Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Why did Dr. Oz lose? well, according to the exit polls, it’s because Fetterman won.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

I really should read my own blog.

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Consistently wrong since 2002

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

We still have time to mess this up!

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Happy Boxing Day!

Happy Boxing Day!

by | 64 Comments

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Here’s a thread for everyone to describe their left overs and those gifts that you’d like to be able to pawn off on someone else.

Or if you want to be overly literal, I highly recommend you watch HBO Films two documentaries on Ali-Frazier today. The first is entitled The Thrilla in Manila and deals with Ali and Frazier’s relationship and how the fight came about and ended. The second is Ali-Frazier: One Nation Indivisible. You can find them on youtube. I’m not putting the links in here so as not to cause us any copyright issues.

Reader Interactions

64Comments

  2. 2.

    Germy

    Last night during the xmas festivities we had a classical music radio station playing in the background. Every hour they cut to NPR news, and I thought I heard a story about Bill Clinton’s childhood home being torched by an arsonist. Anyone else hear the story?

  3. 3.

    henqiguai

    @Germy (#2): Yep, Bill Clinton’s childhood home may have been torched.

    Adam; that whole ‘Boxing Day’ thing and the Ali-Frazier matches. Think maybe you got the whole Boxing Day concept a bit twisted? C’mon; someone had to say it, and looks like I simply got there first…

  4. 4.

    dr. luba

    @Germy: Saw it on Google News today; minor damage apparently. From the Wasington Post:

    Authorities say a fire that caused minor damage to former president Bill Clinton’s first childhood home in Hope, Ark., may have been arson.

    Hope Police Department Chief J.R. Wilson said a motorist spotted flames early Friday at the Clinton Birthplace National Historic Site. Wilson said that when firefighters arrived a short time later, flames were shooting 8 feet into the air on one side of the structure, a two-story white frame house.

    The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported that the fire was quickly extinguished and only one interior room was damaged by flames. Wilson said there was graffiti found at the scene, with footage from the scene showing a large painted frown with a protruding tongue on the exterior of a door leading to the inside of the home.

    The cause of the fire is under investigation, with arson suspected in part because of a smell of accelerant at the scene. “It looks like that [the fire] was started intentionally at this time,” Hope Fire Department Chief Dale Glanton told Shreveport, La., station KSLA. “So it will be investigated and handled as a potential arson fire.”

    CNN reported that officials were gathering video from surveillance cameras, with the National Park Service investigating. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms also planned to send a fire investigator, said the network, and the FBI offered to assist in the probe. The home, which also suffered smoke and water damage during the blaze, will be closed until the investigation is complete.

    Clinton lived in the home for the first four years of his life, and visited frequently before his family moved to Hot Springs, Ark., when he was 7, after his grandfather Eldridge Cassidy passed away. The house was designated as a National Historic Site in 2011.

    “It has been restored before, and it will be restored again,” Skip Rutherford, dean of the University of Arkansas Clinton School of Public Service and a friend of Clinton’s for more than four decades, told CNN. “If Bill Clinton was the comeback kid, then the Clinton birthplace is the comeback house.”

  7. 7.

    Comrade Luke

    Betty, if you’re around, I just want you to know that your egg nog recipe is now a staple of my family’s Christmas. I started making it a couple of years ago, after you posted the recipe. This year, my mom started asking if I was going to make it shortly after Thanksgiving, and a relative in for Christmas from out of town asked for it explicitly on Christmas Eve.

    For those of you who haven’t tried it, it’s highly recommended. It’s loaded with booze, but it’s so rich that you can’t have more than one or two glasses anyway. The perfect way to deal with relatives on Christmas :)

  8. 8.

    rikyrah

    Guess the complexion of the Government Agent that wasn’t believed…

    and the complexion of the Drug Lord..

    I’m just sayin.

    ………………………..

    The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord

    Gary L. Alford was running on adrenaline when he arrived for work on a Monday in June 2013, at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A tax investigator, he had spent much of the weekend in the living room of his New Jersey townhouse, scrolling through arcane chat rooms and old blog posts, reading on well after his fiancée had gone to sleep.

    The work had given Mr. Alford what he believed was the answer to a mystery that had confounded investigators for nearly two years: the identity of the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road — a criminal known only by his screen name, Dread Pirate Roberts.

    When Mr. Alford showed up for work that Monday, he had a real name and a location. He assumed the news would be greeted with excitement. Instead, he says, he got the brushoff.

    He recalls asking the prosecutor on the case, out of frustration, “What about what I said is not compelling?”

