It’s worth mentioning that this blog was the runner-up in the 2010 Seven Days “Daysie” reader’s choice awards again this year. The sisters LeMay took the top prize for the second time in a row. I was shocked to have made the runner-up spot despite the utter lack of any serious blogging around these parts lately. Thanks, if you voted for Candleblog!

I’m a filmmaking fool these days, having just completed the Baruth campaign film (see it in the previous post), and now I’m deep into a short web video for an environmental start-up. Also, the Pants projects are rearing their heads and gaining some slight momentum. I hope to have something good to report on that front soon.

You must now go and vote for my SXSW panel proposal! You have to register to vote and comment, but I swear it’s really quick and easy. My thirst for hanging out with alpha nerds and rock stars must be slaked.

And if you’re not already following Emily’s Tumblr blog, you should go there now and subscribe. It’s a continuous linkdump of cute awesomeness.

And look at this crazy shit!

• Justin Bieber slowed down 800% sounds ethereal and awesome. They should have used this in Inception.
• Wil Wheaton has quit W00tstock in a fabulous way.
• This short film teaches you How to be Alone.

Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow and families will be coming together for dinner all over the USA to share the big meal. Football will be watched. Pie will be consumed. And inevitably, in some homes, politics will be discussed. Family members love each other, but they don’t necessarily see eye-to-eye on political issues. Political divisions among family members are often extreme and for some of these people, holiday meals are the only times in the year that they come face-to-face with folks who are so diametrically opposed to their political views.

So this year, Candleblog would like to offer a little help — some ammunition for the Thanksgiving table-talk.

One big topic of discussion will be the continuing debate on Capital Hill over health care reform. That’s what’s still taking up the bulk of the news cycles. But that debate has been raging for many months and all you good progressive blog readers should already be on your game for that discussion (if you’re not, there is some great material to get you started here).

But I think the political dark horse at this year’s Thanksgiving table will be global warming. Right wing blogs are all in a lather this week about some recently hacked emails from the University of East Anglia in Britain. These bloggers have cherry picked some quotes from individual scientists over the last decade of the email log and presented them as evidence that global warming is a sham being perpetuated by a conspiracy of alarmists. The link above literally calls the news “the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic [human-caused] Global Warming.’”

Right wing blogs and email lists (and Fox News) are apoplectic about this, so if you have family members at your turkey-day table this year who follow these information sources, it’s likely you’ll get an earful, particularly given the imminent summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

The truth, of course, is that while the hacked emails have proven embarrassing for some of these scientists who were informally (and sometimes ingraciously) communicating with each other in what they assumed was private correspondence (let this be a lesson for everyone about the security of email), the science behind human-caused climate change is totally unaffected by this development.

Below you’ll find a series of links to some good reactions to the “climategate” story in both the MSM and climate science blogs. There’s a lot of info here and it’s fascinating stuff. If your time is limited (gotta mash those potatoes!), I recommend starting with the NYTimes’ story on the hacked emails and them immediately reading the reaction to that story by Dr. Joe Romm (MIT physicist, former Clinton Dept. of Energy official and a leading climate change blogger):

• NYTimes story
• Dr. Joe Romm’s reaction

Then if you still have some time, read the reaction from the scientists at RealClimate.org (very thoughtful piece) and from the indispensable Nate Silver, who writes:

I don’t know how you get from some scientist having sexed up a graph in East Anglia ten years ago to The Final Nail In The Coffin of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Anyone who comes to that connection has more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger. And yet that’s literally what some of these bloggers are saying!

Incidentally, 2009 is shaping up to be the 5th warmest year on record, according to the conspiracists at NASA.

And if you’re still hiding in the office and surfing the net when you should be making the gravy, there’s more good info at HuffPo and The Wonk Room at Think Progress.

But my favorite reaction is this one from the Carbon Fixated blog (quoted in the HuffPo piece above), which declares that “Newtongate” has driven “the final nail in the coffin of Renaissance and Enlightenment ‘thinking.’”

