Entries tagged with thanksgiving

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thanksgiving

pardoning turkeys

On the way to Thanksgiving dinner we found ourselves wondering what happens to the turkey that the US president pardons each year. We were both under the impression that the president is presented with two turkeys, one of which gets pardoned and one of which becomes dinner. I said I thought the pardoned bird went to a zoo or some such, and that it would be wrong for it to go back to the farm where it could become somebody else's dinner.

We talked about the similarity to the two goats on Yom Kippur, one of which becomes an offering and the other of which is sent to Azazel. I pointed out that neither of those goats gets out alive (though they at least serve a holy function), and said I didn't think the turkeys worked like that.

When we got home I looked it up, and found that we were both wrong on several points. (I blame that West Wing episode, though perhaps my mistaken impression predated it and I shouldn't.)

The president is presented with one turkey, not two. There is a backup turkey, in case something unfortunate happens to the first one. (Still on the goat theme: like the backup wife for the high priest on Yom Kippur? Topic for another day...)

This turkey is presented by the National Turkey Federation. (Today I learned that there is a national turkey federation.) This started in the 1940s, apparently as tribute. They ate the turkeys until sometime in the 70s, when presidents started sparing them. The regular ceremonial pardon started with Bush the First (though it also says Reagan pardoned one).

I hadn't thought about this at all, but there is a selection process where a pool of candidate turkeys is filtered on not only size and appearance but also tolerance of loud noises, flashes, and large crowds.

And yes, the turkeys end up at various places where they will not become food.

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misc updates

We did Thanksgiving dinner with my parents, sister, and niece, as usual. (My nephew is currently away at law school.) Someday my parents will decide that this is too much fuss and that's what they have children for, but apparently not yet. My niece brought her boyfriend, who I enjoyed talking with. I overheard my mother say to my father "that's the most I've heard Monica talk in ages" and, well, it's because there was more to talk about. Old family tropes only get you so far, and my mother and sister, at least, share basically no interests with me and Dani.

I've decided that Felix and Oscar aren't the right names for the cats; the initial behaviors that prompted them haven't continued. I'm currently leaning toward Orlando and Giovanni, which pass the random-friends-and-relatives test and the neighborhood test (would I be embarrassed calling an escapee?). A pair of perfectly-nice Italian names will suit, and if you happen to know that I'm a fan of Renaissance music, you might correctly detect a further inspiration for those names in particular. :-) (Orlando is the brown one, who's also the lovey guy who sleeps in my lap purring loudly.)

We had a couple of people over for board-gaming this weekend. History of the World plays differently with four players than with six. We also played San Juan (a "light" version of Puerto Rico), Automobile (only our second time playing), and Pandemic. I suspect we haven't really "gotten" Automobile yet; our scores were pretty close and nobody did anything really unusual. (Well, only one player took out loans, but other than that we seemed to be playing similar strategies.)

Some links:

HTTP Status Cats: the HTTP return codes illustrated. I've seen 408 (timed out) around, but many of these were new to me. Also, I didn't know about some of those status codes (402 I'm looking at you).

Are Twinkies really immortal? Snopes weighs in.

This recipe for schadenfreude pie looks delightfully yummy. Alas, I saw it the day after the annual baronial pie competition. Maybe next year... Hat-tip to

siderea.

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Thanksgiving torah

Kind of like Purim torah, but not. :-) A talmudic take on Thanksgiving by

magid. Excerpt:

What turkey fulfills the obligation? A turkey cooked whole, the bones unbroken. However, if he has only turkey cut in parts, he has fulfilled the obligation. Ground turkey does not fulfill the obligation. Abba Arika says, since it is not distinguishable from other ground meats. Mar Ukva says, because he cannot point at the turkey. A chicken does not fulfill the obligation, but may be served to minors if there is insufficient turkey for all.

There's more in the comments.

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a few links

Thanksgiving food: it's not too late! Thanks to

shalmestere for pointing out this Thanksgiving dinner flowchart.

A great rant on web-service protocols (that is, SOAP versus REST) from a former coworker: the S stands for simple.

Law and the Multiverse on Once Upon a Time: is Rumpelstiltskin's contract valid?

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thanks-giving

I'm thankful for many things:

My husband, who is kind and caring and a true partner in our marriage.

My family, who are all basically healthy (albeit seeing the effects of age in some cases).

