Building the Thanksgiving Plate

Building the Thanksgiving Plate actually starts weeks, possibly months before Thanksgiving, depending on who is in charge of orchestrating the meal.  If you are completely in control, you can leave everything to the last few weeks, since the most important part, deciding what to eat, was determined decades ago.  If you are depending on friends or family to assemble the menu, you may need to spend months, even years, conditioning your loved ones to ensure the critical items are included.  I usually do this by whining and moaning about the importance of The Key Components of a Proper Thanksgiving Meal whenever the opportunity comes up.  If this fails, you must be prepared to provide the missing components yourself.

The Key Components are:

Turkey
Stuffing (or dressing)
Mashed Potatoes
Gravy
Green Bean Casserole
Corn
Yams (preferably candied)

Many people consider the Cranberry to be a Key Component.  While I prefer my cranberries mashed up and mixed with vodka, I don’t object to cranberry products on my plate as long as I don’t have to eat them.  I do think they have a negative impact on the visual presentation since they add an unsightly note of color to what is ideally a palette of muted Earth tones.

Once the Key Components are spread out on the counter and the starter’s signal has been given, an experienced trencherman should have no trouble maneuvering close to the front of the line (being at the actual front of the line is considered crude).

Holding the plate in the weak hand, begin to build the Primary Assembly.  The Primary Assembly consists of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  The turkey should be placed first, directly on the plate, in order to serve as the foundation or base.  It should cover almost, but not quite, half the surface of the plate and should be off-center, so that the outside edge of the Primary Assembly is close to the edge of the plate.  With the foundation in place, apply stuffing over roughly half of the turkey and mashed potatoes over the other half (be advised it is very bad form to completely hide the turkey).  Use the serving utensil to put an indentation in the center of the mashed potatoes.  This will facilitate gravy retention.  Then pour gravy over the entire Primary Assembly.  When the Primary Assembly has been completed, cover the remainder of the plate with roughly equal amounts of yams, corn, and green bean casserole.  There should be no space visible between any of the components.

At this point, you may add non-Key Components if there are any, just enough to be polite.  Try to keep them away from the Primary Assembly.

Locate a place at the table, obtain a beverage, and enjoy!

Repeat as required.

Poppa

Changing My Mind Part 2 -The Death Penalty: A Good Idea in Theory, but Difficult to Execute

Back when I was young and knew everything, I didn’t need to think about the death penalty much.  It was in place, no one I knew thought it was controversial, or if they did, they didn’t say so out loud, and the US Justice System was fair and impartial (as evidenced by hundreds of movies and TV shows I watched as a kid).

I became aware of the controversies swirling around the death penalty as I grew older, but I had no philosophical objection to it.  Given the number and nature of the offenses calling for the death penalty in the first five books of the Old Testament, the Three Commandments * didn’t seem to prohibit it, either.  Of course we should only apply the death penalty where it was really, really justified.  Sure, there had been abuses and failures to apply it fairly, but those were exceptions, not the rule.

And then I was called for jury duty.

I’ve been called for jury duty three times and impaneled twice, both times for trials concerning minor altercations.  Seeing the process first-hand, even as applied to these minor matters, has made me blanch at the thought of making someone’s life depend on the less than perfect workings of the system.

I still have no philosophical objection to the death penalty.  Opponents of the death penalty claim it’s not an effective deterrent, and that too many people are sentenced to death unfairly.  They’re wrong about the deterrent factor.  Even a criminal sentenced to life in prison without parole can kill again; a prison employee, another prisoner, or a visitor.  A criminal put to death will never hurt anyone ever again.

However, they’re right about the fairness factor.  The US Justice System is fine as an ideal, but is administered by fallible humans.  The system needs to be able to correct its inevitable mistakes.  There’s no correcting a mistaken execution

If I were King of the World and did a little brainstorming with folks who knew the law, I might be able to come up with a system I could trust to put someone to death.  Until then, the only death penalty I can support is the one applied during the commission of a crime, the penalty known as justifiable homicide.

- Poppa

* The other Seven Commandments have been decriminalized and downgraded to Optional, Good Advice, and Opinion.

Changing My Mind, Part 1 – Religion: Mitigated or Unmitigated Evil?

It’s no great challenge to enumerate the evils committed in the name of religion.  Anyone with the slightest knowledge of history or current events can think of plenty of examples by themselves.  So lets move on.  Is there anything to mitigate the evil of religion?

Back when I was young and knew everything, I knew religion served no useful purpose. Potlucks and acts of charity were nice, but Rotary and Kiwanis could provide those and were, so far, crusade and jihad free.  I also knew only ignorant and thoughtless people clung to religion.  These were people who spent no time thinking about important stuff and big issues, who were religious only because their parents were.  I had to reconsider my position when I started to realize many religious people were far smarter, better educated, and more insightful than I’d ever be.

Still, it took me years to appreciate the beyond-potluck-and-charity positive side of religion.

Humans want structure.  We see patterns everywhere, in clouds and ink stains, in random occurrences.  Religion supplies the structure and meaning we want so badly and allows us to put our experiences and ourselves in a frame of reference.  Religion makes us feel like we matter and have a place in a world growing larger and more complex every year.  Religion gives us the means to control the uncontrollable and endure the unendurable.  Religion allows us to cope with and accept things that don’t seem to have a reason; the death of a loved one, an incurable disease, a train wreck, a killer storm, the slaughter of an innocent, a war.  It’s all free, free in the sense you don’t have to pay money for it unless you want to.  It’s portable and secure.  You can take it anywhere but no one can take it from you.

Powerful stuff.  No wonder religion is still going strong.

But there’s still that pesky evil…

- Poppa