If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.

Good luck! If you actually do engage your relatives on this, make sure you leave comments here about it! We like to know we’ve helped (or hurt) your argument.

H/T to Steve Benen for providing me with some of the above links.

UPDATE: In the comments, Gerry Canavan reminds us that a good first stop in dealing with climate change deniers is this post about How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. And indeed, it’s a great clearing house for refutations of the most common canards coming from the global warming deniers. I do take issue with the use of the phrase “climate skeptic,” however. A “skeptic” is someone who doesn’t trust a given claim in the absence of strong evidence. There’s ample evidence of anthropogenic global warming to convince any actual “skeptic.” Once they’ve been presented with the evidence and scientific consensus, if they still claim it’s an open question, they’re just deniers at that point. Perhaps a new post needs to be written about How to Talk to Climate Change Ostriches (heads in the sand and all). Or maybe there’s no point in talking to them — if the actual evidence doesn’t convince them, it’s unlikely that a few more links will.

Over the last several years we’ve developed something of a tradition. Emily and I host the meal and invite my mom; Emily’s parents, sister and niece; our friends Steve and Eve and Steve’s mom; and this year will be the second year we’ve added our friend Alex to the list. That’s 11 people in our little condo. And in addition to feeding everyone, we really like our leftovers, so we make sure to make more food than we can eat at the dinner table.

The menu we serve is actually pretty traditional — turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, green peas, a corn and squash gratin, biscuits, gravy, etc. We really love the traditional Thanksgiving meal, when done well, but the standard preparation is complicated by the following concerns:

*We only eat local, humanely raised and killed, hormone-free meat. This includes the stock, which we use in lots of dishes, so we need to prep that early. It also means our bird is a lovely, never-frozen fresh Vermont turkey — no Butterballs on our table.

*We don’t like to use any prepared foods either — no Stovetop Stuffing. The one exception are the biscuits. We really like the Immaculate Baking Company’s pre-fab buttermilk biscuits. They’re quick and easy, delicious, and there’s no trans-fat or other nastiness in them. We’re also experimenting with a green bean casserole that adheres to our yummy childhood memories, but that doesn’t rely on condensed cream of mushroom soup and canned onions. My mom always makes the homemade cranberry sauce and she also traditionally brings her famous creamed pearl onions.

The Brine
I brine the bird the night before we roast it. I usually improvise the brine ingredients, using some combination of kosher salt (the largest ingredient by far, apart from water, in the brine), brown sugar, rosemary, molasses and aroma veggies. Then for roasting, I stuff the bird with the veggies from the brine — giving preference to the garlic. The brining process makes the bird taste yummy and helps it to retain moisture while roasting, but mostly we do it because it makes for KILLER stock and gravy, and that influences the entire meal.

Stuffing
Technically, this is “dressing,” because I don’t stuff the bird. Why? There are differing schools of thought, but I happen to think:

• Sticking bread inside a roasting bird means you have to roast it longer (in order to avoid salmonella) and that dries out the bird, as does having bread inside of it, frankly.
• There isn’t enough room in the bird for all the stuffing we need, so since we’re baking an extra pan of the stuff anyway, why dry out our beautiful bird?

My recipe for this is dirt-simple. I cut up loaf bread (any yummy brown bread that doesn’t contain high fructose corn syrup will do — if it’s local, so much the better) and let it dry for a few days (it always takes longer than I think and I try to do it really early because cooking in a kitchen filled with pans of drying bread is tricky). Then I cut up a bunch of onions and celery, mix it all together and moisten generously with stock. You don’t need much salt if you’re using stock from a brined bird, but I like to add lots of black pepper and some rosemary. Thyme is a popular stuffing herb, but I’m a rosemary guy. Your mileage may vary. Then I bake it while the bird is cooling right after coming out of the oven. Done.

