drat fink

are you ready for some seal meat?

"In other NFL news, Thanksgiving has become Throwback Day, with teams to wear old-fashioned uniforms and old logos on the NFL.com home page. TMQ suggests this menu for your own personal Throwback Thanksgiving:

Wild turkey, shot with a musket and hand-plucked.

Dried maize; no corn-on-the-cob.

Ample, overflowing servings of lobster. (The Pilgrims considered lobster tasteless and complained in their diaries of having to eat it so often.)

Seal meat.

Hard apple cider. (Till the early 1800s or so, hard cider was in rural North America considered the only totally safe beverage, because the alcohol killed waterborne pathogens; children often drank diluted hard cider and went through the day slightly tipsy.)

For dessert: plums, grapes and stewed pumpkin. (There is no chance the Pilgrims ate pie at the first Thanksgiving, because they had no refined sugar. Until the 1800s, most Americans rarely tasted anything containing refined sugar.)

As you dig into your turkey, stuffing and pecan pie, washed down with a $10 bottle of wine superior in quality to any wine available to the 17th-century kings of France, remember how hard your ancestors worked, and how they sacrificed, in the dream that someday their descendants would be warm, well-fed and secure against nature. Considering that your forebears just a century ago had an average lifespan of 46 years and often shivered during winters while eating mostly salt-preserved food, try to get through turkey day without complaining about anything, okay? Happy Throwback Thanksgiving!"

cookie puss

had an opportunity for a great proustian "madeleine" moment but in my present mindstate it was all signifier with little signified. still, the cortical stimulation was pleasant enough.

saw through my gauzy windowshade at what looked not unlike some of toms molecule images yet possessing a spatial orientation that had a certain hazy familiarity of a different bent. that the colorful spots were slowly rotating allowed for a more solid recollection to begin to take shape.

(shit. this truck is in another state by now and im just in up to my ankles. fortunately theres another truck parked across the street with a rig which mimics the color of the original truck. so i can use that truck as a memory device to remind me of the other truck which itself was supposed to set off a flood of childhood memories but owing to my sentiment free mindset there was an unwillingness or an inability to venture down those hoary lanes. but, go ahead, finish your untale. i know i was enthralled.)

fim flam

"Which, unfortunately, was what more than a few Capital J Journalists here said after her speech. I had the personal misfortune of sitting next to a former CNN exec who nearly spewed her salad across the room when Ana Marie said "bloggers have succeeded in deprofessionalizing journalism." Here was one highbrow who was taking this deprofessionalizing like a lobotomy -- she squawked that it was "an insult" to have Wonkette speaking to such an Esteemed Group Of Professionals. It was obvious that a few people here don't actually know what Wonkette is."

borscht beltway

"the only politician in america with a man-date is jim mcgreevey." -- carville on meet the tim

squeal like a pig

mccain is a whore. he complained on This Weak that the cia tried to impact the us election by leaking, i assume, the information that the high grade explosives in iraq went unprotected, and then he blamed a compliant media for echoing the charge. if only the truth concerned him half as much protecting his presidential viability.

so vain

vanity fair (conde nast) decides it would like to be a part of the conversation.

new car smell

for an activist liberal lawyer, this post from kos portrays surprisingly little sympathy for certain civil liberties.

surfer girl

"The campaign experience, she said, was a lot like 'getting tubed.'"

red state herring

"As Jeffrey Rosen (a pro-choice but anti-Roe legal analyst) recently argued in The New Republic (subscription-only), abortion is probably a red herring in the Supreme Court battles; Bush and his people seem most preoccupied with stacking the court with proponents of the “Constitution in Exile” movement, which seeks to return American jurisprudence to pre-New Deal interpretations of the interstate Commerce Clause that hugely limit the scope of federal action and policy. Last year, Michael Scherer wrote a terrific piece for Mother Jones that, in a similar vein, focused on the massive corporate underwriting of most of Bush’s controversial judicial nominations in his first term, and argued that media accounts focusing on, say, William H. Pryor’s religious extremism or Priscilla Owen’s anti-choice advocacy miss the more important story of these judges' radical fealty to corporate interests."

red state rover

"This is what decades of voting for conservative politicians has wrought: nothing.

Or, rather, not nothing, in another sense it has wrought a great deal. Tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors to Republican-friendly corporations and campaign contributors have proliferated faster than gay pride parades and pornographic websites. Back in Washington for his victory lap, Bush claimed a mandate from the voters and proceeded to outline his agenda for his second term -- tax cuts for the wealthy, subsidies for energy companies, tax shelters for the wealthy, a massive giveaway to the insurance industry, and a larger giveaway to the financial services industry. The faith-based agenda of his most loyal flock was left on the cutting room floor. Just as it always has been, and just as it always will be. The powers that be in the Republican Party are, as in Andrew Sullivan's memorable phrase, "closet tolerants," uninterested in the values agenda except as a hateful prop to be deployed at campaign time."