My cats, and having the housing and financial support to be able to have them. They've brought a remarkable amount of joy into my life, even despite the 3AM meow-fests, the hairballs and other exports, and the mysterious ailments (for which I'm also thankful for an excellent vet). I don't know what wiring casues me to have such affection for cats (and even dogs) but none whatsoever for small children, but I'm glad to have it.

My rabbi, who teaches and encourages me and lets me do things that most congregants don't get to do. He has been (and is) a real mentor for me.

My friends, both those I know in person and those I know only online. You have enriched me.

The grace that brings me health, intelligence, happiness, and the ability to pursue the things I find fulfilling, largely free of interference. May it continue to be so.

The coming changes in our national leadership. While I don't think the new administration has all the answers, I do hope that much of the damage and ill will of the last several years will start to diminish. I also hope that the minority keeps the majority honest; we need multiple views, not just one, at the helm.

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thanksgiving

Thanksgiving

I commend this post about George Washington and thanksgiving by

osewalrus to your attention.

And so I say to my coreligionists that spurn Thanksgiving as a "goyish holiday," to the secularists who deride Thanksgiving as a recognition of a false "higher power," to those for whom the real injustices and oppressions that they have suffered -- and in many cases continue to suffer -- make the expression of Thanksgiving seem a bitter irony, and to those who see a recreation of the "First Thanksgiving" a celebration of the prelude to genocide, I beg you to consider this. Is it not worthy to take one moment to reflect on the creation -- whether by accident or Design -- of the dream and ideal of George Washington spoke? Fear not that recognition of this good renders injustice more palatable or forgives the unforgivable. Rather, I shall argue, if we refuse to recognize even this bit of good, if we refuse to acknowledge that nobility of spirit and ideals to inspire can arise in all places out of the complexity of the human spirit, then it is we who have proven the hypocrite.

I don't think I can add anything to that.

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me,
thanksgiving

thankful

I am thankful for many things, including:

Family, most especially a loving husband, parents who are happily married and pretty healthy, and the cats.

A wonderful rabbi who teaches me, encourages me, shares with me, and gives me special opportunities not available to others.

A job where I am able to do what I'm good at and where I'm apparently well-respected by people above me (and at least some peers). There are certainly challenges when a small company is bought by a mega-corp, but we have also retained some of what made it good to be at that small company.

A passion, not related to my technical career, that challenges me, excites me, sometimes scares me, and forces me to really think and evaluate -- and that brings rewards for its own sake.

The opportunities available to me through LiveJournal: a place to share ideas and interact with interesting people I might not have met otherwise. Writing is important to me; the sheer act of writing something down helps me analyze it. I don't need LJ to write, but I find that having an interactive audience pushes me to write.

Comfort++ -- health (physical, mental, spiritual), financial grounding, and the ability to spend time doing things I enjoy.

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family visit

We had the usual Thanksgiving gathering at my parents' house today. Everyone seems to be doing well overall. The nephew was sometimes snarky but usually well-behaved. The niece was sometimes quite rude to her mother and my parents; while some of her frustration was provoked, some of it was either gratuitious or, more likely, connected to something else that I never saw (past differences or the like). But this was pretty much limited to part of dinner; the rest of the time they were not interested in interacting with us. Oh well; I guess this is the surly stage or something. Things have been worse.

The niece is going to study in Italy next semester. I'd hoped to hear more about that from her, but she wasn't being talkative. Oh well. (She's a junior in college.) My mother was expressing the usual grandparental concern about her being "all alone" on a big trip, but I suspect she'll be fine -- and that even if she's not, she's probably not receptive to advice right now.

My parents are talking about going to Italy for a week or so while she's there -- not to bother her, they said, though if they can see her they'd like that. I'm glad that my parents are thinking more about travel; it's something they've enjoyed in the past, and then they couldn't for a while because their elderly dog was sick. The dog has passed on, which is sad, but that does leave them free to travel now.

There was a lot of good food. My mother made the turkey, stuffing, cranberry relish, mashed potatoes, honey-glazed carrots, and sugar-snap peas. Either she or my sister made the yam/oatmeal/sugar/not-sure-what-else casserole. I made a salad (lettuce, some veggies, apple, mango, hard-boiled eggs -- went over well) and bread. All of this is sounding reasonable so far, right?

And then there was dessert. For calibration, there were seven of us. Given that, I think my mother's apple-nut cake (large pan -- 10x13?) would have been sufficient. But my sister wanted to contribute something, so there was a mixed-berry pie. But that might not be enough, so my mother also made a huge poppyseed cake. (Alas, this one was dairy so I didn't have any.) In other words, there was enough food for each person to have the equivalent of half a pie. Fortunately, the poppyseed cake, at least, will freeze.

