I grew up knowing that Halloween means trick or treating, usually going from house to house collecting candy, dressed in some sort of costume. Sometimes the school would have a parade where you could flaunt your silly costumes, but whatever, it was fun.
When I grew older and had kids of my own, I noticed people dropping their kids off in my neighborhood. Odd, I thought, until I realized: they have no trick or treating, no candy, nothing where they live for whatever reason, and that must suck.
I gave up on whether the kids are local and just focused on the fun.
To my Wendy and I, Halloween is a favorite holiday.
And it just keeps getting bigger and better for us. Wendy is worried about sound, but I have actually done checks and where she wants to be, giving out the candy, we are fine. I learned little kids get startled and scared so we play very low and spooky, and they dig it.
“I think we should call it your grave!”
I built a graveyard and set up strobe lights and some green, purple, and orange lights on the ground for effect. Then I run a sub-cooled fog machine across the graveyard, which looks uber cool as long as the wind doesn’t get too crazy.
Going with live scary music with my guitar player on Morlock/Borg guitar.
Massive disco lights and two fog machines. I need to notify the Fire department before I do it. (Ask me how I know.) This year will be the best ever.
Too many folks forget the fun, focusing on politics, scary things, and Democrats. My kids had a great time trick or treating, but it seems to a fading tradition.
So take those kids where the candy is and have a killer Halloween!
I am the Time Traveler.
Fuck you John Titor*
*optional
Nice place. The wife and I went all out for halloween when we first moved in to our house. Once we got a 85 lb dog that treats kids like other dogs we had to stop entertaining trick or treaters in the house.
Thanks, I still have to finish some lights, but that will wait til Tuesday
We’ve got a few houses like that around here including one of my buddies from work. I moved in the day after Halloween last year so not sure how many people will come by my house (cul de sac). Then again…what do I care…I’ll be at the theater watching Halloween.
I live on the corner of a major thoroughfare so I get maybe 20K cars a day go past my place, lot’s of attention around the holidays.
And my house is peanuts compared to some others, I just love the creepy vibe I have going 🙂
We’re planning on doing that “Please take a couple” thing next to a bowl of candy this year. Our neighborhood is pretty nice, and a lot of the younger kids are accompanied by their parents still. I think Mr. Riven just doesn’t want to answer the door. Lol. Not that I blame him. I hate answering the door, too
The wife is going to sit in her wheelchair, surrounded by a halo of led lights, and we are going to bloody up her Stumpy, and hang a foot nearby,
/wife lost foot earlier this year
Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude. ^Best neighbor ever.
That is commitment to your theme.
“Take one please”
Printed out of a picture of a Glock.
Not only do I live at the end of a dead-end road, I’ve got a 1000-foot uphill driveway. Nobody comes up unless they have to.
Those are some vey excellent decorations. We do a couple jack-o-lanterns a day or two before Halloween and that’s it. Maybe one day we’ll get on this level.
It does look good at night, when your right in front of it,
We put a red light on the porch, for last halloween and that was about it. Then we realized the red light was way better for not blowing out people’s night vision as they walked by and it stayed there all year.
All the kids trick-or-treat in Playa’s neighborhood anyway.
This finishes well,Wretchard,
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/tower-amid-ruins/
The left don’t care about murderous thugs like Stalin because he’s one of their own.
I’ve lived in my place for 17 years, and I think I’ve gotten about 5-6 trick-or-treaters. Not per year – TOTAL.
I’ve noticed around here in urban hipster-cum-soccer-mom hell, most kids do organized trick-or-treating. When I got my hair cut yesterday in Old Town Alexandria, there were a ton of families walking around with lists of businesses that were participating in some kind of t-or-t event. The salon had about 10 kids come through when I was there.
Back in the day, the neighbor guys and I would grab a half pint, and take about 10-15 of our kids out together, that’s ,hic, organised
There’s also the blasphemy that is Trunk or Treat.
Fun and safe.
Fun. And. Safe.
Because walking through a suburban neighborhood is both dull and dangerous.
Yea, that’s sad, kind of how my house is dark, and kids can’t see where they are walking, not to mention all the Neighbors doing the same thing
/irony meter off scale
Exactly. These people people make Eleanor Skenazy into a prophet (not that they know it.
I think we had one last year, a neighbor’s kid, and maybe 3 or 4 total in the last 4 years. There aren’t many kids in this neighborhood, mostly older people and this place is pretty much impossible to find if you don’t know it’s here.
One Ass talks about another Ass,
https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/29/millennials-ruined-halloween/
And yet, Jazz Shaw still managed to be named after a drag queen.
Score!
Millennials didn’t ruin Haloween, the left ruined it. They ruin everything they touch.
What a crock of shit. I still love candy, costumes and pranks and I also care about my 401(k). Why is it always either/or with these people?
Wonderful. Especially the princess table.
Did you notice Beary Bear? I lit up teddies eyes, creepy at night;)
You should have got a Trumpy Bear to trigger your neighbors.
