Carnival of the Recipes is now available for your viewing and cooking pleasure. This week it’s being hosted by Boudicca’s Voice. She’s been good enough to classify the recipes cookbook-style and, I have to say, I like that format quite a bit better. I think I’ll follow it myself when I host the Carnival again.
Looking for ideas for Thanksgiving? Whether it’s cranberry sauce, stuffing, or potatoes, you’ll find them here!
Over the last several days Iran’s nuclear program has made the headlines on nearly a daily basis:
November 15, 2004 Iran agrees to suspend uranium enrichment November 17, 2004 Iranian group claims ‘new’ nuke facility in Tehran November 18, 2004 Powell: Intelligence suggests Iran trying to adapt missiles for nukes
This flurry of stories has occasioned a variety of responses in the blogosphere, mostly expected—from denial to extremely hard-line (“nuke ’em nowâ€) positions. I’ve made the comment on several blogs that I think it’s time for a public restatement of the United States’s policy of nuclear deterrence.
For the last ten years or so I’ve smoked my turkey at Thanksgiving. For the last half dozen or so of those years I’ve brined the turkey before I smoked it. Whether you smoke, barbecue, roast, or even deep fry your turkey I think you’ll find that brining will give you a tastier, juicier bird. To brine your turkey you’ll need to start around noon (or earlier) the day before Thanksgiving. Use a large stockpot or bucket large enough to hold the turkey and the brine with enough space left over so you won’t go insane trying to keep the whole shebang from spilling. Here’s what you’ll need for the brine:
1 gallon water
1 cup kosher salt
½ cup brown sugar
¼ cup dried tarragon leaves
12 peppercorns
6 allspice berries
- Mix all the ingredients making sure the salt and sugar are thoroughly dissolved.
- Place the turkey in the brining pot. Pour the brine over the turkey. Cover the turkey completely with the brine.
- Allow the turkey to soak for at least 12 hours in the refrigerator or a cool place that gets no warmer than 40°F.
- When ready to roast or smoke, remove the turkey from the brine, pat it dry, and coat it with butter or olive oil.
Smoke the turkey according to the instructions for your smoker. I typically smoke a 15 lb. turkey roughly 12 hours using mesquite, apple, or hickory chips. Use oak only if you want it to taste like a desk.
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It looks like others are coming to a conclusion that I’ve believed for a long time now—that our species arose as cursorial hunters:
LONDON (Reuters) – Humans were born to run and evolved from ape-like creatures into the way they look today probably because of the need to cover long distances and compete for food, scientists said on Wednesday.
From tendons and ligaments in the legs and feet that act like springs and skull features that help prevent overheating, to well-defined buttocks that stabilize the body, the human anatomy is shaped for running.
“We do it because we are good at it. We enjoy it and we have all kinds of specializations that permit us to run well,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University in Massachusetts.
“There are all kinds of features that we see in the human body that are critical for running,” he told Reuters.
Lieberman and Dennis Bramble, a biology professor at the University of Utah, studied more than two dozen traits that increase humans’ ability to run. Their research is reported in the science journal Nature.
They suspect modern humans evolved from their ape-like ancestors about 2 million years ago so they could hunt and scavenge for food over large distances.
Cursorial hunters that hunt in packs occupy a pretty specialized ecological niche. It’s probably not a coincidence that we took up company with another species that occupied the same niche: dogs. We just ran into them along the way.
This isn’t a new idea by the way. Friedrich Engels first came up with it in his essay The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man 125 years ago.
Posting will be a little light today. Real life has intervened and work beckons. Yes, I do work. There are quite a few longer topics I’m working on right now:
- The Wave Theory of the Core (Pentagon’s New Map)
- Why the demise of TennCare matters to non-Tennesseans
- A really great fruitcake recipe (really)
The Diplomad has a post from a retired foreign service officer on the occasion of Gen. Powell’s announcement that he will be leaving State that simply should not be missed:
“I was in the Department the day that Powell arrived. He was a breath of fresh air after a string of very bad Secretaries of State, starting with Jim Baker, continuing with the comatose Warren Christopher, and then the vile Madeleine Albright. The State Department was in disarray, morale was at rock bottom, literally hundreds of officers had quit or taken early retirement. Our Embassies in many countries were barely functional, and very exposed to terrorist attack. Department employees were constantly being lectured on the need “to do more with less” but no reform of the bureaucracy was undertaken to make it leaner and more efficient; everything was pretty much left as it was, but just given less money — except of course for Albright’s travels, in (my office) she was known as the “Empress” for her lavish demands on the budget.”
Read the whole thing.
…muttered the ogre has put the data on the Red State/Blue State per capita incomes and tax consumption ratios I reported here into a beautiful bubble graph. Now if I only knew what to make of it…
In his recent post on proposals for a flat tax, Tyler Cowen cites this op-ed from The New York Times:
In 1940 the instructions to the Form 1040 were about four pages. Today they are more than 100 pages, and the form itself contains more than 10 schedules and more than 20 worksheets. The complete tax code totals about 2.8 million words – about four times longer than “War and Peace” (and considerably harder to parse).
Look at the bright side, Tyler. They could be in Russian.
My own feeling on the subject of taxes is that marginal tax rates are largely beside the point. The critical issue is how income is calculated. Differences in how different kinds of income are taxed, various different deductions, and varying levels of fringe benefits that aren’t subject to personal income tax, are all methods of altering the progressivity of the tax system.
That’s why the Fair Tax is so appealing. It’s not regressive and it cuts the Gordian Knot of the calculation of income
The Carnival of the Liberated, a sampler of posts from Iraqi bloggers, is up at Dean’s World. It’s been a very busy news week in Iraq so go check it out. This is stuff you just can’t get by listening to the evening news.
As you may or may not already be aware, members of the Watcher’s Council hold a vote every week on what they consider to be the most link-worthy pieces of writing around… per the Watcher’s instructions, I am submitting one of my own posts for consideration in the upcoming nominations process.
Here is the most recent winning council post, here is the most recent winning non-council post, here is the list of results for the latest vote, and here is the initial posting of all the nominees that were voted on.
