I keep seeing this remark everywhere, and it’s gotten on my last nerve:

“All Hasan Nidal had to do to get out of the military was to say he was gay.”

Hasan Nidal was a devout Muslim, of a particularly fanatical strain of Islam. He was never going to say he was gay, for any reason whatsoever. Do you get it? It would not have happened. It’s not even a funny joke or a cogent criticism of the military’s DADT policy. It’s just stupid.

IT WOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED. GET OVER IT. QUIT SAYING IT. STOP. NOW.

Thank you.

My friend doesn’t like soup, so the goat soup is all for me! (And it’s not really goat’s head soup… read on.)

We had a leg of goat the other day, courtesy of the local farmer’s market, that we roasted. (For those who want to know, goat meat is very lean, but you have to cook it slowly at low temperatures or it will be very tough. This means a crock pot, or a stove on low for several hours. The leg took the stove on low.) Anyway, there was this big bone left, so my friend gave it to me so I could make soup. Soup is easy — my mother used to make this wonderful vegetable soup out of a ham bone and whatever vegetables we had available. I figured I could do the same with a goat bone. We also had some leftover kohlrabi — my friend ended up eating none of it, because he’s not a big broccoli or turnip fan and kohlrabi basically tastes like both — so I added the leftovers to the pot.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s run down the recipe, which I more or less made up on the spur of the moment:

• One goat bone, with some meat left clinging to it
• About three quarts of water, or it measured that much once I added the bone
• two beef bouillon cubes (all I had left)
• an eight ounce can of tomato paste, because some online recipe from Africa said to add tomato paste, and I had a can, and didn’t want to save any of it
• one small sweet onion
• two cloves of elephant garlic that I needed to use before it went bad
• the leftover kohlrabi, about two cups
• one cup of white rice.
• A sprinkling of red pepper flakes, maybe about half a teaspoon

I boiled the goat bone for about an hour, then removed it from the water. (By the way, the leg of goat had been marinated in lime juice and red wine, and then cooked with a coating of lemon pepper, rosemary, sage, and thyme.) When the bone cooled, I pulled off all the meat bits I could and added them to the pot in which I’d already put all the rest of the ingredients. Then I brought all to a boil and then let simmer for about an hour and a half. It came out very tomato-y and spicy from the peppers, but the flavors of the goat and the other vegetables (even the kohlrabi — I like broccoli so I liked it fine, but it’s a pain in the ass to deal with, so I figure I’ll just stick with broccoli) weren’t overwhelmed by the tomato-ness. Still, it basically turned out to be tomato-goat-vegetable soup. Not that I mind — I like tomatoes. Anyway, the soup came out real good. Now I have to think of how I’m going to store the rest…

With the soup I had some toast, and I’ve been drinking (only on my second small glass, okay?) a red wine from Democracy Vineyards here in Virginia — the Velvet Revolution 2007 Reserve. It was a tiny bit more than I usually pay for wine, but considering today is the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I couldn’t resist.

Rather buried in the mix about this post on a successful effort by Muslims to get the crucifix banned from Italian public schools is the fact that they also want an “offensive” fresco removed from the Bologna cathedral, and for Dante to be removed from the Italian school curriculum. I certainly hope that the European court, which so far has demonstrated only a complete lack of spine, resists that nonsense. For one thing, fuck you, Muslims, don’t go in the goddamn cathedral if the mural bothers you so much; for another, removing Dante from the school syllabus in Italy would be like removing Shakespeare from British schools, or have they done that already? After all, there are all those “offensive” Muslim characters — Othello, not so much for murdering his wife, but for marrying an infidel; Aaron the villainous Moor in Titus Andronicus — though considering his name was “Aaron” you could say his name is a twofer swipe at Mussulmen and Jews.

In any case, I do hope I get to go to Europe some day while there are still cathedrals and other things from my own heritage, before it’s all torn down and replaced by mosques and “Diversity Awareness Centers” — which I imagine will look like old Soviet museums, with faded red posters sagging on the stained concrete walls, neglected by all and sundry. Anyway, how’s that European Union thing working out for you, Italy?

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

I‘m just shifting some things slightly and playing with the theme. Expect some color changes and so on.

Update: okay! I had a bit of a conflict with the comment editing plugin canceling out some formatting options for people who were not logged in, which is everyone but me since I’m not making people register to comment. So I deactivated the rich text formatting plug in and found one that just puts plain HTML formatting buttons above the comment box. All the tags have to be closed — if you don’t know what that means just click the “close tags” button and all of them will be closed for you. But once you click on a button it will change to show you a backslash, to indicate that after you finish inserting the text you want to format, you need to click the button a second time to close the tag. A properly closed tag looks like this:

<strong>Bold</strong>

And it results in this:

Bold

Obey!

Now, there are no formatting buttons in the editing box, so make sure you pay attention to the ones that come up in the regular commenting box, because they will display the syntax that is allowed on the system. (For example, the commonly used <i></i> and <b></b> are not accepted for italics and bold, you have to use <em></em> and <strong></strong>. And the <strike> tag does not work for strikeouts; the correct syntax is <del></del>. I’ve decided to dispense with underlining; it just looks like a link anyway and is confusing.

Also, I’ve turned on the reply function, but only two comments deep, because any more than one reply is all squished and looks terrible. So you’re limited to one reply per comment.

Hi guys, just a brief note about comments. I have rich-text comment formatting enables (via a plugin). I’m not sure it’s showing up in all operating systems or browsers, though. Most people should see a row of formatting buttons along the top of the comment box. I’ve also added a comment-editing plugin, so you can edit your comments. I have it set to ten minutes, so don’t dawdle! Again, I don’t know if it will work in all operating systems or browsers.

Back to your regularly scheduled stuff.

Update: okay, having checked, the edit box itself uses html tags, not rich text formatting.  I’ll put up a list later.