Yeah, I've been eviscerating lawyers across the v. from me again, and this time I got a little sloppy. Pass me the mop, please...
- As bad and corrupt as is FIFA, the IOC is worse. Which does not, by any means, excuse anything or anyone: It's just money, politics, spite, and neocolonial arrogance.
- I'm irritated at bad science related to cooking. There's an article in today's WaPo on a purported "brisket controversy" between smoking and sous vide that is utterly stupid because it doesn't even consider — let alone test or control for — the major difference: The ingredients. News flash, you jerks: High-end Harris Ranch beef, and in particular the "less-expensive" cuts of Harris Ranch (and other west-coast-available beef), is not the same as its market equivalent in Kansas City or Houston or Raleigh (let alone in the arrogant-foodie centers). Neither are the environmental conditions... and if you don't think that ambient air conditions matter to long-smoking, you haven't paid attention; high-altitude dry air, to name an obvious variable, is not your tasty-smokehouse-brisket friend. The argument reminds me of Alton Brown's notorious recipe for ribs done in the oven in aluminum foil — and the pseudocontroversy over whether it's ever appropriate (in 2007) to say "ribs" without "barbecue."
Go ahead. Argue your positions from an abstraction having nothing to do with the reality of the ingredients or conditions facing either the average home cook or a smokehouse restaurant. You'll sound just like the arrogant morons running for office.
- Speaking of whom: I wouldn't trust Ms Clinton (or Mr Johnson or Ms/Dr Stein) to properly handle any aspect — whether the initial contact or later — of a death notification concerning military personnel. I would trust Mr Drumpf even less. And unlike any of them, I say this from a different perspective: I've had to do it. Contrary to isolationist retconning, the period between the fall of Saigon and Desert Storm was most emphatically not military-casualty free. Not one of the candidates has yet demonstrated compassion when there weren't cameras there for the photo op; Drumpf has demonstrated pretty definitively that he perhaps has more in common with a seventeenth-century Elector who figleafed politicoreligious ideology behind naked personal ambition (and, simultaneously, the converse) without regard to body counts or collateral damage.
At least Drumpf now has something in common with Bill Shatner (aside from hairpieces, that is): Screaming "Khaaaaan!"