I just got back from a 6 week trip to the States which had me traveling to NJ, FL, PA and the last 3 weeks in VA. The jetlag thing is crushing us right now as the little ones are not even thinking about getting tired till about 11PM.

One of the Highlights of the trip was meeting the other ministers at Small Holders sprawling farm in Charlottesville.

It was a truly delightful time.

I think I was up to bat for the Men’s club thingy… sorry I dropped the ball but I did not have steady e-mail access while away so I only had a vague idea when it was my turn and no computer.

Next time…

Speaking of Men’s club/ Diva issues, I don’t think I got my login stuff from Sadie. If its not too late, can you hook me up?

Back to the trenches….

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader wanted to direct you all to a number of good things (as Martha might say if she weren’t still confined to her home) and important things on other blogs.

Before you do other things. Go and visit Kate. Help her out. She needs new fangs and is a very good cause.

Check out Sadie’s interview of Dan.

Somewhere. Out there. There is an iPod in need of a name.

You should go and read this story. Very moving. Thanks to Geeklethal for the tip.

Check out Basil’s tips to cut down on Spam. Yeah, you may have read them before, but read them again. Some people are thickheaded…

Just when you get the news from Iraq gets so sad, remember what we are there for. Tiki reminds us at Cranky Neocon.

Uh… No… Your Maximum Leader has never been “that guy” sitting in front on the Victoria’s Secret store sucking on a milkshake…

And while you are thinking hormonally… Your Maximum Leader isn’t sure about this (not-safe-for-work) site. But he doesn’t put it past someone to make that stuff. (Link courtesy of I Like Your Style. That link only moderately work safe.)

Ted laughed hard. So did your Maximum Leader when he saw that show. BTW, Jenna Elfman… Kooky. Crazy. Probably certifiable. But darned attractive.

Also courtesy of Ted and Buckethead, we have this site. Be careful lest you be touched by its noodly appendage.

And finally… This joke made your Maximum Leader think of Villainette #1. Because she tells jokes just like this.

Soon your Maximum Leader will be off to another Nats/Dodgers game. Go Nats! (Which if you listen to drunk people yelling it sounds remarkably like “Gonads!”)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is feeling a bit thin today. He believes this may be attributable to the three-quarters of a bottle of Pol Roger he consumed last night. Although it wasn’t all at once, it still was nearly a whole bottle of champagne.

This is his round-about wa of saying that blogging may be light today.

Anyho…

Loyal reader “RD” wrote in the comments of this post the following:

How long have you been drinking Bull’s Blood? If for very long(I first started in London,69) than you will know that unfortunately they have changed more than the label. The last few times I had it, it seemed as if some of the “bite” had gone out of it. This was confirmed by my favorite expert in this area, who stated that it was mellowed out for the American market. He explained that most Americans don’t drink wine as I, (and apparently you) and most Europeans do, i.e., with major meals. Rather most is consumed as either a “stand alone” before bedtime deal, or with very lite fare indeed. Hence, the watering down of our old favorite to increase sales. More’s the pity. The old stuff with a steak,
salad, and some garlic French bread (I live in N.O.) was unbeatable for the price.

A fair question indeed.

As “RD” surmised, your Maximum Leader does tend to drink his wine with a meal. If he is going to imbibe in an alcoholic beverage without food it will almost always be beer, scotch, or bourbon. Indeed the more your Maximum Leader thinks about it the more he can positively confirm that he almost never drinks wine except at meals.

And as for Egri Bikaver (or Bulls Blood as it is known), it is one of his favourites. It has a very full body (compared to other wines) and is a wonderful compliment to steaks. As RD pointed out, Egri Bikaver does accompany aromatic foods (like garlic bread) very well. It is not a meek wine that will be overpowered by other items at the table.

Your Maximum Leader doesn’t have the experience with Bulls Blood that RD does. Your Maximum Leader’s first taste of Egri Bikaver came in 1993 in fact. And, as RD has mentioned, he has noticed in the intervening 12 years that the wine is not as robust as it once was. It is, still, inexpensive. Your Maximum Leader picks it up for about $6/bottle.