Potatoes
It almost doesn’t matter how these are prepared because they’re just going to get drowned in gravy anyway. I like them with skins or without. I prefer them creamy and smooth, but I’m fine with the lumpier kind too. Lot’s of black pepper is the key here. If I’m feeling really decadent (when am I not?) I like to use generous amounts of butter and heavy cream and whip them senseless. Garlic is a nice addition. Emily prefers a drier, lumpier spud, but she throws a dollop of sour cream on them on the pate.

Sauce
It’s all about the gravy. My mom is the gravy queen of our Thanksgiving. This year we’re going to make a Marsala wine and mushroom sauce for the table too.

Now I have to go home and clean the kitchen. We’re a week out, and my Thanksgiving prep begins tonight! Feel free to add your own traditions and recipes to the comments.

I’m writing this post because I think I’m one of the luckiest guitar players in the world.

I’ve played a lot of guitars in my life. I’ve probably owned 15 of them over the years (of varying brands and types) and if you count guitars I’ve played in music stores and ones that belong to friends, I’ve played hundreds of the things. About 10 years ago I picked up an electric guitar that was the finest electric guitar I’d ever played. It was a Time guitar, manufactured in a small factory in South Burlington, Vermont sometime in the 80s. (Time made overly engineered and under-priced guitars and basses and were only in business for a short while — Phish played them early on and one of the luthiers at Time — Paul Languedoc — became Phish’s sound man and custom guitar builder.) I bought it. It cost me $525 used. I still own it and it is still the nicest electric (in terms of tone and playability) that I’ve ever plugged into an amp.

Owning the nicest electric guitar I’ve ever played makes me one darn lucky guitar owner. Not many players can say that. Well, as of a couple of weeks ago, I now own the nicest acoustic guitar I’ve ever played.

My brother Rob lives in Naples, Florida with a luthier named Donny Heyser (he used to have a web site but I can’t find it now). Donny makes crazy-beautiful guitars and for years, whenever I would visit Rob, I would inevitably wind up spending hours playing this one particular acoustic. I absolutely loved it. After a while, Donny and Rob just started calling it “Bill’s guitar.”

I have owned Taylors, Martins, Washburns, Ovations, Guilds… and I’ve played hundreds of acoustic guitars. I have never loved one as much as this. It’s tone is bright and balanced, it’s action is smooth, light and buttery (almost like an electric) and it is a gorgeous piece of woodwork.

This Christmas, Rob purchased the guitar for me. I now literally own the two best guitars I’ve ever played. I’ll never be a rock star (or a famous finger-style acoustic instrumentalist/folk singer), but few actual working musicians can make that claim.

Pictures are below. The top photo is of the three guitars hanging on my office wall. The Time is on the right, the Heyser custom is in the middle. The Batman guitar on the left was another gift from Rob — an electric he built for me in Donny’s shop. Below are detail shots of the Heyser…

Well I have a new one to add to the list. My cousin Brian told me about these last Labor Day and at New Years, he promised to send them to everyone in the family. Two of these arrived in yesterday’s mail…

Emily refused to even try it, despite loving both milk chocolate and bacon. I tried it and it’s as advertised. It’s rather like the first time I ever had a Hawaiian pizza — I’d never thought of combining pineapple and bacon and pizza before, but once I tried it, I understood the appeal.

I rediscovered an old love on the trip: Euchre. We held a tournament at the Simmon compound in Illinois and determined that my cousin Jay Naegele is the Euchre champion of the family and that Emily and I are… not. Still, it’s a great game that I intend to play a lot more of in the future. Any takers?

I also discovered that if I take a 16 oz. cup, fill it with ice, then fill one half of it with Jack Daniels and the other half with Diet Coke (a drink I like to call the “John Cougar”) and drink two of those, I will get a little bit lit. I also discovered that drinking 5 of them is an actively bad idea.

Let’s be clear: I almost never drink. I have a beer about once a month when left to my own devices. Put me together with that family though and look out. I’m happily back to my Diet Coke (without the Jack, thank you) vice.