recipe emergency

Law-Co blogger Genderist sent me her grandmother’s recipe for cornbread dressing (a woman I know and whose food I trust). Thanks. I need this because as expats we’re celebrating Thanksgiving on a Sunday (with a bunch of foreigners). But there’s a leeetle problem. I was going to start on it today – but then when I checked my blackberry to look at the recipe and write it down in my book – I couldn’t get all of the email.

Unfortunately, my work server is down this weekend. I knew it would be, but I plum forgot. So I was able to get all the ingredients out of the email – but none of the instructions about how to actually make the dressing.

I know that it’s basically a question of mix it all up and bake it – but for how long and at what temperature??? (Oh, who am I kidding – my oven reads out in centigrade – and all the recipes are in Fahrenheit – I’m too darn lazy to do the math and convert so I just guess – which sort of defeats the purpose of my fancy digital oven.)

Anyway, Genderist, if you’re out there – can you copy the recipe into the comments?? I’ve got it all down to the line “fluted mushrooms” – and could you maybe tell me what a fluted mushroom is while you’re at it?

…and now my Thanksgiving begins

I have celebrated Thanksgiving on a Thursday several times since living in the UK, but it’s hard. You end up having to cook the whole dinner yourself, and I don’t know what you do in your family, but I’m very much a believer in having Thanksgiving as a collaborative effort. You bring this, I’ll bring that. So, American expats sometimes celebrate Thanksgiving at the weekend. It is, after all, a moveable feast.

So, my friend the Texan is hosting Thanksgiving at her house. She’s doing turkey, mash, cranberry sauce and green bean casserole. (I haven’t mentioned it, but I’m not a big fan of the green bean casserole with cream o’ mushroom – I’m in the cook-them-beans-down-in-bacon-fat camp).

I’m doing some kind of Thanksgiving related pie (probably pumpkin, but I’ve seen a recipe for some kind of monster pecan-pumpkin hybrid pie) and the cornbread dressing – since I’m the only one anyone knows with cast iron skillets to make the corn bread.

Request for help
So…since y’all have only just pushed your swelling tummies and loosened belts back from the Thanksgiving table – does anyone have any a really good recipe for cornbread dressing? Mine never turns out that nice cake-y way that it should. (Partly because I’ve been trying to make a vegetarian version for finicky Brit guests – since I’m bringing and not hosting I don’t feel under any such obligation.)

******

My colleagues wished me a “Happy Thanksgiving” as I arrived at work yesterday. Awwww. Then one of them paused. “That is the right greeting, isn’t it? I mean – happy isn’t inappropriate or offensive is it?”

I wish I’d thought to feign offense and say “Well, actually you were supposed to wish me a Reflective Thanksgiving.”

*****

Later on, when I told another colleague that I would be making the cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie on Sunday (after having been asked) she said somewhat wistfully “I’ve never had pumpkin pie or cornbread – if there’s any left over on Monday you could bring it in.”

I just laughed. “There won’t be any left over,” I said. But I do feel kind of sorry for people who’ve never tasted cornbread.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m off to eat a Thai dinner for Thanksgiving – I hope your dinner has been good, too.

Atomic Tumor

Today’s the birthday of a special 10 year old boy, a little boy who just lost his mother. I hope he’s having the best birthday he can muster.

His mom was a blogger, part of the Rocky Top Brigade. Her husband kept a hopeful vigil on their blog Atomic Tumor, while there was hope and has kept a diary of celebration and mourning of her life since she died.

I don’t know them. I knew of their blog. I wouldn’t say I had been a regular reader, but I did occasionally check a post here and there. I guess maybe there were like fellow residents of my subdivision. I might nod at them in passing.

Since he began keeping his vigil, I’ve been reading more regularly. I admit I thought his hope was admirable but misplaced. But then I believed that she would pull through, too. The power of his hope was so strong and so convincing. I didn’t check the internet for a couple days and when I saw that she had died, I felt almost a physical jolt. She was only 29 years old – the mother of two children. She was about to graduate, she had hopes of a new career.