I don’t think this place will get many kids running through it. Boulder does the center of town planned thing.
In Georgia one year I got 7.1 pounds. I needed a second pillowcase.
In VT, we’d go to the town center, and those 35 houses really just made us kids group up and hang out all hours of the night.
I stopped trick or treating pretty young- like maybe the last year I did it I was 10 or 11. But when I was littler and lived in Vermont we’d go up to Quebec to do it. It was hard to hit that many houses, cause very rural, but the haul would still be impressive. French Canadians go all-out for Halloween.
I didn’t get to keep much of it though. My step-dad, who had a remarkable facility for taking the fun out of things, would make me pick ten pieces of candy to keep, and claimed to throw away the rest, for the sake of my teeth. He also had a remarkable sweet-tooth, and let me tell you a remarkable tantrum occurred in the Amashi household when I caught him eating what was clearly -my- candy out of his desk drawer in late November one year.
My parents made us sort through the candy with them, toss some of the poorly packaged stuff and whatnot, and then our bags would be hidden away and candy was doled out for a while. The last year I went t-o-ting, I carried two bags, and presorted the candy I liked and the candy that was just ok or I didn’t care for. Dropped the bag I liked outside my window on my way home and retrieved it in the dead of night.
Years later I found a bunch of way-past-expiration candy hidden in the back of my cabinet and I think I ate considerably less candy that year than any prior year. It’s funny how things like that work out.
You were either a more devious child than I was, or your units were less vigilant. Dunno, though, when I was 9 candy was what it was all about, and it’s hard to imagine anything dimming my enthusiasm for it. This might have been partially because I was deathly allergic to sugar until I was 6 or so.
Oddly enough I lost my sweet tooth pretty young, and still lack it. Now, if I could go trick-or-treating for Mediterranean food, as is suggested downthread… I’d be there with bells on.
The BF is always confused by how long candy can just sit around my house without being eaten. Last year we had a small bag of candy for Halloween and nobody came. I’d occasionally have a piece, as would my roommate, and then the BF would come by and start ranting about how it’s just not possible to keep candy around from October to January without eating it, while eating 4-5 pieces to “help out”. He’s mostly joking…I think.
I still like candy well enough, but it’ll strike me occasionally that I want some, I’ll have some and then be done for a while.
Search Tilson Street Halloween in Romeo, MI.
I am putting the finishing touches on our display. I put up black plastic sheeting on the walls of the garage and have several fluorescent black light fixtures. We paint all of it in neon so it glows. Each year in the yard I do a different display. This year it’s biohazard gone wrong. A few dummies in hazmat suits. All of us in hazmats. The only problem is that the weather is going to suck this year.
Tillson Street.
I don’t live there, but we go by each year. It’s a blast.
That looks like a lot of fun!
I find its cheaper and more effective just to impale a few of the first children who arrive, and put some candles in their eye-sockets.
What do recommend for eyeball removal: custom melon-baller or custom Dremel bit?
Depends on the effect you’re going for/whether you want to use the eyeballs for cauldron-purposes afterward. I’m a fan of just drilling a hole in the side and giving it a blast of compressed air.
Neat.
Compressed air extraction means increased resale value. Thanks, Gilmore.
I put the heads in a vise, they pop right out as you can see
That also works.
A face like a magnet.
A long time ago, I had some friends who were really into Halloween. One guy would wear his sheetrocker stilts and dress up as Frankenstein. He’d take the pins out of the hinges on the front door, and when some kid would ring the doorbell, he’d pull the top of the door back and scowl down at them and yell, “Whaddya want?”
Talk about screams. I’d just hang out and drink and laugh.
Classic.
I was always a fan of terra cotta roofs
That thing Masala’d me last year, a piece slid off and nearly killed me,
Ya the added danger is part of why I like them
Almost every house in NE Brazil has those. I put a metal roof on my house in the midwest because shingles kept blowing off. It’s green, looks really nice.
I wanted to dress as Mueller this year and hand the kiddos indictments. Too bad nobody will come by.
And God help those who show up dressed as Russians…
…you’d think the Japanese would be into Halloween, it’s made for their dumb off-brand weirdness. And suicide forests.
Now you have to tell us the story of how you know to contact the fire department.
The day after Halloween I was in the MIDDLE of my yard cleaning my fog machines, in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING DAY, I finished and set them aside to dry, when all of a sudden, Sirens and the Ladder truck comes rolling up.
Someone driving by saw some excess fog as I was cleaning, totally embarrassing, but the FD was cool about the whole thing, laughs exchanged etc.
My Favorite H’ween tune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gt-jnzlYNyM
Cool story. At least the FD had a sense of humor.
I did not see that song coming.
The first time I went trick-or-treating, I was 4 or 5. My dad accompanied my brother and me. After that, My siblings and I were one our own for Halloween.
One year, some Helen Lovejoy type tried to move the trick-or-treat date and set a firm curfew, but the rest of the neighborhood ignored her. Good for them.
Never saw what all the fuss is about. Statistically, kids are way more likely to get hurt in the summertime.
