Nut/Cereal Bars and Chairs

Sweetie says that since this is ostensibly a "food blog," I should blog more about food. I do so rarely that random visitors apparently get the impression that this is a professional blog, or a travel blog, or your standard confused coming-of-age blog. So look! Chocolate! There.

Sweetie and I have been eating nothing but cereal for breakfast lately. I normally don't like cereal because it's not very filling and I get hungry for snacks in an hour. But with the deadly heat wave, pancakes, oatmeal, etc. do not sound appetizing at all. Sweetie never ate much cereal other than Cocoa Pebbles and Frosted Flakes, but the sugarsugarsugar has an even worse effect on the male blood glucose than it does on the female. He wanted to branch out, but doesn't know other brands and expected me to just pick things off the shelf that he would like. So I have been, with a relatively high success rate. He liked the Cinnamon Life, the Honey Bunches of Oats (which I mix into my bran flakes for flavor), and the Honey Nut Cheerios.

But it isn't a 100% success, because he refuses to touch the Kellog's Corn Flakes. He may not like the taste, or he may just be huffy because I commented that there's so little in them it's like eating air. Either way, I have a box of corn flakes that is not being eaten. They taste bland and salty to me, so I'm not going to dilute my bowls with them. The universal solution: chocolate and peanut butter.

I've made two variants of cereal bars in the past week, experimenting to find my preferred recipe. The first I cobbled together from various recipes on the Interwebs:

PB Cereal Treats
-pat of butter
-1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
-1 cup miniature marshmallows
-3 cups corn flakes
-dark chocolate chips

I melted the butter and stirred in the peanut butter before adding in the marshmallows and stirring until I made a big sticky mess. Then I used my full upper body strength to crush in the corn flakes and spread the mixture into a greased 8x8 pan. I dotted the top with the chocolate chips, and when they melted from the heat I used a spatula to spread them around for a bittersweet coating. After refrigerating, the result was only slightly crumbly, but nicely sweet and slightly addictive.

The second recipe came from Mama Pea. I made some modifications because I'm poorer than Mama Pea and I was baking Shake 'n Bake drumsticks for Sweetie's dinner simultaneously, so the temperature was all wrong.

Chocolate Cherry-Nut Cereal Bars
-2 tbsp milled flax seed
-1/2 cup maple syrup
-1/2 cup salted peanuts
-1/2 cup cashew halves
-1/2 cup corn flakes
-1/2 cup dried cherries (or raisins, if you can't stomach the 70¢ per ounce, which I couldn't have if I wasn't hungry and impulsive at the time)
-dark chocolate chips

Mix the flax into the maple syrup and set aside. Combine the nuts, cereal, and cherries in a bigger bowl. Pour the maple syrup over the mixture and toss to coat. Bake in a parchment-lined 8x8 pan for 10 minutes at 375°, or for 20 at 325-350° like you're supposed to. Dot the top with chocolate chips and swirl when melted like the first recipe.

Unfortunately, this second one from Mama Pea wasn't as successful as the first. Healthier and more interesting, to be sure, but because I was messing with times and had cheap fake maple-flavored syrup instead of the real stuff, it didn't set properly. The liquid all settled to the bottom and I had to flip them over after cutting to dry out in the fridge overnight. They held together slightly better after that, but I'm not sneaking into the pan like I was for the other bars.

Now back to the non-food content. Today Sweetie is reorganizing all the furniture in the bedroom to get his desk in front of the vent. He moved mine to the air conditioner in the living room while I was sleeping so he could play happily with his dwarves without overheating in the leather chair. Before, we had his set up so that we could sit on the bed to use it. Once it's moved, we'll have to go to Staples and pick out a new chair. Sweetie is very picky about his chairs, and I don't mind spending the money on it because a bad back would be much more expensive. However, we will have to find a way to keep this away from it:



At least if she's up there, like she is at this very moment, she's not scratching the heck out of the arms and kneading her claws into the seat. I don't like this chair anyway. It's made for someone five inches taller and fifty pounds heavier, and in order to get my knees over the edge I have to sit away from the back, which negates the whole point. The next time I get one for me, we'll have to find one designed for Asian people.

What's Your Take on Naps?

Yesterday my internship ended at 3. I drove home and diddled some before putting on my workout clothes and getting on the treadmill before dinner. I pushed myself to keep jogging for the full two miles, and made it to the last quarter mile before a side ache made me stop to walk. I only stopped once near the start to rescue the cat, who had gotten herself hooked again. She plays with the scratcher until one of her claws gets caught on the threads, and then she hangs there and cries for someone to come and save her.

