I’ll spare you a photo on this, but not the discussion. If you’ve been to Greenland, have you tasted (or heard of) kiviaq? It’s a staple at celebrations among the Inughuit, a distinct Inuit culture indigenous to Greenland. The ingredient list includes one seal carcass (hollowed out, of course), and 300 to 500 dovekies. These are small birds, also called little auks.
You take your 300 to 500 whole dovekies (beaks, feathers, and all) and cram them into the seal carcass. You then sew up the opening and seal it with seal fat. One nice thing (perhaps the only one) is that seal fat repels flies. On the other hand, you may wonder about a “delicacy” that even flies don’t want any part of.
Hopefully, you’re not too hungry at this point in time because the next step is to bury the whole mess under rocks for a few months to ferment. When it’s dug up, and opened up, you skin the little birds and eat them one at a time. Yum.
Our friend Pam has made recipes that have appeared in Owl Chatter before. Let us know how the kiviaq turns out!! Maybe you can bring a few dovekies on the Fourth. You should have enough time for the fermenting, no?
Alicia “Lisa” Shepard died on April 1; she was only 69. (Anyone dying within five years of my age in either direction gets an “only.”)
She was at the center of some controversy when she was the ombudsman at NPR, a post she held for nearly 4 years. It was back when the Bush administration (W’s) was using waterboarding to elicit information from detainees (or to force them to finish their kiviaq). NPR was using language such as “enhanced interrogation tactics” instead of labeling them torture, and it was accused of serving as a right-wing apologist. Bush would not refer to waterboarding as torture, but Obama did.
Shepard personally believed it was torture, but felt an obligation for NPR to be neutral. So her position was to have the practice described and let the listener decide. E.g., to report that “the U.S. military poured water down a detainee’s mouth and nostrils for 40 seconds.” But she and NPR were accused by some of misleading its listeners and adopting “Orwellian government euphemisms.”
She also wrote a book on Woodward and Bernstein, “Life in the Shadow of Watergate.” She revealed in it that Woodward and Bernstein greatly angered Barry Sussman, an editor at WAPO with whom they worked very closely on the Watergate story. Sussman felt he should have been listed as a third author on “All the President’s Men.” He told Shepard: “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.” Ouch.
The cause of death was lung cancer. She is survived by her husband, their son, and a grandson. When asked how it was raising her son through his teen years, she just shook her head. “It was torture,” she said.
The puzzle today was by Robin Yu. Yeah, Yu. It had several phrases that did something weird until you found the “revealer.” E.g., for the clue “Dangerously near,” the answer should have been TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT. But the answer seemed to start with CLOSE and the entire phrase wouldn’t fit in the spaces allotted to it. The same thing happened later with TOO HOT TO HANDLE — the answer started with HOT and couldn’t fit.
Cleverly, the revealer turned out to be TOO LITTLE TOO LATE, and what you had to do was shift the TOO to the end of the answer (“too late”) and squoosh it into one square (“too little”). Neat.
It earned a rare nod of approval from Rex on his blog — he is famously critical. And among the comments was this from Constructor Yu:
“Wow, I got a rave review from Rex! I’ve been reading your blog for years and this absolutely made my day. Thank you!”
There were some bruisers in it. 27D: “Romantic music genre originating in the Dominican Republic.” WTF? Turns out to be BACHATA. Gimme a break! And there was a cross that defeated me: 71A was “Some compound gases,” which was MONOXIDES, and I couldn’t get the I from the crosses because 58D was “Singer Zayn,” with the answer MALIK. Never heard of him. He’s a good-looking kid. Thirty-years old and British. His mom’s British/Irish and his dad’s Pakistani.
He has a daughter with model Gigi Hadid, but they broke up in 2021. There was some abuse/violence involved, sorry to say. He especially had problems with Hadid’s mom.
Here’s the lovely Ms. Hadid. Is that a wrist watch down there?
Last, do you know the difference between comfits and confits? The clue today was “Candied fruits or nuts,” and that’s COMFITS. As for confits, Barbara S. kindly explained:
Confit is any type of food that is cooked slowly over a long period as a method of preservation. Confit, as a cooking term, describes when food is cooked in grease, oil, or sugar water, at a lower temperature, as opposed to deep frying.
Both differ quite a bit from the fermentation of dovekies sealed up in a hollowed-out seal carcass buried under rocks for a couple of months. But you already know about that.
See you tomorrow.
The Wellington Files 