Dead of Winter

Looks a little something like this in Minnesota:

Sweet Potato Soup with Chilies and Honey

I tried and loved this very easy recipe for sweet potato soup. The flavors are interesting and complex because of the mix of spicy/savory and sweet and because of the roasting of the sweet potatoes. In the dead of winter, I'm always craving creamy food and this is at least a little creamy without being full of the calories that usually come with creamy.

2 lbs fresh sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into wedges (I cut them into slabs of relatively uniform thickness so they cook evenly)
2 TBSP olive oil
1/2 tsp hot pepper flakes
1/2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 cup golden honey
6 cups chicken stock

Options for garnishes:
1/2 cup heavy cream whipped to soft peaks
1/2 cup fresh cilantro leaves, chopped
1/2 cup pumpkin seeds

Preheat oven to 375 F, with rack in the middle. Put all ingredients except stock (and optional garnishes) in a medium bowl and toss very well. Tip everything onto an ungreased heavy cookie sheet or shallow roasting pan. Bake at 375 F for 40 minutes, but check them after 25 minutes. (You don’t want any blackening on the edges, but you do want them to brown well in a few spots. If you get black spots on any of your wedges, don’t use them in the soup – just eat them.)

Put the stock in a large pan over medium heat and add the roasted sweet potatoes and simmer for 20 minutes.

Blend to a smooth puree, either with an immersion blender or in small batches in a blender. Check the consistency; if too thin, return to pot and simmer further; if too thick, add water or stock.

Optional: add garnish to dished soup. I recommend a good crusty bread to go along with it.

This recipe was printed in the Fall 2008 issue of Real Food, a magazine provided free by Lunds & Byerlys (my favorite grocery stores), and I post it here with permission from the magazine's editor, Dara Grumdahl. The recipe is the creation of caterer Serena Bass.

More on taxes from the CBO

From Mankiw:
...

Here are the total effective federal tax rates for 2005, the most recent year available:

Lowest quintile: 4.3 percent
...

Top 0.01 Percentile: 31.5 percent

N.B.: These figures include all federal taxes, not just income taxes.

Tax Transparency

A lot of talk going on about the President-elect’s tax concessions in order to get the Rethugs, or at least some of them, to go along with his economic recovery plan.

One of the ideas I’ve heard floated is a sort of tax holiday in which, instead of rebates, employers simply wouldn’t deduct any income taxes from the employee paychecks for a certain period. I used to think this would never happen because it would give taxpayers a painful reminder about taxes once the holiday ended and their checks went back down to the pre-holiday amount. It would make that income tax too transparent. Of course, any taxpayer with a brain sees the amount that is deducted but I believe there are many taxpayers who see their refunds as some sort of windfall they get every spring. I know people who actually ask employers to withhold at higher rates than necessary to enforce saving when they should have been using the time value of money to increase net worth. Because of lunacy like this, maybe a holiday can be safely implemented.

I also hear it tossed around a lot on the right that among industrialized nations, only Japan’s corporate income tax rate exceeds ours. I have never understood corporate income taxes except that politicians know they can succeed because they are not transparent. Corporations are not taxpayers; they are tax collectors. At least one’s local sales taxes are visible. Lawyers out there know there are ways to avoid those corporate income taxes on the federal level (at least for smaller businesses) by making a sub-S election or jumping through other hurdles. I don’t get why a corporation, upon reaching a certain size, should become a tax collector. If we want transparency, let’s drop the corporate income tax and increase my income tax accordingly.

The Sopranos

One of the running jokes with my friends is how long it takes me to jump on bandwagons. Books, movies, music, tv. One prime example is Seinfeld. I didn't start watching it until maybe season 3 or 4, even when my friends were telling me how great it was. It WAS great. It IS great. In my opinion, the best tv series ever. The Sopranos is another example. My excuse is/was that I don't have HBO. But even after being released on dvd, it still took me until maybe last year to start checking the series out.

