2 tbsp. lemon juice 1/4 c. packed brown sugar 4 Market Day salmon fillets 1 tbsp. butter, melted 4 thin slices lemon 8 tsp. brown sugar

Heat oven to 375 degrees. Pour lemon juice into ungreased rectangular baking dish, 11″ x 7 1/2″ x 2″; sprinkle with 1/4 cup brown sugar. Arrange fillets in dish; drizzle with butter. Bake uncovered 15 minutes; turn. Place 1 slice lemon on each salmon fillet; sprinkle with 2 teaspoons brown sugar. Bake until fish flakes easily with fork, 15 to 20 minutes longer. Serve with juices from dish.

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That was easy. And the recipe doesn’t sound too difficult. On to step two!

2 tbsp. lemon juice √  1/4 c. packed brown sugar √  4 Market Day salmon fillets √  1 tbsp. butter, melted 4 thin slices lemon √  8 tsp. brown sugar

Well, that’s most of it. But the lemon kind of seems important.

So I need something moisture-like to substitute the lemon juice. I guess canola oil is slippery, it should work. And then I need a lemon slice to put on top? Some of this leftover ground-up Kellogg’s Corn Flakes can work instead. It just needs to go on top while it’s cooking, I’m sure it will be fine.

Okay, getting a glass dish, pouring some oil in in, and something with brown sugar? Eh, I’ll just sprinkle some in there and see if that works. I guess it doesn’t make sense to have it below the skin. Flip it over to get some on top, rub it around a bit, that’s good enough. Melt the butter, mix in the corn flake crumbs, and spread that on top too. Now then, I don’t think it would be a good idea to turn it over partway through. Crank up the heat to 400 and check back in 10 to make sure it’s not too overdone.

Personally, I like to hum the Jeopardy Final Question theme twenty times in a row. Preferably around other people.

Wow, that actually doesn’t look that bad. Almost done, even. Not going to keep it on 400, though. I think I’ll turn it down to 325 and let the insides cook for five more minutes.

Always, ALWAYS serve your newest creations to somebody else first. If you undercooked something and just crisped the outside a bit, it’s best to know that before you eat some. Well, my dad seems to like it. I guess it’s safe to eat.

Hmm, this is actually quite good. I’m not sure how I managed that, but this is easily the best salmon I’ve had at home, whether prepared by me or someone else. I am astonished at my own awesomeness! Gold star for the day!

You have several choices here. You can go with the ‘I cooked the meal, so I don’t need to clean up.’ line, the disappearing act where you just leave the table and hide in your room for a while, or my option of having previous plans that require me to leave pretty much exactly when dinner was over. Just make sure you don’t look like you’re shirking responsibility, and you can usually get away with it.

1 or more salmon fillets 1 stick margarine, melted some brown sugar some canola oil some corn flake crumbs

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Pour canola oil into glass baking dish; sprinkle with brown sugar until it looks good. Place fillet(s) in dish skin-side up. Flip fillet(s), rub in canola oil/ brown sugar mix, adding more as needed to get full coverage.  Melt margarine in small bowl. Clean out microwave because the margarine exploded a bit. Mix in corn flake crumbs until it’s more solid than liquid. Pour evenly over the fillet(s), making sure to get some on the sides for full coverage. Bake in oven for 10 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 for another 5 minutes. If the rest of the meal is still not done, turn off the oven leaving fillet(s) inside. When ready, take out of the oven using mitts or something to not burn yourself. Remove fillet(s) from the dish using a spatula; remove skin if desired. Serve hot.

[Author's Note: This final recipe actually works for cooking salmon, and tastes great. Some other breading may be substituted for the corn flake crumbs if desired.]

This is a shrine to John the Baptist in Damascus. What’s so special about it? It’s completely contained within the Umayyad Mosque. That’s right, a Christian holy site within an Islamic holy site. All we need is for someone to put the Ten Commandments in there and we’d have a religious turducken!

$3 for this crap?