I think walking around in the dark by yourself or with a few friends is good for children. It teaches them independence.
Skenazy has a good take on it:
***
Readers? Have you heard of “Trunk or Treat”? It’s the growing trend of celebrating Halloween in a parking lot. (Woo hoo!) Folks fill up their trunks with candy and drive to a designated spot. Kids go car to car, collecting booty. As Wikipedia explains: Concerned parents see it as safer for their children, while other parents see it as an easier alternative to walking the neighborhood with their kids….
The problem is that Halloween is ABOUT kids walking around the neighborhood, especially when they get old enough to go out with just their friends. Think about it: They dress up like grown-ups. They take to the streets. They encounter the scariest possible locals (witches, goblins) at the scariest possible time: night. The whole thing is dress rehearsal — literally! — for adulthood.
Trunk or Treat takes all that away. It assumes the holiday is simply about amassing free food. Trunking (which sounds dangerously close to twerking!) also subtly suggests that kids are in peril walking up to any neighbor’s porch. This reinforces the community-killing idea that kids aren’t ever safe outside the home, school, or supervised program.
***
http://www.freerangekids.com/the-problem-with-trunk-or-treat/
When I think about the stuff I got up to as a small child I have a hard time taking Halloween worries very seriously. When I was 6-7 I lived in Butte, and we ran very free. Most of the kids I knew were the children of miners, and we’d go exploring the upper reaches of abandoned mines.
Later, when I lived in northern Vermont, and was maybe 9 or so we’d spend all day out in the woods, negotiating difficult terrain, exploring bogs and small bodies of water, and eating things we were pretty sure weren’t poisonous.
I started helping bring in the hay at about 9, and driving a tractor at around 12 (kind of late for up there, but I lived in town from 10-11.) Wanna know what’s actually kind of dangerous? Being a kid on a farm. Also, having half a dozen kids riding around loose in the back of a pickup truck driven by some zonked out commune-dweller.
I was canoeing alone from island to island on Memphramagog, a pretty good-sized lake, around the same age. And jumping 50-60 feet into quarries not much later.
I’m not sure all of that was advisable, but we pretty much all survived it. The dangers of trick-or-treating seem very small in comparison.
Similar experience growing up in northern New Hampshire. Lived in an old farm house below a “mountain” range. Lots of heavy woods and steep slopes to explore and of course ice skating on random frozen creeks and beaver ponds.
Yeah, but people put marijuana in candy and will give your kids beer.
I’m failing to see the problem here. I mean- and I can see how this might be a controversial statement- I kind of think if you’re going to do psychotropics it’s best to start young.
I’m actually kind of glad I started taking LSD as a child, though I’m not sure I’d recommend it to everyone, and if I had children I imagine I wouldn’t dose them. Fortunately, for me and the hypothetical them, I don’t.
Still- having watched a lot of people flip out on psychedelics it is my opinion that they mainly do so because of a faculty that doesn’t develop fully until well into the teenage years. I’m not much of a Freudian, but let’s just call it the superego. Your ego and id are well-formed at 12, but the bit of you that is concerned about and very aware of how other people see you is less so, which is why children are such a pain in the ass, and why we forgive them for it.
It turns out, I think, that if you’re going to take acid at all you’re probably going to handle it better if you first take it before you are 14 or so. Now, it’s pretty socially unacceptable to give your tweens acid, but you can always take them out trick-or-treating and hope the rumors are true. Sadly, they aren’t…
This is why I send my orphans out trick or treating every year. For every pot candy and beer they get me, I increase their gruel rations. I test them when they come back to see if there is any weed or alcohol in their system and if there is, it’s the salt mines for them.
I’ve only tried psychedelics like 32 times… I mean once, man, yeah… once.
It’s all one day man. We figured it out on the train.
The perfect woman doesn’t exi….
Nevermind.
The Middle East has its own version of Halloween. From wiki:
***
Eid il-Burbara or Saint Barbara’s Day, is a holiday annually celebrated on December 4 among Middle Eastern Christians in Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Turkey (Hatay Province). It has become Lebanon’s counterpart to the Halloween celebration, although it existed as a tradition much earlier.[1] It is celebrated in honour of the Christian Saint and Martyr Saint Barbara. The general belief among Lebanese Christians is that Saint Barbara disguised herself as many different characters to elude the Romans who were persecuting her.
…
The traditional food made on this feast is Burbara, a bowl of boiled wheat grains, pomegranate seeds, raisins, anise and sugar. It is offered to children who go from one house to another in costumes. [2] In Lebanon, Lebanese Christians cook a dough that is filled with walnuts or cheese. Heavy traffic occurs in bakeries because of people buying the traditional food for this holiday. Children go trick or treating [3] while singing a special song for Eid il-Burbara. Moreover, Halloween decorations, such as jack-o’-lanterns, can be seen.
A common practice in Lebanon on Eid il-Burbara finds its source on the legend of Saint Barbara who was believed to witness a miracle while fleeing prosecution. She ran through freshly planted wheat fields, which grew instantly to cover her path.