I finished Season 3 yesterday. While I'm finally getting and seeing the subtle humor (whether intentional or not is up to some debate I think), I'm still not seeing what all the hype was about. It's good, it's different, but I'm not sure I would have made it to season 3 if I had been watching it real time. As for the humor, I question the humor aspect based upon listening to the commentaries that are part of some of the episodes. The directors and the creator (David Chase) make comments about inside jokes, extremely subtle lines, the way the actors made something funny that might not have been written that way, etc. So that makes me question whether the humor was intended or just a part of the actors playing it that way. I guess it's both and maybe that is the genius that everyone else sees.

Season 3 did have, so far, my favorite episode - Pine Barrens. Basically a debt collection gone bad - way bad. The stuff in the woods is very funny and the comments on the commentary (by director Steve Buscemi of Fargo fame) gave a lot of insight into how they filmed the wood scenes. He mentioned several times how the actors underplayed scenes that made the humor even better. The episode had a very "Fargo" feel, which he said wasn't intentional at all. It just happened to snow at the location before and during the 4 day filming.

I will start Season 4 in the next week or so (thank you Netflix). I'm not sure what direction Season 4 will go in, but I have to think that a couple of the regular characters have to have something bad happen to them. Time will tell.

Medicare/Social Security Ponzi Scheme

From John Stossel at JWR:

Ten years after Social Security passed in 1935, there were almost 42 workers for each retiree. Five years later, the ratio slipped to about 17 to 1. Now it's about 3.4 to 1. Thirty years from now, the ratio is projected to be 2 to 1.

Think of the burden on those two to three workers who'll have to support one retiree for 15 to 20 years.

With African-American males having the shortest life spans and white women having the longest...who's taking care of my mother?

Thank you credit/financial/mortgage crisis

To date, the only effect the financial crisis has had on C and I was in a negative way, as mentioned here. Well, now we've had a positive. I spent most of the day yesterday on the phone going through the process of refinancing our mortgage. Went from a 30yr @ 6.58% to a 15yr @ 4.69%. Our monthly payment went up just a bit, but the prospect of paying off the mortgage in at least half the time is very, very attractive. Then we can start on the vacation cabin in Wisconsin.

Re: Daily Coyote

Wow. I finally took the time. Those photos are amazing. Even if this ultimately ends not so well (as I suspect it might), it is an interesting experiment.

Take your time and follow Stephanie's advice and start from the beginning.

Good Heavens!

Take a look at these guys...flying. Yep. Flying. Stolen from Hot Air.

Dallas "winter" weather

The weather in the DFW is so weird. Saturday C and I were doing yard work (raking leaves, cleaning gutters, taking down Christmas decorations) wearing shorts with the temp near 80. Yesterday, it never got above 44. Today, freezing rain and temps near freezing. A week or so before we left for Wisconsin for Christmas, it was 80, then down to the highs in the 20's for 3 days, up to the 50's, then down to the 30's and back to the 70's in the span of 7 days.

Can anyone say...climate change????

The Daily Coyote

Shreve Stockton is a writer and photographer who has transplanted herself from NYC to a 12X12 cabin in Wyoming. In 2007, she was given a coyote pup, 10 days old, by a cowboy who'd just orphaned the pup by killing its parents and siblings (for his government job to protect cattle from coyotes) and who later becomes her boyfriend. She's raising the coyote, Charlie, and lives with him. She chronicled their first year in a book, The Daily Coyote, which I have not read. She also blogs about the experience here, with lots more pictures (beautiful pictures) than text. I recommend starting from the beginning, to enjoy watching Charlie grow up. Among other fascinating things, the coyote gets along great with her cat. Of course, there's plenty of criticism out there for her for raising a wild animal and for pimping out the coyote (besides the book, she sells calendars and T-shirts), and for giving (crazy) people the impression they should raise coyotes too (she strongly discourages this). I'm suspending judgment and just enjoying the beautiful photography of coyotes and Wyoming.

Book report: All the King’s Men

This was a book club pick that I wasn’t all that excited to read, but I’m glad we did. It’s a classic of contemporary American fiction and It has been a gap in my literary education but now I’ll know what people mean when they reference this.

