“Rebecca Ransohoff, 9, watches Vice President Al Gore explain how to hypnotize chickens.”

Oh! Uri Gellar was what made the olympic flame stall during the Sydney opening ceremonies! That rascal!

The Cathar religion was extinguished by 1230 by the brutal Albigensian crusade. But that hasn’t stopped all kinds of wackos from appropriating the Cathar name.

10 years before L. Frank Baum had a bestseller with The Wizard of Oz , Baum was publisher of The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer in Aberdeen, South Dakota. It was 1890, a dangerous time to be in South Dakota, especially if you were Native American. Chief Sitting Bull was murdered. The U.S. Army killed about 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek. And L. Frank Baum, in his editorials, called for “the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.” I had no idea.

There’s another presidential debate Wednesday (go Cardinals!). Tom Tomorrow has summed up the last one nicely in this week’s This Modern World.

The University of Georgia football team beat hated rival Tennessee at home Saturday night, in a game that was televised on ESPN. The evening ended in a near-riot as fans stormed the field (early, at that, nearly resulting in Georgia forfeiting the game). During the “celebrations,” a young woman was nearly killed and the stadium suffered over $100,000 in damages. The day before the game, this amusing letter to the editor ran in the local paper.

Human rights defenders from around the world tell their stories for a PBS special presentation.

Here’s a long and thought-out case for euthanizing The Simpsons I found on MSNBC. The author descibes the transformation over the last several years of the original Simpsons characters, especially Homer, into what he calls “the meta-Simpsons”, or, less civilly, “jerkass Homer.” An interview with George Meyer, the last of the staff old guard, helps the author make his case.

My co-worker Paul has a conversation on software code reuse.

Señor Coche, the glory of chicharones! It’s been several years, since I moved away from New Mexico, since I’ve had chicharones. And I miss them. At a few Mexican restaurants here in Athens, I’ve asked if the cooks had any chicharones in the back. After getting over their amazement that a gringo would know what chicharones are, they’d laugh at the sheer notion that they’d have any to make. (Note: one place did briefly put them on the weekend brunch menu after I talked with them about it, but they didn’t stay) Chicharones are but one end product of a Matanza, what the first page referred to as a “pig fry”. Matanzas are family celebrations, usually held around Christmas. The centerpiece is the pig roast, which begins the night before and lasts well into the next day. In fact, the word “matanza” translates as “bloodshed”. The slaughter of the pig used to be a solemn event, as explained in this Spanish oral history project. (elingo.com does a fair job at translating.) The parties are a celebration of a successful year, Christmas, and the upcoming year. They are traditionally open parties, as sharing with neighbors is a major theme. Here’s a nice list of Spanish [Matanza-related recipes](http://soria-goig.com/Recetas/pag_0202.htm#migas matanza), and the rough English translation. The air here turned crisp over the weekend, and brought to mind the wonderful traditional Matanzas I was lucky enough to attend.