Nine Odd Jobs that Pay Six Figures

Seriously, we’re getting our airplane repo man gig like tomorrow.

tanya77:

themattsmith:

You guys.  Japanese CGI re-enactment of the Tiger Woods saga.

Sigh. The Japanese Chinese (yikes! how could we get that wrong?) really are five years ahead of us, aren’t they?

What if Gore Had Won?

This week, we’re playing the alternate history game, in which we ask three writers to write the history of the last 10 years if the Supreme Court had decided differently in Bush v. Gore. (Here we must admit that, as great as these three pieces are, none come close to the genius of Thurber’s “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox”). First up for us is Rakoff, with an alternate, oral history of the 00s.

Holcomb, Kansas, 50 years after the In Cold Blood murders.

Tiger Woods seriously injured in car accident.

(via soupsoup)

UPDATE: More here.

OK, last Thanksgiving one of the day, we swear, but we love this from JP

Until about the middle of the last century, most of the turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving would have been what we now call “heritage breeds,” including the Standard Bronze, Bourbon Red, White Holland, Naragansett, and Jersey Buff varieties. These turkeys are gorgeous, hardy creatures, developed in Europe and America over hundreds of years and rich in flavor. Though they are the ancestors to the Broad-Breasted White, a sort of made-up breed that arose in the 1960s with the advent of industrial turkey farms (the Broad-Breasted Bronze was mostly abandoned because its dark pinfeathers put off consumers), they bear little resemblance to that now ubiquitous bird in taste or texture.

Today more than 99 percent of turkeys sold in America come from the roughly 270 million raised on factory farms each year. These birds are bred to be so literally broad-breasted that by the time they are 8 weeks old, they are too fat to walk, much less procreate—every Broad-Breasted White on the market is the product of artificial insemination. They are kept in giant barns, given antibiotics to prevent disease, and fed constantly so that they reach maturity in almost half the time it takes a heritage turkey. The result is bland, mushy meat that we have come to equate with tenderness, but in reality processors inject the dressed birds with saline solutions and vegetable oils to improve “mouth feel” and keep the oversize breasts from drying out.

Julia Reed’s history of the Thanksgiving turkey is like a fine meal.

Today in Fun: Vintage Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Photos (Design:Related). Also, these, via evangotlib.

What Jamaica and Utah have in common…

Without evolution, biology isn’t really science—it’s just memorization—and our kids, even the littlest ones, deserve a more interesting introduction to the natural world than that. It’s time we gave it to them.

Mary Carmichael makes the case for teaching evolution for kids.