The scumbag who robbed a pharmacy in New York and while doing so murdered four people, including two people that he ambushed after they came into the store in the middle of his crime, has been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.  His wife, who drove the car for the robbery and murder, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

This trash blamed his wife’s ‘need’ to take massive amounts of prescription drugs, including hydrocodone, for this outrage.  He also maintains that he shot his first victim when the gun he used in the robbery went off accidentally, then apparently he just followed through.  By following through, I mean he went and found the other employee at the store, murdered her, then stalked and executed two other people who entered the store.

Hey, jerkoff, no gun goes off ‘accidentally’.  I’m probably taking a very simplistic view of this, but if you don’t hold up a pharmacy, you don’t take a chance on ‘accidentally’ shooting the pharmacist.  If you didn’t want to shoot anyone else, then you didn’t have to.  Even assuming that the first murder was ‘accidental’, which I don’t buy for a moment, you still, in cold blood, ended the lives of three non-threatening people who just happened to be in a place they had every right to be in at the same time that you were.

The gun didn’t magically start shooting people all by itself.  Your wife didn’t ‘need’ all of the drugs you stole.  You aimed the pistol and pulled the trigger of your own volition, and I will never be convinced that you didn’t plan on doing it that way to begin with.  Your wife either chose to start taking that crap in the first place as a recreational activity, or she didn’t do what was necessary to get off of it after using it for some truly therapeutic reason.  Either way, no-one but you two wastes of good protoplasm are to blame for the shattering of four families.  Not the gun, not the drugs, and not the doctors who prescribed them.

Personally, I hope they stick you both in the third sub-basement of some old, stone building, and you spend the rest of your very long lives listening to the roaches in the walls.  It’s still better than you deserve, but Death by Duracell wasn’t prescribed by the law in this case.  If there ever was a case that made me wish for public, gruesome executions, it’s this one.

Fox News is discussing five myths about cast iron pots and pans, including whether or not to use soap to clean them, and whether or not cooking with cast iron adds nutrients to your food.

At Casa de Oso, we cook a lot in our cast iron pans.  We mostly use two griddles, one large and one small, and a couple of frying pans, but we also have large dutch ovens and a few saucepans.  We are forever in the hunt for a large frying pan for making fried chicken like Irish Woman remembers seeing used as a child.  Nothing says “I love you” in Kentucky like a big cast iron pan full of hot lard and spiced chicken parts.

I prefer cast iron for sauteing and frying foods over the aluminum cookware we have.  We have to use so much more oil to keep things from sticking to the aluminum and it’s so much more work to clean the shiny pans that it’s just not worth it.  And aluminum cookware just doesn’t have the soul that a good, well-used, black cast iron pan does.

One thing I can tell you – a teenage boy, who is doing dishes against his will, takes his life in his own hands when he loads his step-mom’s cast iron skillet and griddle in the dishwasher and turns it on.  Luckily we caught it before it got beyond the ‘pre-wash’ cycle, but he was banished from the kitchen for a while.  It took us an entire day to reseason those pans.

Also, contrary to popular belief, a cast iron frying pan does not make a very good weapon.  The two foot by one foot cast iron griddle with big handles on either end makes a much better flail or club, and it also makes a dandy shield. 

A cast-iron dutch oven is a wonderful cooking implement for camping, especially for those who want charcoal ash in their cobbler after the kids start taking the lid off to get a second helping.

And finally, the proper way to get stuck-on food off the bottom of a cast iron pan is to boil water in it for a few minutes, then scrape it out and reseason as necessary.  It is not to fill it about 1/3 of the way up with camp fuel and burn out the scraps.  Remember folks, behind every pyromaniac is a Boy Scout leader with bandages and a shovel full of dirt.