thanksgiving plans

first of all, a day early, but i won’t be blogging tomorrow — happy thanksgiving!

our plans?

usually, they involve lots of yummy pennsylvania dutch starchiness when we visit kirk’s parents, but this year we’re staying home. kirk’s parents had a previous commitment (on thanksgiving? whatever.) and it’s our first year in our new apartment anyway. so instead of a food network thanksgiving, or a southern-ish-style thanksgiving, we’re having a martha stewart living thanksgiving. the turkey recipe from the november issue, to be specific. here’s what’s planned so far, with more probably to be added:

» brined turkey and stuffing, a la martha — we got a fresh turkey from our local farmer’s market, and we’re soaking it in a spiced brine for 24 hours prior to cooking. yummo, as rachael ray would say to martha if they weren’t blood enemies. the turkey will be stuffed with some kind of yummy stuffing, the details of which i can’t remember. the most important stuffing note, though, is that the recipe calls for the stuffing to be placed in cheesecloth before placing in the turkey. that way, you can take out the stuffing when the turkey is done, and cook the stuffing longer so you don’t get salmonella or whatever. this is a major victory for me. kirk always worried about the ill effects of stuffing a turkey, so he’d never let me put stuffing loose in the turkey. never mind that i lived my entire life doing it, and never died as a result. ah, compromise.

» organic green bean casserole — they had a display of organic fried onions and organic green beans and organic cream of mushroom soup at whole foods, and the concept of organic green bean casserole cracked me up so much that i had to buy it. maybe we can have organic jell-o salad for dessert, to complete the ’70s vibe.

» cranberry salad — my family historically makes the standard cranberry sauce from fresh cranberries. one bag cranberries, one cup sugar, one cup water. boil. kirk this year made his aunt marcia’s cranberry salad, which has nuts, and oranges, and chopped fresh cranberries, and sugar, and oysters, and chopped chives, and other stuff i’m forgetting. well, not really oysters and chopped chives. but it’s far too busy a recipe for me. and nonstandard thanksgiving fare to boot. and he made at least 18 pounds of it. i’m skeptical. we’ll see.

» cope’s corn — no thanksgiving would now be complete for me without it. see, i can change.

» potato filling — this is mashed potatoes with celery and onion and bread and 11 herbs and spices according to the colonel’s secret recipe. actually, kirk’s mother’s recipe. but it is yummy. i’ve adapted to this, as well. great comfort food.

» gravy — lotsa lotsa gravy. made from pan drippings and roux, the right way.

» steamed broccoli — there has to be something green, right? or i may open a can of mustard greens.

» pumpkin cheesecake — a bit of a twist on tradition, but one i can handle.

i think that’s it. i’m probably forgetting something. but you get the gist.

here’s hoping your thanksgiving is as blessed as ours will be.

our wii media center

who needs an apple tv? not us.

we have a mac in our “home office”, which is in fact a shallow closet. elsewhere in the apartment, we have a wii, and we have the wii hooked up to the hdtv, and we have the wii hooked up to the home theater. and the mac and the wii are on the same network.

enter wii transfer.

for a $19 shareware fee, which i paid and so should you when you use shareware, this little program feeds music, movies, photos, and browser bookmarks from your mac to the wii’s internet browser. so if i want to listen to itunes music through the stereo, or watch a downloaded video file on the hdtv, or watch a slideshow of my iphoto pictures, i can now just fire up the wii, use the wii’s browser to pull up the content, and bob’s your uncle, as they say in paraguay. it installed easily with practically no configuration, and worked perfectly out of the box.

there are a couple of minor drawbacks. you can’t play purchased drm-encoded video, so all my wonder showzen episodes bought in itunes stay on the mac. and audio files don’t stream yet (they are copied over to the wii on the fly), so you run into wii memory issues with large audio files. no radioshift yet.

but those are very minor quibbles. quibbles i can put up with when spending $19 for wii transfer, as opposed to $299 or even $399 for an apple tv. we listened to itunes playlists all weekend.

great stuff.

unsolicited recommendation: homedecorators.com

for years, kirk and i just left our liquor bottles in a disorganized clump on the floor. with our holiday party coming up, we thought it might be nice to have a small liquor cabinet to put the bottles in, something that had a top that could double as a small dry bar.

so kirk found this lovely and well-priced corner cabinet at homedecorators.com, and he ordered it.

the website was well-organized and very informative, the ordering process was straightforward, and the shipping was expedient (delivered less than a week after the order was placed, good for such a large object).

we were especially pleased with the quality of the shipped product. it was partially assembled, and the pieces were clearly labeled, each with its own letter of the alphabet. the assembly directions were clear and literate, and it was fully together in about 20 painless minutes.

since our entire kitchen came from ikea, we are not strangers to furniture assembly. the homedecorators.com assembly experience was much better than the ikea experience, and considering how happy we were with ikea, that’s saying something. the parts were of superior quality. no pressboard, all hard wood, better hardware (bolts, screws, etc.).

for a price comparable to ikea, we got a higher-quality product and a better overall customer experience. we’ll be repeat customers with homedecorators.com, without a doubt.

your creation museum report

via daring fireball, a tour of the creation museum, from just the right perspective.

here’s a sample:

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

i had to stop reading, because i was at work and in danger of laughing so hard i’d disturb the nearby cubedwellers.

this one’s a classic.

entertainment on strike

the world of entertainment is on strike. and how is it affecting me?

not much, i have to say. at least not directly.

first there’s the writer’s strike in hollywood. i guess that if you were a big tv watcher, you’d be upset about this. no new episodes of csi or lost or letterman or whatever, and all. but, having given up television (no cable tv, and our tv doesn’t have a tuner, so no over-the-air broadcasts either), i could care less. if the strike goes on long enough it could eventually affect the movies, and i’d care marginally more about that, but there are enough movies on netflix to last a lifetime. if they stopped making new movies tomorrow, i’d still never get to watch all the movies i’d like to see.

second strike is the stagehands on broadway. we don’t go to as many shows as we used to, so this doesn’t directly affect me in that sense. however, it definitely affects the economy of new york city, so in that sense i’m at least indirectly affected. but again, there are plenty of live entertainment options in new york — some broadway shows, off-broadway, off-off broadway, concerts, cabarets, and so on.

in general i support the concept of unions — we wouldn’t have much in the way of benefits and rights as workers if they hadn’t fought for them. and there are many jobs that i wouldn’t take unless there was a union to represent me. and when i taught school, i always belonged to the union — even though i agreed that they promoted and tolerated incompetence, i still saw the overall value in membership.

i think the writers have a valid point. everything’s going online, and if something they wrote is rebroadcast on the internet or sold via itunes, there should be some payment for that. of course, if the strike continues, there may not be much of an audience left for their product, given people’s limited and continually fracturing attention span. but they have a point, and they should press for a solution if they think the risk is worth it.

i don’t think it helps their image, though, to have big stars on the picket lines, and jay leno bringing them donuts, and so on. i’ll bet the vast majority of striking writers are middle class folks with middle class incomes, and all those big stars do is leave casual observers with the impression that all writers are wealthy people looking for even more wealth.

the broadway stagehands seem to me to have less of a point. i’ll be the first to admit that i’m not fully informed, but from what i can gather, one of their main demands is to retain the right to tell producers how many union members each show must hire.

i’m guessing that most people would think that an unreasonable demand. i know i do.

i’d love to have the contractual right to tell my company that they had to employ a set number of my co-workers. who wouldn’t? but that’s not reasonable. and while i’m sure greedy producers drive up the cost of broadway tickets, having to hire union employees regardless of actual need isn’t helping either.

for the sake of the economies of new york and los angeles, i hope both strikes are settled soon.

personally, though, i don’t care much either way.

update: with the broadway strike, what’s at issue is controlling how many workers are present at the load-in for the show (when all the sets, etc., are brought into the theater). i have less of a problem with that — i dont think the producers should be telling the union how many people that takes.

for the grammar nerd in you

via daring fireball: Philip B. Corbett, who oversees language issues for the [NY Times] newsroom, is answering readers’ questions this week.

this is by far my favorite NY Times article in recent memory. you may think that odd, given that i’m posting about it on a blog that has no capital letters, but it’s true.

update: here’s what mr. corbett says about the phrase “in recent memory”:

A small sample of other words and phrases that my colleagues and I have identified as overworked and deserving a bit of rest:

in recent memory — An almost meaningless phrase.

it’s a long article, and obviously i posted the link before reaching the end of it.

sometimes i just can’t win.

not going to dubai

i’ve never thought much about going to dubai. it seems to me like las vegas in the desert, except that it costs much more to go there, and you can’t gamble. there’s shopping, but if i want to go high-end shopping, which i don’t, i have a whole nyc full of exclusive shops. there’s, i suppose, seeing the desert.

you get the drift.

anyway, after reading this article in today’s ny times, i’m quite sure i will never go. from the article:

Alexandre Robert, a French 15-year-old, was having a fine summer in this tourist paradise on the Persian Gulf. It was Bastille Day and he and a classmate had escaped the July heat at the beach for an air-conditioned arcade.

Just after sunset, Alex says he was rushing to meet his father for dinner when he bumped into an acquaintance, a 17-year-old native-born student at the American school, who said he and his cousin could drop Alex off at home.

There were, in fact, three Emirati men in the car, including a pair of former convicts ages 35 and 18, according to Alex. He says they drove him past his house and into a dark patch of desert, between a row of new villas and a power plant, took away his cellphone, threatened him with a knife and a club, and told him they would kill his family if he ever reported them.

Then they stripped off his pants and one by one sodomized him in the back seat of the car. They dumped Alex across from one of Dubai’s luxury hotel towers.

Alex and his family were about to learn that despite Dubai’s status as the Arab world’s paragon of modernity and wealth, and its well-earned reputation for protecting foreign investors, its criminal legal system remains a perilous gantlet when it comes to homosexuality and protection of foreigners.

The authorities not only discouraged Alex from pressing charges, he, his family and French diplomats say; they raised the possibility of charging him with criminal homosexual activity, and neglected for weeks to inform him or his parents that one of his attackers had tested H.I.V. positive while in prison four years earlier.

nothing like institutionalized homophobic ignorance to attract tourists to your desert paradise, right? any glbt person who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.

correction: anyone at all who goes to dubai has lost their frigging mind.