EdLucas.com

Since I moved to this state, I’ve been catching up on the local political climate with a few outstanding resources on the web.

Inside Track – Peter Freyne’s weekly column in the Seven Days weekly is a must-read.

Vermont Daily Briefing – Philip Baruth is a novelist and a commentator for Vermont Public Radio. Excellent commentary on national political issues.

Pat Political – Patricia Hejny, fiery, cantankerous and progressive, she was an independent candidate for Governor of Vermont in 2004. Pat writes about local Vermont issues relating to education, taxes, and health care. Recently, she’s been busy outlining her platform for governer (1, 2, 3).

Politics VT – Op-Ed and Vermont political news. I just found this one and unlike my other three resources, this one’s pretty straightforward and dry.

Please leave me a comment if you have any recommendations for other blogs that are concerned mainly with Vermont political issues.

Tags: Politics, Vermont
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Tonight I surfed my way to a vegan mac-n-cheese recipe on WikiBooks, so I thought I’d collect my vegan wiki links and encourage others to read and post their own entries and recipes.

• Vegan Cuisine cookbook (WikiBooks)
• Vegan Club wiki
• Veganism (Wikipedia)

Tags: Vegan
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The New England Anti-Vivisection Society is a Boston non-profit dedicated to replacing animal experiments with humane and scientifically superior alternatives. They do a lot of great work, including fighting for the release of chimpanzees from animal testing labs and supporting the Canadian chimpanzee sanctuary run by the Fauna Foundation.

Check out NEAVS auction, running through 12/5/2005. They have quite a few items listed, especially gift certificates for businesses in New England.

The photo is of a chimpanzee named Bucky who started out his unfortunate life at the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP) at New York University.

Tags: Animals, Non-profit
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Nearly every year since I’ve been at least vegetarian (now vegan) I’ve had a Tofurkey for Thanksgiving. It’s been such a ritual that most of my friends wish me a “Happy Tofurkey day” before the holiday. This year, a friend was planning to make a homemade tofu-turkey, so I instead bought the seitan-based UnTurkey, the Tofurkey’s closest rival for vegan Thanksgiving meal centerpiece.

Right out of the package, I could tell I was in for something different. Instead of appearing to be an unnatural, pasty cheese ball, the UnTurkey appeared to be an unnatural, pasty, headless, wingless fowl…skin included. This was going to be interesting. It was easy to prepare. I just covered it with foil and stuck it in the oven with Michele’s tofu-turkey for an hour. I basted it with a mixture of olive oil and orange juice and left it uncovered for the last ten minutes or so, during which the yuba skin took on a nice golden color. If you’re a veg*n that doesn’t mind food that looks like meat, you’ll appreciate how closely the UnTurkey approximates a cooked turkey.

The UnTurkey sliced up well and contained plenty of light, seasoned stuffing. The seitan shell had a more pleasant consistency than the Tofurkey and was very tasty. The only area in which the Tofurkey wins out is the gravy. I’d actually bought some Tofurkey-brand gravy so that we’d have some extra for Michele’s creation and found that it’s a lot more savory than that which came with the UnTurkey. The tofu “giblets” in the sauce are nice addition.

I think everyone that tried it agreed that the UnTurkey was a major improvement over the Tofurkey. I guess I’ll have to see if I can convince my friends to wish me a “happy un-turkey” day next year.

Tags: Vegan
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Those of you who have been holding their breath, waiting for me to update my site, can finally relax. I’ve started over on Dreamhost (a kickass $7.95/month hosting service) and based the site on WordPress. The plan is to have WordPress handle the common tasks of updating page content and news, giving me more time to work on other projects on the site.

I’m starting off with the following WordPress plug-ins:

• CaptCha! - for comment spam blocking
• inlineRSS - to quickly add feeds
• last.fm recent tracks - until I can write some code to cache my tracks in MySQL and display them grouped into albums
• Search Pages - to allow the search functionality to work site-wide and not just on blog entries
• Spelling Checker - adds aspell spell-checking to blog entries

If you can recommend any other useful plug-ins, please leave a comment.

Tags: Web Development
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