DENVER, Colorado -- During this year's interminable election season, the McCain campaign resurrected a quaint yet poisonous notion: that we live in two Americas, one of them "real," and one of them "fake." Well, this past weekend I found the real America, and it was at the National Western Stock Show, the country's largest cattle showcase that has been held at the Denver stock yards since 1906. This is the second year in a row that I have gone to the stock show, and I thought I would share some of my highlights from this year's event.
Below I have posted a video of the Hereford cattle auction we attended. The bull up for sale in the video - his name was Patton, and he hailed from the Double L Ranch in Hearne, TX - sold for $57,500, and that was just for a 50% stake in him. The consortium of buyers that bought the share ranged from Montana to Illinois to Texas, meaning this young bull (he was just over a year old) will log a lot of miles traveling across the country to stud.
I found the auctioneer's voice mesmerizing, and it reminded me a lot of some sort of Central Asian throat singing. In addition to selling bulls and cows, embryos and sperm - as well as partial shares of them - were up for auction. Genetics and scientific breeding are a major part of modern animal husbandry, but it is still fascinating to see people buying and selling genetic material and advertising their animals' sexual functions. The stock yards are plastered with fliers advertising animals and their impeccable genetics, like the "Face of Change" pictured above. Another bull up for sale at the same auction carried this description in auction booklet:
861U is a fantastic prospect for the future! He is very easy fleshing with a huge hindquarter and powerful muscle from end to end. He is very sound with 100% pigment and a large scrotum. His dam [mother] is a very efficient, productive and fertile cow with an excellent udder.
Very few animals are actually sold at the stock show. Most farmers come to Denver simply to show off their livestock and have their pictures taken, in the hope that buyers will take notice of their product. People travel from as far away as New England simply to show off their cows. Obviously, they want their animals to look good, so washing and grooming is very important; often the result is cows that resemble show dogs instead of farm animals.
After the auction, we ended the day at the rodeo inside the Denver Coliseum. The competition was good, though there were a lot of "no times" in many events we saw on that particular evening. The slack (the entertainment in between the rodeo events), however, was fantastic. Mutton busting is easily my favorite rodeo event, when four- and five-year-old children are placed on the backs of frightened sheep and forced to hang on for dear life.
But the high point of the stock show, and perhaps this entire year for me, was definitely seeing a bunch of monkeys riding dogs and herding goats into a pen. I leave you with this amazing video:
QUECHEE, Vermont -- The turkey is in the oven, the Lions are losing 38-10, and we are all waiting for my brother - it must be Thanksgiving.
Watching Sarah Palin visit a turkey farm brought back memories of picking out a turkey for Thanksgiving as a kid. Growing up in Connecticut, the only place to buy your turkey was Gozzi's Turkey Farm, located along Route 1 in Guilford. The place was always best known for the pastel-colored birds they had roaming a pen in front of their store (pictured above). Though the birds look radioactive, Gozzi's developed one of the most delicious and popular local varieties of turkey, the Gozzi White, without the use of hormones or genetic modification. It has been a family-run business since the 1940's, and founder William Gozzi's wife began coloring the display birds during the company's early days to attract customers.
Finally, can the Detroit Lions get in on the auto industry's government bailout package?
BROOKLYN, New York -- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin can't seem to catch a break. After a vice-presidential campaign that all but the Bible-thumping-est of the GOP would rather forget, she was part of a gruesome and comical scene back in her hometown of Wasilla on Friday.
Palin came to the Triple D Farm & Hatchery to take part in an annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony. Unfortunately, local TV station KTUU filmed an interview with her in which birds were being butchered rather unceremoniously in the background.
This latest piece of political theater got me to thinking - how exactly do you kill a turkey? The man in the background was doing his best to be discrete about the grisly deed he was engaged in, apparently unsure if he was actually being captured in the frame (though he was so confident that he wasn't, after dispatching the first fowl, he came back with a second while the interview was still going on), so I thought I would investigate the business of turkey slaughtering.
Killing a turkey is a simple process. In this case, the turkeys were being slaughtered with the aid of a device called a "killing cone," which holds the birds in place as their throats are cut. The cone prevents the turkeys from thrashing around (though as you can see, they still tend to move quite a bit) and allows the blood to drain cleanly into the receptacle beneath.
Blue Oak Ranch, an organic poultry farm in Santa Barbara, California that raises "heritage poultry" - traditional varieties of birds that have not been genetically modified - describes their "hand processing" by means of a killing cone:
A bird is placed in the cone headfirst to restrain it during the killing process. I find the killing cones especially useful for the larger turkeys. My cone is a modified road cone - I find it a better size for processing large framed birds like turkeys than the smaller metal cones available commercially. All but the largest toms can fit in a generously sized road cone! Killing cones also restrain the bird better and prevent bruising of the carcass as the bird convulses. Simply chopping their heads off is messy - blood goes everywhere and can be aspirated back into the lungs. It also makes it hard to restrain the birds, and it flopping around can bruise the meat and even break wing and leg bones in the process, leaving an unappetizing appearance.
Many companies manufacture commercial killing cones, though a traffic cone with the end cut off will get the job done just fine. For a mature turkey, a cone 20" deep and 12" across is recommended.
Before birds can be slaughtered, by law they must be stunned - supposedly a more humane killing method - either by use of an electric shock or by a swift stab to the brain. In large commercial operations, birds have their throats cut along a conveyor belt and are suspended upside down by leg shackles. They then pass through what is called a "killing" or "bleeding tunnel," which is a large metal cabinet where most of the blood is drained from the body.
