the top, changing /dev/sda4 to /dev/hdb4 and adding console=ttyS0,57600 to each append line. Then, I just did grub-install --recheck /dev/hdb.

You should comment out the mingetty lines in /etc/inittab and add one like this:

S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty 57600 ttyS0

if you want to have a login prompt on you serial console. This requires an agetty addon package. You can get it here: http://www.ipadd.de/binary.html.

That should be enough to get you up and running. After that, if you feel like it, you can clean up some of the scripts in /etc/rc.d to remove stuff that doesn’t work on the Soekris, like doing anything with /dev/tty1, /dev/tty2, etc., or outputting tones to the non-existent speaker.

OK…this is a bit different from what I usually post here, but I want to put this somewhere in case anyone else is ever trying to figure this out.

After fighting with Nagios distributed monitoring off and on for months, I have concluded that the submit_check_result_via_nsca script is just broken. It is sending the service state (“OK”, “CRITICAL”, etc.) to nsca, which is expecting a return code (-1,0,1,2).

The solution is to just change the script. Here is my version:

#!/bin/sh

# SUBMIT_CHECK_RESULT_VIA_NSCA
# Written by Ethan Galstad (nagios@nagios.org)
# Last Modified: 11-21-2008 by Brian Knotts
#
# This script will send passive check results to the
# nsca daemon that runs on the central Nagios server.
# If you simply want to submit passive checks from the
# same machine that Nagios is running on, look at the
# submit_check_result script.
#
# Arguments:
#  $1 = host_name (Short name of host that the service is
#       associated with)
#  $2 = svc_description (Description of the service)
#  $3 = return_code (An integer that determines the state
#       of the service check, 0=OK, 1=WARNING, 2=CRITICAL,
#       3=UNKNOWN).
#  $4 = plugin_output (A text string that should be used
#       as the plugin output for the service check)s
#
#
# Note:
# Modify the NagiosHost parameter to match the name or
# IP address of the central server that has the nsca
# daemon running.

printfcmd="/usr/bin/printf"

NscaBin="/usr/sbin/send_nsca"
NscaCfg="/etc/send_nsca.cfg"
NagiosHost="<your nagios central server>"

# Convert the state string to the corresponding return code
return_code=-1

case "$3" in
OK)
return_code=0
;;
WARNING)
return_code=1
;;
CRITICAL)
return_code=2
;;
UNKNOWN)
return_code=3
;;
esac

# Fire the data off to the NSCA daemon using the send_nsca script
$printfcmd "%s\t%s\t%s\t%s\n" "$1" "$2" $return_code "$4" | $NscaBin -H $NagiosHost -c $NscaCfg

# EOF