Set in the 1920’s in a Southern state, it’s loosely based on Huey Long’s political operation in Louisiana. Ostensibly, the main character is Willie Stark who begins as a small-time politician used by the state political machine to its own ends and rises to become governor and the boss of his own ruthless corrupt political machine. Willie’s corruption is different from the machine he’s supplanted; he’s doing it for the good of the people and he secures cooperation by threatening to divulge others’ secrets rather than offering them cash.

The real main character, though, is the narrator, Jack Burden, who tells us Willie’s story. Jack reveals his own story along the way and we get to know him through his observations and long and intricate descriptions of things.

It reminds me a smidge of Virginia Woolf (with the stream of consciousness narration), a little bit of Catcher in the Rye (Jack and Holden are similarly emotionally disconnected from the worlds they describe), with a splash of noir with some mystery, patter in the dialogue, and deliciously overwrought metaphors on every page, a few of which have graced the subhead recently. The metaphors alone are reason to read the book. I may have used this as a subhead, but I’ve forgotten, and it’s worth enjoying again anyway:

Duffy was face to face with the margin of mystery where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails in the test tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and we hear the laughter in the ether dream.

It won the Pulitzer in 1947. Two movies have been made of it, one in 1949 and one in 2006. The 2006 version (Sean Penn, Jude Law) was on Ebert's list of the worst movies of 2006.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

I normally stay away from any and all things "Oprah". Had I known that this was an Oprah Book Club selection, I might not have asked for this for Christmas. But, it got great reviews and was set in rural, northern Wisconsin. Since we recently purchased land in northern Wisconsin, I was interested.

This is a long book (560+ pages) and is rather slow. Not boring slow, but slow. It held my interest through-out, whether in the description of the training of the dogs they raised, the bond between mother and child, the bond between child and family "pet", the description of life in a remote setting, the portrait of the landscape and sounds and smells of that part of Wisconsin.

I had read a blurb somewhere that the author has been approached to write a sequel; sadly (I thought), I read this before I had finished the book. So I was somewhat (though in a strange way) pleasantly surprised at the ending. In what way the author would write a sequel is enough to ensure I check it out if in fact he writes one.

I think both of my fellow contributors would love this book, if for no other reason than being dog lovers/owners. The setting in the NW part of Wisconsin should be familiar enough to Stephanie; for Scooter, well no guns, but lots and lots of dogs.

GM, Chrysler and Treasury v. Ford

When I heard about the GMAC bailout, I didn’t connect the dots. Per the WSJ, what a slap in Ford’s face:

When the Bush Treasury decided to bail out Detroit, GM and Chrysler quickly said yes to the taxpayer cash, but Ford Motor Co. said it didn't need the money and declined. Ford's reward for this show of self-reliance? Treasury is now helping GM again by giving it a credit pricing advantage against Ford in the marketplace.

That's one little-noted result of Treasury's action earlier this week to rescue GMAC, the GM credit arm that, as it happens, is 51% owned by the Cerberus private-equity shop that also owns Chrysler. With $5 billion in taxpayer cash in its pocket, GMAC quickly decided to offer 0% financing on several of its models. "I think it would be fair to say that without this change . . . we would not be able to do this today," explained GM Vice President Mark LaNeve in a conference call with reporters this week.
…

This is always what happens when politicians decide to muck around in private industry. Even when made with the best intentions, their policy decisions have unintended consequences that help some companies at the expense of others. Meanwhile, your neighbor who buys a GM SUV this weekend with 0% financing should thank you when he pulls into the driveway. He did it with your money.

An Austin Legend passes

Feel like an active, community oriented/interested person? You just think you are. A fellow lion Willie Kocurek passed away yesterday. I met and talked to him a few times through Lions but I certainly couldn’t call him anything more than an acquaintance.

Just some snippets from today’s Austin American Statesman:

Willie Kocurek, a former Austin school board president, merchant and bow-tie-wearing pitchman recognized as a tireless civic advocate, died Thursday of natural causes at the Westminster Manor retirement home. He was 98.

Kocurek, who had an elementary school in Southwest Austin named for him in 1986, was known for his gracious personality and can-do spirit. He spent his life advocating for a variety of causes, including care for the elderly and education. He was a perpetual student, entering law school at age 67 and starting a practice at age 70.

