What to do when you can’t work

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I thought I would start the new year with a lovely walk to work and a nice quiet day in the office. But I woke up late this morning with that unique combination of trembly weakness and neck stiffness that portends a migraine. I wobbled into the kitchen, took a Relpax with my oatmeal, and waited to see if it would work. (I’m trying new migraine meds since Frova slowly stopped working last year.) An hour and a half later I didn’t have a migraine, but I was drowsy, silly, and stupid. I tried to work, but only ended up sending embarrassing emails and scrambling spreadsheets.

After spending half an hour feeling guilty/panicky about not working, I realized that my day needed some cookies! So I pulled out a recipe card from my gramma. If you actually know my gramma, you may be hurrying to close this tab, but don’t run away! My gramma’s roasts may have you chewing until next Christmas, but these cookies will melt in your mouth.

Grammas cookies

Old-fashioned molasses cookies

  • 5 cups flour
  • 2 tsp baking soda
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 2 tsp cinnamon
  • 1 tsp ground cloves
  • 1 tsp ginger
  • 1 cup butter
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup molasses
  • 1 cup boiling hot coffee
  • nuts or raisins and some extra sugar

Sift together flour, soda, salt, and spices. Cream together butter and sugar. Add eggs and molasses and beat well. Add flour mixture alternating with coffee.

Place in refrigerator for one hour then drop by teaspoonfuls onto greased cookie sheet. Place a nut or raisin in center of each cookie and sprinkle with sugar.

Bake at 350°F for 10-12 minutes. Makes a lot.

The best coffee to make these with is, of course, Luzianne’s Coffee & Chicory. The recipe is pretty forgiving if my gramma’s brew of choice isn’t available at your grocery story. Honestly, I’ve made do with a strong cup of black tea or even just hot water. But the cookies are definitely best with coffee.

These cookies are quite cakey and the kind of flour matters. Because there’s so much stirring, even whole wheat pastry flour can give the cookies a bready texture.

In addition to refrigerating the dough prior to baking, I recommend popping the cookie sheets in the freezer (cookies and all!) for a few minutes before baking. Otherwise they tend to burn on the bottom.

 

While you’re waiting for the bus

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Helena, Montana Passes LGBT Nondiscrimination Protections
Who started that ridiculous bathroom idea? I’ve heard it in several discussions now when towns were trying to pass non-discrimination ordinances.

How Online Giant Amazon Prevents Workers From Receiving Unemployment Insurance
I really need to stop shopping on Amazon.

Revamped Migraine Elimination Diet: Avoiding Histamine & Salicylates
Figuring out migraine triggers is a long and painful process with pretty much no guidance or investigation by doctors & researchers

 

 

Klout thinks spammers are better than you

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You’ve probably been invited to “view your Klout score!” if you use any kind of social media. You certainly are assigned one whether or not you actually sign up for Klout. If you’ve read any of the other 90 bajillion posts on how bad Klout is, I recommend you stop reading here – I won’t be saying anything new. If you think Klout is a useful thing, read on!

The other day I was spammed by @renaphillips9. When I went to report the account in Hootsuite, I was presented with her Klout score.

A Klout score

measures your influence on a scale of 1-100—the average Klout Score is 40.

The greater your ability to drive conversations and inspire social actions such as likes, shares, and retweets, the higher your Score will be.

So, in theory, people with higher Klout scores are popular people on social networks who really shape conversations. In reality, spammers can easily get higher Klout scores than average users, e.g.

Spammer on left, real person on right

Spammer on left, real person on right

Klout pretty much comes out and says their fancy system can’t be gamed by spammers:

Did you know that the Klout score focuses more on the amount of conversation and interactions you generate rather than the volume of your posts? Being active is different from being influential.

All of @renaphillips9 tweets were direct spam to real users or interactions with other spam accounts. I’m a real person with an active twitter account with plenty of real conversations and retweets. Clearly Klout isn’t measuring what it claims to be measuring.

Klout advertises itself as a way to figure out your own influence, sort of an ego-stroking algorithm I guess, but I imagine its real business plan is to sell its scores or algorithm or something to advertisers to figure out which horse to hitch their wagon to.