Author: Eric Johnson

Brine that bird!
I’m up late, way too late, the latest in a string of late nights laboring on stuff at work. I’m beginning to hate computers. The cathode rays are penetrating my brain and me no think good no more.
While I wait for my co-workers to get back to me about one of our systems, I want to talk about a very important subject this holiday season: brining your birds. If you’re like me (and if so, I’m truly sorry), you start thinking about Thanksgiving dinner two months prior. I’ve been meaning to pass this advice along for several weeks, and now seems like a good time.
Primarily, we’re talking about brining turkey birds, but maybe your holiday table includes duck or chicken. The advice applies no matter what avian friend you consume. The result will be succulent, evenly-cooked meat from wings to breast, a golden and crispy skin, and the enduring gratitude of your guests. I have cooked turkeys for the last three Thanksgivings, and the in-laws and relatives thought I was nuts at first. They still think I’m nuts, but it’s for other reasons now.
What is brining? It seems to be catching on among food-loving circles, maybe because it’s promoted by Cook’s Illustrated, which is kind of like the Consumer Reports of food. Brining is similar to, but not exactly like koshering. The concept is to soak meat in a salt solution, which tenderizes the meat and makes fast-cooking parts cook slower, and slow-cooking parts cook faster.
For best results, brine your turkey overnight, or for about 8-12 hours at least. Use one cup of kosher salt for each gallon of water, and make sure the entire turkey is covered in water. Flip the bird (ha!) over every once in a while to ensure that it’s getting evenly brined. Then, the evening before you eat, take the turkey out, dry it inside out with paper towels, and put it on a rack over a sheet pan in the refrigerator overnight. That will dry out the skin.
The next day, you can cook the bird as you normally do. Cook’s Illustrated recommends roasting over high heat for a while, then lowering the temp. This personal site has a few suggestions for brining, some of which I can’t vouch for. When brining chicken breasts, for example, using sugar in the brine solution works splendidly, but I don’t know about using herbs — does the taste really penetrate deeply into a turkey? The best thing is to buy a subscription to the Cook’s site and download the brining articles.
Final thoughts:
• You might be saying, “How can I brine a 20-pound turkey? I don’t have a pot or pan big enough to fit it.” Look, when the going gets tough, the tough go to the hardware store. In this case, go get yourself a big plastic Rubbermaid tub, the kind used for storing clothes. It’s only ten bucks or so, less if you get it at Wal-Mart.
• “But the bacteria!” you may be sputtering. “I can’t fit a Rubbermaid tub in my refrigerator! My loved ones and I will die a horrible death from poultry! Boo hoo hoo hoooooo! I don’t want to diiiiiieeeee!”
Get a hold of yourself! First, in most of the country, it’ll be cold before Thanksgiving. If the temperature never rises much above freezing, you’ve got a remarkable refrigerator in the great outdoors itself. If you live in places where Jack Frost doesn’t come, then work something out: put ice in the brine to keep it cold, then add more as the temperature in the tub rises (check the temp with a liquid thermometer.)
Second, the USDA will never tell you this, but if the internal temperature rises above 170-180 degrees, you’ve killed any harmful bacteria in the bird. (For Pete and all the Canadians, the metric equivalents of those temperatures are 4.3-76.54 deciliters, I think.) You could have left it out in the Arizona sun for two days, but if you cook it long enough, the turkey will not make you sick. It might taste funky, but there’s no reason to think it will kill you. That being said, brine at your own risk.
Now back to the @#$$% servers.

Sen. Wellstone, campaign prop
You beat me to it, Sal — I was about to post on the Wellstone funeral, too. This does illustrate the difference between political liberals and the rest of the world. I’m not talking about people who happen to be liberal, but about professional liberals: people who are employed by politicians or unions or government agencies, whose mission in life is to advance liberal causes. The whole event was thoroughly distasteful, though I had a large amount of respect for Senator Wellstone himself.
To them, even death can be politicized, and is worthy of being politicized, because all of life is political, and all justice must be achieved here on earth through politics. So if there is a groundswell of pity for the Wellstone family, the liberal politician thinks, “How can we translate this enthusiasm into votes?” (There are conservatives and Republicans who think this way, but they’re the exceptions.) They see no contradiction in attacking Republicans for “playing politics” when they say that Mondale is a poor choice for senator, and then they turn around and hold a political pep rally at a funeral.
Liberals have a problem with sacralizing the secular. What I mean by that is that they treat contingent, transitory things like politics as if they are the most important things. Therefore, death is just one more thing that can be ordered toward gaining an advantage over one’s political enemies. Want more proof? Look at the rhetoric of people like celebrities, columnists, and professors, who do not have to stand for elections, and see how they are not content to merely disagree with others’ views. You get the sense that they think conservatives and Republicans are not merely horrible wrong, but unrighteous for holding contrary opinions, e.g.: if you want lower taxes, you hate the poor. If you want to govern your own retirement, you want to throw old people into dumpsters. If you’re against abortion, you hate women. If you want to own a gun, you want to hurt kids. And on and on….
Again: I’m not talking about rank-and-file Democrats, just the pros. Please don’t get offended, unless you’re one of the pros, in which case you can get as offended as you want.

