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All hail King Mike!
The Snook and I watched a fascinating program last night called Britain’s Real Monarch. While researching a previous documentary, Tony Robinson discovered evidence that Edward IV was illegitimate, and thus every British monarch for the past 500 years has been ineligible for the throne. The goal of the program was to figure out just who exactly *should* be the current monarch. We were only mildly interested until we realized that Tony’s search was taking him to… Australia. That’s right, the true King of England is a fair dinkum Aussie battler. (Okay, so he’s really a Pom and a Lord, but he lives here now and barracked for Australia during the Ashes.) What’s more – he’s a Republican! It was too funny.

I’m going to be ordering tickets today for Goblet of Fire on Thursday (probably the 8:15 show at Broadway) so let me know if you want to join us!

The Thanksgiving Photos are all uploaded and ready for your perusal! The first half are all about the turducken preparation – final boning, spreading the stuffing, sewing him up. (Vegetarians may not want to look!) Then there are a bunch more shots from the party of people eating way too much… I hope everyone is recuperating well today!

We did it!
I’ve got a LOT more photos to upload tomorrow, but these are all I can bear to do right now. I’m going to go into a food coma. Suffice it to say that the turducken was a magnificent and stunning success! Thanks to everybody who attended and shared their awesome food with us.

The Turducken is IN THE OVEN, folks! The assembly was much easier than we’d imagined, and the Snook exhibited a heretofore unknown sewing aptitude with a blanket stitch to make your Grandma weep. Photos are forthcoming…

Check it out: a knitting pattern for iPod Mittens. They’re mittens with a pocket to put your iPod in. Clever!

Here’s a link for my Dad, who is probably sitting in a tree with a gun at this very minute: How hard is it to shoot off a padlock? Answer: Very hard. (Link courtesy of John.)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!
Preparations for our Saturday feast are continuing apace Down Under. Stage One of the Turducken Assembly is now complete. Two of the three stuffings are finished and chilling in the fridge. Both recipes are from this article. First is the cornbread stuffing, which we’re planning to use as the outer layer between the turkey and the duck. (That’s actual Jiffy Cornbread in there!) Next is the sausage and smoked oyster, which we modified a bit. The sausage is actually beef sausage (because I have Jewish co-workers), and one-third of the oysters are actually mussels (because we grabbed the wrong can at the supermarket). I was a bit skeptical of this one but the smell is absolutely fantastic. It’s going in the very center of the chicken, so obviously we’re going to have a bunch of it left over to eat on the side. I can’t wait! Still to make: remaining stuffing (chicken, chestnut, and truffle), banana pudding, sweet corn casserole, deviled eggs, and maybe some baked beans if I can be arsed. Oh, and I’m dipping the rest of the frozen buck eye balls from Halloween, so we can finally finish those off too!

Update: Whoops. Snookums has just pointed out to me the inconsistency of using beef sausage instead of pork for our Jewish friends… and then loading the stuffing with shellfish. Apparently that’s not the reason he chose the beef after all, but rather because “they’re the closest thing to American spiced sausage I’ve seen here (in terms of the spiciness).” Lest you think we’re both idiots…

Heh. I was a finalist in Kay‘s Frappr Awards in the category of “My Hair is Red.” Not anymore, it isn’t! (Secretly I already miss it.)