We’re back. Exhaustive posting to follow, after recovery from 2-day drive along IH-10 and 8 across substantial portions of four western states between San Antonio and San Diego… with a dog. Did we miss anything interesting? Don’t everyone chime in at once….
go to the NSA’s official website and read their mission statements and outline of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). Hell, dig through the whole thing.
Tell me again the kerfuffle? I’m more confused than ever. If the signal orginates overseas from a known bad guy, we’re supposed to ignore it because the guy at this end might be a U.S. Citizen and
a righteous dude?
When I was a teen, the rule of thumb was that being a civil servant meant taking a lower rate of pay than one might make in an equivalent position in the private sector, in exchange for greater job security. But, for at least two decades, that has hardly been the case:
According to the Manhattan Institute, the average bus or subway driver–the most-skilled job in the union by most standards–is already paid $63,000 a year. The person who sits behind the bullet-proof glass in what used to be called a token booth, and who now says for most purchases you have to use the metro-card machines, takes down an average of $51,000. And the least-skilled work, though certainly the dirtiest, is the subway cleaner who clocks in at an average of $40,000.
Compare that with the average New York worker. Take out Wall Street, where mega-bonuses skew the average unfairly, and the average private sector worker earns $49,000. Peel off the college-educated (which you don’t need for most transit jobs) and the average income drops to well below $35,000. That includes everyone from a skilled factory worker to the clerk in Bloomingdale’s.
Nationwide, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average unskilled worker (we’ll put the cleaners in that category) earns $23,753 a year in the private sector; in the public sector that jumps to $30,056, but is still ten grand less than a New York subway cleaner. The disparity jumps even further when you look at the nationwide “transportation workers” as a specialty. There the average annual wage is $30,846 in the private sector and $34,611 in the public sector. Clearly, it pays to work for the government. But it pays even better to work for the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority)–indeed 80% better. New York is expensive, but not that expensive.
The reason? compliant elected officials have failed to hold the line against public employee union demands
* In 1994, then-Gov. Mario Cuomo signed a law giving transit workers the right to retire at age 55, with a half-pay pension, after just 25 years on the job. At the time, employees opting for this 25/55 benefit were required to make an added pension contribution equal to 2.3 percent of their annual salaries.
* In 2000, as part of a series of pension sweeteners affecting every government employee in the state, Gov. George Pataki and the Legislature agreed to reduce transit workers’ regular pension contributions by one-third, and to eliminate the added contribution for the 25/55 benefit. This effectively amounted to a 3.3 percent increase in transit workers’ base pay, on top of pay hikes in that year’s contract.
* In 2003, fresh from another negotiation with the MTA, the union persuaded state legislators to introduce a bill allowing transit workers to retire with half-pay pensions at age 50, after just 20 years on the job.
Coming at a time when the state, city and MTA were awash in red ink, the 20/50 pension sweetener would have cost more than $100 million a year. Nonetheless, just before adjourning in 2003, the Legislature approved the bill. The vote tallies were as good as it gets — 148-0 in the Democrat-dominated Assembly, and 62-0 in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Pataki killed the measure with a “pocket veto” in early 2004. Even then, however, he didn’t object in principle to 20/50 pensions. Instead, in a tepid veto message, the governor cited technical problems with the bill, expressed qualms over its cost and said he was “constrained to disapprove the bill” based on the objection of the MTA and Mayor Bloomberg, “who contend that this type of enhanced benefit should be the subject of mutual agreement through collective bargaining.”
Indeed, this problem is nationwide:
The pension deficit now reported by state and local governments totals $278 billion. If these governments adopted the more conservative estimates used in the private sector, however, the total deficit would be $700 billion. This amount does not include retiree health benefits.
New York City put $2.46 billion into its pension fund in 2004 — eight percent of the total city budget. By 2007, the City expects pension contributions to hit $4.9 billion, or 12 percent of its total budget. Illinois’ pension plans are facing a $35 billion deficit in a state with a total operating budget of $43 billion.
Legislation to end defined benefit pensions in favor of defined contribution plans similar to 401(k)s for government employees has been proposed in Alaska and Maryland. Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Carolina and Virginia are all considering a shift to defined contribution plans.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed ending the California defined benefit plan and instituting a 401(k)-type plan instead. California contributed $3.5 billion for pension and health care benefits for its retirees this year, almost triple what it paid three years ago. Schwarzenegger has indicated that he will put the public employee pensions issue on the ballot in 2006.