Why Linux development is like the Catholic Church
Linux shouldn’t work. It’s an operating system designed by hackers, the kind of people who can give you detailed plot synopses of every “Star Trek” episode. The “official” releases of the OS are really just releases of the kernel, the basic core of the system. Other companies and groups assemble drivers, programs, interfaces, etc., and package them all together in distributions, which are free to the public.
You can view and modify the Linux source code, if you’re into that kinky stuff. Microsoft would spend a zillion dollars in court before it let anyone look at the code for Windows. Anybody can submit changes to Linux if they want, and their code may be incorporated into the next release, but nobody gets any money if it does. Linux is a hodge-podge of patches, contributions, and hacks. Contrast that to Windows, which is designed by thousands of programmers closely monitored by supervisors and coordinators and managers.
So which one works better? Obviously, the one that’s backed by billions of dollars in capital: the one from the strictly hierarchical, take-no-prisoners, profit-crazy Microsoft, right? Wrong. Ask anybody who develops applications on both platforms, and they’ll tell you Linux is the more stable and flexible of the two. We’ve had Linux servers run for hundreds of days without a restart, which is a dangerous thing if you’re running Windows.
The Catholic Church may at first appear to be governed by the Windows model. It has a pope, bishops, and priests, plus assorted religious orders, lay orders, and apostolates, all with their own hierarchies. Looking at it from a distance, it looks like a top-down, authoritarian society. However, the Church prefers to promote that which grows organically from the life of the faithful, rather than imposing them from above. The pope and the other bishops don’t wake up and say, “let’s develop some doctrine today” — they respond to practices and lines of thought submitted to them by clergy and laity alike. Sometimes they are rejected, but more often, if they are in accordance with Scripture and Tradition, they are nurtured and encouraged. Some examples of the latter are the Rosary, the infallible doctrine of the Assumption, and lots of religious movements (nobody asked St. Francis of Assisi to found an order).
There are some other similarities, too: like the Church, Linux was founded by one man, Linus Torvalds, who continues to guide its development, and there are other men who supervise different aspects of the OS. (Although leadership in the Linux community is not reserved to men alone, there aren’t that many female kernel developers.) Torvalds and his inner circle are completely in charge of accepting and rejecting new code, just as the magisterium accepts or rejects new doctrines.
Many of the failures of Church governance come from people trying to run a Linux religion like it’s a Windows religion. There are Windows religions out there, such as the Mormons and the Unification Church, which are centralized and authoritarian. (I mean those words descriptively, not pejoratively.) Far too many officeholders regard themselves as managers instead of shepherds – that is, they think they are supposed to be directing things, instead of serving those who do all the work. The pope isn’t a despot, he is the servant of the servants of God. It is not we who support him, it is he who supports us from below. We, the laity, are supposed apply the teachings of the Church in everyday life, figure out what works, and check with the teaching authority to see if we’re doing it right.
As for Torvalds, his design philosophy begins with a kernel of wisdom: “I think a lot of things I don’t like tend to be overdesigned,” he said. “To me it’s bad. Somebody spent too much time thinking and too little time doing.” That statement could apply to so many things, in and out of church.