I felt a bit wobbly as I showered and made pizza for dinner. It had been a long report-writing day and I don't think I had enough calories in me before I went burning them all up. I put on lots of spinach and drank water instead of cola, and watched a low-stress YouTube video of Britons playing Minecraft (Sweetie's on-again-off-again video game obsession). Then, before putting the dishes away, I lay down just for a bit to close my eyes.

And then it was 9pm, and I was on my side of the bed with the covers on and Sweetie beside me. He's such an enabler.

I hate naps. If I were leading the ideal lottery-winning existence, I would love naps. But when you have responsibilities the next day, they're nothing but trouble. For one thing, I always have to take an aspirin afterwards, and my tummy acts up for unknown reasons. For another, I couldn't go to sleep again until 3 in the morning, and had less than five hours before the cat alarm woke me up. No, she wasn't hooked and crying again; Sweetie came in to see if I was awake for my internship and I stumbled out for water, before sneaking back in and collapsing. Then the cat weaseled through the open door and hopped up to try and tunnel under the covers with me. So that was that.

Even though a nap + a night's sleep = a full 8 hours, it sure doesn't feel like it. I had to put in eye drops because they felt so heavy and dry. And I was half an hour late today because I wasn't moving as fluidly as usual. I had to exert all my mental energy to safely follow a truck full of tree limbs all the way to campus, and I barely processed what was playing on the car radio until I was parking and the host was saying something about a rapper going to federal prison for income tax evasion (who is Ja Rule, by the way?).

According to Glamour, Greek researchers say naps will lengthen your life, but it doesn't feel that way. Yes, I just linked to Glamour quoting Yahoo News! quoting no authoritative sources. That's how out of it I am.

Speaking of Glamour, some of the things they've been posting have really bugged me lately. A few days ago they advised ripping restaurants off by asking for a bunch of free lemon wedges and mixing them in your water with sugar packets for a "skinny lemonade...right at your table!" And on all of their positive body image posts, they put this girl:


The file name on their site is "happy_body_image_vg.jpg." Why? Does she look average to you? The only aspect of her gorgeous appearance that even hints at less-than-airbrushed-perfection is the unflattering top and slouching posture, probably meant to disguise the size 0 professional model's body underneath. Of course she has a "happy body image;" she could be a soap star!

Anyway, what do you think of naps? Life-lengthening or stress-inducing? Right now, as I'm preparing to buckle down and stare at the report I wrote yesterday and try to figure out what I was trying to say, it definitely feels like the latter.

Ice Cream Adventures

Before the Post Really Starts
I feel like I owe my readers an apology. Yesterday, my blog was derailed by a zealot who latched on to a casual comment on one of my posts and devoted his/her (likely 'his') Friday morning and night to skewering my cynical, apathetic ways. If you want to read the soapbox dissertation of a self-proclaimed "professional" with "a career spanning many years" and a fondness for typing five periods in a row, trying to prove that he's smarter than a girl a fraction of his age, you can view the past two posts below.

However, that's where it ends. I know you don't come here for drama. You go to The Real Housewives of New Jersey for drama. You come here for diaries of my little travels and recipes for cheap Americanized stir-fry. You drop by for pictures of Pokéball Cake and to snicker at my pathetic attempts at "running," a.k.a. shuffling along for two measly miles and collapsing on the couch for the next week.

So let's carry on, shall we?

Where the Post Really Starts
For the past month I've been meaning to share the news: I have an ice cream maker! Yay!


When I was in the market for one, I scoured reviews and debated whether it was worth coughing up $50 or more for one with a good reputation. I make $1 more per hour now (BTW I finally sent in my resignation to the library yesterday; I'm 100% ITG starting in September), but it's still a lot. But I did the math, and at $3 for a tiny pint of soy ice cream at the store on sale, I would make it up in about ten batches if I used reasonably-priced ingredients. I closed my eyes and hit the "Checkout" button in Amazon...but the final bill had $20 knocked off the price! Apparently it was some weekly Friday promotion that wasn't advertised. So I ended up paying $30, getting free shipping, and two days later this beautiful box was on my doorstep.

Inside the box were more pretty things.


Kids dig it!


Indulge! Quick and easy!


Get the scoop!

