Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalMust-Have Spice Blends That Culinary Experts Swear By
While some chefs turn up their noses at spice blends ― such as everything bagel seasoning or Old Bay, for example ― these flavorful seasonings can be a real asset in the kitchen.
“Spice blends come in handy when you’re looking to enhance the flavor profile of a dish and you don’t want to buy numerous containers of multiple herbs and spices for a single recipe,” cookbook author Brian Theis told HuffPost.
He noted that spice blends can also be a great option when you’re trying your hand at new dishes and types of cuisines from different cultures around the world.
“Also, many popular spice blends have a signature flavor profile that you just can’t quite create on your own, at least with the same trademark results,” Theis added. “Certain blends might contain dried lemon or orange peel, for example, which are not common ingredients to come by on their own.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/spice-blends-experts-swear-by_l_61ae21f6e4b025be1afac58a
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I have my own favorites---some in this article, like garam masala and Tony Chachere's, but also berberé, harissa, a good Madras curry powder, and of course Sazón. And we also love the various varieties of Japanese rice seasonings, which we use on a lot of other things. What are your favorites?
'She was very complicated. She was a conundrum': who was the real Lucille Ball?
“She was very complicated, she was very loving and she was very mercurial. She was very generous but she came from the Depression and she was very guarded about money. She was a conundrum. She was a paradox of things. But she made me feel like I was the only person in the room, even in a crowd, and she made me feel authentic.”
Lee Tannen, author and playwright, is in full flow as he reminisces about his intense decade-long friendship with Lucille Ball, once the funniest and most famous woman in America. Her 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy, pulled in 60m viewers and became part of the country’s cultural DNA.
Thirty-two years after her death, the legend is about to be burnished by Being the Ricardos, a biographical drama starring Nicole Kidman as Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, her husband both in real life and on screen. It explores the couple’s personal relationship – they divorced after 19 years but are said to have remained soulmates – and a professional crisis in which their careers were nearly derailed by the “red scare” in Hollywood.
This chapter of Ball’s career is so little known that writer and director Aaron Sorkin was unaware of it when he took on the project.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/dec/07/she-was-very-complicated-she-was-a-conundrum-who-was-the-real-lucille-ball
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I'm probably the only person in the world who doesn't think "I Love Lucy" was funny, but I think she was an interesting person.
The inner lives of cats: what our feline friends really think about hugs, happiness and humans
I wanted to know the exact amount of time I spend ruminating on the inner lives of my cats, so I did what most people do in times of doubt, and consulted Google. According to my search history, in the two years since I became a cat owner I have Googled variations of “cat love me – how do I tell?” and “is my cat happy” 17 times. I have also inadvertently subscribed to cat-related updates from the knowledge website Quora, which emails me a daily digest. (Sample: Can Cats Be Angry or Disappointed With Their Owner?)
How do I love my cats? Let me count the ways. The clean snap of three-year-old Larry’s jaw as he contemplates me with detached curiosity is my favourite sound in the world. I love the tenor and cadence of my six-month-old kitten Kedi’s miaows as he follows me around the house. (High-pitched indignant squeaks means he wants food; lower-pitched chirrups suggest he would like to play.) I love the weight of Larry on my feet at night and the scratchy caress of Kedi’s tongue on my eyelid in the morning.
But how do I know what these little tykes really think and feel? I fear the authors of online listicles written in cursive fonts are unlikely to provide me with the latest scientific research – and are probably just saying what they think I want to hear. To truly journey into the feline soul, I will have to go to the fountainhead.
Despite the fact that cats are the most common pet in UK households after dogs, we know relatively little about them. This, says Dr Carlo Siracusa of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, “is partly due to practical problems.”
Dogs are easy to study: you can take them to a lab and they will be content. But cats are intensely territorial creatures. “The behaviour of a cat is so modified by its environment that if you move it to a laboratory,” says Siracusa, “what you’ll see is not really reflective of what the normal behaviour of the cat is.”
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/08/the-inner-lives-of-cats-what-our-feline-friends-really-think-about-hugs-happiness-and-humans
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For further reading, I suggest The Tribe of Tiger, by Eiizabeth Marshall Thomas
The lead poisoning crisis unfolding among US children
Nine-year-old Turokk Dow loves spelling, airplanes and basketball. He is learning to read and write in his third grade classroom.
