Hot sauce? Hot air? Both? Barack and Hillary are tied for 12 percent, and Newt's hanging on, just barely, with 4 percent. Independent candidate Nunov Deabove? He's missing from the mainstream media but has a respectable 9 percent here. These aren't AP polls, but hot sauce sales for the presidential-themed bottles at Dave's Gourmet....
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Sometimes, for all the bloviating that goes on in the blogosphere, interesting, provocative stories still go relatively unnoticed. It happened last week when Kim Severson reported on the meal President Bush had in New Orleans at Dooky Chase, the legendary Creole restaurant run by Leah Chase, the 84-year-old "Queen of Creole Cuisine." According to Severson, some people in New Orleans and out took Chase to task for hosting the president for dinner and a photo op. Her crime: By agreeing to host the president, Chase was seen as somehow legitimizing and sanctioning the Bush administration's feeble efforts to rebuild New Orleans. What hogwash!...
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In an atypically short piece (at least for him) in the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan says the current farm bill being formulated in Congress "essentially treats our children as a human Disposall for all the unhealthful calories that the farm bill has encouraged American farmers to overproduce." What's the answer? "The guiding principle behind an eater's farm bill could not be more straightforward: It's one that changes the rules of the game so as to promote the quality of our food (and farming) over and above its quantity."...
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There was a fascinating story on NPR that got lost in the shuffle in the days leading up to the holidays. On December 22, the network aired a piece on Bobby Egan, a Hackensack, New Jersey, barbecue-joint owner who for many years has been an unofficial go-between for North Korea and the United States. According to the story by Adam Davidson, Mr. Egan, owner of Cubby's BBQ Ribs, fell into the role in the 1980s, when some friends of his, Vietnam veterans, asked for his help in dealing with POW-MIA issues. Mr. Egan began assisting them, traveling to Vietnam several times and eventually making friends with the country's Communist officials. The Vietnamese took a shine to Egan and mentioned him...
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