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this morning's service

I pried myself out of bed this morning to go to minyan; while normally I would have slept in on a day off from work, as the leader I didn't have that option. There were two other people when I got there (five minutes early). By the start time we were up to six, but unfortunately we topped out at nine. I often have to skip the first kaddish or two; a few times I've had to skip barchu; once I had to skip kedusha. I've never had to skip the torah service and mourners' kaddish before. That was weird, and unsatisfying. (The torah reader wasn't thrilled either.)

(I mean this is the first time in this congregation. I had to skip a torah service once at my home congregation.)

(For those who don't know, the parts of the service I listed are ones that require a minyan, ten adults, to do.)

The group has apparently talked about starting services later on secular holidays, but there were objections -- from people who were not there this morning. I predict that they will revisit the question. :-)

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weekend bits

There's nothing quite like a fire truck parked outside your garage to get your attention upon looking out the back window. (Err, is there a problem on our property we're not aware of?) Near as I can tell, the bus stopped between the fire truck and the ambulance had caught fire. There was lots of milling about but no haste, so I assume no one was badly hurt.

This has been mostly a quiet weekend, which I'm not complaining about. :-) We did Thanksgiving with my family on Thursday, and we've been puttering around the house the rest of the weekend. (We'll be headed out to dinner with friends tonight.) Friday afternoon I cooked a brisket for Shabbat because, for once, I actually had the 3.5 hours available to tend it. (I'll freeze the rest -- there's no point in making only a little brisket.) It was quite tasty, and very easy. Saturday for lunch we had leftover turkey et al.

Odd Thanksgiving nomenclature: lots of people apparently call the bread stuff "stuffing" if it's in the bird and "dressing" if it's in a pan, but I learned it all as "stuffing". magid refers to them as endostuffing and exostuffing, which I think sums it up perfectly.

Services Friday and Saturday had lighter attendance than usual but not as light as I had expected, and Saturday morning the 94-year-old woman who asked if she could chant halftarah brought several family members along. She did a good job (especially considering the challenge) but felt that she had made mistakes. I'm glad she gave it a try, though, and lots of people had kind words for her.

We almost had the opposite end of the spectrum at the same service -- a recent bar mitzvah who wants to keep up his involvement and was going to chant torah -- but family holiday complications kept him away. He'll chant next week instead. The confluence of young and old would have been nifty if it had worked out.

Real Live Preacher (preachermanfeed) recently published a book collecting some of his blog-published essays and a few new ones. It's an interesting read. I wonder if that will catch on -- dead-tree compilations of the best blog entries, either from a single author or in topic-based compilations. While entries like this present one are just "daily life" stuff not really interesting to most people, some entries out there are more like essays and, I imagine, the same writing considerations go into them whether they're for blogs or print. Compilations of essays are nothing new; there's just a new venue for building up a following prior to a collection.

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Hodu [Hashem] ki tov

(The subject means "It is good to give thanks to God"; it's a holiday pun of sorts because "hodu" also means "turkey".)

We went to my parents' house for Thanksgiving as usual. There were seven of us, including my sister and her two kids.

It was weird to have Thor absent. Thor was my parents' golden retriever, who would have been 14 last month but died two months ago. On my mother's birthday, more's the pity. He was a good dog. They were really attached to him and they took it hard, but he had a good life and 14-minus-two-weeks is pretty good for a golden retriever. They haven't said anything yet about getting another dog. (There's almost always been a dog in that house.)

When my parents' basement flooded in September they lost their electric roaster, and I'd been thinking about replacing that for them in December. (I always have trouble identifying suitable gifts for them.) But they decided they wanted it for Thanksgiving, so so much for that idea. The turkey was done in five hours in the roaster; it was probably done sooner, as we measured the temperature at 200, but it was not dry. The skin was very crispy and that kept the insides moist. For those who missed my update to an earlier post, we determined that Butterball turkeys contain no actual butter, so I was able to eat it.