This miracle is recreated symbolically today by planting wheat seeds (or chick peas, barley grains, beans, lentils, etc.) in cotton wool on Saint Barbara’s feast day. The seeds germinate and grow up to around 6 inches in time for Christmas, when the shoots are used to decorate the nativity scene usually placed below the Christmas tree.
***
The Hashli Berbara song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM7Ib7sC_z8
They’re coming to get you, Barbara!
Quick! To the cellar! It’s the safest place!
-But Johnny has the keys!
If I could get the food you describe by doing so I would unabashedly go door-to-door.
Now that’s some funny shit right there.
Kind of reminds me of the time my dad wanted to demonstrate that black powder that’s been left in the open and exposed to moisture burns rather than explodes by throwing it in the fireplace. As it turns out, black powder that isn’t actually dryer than you think will, in fact, explode, and if you want to fill a room with fireplace ash it’s a pretty efficient way to do it.
I had an incident 3 nights ago.
My own custom blend of strontium nitrate and 325 mesh magnesium powder.
I have no hair below my wrists, and my knuckles are sunburned.
I have no hair below my wrists
Well that certainly debunks an old wives tale.
I do…. it’s just melted.
So according to Internet Historian, the Fyre Festival tickets that everyone was hyping up as costing up to a quarter of a million dollars were actually being sold for as low as five hundred.
So the narrative of ‘stupid rich kids’ changes to ‘if someone’s promising you a luxury stay in the Bahamas with everything provided for something between half and a full grand, it’s probably a scam’.
the numbers i saw being tossed around were “10-22,000”
its not really that unusual for a wide range of prices to be offered for some faux-exclusive events; it might be nominally 1 ‘event’, but they scale access, where “VIP” privs come for extra $$$.
unless someone has access to the books and has total ticket $ taken in and total # of people who paid for tickets…. i’d be skeptical of anyone’s claims of knowing the true average.
My neighborhood is great during Halloween. It is traditional for the kids to perform for their candy. They tell jokes, sing, do magic tricks.
The parents and homeowners make haunted houses and sit outside by fire pits drinking beers and cider.
“The parents and homeowners make haunted houses and sit outside by fire pits drinking beers and cider.”
I mean, who could not like that? My neighbors are mostly boring old yuppies. I just avoid them when I can. Even my wife who is a people person and social butterfly cannot stand to be around most of them and will avoid them just like I do.
It’s always a good time to drink on the porch, we give out the candy to look respectable, yea right….
My wife will answer the door for anyone who comes, but like I said, that will probably be one person. She wants them to come but no one is coming out here who doesn’t live here. But I’m cool with drinking on the deck.
Halloween is pretty ridiculous here:
https://patch.com/california/manhattanbeach/photos-halloween-trick-or-treating-in-manhattan-beach
Do you guys put lights on palm trees? In Brazil, they do that, it’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen. There’s some palm trees lining the main boulevard near our place, they look like they’re 100 ft tall, I know they’re not, but they’re damn tall and they manage to put these huge spherical bulbs on them near the top.
I mean for Christmas of course, not Halloween.
The HOA does it for the main street inside the gate. Gotta waste money on something.
Romney and Obama jackolanterns? Now that’s extra terrifying. Thumbs up
amusing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sforzinda
***
Sforzinda is a visionary ideal city named after Francesco Sforza, then Duke of Milan.
…
The city also contained many buildings, including parishes and separate schools for boys and girls. An example of a building that appears in the treatise is Filarete’s House of Vice and Virtue, a ten-story structure with a brothel on the bottom and an academy of learning on the higher levels.
***
That’s nice Yusef
At my place we put a round bale in the front yard and spray paint a pumpkin face on it. you pit out a lot more effort than I did.
To be fair though, a kid would have to walk at least 15 miles to get to my place from any town, so I don’t think it matters what I put out.
Top Men have been at it for a long time.
***
During the renaissance many ideas of a utopia, both as a society and as a city, surfaced. Utopia was considered to be a place where there was perfection in the whole of its society. This idea was started by Sir Thomas More, when he wrote the book Utopia. The book described the physical features of a city as well as the life of the people who lived in it. His book sparked a flame in literary circles. A great many other books of similar nature were written in short order. They all followed a major theme: equality. Everyone had the same amount of wealth, respect, and life experiences. The society had a calculated elimination of variety and a monotonous environment. The city where they lived was always geometric in shape, and was surrounded by a wall. These walls provided military strength, but also protected the city by preserving and passing on man’s knowledge. The knowledge, learning and science gave form to the daily life of the people living inside the walls. The knowledge of each person was shared by the entire society, and there was no way to let any information either in or out. As Thomas More said in his book, “He that knows one knows them all, they are so alike one another.”
***
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmanova
But did they have the _right_ top men? That’s the trick, you see.
I’d nominate myself as benevolent dictator for life, but I’m frankly way too lazy to worry about the shit you people get up to. Oh, wait… I’d actually probably be pretty good at the job, not through any real virtue, but because benign neglect is my default setting.
