Learning to Like Turkey

Folk singer Janis Ian wrote a post about a conversation between her and her wife. She attached an article about the worst leftover turkey ideas.  

It reminded me that I honestly never really liked turkey or sweet potatoes, the staples of Thanksgiving dinners. The other staple of Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie, which I did enjoy with a healthy portion of whipped cream. I mean, who doesn’t like pumpkin pie?

Since I didn’t like turkey, I REALLY didn’t like leftovers on the next day or days after the holiday.

Over the more than seventy years I’ve been on the planet, my tastes have surely changed. My wife has found a way to roast sweet potatoes and mix it with onions that I can more than tolerate. I actually like it. A lot. Don’t get me doing on yams, as I can never figure out the difference.

I loved most of the other things on the menu of the holiday feast. My mom’s czarnina, which I have learned to make myself even if it does involve heading to a farm when they are slaughtering ducks. My grandma’s homemade kielbasa. The huge ham. Even the string bean casseroles, the mashed potatoes, the stuffing, the gravy, and everything else that was on the table where the entire extended family sat. Yes, there was an adult table and a kids table.

But turkey? Not really. I ate it, of course. It was a polite thing to do, but I didn’t relish it. First thing I went for was the kielbasa and the ham. If I wanted second helpings, it was the kielbasa and ham. Now that I think about it, leftovers of ham or kielbasa never existed in our house. But turkey? Always leftovers of that. 

My mom would try to get us to make turkey sandwiches. She’d reheat it in the oven. She tried it in soup. Again I would eat it, but no matter in what form it was presented, I just didn’t like it. 

Until last year.

My wife didn’t want to cook much for Thanksgiving, much less defrost and bake a bird big enough to feed her kids, my kids and their kids. 

Enter BBQ Productions, a restaurant in our area. We’ve eaten at the place a few times and liked it. We found out they offered entire family meals for Thanksgiving. They also offered smoked turkey. We ordered it. The entire family, except the vegetarian member, liked it. I liked it. I even asked for seconds. It was the first time I liked turkey. 

I still like ham and kielbasa more. I miss my mom’s czarnina, and my grandma’s desserts, especially her kołaczki.

This year we will order the smoked turkey again. I think it will become part of a new tradition. And the leftovers will be good.

If there are any.

Remember when no one had problems getting vaccinated?

The other day, I heard a report on CNN about the search of a workable, viable, safe vaccine for the coronavirus. Pfizer announced  they had one and that their early data showed a 90 percent effective rate. 

That’s good news. The stock market agreed with the Dow Jones soaring 1000 points. 

Other companies are doing research for a vaccine. According to some sources, as many as 179 vaccines are in some stage of development.

A vaccine can’t come soon enough. In the United States, the seven day rolling average is over 130000 new cases and 1045 deaths.

Something about the CNN report struck me. The reporter said, “This is the largest scientific research project in history.” I think that is a little overblown. Large, yes. Important and necessary, definitely. In history? I don’t think the guy ever heard of the March of Dimes and Jonas Salk’s development of the polio vaccine. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt had polio. A popular entertainer of the time, Eddie Cantor, said Americans should start sending a dime to the White House. They did. Eventually, thousands of letters and envelopes started arriving at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Over two million dimes. 

I remember the March of Dimes collection cards. I filled one myself, completed with the Liberty silver coins with Roosevelt’s image on them.

Polio scared the shit out of people. If the President could get it, anybody could. I remember people boiling their sheets and doing whatever else the experts might recommend to prevent the spread of it.

When Jonas Salk developed the first vaccine in 1954, parents sent their kids off to school to get the shot. I remember the lines in the hall of the school I attended. In 1961, Albert Sabin developed an oral vaccine, and once again, parents sent their kids off to school, this time to get a small sugar cube.

Over time, hundreds of millions of children world wide received polio vaccine to the point where it is basically eradicated from the globe.

Interesting fact about Sabin’s vaccine is that he refused to patent his vaccine. He didn’t make any money off of it. He wanted it to be as widely available as possible for everyone who needed it, which was every damn child on the planet. Think Pfizer or any of the other developers will do anything close to that?

I read recently, too, that 50 percent of Americans won’t take the vaccine if one becomes available for coronavirus. Vaccines work. It’s why polio no longer is a threat. Neither are measles, smallpox, and a whole slew of other diseases.

People wholeheartedly got behind the March of Dimes and had their kids vaccinated. They did the same thing when vaccines for other childhood diseases were developed. I don’t know why people feel different about it now. There should be lines like this.

Nobody is going gently even if they should

Joe Biden has enough Electoral College votes to become the next President, the 46th in the country’s history. Donald Trump has not conceded, and it is doubtful that he will go gently into that good night. I hated using that last phrase as it comes from one of my favorite poets, Dylan Thomas, but I suspect that the Tangerine Wankmaggot will go on Tweet Raging for a while yet.

The coronavirus has not miraculously gone away after the election as some claimed it would. Illinois where I live and Wisconsin where I lived for 40 years have both seen record increases in cases. The entire country has seen over 100000 new cases for the past several days. Deaths have numbered over a 1000 per day for over a week.

Most experts say it’s going to get worse before getting better.

The excuses for continuing to ignore the experts boggles my mind.

One claim in Wisconsin is that you have a greater chance of dying in a car crash than you do of COVID. In Wisconsin the estimate is that about 600 car deaths will occur this year. Nationally about 37000 traffic fatalities occur every year. Statewide, Wisconsin COVID deaths total 2330, almost four times more. Nationally the rate is 6.5 times higher. It hardly seems plausible to compare the two.

Another wild-ass claim is that the survival rate is 99.9%. I have no idea where people are getting that number. Right now the national mortality rate is 2.4%.