The manufacturers must realize that by the time we see the colorful wrapping dotted with exclamation points, we have already bought and opened the machine. Anyway, after washing and freezing this bowl for a day, I hacked out my first batch of chocolate soy ice cream with marshmallows.



I didn't have a standard recipe, so I just made a batch of pudding and chilled it before freezing in the machine. It was beyond delicious, but didn't freeze too well--there wasn't enough air to make it scoopable and the cornstarch I used to thicken it got gritty over time in the freezer.

For my second attempt, I tried simply mixing pureed strawberries and sugar into a batch of 2% greek yogurt. No thickening agents necessary.


Gorgeous and perfect fresh out of the machine, but like the last batch it froze into a solid block. The next time I try the frozen yogurt approach, I should probably use full-fat.

Since then, I have tried boiling down the milk first, letting the cornstarch steep instead of doing it the custard way, and just pouring sweetened soy milk into the canister directly. I've had varying results, but none of them are quite there yet. I made a successful batch for Sweetie using heavy cream, but soy creamer is terribly expensive and that would defeat the whole point. Other recipes I've seen introduce ice-thwarting fats through egg yolks, but I can't find containers of yolks-only in the grocery store and I'm wary of bacteria in raw eggs. My latest trick was just to throw the block into my Vitamix when it got too hard. But that was a lot more work than I'm willing to put in every time I want a sundae.

In the future I could try working in silken tofu...it seemed to work for the Tofutti folks. I could also try coconut milk or Lactaid or other sources of "alternative dairy." I don't like the idea of coconut milk much, though, because the kinds I've tried from manufacturers had a very powerful under-taste even if they were supposed to flavored with chocolate or green tea.

Do you make ice cream? Have any tips or fool-proof recipes?

Case in Point

Not an hour after posting this morning, I got fresh material from someone who did exactly what I predicted, verbally lynching me for two sentences on a personal blog. They put so much effort into their sermon hoping that people would read it that I'm going to be nice and put it front and center, with the key points in bold:

"I am appalled at your insensitive comments regarding the Lauren Spierer case. While I understand the points you were making concerning the media, your choice of wording displays some sort of hostility towards this girl and those that miss her (90 pound blond....wasted....tiresome....make her corpse surface faster...) As a parent and a library professional I would suggest you seriously consider some of your career plans that you noted in an earlier posting - you mention becoming a manager someday. Good managers never forget that they are managing people and good library managers never forget they are serving the public who use the institution and not the IT or book collections within the building. Your tone is cynical and your criticism of how people treat you as they interact with you as customers tells me that you should stay away from contact with the public, as you will only give the institution you work for a bad reputation. Humanity as well as technical expertise is needed in the IT/Library world if we are to hope that Libraries will continue on in this century. Otherwise we may find our customers preferring to get their IT fixes at the local Apple/Microsoft/or whatever else there is rather than have to interact with someone like you. I appreciate that you have created this blog and are in no obligation to provide it at all - hey, it's your blog after all - but today it showed up in a simple google search in the first page of results for news on Lauren Spierer and it is probably safe to say that someone who cares about her and her family read it and now wonders about why libraries would employ a person with an attitude like yours. Lose the cruel tone please, it doesn't come over as witty or clever, just plain nasty."

Now, if you know anything about the Lauren Spierer "case," these are the facts: she was approximately 90 pounds. She was a blonde. She was underage and wasted. And after more than a month, I am 99.999% certain that all that is left of her is a corpse. If you read my post, my main point was that the local mobs have careened out of control, and are posting virulent messages against anyone who dares say anything to that effect. As soon as you do, you have your entire character generalized and speared by self-righteous white knights. Funny enough, if I happened to say the exact same thing about 90 pound blondes getting wasted and running around at 4:30 in the morning while she was alive, everyone would applaud my upstanding character. But it got her killed, so, now it's "nasty."

So thank you, Anonymous-person-who-claims-to-be-a-library-professional-but-doesn't-have-the-spine-to-identify-yourself, for proving my point exactly. If you read my post from Tuesday with any attention, which you claim you did, I didn't complain about customers at all--I complained about the lazy people I have to work with. People who, for example, would rather be commenting on blogs at 11:15 in the morning than doing their actual work. If I were a baser person, I would point out how blatantly unprofessional it is to attack random students on websites for their personal opinions. It makes me wonder exactly what kind of "professionals" the libraries are hiring these days, who believe that "the public" only includes select people they agree with.

Media Ethics

From the events of the world in the past few weeks, it's impossible to conclude that "media ethics" is anything more than an oxymoron.

