by Natasha Vargas-Cooper

By the time Sharon Angle conceded to returning Senator Harry Reid, well past midnight, her victory party at the Venetian’s ballroom had thinned out to a couple hundred diehards: bleary staffers, despondent volunteers, long-time (Republican) party contributors. Noticeably absent were the tea partiers. At the beginning of the night and throughout the campaign, they were easy to spot: they are a dustier sort of Republican, outfitted in jeans, zany political shirts and always gripping signs with slogans like “Trust God Not Government.” After the Las Vegas Sun called the race in favor of Reid at 9:43 p.m., nearly all had disappeared. Except one.

Right as Angle came to the center of the stage, her nose and eyes visibly reddened, a pot-bellied man with heavy-metal length hair and a homemade shirt that read “MAN UP, HARRY REID,” jumped on stage from the audience and plopped himself right next to Angle’s husband. He rocked back and forth on his heels, smiling at the crowd, looming behind Angle throughout her entire speech, while campaign workers and family continued to shoot him uneasy glances.

Everyone surrounding Angle seemed uneasy. That’s the national dilemma of the Republican party now: a long entrenched establishment confronted by a startling and brazen element willing to seize the stage.

* * *

You had to ascend to the Angle celebration room by way of four separate escalators. You pass a Barneys, a Swarovski kiosk and an oxygen bar where patrons can pay 20 dollars to sniff air. If you have ever been to the Vatican, then you know what the inside of the Venetian looks like. It is a cathedral of opulence: one is dwarfed under its giant vaulted cellings that drip with golden chandeliers. Botticelli-”style” paintings adorn the walls; gleaming marble floors that are fit for a Pope. Or a Medici.

I rode up with a married retired couple from Henderson, the middle class suburb outside of Las Vegas. She was a pigeon-toed woman in cheap sneakers and he had on a beaten up MARINES hat. They had donated $100 to the Angle campaign and had put three signs up on their lawn. Both wore baggy “ANGLE FOR SENATE” t-shirts over their clothes. Their animated conversation about the prospects of an Angle victory petered out by the third escalator.

Here they were confronted with realtors, corporate attorneys, pharmaceutical reps — the men who will be attending these parties, win or lose, for several more election cycles to come. This lot does the routine booing and cheering for their candidates but never rise to their feet unless it’s to greet each other. When it became clear that Angle had lost, it was they who stuck around just to bullshit and drink with pals for the next several hours.

Maybe they hung out and got loose to commiserate or maybe it was because they were relieved.

* * *

In the Nevada Senate race, both parties ran loser candidates. The Republicans backed Sharron Angle: a loopy state senator who rattled off outlandish reactionary positions in a cynical (or delusional) ploy to exploit the paranoia and frustration of conservative voters who feel the current administration is a failure. It’s beguiling that a fringe candidate like Sharron Angle could come as close as she did to unseating the Senate Majority Leader.

Then there’s Harry Reid, the very prototype of a calcified, gray-faced, middling politician, who out of fear (or calculation) opted for the championing the status quo instead of offering a populist alternative to a state filled with economic despair. The two spent the past several months fighting a war of attrition against the other, each party attempting to grind down and exhaust the opponent. Tonight’s race ended with a clear victor, though no leader has yet to emerge.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper has more pictures here.

Remember this guy? According to Matt Lauer, he “seems to be completely at peace with his surroundings.” Isn’t that great? Aren’t you totally comforted by the fact that the dude is fully Zen? Doesn’t it cheer you to know that the fella who set the bag ablaze can live life with an overwhelming sense of rectitude and equanimity? Seriously, this is good news for all of us: George W. Bush is showing America that no matter how badly you fuck things up, there’s still a chance for personal redemption. I mean, that’s what I’m taking away from it.

“The restaurant’s steaks are taken off grass-fed cattle, and butchered to the thickness of a Frisbee. This is a grim combination, leading to giant flaps of crust-free, overly chewy meat the flavor of nickels. Most people cut bits off, then push the rest around the plate as if it were a pile of napkins. At $45 for a rib-eye, this is a nasty business.”
 — Sam Sifton gives the very attractive new East Village restaurant Peels a nice kiss at the start of his review in today’sTimes

. But then he slaps it across the face! But then he gives it a kiss again at the end, saying of their breakfasts, “It is for this feeling that we go to restaurants.” It is for this feeling that couples go into couples therapy.

Oooh! Intriguing! A new twist in our favorite mystery from the Paleozoic era’s Cambrian period. Mount Holyoke paleontologist Mark McMenamin thinks there’s something fishy about his colleague James “Whitey” Hagadorn’s work concerning Anomalocaris, a giant shrimp-like creature conventionally believed to have preyed upon hard-shelled trilobytes, whose broken, apparently bitten exoskeletons are a well-established part of Cambrian oceans’ fossil record. “I’m a bit skeptical about Whitey Hagadorn’s conclusions regarding Anomalocaris,” McMenamin said, of findings Hagadorn presented at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver yesterday.

