One of these cheerleaders…

Is my brother.

My SIL just told me that he said my sister and I used to dress him up like a girl when he was a toddler. I have just set the record straight.

(not that there’s anything wrong with that)

Zombie CDS – It Never Dies!

 

She wants our manhood!

Brian Morton at The Smirking Chimp gives an accurate description of Clinton Derangement Syndrome in the media:

There’s something about Hillary Clinton.

Well, to be honest about it, there’s something about what happens when the Clinton name itself enters the picture, whether it’s the senator from New York or the former president. It makes editors get stupid, it makes national political columnists spin into paroxysms of foolishness, and it makes cable television pontificators start thinking out loud thoughts normally not found outside of support groups for people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens.

Clinton advisor James Carville has famously described it as the “puke funnel,” where all the craziest statements made from the farthest reaches of the right wing get channeled through people like Rush Limbaugh and Matt Drudge and end up in the mainstream newspapers and supposedly respectable cable outfits. And then a stuffy columnist like The Washington Post’s David Broder gets to sniff huffily about the effect the Clintons have on the genteel bipartisan niceness of Washington and high-school drama reviewer Maureen Dowd of The New York Times gets to toss off another column full of cutesy diminutive nicknames where she acts as if she can read minds.

I always thought a “puke funnel” was what you needed after watching MSNBC.  But Morton says something else that I found to be a unique and interesting take on Hillary’s agreement to serve as the next Secretary of State: 

Begging for money for election campaigns is the most humbling, the most humiliating, the most uncomfortable, and the most boring job a politician has to do. 

[…]

 Given the chance to get away from that and spend four and possibly eight years as a traveling policy wonk–quite likely Hillary Clinton’s idea of heaven–it seems like a no-brainer.

No wonder Morton only writes a column for the Baltimore City Paper and not for a more well-known newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post.  He makes too much sense.

It’s a Wonderful Life Parts 8-9-10-11-12-13

It’s a Wonderful Life Part 7-13

It’s a Wonderful Life Part 6-13

It’s a Wonderful Life Part 5-13

Happy Thanksgiving!

Google's says Thanksgiving

Roughly 400 years ago, native Americans took pity on the remnants of a hapless freak religious colony and helped them survive a year in the wilderness of Massachusetts.  The Pilgrims repaid their hosts by shoving their fundy church down their throats and stealing the land.  But, dayum, the food was good.

The first Thanksgiving wasn’t really a “planned” 3 day feast.  It just sort of ended up that way.  The Puritans didn’t celebrate holidays.  They weren’t supposed to be partaking of the traditional English harvest feast.  It probably had pagan origins, if I can extrapolate from the thinking of modern day Puritans, the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  But, hey, fundies are only human and they wanted a party to “rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.” I have sooo been there.  Like that time when I tied my grass skirts together and snuck out of the house to attend a Girl Scout Halloween party dressed as Cousin It. But I digress.

Funny how the Puritans forgot to send an invitation to Massasoit and his family.  I’m sure it was just an oversight.  But once the natives heard the thunder of blunderbusses in the woods, taking out all of the fowl in the immediate vicinity, they decided to investigate and found a party going on.  So, they quickly downed some deer and joined the throng.  The Puritans, no doubt embarrassed by their lack of manners, graciously accepted the deer and the corn and made a 3 day affair of it.  Two brief contemporary accounts contradict one another as to the presence of wild turkey on the menu but it wouldn’t surprise me terribly if they were part of the fowl booty since they wander around NJ to this day as if the rest of civilization didn’t exist.  It couldn’t have been very hard to catch them.

Other goodies on the menu included a wazoo of seafood including cod, mussels, eel and lobster.  I’d heard an urban myth about a law that was passed in Plymouth colony that it was illegal to force prisoners to eat lobster 7 days a week.  Maybe they didn’t provide melted butter and the detained felt it was a hardship.  I can only speculate.

But anyway, the governor makes reference to a peck of food per person.  I’ll leave it to the stoichiometrists among us to convert that into modern units but that seems like a lot of food.  Governor Bradford does note that over a short period of time, the fowl in the area became less numerous than when they first arrived and that a lot of the diet was supplemented by corn.  I think corn was a catchall word for grain back then but there’s no evidence that wheat was in the early Pilgrim diet so we probably have to assume they were referring to maize.

Which brings me to one of my favorite dishes at Thanksgiving, corn souffle.  My mom makes it using something call Cope’s Corn, which I think can’t be found far from Amish country.  Unfortunately, I can’t find the original recipe that uses the Cope’s Toasted White Corn in a box, though this recipe comes pretty close:

BAKED CORN CASSEROLE
Time: 1 hour 15 minutes
1 7.5-ounce package John Cope’s Toasted Dried Sweet Corn
5 cups milk
3 1/2 tablespoons melted butter, plus additional for the baking dish
1 teaspoon salt or to taste
1 tablespoon sugar
4 eggs, beaten until well blended.
1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Using a blender or food processor, chop
the dried corn until finely ground.
2. In a large mixing bowl, combine the ground corn, milk, butter, salt,
sugar and eggs. Mix well.
3. Butter a shallow 2-quart baking dish. Pour in the corn mixture. Bake
until set and golden brown on top, about 1 hour. Serve
hot.
Yield: 8 servings.

Here are some other recipes for Corn Souffle that might be suitable in the event that you don’t have a box of Cope’s Corn handy.  In my humble opnion, there’s too much damn sugar in them so I’d cut back.  Americans have a maddening sweet tooth.  Not everthing has to be sweet.  Grrrr.  Ok, I’m better now.

Whatever you’re having today, enjoy it.  Savor each thing and think about the sunshine and hard work that went into growing what is on your table today and be thankful that food in this country is so cheap and abundant.

Happy T-Day!  Dig in.