Biden is going to have his work cut up for him. He has to convince people that Trump was wrong about the virus. He has to undo a lot of damage that incompetence and lack of leadership caused.

Maybe nobody is going gentle into that good night. The dying of the light is not happening easily.

The Day After the Election

 I went to bed last night not knowing who won the election. I woke up this morning still not knowing. 

As I write this, neither Trump nor Biden has the necessary 270 electoral college votes. 

Without any basis in fact, however, Trump made an announcement at 2:00 a.m. that he had won the necessary states to get him to the 270. He evidently forgot that several states were still counting votes. Yet, he said he won and that all counting should stop. 

Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Alaska, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and MIchigan were all states that Trump won in 2016, the last three of which because Hillary Clinton basically ignored them, not even stepping in Wisconsin once during her campaign. Biden didn’t make that mistake.

Since I woke, Wisconsin and Michigan started counting all their absentee and mail-in ballots. Milwaukee gave Biden the lead in the Badger state. In Michigan the Detroit area did the same thing. 

We actually won’t know vote totals in all the states for a few days. The popular vote right now is Biden: 70,553,886 Trump: 67,264,273.  The candidate winning the popular vote has lost the electoral vote twice in my lifetime. I hope this is not the third time.

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Sadly, regardless of who eventually wins, the country will remain very divided. These divisions are based on numerous things all of which, to me, are smokescreens for what really ails our nation. Yes, there is a systemic racism in the system. Our races, our religions, our various ethnic backgrounds are all things that keep us separated, figuratively and literally. At the root of our differences, however, is money, the haves versus the have nots. 

When I was growing up, I distinctly remember the residual fear of the Great Depression that my parents and grandparents experienced. That fear was being out of work and poor. If you had a job and money coming in, you certainly didn’t want any other group ruining your chance at solvency. Irish, Chinese, Italians, Polish and other ethnic groups all experienced discrimination from other groups of immigrants previously established in the country. Catholic immigrants faced the same from the established Protestant faiths. Black and Native Americans were always at the bottom of the pile of opportunity.

There is an extremely and increasingly small number of people who control the largest amount of wealth. The rest are scraps that the rest of us have to fight over.

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It’s been six years since Pete Seeger died. It’s been longer since Woody Guthrie died. People like that don’t come along very often. In more ways than one, both men have helped unite people. I think it’s time to find someone like them to lead us again in song.

This was a cartoon that came out when Pete died.

This is one of Woody’s songs performed by his granddaughter, Sara Lee Guthrie. 

All You Fascists Bound to Lose - Prove Woody Right

 

All Souls day - Election Eve.

Your are the home I didn't know I needed

When I thought being alone

Was what I meant but didn't say

When I find what I may lack

There is always a way back

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I don’t get a lot of views on this page, not that I expected to get many even when I started this. Blogs are passé now, I suppose. I think all the “influencers” on the internet use twitter, instagram and tick tock. I don’t understand that whole tick tock thing. I think more people are doing podcasts, too. I’m sticking with words and my poor typing skills.

The views I get are mostly from the United States. Sometimes I get some people in Canada and England, excuse me, the United Kingdom. The odd views are the single views from places like Somalia, Kenya, and Russia. I suspect that the people in Somalia and Kenya are looking to start sending me messages from some prince that wants to give me money. I’d like to think that there is that one person in Russia who is honestly interested in what I have to say, but given the news of how much they are interfering in our elections, I suspect that they probably have more nefarious intentions.

So, if you are that one person in Russia reading this, leave me the hell alone. I’m just an old fucker saying what I want to say. Just like other Americans.

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Pete Seeger quote:

​"Participation, it's the only thing that's gonna save the human race."

If you can't march or phone bank or donate, you can call or write or email your senators and representatives. They probably won't listen much, but you can still tell them how you feel.

Or you can vote.

Pete's banjo had these words written on it:

"This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender"

Woody Guthrie quote:

Woody Guthrie quote:

"The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine"

Woody's guitar read: This machine kills fascists.

A lot of people think we are in dangerous times in our country. I think so, too. Biden is right. This election is about the soul of our nation and what we decide tomorrow will determine the direction we go for a long time.

If we don't like the direction it takes, then we will have to do what we think is best for ourselves and our families. We just might have to be the machine ourselves.

Tomorrow is election day. We should all be singing Woody's words:

Vote dammit. Just vote. Prove Woody right.

Observations two days from an election

 All Saints Day - two days until the election

Two days to go in this election madness and regardless of who wins, by the end of this year, we’ll start seeing people jockeying for the nomination in 2024. 

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When you’re down, fight it

March uphill

Keep marching 

Find what’s wrong and right it.

If they knock you down, get up

Fight it.

Fix what’s wrong and right it.

Just remember that you are part

Of what they call the riff raff 

And of that you should be proud

When you want cry instead just laugh

Cuz you are part of a larger crowd

We outnumber them

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The GOP will try to change the rules of counting votes. Democrats will try to count the votes. On election night, no candidate is awarded electoral votes. That only comes after the votes are tallied and certified by each state. Some states will have all their ballots tallied. Most won’t. Patience will be a virtue more than ever. I keep telling myself that.

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Doctors and nurses DO NOT make any more money on COVID patients than they did before the pandemic. I wish Trump would stop telling that lie. As one health care worker said:

It is true, however, that hospitals do get 2000 bucks. According to researchgate.net, 

“The average cost of an ICU day is estimated at US$10,794.00 for the first day and then plateaus at US$3,968/day by the third day, depending on the need for mechanical ventilation, 25 and surgical floor costs are estimated at US$1,488/ day” 

While the average ICU stay is a 3.3 days, the ICU stay for COVID ranges from 5 to 19 days. Seems that an extra 2000 bucks that hospitals get is cheap.