    Mr. Alford, a young special agent with the Internal Revenue Serviceassigned to work with the D.E.A., isn’t the first person to feel unappreciated at the office. In his case, though, the information he had was the crucial to solving one of the most vexing criminal cases of the last few years. While Silk Road by mid-2013 had grown into a juggernaut, selling $300,000 in heroin and other illegal goods each day, federal agents hadn’t been able to figure out the most basic detail: the identity of the person running the site.

    It ultimately took Mr. Alford, 38, more than three months to gather enough evidence to prevail upon his colleagues to take his suspect seriously. After he convinced them, though, the man he identified, Ross W. Ulbricht, was arrested and Silk Road shuttered. The night of the arrest, Mr. Alford got an email from one of the other special agents at the center of the case: “Congrats Gary, you were right,” it said.

    Mr. Alford’s experience, and the lag between his discovery and Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, were largely left out of the documents and proceedings that led to Mr. Ulbricht’s conviction and life sentence this year.

    Previous examinations of the Silk Road investigation have generally focused on the role played by special agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security, who infiltrated the website, arrested important deputies and gathered reams of crucial information, but not enough to find Mr. Ulbricht — until Mr. Alford came along.

    The other agencies involved in the investigation declined to comment on Mr. Alford’s work, but several people briefed on the investigation, who were not authorized to speak about it publicly, confirmed the basic outlines of Mr. Alford’s story.

    Back in the summer of 2013, it was not hard, even for Mr. Alford, to understand why it took him time to win over the others on the case. He had joined the investigation relatively late and was on a team that hadn’t previously found much of value. He also lacked the sophisticated technological experience of colleagues at the F.B.I. On a more personal level, Mr. Alford could come across as overeager.

    But Mr. Alford also detected the sort of organizational frictions that have hindered communication between law enforcement agencies in the past. Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.

    “They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case,” Mr. Alford said in an interview at the I.R.S.’s Manhattan headquarters. “That’s just how it is.”

  9. 9.

    Germy

    Big leftover xmas ham that I’ve been taking little slices of to combine with leftover baked bread. Leftover pepperpot, leftover turkey with stuffing. I can barely move.

  10. 10.

    jeffreyw

    Leftover pan of dressing. Not so much leftover as plumb forgot, dammit. Left in the basement fridge and remembered it way too late. Good thing I made a practice cornbread dressing the day before. Mrs J suggested putting together a platter to memorialize the rib roast so the entire plate here can be considered as leftovers.

  11. 11.

    Ruckus

    @rikyrah:
    The people who get their fingernails dirty rarely get credit for what they do. But without them most of our modern society would grind to a halt rather rapidly. Their jobs are generally underpaid and almost always under appreciated. Those who are farther up the money chain most often have no idea of what or often, how their job is done. And it doesn’t have to go very far up that chain to hear it stated that the people below them are useless, worthless and shouldn’t be paid a living wage.

  12. 12.

    gogol's wife

    I am looking forward to leftover brisket tonight. We just had leftover smoked trout spread for lunch and it was great.

  13. 13.

    Satby

    We ate elsewhere, so we only have leftover cookies from what we made the neighbors. Debating on what I’m making for dinner. Pasta with artichoke pesto is currently in the lead.

  14. 14.

    Randy P

    Thought I’d hop on the Star Wars bandwagon, but can’t find an open seat this weekend. So I guess we’ll wait awhile, even though people are probably going to start leaking spoilers pretty soon.

    The AMC chain around us has gone to a weird new thing where they have huge comfy chairs, basically La-Z-Boys, which means they have much fewer seats available in the theater. And they’ve also gone to a reserved seating system. There hasn’t been any increase in the ticket prices that I can detect (if it is, it’s lost in the noise, as tickets vary from around $9-12 or so around here anyway). So I’m not sure what the business model is.

    Except one AMC theater also has (I’ve heard) some sort of food service, where a waiter takes an order and a server brings you food. Maybe all the AMCs are converting to that model. And maybe they jacked up the concession prices to cover the reduction in seats. I wouldn’t know as I don’t bother with the concession stand any more.

  15. 15.

    burnspbesq

    @rikyrah:

    What you’re just sayin’ is bullshit. As a former IRS Chief Counsel lawyer, i can tell you with absolute assurance that the only identity that matters in cases like this are the three letters on the agent’s windbreaker. IRS agents always get hosed in situations like this. It’s always been that way, and it will always be that way as long as DOJ and FBI warite the press releases.

  16. 16.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Randy P:

    I’m somewhat of a fan of the cushy seating, mostly because it also means extra foot space for people going back and forth in front of you. And I like the reservations, too, although, yeah, it sucks when you can’t get one exactly when you want.

  18. 18.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @rikyrah: Real life investigations are much more boring and tedious than what you see depicted by Hollywood friendly types like the FBI.

  20. 20.