Using a 3-D computer model of Anomalocaris anatomy based on 505 million-year-old fossils, Hagadorn (who has apparently switched from Amherst to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science in the year since the Awl started covering this story) determined that Anamolocaris mouth-parts were soft and rubbery: suited only for a diet of jellyfish and worms or filtered plankton, physically incapable breaking trilobyte shells.

Or so he says.

“The damage to those Cambrian trilobites is real,” says McMenamin. “And if it was not Anomalocaris’s doing, who then was the predator? If Hagadorn is right and Anomalocaris could only gum its prey, then the search is on for the actual durophagous (that is, shell-cracking) Cambrian predator.”

It’s totally going to turn out that Hagadorn did it himself.

Contrary to claims by shambling homosexualist Stephen Fry, British women are gagging for it.

“As of this writing, the House GOP’s net kill count stands at 59. The party defeated these incumbents: Rep. Bobby Bright (D-Ala.), Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick (D-Ariz.), Rep. Harry Mitchell (D-Ariz.), Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.), Rep. John Salazar (D-Colo.), Rep. Allen Boyd (D-Fla.), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), Rep. Suzanne Kosmas (D-Fla.), Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), Rep. Walt Minnick (D-Idaho), Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), Rep. Debbie Halvorson (D-Ill.), Rep. Phil Hare (D-Ill.), Rep. Baron Hill (D-Ind.), Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.), Rep. Mark Schauer (D-Mich.), Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.), Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.), Rep. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-N.H.), Rep. Harry Teague (D-N.M.), Rep. Michael Arcuri (D-N.Y.), Rep. John Hall (D-N.Y.), Rep. Michael McMahon (D-N.Y.), Rep. Scott Murphy (D-N.Y.), Rep. Bobby Etheridge (D-N.C.), Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D), Rep. John Boccieri (D-Ohio), Rep. Steve Driehaus (D-Ohio), Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-Ohio), Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio), Rep. Charlie Wilson (D-Ohio), Rep. Chris Carney (D-Pa), Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.), Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C), Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (D-S.D.), Rep. Lincoln Davis (D-Tenn.), Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Texas), Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Rep. Glenn Nye (D-Va.), Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.), Rep. Steve Kagen (D-Wisc.).”

At least Rush Holt held on. Can the Tom Perriello for governor campaign start now? By 2013 everything should be good, right?

Starting at 2am EST, commenting (and posting) will be disabled for a few hours, possibly through the morning, while we do some server work on this site (and its two sister sites). Sorry for the inconvenience!

You guys, I’m literally ill with excitement. Tonight is that magical night when the punditry cycle is silenced — okay, briefly muted — by actual facts and events! It all begins now. Obviously we are all grown-ups so we know that the exit polling numbers are just for giggles. We pay them no mind. Also obviously, tonight we are watching, with great interest: Nevada (10 p.m.), Florida (polls close at 7 p.m.), Delaware (polls close at 8, also just for laffs), and California, (11 p.m.). Also at about 9:01 p.m., Carl Paladino’s ass should be handed to him and we can all move into a stage of missing him then forgetting him. What else?

What is already killing me is the AP EXIT POLL interpretation:

Voters are expressing dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama and the Congress, and they don’t have a favorable view of either the Democratic or Republican parties.

O RLY.

by Aaron Lefkove

Leading up to Thanksgiving, we’re going to bring you recipes galore! Thing is, anyone can make a turkey and yams, so we’ve asked folks to ransack their family histories for what you might call the “locally traditional” Thanksgiving dish — that delicious and sometimes-bizarre kind of dish that only your family makes.

I’m not big on Thanksgiving. Don’t worry, there’s no overarching sense of white guilt and I don’t care to get all sanctimonious and lecture you on the evils of European Colonialism. In fact I don’t care about any of that stuff at all. Thanksgiving is an American holiday. It’s meaningless to the rest of the world — although I did once inexplicably stumble on a full Thanksgiving meal in a rural Costa Rican village — so if you want to get out of town and travel abroad, the flights are still reasonably priced and you can burn a vacation day or two on either side and all of a sudden you have a whole week of travel time to play around with. I hit Barcelona for a week last year and Berlin the year prior. Whereas most people feel obliged to be with their loved ones at Thanksgiving time, I like to get as far away from mine as possible.