In his writing, he describes places that I know: Sophie’s, the Krystal* on the Strip where they had their first meal together as a romantic couple. Somehow, through the miles it makes it more real for me. But even if it weren’t it would be so touchingly sad, but joyful, too. He really has celebrated their life together through that blog.

Her name was Barbara Jamie Bearden Kilpatrick. Here’s the obituary her husband wrote for her. But the whole blog of late has been a moving testimony to her life and the people that she loved.

_________
*That would have totally worked with me. No matter how bad English food is, they haven’t come up with anything as disgustingly yummy to my tastes as a Krystal. I would, if not kill, then threaten or maim for four cheese Krystals right now – I’d kill for it if it were washed down with a SunDrop.

still alive

Hey, handful of devoted readers out there. I’m still alive, and all is well. I just have something in my life that’s quite blogworthy, but I’m not ready to blog about it and it seems like I can’t think of much else to post on.

That’s all. Sorry to be cryptic.

Except, hey – Go Vols – I’m glad we beat Vandy after the two previous losses. But sorry to all you Vandy fans, that shouldn’t even be worth mentioning except for that disaster of a 2005 season.

free speech

Nick Griffin is the head of the British National Party. Nick Griffin is almost certainly not a very nice man. The British National Party are a far right David Duke-ish bunch of Know-Nothings. They’ve been ever-so-carefully avoiding saying racist things, but at the very least, in the past, the have been an overtly racist political party.

Nick Griffin was speaking above a pub to his party faithful several years ago. An undercover television reporter happened to be in the audience. One of the things that Nick Griffin said in his vitriolic speech was that “Islam is a wicked, vicious faith.” For this and several other controversial utterances, he was brought up before the dock on charges of “stirring up racial hatred.” Charges which he vigorously defended himself against.

There were some mutterings of protest amongst the general public at the time. Most people didn’t really defend what he’d said, but many people have said something a little off-color in a pub at one time or another or at the very least failed to protest when someone else had done so. But Nick Griffin is hardly a beloved national character, so not too many people came to his defense. To make it even easier to swallow, the Government promised that charges such as these wouldn’t be brought against your every-day bigot, but would only be brought in egregious cases like Nick’s.

In Griffin’s first trial, he was acquitted of most charges. The case was pretty weak. Is saying “Islam is wicked…” etc really stirring up racial hatred? After all, Islam is a religion not a race, and as a religion Islam really is about as multi-racial and multi-cultural as it’s possible to be.

But the jury failed to reach a verdict on a few of the charges. An independent prosecutor is supposed to make the decision about whether a case should be brought to trial, whether it’s in the public interest to do so. This decision takes into account the probability of achieving a conviction, the importance of the crime and even the cost of the trial. But I don’t believe that the decision to prosecute Nick Griffin a second time was an independent decision. And Nick was brought to court again recently. And he was acquitted of all charges this time.

Did the Government accept defeat graciously? Did the Government say “Well, we are bringing in a law soon which makes it illegal to stir up religious hatred. And we couldn’t have got him that time, but with our new law we’d be able to get him if he did it again,”? No, no they did not. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor and heir apparent to No 10 Downig Street, was stating to reporters the next day that they would be looking at ways to toughen up the laws to stop people like Nick (or anyone?) saying the things like Nick said. Absolutely sickening. And the Attorney General is looking at “gaps in the law”. What is happening to our ancient liberties of freedom of speech?