Back to the Palin fiasco, the cameraman responsible for the footage claims that he asked the governor if she wanted to move so the killing cone was out of the shot, to which she responded, "No worries," and the interview went forward from the same spot.
It appears as if most of the reporting on this story is actually being done by the evening entertainment news programs. Entertainment Tonight reported that the Palin camp is denying that the cameraman asked if the governor would like to move so the butchery was not in the shot, claiming they had no idea what was going on in the background. Even the television audience can clearly hear the bird struggling in the stainless steel death chute, so Palin and her staff must have been struck by an electric stunning knife (another implement used to kill poultry) if they couldn't hear that racket.
Another of America's favorite infotainment television nightmares, Inside Edition, managed to snap up an exclusive interview with the farmhand immortally captured on Youtube, Brian Tomes. He described his valiant efforts: "I thought they had panned in on her face…I did try and block the process," adding the nonsequitur, "Don't mess with my governor!" I didn't manage to catch this program, though I usually like to catch up on my celebrity rehab stories after Jeopardy! I will venture a guess that this segment lasted approximately 11 seconds. Great reporting, as always, IE!
Of course, the American people will fall into two camps over this story. Either they will believe that Sarah Palin is again the victim of a vast liberal media conspiracy to wreck her public image, or they will believe that she is blood-thirsty imbecile who revels in watching animals twitch in the throes of death. I think she just needs to be a bit more aware of her surroundings, and she should probably fire her entire incompetent staff.
Happy Thanksgiving, America! Eat turkey and stuffing until you pass out while watching football - my game of choice this week will definitely be the Egg Bowl, Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State in Oxford.
BOULDER, Colorado -- When asked a question about whether or not she voted for convicted fraudster and tube enthusiast Ted Stevens, Sarah Palin said the following:
I am also exercising my right to privacy, and I don't have to tell anybody who I vote for. Nobody does, and that's really cool about America also.
Did she just say that she had a "right to privacy"? Isn't that the cornerstone of the Roe v. Wade decision, which established the constitutional right to privacy? As if we didn't need more evidence of this woman's complete lack of understanding of the separation of powers, the branches of government, and the Supreme Court, here's another piece. She's forgotten how to properly use her Evangelist code language! There is no right to privacy, Sarah - that's just "activist judges" "legislating from the bench." Get with the program.
Certainly, Gov. Palin has the right to cast her vote in private, like every other American citizen, but next time she should choose her words a bit more carefully if she wants to maintain her megachurch street cred.
BOULDER, Colorado -- A couple of guys on a Montreal radio station managed to get through to the phone of Gov. Sarah Palin, and they had a five-minute conversation with her posing as French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Palin was totally duped, and she did not seem to catch the references to a fictitious Canadian prime minister, Sarkozy's sex life with Carla Bruni, and Hustler's election-themed porno, Who's Nailin' Paylin?
BOULDER, Colorado -- A friend of mine from college recently posted this awesome music video in which he plays the part of a lonely Russian pining for Sarah Palin from across the Bering Strait:
What I like most about this video are the little details - the mullet, the heinous sweater, the poor spelling - that make it look like it might have been made by actual Russians. The song itself is hilarious, too, but it's an obvious parody. Well, the people at the Kremlin propaganda station (and my former employer) Russia Today were duped pretty easily. This is what they wrote in response to the video:
Отличное видео, хотелось бы получить разрешение на его использование Добрый день, коллеги.
Вам пишет англоязычный телеканал Russia Today. Нам бы хотелось получить разрешение на использование вашей песни у себя на сайте, а также услышать небольшой рассказ о том, кто вы такие есть, почему решили написать песню про Сару Пэлин, планируете ли дальше использовать тему выборов в США и тд.
Если вы не против, ждем ваш ответ на это сообщение или на адрес: aaantonov@rttv.ru
Если есть возможность прислать ролик в лучшем качестве, чем на Ю-тьюбе, мы будем обязаны.
С уважением, А. Антонов RTTV
[Translation: Excellent video. We would like to get your permission to use it.
Good day, colleagues,
We are writing you from the English-language television station Russia Today. We would like to receive your permission to use the song you have posted, and we would also like to get a brief description of who you are, and why you decided to write a song about Sarah Palin, whether you plan to do more about the American election, etc.
If you're willing, we await your reply at the following address: aaantonov@rttv.ru. If it's possible to send us a high-quality copy of the video, instead of just the Youtube clip, it would be greatly appreciated.
Yes, they wrote the letter in Russian, believing the creators to be their countrymen. I have encouraged them to string these fools along for as long as possible - maybe finagle a free trip to Moscow out of it. Keep up the good work, propagandists!
UPDATE: Russia Today has posted this story about the "musical video" on their website, under the title "thrilling videos."
As a couple of former reporters who worked and lived in Russia, we created this blog in response to a worrying lack of expertise and critical analysis in the reporting on Russia by the English-language press. That is why we named the blog after Walter Duranty, a New York Times reporter posted in the Soviet Union during the 1930's. He wrote glowing reports about Stalin's show trials and the disastrous collectivization drives. Somehow, these fabrications won him a Pulitzer Prize. So we try to provide our own expertise and opinions about Russia to make sure another Duranty doesn't slip through the cracks. Russia can be a disheartening place, so more often than not, you will find we divert from our original purpose to take up other subjects and causes that are of interest to us - we hope they are of interest to you, too.
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