For years, state legislatures and local governments were able to justify higher overall benefits for public sector workers because wages in the private sector were generally higher. With the employer attack on private sector unions and the decline in wage growth in the private sector, however, public sector labor costs are now higher than private sector costs.
Total compensation costs for state and local government employees were $34.72 per hour worked in 2004, compared with $23.76 for private-sector workers, according to BLS and Census Bureau data. Public sector benefit costs are approaching 40 percent of total compensation, compared to 30% in the private sector, and pressure is building to cut these costs dramatically.
The disproportionate political power of public employee unions has not only been due to their massive financial power, but that they have always been able to muster legions among their membership, to man phone banks and walk precincts, in support of their favored candidates.
But, as the rush of angry comments – on the TWU’s own blog – demonstrate, the general public is feed-up:
The Transport Workers Union Local 100 has a blog. The Blog had comments. But no longer. Fortunately the comments were cached before the union tried to make all those angry New Yorkers go away. Bloggers wrote a lot about the strike, but the comments on the union site really seemed to catch the enmity of a lot of New Yorkers towards the union.
Sample Quote: “You guys really have a lot of balls. All you do is drive around in circles. Your job isn’t hard at all. You get paid as much as cops and firemen, while much more as teachers. Something is wrong. You’re asking for way too much here. Back down and know your roll. You guys aren’t as high and as mighty as you think.”
Thanks to Bill for finding this cache!Hey, Local 100: you guys weighed the options, asked for support and chose to go on strike. So you ought to own and acknowledge citizen’s reaction. Censorship is so lame.
Think about this: Reagan replaced the air traffic controllers without much problem (largely due to highly trained, but unemployed vets). But what do you think it takes to train someone (even with military experience) to manage a crowded airspace, verses sitting in the front of a train, to put on the brakes, should the (virtually infallible) computerized controls go awry?
I have no issue with their right to strike – regardless of New York law. But we must recognize that these people are the Deltas of the world. And, while our private sector is blowing off these high pay/low skill workers in droves, they keep holding on in the public sector. This situation cannot endure.
My daughter and I leave tonight for a long Christmas-time road trip, yet another in a semi-long series— an addition and continuation of the times I drove from Northern California, and from Ogden, all the way south through several climate zones, to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad. But we did more often spend our Christmases together, just the two of us in whatever home we happened to find ourselves in that particular year, establishing our own Christmas traditions— Blondie could pick out and open just one of her Christmas presents from under the tree on Christmas Eve, as long as she left milk and cookies for Santa, we would have anything but turkey for dinner, and for a long run of Christmasses I would give her an enormous and lavish Lego assortment, a castle or a pirate ship, which we would build together on Christmas day
And so a pic from one of those Christmasses, as we prepare for a long road trip.
Blondie, checking out the ornaments, Christmas 1985, Zaragoza Spain
We’ll be back New Years’ Day— have a lovely holiday and the most wonderful and promising of New Years!
I received my new liscense plates and registration the other day and forgot to mention something weird on them:
Bar Codes. There are bar codes on my liscense plates. So not only does the state government have me cross referenced by my liscence plate number, it also has me related to this bar code. Somewhere there’s a database that has my name attached to that bar code.
Part of me really wants to take that code to a tattoo artist and have it done just below the collar line in the center of the top of my back. But that’s also the part of me that still listens to XTC and New Order so…the rest of me doesn’t pay much attention to him…unless we want to dance badly and look completely like a middle-aged white guy. My hips don’t slip as easy as they used to.
Oh, yeah somewhere, someplace, someone is forgiving me for cadging Jack Aubrey’s joke in the movie version of “Master & Commander”, about choosing the lesser of two weevils, in reference to my darling daughter presenting me with the choice of either a gun or a dog as a personal home protection device. I chose, of course, a dog as the lesser of two weevils, over my own misgivings, and the even deeper misgivings of the cats, especially Bubba and Parfait, the visitors who now find their gentleman’s paradise closed to them, for now my backyard is home to… a dog. I put their dishes on the front porch, but they have not been back since yesterday morning, when I returned from my morning run, dragging Lesser-Weevil back with both hands on the leash from chasing them. A couple of miles, and she still has energy and enthusiasm. The discipline will come, and fairly easily, I think, for she appears to be an intelligent and personable dog.