A sign I saw in front of Parliament Square on Remembrance Sunday

Not just the law
What is stirring up religious hatred? Saying things like “Islam is wicked…” doesn’t stir up any hate in Islam for me – and I’m very unlikely to make such blanket statements. But what if I say “I think Islam treats women as second class. I find the way that women are treated in Islam, by and large, abhorrent,” or “Islam as is popularly practiced in many communities is encouraging seperatism, discord between communities and even terrorism,” or even “I think literalist, fundamentalist Christianity such as I witnessed growing up in the Bible Belt encourages a decline in empiricism and reason and a blinkered world view.” Will I be prosecuted for stirring up religious hatred? Am I allowed to criticise Christianity because that’s the religion I grew up in? Or am I not allowed to criticise Islam because no one is allowed to?

This isn’t just about the law. Carol Gould, writing about the weird juxtaposition of the prosecution of an Islamist terrorist, the head of MI5’s report on the danger of Islamist terrorist plots which received little social commentary and the universal hand wringing which resulted after Griffin walked free.

No sooner had Griffin been cleared than every pundit in Britain, and even the BBC reporter who had covered the case, was pontificating about the appalling state of Her Majesty’s empire that such a scurrilous character as Griffin could be allowed to go scot-free. It was mooted that the government would ‘urgently explore new legislation to curb religious and racial hatred.’ The disappointment that Nick Griffin had gone free was palpable on the faces of the usual crop of social commentators wheeled out on various television stations.

…snip…

No sooner had I absorbed this bizarre sequence of events than I opened my mail to find an urgent call to members of my union, the National Union of Journalists, asking us to endorse the idea of censuring journalists who use terms that denigrate Muslims and encourage Islamophobia. Journalists who will report their colleagues to the union or to law enforcement authorities will be performing a virtuous deed.

Fair and balanced
Nick Griffin is a nasty sort and BNP politics are divisive and worse. When I heard that BNP candidates were running for council seats in our neighbouring borough, it actually struck fear in my heart. That was too close for comfort. Generally speaking, where BNP candidates run racial tensions will be high and can only be made worse still by their presence. Yet still, I defend his right to free speech partly because I strongly value my own right to free speech.

So I can’t comment on his acquittal without commenting on the conviction of Mizanur Rahman. Rahman was convicted of “stirring up racial hatred” for his part in protesting at this rally outside the Danish embassy or a related one about the Danish “Mohammed cartoons”. Rahman had been carrying a placard saying “Behead those who insult Islam.” Lovely. If you watch this video of the rally, you can see that quite a few in the crowd were to my untrained legal eye inciting violence on both a personal and a monumental scale. But I really didn’t see anything that incited racial hatred against Westerners, not to me anyway. It think it’s pretty clear that the hatred was for non-Muslims, the foolish Kaffirs who cling to their traditions of discourse that include satire.

It’s true that Rahman may be retried for inciting murder, but his conviction also shows the Government’s willingness to bring charges of stirring up racial hatred wherever they can and against people like 23 year old web-designer Rahman who may be abhorrent but who’s hardly a public figure on the scale of Nick Griffin.

Grand advice

The best seasonal advice I’ve seen since no white shoes after Labor Day.

Knoxville, Knoxville, Knoxville

The tv at the gym today was showing The Simpsons epsiode where Bart goes to Knoxville on Spring Break.

“Disneyland or Knoxville?” Bart asks.
“Knoxville, Knoxville, Knoxville,” is the unanimously chosen destination shouted by his rag tag bunch of chums.

I know it ends in strife and despair. I know the Sunsphere falls over in a heap. I’ve seen this episode before. A friend in York taped it for me and sent it through our work’s internal post years ago when it was only a fabled rumor. Still it cracks me up. Who ever went to UT who hasn’t felt stranded in Knoxville at some time? I laughed so hard at the scene of the decrepit and abandoned World’s Fair site I felt compelled to tell the woman on the bike next to me as she stared at me quizzically “That’s where I’m from.”

I stayed on the bike a full 20 minutes longer than I meant to just so I could watch the Bart goes to Knoxville show.

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Post election anecdote

I know it’s not definitive or anything, but I found this email from VolBro just today – he’d sent it back in October. No racism in Tennessee? I don’t know if it was what cost Harold the election, but given the closeness of the outturn isn’t it just possible that the margin of defeat was composed of people like the ones described below?

