Trump Lawyers Powell, Chesebro Plead Guilty in Georgia

There's been unexpected movement this week in the Georgia state election fraud trial against Donald Trump and 18 of his cronies. Two of those cronies pleaded guilty this week. Sidney Powell, the Trump lawyer who propagated and litigated some of his campaign's wilder claims about massive vote fraud leading up to the January 6 mob attack on the US Capitol, pleaded guilty on Thursday (CNN.com story). She pleaded to 6 misdemeanors involving tampering with voting machines and illegally accessing voting data in Georgia. Following her surprise about-face with the plea, Trump crony Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who is regarded as an architect of the fake electors scheme, on Friday made an equally surprising U-turn from proclaiming his innocence to pleading guilty to single felony charge (CNN.com story).

These are not the first guilty pleas in the case. Last month local bail bondsman Scott Hall plead guilty to 5 charges (CNN.com story). Hall was just a bit player in the conspiracy, though. He was a gung-ho local Trump supporter who was rooked by highly placed operatives into illegally entering a county voting office and stealing vote data. Powell and Chesebro are two of those highly placed operatives. They worked with Trump in the White House.

Now three dominoes have fallen along the path leading to Trump in this case. The first one, Hall's plea, wasn't a big one. But his testimony likely helped prosecutors with evidence to get a plea deal with Powell, who had long maintained her innocence. And that in turn rapidly toppled the third domino, Chesebro's guilty plea. This is typical of how conspiracies unravel. How many more dominoes will topple next?

From Wienerschnitzel to Parmigiana!

A few weeks ago I bought a Wienerschnitzel kit from Costco. I made half of the meat in the kit following the recipe on the box.



The result was pleasingly similar, visually, to the picture on the box. I note that because that's not always the case with boxed meals. See this chicken parmigiana from Trader Joe's as an example. The schnitzel tasted okay... but merely okay. The meat was tough and bland— a problem I've found, BTW, with all sous vide meats, including (and especially) those cooked by friends who've sworn up and down while inviting me to taste their cooking that it's the most tender, flavorable meat they've ever had and is comparable to a high end steakhouse. High end steakhouse? I'd send it back at a Denny's!

Like I said, it was kind of bland. So I got the idea to try preparing it differently when I cooked the other half. Here I made a jump between cuisines and geographies. Let's switch from doing it à la Vienna to Parma. Pork cutlet parmigiana!



I reheated, breaded, and sautéed the meat the same as when I made it as schnitzel. I did sauté it at a lower temperature, though, to avoid charring the breaded coating. Then I put it in glass baking dish with marinara sauce and a covering of shredded mozzarella cheese and placed it under the broiler until the cheese melted and became just slightly crispy. On the side (not included in the meal kit) I made spätzle— I kept that part of the meal Germanic 😅— creamed spinach, and garlic bread.

BTW, my recipe for creamed spinach is different from most. Instead of making basically a béchamel sauce with milk, butter, and flour to mix in with the spinach I simply use a few tablespoons of butter and a few ounces of cheese. For seasoning I use a pinch of nutmeg— but literally just a pinch, as even 1/2 tsp. of nutmeg can overpower a dish— and salt to taste. I wish I could claim credit for this recipe but I found it on the label of a can of spinach years ago. I've been enjoying it ever since.

Red-Shouldered Hawk and Broad-Winged Hawk

It's been four weeks now since we returned from our vacation to West Virginia and North Carolina... and I'm still not done posting blogs about it. Specifically I'd like to share some pictures from our visit to the Carolina Raptor Center on our last day. In fact it was not only on the last day of our trip but in the last few hours of it. After visiting the birds we drove across town to the airport to leave!

Part of the reason I'm posting these pics four weeks later is that I didn't initially realize I had good photos from the visit. The conditions were poor. I tossed the pics into a folder on my computer and didn't look at them, assuming I'd be disappointed. Three weeks later, with a proverbial sigh and a feeling of "Well, I might as well take a look," I looked and... was surprised at how many great photos I had.



What do I mean by poor conditions? Two things. For one, dim light on a cloudy day meant I was capturing pictures at slow shutter speeds. Image stabilization on modern cameras helps with reducing blur from camera shake at slow exposures but does not help with photographing subjects that move— such as extremely agile, and sometimes twitchy, birds! Unsurprisingly many of my pics were blurry... but that's also why it's great that digital "film" is cheap. I took lots of photos to try to get at least one good one of each bird. The photo above is an example of a really good one. It's a red-shouldered hawk.

The second challenge of poor conditions was that the birds were in enclosures placed far away from where we could view them, and the enclosures all had wire mesh. It is hard to focus through wire mesh on the animals behind it. You can see the wire blurred out in the foreground of the photo above. That's because in that photo I really nailed the focus on the bird's eyes. Here's a 1:1 crop of the bird's head:



Just as this red-shoulder was hardly the only bird at the raptor center it was also far from the only bird I capture good pictures of. The next bird I struggled to identify after the fact as it looks to me like a red-tailed hawk... except the colors aren't quite right, even for that species which has a fair range of color variation. In fact it is a broad-winged hawk.



Part of my difficulty in identifying this broad-winged hawk correctly is that the species is not native to the Western US. Its range covers the Eastern US and Great Plains, on up into Canada, and down through coastal Mexico and into Central America. I've only seen broad-winged hawks with certainty once before, on a trip to Florida several years ago.



Once again, capturing sharply focused pictures of the bird through the wire mesh was difficult, but I tried dialing it in with manual focus. The immediate feedback of digital photography helps immensely here, as does the ability to capture multiple shots inexpensively. Viewing these photos at full resolution (the pic above is another 1:1 crop) was a pleasant surprise weeks after the fact.

More birds to come!