The View from the Hermitage, Day 284

Merry Christmas Eve! I have spent the day in the kitchen preparing as much as I could do in advance to take some of the strain off tomorrow. Berry sauce to go with a cheesecake (we are including Son #2's missed birthday, and he asked for cheesecake with berry sauce). Pumpkin pie. Dressing. Simple syrup to go in the pisco sours we'll be making in a bit. The Professor helped with all of it. And once the dressing comes out of the oven, we can put in the half-baked pizza The Professor got curbside at our favorite pizza place. The Professor always buys one of my gifts on Christmas Day, and this year we agreed it could be the pizza. 

No politics today, though there is news on which I could comment. As for the pandemic, Virginia set another record in terms of the number of new cases and the rolling seven-day average number of cases yesterday. We'll hit 5,000 new cases one day next week if not tomorrow. And the TSA screened almost 1.2 million passengers yesterday, the highest number since the pandemic began. Wait for it. Starting about January 4, we'll be slammed even harder than we've already been.

And now for a few non-political, non-pandemic items that don't really relate to Christmas or Christmas Eve, but that caught my attention. KFC, otherwise known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, has launched a game console that include a place to keep your chicken warm as you game. It's sort of a "chicken chamber." This is not the first KFC tie-in to another popular product. In February 2020, KFC and Crocs produced a limited edition shoe covered in fried chicken print. And in December 2019, KFC partnered with EnviroLog for a chicken-scented, 11 herbs and spices fire log. 

It turns out that trees may not be Tolkien's ents but they do talk to one another through an underground network of fungal threads called hyphae. As a result, forests can act like one but super-organism. Just don't call it the Wood-Wide Web. That is not my thought but one from the article I read about this. 

I came across a 2016 National Geographic article I missed on its first run. A hunk of amber purchased at a market in Myanmar contained the first dinosaur tail found in amber. The dinosaur's feathers were even visible through the amber. The feathers remind me of something I recently saw on Facebook wondering if dinosaurs honked or quacked like ducks rather than roaring as the ones in Jurassic Park do. Somehow, a tyrannosaurus rex honking as it charged you doesn't seem the same as one roaring. 

Finally, this year I discovered Tim Cotton, a member of the Bangor, Maine Police Department and a very talented writer. In a short piece posted this morning, he used the phrase "...tall glass of contemplative consideration..." I like that. I think I might make more contemplative consideration one of my New Year's resolutions.