While my gâteau gently weeps

My experience with pie has mostly reached a comfortable low-grade mastery. Not that I'm a professional pastry chef, but I can make a banana cream pie out of flour, sugar, salt, butter, water, eggs, vanilla, and bananas with my eyes closed. I don't intend to come across as smug, but I don't quite get the notion that crusts are frighteningly difficult. Maybe they were fifty years ago, but with a food processor and a pie crust bag it really isn't any harder than bread. I wish I could get into online videography *kicks Vista* so I could make some YouTube tutorials for newbie geek cooks like me.

What I evidently can't do is meringue. I gather that lots of people have trouble with it, but argh the weeping! I've overcooked the pies, I've pre-cooked the egg whites, I think they only thing I haven't tried is locking the pie into a closet with a dehumidifier. Don't think I won't. What's your secret?

Sanctuary

George Tiller, a doctor who performs abortions in Kansas, is shot dead.

While in his church. On Pentecost Sunday.

The Operation Rescue website (which still has links referencing him as "America's Doctor of Death") is shocked (SHOCKED!) to find that someone would commit such "a cowardly act" and hopes that his family "will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ." Perhaps that advice rings hollow when their familiar consecrated ground has been defiled by one of OR's followers. I pray that Troy Newman recognizes the damage that he has done to the body of Christ through his campaign of stalking and harassment and his own role in rousing the rabble who then go on to accomplish Newman's mission of fear and intimidation without dirtying his own hands. And I hope, once again, that his allies recognize the toxicity of OR and the wrongness of the campaigns that spring from them.

ETA: And, once again, I use the word "hope" to indicate an opportunity that I expect to be missed, and lo it is missed. Operation Rescue and its affiliated Christian groups spent more time in their recent press conference chiding liberals for being outraged than advising that their own followers step back from acts of anti-Christian terrorism, despite the fact that their followers will listen to them and liberals will not. Here we go again: I hope that Mr. Newman and his crowd privately recognize the harm that they have done and make nigh-invisible incremental steps to lessen the role of violence taken up by their own extremists.