My dad (hi, dad!) makes the best cheesecakes. All kinds! I don’t recall when or how he got started, but one day he was the cheesecake expert and was making them for all occasions and selling them to neighborhood people who wanted the best. I watched, and he taught, and now I can make cheesecakes that are almost the best. CNN’s food section has a nice page up on home cheesecake making, along with three nice looking recipes.

Another site from our local Egiptian friends. The archives make for fun browsing.

More news from/on the local wacky “fraternal organization”: Nuwaubians make D.C. History. I especially like the statements that George Washington was a “freemason of the Ancient Egiptian Order” and that in Greek mythology, the deity of fire was Thor. Methinks the author could use a little education.

Say what you want about Ted Turner, he spends at least some of his money admirably. He buys huge tracts of land and then “gets out of nature’s way.” I did some work on Ted’s recent New Mexico aquisition, several hundered thousand acres along the Rio Grande south of Socorro and north of the Elephant Butte reservior, a few years back. I was surveying for a power line to serve a new visitor’s center for an old Army fort that sat on land surrounded by Turner’s ranch. The power line was several miles long, some overhead lines hidden from view by a ridge and the rest underground. The ranch had a sizable herd of bison, who liked to stare at me while I did my survey work, not quite sure of what they thought of me there among them.

I’ve been slowly looking over the other Behind the Curtain galleries. My favorite thus far isRedCricket’s.

Nike is letting you create your own commercials using shockwave on their website. Here’s mine. Go ahead… be subversive. You know you want to.

Internet Killed the Video Star: a well-done shockwave remake of the 80’s anthem of a new music medium.

CNN has a nice online section on urban sprawl and New Urbanism, using (naturally) Atlanta as an example of how bad sprawl can get. It’s made up of several pages, but this one featuring Jim Kunstler, the New Urbanism advocate I saw speak a couple weeks ago, is a good place to start.

Interactive webcam! This fellow has a 486 computer sitting near his desk. He’s got a quick-refresh webcam pointing at him. You type text in his webform, and his 486 talks to him. Pretty silly. I like silly.

New Mexico, my former home, with its puny five electoral votes, is this year a key battleground state. The story says that Bush and Gore are running neck and neck there, too. I’m surprised. Most New Mexicans I met would go out of their way to put down a Texan. Local legend has it that at the outbreak of the Civil War, the New Mexico territory waffled on the issue of leaving the Union. When Texas joined the Confederacy, the issue was decided. New Mexico would stay Union and fight Texas. Texas has officially invaded New Mexico on three occasions. When the official border surveys were drawn up, the survey team (Texans, supposedly) made a mistake, resulting in the state line being set a mile or so to far west (look closely at a map showing the common border with Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Notice that the western edge of Oklahoma and Texas don’t quite line up north/south. They were supposed to.). When I was moving away, there was a move afoot to petition the Federal Government to redraw the border as it should have been. It turns out that there are lucrative natural gas deposits right under the border, and the additional mile or so would mke a big difference on revenues. Also, there was a half-hearted movement in Texas to give the area around and including El Paso to New Mexico, as Texas was finding the area difficult to manage from far-away Austin. New Mexico’s reaction was “Ugh! No, thank you!” I think most people don’t realize just how different the entire Chihuahuan desert region is from the rest of the country. In El Paso once, at a McDonald’s downtown on the plaza, I had to order using the illiterate’s picture menu, because I couldn’t communicate with the counter staff. “Big Mac Value Meal” just wasn’t coming across, so we used the pictures to figure out what I wanted.