If you come across any in your travels to the local wine distributor, and you like hearty red wines, your Maximum Leader suggests you pick up a bottle and give it a try.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader is still trying to figure out how he wants to deal with comments here on Naked Villainy. He has tried to respond directly to commenters when he feels he has something pithy to say to them. This is to say he’s been e-mailing commenters directly. He isn’t sure that he want to engage himself in long discussion strings in the comments of his own website. Because he feels like those discussion strings are probably not well read.

On the other hand, responding directly to someone cuts out the other minions and readers of this site from a potentially interesting “conversation” as it were.

Your Maximum Leader had planned on writing separate posts on subjects spawned in the comments of another post. He’s thought of these as something of an extension of the “Minion Mailbag” feature from the old site.

If you have a preference for how you’d like to see comments and comments on comments handled, write them in the comment section of this post. Your Maximum Leader will take all serious suggestions under consideration.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has just posted his contribution to that wonderful weblog that is The Hatemonger’s Quarterly.

Go and read.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been a very bad man tonight. After the culinary debacle that was Monday night your Maximum Leader recovered in grand form.

He had a perfectly cooked Delmonico from the grill. He first built up a pile of hot coals in the grill. Upon this pryamid of coals he placed an iron skillet. When the skillet was white hot, he added the room temperature steak that had been bathed in salt, pepper, and oil. 3 minutes per side (approximately).

The steak was removed from the skillet and plated next to a 2.3 pound Maine lobster which your Maximum Leader had steamed simultaneously.

He also had a cucumber salad. (He knows… Another cucumber salad… The Villainschloss garden has lots of cucumbers…)

He did decide to scratch the Egri Bikaver. Instead he opened a bottle of Pol Roger Champagne.

Now that dinner is finished and the kitchen clean your Maximum Leader will take the remaing Pol Roger and go to watch The Taming of the Shrew with Burton and Taylor.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader really respects when people can come clean about their deep, dark, secrets. He especially respects it when they can do so in a public forum like the internet.

Brian has recently come clean. He like Canadians.

Like Brian, your Maximum Leader agrees that some of the best non-mericans he’s ever met have been Canadians. One of the coolest, smartest, most ambitious, (and sexiest) people he’s ever worked with is his friend JT in Chicago. (NB to JT: E-mail your Maximum Leader if you’re reading this. If you’re not… Well start!) JT is Canadian. In fact she majored in Canadian Studies in college. (But that hasn’t held her back from taking the American business community by storm!)

That said… Your Maximum Leader is concerned. Concerned about the idiocy of the Canadian government. Concerned about Skippy. (General concern there. Nothing specific.)

And he is concerned about Canadian World Domination. Claire and Jenny are on your Maximum Leader’s watch list. And have been for about 6 years now. (He discovered their web site about 6 years ago.)

So perhaps there is something rotten (aside from the government and socialist medicine and free speech restrictions) in the state of Canada…

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader proved yet again that he is a sucker for silly quizzes. We can thank Phin for this one.

My life is rated R.
What is your life rated?

It seems your Maximum Leader is not as racy as either Phin or Kathy. Just as racy as Robbo the Llamabutcher. And definately more racy than Steve the Llamabutcher.

Carry on.
(more…)

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader has been following the story of Susan Torres in the Washington Post.

Ms. Torres was the brain-dead woman who was being kept alive in the hopes that her unborn child might be able to live. The 26 year old Ms. Torres had a stroke when 15 weeks pregnant. The stroke was related to the terminal cancer from which she suffered.

Her baby girl was born via ceasarian section yesterday. Healthy but very premature.

Your Maximum Leader cannot imagine the joy and suffering that Jason Torres, Susan’s husband, must be experiencing. According to news reports he will request that the life support machines keeping Susan’s vitals going will be removed today. What a horrible thing to have to do. He will be in your Maximum Leader’s prayers.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader had a very good time last night at the Nationals v. Dodgers contest. Alas, the hometown team lost to the visitors from LA 5-4. But it was a good contest all the way through. As is becoming the case with the Nationals, run generation is a problem.

It is likely that your Maximum Leader may attend another Nationals/Dodgers game tomorrow night. But time will tell.