    Elmo

    Working steadily on the 11lb Honeybaked ham that my wife and I picked up on Xmas Eve. We do this every year, and every year I forget to lay in extra soda and bottled water for how thirsty it makes us. (The house well water tastes awful so I have a dispenser and a water delivery service.). So I have to head out to the store in a bit.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    Only 9:30 in the a.m. yet already looking forward to tonight’s leftovers from yesterday’s meal. Have enough to last probably 4 or 5 days.

  23. 23.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    Heading out shortly to regift the honeybaked ham the biggest client of Mr. Q’s company sent. It’s often gone to a nearby church for their Xmas cafeteria (and delivery) dinner for old folks in that parish, but finding DEFUND PLANNED PARENTHOOD on the home page of the website persuaded me that the tradition was past its prime. This year it’s going to the men’s shelter of City Gospel Mission, which is appropriately agnostic on the topic of Planned Parenthood.

  24. 24.

    Phylllis

    Polished off leftover gifted ribeye steak from Sunday for lunch, along with yesterday’s mashed potatoes refried in brown butter. Gonna fix chicken & yellow rice for supper for a change of pace. Lots of ham left, which will make up Sunday supper tomorrow & many sammiches throughout next week.

  25. 25.

    Emma

    Basic takeout Chinese. Can’t look a pork roast in the eye for at least several months. Thank goodness this year we went light on the amounts.

  26. 26.

    Mingobat f/k/a Karen in GA

    Minor league hockey tonight. And according to Dr. Google, the cause of my limp may be some kind of hip flexor injury suffered at the gym. If true (I’ll call my real doctor on Monday), I’m oddly proud of myself — my first workout/sort-of-athletic injury. Yay me!

    Hey, when I first joined the gym a few years ago, I hurt my back buying workout clothes. Seriously. So this is progress.

    ETA: Re gifts — Mr. Mingobat got me a new insulated water bottle, and a small DSLR holster bag for my cardio walks in the park. And a restaurant gift card, thereby defeating the cardio. But I love him anyway.

    (No, I don’t mind gift cards.)

  27. 27.

    Goblue72

    @rikyrah: Odd the article refers to the 35 year old IRS agent “young”. 35 is not young; 35 is a mid-career professional.

    Unless you’re black, in which case he’s a boy.

  30. 30.

    Linda Featheringill

    I have begun to make my stuffing into muffin type things. Just mix with egg, put into muffin tins, and bake until the tops begin to brown. Stuffing then becomes finger food.

    There are always a few left but I just leave them on the counter and folks can grab one as they walk by. They tend to disappear as if by majic.

    ETA: The muffins disappear, not the people.

  31. 31.

    Starfish

    @Randy P: This is a concept from smaller theaters that is being adapted by bigger ones. I think that when we went to a theater in Chicago three years ago, they were taking concession orders and bringing hotdogs and things like that too you.

    E Street Cinema in DC has a bar in it so you can order some wine.

    I think that all of this might have started in Texas with Alamo Draft House. There are a lot of places in Texas that let you do dinner and a movie. AMC Dine-In Theatres concept made its debut in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in 2010 where stuff like this already existed.

  32. 32.

    PurpleGirl

    @Germy: I heard about that this morning on NY1 (Time Warner’s news channel in NYC). It appears that only one room was badly damaged but the authorities think it was arson because of the smell of an accelerant.

  33. 33.

    SWMBO

    @Starfish: The Cinema and Draft House in Ft. Lauderdale was doing movie and food at your table (low tables between recliner type seating) in 1978.

    The AMC Disney at Disney Springs has had Fork and Dine movies for a few years now.

    It’s becoming more popular, I think, because people started buying HD tv and surround sound, so they started doing this as a “date night” thing. No one has to cook or clean up then.

  35. 35.

    lamh36

    All the talk of Chinese yesterday made me want some today. So had takeout for lunch.

    “Boxing Day” .. since Star Wars is probably full, go see Creed instead

  37. 37.

    henqiguai

    @Elmo (#20):

    Working steadily on the 11lb Honeybaked ham

    Used to do the Honey-Baked Ham thing, then out of curiosity did a comparison and found the (Costco and grocery store) Carado Spiral-cut Ham tastes just about the same; at something like 1/2 to 1/3 the cost.

  39. 39.

    Zinsky

    Just finished a hot turkey sandwich (white bread – volcano style mashed potatoes), courtesy of the leftover turkey from yesterday. Yum! Gotta cut down on the cookies, though. Too much…

  40. 40.

    Keith G

    As a boy entering my teens in the early 70s, I absolutely idolized Muhammad Ali. I followed all of his fights and read as much about him as I could. As a 21 year old bartender in Columbus Ohio in the late 70s, I had a chance to briefly say hi to him as he was a patron in the bar where I worked.

    It is very painfully hard to reconcile the notion that the man I idolized was brutalized and irreparably harmed doing the thing I very much wanted to see him do.