One, two, three, four, we chant the chants we used before
As war looms closer with Iraq, anxious Americans lifts up their heads unto the Lord and cry, “Where, O Lord, where is thy servant, the Reverend Jesse Jackson?”
In front of the cameras, naturally. There was a march in D.C. today to protest our war in Iraq, though there is no war yet — call it a pre-emptive demonstration — and the Hymietown Rhymer was there to lead the way, along with Susan Sarandon and other perpetual protestors. There was a bunch of people dressed as the ghosts of dead Iraqis, but they looked a lot like Klansmen, which must have displeased Jesse.
There were some counterdemonstrators who looked suspiciously Middle Eastern, possibly even Iraqi, who want to see Saddam ousted. Mostly there were anti-Bush slogans:

The protesters brandished signs reading: “No Proof, No War,” “Bush Sucks” and “Pre-emptive Impeachment.” Some protesters carried Iraqi flags. “No war, no way,” shouted a protester wearing a mask of Bush with horns and a pitchfork.
“George Bush, you can’t hide. We charge you with genocide!” chanted the demonstrators, who were escorted by mounted U.S. Park Police and watched by 600 police officers along the route in the heart of the nation’s capital.

It might be impolitic to say this to the protestors, and in any case they wouldn’t listen, but the last war the U.S. started was the Spanish-American War. (Athat time most people thought we were avenging the Maine’s sinking in Havana harbor, which was later proven to be from a boiler explosion, not Spanish malfeasance.) Since then, every time we’ve gotten involved in a war, we’ve joined a war already in progress (WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War.) This would be the first time we’ve actually initiated the hostilities, if you want to say that — though since this is just a continuation of the Gulf War, you could make the case that it was Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait that started it, not to mention his possession of those nasty weapons we keep hearing about.
Reasonable people can differ on the question of war with Iraq. You could make a good prudential argument against it on several grounds: because attacking Iraq makes it likely that Saddam will use his dirty tools of death; because it could provoke a regional war; because it would inflame anti-American sentiment among countries that already harbor hostile terrorists. Personally, I am convinced that ridding Iraq of Saddam will be a boon for humanity. I don’t think he’s trying to get nukes so he can murder Iraqi Kurds and Shiites more efficiently, but so he can dominate the region and live out his fantasy of uniting all Arabs under his uncomfortably firm leadership.
Nevertheless, notice how unserious and unoriginal the protestors are. Unserious, because they don’t want to engage the Iraqi question head-on by providing alternative plans, or making the kind of serious-minded objections I list above. They leave that to the sober sell-out liberals who have day jobs and probably don’t have pictures of Che above their beds. Every U.S. action is an opportunity for them to question American motives and tell the world what a rotten country we are (“One million Iraqi children are dead because of sanctions! I know because Iraq says so!”) It’s a shame that the more responsible war opponents are tainted by these folks. I mean, “Bush Sucks”? Iraqi flags? Who do these people imagine they are convincing?
Unoriginal, because “No Blood For Oil” is vintage 1990-91, and their various other chants and slogans are of older provenance, circa 1966-70. It’s like all you have to do is wave a possible war in front of these protestors, and they have a collective Pavlovian response. “Give peace a chance!” “Stop the war machine!”
Their nemesis in the White House has revised longstanding postwar U.S. doctrine, re-oriented foreign policy, cajoled the U.N. into living up to its charter, and completely re-thought his own political view of the world. The protestors show no sign that they live in a post-September 11 reality, and try to fit every conflict into their neat, pre-defined ideological template, where the U.S. is always the racist agressor, and the enemy is always the helpless victim. And they accuse the military of being conformist reactionaries.

Senator with a pants problem
Democrats have affairs, Republicans get divorced. My friend Brian, a Democrat, likes to relate that theory every time a Dem politician is caught with his pants down or a Republican dumps his wife for someone younger (and probably stupider, if she’s willing to marry a man who would dump his wife for another woman.) Brian has an impressive mental list to back up his theory, and I’m beginning to suspect he’s right.
One man who fits the mold is Senator Tim Hutchinson, (R-Arkansas). Unlike former Arkansan William J. Clinton (D-Harlem), Hutchinson wasn’t content to take advantage of a junior staff member. Nope, he had to make an honest little home-wrecker of her. Now he’s married again, and his three sons and wife of almost three decades are left to deal with his sexual incontinence.
Is this a good time to point out that Sen. Hutchinson is an ordained Baptist minister, one who was elected on a “family values” platform?
Voters in Arkansas, who frequently elected Clinton but are still apparently hung up on ancient, pre-Woodstock concepts like marital fidelity, would have probably re-elected Hutchinson but he’s now behind in the polls. I want the Senate to remain in Republican hands, but if the senator is defeated on Nov. 5, I’ll be glad. I guess it’s too much to ask for the state to refuse to rubber-stamp his “lifestyle choices” and grant him a quick divorce and remarriage, but maybe the electorate will administer a shock to the reverend senator.