Her qualities are as murky as the circumstances under which she was acquired, from friends of my daughter who were either vague, or unknowing, but this much we have been able to deduce either from personal observation, or from the judgment of an attending veterinarian: She is an un-neutered female (and partial to females, small children, and non-threatening males), is somewhere between six and nineteen months of age. Her adult teeth are grown in, but relatively unworn, her paws and leg bones are in proportion to the rest of her, and the expert veterinarian concludes that she has grown to her adult size and weight (about 45 pounds), and is in excellent health. She appears to be mostly boxer, and lashings of something else, at which can only be guessed; whatever what may be in the genetic mix she is openly friendly with other, non-hostile dogs, and genuinely civil and affectionate to the average non-hostile person. She was actually pretty territorial about Blondie’s car, during the drive from Cherry Point, which bodes well for her assigned profession as a guard or alarm dog.
Lesser-Weevil also— which is good for me and the small yards in the neighborhood I live in— not one of those nervy or terribly bored dogs who barks interminably at any provocation as a hobby. (Her bark is more of a deep, sonorous bay, the sort of thing you can imagine from a bloodhound on the trail) I may have to get a couple of the distant neighbors to walk up to the front door as a test, to see how she handles strangers coming to the door; she is quite calm about Blondie or Judy or I coming up the walk. She sleeps on the back porch, curling up very small, and is ecstatically happy to go out with me for my early-morning run, cavorting and bouncing up and down on her hind legs for about the first half block, until I shorten the leash and then she settles down into a steady mile-eating jog. Three mornings, and she seems to have already grasped that I need a dog that will pace a short distance from my right hand, not tugging or jerking at the leash. Blondie is already working on “sit/stay”, with promising results; the Lesser-Weevil sits and waits, even while you have her full food-dish in hand.
Now, if she would only restrain herself from chewing up everything in sight; she’s already done a number on the bamboo table on the back porch, my gardening hat (well, that was nearly shot already), the plastic lighter I use for the oil lamps, and Blondie’s pleather purse…. Ah, well, things to work towards.
As our long-term readers know, I’ve been following the case of Terry Bressi, and his fight against a seemingly illegal joint federal/state/indian roadblock conducted in Arizona.
Well, included with my last email update was this from Denver:
A similar incident to mine recently took place in Denver, Colorado. A 50 year old mother of four was forcibly removed from a public bus by federal agents while she was on her way to work one morning. As part of its normal route, the bus was traveling through the Denver Federal Center and was stopped at a federal checkpoint. Armed agents boarded the bus and demanded that everyone show their ID. Given that nobody is even required to have ID on their person if they aren’t driving, Deborah Davis refused and was arrested and charged with two federal misdemeanors for daring to stand up for her rights. Her case was quickly highlighted at:
http://www.papersplease.org/davis
and the resulting public outcry resulted in the federal prosecutor dropping all charges the day before she was to go to court. To find out about what’s increasingly becoming a common occurrence in this country, please check out the website highlighting Deborah Davis’s case above.
This story has gotten some MSM attention. But for those who would like to use this as something with which to demonize the Patriot Act, sorry:
Carl Rusnok, spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which oversees the Federal Protective Service, said the practice of checking IDs at the bus stop was instituted after the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
The cursory bus check is part of a “multilayered security system,” he said. “There are 9,000 federal facilities in the country, and virtually every one of them requires an ID check.”
I’ll have to do some follow-up on this. At the moment, I’m confident nobody checks the ID of passengers on the several buses that pass the Ronald Reagan Federal Bldg. in Santa Ana, which is immediately adjacent to the Transit Terminal.
Update: Jacob Sullum is following this. So is Adam Shostack. And Alicia Caldwell at the Denver Post has a good article, including a graphic, showing that this particular bus actually goes through the Federal Center campus. Im still wwondering if they check passengers in private vehicles.
And here’s a discussion post, with one comment, at Josh Marshall’s TPMCafe. I honestly don’t know why this hasn’t gotten more exposure in the blogosphere. I would think this would have my old friend Jeralyn Merritt blowing steam out her ears, as this is just the sort of abuse she rails against, and it’s also in her neck of the woods.
Update II: Jeralyn informs me that she blogged on this at a local Denver site, 5280.com. She also notes that charges weren’t filed on Ms. Davis. I, for one, hope it doesn’t end here. Criminal charges were also dropped in Terry Bressi’s case; but he’s following-up on it civilly. And the fact that she’s not being charged with a crime does not effect the matter of Ms. Davis’ rights being violated. If the facts are as she states, she was man-handled, and detained for over three hours, which caused her to lose her job.