"He didn't stick to one theme and one passion," said Joyce Lauck, executive director of Austin Groups for the Elderly, which Kocurek co-founded in 1986 to provide resources to seniors. "Underlying all of it was care and concern and making the community better."
...
Kocurek remained vigorous throughout most of his life, also working as a banker into his 90s.
...
His slogans "Where there's a Willie, there's a way" and "You don't need money, just a little bit a month," as well as hand-drawn Mr. K. newspaper ads, led him to be called one of the most visible and often-quoted men in town.
...
A newer generation of Austinites knew him on the airwaves as a promoter of education.
"He knew everybody and everybody knew Willie; he was friendly to everybody," said one of Kocurek's grandchildren, Dr. Jeffrey Kocurek, an Austin urologist. "I have patients come into my office every day saying 'I met your grandfather. Your grandfather gave me credit when no one else would."

Kocurek served on the Austin school board from 1946 to 1954, the last four years as board president. In recent decades he offered his quasi-celebrity to the Austin school district as an advocate for school bond referendums, appearing on television to urge Austinites to approve the measures at the polls.
...

Eventually, he bought that service station and expanded it from a place that sold gas and lube jobs to what became the Willie Kocurek Co. Kocurek also began wearing a leather bow tie.
"The reason it was leather was oil could be wiped off," he recalled once. That evolved into red cloth bow ties sewn by his wife Maurine, an Austin native whom he married in 1934.
...
Indeed, Kocurek enrolled at the University of Texas School of Law in 1977. He had gone to law school in 1943, but his work schedule and service in the U.S. Navy during World World II interrupted his studies.

In the 1980s, Kocurek chaired the Austin school district's Forming the Future long-range planning project, which involved 14,000 Austinites developing goals and building plans for the district. From that came a $210 million bond issue that voters passed overwhelmingly in 1983.
He later chaired an $80 million bond election drive for the school district in 1986.
...
J.P. Kirksey, past president of the Austin Founders Lions Club, a group Kocurek belonged to since 1939, once told the American-Statesman: "He gave an unselfish sharing of himself."

The last Cotton Bowl at the Cotton Bowl

To continue my sports theme for the past 2 days, I thought I would mention the Cotton Bowl game to be played today. Ole Miss vs Texas Tech. Normally, I would be for the SEC team (Ole Miss), but for reasons too complicated to go into, I'm rooting for a BIG TT win today.

I also won't get into the whole thing about why the game won't be played in Dallas or the Cotton Bowl stadium anymore. My interest is about why is the game being played on January 2, instead of the traditional Jan 1 date? It's a work day for most and the game will be over around 4-5pm, which will help nicely with the Friday afternoon traffic mess that is bad enough without adding 70,000 more folks around Fair Park. Nice planning. I guess they want everyone to get used to the traffic hell that will happen at the new "Jerry World" stadium in Arlington - a stadium that will hold between 85,000 to 100,000 (depending on the event) with even less parking and traffic flow options.

So long Cotton Bowl as we knew you - we'll miss you (maybe).

NHL Winter Classic

The NHL played their 3rd Winter Classic (outdoor game on 1/1) today at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The Chicago Blackhawks vs the Detroit Red Wings. My interest in this was two-fold. First, C and I are BIG Wings fans and second, watching outdoor hockey. Since I grew up in Houston, I don't get the whole outdoor hockey thing, but it was obvious that it was a very big deal to the players. The skating wasn't as smooth and fast as you see with indoor games (ice conditions and the wind in Chicago toady played a big role in that), but it was a very entertaining game. Big hits, lot of goals, great saves. The only thing missing, as in most NHL games these days, was a fight.



I posted this last picture to show the uniforms the teams were wearing today, especially the Wings. This was the uniform they wore during their first season in the NHL, back in the 1920's. I liked the shirt, but the socks are awful. The Detroit players described them as "Dr. Seuss uniforms", which is a very accurate description.

The Wings won 6-4. All-in-all a great day for hockey fans.