I’m just worried that you’d be a real threat to civilization by leaving people alone.
My political philosophy has become very simple: cut taxes, cut spending, repeal laws. If that is not possible, at least don’t make any new ones.
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHash5takWU
You have my vote for Supreme Overlord. All I ask is that you make me woodchipper czar. I have a lot of work to do.
To be more serious than usual here- cut spending first. Maybe rethink the tax code in sensible ways, but the spending cuts have to come first. Unfortunately, there’s only one spending cut that could move the needle- means-testing social security. The wailing and gnashing of teeth over that would be epic, but it’s the only way I see to avoid catastrophe. Unfortunately, I think we’re going to pick catastrophe.
Most geezers want their Shull Skurdy.
There was a great Stossel bit where he goes to some retirement community and shows them that they’re getting more than they put in and many don’t shull skurdy to live on.
Yep, they want it, cause who doesn’t want free money, specially free money they’ve been promised, and told they’ve paid into. And they did pay in, sadly.
But it’s gone. It has been spent. You geezers watched it being spent and did nothing about it, and it’s not there anymore. We can still treat it like the social welfare program it is, at great and crippling expense, but we are going to have to stop making payments to those of you who are well off enough to get along without it. Sorry.
You geezers watched it being spent and did nothing about it, and it’s not there anymore
^^1000x. Funny how the ‘But I put into it’ crowd switch from ‘We went to the moon’ and ‘We won the cold war’ to ‘They stole our retirement money’
Yep, lel.
Repurposed tiki torches from Charlottesville? Spooky indeed!
And a special Thanks to Riven for putting this together, and the alt text is awesome, as usual!
On the menu for the second time this week.
(Loosely based on this. My first stage brine is a little different.)
I guess Chickens on the menu Tonight, thanks Playa
Switch out some of the spices, like cumin for lemongrass, and that could be Thai-style roast chicken.
I never realized how much of those ingredients I have, but tonight I need to work on the 11 pounds of butt in my fridge. I’m thinking half char siu and half this
I’ve been away from theater far too long to understand this bit of gay slang.
You get good results using pork butt rather than tenderloin for cha siu?
Playa introduced me to chefsteps’ char siu recipe. I’ve only done it once but it turned out great. It’s a point of annoyance with the BF that I’ve waited so long to do it again.
Best result for that was using the powder from Noh Foods Hawaii. Lee Kum Kee was great, but not the best.
They have the powder at Marukai in Torrance, and probably a lot of other places around here too.
Now you tell me. I just bought more of the Lee Kum Kee. Oh well, it was really fucking good last time. I’ll pick up the powder next time.
You guys want to give the Seem Sum book’s char siu sauce a try, here it is.
DEEM SUM, dammit
I find recipes from Deez Nuts to be more authentic, to be honest.
Bookmarked. I have everything but the wine.
I pretty much never make a savory stir-fry anymore without shaoxing wine. Fucking delicious.
Not sure how I feel about using spicy mustard on cha siu, it doesn’t sound appealing. Spicy mustard with freshly cooked siu yuk though, god damn, that is delicious.
I think tenderloin is too lean for char siu. It’s great for other things, though.
I’ve had reasonable luck using tenderloin in the past the one time I made it, just needed to make sure that it was basted often and not overcooked. But you’re right, I can definitely see how a fattier cut would be superior in terms of taste and moisture, as the ends of some of the thinner pieces were a little dry. Haven’t cooked it a second time yet because it’s a whole procedure.
Most Noh Foods products are delicious. I didn’t use a commercial cha siu when I made it, I roughly followed the sauce recipe in this book. The cooking method they prescribe is pretty clever, in that they suggest using drapery hooks like this to hang from an oven rack (and of course a pan to catch basting and fat dripprings).
I don’t get the trend toward leaner pork. Pork is about the fat, imho. If you want less fat go eat a chicken breast and leave those of us who appreciate food alone.
I love fat in meat. It’s the best part. And also good for you, it’s brain food.
There’s a time and a place for everything.
For instance, if I know I’m going to be drinking heavily, say at a bachelor party or something along those lines, I always have a high protein low fat meal. Usually, that’s going to be pork tenderloin.
Tenderloin is very different than fatty pork, but good in its own way, as long as you don’t overcook it.
Oh yeah. If you’re doing Chinese bbq, hooks are the right way to do it.
I hadn’t thought about doing it in my own oven though. Looks like I’m going to make a big mess figuring it out….
Get those drapery hooks or ones like them. I didn’t, and opted instead for an asinine system of key-rings (which I haven’t bothered to remove from my oven rack) and S-hooks. The manoeuvreability for basting was horrible.
Those drapery hooks though, thread the pork cut onto the needle, and boom, done – total flexibility if you need to move closer ones out of the way to baste the cuts in the back.
pictorial from the book.
Should be stupid simple if you just get a huge catch pan.
Actually it was worse than that by a longshot. I used key-rings and metal skewers I bent into latches so that I could load up multiple cuts on one skewer. It was a fucking stupid mistake, never do it.