First, we had British journalists hacking into the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim to get exclusive "scoops." They were inept, of course, and ended up deleting some of her voicemails. The family noticed and thought that their daughter was still alive and accessing her messages. Of course the other newspapers are having a heyday about the paper's downfall, with close-ups of the Murdochs and the News of the World head honchos...but not terribly much about the actual victims (Source/Example).

Then, Stateside, we had the hullaballoo over Casey Anthony. News anchors might has well have been chanting "Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!" months before the trial, publishing reams about how Anthony was a party girl, a bad mother, a druggie blah blah blah. So then, when the prosecution failed to show murder one beyond a reasonable doubt (they didn't even show cause of death, for heaven's sake), a jury of her peers untainted by the media angle acquitted her. Now a sixty-year-old juror has fled the state because mindless mobs are "protesting" outside her house (source/example), and hordes online are posting about how jurors shouldn't be random Florida trash, but better educated rich white people who will return a just Guilty verdict no matter what the evidence. Hooray for the Land of the Free.

Locally, there's been a tiresome frenzy over Lauren Spierer, a 90-pound blonde who disappeared while running around with her friends at 4:30 in the morning. She was so wasted that she forgot her cell phone and her shoes at the bar where she was drinking all night, underage. Her friends were so wasted that none of them remember anything about the day before. Yet the papers are clinging to every false lead, every neighbor who retains a lawyer, every tear that drops from her mother's eyes. It hasn't reached the torches and pitchforks stage (yet), but there are delightful comments online about how the police should be forcing confessions from these kids, that it's a big cover-up and the friends should be raped in retaliation, etc. etc. Anyone who dares to say that she's probably in a ditch somewhere because she made stupid decisions is verbally lynched for "blaming the victim"...if she even was a victim. So far, there's no evidence of any crime committed, but let's waterboard them all just in case, right?

Now, yesterday morning when I was driving to my internship, I was treated to a ten-minute infomercial for weight loss pills. The local radio station for young folks has this deal with a local vendor called "Complete Nutrition," which has very little to do with nutrition and a whole lot to do with potentially dangerous drugs. In the past few weeks I've heard not only traditional commercials voiced by self-proclaimed "doctors," but tidbits from show hosts between songs talking about how they've been on their products for two weeks and have lost, like, fifteen pounds. This morning's infomercial was in the guise of a down-home interview with a local business owner. He and the host chatted casually and earnestly about how great Complete Nutrition is.

The premise of Complete Nutrition? It "mimics ephedrine, but without all the side-effects." The host actually said, "Ephedrine was popular, like you said, in the '90s and early 2000s, but it was taken off the shelves because the side effects were too dangerous. But you've taken the side effects out!"

Here's the thing about ephedrine: its intended effect is the side effect. It's an amphetamine-like stimulant; it hypes up your system. So your heart rate and blood pressure and all those goodies skyrocket. Have you ever had asthma or bronchitis, and they make you breathe through that contraption to clear your lungs out? And then for half an hour afterwards you can't hold your hand still or think clearly? That's ephedrine.

So if a drug is intended to mimic ephedrine, it should do the same thing. Which means the "side effects" are the same, and people could be taking these things and going jogging in 90 degree weather and dropping dead on the sidewalk. By "taking the side effects out," they might mean they decreased the dosage, but there's no magic that would make an inherently dangerous pill safe and sound.

What do all these stories have in common? Money. Newspapers earn money by printing scandalous headlines. TV stations make money by leading lynch mobs that have to tune in every hour to hear an unending loop of anti-Anthony sermons. Printing yet more uninformative interviews with Lauren's emotional roommates/family/tangential acquaintances will not make her corpse surface faster; their only purpose is to keep people paying subscriptions. And the radio station makes money by taking it from the Mom and Pop owners of Complete Nutrition hawking stimulants to impressionable college students.

Now don't get me wrong; I love money. I spend the majority of my waking hours trying to get it. But there are certain things decent human beings don't do. The Britons did not have to hack into voicemails to get a good story that people would read. The radio station did not have to sign on with Complete Nutrition. They could have stuck with Holiday World, local restaurants and Marsh groceries. It's not an equal opportunity issue, because they're a private station. If the KKK rang up with an offer of $100,000 for a prime-time spot, I'm sure they'd tell them to go hang (themselves, of course, in case they get confused). So there's really no legitimate reason for the station to be peddling snake oil at 9am, noon and 5 like a happy, wholesome neighborhood meth house.

