It's not really surprising...

...that the story about the student who was visited by the Feds after requesting a copy of Mao's little red book on interlibrary loan turns out to have been a hoax. Some people, including Gary McGath, spotted inconsistancies right away.

On the other hand, it's sad and appalling that we live in a country, and under a government, where it was easy to believe that it wasn't a hoax.

Saturday evening

Well, we've had a pleasant Christmas Eve -- or Newtonmas, if your preference runs in that direction. (We do have an apple tree in the side yard, but I'm afraid we haven't decorated it.) Got out of bed at 6:30 or so to discover the Younger Daughter sitting in the office happily waiting for a chocolate-chip coffee cake to finish baking. ??!?!? Claimed to have been up for an hour. Her?

She went out for the last-minute shopping with the flower_cat, while I worked on the dishes and generally puttered about attempting to clean up consolidate the debris. We then spent most of the rest of the day cooking.

Lunch was a rare treat: Olympia oyster stew. Only the two of us and grendies had any -- there was leftover "broth". (The recipe is trivial: heat a pint of whipping cream until it's nearly boiling, add a little pepper and crumbled bacon, then put in as many oysters as you can afford [a 1/2 pint jar, in our case]. Let them come up to the temperature of the broth, and serve.)

Dinner, served around 4:30, consisted of a crown roast of pork, stuffing (cooked separately), German-style braised red cabbage, and roasted potatoes. If we hadn't had some last-minute cancellations we'd have made salad, too. Even with five hungry guests, we had leftovers. Yum. The roast was to the "falling off the bones" stage, having cooked since 11am.

The Y.D. went up to bed early -- sometime around 7:30; the twenty-somethings about 8:30. The Y.D. is now up again (it's a little after 9), but probably not for long. I strongly suspect that she didn't sleep last night. What else explains being told to be quiet past 2am and getting downstairs by 5?

Speaking of gifts, I seem to have forgotten to mention that we ordered the Cat's walk-in tub yesterday. It will go in the back bathroom, and has a considerably smaller footprint than our current tub; we'll have room for some shelves. Also speaking of gifts, one of our guests mentioned that his computer had died, apparently of motherboard problems. After establishing that his CPU was an AMD Duron, I gave him the spare MB that's been cluttering up the office ever since I couldn't get Windows 98 to install on it when I upgraded the Y.D.'s computer a couple of years ago. It might work; the MB is pretty old and there have been more changes in AMD's socket interface than in their CPU code names.