Your Maximum Leader thought he might share with you some lines of conversation he overheard while at the game last night. He wrote these on the side of his scorecard…

“Jeff Kent… What a pussy.” (This was overheard immediately before Kent hit a lead-off home run for the Dodgers at the beginning of the 2nd inning.)

“So… Like… I want my boobs done but my mom won’t pay for it.”

“What do you mean you don’t have any fitted hats in red?”

“What sort of idiots can’t figure out how many hot dogs people eat at games? We are halfway through the season. You’d think that you would have caught a clue by now.” (This was said by the man standing in front of your Maximum Leader at a concessions stand in the middle of the 6th inning. Your Maximum Leader also wanted, but did not get, a hot dog. They did run out.)

“So do you think I’m overextended in blue-chips?”

And the first overheard quote that caused your Maximum Leader to think “only in Washington” would people talk about this at a baseball game…

“Come on! You’ve got to be kidding! Dean Rusk was one of the greatest Secretaries of State this century. I mean it goes George Marshall then Dean Rusk. I can’t believe you don’t see that!”

By the way… Your Maximum Leader believes he lost about 5 pounds last night. He sweated it out. It was damned hot.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader directs you to the third installment of his pithy commentary over on The Hatemonger’s Quarterly site.

Today’s subject, The Current Channel.

Carry on.

Go Dodgers! Think Blue!

Believe.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader saw the following quiz over on the Llama’s site. So he took it.

Take the Star Trek Quiz

Your Maximum Leader was a little disappointed in that the quiz was really too short. But hey… He’s just takin’ the quiz, not writing it.

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader should not have deviated from his plan yesterday night.

Yesterday he wrote that he would do a little shopping, then get chinese food from the restaurant with the drop dead gorgeous owner. Well, he was diverted from his plan while shopping. At the grocery store your Maximum Leader was enticed by a frozen crab cake. Samples of which were being offered to patrons. Your Maximum Leader sampled a crab cake and was pleasantly surprised by it’s texture and taste.

He bought some.

Now generally your Maximum Leader prefers to buy seafood fresh (if he doesn’t catch it himself). And to be quite honest, your Maximum Leader generally makes his own crab cakes from crabs caught by his esteemed and much beloved in-laws.

Excursus: Your Maximum Leader’s in-laws live on the Chesapeake Bay. Well, actually on a river right near the bay. As owners of waterfront property they are allowed to have one unlicensed crab pot for every taxpaying permenant resident of the improved property. So my mother & father-in-law have two crab pots in the water during much of the crab season.

Your Maximum Leader makes his crab cakes very carefully. He picks the meat himself. Then he adds one baten egg and a few tablespoons of homemade bread crumbs into 2 lbs of crab meat. He seasons lightly with Old Bay seasoning. Then he hand molds the crab mixture into patties and fries the crab cakes in melted (salted) butter in a medium heat iron skillet.

Needless to say, your Maximum Leader is particular about his crab cakes. But he was hungry last night and these crab cakes tasted good. So he bought some.

Then he went home and put them in the oven to cook/reheat.

While they were cooking he set about cleaning up the Villainschloss. He also puttered around in the garage for a moment.

When the crab cakes were done, he plated them. Got a little melted butter ready. He had his cucumber salad at the ready. He sat down in front of the TV preparing to watch some news… Then he bit into the first Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Crab Cake.

It was awful.

So he took a bite of a second crab cake. It was a little better. But still not very good. He did in fact eat them all. (Your Maximum Leader’s Catholic upbringing somehow compells him to eat at least a regular portion of bad food without throwing it away all together - as wasting food is sinful.) He ate them with a particularly strong cocktail sauce he whipped up to masque the taste of the crab cake.

The cucumber salad was good however…

Lessons to be learnt here: 1) don’t deviate from the well laid plan; 2) don’t ever buy Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville Crab Cakes.

Tonight’s adventure is to the Washington Nationals/LA Dodgers baseball game. Consider yourself warned that blogging may be light the rest of the day.

Perhaps some of your Maximum Leader’s ministers might choose to blog a little… (Hint! Hint!)

Carry on.

Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader just put up his second offering on The Hatemonger’s Quarterly.

Check it out if you like.

Carry on.