Happy Thanksgiving! It seems my log is saying thanks for cute, furry animals this year. But, of course there is more to be thankful for. I will be traveling and may not post for a couple days. Enjoy!

The National Zoo is getting two new pandas. I remember reading about the deaths of the previous pandas, but it hadn’t dawned on me that this meant the zoo no longer had any pandas. I have snapshots (badly framed photos from my less artistically aware childhood) of the pandas munching on bamboo. According to The Washington Post, the pandas will arrive in Anchorage on a donated FedEx plane and head to Dulles Airport on December 6th. I hope the zoo arranges a web panda-cam like San Diego.

Every year, NPR’s Susan Stamberg presents her mother-in-law’s cranberry relish recipe. Pavel Curtis was kind enough to introduce me to hi! monkey.net’s visual step-by-step for this recipe. If you’ve never seen a stuffed animal operating a Cuisinart before, click on through and see how one little monkey makes it happen. It puts my Stairmaster skills to shame. This very same monkey also demonstrates how to make cheese & crackers, cocoa, and rice krispie treats.

Clinton’s final Presidential Turkey Pardon was today. The turkey, named Jerry, is from Wisconsin. Clinton made an actual recount joke in his remarks about when the first Thanksgiving occured. Jerry goes to the petting zoo in Fairfax County, Virginia. And we don’t know yet who goes to the White House. (oh… so very hard to refrain from lame duck and turkey jokes in this posting! :-)

Community colleges have been treated inconsistently by Network Solutions in the registration for .edu domains. This Chronicle of Higher Education article describes the community college fight for the .edu names which currently are restricted to “four-year, degree-granting colleges and universities.” Apparently some community colleges have slipped through and gotten .edu. Of course, they all would like to have it as it gives them a more authentic educational domain name. The Commerce Department is figuring out who to reassign the administration of .edu to. Educause would like to take over administration from Network Solutions.

Bird on a Wire, silent for over a month, blinked up an update yesterday and brought my attention to the striking Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
Both Seattle papers are affected. The striking workers, some of them rival writers, are collaborating to publish their own paper online and in print. It’s the Internet age, of course, and you can put stuff on the web in a jiffy. You don’t need your publishers to get the news out — hey, what if you start selling ads and adding infrastructure to create a truly competing paper? I’m certain that is not the intent, but Internet publishing definitely gives them a leg up. The Times and Post-Intelligencer say they are going to give their papers away for free, but I wonder what they’ll say to the advertisers. According to this article, “The Times put some advertising inserts planned for Thanksgiving editions in Monday papers.” That can’t be as good as getting the eyeballs of turkey-stuffed paper readers.

Is Ben & Jerry’s going to lose Ben & Jerry? A new chief executive has been brought in by Unilever and the two founders expressed disappointment at the choice. Of course the press release is yummy vanilla, but a Boston Globe article quotes a statement from Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield which says that the two have not decided if they are going to stay. Other executives are reportedly on their way out. It’s standard big company takes over little company politics. But it is a shame to have Ben & Jerry’s culture crumble away. If they stick to their strong stances on social issues and don’t just use them as marketing fluff, perhaps they can stay noble. But the bottom line will have to be profits. (Also noted: they are starting to use unbleached paper for their pint containers. Welcome the dark paper for the sake of the fish and your grandkids.)

Ever noticed the phrase “meets the nutritional standards established by AAFCO” on pet food labels? Who is this mysterious AAFCO? They are the Association of American Feed Control and they keep pet food labels standardized and give nutrional recommendations. They don’t enforce any laws, they are an advisory body only. It’s up to each state’s Department of Agriculture or equivalent to adopt and regulate any recommendations of the AAFCO. Other interesting pet food facts can be found on Petfood for Boneheads.

The Online Journalism Review has a directory of “journalistic Internet resources”. Divided into traditional reporting beats, the categories contain some interesting and diverse resources (with a bit of a SF Bay Area slant since it was compiled at UC Berkeley). Great for random surfing.

Once in a while, I get a craving for Haribo gummi peaches. More precisely, I get a craving for a chewy form of malic acid. As I discovered from this Wired article on masochistic candy, malic acid is the sour stuff that gives tartness to apples and cherries. It is the tangy ingredient for most sour candies, and I started noticing it on the ingredients labels for many of my puckering favorites (Jolly Ranchers, Sweet Tarts). There are other acids that impart slightly different effects. This supplier’s page reads “to prolong the sourness in candy or chewing gum, citric acid is used for an initial sour boost, malic acid for a lingering sourness, and fumaric acid to sustain the tartness even longer”. Don’t forget to brush!