But suffering from extreme blood lead poisoning at age 3 – with lead levels nearly ten times the EPA action level – has hugely exacerbated the already-substantial challenges in his young life.
As a toddler, he had to be rushed to the hospital and started on months of “chelation” treatments to soak up the lead in his body. These involved making him swallow a liquid that his mom said “smelled and tasted like rotten eggs”.
“His levels were so high that lead actually got stored in his muscle and his bone,” said his mother, Nette Catholdi-Dow, who now works as an advocate against lead poisoning at the Childhood Lead Action Project in Rhode Island.
She said it was only last year, five years after the poison was first detected, that his lead levels dropped to the single digits, getting close to the EPA’s action level of 5 micrograms per deciliter. He still does not have the ability to hold a conversation, and his mother will always wonder how much the lead contributed to his many learning challenges.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/08/lead-poisoning-crisis-us-children
The Criminalization of Testosterone Endangers Gender Variant People
On a Saturday night two years ago, Stann Fransisco was driving back home to New Mexico after visiting their parents in Connecticut. Crossing through Texas, they were just reaching the small, well-lit town of Stratford when they knew they were too tired to keep driving safely, so they pulled off the highway to rest their eyes for a bit. As they hopped into the back seat to join their service dog, they suddenly saw flashing police lights. Officers approached the car.
“One officer said, ‘It smells like you’ve been having a party in here. Is that right?’” Fransisco, a white nonbinary person in their 30s, told Filter. “He said, ‘Well, if you haven’t been having a party, you won’t mind if we check your car.’”
Moving quickly, the officers violently handcuffed Fransisco, took their keys and called animal control to confiscate their dog. Then they searched the car.
“One yelled, ‘Show me your track marks, you fucking junkie! We found your needles and drugs,’” Fransisco said. The cop held up their prescription bottle of testosterone. “I said, ‘Those aren’t drugs, that’s my medication. I’m trans.’”
“The second it went out of my mouth, I think ‘Oh, fuck’ … I’m sitting there in a sundress and they see male hormones after they’ve been waiting to get me alone because they think I’m a girl.”
https://truthout.org/articles/the-criminalization-of-testosterone-endangers-gender-variant-people/
Watchdogs Urge DOJ to Investigate Legality of Facebook's Cryptocurrency Venture
Financial industry watchdogs are asking federal officials to attempt to stop the cryptocurrency pilot program launched by Facebook, noting that the U.S. government has the power to criminally prosecute executives for operating the venture.
The Open Markets Institute sent a letter on November 23 to numerous regulatory agencies and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), saying the omnipresent tech conglomerate may be “in the illegal business of receiving deposits without a bank charter.”
“There are several legal and regulatory implications for Facebook’s pilot that warrant particular attention by the agencies,” the Open Markets Institute letter stated.
Other financial industry analysts share the Open Markets Institute’s opinion. Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress issued a joint statement in response to the pilot, urging “relevant regulators and lawmakers with jurisdiction over banking, consumer protection, and antitrust to intervene to put this project on hold.”
https://truthout.org/articles/watchdogs-urge-doj-to-investigate-legality-of-facebooks-cryptocurrency-venture/
This Small Tech Company May Be a Ransomware Front Group
It seems innocent enough: a little-known Canadian company that offers an array of tech and consulting services. But a certificate from that company—a sort of signature that can be tacked onto malware—showed up in two pieces of ransomware last month and leading experts told The Daily Beast they believe the small company is actually a front for at least two Russian ransomware gangs.
The company—cheerily named “SpiffyTech”—has a number of red flags. For one, if you want to look at SpiffyTech’s leadership team, you’re out of luck. They don’t exist.
The site does list four top staffers next to their stylish headshots. But the SpiffyTech operators appear to have stolen each and every photo.
A reverse image search on Google shows the headshots come from a professional photographer’s website. The photographer, Kirill Tigai, confirmed the photos in question were part of a shoot for a different company and said he did not give SpiffyTech permission to use them.
“I think… this website SpiffyTech is a fraud,” Tigai told The Daily Beast. “They just use photos that I made for my clients under different names.”
Another reason experts believe “SpiffyTech” is a front is far more technical.