I should be good. I have giant hotel pans that can pretty much cover the bottom of the oven.
I wonder if I’m going to regret doing this with the convection fan on.
I used convection, and I have seen some kitchens in Hong Kong use commercial convection ovens for this. I don’t think you’re going to be disappointed – few drawbacks – but let me know if it doesn’t work for you for some reason.
Oh I’ll make it work…. for me.
I’m not sure how my wife is going to feel about a bunch of animals hanging from the oven rack, but that’s why I’m not going to ask for permission first.
Um, I though the butt was nowhere near the shoulder.
Depends on how small the animal is…
Seriously, though, Boston Butt is the front shoulder.
It’s not ass meat.
Yep- an unfortunate term.
Does anyone have recipes/preparation tips for goat? I picked-up a leg at a local locker, but have never cooked before. My husband loves goat, and I was thinking Middle-eastern, North African, Spanish)??
I’ll be watching this thread. I’ve never cooked goat, but Jamaican goat is fucking delicious.
I’ve only had it Mexican style. Birria and tacos. It’s very good, but it’s seasoned so heavily that it could really be any meat.
I had it… 2 weeks ago? Shredded over tortillas with cotija crumble and serrano sauce. If I had it in front of me right now, I’d gladly eat it.
Goats are springy and jumpy little fuckers when they’re young, so the leg muscles are very well used and fibrous. Any cooking method that you’d use on beef brisket would be good for goat leg too.
Oh, I take that back. My Persian father-in-law has made it too. Slow cooked with saffron, turmeric, garlic, parsley, and a bunch of middle eastern herbs that I probably don’t know the names of. Finished with lemon juice and vinegar, over yellow rice.
Delicious. IMHO, Persian home cooking doesn’t include enough salt, so I’m always prepared to add it at the table.
I like goat (I grew up around the guy who wrote “never kiss a goat on the lips” and his goats, so I kind of like goats in general,) but I have never cooked goat. That said, I think I could cook a mean fricasee of goat:.
I’d take some inspiration from Indian cooking and work up a spice mixture using traditional techniques. Then I’d put a lot of onions in a pan, maybe some garlic too, and cook them down. I’d remove them from the pan and add oil or ghee, and brown the shit out of the pieces of goat.
Then, maybe, I’d add a can of tomatoes, crushed by hand, the goat pieces, the spices, and lots of butter and simmer on low in a 12 inch pan for a while. I won’t claim it would be authentic, but I guarantee it would be good.
This article is stupid, but SJWs and feminists are going to lose their fucking minds over this. I need to get my orphans building some new tear barrels. The tears are going to be more delicious than ever.
Rise of the Sexbots
What’s really dumb about this is that we are a long way away from true sexbots of the sort that could take the place of women, even just sexually. These are sex-toys, just as vibrators and dildoes are.
But I kind of understand why women are threatened by them. I once knew a salty old Vermonter prone to saying obnoxious things, and one of his favorites was “if it weren’t for that patch of fur between their legs we’d be hunting them in the woods like deer.”
That might be going a bit far, but real sexbots would kind of lead to a change in social relations.
[Raises fist in solidarity]
#MeToo
Must be a really rare event. When I used to go down to Mexico often, the first time I was so looking forward to the topless women on the beaches. So the first woman I see topless was like 90 years old. The 2nd weighed at least 400 lbs. My dreams of a utopia south of the border was crushed forever.
Go to South Beach. Top optional and it’s the only beach of its kind that the women going topless are ones you actually want to see topless.
A lot of the South Beach women look like strippers. And yes, that’s a bad thing. I don’t like fake.
Try just south of Barcelona. You will not be disappointed.
In Brazil, I don’t think they do topless beaches, I’ve never heard of one anyway. But there is eye candy everywhere, the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.
Brazil makes up for it in other ways.
Well, there is the dental floss bikinis. Those are not as common as some people think, but just the quality of eye candy is fine with me.
Go to Australia. I hear women sunbathing topless is less common than it used to be, but all the women I saw going it were women you’d want to see naked.
Ipanema beach between Posto 9 and Posto 10 is a cornucopia of extremely hot women in nice small bikinis with maximum ass exposure. It has to be per square foot one of the highest concentrations of hotties in the world.
As a counterpart the Feira Nordestina in Rio Norte has some of the ugliest women you would ever want to come across.
NYC has a great Halloween parade in the Village. You just show up and join, walk for as long as you want and then duck into your favorite bar or party. The parade gets more adult the farther north you go. The creativity of some of the costumes boggles the mind. Various local bands provide the music in a wide variety of styles. I still have a couple of CD’s given out by some of the bands.
At night the subway system always has “unusual” denizens, but on Halloween the subway passengers run at 11 or even 12.
