Real Live Preacher lays out where it all started

One of the points about “traditional” church going that always bugged me was the difficulty in reconciling logical inconsistencies in the Bible with the divinity of the text. Even among churches that don’t insist on the literal truth of the Gospel, you sometimes get people discussing the differences in the Gospel of John, for instance, from the other gospel accounts, without digging deeper as to the meaning.

Perhaps worse are the “cultural memory” versions of scriptural events, such as the placement of the birth of Christ in a wooden barn, with the magi attending, everything glowing and pretty, and a beatific, happy Mary at the center. As Real Life Preacher points out today in the introduction to what he promises will be an eight-part series about the real Christmas story, it is much more about “pain and surprise, of grace, beauty and brutality.”

RLP goes on to lay out known flaws in our received picture of the Nativity, including the aforementioned wooden barn, magi, and prettiness. The other thing, of course, that’s left out is that Mary and Joseph were scared teenagers who had to travel sixty miles during a highly advanced pregnancy. But they did it anyway. God works in mysterious ways.

Cointelpro 2003: files on dissenters?

The report that the FBI is keeping tabs on anti-war protesters casts a chilling shadow, even giving the damages already inflicted on freedom of association by the PATRIOT Act. The FBI says it’s only looking for “anarchists and ‘extremist elements’ plotting violence.”

But by Singin’ John Ashcroft’s actions last year, the agency is already using political and religious profiling to conduct surveillance without evidence of criminal activity.

Taken together, the measures suggest that anyone involved in protesting the war, “extremist” or not, could be subject to FBI surveillance as long as they meet the right political and religious profile.

I used to scoff at the tin hat brigades. Now I wonder. Maybe it’s time for that FOIA request.

New adventures in hi-temp

A great thread on Plastic about cooking turkey reminded me of my own favorite poultry cooking recipe. It hasn’t been turkey tested but might just work with the Big T (where T stands for tryptophan). (Note: original recipe published in Cooks Illustrated, but (a) it’s not on line, (b) I don’t have the magazine any more. But credit where due.)

Note 2: I originally wrote about this approach last year. But it being the holidays seemed a good excuse to drag it back out. Or at least that’s my excuse for having no brain. 🙂

The recipe is a high temperature roast, meaning that the meat cooks at 500° F, but don’t be scared. It solves three problems of high temperature roasting (dry meat, uneven cooking, and smoke) by the following easy expedients:

  1. Brining the meat (see the Plastic thread for a good discussion of the pros and cons of brining). For a chicken, a really large glass bowl is sometimes the right size to hold the chicken and the water. There are also five-gallon tupperware-esque containers that hold a full chicken and brine. If it’s Thanksgiving, your garage may be cold enough to hold the bird outside. Use a thermometer to make sure you’re not breeding bacteria in your brine. As for the seasoning, I use a quarter cup kosher salt and a quarter cup sugar to a gallon of seasoning, and sometimes add juniper berries or whole peppercorns for additional flavor.
  2. Flattening the bird so that all the meat is the same distance from the heat. They recommend doing this by cutting out the backbone of the chicken, spreading it out flat (skin side up) on a slotted roasting pan, and flattening the breastbone by pushing down with the heel of your hand.
  3. Great. But at 500 degrees, or more, all the fat from the chicken will drip onto the bottom of the slotted roasting pan and smoke like crazy, right? Not if you put a single layer of thin-sliced potatoes (appropriately seasoned) on the bottom of the pan first.

So: juicy, crisped-skin, tasty roast chicken, and crispy potatoes, all in one fell swoop. And quick: about forty-five minutes if I recall correctly, though since I don’t have the magazine any more I wouldn’t try to do this without my programmable thermometer set to alarm me when it gets hot enough.

<julia>Bon appetit!</julia>

Plus ça change…

After business school and a couple of years away from being a programmer, you’d think my geekiness would be dropping. Apparently not. I just took Newsweek/MSNBC’s Digital IQ quiz and scored 194, where anything greater than 110 is “nerd” level. Sigh…

New mixes for an old friend

Our friend Shel is getting married around Thanksgiving. I’ve written a bit about Shel before; suffice it to say that the “happily ever after” day for the woman who introduced me to my wife is a pretty big deal. So we’ll be driving down to Portland the weekend after Turkey Day for the party, music in hand.

Music? Yeah, Shel asked me to roll a mix for the reception and party. Being the overachiever that I am, I obliged with three cds worth of a monster mix that takes the party from first dance and family friendly stuff all the way through 80s memories deep into funk grooves before ending in trance and “Classic Girl.” The track listings for the three discs, entitled You’re the First, The Last, My Everything, are up at Art of the Mix, so check them out.