Hackers frequently steal certificates from actual businesses in order to help their attacks fly under the radar and trick computers into thinking their malware is legitimate. And while it’s possible the hackers did the same here—or tricked a real company into sharing a legitimate “cert”—the shadiness of the site, and its apparent connection to ransomware, leads cybersecurity analysts to believe SpiffyTech is a disguise for something more sinister.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/this-small-tech-company-spiffytech-may-actually-be-a-ransomware-front-group?ref=home
How Donald Trump Could Help Stacey Abrams Win Georgia
The last time Donald Trump screwed things up for the Republican Party in Georgia—less than a year ago—it cost his party control of the U.S. Senate and the country trillions of dollars (so far). Guess who’s back to offer more “help” to Georgia Republicans?
In case you missed it, Trump (who also managed to lose Georgia’s electoral votes during the presidential election to a Democrat for the first time since 1992) is backing former U.S. Senator David Perdue in a primary bid against Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, who angered Trump by not helping him overturn the 2020 election results. Trump wants to get even, but a lot of Republicans just want to get ahead.
“I would hate to see two good men run against each other,” Eric Tanenblatt, who served as chief of staff to former Gov. Sonny Perdue, told CNN’s Mike Warren in November. “Having watched the Republican Party become the dominant party in Georgia, it’s puzzling to me [that] we would see a sitting incumbent Republican governor be challenged by another Republican.”
“My hope is that [Perdue] won’t run,” Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter, a Trump supporter, told Warren at the time. “My hope is that we’ll have just one candidate that we can unify behind.”
Guess what? Party unification isn’t at the top of Trump’s priority list. And keeping Stacey Abrams from becoming governor is, at best, a distant third (right behind getting revenge against his enemies and paving the way for his own 2024 election).
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-donald-trump-could-help-stacey-abrams-win-georgia?ref=home
Jersey City's New Police Chief Has Never Been a Cop
Tawana Moody has never conducted an arrest. She’s never had a badge or a police-issued gun, and she hasn’t gone through academy training. Yet she’s in charge of Jersey City, New Jersey’s 950-officer police department.
Moody, a 50-year-old Black woman with no traditional law enforcement experience, became the country’s first civilian police leader earlier this year, when her predecessor retired. To address the growing gap between the force and the community at a time when national faith in law enforcement was at an all-time low, Democratic Mayor Steven Fulop decided the department needed a fresh perspective and appointed Moody, instead of a sworn officer, in February.
“I was born and raised in Jersey City my whole life,” Moody, who’s also the first Black woman to lead the department, said of the fast-growing and racially diverse city, just outside Manhattan. “Growing up here, we know the struggle of what people didn’t understand about homelessness, about the drug dealers and other issues in the city. And all the community really wants is accountability and to know what’s going on.”
Police departments often hire leaders who’ve retired or haven’t worked on the force in years—much like the Constitution’s requirement for control of the military. But unlike Moody, these retired officers have always had a firm foundation in law enforcement, working their way up the police hierarchy for decades before exiting and returning to lead. Without that same experience, the idea is that Moody can merge the interests of the community and the department, without the same pressure to adhere to the problematic elements of police culture, like the “Blue Wall of Silence.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akvevk/jersey-citys-new-police-chief-has-never-been-a-cop
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More of this, please!
'I thought I was a free man': the engineer fighting Texas's ban on boycotting Israel
For more than two decades, Texan civil engineer Rasmy Hassouna was a contractor for the city of Houston. Hassouna has consulted the city on soil volatility in the nearby Gulf of Mexico – a much needed service to evaluate the structural stability of houses and other buildings.
He was gearing up to renew his government contract when a particular legal clause caught his eye: a provision that effectively banned him or his company, A&R Engineering and Testing, Inc, from ever protesting the nation of Israel or its products so long as his company was a partner with the city of Houston.
For Hassouna – a 59-year-old proud Palestinian American – it was a huge shock.
“I came here and thought I was a free man. It’s not anybody’s business what I do or what I say, as long as I’m not harming anybody,” he told the Guardian. “Were you lying all this time? If I don’t want to buy anything at WalMart, who are you to tell me not to shop at WalMart? Why do I have to pledge allegiance to a foreign country?”
But Hassouna’s reaction did not stop at anger. He took action, launching a case that is challenging the Texas law and – by example – similar provisions that have spread all over the US that seek to stop government contractors from boycotting Israel and can be found in more than 25 US states. Along with the Arkansas Times newspaper, A&R Engineering and Testing Inc is now one of only two companies fighting this kind of law in the nation.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/07/texas-ban-boycotting-israel
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