That’s not to say there haven’t been to a few good family-style ones here and there. For instance there was the one year at Tavern On the Green when I tipped the roving guitar player five bucks because he was playing “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica. Then he went and stood between two adjacent tables where David Hasselhoff and Donnie Wahlberg Joey McIntyre were eating with their respective families and picked out the opening to “Fade To Black.” I don’t know where he took it once he got to the heavy part because he roved away to the other side of the dining room but if I had too make a gentleman’s bet I’d say it segued into a tasteful Flamenco lick. Any way you cut it the Metallica songs were a lot more memorable than the food.

The last real family Thanksgiving I recall was four or five years ago with my girlfriend’s family in a lovely suburb of St. Paul, MN. And that is where I had lefse for the first time. Lefse is Norwegian flatbread made from potatoes and lard. You can buy it pre-made at IKEA in the prepared food section where they have those tubes of creamed salmon paste and Lingonberry soda but I don’t recommend that. There is really nothing like homemade lefse. It’s a holiday staple among people of Nordic heritage and is typically found on Christmas dinner tables all over the upper Midwest. So it figures a lapsed East Coast Jew who considers cheeseburgers a major food group would have never heard of it. Lefse is like a really rich and hearty tortilla that you either roll up with a little butter and/or sugar in the middle or else top with all sorts of savories and sweets. Some common pairings include beef, onions, smoked salmon, salt, sugar, or lutefisk, which is made from whitefish dried out with lye.

I eat mine with gefilte fish.

Wait, I’ll back up for a second. In anticipation of spending the holiday together, my girlfrend’s mother asked if there was anything she could get to make me feel at home or if there were any dietary restrictions she need be aware of. OK, I know this sounds a lot like a plot device in a wacky Ben Stiller romcom but when I got there, right on the kitchen counter was a jar of Manischewitz gefilte fish waiting for me. You know the kind, it comes packed in that salty clear jelly that you either love or else provokes dry heaves.

Don’t get me wrong, a jar of gefilte fish is a totally thoughtful gesture. I willl eat the fuck outta some gefilte fish. But it is in no way necessary. Most Jews, or you know, people in general, don’t even like gefilte fish, it’s just something that you eat. Or else you pass the platter along to the person next to you and nosh on some chopped liver until they bring the soup out. I mean I love gefilte fish but I’ll eat anything you put in front of me so don’t let that be your litmus test. You probably already know all this. You’re going to The Awl for your holiday recipes so obviously you know something about something.

So, lefse… here is how you make it:

First you’re going to need a few special cooking utensils so if you don’t have a griddle, a potato ricer, a turning stick (preferably one with a tastefully designed handle reminiscent of the decor in a Norwegian ski chalet), and a grooved rolling pin go get them.

Alright now you have all the utensils so let’s get cookin’!

6–8 potatoes, peeled
1/4 cup of lard, melted (any vegetarians out there, you can substitute Crisco for this step)
2 cups of flour
1 tablespoon of salt
1 tablespoon of sugar

1. Boil the potatoes until tender. Take them out of the water and let them dry. Once dry run them through the potato ricer. Add the melted lard (or Crisco), flour, salt, and sugar to the potato mixture, give it a good stir until the whole thing is mixed together and let cool for up to two hours or until at room temperature.

2. Add the flour to the mixture and roll the dough into balls about an eighth of an inch thick. On a floured cutting board or pastry cloth, roll the balls out flat with the grooved rolling pin.

3. Heat your griddle to 400 degrees and place the rolled out dough onto the surface rotating and flipping with the turning stick until lightly brown on both side. Take the lefse off the griddle and let it cool between layers of paper towels.

4. Now you can either eat the lefse rolled up with a little bit of butter and sugar inside or flat and topped with some of the items mentioned above. And finally if you’d like to add a little yiddishkeit to your lefse like I do, just find a big chunk of gefilte fish (the bigger the better and with some of that clear jelly if you feel so inclined) and throw it on there. Doesn’t matter how or where, just put it on the plate next to the lefse or unroll the lefse and put it on top of the unrolled bit. Then roll it up like a taco. Then eat it!

Aaron Lefkove is the gross one at Summer of Megadeth.

Here’s a good new rap song from New Orleans rapper B.G., who was Lil Wayne’s partner on Cash Money Records when they were both still in their teens, and one of the millions-selling Hot Boys crew that led the label’s rise to national prominence in the late ’90s. Most importantly, probably, in world-historical terms, B.G. is credited with popularizing (if not the inventing) the now ubiquitous term “bling bling,” an ideophone meaning “jewelry.” B.G. was a heroin addict for a while, and I like the way his voice sounds with the woozy nod of the horns on this track, which was made by local producer Big Ro, for B.G.’s independent company Chopper City Records. (And I’m glad B.G. is off heroin. It is, after all, the second-most dangerous drug…)