Addicted to Solace

I go through periods of being addicted to computer games. My shame (if that’s the right word) is that instead of being addicted to the “cool” games like EverQuest or Final Fantasy, I find these random games that no one else is playing to get hooked on.

The latest is Solace, from Freeverse, a small developer who specializes in entertaining, clever versions of card and board games (and who also became infamous for their Jared, the Butcher of Song). Solace starts out a lot like Risk or Axis and Allies, with six powers facing off across several continents and a lot of territory to conquer. Then it adds some quirks like sea battles, amphibious assaults, artillery defense, and cavalry shock troops. You have to be able to master sea combat if you want to win; there are no other ways to grow your territory, and it’s a lot easier to defend your country from sea attack if you head them off in the open ocean.

Criticisms? The game crashed once when I left it running unattended for a while, and the computer turns are quite slow. But overall I’m hooked. And at least it means I’m not playing Burning Monkey Solitaire.

(Incidentally, I categorized this under Mac, but both Solace and BMS are cross platform. As is Jared.)

Patch management critiques

Scott Berinato’s article in CIO Magazine about the dangers of patch management, “FrankenPatch,” discusses the issues around patch management, the problems that come about with trying to keep on top of patches, what happens when patches break things, etc.

It suggests that the right approach is to be watchful, and to patch selectively and late after others have worked out the kinks, and to not disclose vulnerabilities so as not to give hackers a roadmap to exploit the problem.

Eminently sensible.

Except for this one small problem: in a highly networked world, where worms can infect all the world’s vulnerable systems in less than ten minutes, it’s hard to make a case that selective patching and risk management makes things better. In fact, I’d argue that it gives virus writers a broader target.

And not disclosing vulnerabilities? Smells like liability lawsuit to me. Even if it didn’t, though, I think we as software makers have an ethical obligation to fix vulnerabilities and tell customers about what we fixed.

An interesting factual error too: Berinato mischaracterizes MSDE (the Microsoft SQL Desktop Engine) as embedded database connection software. It’s actually a database engine that a developer can embed in a desktop application.

That said, applying the patches that prevent Slammer was a truly painful process.

Harry Potter y tu mamá también

The preview trailer for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban has been released. This is the first movie not to be directed by Chris “let’s face it, I direct children’s movies” Columbus, and the trailer shows hints of Alfonso Cuarón’s approach: the choir of children singing “something wicked this way comes,” Snape and Draco Malfoy not looking like pure villains, the generally darker cinematography, the dread hand of the Dementor… The question is, how much of it is due to the new director, and how much to the generally darker tone of the third book? Hard to tell from just a trailer, but I like the note of dark humor that I detect in the choir.

iTunes and Playlistism

Hysterical article in the Wesleyan Argus, pointed to by Wired, about how sharing one’s iTunes playlists sometimes reveals more about oneself than one intends—and can either lead others to idolize or ostracize you. It’s called playlistism. And it’s almost certainly for real.

At work, I had to change the default name on my iTunes shared music (the name defaults to your computer name, which defaults to my email address) because I was getting too much grief about even using iTunes—this on the first day it was out, when one could be forgiven for experimenting. So I changed the name to “The Boney King of Nowhere.” Now I find I have random people tuned in from time to time. Have I become a recipient of reverse playlistism? Am I now some kind of pirate radio station?

Moxie’s Jeremiad

Moxie nails a theme that I’ve been thinking about since the fires in Southern California last month: that disasters are waiting in the wings like process servers to hit California. In her “next up for the golden state? earthquakes,” she points out, “Late fall heatwaves, fires, famine, no public transit, floods, hail, thunder and lightning storms? All in less than one month. It would seem the gods are unhappy with Los Angeles.”

Moxie lays the blame on NBC, “Gigli,” “Love, Actually,” and Paris Hilton’s video. Me? I think it’s interesting that this all started after the recall election. But it’s a good thing there aren’t volcanoes in SoCal, and it never ever snows.

Blog less, email more?

I’ve been a little quiet here lately—but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing. I had a backlog of email from people with questions about my genealogical research: lots of interest in the Brenneman family, for whatever reason, plus an assortment of Freeman and Jarrett questions.

I should probably instrument the genealogy pages to see how many people find my site through them. I’m afraid I’d find that they draw many more readers than my blog does, though. 🙂