So this is how haggling is supposed to work: you’ve got a sheep herder named Akhbar, wants to sell one of his sheep. You’ve got a farmer named Muhamed who wants to buy a sheep. Akhbar knows that the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis, and he doesn’t want to sell his for any less. So he starts the haggling process by offering Muhamed a great deal on a fine, strong, young buck at 60 Kubokis. Muhamed also knows the going rate for sheep is 35 Kubokis and he refuses to pay a dime more, so he answers that the scrawny, sickly, old specimen before him isn’t worth more than 20 Kubokis. Read more »

To your list of world’s most dangerous jobs, you might want to add: Iranian nuclear scientist. The New York Times is reporting that two Iranian nuclear scientists were targetted for assassination, by persons unknown, today Monday, Nov. 29 and one of them, Majid Shahriari was killed when a car bomb that had been attached to his moving vehicle was remotely detonated. Shahriari’s wife was wounded as was the wife of the second scientist Fereydoon Abbasi, whose car was also targetted. Abbasi survived. Read more »

First the news, in case you missed it over the weekend. It was in the Times, so it must be Big:

PORTLAND, Ore. — A Somali-born teenager who thought he was detonating a car bomb at a packed Christmas tree-lighting ceremony downtown here was arrested by the authorities on Friday night after federal agents said that they had spent nearly six months setting up a sting operation.

The bomb, which was in a van parked off Pioneer Courthouse Square, was a fake — planted by F.B.I. agents as part of the elaborate sting — but “the threat was very real,” Arthur Balizan, the F.B.I.’s special agent in charge in Oregon, said in a statement released by the Department of Justice. An estimated 10,000 people were at the ceremony on Friday night, the Portland police said.

Frightening stuff, as the FBI sez:

“Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon. “At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.”

Whoa, hold on a sec: At every turn?

Perhaps — and we’re just spitballing here — from the very first turn?

As an Expat Oregonian — half our library is from Powell’s, just a few blocks from Pioneer Courthouse Square — we take more than a passing interest in this case. So let’s take a leisurely stroll through the indictment…

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Leslie Nielsen, ‘Airplane!’ and ‘Naked Gun’ star, dies at 84 [Entertainment Weekly]

Amazing how much I can accomplish on a Sunday if the Jets played already on Thursday …

Like a restaurant, I’m trying to use everything that’s left from other cooking forays – here it’s the duck carcass from Thanksgiving dinner, leftover shredded carrots from a soffrito, celery ends, and some onions that were getting ready to go south. Oh, and some beef broth leftover from another recipe. All of it goes into the stockpot with water and gets cooked down to make duck stock.

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IRAQI REFUGEES WHO RETURNED NOW LEAVING AGAIN. “(NEWSER) – Nearly 100,000 refugees have returned to Iraq since 2008, but many are leaving again—and for some, this may be the last time. “I was near a female suicide bomber a couple months ago. Then I was in my brother’s truck when insurgents opened fire on a bridge. My friend was killed in front of me with a knife,” one tells the New York Times, highlighting the fact that despite the improvements that induced so many to return, the nation remains far from secure.”

Man, this dude is a fucking tool. And scary as hell.

[NYT: The Tea Party’s Radical Constitutionalism]