There was a time, I'm sure, when journalism was a respectable profession. Now, it seems, they just exist to squeeze out a dime. I'm just waiting for the day that somebody does drop dead from Complete Nutrition, and then all the local newspapers latch on gleefully to the fact that the radio station was pushing it. Then they'll program their mobs to forget about Casey Anthony and Lauren Spierer to flock over to the radio station and throw rotten eggs at the interns just for working there.

5 Things I Hate About Being in IT

I work in IT for a living. It wasn't supposed to end up that way, but the world decided it would pay web developers a lot more than it would reference assistants or lab techs. I think I'm quite good at it...not to a fully professional standard yet, but close enough for academic settings.

The work pays okay, and a lot of the time it's enjoyable. I like creating things, making things work. Giving people what they need to do a job efficiently. However, there are some aspects of it that really, really annoy me.

1) People Never Talk To You
People will complain to the secretary that something isn't working properly. They'll write lengthy emails to their bosses or coworkers about how absolutely critical it is that a title be changed on a certain page. But they will never talk to you. Usually, the issues blown out of proportion will take two seconds to fix. A single line of code altered, and there you go. No drama, no gossip, no forwarding necessary, if they'd just taken the time to walk back and say "hi."

2) IT People Never Talk To You
I don't know why, but I've only had negative experiences with people who were supposedly on the same side as me. The knee-jerk reaction for any inquiry is, "It can't be done," with no explanation or effort offered whatsoever. I'll ask someone in a different department storing our XML documents for shell access to their servers, and they'll think I'm stupid enough to believe that it's impossible because they're Windows servers. I'll ask someone in my very own information science school for a MySQL account to link to my little section of its server, and they'll think I'm stupid enough to believe that the department can't offer one because, well, just because. It's not like MySQL is open-source or anything. And as soon as I point out a way it can be done, I get dead silence on the other end. Unfortunately, people like this may be the reason no one ever wants to talk to me.

3) People Believe Your Work is Done By Somebody Else
Ah, the Big Black Box of Technologiez. Everyone can rip widgets and apps from everyone else nowadays, so who would believe the new application for editing pages was made by me? I have received the following comments on applications I made from design to release, updating everyone involved every step of the way:

-"The program we're using probably isn't sophisticated enough for this, but..."
-"How do we get to the new system that was installed?"
-"I wonder how they did that?" (Actually said to Sweetie by a new coworker about a feature on the website he had developed the previous year)

This isn't just a pride issue, either. People just will not believe that I can make "The Program" do whatever I want it to (within reasonable limits, of course). If they don't like the way it looks, the way it works, or the way a box opens when they click it, I can change it. They don't have to shrink and then mumble about how inadequate it is behind my back (see #1 yet again).

4) People Are Terrified of IT
Whether they're the people who are vocally gung-ho about Twitter or the ones who think the government will steal all their secrets if they turn on the screen, people are terrified of doing anything substantial with technology. My applications sit on the shelf for months because nobody wants to look at them or talk about them. Then, all of a sudden, they want to have a two-hour meeting and change everything, which I'll do in a day just to let it gather dust for another month. Why? Because it has to be 100% perfect before anyone even hints at showing it to the world. Even if they're tools to make staff members' lives easier, they refuse to touch it. Half a year after giving control of part of the website to someone else in the library, I get weekly emails telling me to click the buttons for him.

5) People Don't Want to Learn
Personally, when I'm terrified of something, I prefer to learn about it so I'm not flailing in the dark. Then it's never as scary as before. But the people I've worked with seem to like being terrified, and want it to stay that way. Every time that staff member sends me an email telling me to click his buttons, I send the exact same response with the link and step-by-step instructions on how to do it himself. He says "Thanks" and doesn't bother to look at it. I'll explain to a supervisor how something works, because I'm not going to be around forever, and she'll just tell me to put it all in documentation so someone else with fancy skillz can understand it later. Never have I given a spiffy online present to someone and seen them actively explore it of their own free will.

After I get my degrees, I will probably move on to other kinds of work. I'm setting myself up to manage information, not push out code. So right now I'm just blowing hot air. But I do believe that if I enter a management position, my frustrations on the front lines will help my relations with future underlings and other departments. At the very least, I can ease their frustrations a little bit, so they don't end up blogging about how much they hate their lives and scheming ways to escape.

Pokemon National Championships

Over the weekend I developed a sore throat, so I'm taking it easy at home today. I haven't had a day of no responsibilities for a long time, so this one morning will have to stand in for an entire summer vacation.