I love this. I also go all out. When I lived in California, there was an older man on my street who would compete with me for the best decorations. His wife said she always had the hardest time getting him to put the stuff up for the holidays until he started competing with me. Now in Oregon I’m the only one who does hardcore Halloween decorations because my neighbors are all SCROOGES. (Whatever the Halloween equivalent of Scrooge is, anyway.) But I get all the trick-or-treaters for miles around, so I like to tell myself I ultimately won against my old neighbor.
You help keep this Holiday going, House to house, where the fun is, someone’s Trunk? Who even thought that would look right?
Yarg!
Century after 1917 revolution, some Russians crave return of a tsar
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/10/century-after-1917-revolution-some-russians-crave-return-of-a-tsar/
***
Mikhail Ustinov’s ancestors were executed in 1917 for supporting the tsar but a hundred years later the 68-year-old yearns for the return of monarchy to Russia.
“Russians are monarchists in their soul, even though the Soviets tried to destroy our soul,” Ustinov, who is a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Moscow monarchist community, told AFP in his small apartment on the outskirts of the Russian capital.
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ustinov has dressed in stylized military fatigues in a nod to the officers of the Tsarist army who were fiercely loyal to the monarch and heavily persecuted after the October Revolution.
…
More than 28 percent of Russians are in favour of the country becoming a monarchy again one day, according to a study by VTsIOM, a state pollster, released in March. That figure increased from 22 percent in 2006.
Monarchy sympathisers are especially prevalent among the younger generation: 33 percent among those between 18 and 24 years old and 35 percent of 25-34 year-olds.
“We see clearly that the ‘Soviet’ generations resist this idea more than the younger people, for whom monarchy is one possible system of governance,” said sociologist Stepan Lvov who helped organise the poll.
“It’s as if the Soviet vaccine doesn’t work on them,” he added.
On the contrary, for young Russians monarchy is “rather attractive for its rationality and effectiveness,” Lvov said, adding they no longer see it as the antithesis of liberty and democracy.
…
Born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pavel Markov is someone who sees monarchy as a “more adequate and balanced system” than the current political regime in Russia.
“Democracy doesn’t suit Russians, our mentality needs authoritarian and centralised power,” said the young history teacher from Nizhny Novgorod, a city some 400 kilometres east of the capital.
“A constitutional monarchy allows us to consolidate our traditional values to give strength to the people, who are struggling today,” he said.
Being a monarchist is “inseparable” from the Orthodox faith, the predominant religion in Russia, he added.
And for others, Russia has already become a monarchy of sorts, with President Vladimir Putin reigning over the country for 18 years and widely expected to extend his rule by another six years in a 2018 vote.
***
Yeah, I know, but Vlad is the only guy around who can wrestle a bear with his shirt off and hack American democracy. I mean, no wonder he’s so popular.
I mean, I kind of feel like I could do those things too if I weren’t so lazy. I really should get off my ass and make something of myself at some point.
Relax you can always do that stuff tomorrow.
“Democracy doesn’t suit Russians, our mentality needs authoritarian and centralised power,”
Please help us TOP Men, We are but sheep needing guidance, Pathetic
singing a different tune
Trump critic Matt Taibbi facing backlash over Russia memoir
***
After receiving backlash over a 2000 memoir that details his past behavior toward women, Taibbi now says the book was a fictional “satire.”
Taibbi abruptly canceled his scheduled appearance at a humanities festival in Chicago on Saturday after negative reaction to an interview he recently gave to an NPR reporter.
According to Reuters, NPR asked Taibbi about the memoir he co-authored, called “The Exile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia.”
…
The memoir includes anecdotes in which Taibbi and co-author Mark Ames seem to have mistreated – possibly even assaulted – some women they encountered in Russia, Reuters reported.
…
But in a Facebook post last week, Taibbi wrote that the memoir was really fictional and that his intent was to poke fun at the idea of Americans living in Russia.
…
Co-author Ames also posted that the book was fictional.
“I never raped, harassed, assaulted anyone, and it sickens me that I’m dragged into having to make this sort of denial,” Ames wrote, according to Reuters.
The Chicago Reader’s Aimee Levitt, however, notes that Twitter users have pointed out that the book contains a note at the beginning, saying it was nonfictional.
***
Busted.
They were Russian Women so totes O.K. you see
Ames and Taibbi are scum.
Taibbi is a remarkably good writer though. I mean, yeah, he’s almost as much of a scumbag as I am, which is saying something, but he’s entertaining.
Those guys are opportunistic lying dirtbags and always have been. I don’t believe a fucking word of their “clarification.”
Is this part of a Sugarfree graphic novel?
Yikes
Food movie of the month: Food and the Maiden (Japanese with subtitles).
Summary:
“Young girl Saori, a cook at a diner, loves cooking. There is a regular customer Kujo, a guy who has never touched the plate of her cooking. Saori decides to give him a bag of sandwiches for him to eat at home, but later she finds that he gave it to a Buddhist monk on a street. She does not know that Kujo only eats what he cooked himself. A tragicomedy of 4 couples suffering about eating.”
HOW DARE HE!
All the discussion about Chinese bbq makes me want to watch the opening scene of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (Taiwanese).