  41. 41.

    Randy P

    @Starfish: Got reservations for next Saturday at the Fork and Dine theater, so I just have to avoid SW spoilers for another week.

    The idea of a restaurant that also shows movies is not new to me. The Bethesda Cinema & Drafthouse in the DC area has been around for many years. But the idea of a theater chain going that way, cutting the number of seats down in the process, seems counter-intuitive to me.

    With a restaurant, I could see how adding movies would be a draw, increasing business. But with a theater, reducing your capacity to add food seems like you’re losing business. Unless, as I hypothesized, they’re making all their profits on overpriced nachos and sodas, the way they already were at the concession stand.

  43. 43.

    Mnemosyne

    The prime rib roast turned out fine, if a smidgen more rare than I wanted (I was aiming for slightly more than medium-rare and ended up somewhere between rare and medium-rare). That’s going to be dinner tonight after we get back from the zoo. We haven’t gone in a long time, and it’s practically around the corner, plus I have a discount coupon.

  44. 44.

    gelfling545

    @Linda Featheringill: My daughter mixes the stuffing with egg & fries it in patties, then tops with turkey, cranberry chutney & gravy & another patty on top for a lovely leftover sandwich. There is some feeling about that the leftovers might be better than the original meal when served this way.

  45. 45.

    jeffreyw

    I’ve been getting this a lot:

    Secure Connection Failed

    The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
    Firefox 43.0.1 windows 10, Chrome seems OK

    edit: this is when entering a comment

  46. 46.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @jeffreyw: That happens to me frequently. I just refresh the page and if that doesn’t work, close it and open a new one. It happens whether I am commenting or not and it does not discriminate as to the website, doing it with all of them. I just figure it’s my satellite/internet provider.

    When you live where I do, nothing works quite like it’s supposed to.

  47. 47.

    Ruckus

    @jeffreyw:
    There was just an update for Firefox this morning. Latest is 43.0.2. I haven’t been getting any errors though, mac x 10.11.2 ff updated this morn.

  48. 48.

    ThresherK

    It’s snowing at the Sun Bowl in El Paso. Cannot conceive of that after the December we’ve had in the Northeast.

  56. 56.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Ruckus: Always possible. In fact, anything is possible, including heavy cloud cover and torrential downpours like we are having today. Sucks to be me.

  57. 57.

    The Pale Scot

    Ali! Ali! Ali!

    Watching Ali wear Foreman out by taking a beating and then smoking him was amazing. “Is that all you got George?”

    Watching Ali and Joe standing in the middle of the ring in the 15 th round beating on each other when Ali was ahead on points was awesome.

    MMA is a shadow of what boxing used to be. Sweet science vs savagery.

  58. 58.

    Adam L Silverman

    @The Pale Scot: What’s interesting about that Manila fight is that Ali was out on his feet. He couldn’t get off the stool. Had Frazier’s corner not thrown in the towel, Ali would’ve never answered the bell in that last round. But what no one knew then, and most still don’t, is that Frazier was legally blind in one eye. And his trainer was so concerned that if he took any more hits he could very well be permanently injured in the good eye as well. If they’d waited for the round to start, they would have never had to throw in the towel as Ali would have never been able to get off his stool.

  59. 59.

    gogol's wife

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I used my cranberry recipe from the New York Times, not yours yet. I will try yours when it’s just me and my husband, since I’m not a natural cook and only serve guests things I’ve tried before.

    It turned out great!

    ETA: Yours actually appeals to me more because I prefer a more savory preparation.

  60. 60.

    geg6

    Having crab cakes tonight. Sick of holiday food and I need a break for at least a day. Tomorrow we’ll head back to my sister’s to watch the Steeler game and finish off the prime rib and twice baked potatoes from Christmas dinner. Got a new Steeler hoodie for Christmas, so I’m pretty set for a relaxing day tomorrow.

  63. 63.

    Darkrose

    In what’s becoming a Tradition, we went to the Melting Pot for tasty fondue on Christmas Eve. For Christmas, we had disgustingly awesome orange rolls from a can and eggs for breakfast (around 2 pm). Dinner was a bit of an experiment: poached salmon filets served over asparagus and linguini, mushrooms and leeks baked in a cream sauce. The linguini got a bit too done, but overall it was amazingly tasty. We were going to make creme de menthe brownies for dessert but we were too stuffed.

  64. 64.

    Tehanu

    Adam, I made your Pear Tarte Tatin — first time I’ve ever made anything like it — and we finished it yesterday. It was fabulous! In fact, it was better than the apple Tarte T. we had for dessert at a very pricey Beverly Hills restaurant on Christmas night.

    I can’t wait to make it again! Thanks very much for the recipe.

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