(Please excuse my brother’s swearing, he spent much of his childhood in the company of a degenerate older sister.)

__________

Anyhow Bo and i have been working on the Harold Ford jr campaign. We’ve put
up signs here and there. Got a beer bottle thrown at us on Clinton highway while
doing our civic duties. Fucker hadn’t even finished it yet. A sign of a trully
wasteful and ignorant Republican, but that’s not the best.

A guy came into the store while my co workers and I were discussing
the stupidity of the smear campaign run against Ford.
Guy: ya I got a harold ford sticker on my truck bumper.
Politically aware: oh yeah good for you.
Guy: ya this redneck pulled up to me at a stoplight on kingston pk and called me a nigger lover Politically aware: thats awful but typical.
Guy: thats not the best part, he didnt know i was gay so i told him not only was i indeed a nigger lover, but also a faggot nigger lover. Apparently the redneck peeled off in disgust. Lucky queer.

We lost it and so did everyone else at the counter.
_________
But on the other hand, you gotta love Tennessee. My brother and his friend Bo are some good old, Volunteer football lovin’, bass fishin’, country music listenin’, beer swillin’ boys – but they were out hammering in yard signs for Harold Ford. So how ’bout that and racism?

Remembrance Sunday

Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday. In the UK, this equivalent of Veteran’s Day (though focused almost exclusively on the war dead) is a big deal. A really big deal.

It started as a memorial to the Britain’s many, many sons sent to slaughter in World War I. That was a really big deal, too. On the worst day of fighting at the Somme 60,000 British men and boys perished – many of their remains were never identified and they lay nameless in a corner of a foreign field that is forever England.

Commemoration of Remembrance Sunday (the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day 11 November) begins with the wearing of the poppy. Just about everyone wears them. It’s just a simple paper poppy on a plastic stem to be pinned to your lapel. The poppies are available for a small donation and the money from the poppy appeal is used to support veterans in need.

The Remembrance Sunday ceremony is broadcast on radio and television. The Queen solemnly lays a wreath of poppies at the base of the Cenotaph for those who gave all. As does her husband, representatives of Commonwealth nations, Heads of the Services, chief clergy, and dignataries of all sorts. Veterans groups and the association of War Widows march past, leaving their memorials as they pass.

I have never gone to see the Remembrance service. To get a spot where you might be able to see anything, you’d have to arrive very early. It’s very crowded and usually very cold and you have to stand very still for a very long time. But I do usually try to make a visit to the Field of Remembrance, on the lawn of Westminster Abbey – and I did so yesterday.

The Field of Remembrance is actually a fundraising exercise too. The field is divided into plots dedicated to different regiments, different campaigns or different countries. Crosses are available for a small donation. Far away organisations send in money and labels for their crosses. If you’re in the area, you can go down to Westminster Abbey, buy a cross, write your memorial on it and hammer it in to the damp soil with a rubber mallet available to borrow.

There’s a section for the American fallen, too.

The wreath is for the fallen soldiers of the state of Arkansas. A man who was a boy during WWII and was treated well by some Razor Back boys brings a wreath for them every year. I met him one time as he brought the wreath and he asked me to lay it for him.

The plaque from the US Department of Defense, which must have been engraved fairly recently, is already sadly out of date. This morning UK dead are 125 and US dead are 2,848.

-0-

Mostly people wear red poppies. There has been a movement to support wearing a white poppy for peace since 1933. This year a religious think-tank said that wearing the white poppy was more Christian, since the red poppy implied that redemption could be found through blood shed.

Yes, there’s always a danger that pomp and circumstance can lead to glorification rather than reflection. But anyone who’s watched an old veteran battle his own arthritic knees and bend to the ground to hammer in a cross for a fallen colleague, blink back tears and then struggle wearily to his feet will not have seen redemption through bloodshed in that act.