The colonel’s shepherd’s pie

The main impetus for this own was leftovers from a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal from a couple days ago.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. ground turkey which appears to have a fair amount of mechanically-separated turkey in it.
• Leftover baked beans (not KFC)
• Leftover KFC green beans, about half a large order
• Leftover KFC gravy, 90% of a container
• Leftover small potatoes, baby carrots, and “fiestaflower” (a genetically-orange cauliflower) that had been in the crockpot with Monday’s corned beef, all chopped up
• raisins
• one extra large egg
• About half a container of leftover KFC mashed potatoes, which turned out not to be enough to spread across most of the top; somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 is thinly covered. Had I mashed potato mix on hand, I would’ve used it.

This is all in there for a half an hour a 375 degrees – I’ll go Fahrenheit this time. Then I’ll be turning the oven off and letting it coast, while I head out to pick up the kids; I cannot bring myself to leave the oven on in an empty house. We’ll see what it looks like when I get back, whether it needs more time or if it’s overdone. (It’ll almost certainly be moist; that was watery gravy. I wonder how the gravy flavor fights the baked beans for supremacy.)

The myth of DOMA’s effect on Sally Ride

I see posts going around saying that DOMA keeps Sally Ride’s partner from getting death benefits, and this is showing up even at places like the New York Times, which should know better. As much as I hate DOMA, in the interest of accuracy I must point out that this is not the case – as best as I can find, death benefits do not accrue to unmarried partners in either same-sex or mixed-sex couples. No report I’ve seen indicated that Ride was married to Dr. O’Shaughnessy, even though they did have the opportunity; they were together for decades by the time that California, the state they were living in, started granting same-sex marriages. Even after California stopped, someone who had been to space could surely have arranged to travel to a state which would have granted them a marriage… a marriage which would have achieved some recognition (although not under the term “marriage”) in California. The elimination of DOMA would not require states to start granting same-sex marriages (although it may serve to encourage it in practical terms), and it certainly wouldn’t turn unmarried couples into married ones. There are surely enough reasons to argue that DOMA is bad law and bad policy; we needn’t hang false ones on.

Political Animals

Just watched the premiere of the USA Network miniseries Political Animals. Reckoned it might be some form of good – Sigourney Weaver doing TV is something that carries some weight.

Weaver plays a very thinly veiled Hillary Clinton. I mean, very; it’s like this started as a piece of Hillary fan fiction. She’s the wife of the two-term philandering 42nd President of the United States who runs for president herself years later, loses the primary, but ends up working as Secretary of State for the man who defeated her. VERY. They could’ve named her Clillary Hinton and still been no less subtle.

Within this context, she deals with family secrets, with journalists digging for those secrets, and with international gamesmanship. It’s watchable, the parts are well played, but it fails to be convincing. This is neither racy enough to be a guilty pleasure (although there are various scenes of sex that go beyond what one would find on the broadcast channels) nor insightful enough to be a serious drama. Its world of journalism is focused one women who are far too concerned with proper use of the term “bitch”, and where conflicts apparently arise because Carla Gugino isn’t the sexy one. (Carla’s the good-gal journalist in this, the one who holds back reporting a story so she can use it as blackmail; actually reporting the story is something left to the bad-gal journalist. The script is focused enough on the women in power as dealing with the carelessness and abuse of the men around them that I’m left wondering if this was crafted with Lifetime in mind. Add in some ugly gay stereotyping and we’re left with… watching Sigourney do her thing. Which is of value, of course, but while I’ll be DVRing the upcoming episodes, I would not be surprised if I forrgo actually watching them.