We got there before my sister and my mother mentioned that she would be bringing a mincemeat pie for dessert. This raised the question of just what's in mincemeat anyway; I certainly remember actual meat from my Italian grandmother's pies, but my mother asserted that the filling you buy in a store contains no meat. A little time with Google revealed that the traditional recipe involves beef and pork but that there are non-meat versions, so this remained a mystery. When my sister came we learned that she had bought the pie, not made it; she was pretty sure there was no meat in the filling, but commercial pie crusts contain lard more often than not, so I declined on that basis. (And if it didn't have lard, it probably had butter anyway.) I hope my sister did not feel rejected that I declined all three of the desserts she brought -- the others being cheesecake and fudge containing milk -- but I took some of the latter two home, so that probably helped. And it's not like the meat/dairy thing should come as a surprise by now. Oh well. It's not like I needed the dessert. :-)

( odd social dynamic )

Other than that, though, it was a nice visit!

Apropos of nothing... Since getting the broken window replaced in my car, the horn no longer sounds when I lock or unlock the car with the remote. It does sound if I push the button. This is not a complaint. :-)

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not technically helpful...

I was trying to find out if Butterball turkeys actually contain butter, so I went to their web site. I could find nothing about ingredients/additives on the site, but I found this in the "about us" section: "In fact, the Butterball name was chosen to characterize a new, special breed of broad-breasted white feather turkeys, not because the turkeys contain butter, as many mistakenly believe."

Just a few more words could have removed the ambiguity. So it's a mistake to believe that the turkeys contain butter, or (what this technically says) that it's a mistake to believe that their name has anything to do with the possible presence of butter? Having failed to disambiguate with the resources they provide, I sent them email.

Odd detail: while they have a domain name (the obvious one, in fact), customer support has an AOL address.

Update: Reply received; no butter. (See comments.)

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Thanksgiving weekend

( Thanksgiving )

( aside: buying beer in PA )

Friday we (I rode with Robert) headed out to Darkover Grand Council, a science-fiction convention in Timmonium MD (near Baltimore). The name is a bit misleading; while the con has its origins as an MZB con, the amount of Darkover content has dwindled over the years. I'm not a fan of the series, but I can still find reasons to go to this con. It has the strongest music track I know outside of cons dedicated entirely to music. So I go to perform, and I go to listen. And I go to visit with friends.

( people )

( Clam Chowder )

( On the Mark )

( so *that's* where they keep the cushy rooms!, and hotel misc )

We had a new "interim" CD at this convention. Some of its contents will eventually go onto a "real" live CD, but that will be a couple years away and we wanted to have something for people now. So we did this one on the cheap (allowing us to sell it for $10), but had enough decent material to fill up a CD. It was fun, and it includs a bunch of stuff that we haven't previously recorded.

( Shabbat challenge: probably boring to most readers )

On the way to the con on Friday, the biggest challenge was the dense fog in the mountains. (I couldn't see the car in front of us, and we were following pretty close. Fortunately, I was not driving. Had I been, I would have had to wait it out, and then hope I could get to the con before sundown.) On the way home, however, traffic was worse than usual. It was still much worse going in the other direction; we counted a ten-mile stoppage at one point on the turnpike. I'm not really sure what caused our erratically-slow traffic; we saw two accidents and one near-accident, but there were also just some standing waves in the traffic. (Near-accident: note to driver: if your wheels are going up onto the jersey barrier, you are not centered in your lane.)

All in all, it was a fun weekend!

Addendum: extra bonus -- two nights completely free of the usual snoring soundtrack!

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Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving with my family was good. My nephew was well-behaved (surprise!). Everyone is doing well, and the meal was pleasant. My mother's stuffing rocks!

Note to self: Kim might like a Wacom tablet to hook up to her Windows box. Find out what that means and if that's a unique descriptor.

In a few minutes I'll be leaving for the con. I'm looking forward to music and friends.

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erev Yom Hodu

The Hebrew word "hodu" is the root for "thanks". (Aside to Ralph: yes, "modah" is the same word with different grammatical dressing.) It is also the (modern) word for "turkey". Heh.

Seasonal humor: Mishnah Hodu (go to the second entry in the digest). It's not as funny as the Halacha of Xmas, but the latter is not yet in its proper season and the former is still pretty good. (For additional fun, continue on to the third digest entry, on the hermeneutics of the stop sign.)

Tomorrow we will go to my parents' house for Thanksgiving, and then Friday morning I head off to the Darkover convention near Baltimore with Robert and Kathy. I'm looking forward to all the good music, and to seeing Harold and Becky, dglenn, Clam Chowder (the group not the soup), and many other friends. I hadn't realized it until recently, but this will be my 20th year for this con.

This year I am thankful for many things (in no particular order):

( Read more... )