Ah, the glasses. Those plastic never-the-right-size pieces of overcharge. They’re used to separate the images to each of your eyes. The effect is to make some parts of the screen look closer than others. In this, they succeed. In comfort, they fail. For one thing, they were not made with people who already wear glasses in mind. So either they go with blurry vision or stretched glasses squeezing their face. And the one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the most inclusive for the ‘all’. People with small heads and/or slanted noses have them fall right off their face. The sooner we can be rid of these, the better.

Here’s one of the larger technical obstacles. The image doesn’t adjust to you. So if you were looking at the screen from the end of an aisle, then move to the center to sit down, the image looks exactly the same. Real 3D objects viewed from different angles would create different images. Sure, they expect you to sit in one seat and not jump about, but there would be a difference just by moving your head within a two-foot square. It creates a disconnect between you and the movie, which is part of what 3D is trying to get rid of, right?

Example of problem. The trees are in focus, but if we were looking from that spot, the mountains would appear out of focus.

There’s another big problem with the camera: the whole thing is in focus. That’s just not how it is in real life. You look at something close, distant objects get blurry. Look at the distant objects, and close thing go blurry. But when the movie tries to persuade you one thing is closer to you than another, they both look neat and sharp. Dock another few points from the connectivity meter there. And then they go and zoom around from shot to shot. To a person sitting in a movie theater feeling no force feedback like that necessary to fly through the air, it can either make a person dizzy or outright sick. Plus, they try to keep the 3D effects on! You want to know how to make someone sick from a movie? Here’s your solution. The benefits get tossed aside as the patron hastily reaches for a barf bag. Then, realizing this is a movie theater and not an airplane, just pukes in their neighbor’s popcorn.

So why do directors and producers keep doing 3D? Well, two main reasons. Initially, 3D was more for the ‘ooooo, look what we can do’ pop-out tricks to make people afraid of things flying at them. To startle, mainly. Nowadays their goal is the one that they most often shoot in the foot: immersion. To suck you into the world they’ve created and make you more invested in the movie than you would be when seeing a flat 2D image. And here they fail. Hard. Just when the plot gets interesting and you’re drawn into the fictional universe, BAM! Whirled around and made sick. Or maybe they’re showing you an impossible image with graphical overlays. Text subtitles ruin 3D shots. Where are we? Oh, look, there’s the floating text kindly letting us know where and when we are. Thanks floating text, that couldn’t have been conveyed more subtly through signs or newspapers or whatnot. Next time I want to know what the date is, I’ll just look outside.

Wow, that sure looks real to me!

While this entire review has been negative, I strangely will generally choose to watch new movies in 3D. And at and extra $3 each time because they don’t let you keep/reuse the stupid glasses. What does this say? Either I’m foolishly optimistic that maybe this time they’ll get it right, or they’ve marketed the concept really well and I’m a sucker for it. Either way, I don’t seem to come out on top. You win this time, 3D… ]]> So we live in what we perceive as a three-dimensional world. It works well enough for us; we can get around from place to place each with three coordinates. We know of a fourth dimension, but cannot actively notice it. Sure, we see its effects, but we cannot travel through it. So we’re stuck with 3 usable dimensions. At least, for material things like your computer, a cat, the ocean, or even tardigrades. For images, we have been stuck with two. Wall paintings, crayon pictures, up to majestic works of art at a museum have all existed with a one-dimensional handicap.  Sure, you’d have those red and blue colored glasses, but those were gimmicky and changed the actual color of the picture you were seeing. Electronic images for years had the same hindrance. Only recently have movies come up with a way to keep the color consistent while not sacrificing the trick. But is it good enough? Let’s take a look.

$3 for this crap?

1. The Glasses

Ah, the glasses. Those plastic never-the-right-size pieces of overcharge. They’re used to separate the images to each of your eyes. The effect is to make some parts of the screen look closer than others. In this, they succeed. In comfort, they fail. For one thing, they were not made with people who already wear glasses in mind. So either they go with blurry vision or stretched glasses squeezing their face. And the one-size-fits-all approach isn’t the most inclusive for the ‘all’. People with small heads and/or slanted noses have them fall right off their face. The sooner we can be rid of these, the better.