But there are larger issues at hand than just the fate of a single individual. It seems the Denver RTD has adjusted it’s “route 100” around the campus, with a spur going in, for those with business there – to apease Ms. Davis and her supporters. However, as Carl Rusnok stated, this is going on at other federal facilities. And, as reader Chaz points out (see comments), federal contractors as well.
So, my dearly beloved and somewhat over-protective daughter has put it to me… given that in the row of about twelve or fourteen houses in which I live contains only three houses (one on either end, and one in the middle) which actually contain able-bodied males (and one of them appearing to fall in the weedy and academically ineffectual division of the male spectrum anyway), and that all the rest contain single women— widows, working single women, divorcees, single parents, most of us of a certain age— and given also that the neighborhood was plagued a couple of years ago by an intrusive peeping-tom (who managed to scare the living ***** out of some of my neighbors), given that someone once tried to jimmy the door of my house with a 16-in screwdriver, and a couple of someone elses’ tried to steal William’s Accura Integra right out of my driveway— and even though this is a really pretty safe neighborhood, with an active neighborhood patrolling scheme… she has laid down the law. I must have either a dog… or a gun. Judy, my neighbor, who lives vicariously through me has been insisting the same thing also (I Know Judy and Blondie have been collaborating on this, I just know it!)
I don’t want a gun, I know there are all sorts of reasons why I should, but I really don’t.
Dad had a couple of revolvers in the house when we were children, but they were kept locked away. I didn’t ever handle anything other than a BB-gun until I had been five or six years in the Air Force, and I never took small-arms training until another ten years after than and threatened with a TDY to the Magic Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. (It was with the standard Beretta. I have small hands, and to me the Beretta was so heavy I had to hold it with both hands to keep it steady enough to even squeeze off an accurate shot.)
But I don’t want to have to think that civil authority has been so degraded, that the soft power of the commune and neighborhood has been so destroyed that having a gun in the house is essential. I don’t want to acknowledge that things have become so horrible that we need to take this precaution. Call me a pacifist wuss, call me a freeloader on all my neighbors who do have guns, call me a starry-eyed optimist… but to have a gun in my house would mean to me that we have descended to the law of the jungle, that the SAPD is useless and ineffectual, that things have gone to the point where we cannot depend on civil compacts at all. I am just not at the point— just yet— where I can do that.
So, I will have the dog. She is very sweet, my daughter says, very well mannered and protective. I can’t begin to imagine how she will get along with the cats. I think I will call her “Lesser-Weevil”… because (to steal a line from “Master and Commander”… she will be the lesser of two evils. Although the cats might have a different opinion, of course.
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Sha na na na, sha na na na na,
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Got a job Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Yes indeedy, sportsfans, full and regular employment awaits the lovely and multi-talented Sgt. Mom, as of Friday, 8:00AM…. after three months as a temp mostly at the Enormous Corporate Giant, and pretty well resigning myself to the fact that very few enterprises would be looking to hire new staff until after the holidays… which would mean another couple of weeks after Christmas laboring in the vinyards of the E-C-G.
This whole thing happened as fast as a drive-by shooting, a message from one of the temp services about a possible job on my home phone last night. I called them first thing this morning, from the E-C-G:
“Oh, we really want to put your resume in front of this client…is it still current?”
“Well, pretty much, just tell him I’ve been temping since August for “Insert Major Temp Service Here”.”
“When can you do an interview?”
“Well, I can work with the manager here, and be free on Friday, last thing.”
“Ummm… well, he really wants to have someone start first thing… he’s coming in this morning to interview a possible… could you be here at 11:15?”
This agency is about ten minutes drive away from the palatial premises of the E-C-G, I can kiss off a lunch hour, or a little more, in the service of my eventual economic salvation. The backlong of work I was assigned to expedite for the E-C-G has been accomplished since mid-morning on Monday, and the area manager (a darling and accomplished woman) is very pleased with this, and otherwise inclined to be sympathetic to my quest for gainful long-term employment that does not involve two hours of travel out of my day. (I have better things to be doing with those hours, life being too short to spend them trudging the endless corridors of the E-C-G, or coping with San Antonio’s interminable traffic lights and jammed expressways.)
