Merry Christmas!

[wombat_socho]

Still not feeling 100% (throat is still a bit sore), but good enough to stir forth and get to Mass. Most parishes scrap their late Masses on Christmas, but fortunately St. Olaf has a 5 PM contemporary service and the Basilica has a 4:30 with cantor, piano and flute, which I think will be the service of choice.

Had a few minutes of panic yesterday when looking for the e-mail from my cousin Kathy and the attached Irish Cake recipe, since there was no trace of it on the Deskpro whatsoever. I finally pulled up a generic raisin bread recipe from allrecipes.com, added an extra egg, and went with that. Sure enough, when I went to the bedroom and fired up Cowzilla's copy of Thunderbird, there was the missing e-mail. So, once I clean up the paddle and bread pan from yesterday's effort (which turned out okay but not spectacular) I'll try Kathy's recipe. Which is actually Auntie Agnes' recipe, but Kathy did come up with an interesting variation that I may take a stab at sometime after I pick up some bulk Splenda.

For your amusement on this Sunday, I present the ideal hat for those of you tired of the anti-fur zealots. Black powder smoothbore musket (loaded with buck & ball for maximum crowd dispersal effect) available at additional charge. Vis Small Dead Animals.

Comments

[433.livejournal.com]

As small-"L"-libertarian as I am, I still think fur is pretty fucking stupid, cruel, and unnecessary. We have the technology now to stay warm without killing animals that live out their entire lives in little cages.

However, the coyote hat -- That I approve of!

(merry xmas)

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Here we part company - I don't see any real difference between raising ermine, mink, or chinchilla for their fur and raising cattle & sheep for their beef & mutton. Either way you're making use of domesticated animals.

An interesting sidelight on the coyote hat - while I was out in the DC area the weekend of the 17th, a lot of my friends commented on how coyotes and beavers were becoming a real problem in the third-ring suburbs. I wonder how long before beaver hats come back into fashion? It was only forty years ago that coonskin caps were all the rage, and seventy since raccoon coats were the fashion accessory of choice on college campuses.

[433.livejournal.com]

You really don't see the difference? Animals that (factory farms aside) are allowed to graze and roam before being slaughtered for their meat and hides vs. ones kept in small individual cages for their hides only?

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Free-range cattle and chickens don't make up that big a part of the food supply any more, at least not here in the US. Most cattle go through feedlots and most poultry is raised on what you call factory farms, and that's why the price of meat is actually low enough so that even people on welfare can afford it. And I'm okay with that, having been pretty damn poor at times. As for fur animals, my understanding is that they don't actually just use the pelts, they do recycle the meat. Mink and ermine are close cousins of the weasel, after all, and so not all that particular about what they eat,