2. The Viewpoint

Here’s one of the larger technical obstacles. The image doesn’t adjust to you. So if you were looking at the screen from the end of an aisle, then move to the center to sit down, the image looks exactly the same. Real 3D objects viewed from different angles would create different images. Sure, they expect you to sit in one seat and not jump about, but there would be a difference just by moving your head within a two-foot square. It creates a disconnect between you and the movie, which is part of what 3D is trying to get rid of, right?

3. The Focus


Example of problem. The trees are in focus, but if we were looking from that spot, the mountains would appear out of focus.

There’s another big problem with the camera: the whole thing is in focus. That’s just not how it is in real life. You look at something close, distant objects get blurry. Look at the distant objects, and close thing go blurry. But when the movie tries to persuade you one thing is closer to you than another, they both look neat and sharp. Dock another few points from the connectivity meter there. And then they go and zoom around from shot to shot. To a person sitting in a movie theater feeling no force feedback like that necessary to fly through the air, it can either make a person dizzy or outright sick. Plus, they try to keep the 3D effects on! You want to know how to make someone sick from a movie? Here’s your solution. The benefits get tossed aside as the patron hastily reaches for a barf bag. Then, realizing this is a movie theater and not an airplane, just pukes in their neighbor’s popcorn.

4. The Point

So why do directors and producers keep doing 3D? Well, two main reasons. Initially, 3D was more for the ‘ooooo, look what we can do’ pop-out tricks to make people afraid of things flying at them. To startle, mainly. Nowadays their goal is the one that they most often shoot in the foot: immersion. To suck you into the world they’ve created and make you more invested in the movie than you would be when seeing a flat 2D image. And here they fail. Hard. Just when the plot gets interesting and you’re drawn into the fictional universe, BAM! Whirled around and made sick. Or maybe they’re showing you an impossible image with graphical overlays. Text subtitles ruin 3D shots. Where are we? Oh, look, there’s the floating text kindly letting us know where and when we are. Thanks floating text, that couldn’t have been conveyed more subtly through signs or newspapers or whatnot. Next time I want to know what the date is, I’ll just look outside.

5. The Verdict


Wow, that sure looks real to me!

While this entire review has been negative, I strangely will generally choose to watch new movies in 3D. And at and extra $3 each time because they don’t let you keep/reuse the stupid glasses. What does this say? Either I’m foolishly optimistic that maybe this time they’ll get it right, or they’ve marketed the concept really well and I’m a sucker for it. Either way, I don’t seem to come out on top. You win this time, 3D…

Each of these masses were more than willing to share their viewpoint. Ed Sigman, a middle-aged white male whose hairline had receded like the ebbing tide, was part of the initial group. “I don’t really get that third bunch of folks”, he says. “If they’re protesting people protesting protesters, aren’t they protesting against themselves? I might just round up some of my guys and start protesting their hypocrisy if they stick around for too much longer.” Another surprisingly similarly shaped man whose name I simply forgot had this to say. “We don’t know if they support what we support, but I’m glad they support us supporting what we support.” He subsequently collapsed under his own weight.

Aniva Stewart of Nebraska was the leader of the second set to arrive. “We think these media-brainwashed old farts should go back to their rocking chairs.” claimed the college student. “If they’re going to yell at our congressmen, we’re just going to yell at them. And personally I don’t mind those people yelling at us; by the transitive property of noise they’re yelling at the geezers too.”

The final protesters were very to the point about why they were there. “We have a right to protest, ya know? So why should people be taking a stance against a right given to us by the great Lord Washington and his band of Classy Men? Without his great wisdom and midget brigade, where would the country be? It sure wouldn’t be in North Americaland, that’s for sure. Certainly, we’d be some island, probably floating around Japan, leering at their scandalously clad cats with great envy while our felines wore petticoats. That’s where we’d be, let me tell you!” At this junction in our conversation, someone pointed a remote control at him and hit the mute button.

Will we be seeing these groups back tomorrow? “Probably not,” says Sigman. “I could only afford the hotel for one night, so I’m heading out tomorrow morning. But I know we got our message across.”  Message received, loud and clear.