So, clock out, with the area manager’s best wishes, and allowing ten minutes to get to the VEV and off the E-C-G’s single zip-code encompassing premises, and ten to get down to the agency….
Foiled. The traffic light at a fairly major intersection is not functioning, and I spend the whole twenty minutes I have allotted to travel sitting in gridlocked traffic and fuming. This is the classic nightmare, horribly and embarrassingly late for an important appointment, second only to running in, trailing a length of toilet paper from your foot. I rush into the agency at half past the hour, apologizing and saying to the interviewer,
“I am so sorry… can you please imagine me in a suit, and not panting for breath?”
Fortunately, everyone got caught in the same traffic… and the interview goes very well. Of course, just about every interview I have done over the last five months I think I have done very well… well, maybe not the one where I told the CEO (in answer to the question “What would you do for me?”) “Get you properly organized… and bring in a vacuum cleaner and vacuum this office”. The place was a grubby pit in a warehouse an impossible drive away, and I didn’t really want that job anyway— it would have killed my soul, walking into it every day, with fluff on the turd-colored carpet and waterstains on the suspended cieling tiles.
Well, the agency called this afternoon–I have got the job. Well, that was a welcome surprise…. I shall think of it as my very welcome and most unexpected Christmas Present.
As a place likely to feature in the national news as the site of a horrible civic disaster, San Antonio is pretty far down on the list, rather a comfort for those who live here. It is not on a coast, and therefore subject to hurricanes, tsunamis or landslides. It wasn’t built on a major earthquake fault line, or on a major river: we are too far south for tornados, and too far north to collect anything but the remnants of hurricanes, there are no dormant volcanoes anywhere near. Mother Nature, a temperamental and moody bitch, tends to slam us with nothing more drastic than high winds, hail and torrential rains which, however, lead to sudden and astonishingly fast-moving floods within the metropolitan area. Local residents know where those places are— most of them are clearly marked anyway— but it is a civic embarrassment, knowing that there are places within city limits where it is possible to be innocently driving along a city street and be carried away and drowned.
The very predictability of flooding, though, has the fortunate sidelight of keeping local emergency planners on their toes. A more-than-usually heavy rain will swell Salado Creek out of it’s banks; the Olmos Basin will fill up, the downtown underpass part of I-35 will be impassible, North New Braunfels will run with about a foot of water, and there will be a couple of motorists caught by surprise and having to be rescued by the emergency services— it’s all expected, all predictable. But local disaster preparedness officials and planners have other motivations for staying on top of disaster response planning; as Lawson Magruder of University of Texas San Antonio’s Institute for the Protection of American Communities points out— San Antonio is well situated to serve as a refuge and support area for disasters occurring along the Gulf Coast and the border areas; recently 15,000 refugees from Hurricane Katrina were sheltered in San Antonio alone.
Granny Jessie, tiny and brutally practical, was not particularly given to fancy and fantasies. When she talked of old days and old ways, she talked of her girlhood on her fathers’ ancestral acres, a farm near Lionville, Chester County, Pennsylvania; of horse-drawn wagons, and cows and cats, and how pigs were cleverer than dogs. Of how she and her sister and brother would have to stop going down to the pig-pen early in the fall, lest they become too fond of an animal whose fate it was to be butchered for ham, and bacon, roasts and sausage and scrapple to last the winter through. Of how she played on the Lionville boys’ baseball team, since there were not enough boys, and she was a tomboy and skillful enough to play first-base, and how her grandfathers’ house was once a fall-back way-station on the Underground Railway. (It was the inn in Lionville itself was the main way-station, with a secret room and a concealed access to the woods, or so said Granny Jessie.) It was all very prosaic, very American, a breath away from the Little House books and so very familiar.
Granny Dodie’s stories, even if she did not have a spell-binding repertoire, were touched with fire and enchantment because of the very unfamiliarity of the venue… a row-house in Liverpools’ Merseyside, a few streets away from there the Beatles had come from, where Granny Dodie had grown up the youngest of a family of nine, sleeping three in a bed with her older sisters. “The one on the side is a golden bride, the one by the wall gets a golden ball, the one in the middle gets a golden fiddle, “she recited to me once. “Although all I ever got of it was the hot spot!” All her brothers were sailors or dockworkers, and her ancestors too, as far as memory went. Even her mothers’ family, surnamed Jago, and from Cornwall— even they were supposed to have grafted onto their family tree a shipwrecked Armada sailor. Granny Dodie insisted breathlessly there was proof of this in the darkly exotic good looks of one of her brothers. “He looked quite foreign, very Spanish!” she would say. We forbore to ruin the story by pointing out that according to all serious historic records, all the shipwrecked Spaniards cast up on English shores after the Armada disaster were quickly dispatched… and that there had been plenty of scope in Cornwall— with a long history of trans-channel adventure and commerce—to have acquired any number of foreign sons-in-law. She remembered Liverpool as it was in that long-ago Edwardian heyday, the time of the great trans-Atlantic steamers, and great white birds (liver-birds, which according to her gave the port it’s name) and cargo ships serving the commercial needs of a great empire, the docks all crowded and the shipways busy and prosperous.
