Good-bye Bush.

I didn't think I'd live long enough to see you get the hell out of the White House. I'm totally thrilled I made it. These last eight years have been demoralizing, shameful, criminal, disgusting and lamentable.

But your ignorance, fears, and stupidity are gone now and there's finally some hope that people with brains, hearts and compassion will help raise up our county from the ashes you left us in to a better place...a better place for Americans and a better place for everyone on the planet.

Speaking of the planet, there's now hope for that too. I just hope we are in time to repair the damages done to our now very small world that will heal it and all of its people.

I feel like a hundred pounds of bricks have been lifted from my shoulders and today I feel like if I tried hard enough -- I could fly.

Hormel "Always Tender" products...just what is it they do to the meat to "enhance tenderness"?

That's what I want to know.

Between Butterball turkeys, also enhanced, and now my recent introduction to cooking a Hormel pork roast that was altered in some nebulous fashion, I wonder why companies decide to muck around with food in such a way, and if they are so damn proud of their enhancements ( hmmm I really want to know the ingredients in the enhancement and don't care if it's a patented enhancement) why is it that I didn't even KNOW the pork had been previously attended to by enhancement experts. Answer: the type is so tiny in the Big Y ad, that you need a magnifying glass to go through the weekly circular to locate these special enhanced products.

Me? I like my pork and my turkeys to be unenhanced. I'll do all the enhancing thank you very much. One good thing about me doing the enhancing...I know what I'm putting on my turkey or pork -- with the Hormel line of Always Tender products, I have NO idea what they've done.

My mind reels with possibilities...hydrochloric acid maybe? formaldehyde? rubbed with hyena lungs?, soaked in fabric softener? egret urine? See why I don't want a secret enhancement to my meat???

Hormel should know that I don't want to eat anything that is touted as Always Tender...there's something other worldish about such a claim; reminds me of nuclear waste and half lives and stuff that shouldn't come into my mind when I'm prepraring a center cut pork roast someone else has also prepared making my herbs and spices and rubs and brines "pre"preparing which is too too much attention for one little -- but expensive -- piece of meat.

What happened to the Whole foods people, the greenies, the folks who demand natural products - is Hormel and Butterball giving them the bird?

I've never had a tough pork roast that I've made because I know how to cook them...covered in foil, long and slow, basted with wine, cooked with halves of big yellow onions, then uncovered to crisp the fat that once graced the top of the roasts of yore. Delicious I tell you.

I'd have to pour off a cup of fat before I could add in a roux and some nice starchy potato water to create a cordovan colored gravy to dribble over the beautiful, tender but TASTY white meat of a slow roasted yummy pork loin.

My Always Tender pork roast was soft but so is wallpaper paste. Taste apparently has been removed in favor of creating a quick cook cut of meat that doesn't even tickle the palate with flavor. A flop, in my estimation.

I guess I will avoid Hormel products in the future when once I thought of Hormel as a top name brand.

The only thing that should be always tender is our hearts.