BTW – don’t you Californians use MSG?
Oh yeah. It’s funny, though. I see people sharing recipes and they don’t know what “Accent” is.
The chicken I have in the tumbler right now has a generous amount of MSG and disodium 5’s.
Never heard of a tumbler before today. Are the results for fast marinade penetration and/or texture modification really superior to something like a needle-type meat tenderiser?
The vacuum makes for faster penetration, and the tumbling distributes it evenly. I only use it for chicken.
I like my chicken in a very particular way, and I’m always messing around with the method.
I couldn’t tell you HOW effective it is in my kitchen because I haven’t done a side by side, but with the phosphates and the tumbler, my chicken squirts juice everywhere (these euphemisms) and is never overcooked.
I’ve been trying to extract information from various former employees of El Pollo Loco, but the ones in the know sign pretty tight NDAs. The one that did talk to me told me that they used to brine and marinate the chickens overnight, but when they switched to the tumblers, the process only took 2 hours and 40 minutes. And yes, their tumblers are big enough to fit a human body. I don’t know why I mentioned that.
Interesting. The express vacuum principle makes sense… what displaces from within must be replaced with something.
MSG + I&G – you really are a black-belt!
Added thanx
You should use that bear as your avatar, Yusef.
Hmmmm
But in a Facebook post last week, Taibbi wrote that the memoir was really fictional and that his intent was to poke fun at the idea of Americans living in Russia.
Thompson didn’t get in trouble for that stuff in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas!
We didn’t have trick or treating in my town when I was a kid (the old people didn’t like it). So we would go to the school gym for kind of a costume contest. Now they still go to the school AND have trick or treat. Kids today are spoiled…runs away crying…
Is The F-Word Ever OK In The Classroom?
***
Charles Curtis, the school psychologist, explains the difference:
“So: ‘F*** this!’ Moderate profanity. ‘F*** you, bitch!’ Targeted profanity. See what I’m saying?”
He is trying to explain that when a student blows up in class, teachers should ask themselves: What is the student trying to say? And why is he saying it?
It’s all part of the “restorative justice” approach to discipline at Ron Brown, a school aimed at educating young men of color. And this back-and-forth comes from Episode 1 of our three-part series on NPR’s Code Switch podcast: “Raising Kings.”
Ron Brown high school is built entirely around this philosophy: Don’t suspend students, don’t send them home. Talk to them. Circle up. Try to figure out what’s behind their behavior and help them work through it.
…
In a fit of frustration one day, Travis Bouldin, a history teacher at Ron Brown, tells his students exactly the same thing:
“In the real world, people are not going to want to work with you if you’re cursing at them nonstop. You cannot continue to speak to each other like you’re nothing!”
But instead of suspending the students for their cursing, or kicking them out of class, here is what he does: He challenges the students to turn to a classmate, and pay him a compliment. He is turning cursing into compliments.
And at this school, it seems to work.
But hearing that got us wondering, and clearly some listeners as well: When, if ever, is this kind of language acceptable in school?
First, we reached out to an expert. Eric Shed is with the Harvard Graduate School of Education and directs its teacher fellows program. He has done a lot of work with high schools, including eight years as a social studies teacher.
He says the approach by Ron Brown toward these young men is unusual. “I think that’s terrific that they have a school to express their emotions,” he says. “It’s showing a high level of empathy. … I think it’s an opportunity for students to express themselves.”
But in general, he says, this kind of behavior is not OK. The teacher-student relationship should be professional. “In general, I don’t think there should be any type of cursing,” Shed says. “There are other ways to build relationships with students.”
***
I think’s best not to swear. Then when you do swear, it’s like a bomb going off.
I think it’s better to swear in every sentence. That way no one notices after a while, and we can move the fuck on.
I think this is ok.
‘Fuck you, leftists, you fucking luddite pieces of shit, go fuck yourselves up the fucking ass with a rusty chainsaw and fucking die and go extinct already’.
Seems legit. Not sure it would score high on the collegiality scale though.
“In the real world, people are not going to want to work with you if you’re cursing at them nonstop”
I guess he’s never worked construction.
Or software.
There’s going to be a Sunday night thread, right? Just checking, because what I plan to do is for anyone who has missed any of the Harvey story, I’ll post the whole story so far. I dropped part 5 in yesterdays AM links. I’ll stop there for a while we decide how to proceed.
Depends on if Zardoz or STEVE SMITH are in the mood.
STEVE SMITH ALWAYS IN THE MOOD. THE MOOD FOR RAPE.
Maybe they should remove the Bibles as well.
https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/29/historic-virginia-church-remove-plaque-honoring-former-congregant-george-washington/
Well, as we’ve long expected, JB is an unapologetic racist who believe in the myth that Western Society is superior to primitive barbarism.
That’s what it says under my HS yearbook photo.
I’m sure that it does.
Did they tell that to the people in Oregon?
“Body parts for sale”?
Ah, a Planned Parenthood “clinic”
*shivers*
Nice setup Yusef. If you’re going to do it, you may as well go all out.