Roast a Chicken. Here's how.

A roast chicken dinner is festive, suitable for company,. and easy to do, in fact, foolproof.  Here is how.  First buy your chicken.  You get a choice between 4 pound fryers, and 6-8 pound roasters.  The fryers are tender and tasty.  The bigger roasters are mostly old laying hens that have stopped laying because of age.  They are chewy.  A fryer will serve six people, no sweat.  Used to be, both fryers and roasters came with giblets, now a days they are leaving out the giblets.  You want giblets to make gravy.  The plastic package will sometimes tell you if you are getting giblets or not.
  I stuff my chickens with ordinary supermarket stuffing mix, which is mostly bread crumbs.  I like to jazz the stuffing up with some chopped onion, some chopped celery, the chicken liver, some grapes in season or raisins out of season, some chopped apple.  Put some oil in a big frying pan and saute the chicken liver, and the onion.  Chop the chicken liver after you saute it.  Then press on and do the stuffing mix in the same pan.  The directions will call for bringing water and some oil to a boil and then adding the dry bread crumbs.  You might want to adjust the amount of oil to account for the oil you used to saute everything but that isn't critical.  Fill the chicken with the stuffing and then tie the chicken's legs together to keep the stuffing in.
   Roast in a 375 degree oven for 20 minutes to the pound.  The chickens all come with little plastic "bird watcher" thingies that pop open when they think the chicken is done.  Time is not critical, an extra 20 minutes won't hurt anything.  Baste the chicken with either the fat that cooks out of the bird or some olive or veggie oil.  Baste every 20 minutes or so.  Get a head start on basting by rubbing the chicken down with oil before putting him in the oven.  On the top of the stove, put the giblets into a pan, full of water, with some Bell's Poultry Seasoning.  Bring to a boil, back off the heat until you get to a low boil.  Let them cook until the chicken is done.
   When done, remove the chicken to a serving platter and let it rest while you make the gravy.  Add as much flour to the roasting pan as the grease will soak up.  Then add all the water from the giblet pan.  And perhaps some more,  you want about a quart of gravy.  Put the roasting pan on the stove top and set one or two burners to medium.  Then just stir until the gravy thickens.  While that is happening chop the giblets up fine and add them to the gravy.  With a couple of forks pick the meat off the neck and add it as well.  Season the gravy with some Bell's Poultry Seasoning and a little salt.  Taste and adjust.  Go easy on the salt. 
  You are done, call the guests to the table.  Don't forget the cranberry sauce. You can serve a green veggie and some rice to go with it.  Traditionally white wine is served with poultry, but you can do what ever suits your fancy.
   You can do turkey or Cornish game hens the same way as chicken.  

Foreign students are good deal for America

America has something like a million foreign college students.  Invisible benefit to us, most young folk have a good time doing an American college education.  I think the vast majority of them carry away a nice warm feeling about America after graduation.  And its a good bet that a lot of 'em will wind up influential citizens back in their home country.  In short, as we offer a good college education we are also making friends around the world.  This has got to be a good thing.  Plus foreign students help keep America green, they send money. 
   So let's not hassle them over visas.  Let's make it easy to enter America.  And for that matter, lets make it easy for them to stay here, even after graduation.
   Of the million odd foreign students, a third of them are Chinese.  There has been some rumblings in the media, and some FBI investigations, all concerned with Chinese intelligence agencies using Chinese students as information sources, or worse.  We are now presenting Chinese students with a hostile stare rather than a friendly greeting.  Let's not drive Chinese students away thru plain unfounded suspicions.

Soup has too much salt

The ordinary supermarket canned soups, Campbell, Progresso, and others all have so much salt they taste too salty.  The doctors mostly think salt is bad for you but I am not on that bandwagon.  I figure when it tastes too salty, it is too salty.  Only reason I can think of for the makers to add so much salt is to cover up for some fresh ingredients that are not as fresh as they ought to be.  In fact  ingredients that are on the verge of going bad.
   And the bouillon cubes are just as bad as the canned soups.
  Yummy. 

Did we get Soleimani like we got Adm Yamamoto?

During WWII we broke the Japanese radio codes and read their messages.  We came across Adm Yamamoto's planned itinerary of an inspection trip to the forward areas.  We sent a squadron of P-38 Lightening fighters to intercept him.  They shot down Yamamoto's plane killing the admiral in the crash.  This removed Japan's best admiral, the man who planned and executed Pearl Harbor, and the only senior Japanese leader who understood the United States.  A carefully arranged plan based upon solid intel.
    Was the hit on Soleimani like that?  Did we have the necessary intel?  Or did we just get lucky, putting a Hellfire anti tank missile into a suspected Iranian headquarters, or safe house or whatever and Soleimani just happened to be there at the wrong time?  Someone knows and so far has kept his/her mouth shut to preserve the secrecy of our intel operations.  We will see how long that lasts. 

Cannon Mountain ski weather

Today, 5 Jan, Cannon got 2 inches of new snow.  It's still falling.  It's 27, maybe 28 F.

Counter Cyberattacks with lawyers

Since Friday's Iranian dustup, which snuffed Suliemani, the newsies have been warning of cyber counter attacks from Iran.  If that happens, and if they put anything important down, we have a vast surplus of lawyers sloshing around the country looking for something to do.  We should sic 'em on the companies careless enough to fall to cyber attack.
   There is no excuse for a company to fall victim to a cyber attack.  Straight forward simple procedures will keep Iranian hackers from putting out the lights in the US.  Some rules follow
1.  Never use the public internet, or the public phone system to remote control or monitor anything.  If you just have to have remote control, string your own fiber optics.  In most cases this is the power company, which owns their own poles and has their own line crews to string new fiber optic cable.  This way you have to climb a pole and splice in an optical signal splitter to tap into the control signals.  Hackers don't climb poles.  If they cannot get to the target over the public internet, sitting comfortably in their offices, they don't go there.
2.  Don't run Windows for anything important.  Go with Apple or Linux or anything other than Windows.  Windows is like Swiss cheese, holes every where.  Windows does autorun, any media (floppy disc, CD, DVD, flashdrive) plugged into a Windows computer is checked for  music and code.  Music gets played. code gets run. Malicious code gets loaded onto disk and run.  That's how we spread the Stuxnet virus onto Iranian computers controlling centrifugal uranium isotope separators.  Stuxnet ordered the centrifugal separators to run full speed until they self destructed.  We put the Stuxnet code onto flashdrives and scattered the flashdrives over Iranian parking lots. Sharp eye Iranian workers spotted them on the way into work, picked them up, took them into work, and plugged them into work computers.  The centrifugal isotope separators started blowing up shortly there after.
  Should Iranian hackers knock out anything we care about, we should sic our vast surplus of lawyers on the stupid company.  They ought to be able to sue them, and get convictions for pure stupidity.  The thought of an army of hungry lawyers suing them down to their socks ought to stimulate even Dilbert's pointy haired boss into action.

So we snuffed Iranian big wig Sulimani (sp?)

I never heard of this guy before today.  But the TV newsies are claiming he was a big deal, and snuffing him will cause a war with Iran.  Far as I am concerned Sulimani was just another Iranian terrorist, and we did good to kill him.   It should send a simple message to the Iranians, namely "Mess with the American and they will mess with you".  Are the Iranians smart enough to take the hint?