Yesterday I drove Sweetie to the National Pokemon Championships at the Indiana Convention Center, so he could see the crazy people who devote their lives to the video game in action. Some of them were seriously scary--and I don't mean like unwashed and barely dressed, but capable of reading minds. I even became a little emotionally invested in the outcome, because we spent the morning watching someone from Jersey win through luck and showman antics. His friends and family were all there shouting non-stop, disparaging his opponents and quacking during matches. Yes, quacking. It's a Mighty Psyduck thing. He didn't seem like a bad guy, really, but we did not want him and his loud fans to win the championship against the more strategy-wise one in a collared shirt who Sweetie immediately picked out as his favorite. Sweetie sympathizes with people in collared shirts because they look like "serious business." And he was indeed serious business; during the final matches he had terrible luck (getting paralyzed, flinching, etc.) against the Mighty Psyduck and still managed to stay in control. He won, of course, because Pokemon plushies and quacking do not a battle win.

For lunch we we walked down the street and found a Steak 'n Shake on the corner. I knew there would be restaurants there because we were in Downtown Indianapolis, and you can't walk two steps in any direction without running into a restaurant or shop. Downtown looks sort of like a proper metropolis, but honestly, Indianapolis is tiny. This is coming from someone who grew up in the suburbs, too. Like, if we walked ten minutes in the opposite direction, we would have been out with the corn fields and factories. The streets are bizarre because they were strung together on the fly, and parking is abysmal because it wasn't designed for a big influx of people. It's certainly not the sort of city you would expect national competitions to be held, and apparently this was an unusual year. But that Steak and Shake was much higher quality than any you would find in Bloomington--both food- and people-wise. Our sever had manners; whodathunk?

Other than a spot of bad traffic fleeing the city in the afternoon, we survived the trip without incident. I spent the morning worried that we would come back to find our car towed, or couldn't get out of the public lot, because the machine ate my $5 and opened the gate without printing a ticket. But thankfully no one made the rounds to check, and the exit gate was motion-sensored. I really, really don't want to have to go back again any time soon, but we did escape in one piece.

When we got home I did laundry and ate canned soup for dinner, because canned soup always calls my name when I'm feeling under the weather. Then when I felt better I jogged on the treadmill (2 miles in 23.5 minutes! Woo!). That was probably a stupid thing to do because it ran my body down even more, though it felt like a good idea at the time. So today I am sitting around, sucking on lozenges and waiting until the microorganisms in my system finish their repairs.

Another Friday Fail

Radio show on the way to my internship this morning: "Are You Smarter Than An Intern?" People call in and try to answer more questions correctly than the radio station intern for giveaways from local businesses. Until this morning the intern was 5-0, and the businesses got to save their money. Today's caller was "Ann," who had been a contestant once before and was taking another shot at a free pizza.

Host: Are you ready to play "Are You Smarter Than An Intern?"
Ann: Yes.
Host: Alright. Start the timer. First question: Who ran for president with Sarah Palin in 2008?
Ann: Oh, that was...that would be...um...
Host: You can pass if you want.
Ann: Yes. Pass.

At this point, I almost turn off radio in shame of my fellow Americans. Morbid curiosity gets the better of me.

Host: Name the shape that has three sides.
Ann: Triangle.
Host: Name another shape other than number 2.
Ann: Circle.
Host: Alex Trebec is the host of what show?
Ann: Jeopardy.

Blah blah blah, easy pop culture questions. Now it's the intern's turn. Poor Ann, I think, if only you had turned the television on once in 2007 through 2009. Or read any of the bumper stickers around town still screaming "McCain/Palin 2008"!

Host: Who ran for president with Sarah Palin in 2008?
Intern: Um, I don't know. Pass.

Me: Would have smashed head on steering wheel if I wasn't actively driving.

Host: Name the shape that has three sides.
Intern: Triangle.
Host: Name another shape other than number 2.
Intern: Number 2? What? I don't...
Host: Name another shape.
Intern: A shape that isn't "2?" I don't understand the question.
Host: Name a shape! Any shape!
Intern: Oh! You mean a shape other than the one in question 2! Um...rectangle.
Host: Alex Trebec was...
Intern: Jeopardy.
Host: Colonel Sanders...
Intern: KFC.

But oh, ran out of time. Ann got her free pizza. Though I don't think either of them should be allowed out into society until they read, well, anything.