Highland Games: 70% diehard Scots, 29% diehard Metal fans.* Go figure.

Last day of the Mercatus.

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Friday night after sunset was Yom Kippur, and since Ryter has a level of anti-religion backlash similar to that of former Christians thanks to a few years in Hebrew school he had mentioned he wanted to eat ham on the holy days. I complied, coming up with what I thought was the least kosher thing we could have prepared-- cheese dreams.

A cheese dream is usually bacon, tomato and cheese, melted over a piece of bread into ooey cholesterol goodness (I omit the bacon). Ryter doesn't like tomatoes, so I replaced them with a piece of ham. They were quite good, even if I do think that making them again before the next Yom Kippur may send him into cardiac arrest. Apparently Yom Kippur is also about fasting, which meant that the whole thing was even more sacrilegious.

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Saturday was the Highland Games up at Loon Mountain, and I had decided to take Ryter this year. I love the Games, I go every year I can, and I was hoping he'd like it too but honestly I was kind of expecting he would think it was boring or cheesy.

We got there a little before my family did and took the shuttle from the parking lot to Loon. As we had not eaten breakfast, food was the first priority-- specifically fish and chips for me (mmm, greasy fried fish from a fair stand first thing in the morning) and haggis and thumps for Ryter. Haggis is of course sheep's blood pudding and thumps is mashed potatoes mixed with cabbage. Keep in mind that Jewish law expressly forbids the consumption of animal blood and it was Yom Kippur.

He ate the whole thing and liked it (he wanted more, or to figure out how to get it at home) so he has become an honorary Scotsman and was christened Angus MacJewberg.

Anyway...

We met up with my parents, my grandmother, and my brother shortly after that and then looked around, checking out the Utilikilts and Threads of Time. Then we decided to go up the gondola to the top of the mountain and checked out the view. That was a lot of fun-- very pretty, less of a crowd and more of a breeze (or "stiff wind that nearly blew my skirts up," rather) so it wasn't as hot as at the Games themselves.

And once we went down again Ryter got to see the tail end of the caber toss and the Historic Highlanders, who were sword fighting at the time. We finally reconnected with my family later on for the sheaf toss (stick a pitchfork into a bag of oats and throw it over a 28-ft bar), which Ryter was very enthusiastic about and he cheered quite loudly for his favorites.

It was a lot of fun, and Ryter loved it. We had a little trouble finding our parking lot again, thanks to some bad info from the bus driver who brought us there, and then we wound up getting home later than hoped because we went out to eat with my family at Hart's Turkey Farm, but it was a great day and definitely what Ryter needed. It got him out of his apartment and doing something fun. He's also asking for a Utilikilt for Chrismukkah or Chrismahanakwanza, or whatever it is, which makes me happy because kilts are always sexy.

*Other 1%? Asian tourists, of course.

Foods of the Future, as predicted by Basio

More Floralia. Thus more flowers:



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So maybe, if you were paying attention to the news a month or so ago you heard that they compared the proteins from the bone collagen of a dinosaur (some proteins escaped fossilization) to that of a chicken, thus proving that chickens evolved from dinosaurs, after all. Up until now the whole "birds from dinosaurs" hypothesis was mostly based on the appearance and the transitional forms; this offers DNA proof of the connection.

Of course you know what this means.

Dinosaurs taste like chicken.

Now, you may not know this, but I really want to start moving away from eating birds. I'm not completely opposed to them, but at this point my mild discomfort with their consumption is tempered by the fact that this school can't seem to cook fish right and if I don't eat chicken my anemia will come back and I will become pale and sickly and prone to dramatic fainting spells at inopportune times, or maybe I'll just have to start swallowing iron pills again.

Anyway, the issue with birds are that they're basically as evolved as mammals, just up a different lineage. They're about equally intelligent and all, so my only arguement is that they're not that closely related to me and the ones I eat-- chicken and domesticated turkey-- are pretty damn dumb. But now I won't eat octopus for their intelligence and chickens aren't that much dumber than cows so...

Back to the dinosaurs. Here's my theory. They're trying to find a way to reverse-engineer chicken DNA to create dinosaurs. Awesome, no? You know it's awesome. Don't lie. See, all we have to do is get two dinosaurs, a male and a female. Then we breed them. Then we raise their offspring for meat.

Think about it. Dinosaurs are lizards so I wouldn't mind eating them. Plus for everyone else, they're either the size of chickens or turkeys anyway, or they're MASSIVE. You serve a Neuquenraptor for Thanksgiving and you have leftovers for at least a week, even if you live in a house like mine where a 25-pound-turkey is gone in three days. You might need a bigger fridge though. Plus that drumstick would be MASSIVE, so the kiddies wouldn't fight over it, they'd kinda HAVE to share.

Plus, that's all healthy meat, right there. Lean, white. Good eatin's. You could raise them instead of cows and feed them eggs, which I don't mind eating anyway on account of they're basically chicken menstruation (Just doing my part to lower your cholesterol). And you know, you give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Give him a Utahraptor and some salt or refrigeration and he eats for like THREE MONTHS. Plus there's nothing in the Jewish or Biblical regulations against eating dinosaurs on account of them not being things that "crawl on the earth." Just can't cook them in milk.

Then you get the eggs, which would make killer omelettes; and you can raise like, a T-rex for meat and feed whole towns when he's killed. T-rex meat would be awesome. And then there's the ultimate factor, the thing I noticed in my Bio book while studying that prompted this whole line of thinking:

T-rexes have wishbones.

And I'm pretty sure that if you could find a way to BREAK a T-rex wishbone, and you got the bigger piece, you could wish for God himself to appear and perform a flamboyant musical number with Ernst Mayr, Isaac Asimov, Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche and not only would it happen, but it would be FABULOUS.