She was a good girl. We are heartbroken. That is all I can bear to write tonight.
Get the Emergency Tiara!
In case you were wondering, I do in fact have the emergency tiara:
(What? You think on what Cole pays us I had a real tiara?)
Last night around 10 PM I went out to the fridge in the garage to get the boneless leg of lamb out so I could prep it to roast today. Just a basic kosher salt and freshly cracked black pepper rub so it formed a nice pelicule overnight before roasting. I open the fridge door and what greets me? The rank, rancid smell of dead and heavily decomposing lamb. Sometime between when I put the cryovaced leg of lamb in there last Monday and last night the compressor in the back up (18 years old) fridge died. The light still works. The fan is still blowing. But it ain’t chillin! I won’t belabor the clean up process other than it involved a breathing mask and lots of bleach, but I needed something else to make for dinner tonight. So I broke the glass on the emergency tiara box on the wall, got into uniform, and decided that since I have frozen ground beef, that I’d make the meatloaf recipe that TaMara posted last night.
I made three changes. 1) I used all ground beef – no pork, no sausage. 2) I don’t have rolled oats in the house. I only use steel cut or pinhead. So I substituted a 1/2 cup of steel cut oats for a 1/2 cup of pinhead oats. 3) I am, apparently, out of cider vinegar. I used balsamic instead. I also only have a 10X5 loaf pan, so this came out more like a meat ingot than a meat loaf. I served it with Valencia rice and sautéed squash and zucchini. Everything tasted great even with the substitutions.
(The meat ingot resting)
(Dinner is served!)
Open thread!
Same As It Ever Was Open Thread: Repub Shitbirds Circle Their Shithole-in-Chief
For all the focus on Trump, the fundamental issue is that Ryan & McConnell are letting Cotton & Goodlatte drive the immigration legislation process rather than letting a bipartisan deal get made.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 13, 2018
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Never stop reminding people: Trump is not an “aberration”; Trump is every Republican when the rest of us aren’t in the room. Their only problem with Trump is that he neglects to use his inside voice when the cameras are rolling.
Trump's shithole comments were 'unhelpful,' Paul Ryan said. But when Obama came out against Trump's Muslim ban, Ryan said he 'degraded the presidency' https://t.co/vowkanlUtG
— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) January 14, 2018
Tom Cotton and David Perdue: Hear no evil
Rand Paul: Speak no evil
Donald Trump: See, no evil— Schooley (@Rschooley) January 14, 2018
.@RandPaul tells me "You can't have an immigration compromise if everyone is out there calling the president a racist" #MTP
— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) January 14, 2018
Not _everyone_ is calling him a racist. For instance, no Congressional Republicans are calling him a racist. https://t.co/Dyrl7QqtKd
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) January 14, 2018
Same As It Ever Was Open Thread: Repub Shitbirds Circle Their Shithole-in-ChiefPost + Comments (295)
Estonia Considers Its Monuments
Estonia’s Justice Minister, Urmas Reinsalu, said early in January that the government could take down the Soviet war memorial at Maarjamäe because it is falling apart and it is not on the official list of historic monuments. This led Prime Minister Jüri Ratas to suggest that the entire area, which includes a German cemetary and a memorial under construction to the victims of Communism, be designated a historic area.
The Soviet Union built many war memorials across its territory, particularly to commemorate World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it. I find those monuments moving; they are, after all, memorials to people who died in wars and who had families who grieved them. I’ve been to the Maarjamäe memorial a few times.
One of those times I visited with a graduate student who was studying monuments in the former Soviet Union. As we see now in the United States, monuments are a part of a country’s story of itself. The Soviet Union wanted to erase the past.
Open “Sports” Thread: Putin’s Fancy Bears Go for the Gold
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But (allegedly) Putin shall have his revenge. Buzzfeed reports “Russia, Banned From The Winter Olympics, Apparently Is Hacking Olympic Emails”:
Just over a month after Russia was banned from participating in the 2018 Winter Olympics, and 30 days before those games start, hackers associated with the Russian government have released a handful of emails that appear to have been stolen from the International Olympic Committee.
Calling themselves “Fancy Bears” — a trolling reference to the games’ mascots and the cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect saying a related, earlier hack was the work of Russian military intelligence hackers known in the industry as Fancy Bear — the hackers published the emails Wednesday. They used the same website and the same format used to publish documents in 2016 that had been hacked from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in response to that agency’s finding that hundreds of Russian athletes had taken banned substances…
“These emails and documents point to the fact that the Europeans and the Anglo-Saxons are fighting for power and cash in the sports world,” “Fancy Bears” said in its posting, though it’s unclear how the emails are meant to support that claim. Some of the emails’ contents are encrypted and are therefore illegible…
The “Fancy Bears” website, which was created in the wake of ThreatConnect’s announcement, posted medical information taken from WADA files of famous non-Russian Olympians’ use of sometimes banned substances, including WADA’s approval for tennis star Serena Williams to take anti-inflammatories and gymnast Simone Biles use of ADHD medication. For some Russians, news of American athletes being approved for such medicine was evidence of a scandalous double standard.
Asked in December if previous Russian hacking attempts had convinced the organization to take steps to bolster its cybersecurity, an IOC spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, “The IOC continues to monitor security arrangements in the light of the changing environment and threat assessment,” but declined to elaborate…
Open “Sports” Thread: Putin’s Fancy Bears Go for the GoldPost + Comments (137)
Welfare check for Cole
Fantastic Beasts (Open Thread)
Here’s one of my fur-nieces on a cold morning in Tampa:
Open thread!
PS: Edited to rotate picture. WP has been more fucked up than usual lately!