Meanderings, 24 December 2021

Here we are, one day early, dishing out some fun links for our weekly edition of Meanderings. Enjoy!

Photo by Valentina Dominguez on Unsplash

What’s the Christmas season without someone griping about fruitcake? Well, my great aunt brought fruitcakes to our home every Christmas. They were a combination of dreck and dry and sugar.

(The Conversation) – Nothing says Christmas quite like a fruitcake – or, at the very least, a fruitcake joke.

A quip attributed to former “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson has it that “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world, and people keep sending it to each other.”

It’s certainly earned its reputation for longevity.

Two friends from Iowa have been exchanging the same fruitcake since the late 1950s. Even older is the fruitcake left behind in Antarctica by the explorer Robert Falcon Scott in 1910. But the honor for the oldest known existing fruitcake goes to one that was baked in 1878 when Rutherford B. Hayes was president of the United States.

What’s amazing about these old fruitcakes is that people have tasted them and lived, meaning they are still edible after all these years. The trifecta of sugar, low-moisture ingredients and some high-proof spirits make fruitcakes some of the longest-lasting foods in the world.

Question: Do you buy them? Give them? Receive them? Eat them? Or gripe?

Your favorite Christmas cookie?

INDIANAPOLIS (WANE) — Snowball cookies? Sugar cookies? Snoopy cookies? These are just a few that top the list of most-searched Christmas cookie recipes by state this holiday season, according to Google Trends.

Christmas cookie fudge was among the most searched, topping out the list in Nebraska, Indiana, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee and Louisiana.

Some other popular searches include:

• Italian Christmas cookies

• Keto Christmas cookies

• Snowball cookies

• Christmas sugar cookies

And among the not-so-popular:

• Lemon Christmas cookies

• Cherry Christmas cookies

• Swedish Christmas cookies

Google Trends broke down the search into five categories: flavor, shape, substitute ingredients, internationally inspired and other.

Way to go Sydney!

(CNN)A Saturday afternoon shift turned into an act of heroism for one Minnesota teen.

When 15-year-old Sydney Raley clocked in for her Saturday shift at a McDonald's in Eden Prairie, a few miles south of Minneapolis, she didn't expect to clock out as a hero.

Sydney has been working at McDonald's for around seven months and told CNN that this was just another routine weekend shift. "The day had been mostly normal -- making coffee, making drinks. Going into the lunch rush, it was all normal." she said.

After handing a customer some of her food in the drive-thru, Sydney popped back out of the window to let her know the rest was on the way. That's when Sydney noticed the woman was choking on a chicken nugget.

Merry Christmas to the animals in this zoo!

Christmas celebrations are in full swing at London Zoo, where this week resident gorillas and lions opened their gifts.

London Zoo shared a video Wednesday of its Asiatic lions opening boxes of goodies including spices and Western lowland gorillas opening boxes of vegetables.

“Gorillas Alika, Gernot, Mjukuu and Effie are always keen to clean their plates of all the festive veg at Christmas – they loved digging into their presents to find juicy carrots and tasty Brussels sprouts,” head zookeeper Dan Simmonds said.

While lioness Arya carefully picked up her gifts and carried them off to play with later, Bhanu opened his all at once, rolling around in the boxes to release his favorite seasonal scents – nutmeg and cinnamon.

China and science exchanges:

BEIJING (AP) — China on Wednesday defended its international scientific exchange programs in the wake of the conviction of a Harvard University professor charged with hiding his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said China manages such exchanges along the same lines as the U.S. and other countries.

U.S. agencies and officials should not “stigmatize” such programs and “instead do something conducive to China-U.S. scientific and people-to-people exchanges and cooperation,” Zhao said.

Charles Lieber, 62, the former chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical biology, pleaded not guilty to filing false tax returns, making false statements, and failing to file reports for a foreign bank account in China.

Lieber’s defense attorney, Marc Mukasey, had argued that prosecutors lacked proof of the charges, maintaining that investigators kept no records of their interviews with Lieber prior to his arrest.

Prosecutors argued that Lieber, who was arrested in January, knowingly hid his involvement in China’s Thousand Talents Plan to protect his career and reputation. The Chinese program is designed to recruit people with knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property who could pass secrets on to China.

Lieber denied his involvement during inquiries from U.S. authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, which had provided him with millions of dollars in research funding, prosecutors said.

Lieber also concealed his income from the Chinese program, including $50,000 a month from the Wuhan University of Technology, up to $158,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million in grants, according to prosecutors.

In exchange, they said, Lieber agreed to publish articles, organize international conferences and apply for patents on behalf of the Chinese university.

The case is among the highest profile to come from the U.S. Department of Justice’s “China Initiative.”