Ukraine's Got Talent - Kseniya Simonova

My Favorite Collard Greens

Ingredients:

A bunch of collard greens. I literally mean a bunch, as in how they are sold fresh in a grocery store, or an entire plant, if you are one to pick your own.

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

3-4 smoked turkey necks or fatback or strickalean, if that’s your cup of tea. Cut the oil in half if you use either of those.

Large pot with lid (3 gallons or so)

Water

Salt

2 packets of Sazón Goya

Cut and wash the greens in the sink. Wash them at least twice to get all the grit out. Heat the pot on medium heat. Add the oil to the pot and allow it to heat for a minute or so. Put enough greens in the pot to fill it to about 4 inches from the top. They should sizzle. Stir the greens into the oil, steadily adding greens until the entire bunch is in the pot. Stir them to coat them in the olive oil. Add enough water to completely cover the greens. Add the turkey necks, the Sazón Goya, and a tablespoon or more of salt to taste. The amount of salt that different people like in greens varies tremendously, so don’t be surprised if you use much more salt than this. Stir everything up, set the heat to low, then cover it and let it simmer. The traditional way would be to simmer them for about 40 minutes. You could use far less water and simmer them for only 20 minutes for a different sort of dish. I tend to go for the long simmer, which is how my family always did it. Serve with hoecakes (also called hot water cornbread).

Another Difference between Public and Private

I drove through a Walmart parking lot and noticed how well the drainage system they have works. It takes some serious flooding to damage a Walmart to the extent that roads, schools, and government buildings have been damaged during the recent flooding in the Atlanta area. I snapped a pic of it. It was doing a very good job of keeping that parking lot clear. That’s very different from what we see of government “services,” where the need to please the customer is lacking, to say the least.

Rangel’s no Angel

Charles Rangel, the first black man to head the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and Congress’s foremost proponent of slavery, has perhaps topped all of his peers at displaying contempt for those he supposedly serves. In response to reporters’ questions about hidden personal assets, Rangel responded:

I recognize that all of you have an obligation to ask questions knowing that there's none of you smart enough to frame it in such a way that I'm going to respond.

Well, at least he actually does give an accurate assessment of the press. Truth in politics is such a refreshing change of pace.

The Open Source Future

One of the major factors which will fuel Linux and other open source projects' development will be the developing world. I was listening to a podcast about Ardour, an open source digital audio workstation. One of the interesting things which was mentioned was the ability of members of the community to sponsor code. That is, a person can offer a bounty to have bugs fixed or features added. The fact that incomes vary very widely across the globe can actually help a lot here. Most of the consumers of this software are located in the developed world and have higher incomes than the developing world. As people in areas which have very low average incomes become more technically savvy in software development using free software, some of them will be able to earn nice incomes using their knowledge. This is outsourcing writ large.