One Christmas, she and my great-Aunt Nan discovered a pictue book— John S. Goodalls’ “An Edwardian Summer”, among my daughters’ presents, and the two of them immediately began waxing nostalgic about long-ago seaside holidays; that time when ladies wore swimsuits that were more like dresses, with stockings and hats. They recollected donkey-rides along the strand, the boardwalks and pleasure-piers full of carnival rides, those simpler pleasures for a slightly less over-stimulated age. But the one old tale that Granny Dodie told, the one that stayed my memory, especially when Pip and JP and I spent the summer of 1976 discovering (or re-discovering) our roots was this one:
“There are places,” she said, ” Out in the country, they are, where there are stone stairways in the hillsides, going down to doorways… but they are just the half the size they should be. They are all perfectly set and carved… but for the size of people half the size we are. And no one knows where they lead.”
Into the land of the Little People, the Fair Folk, living in the hollow hills, of course, and the half-sized stairways lead down into their world, a world fair and terrible, filled with faerie, the old gods, giants and monsters and the old ways, a world half-hidden, but always tantalizingly, just around the corner, or down the half-sized stairway into the hidden hills, and sometimes we mundane mortals could come close enough to brush against that unseen world of possibilities.
From my journal, an entry writ during the summer of 1976, when Pip and JP and I spent three months staying in youth hostels and riding busses and BritRail… and other means of transportation:
July 9- Inglesham
Today we started off to see the Uffington White Horse, that one cut into the hillside in what— the Bronze or Iron Age, I forget which. We started off thinking we could catch a bus and get off somewhere near it, but after trying quite a few bus stops (unmarked they are at least on one side of the road) we took to hitch-hiking and the first person took us all the way there. He was an employee of an auctioneering firm, I guess & I guess he wasn’t in a hurry because he asked where we were going (Swindon & then to the White Horse) & said he would take us all the way there. It was a lovely ride, out beyond Ashbury, and the best view of the horse is from the bottom, or perhaps an aero plane. It’s very windy up here, very strong and constantly- I think it must drive the grass right back into the ground, because it was very short & curly grass. We could see for miles, across the Vale, I guess they call it. After that we walked up to Uffington Castle, an Iron Age ring-embankment, & some people were trying to fly a kite-it’s a wonder it wasn’t torn to pieces.
We sat for a while, watching fields of wheat rippling like the ocean & cloud-shadows moving very slowly and deliberately across the multicolored patchwork.
The man who brought us out advised us to walk along the Ridgeway, an ancient track along the crest of the hill, and so we did. It was lovely and oh, so lonely. Nothing but the wheat fields on either side and looking as if they went on forever.
We looked at Wayland’s Smithy, a long stone barrow in a grove of trees & when we got to Ashford, we found the Rose & Crown pub and had lunch. It was practically empty, no one but an elderly couple and their dog, a lovely black & white sheepdog, very friendly. Then we set off to walk and hitch-hike back to Highworth, but we picked the two almost deserted roads in Oxfordshire to do it, because it took nearly forever to get two rides. One got us from Ashbury to (indecipherable) and the second directly into Highworth. Both were women, very kind and chatty; I wish I knew what impulse people have which make them pick up hitch-hikers. What I do know is that the loveliest sight is that of a car slowing down and the driver saying “Where are y’heading for?”
Thirty years later I remember how charmed we were by the people who gave us rides— the auctioneers assistant who was so taken in by my reasons for seeing the White Horse that he decided he had to see it himself, and the two women— both with cars full of children— who were either totally innocent of the ways of this soon-to-become-wicked-world, or had unerring snap-judgment in deciding to slow down and pick up three apparently innocent and apparent teenagers. (I was 22 but was frequently and embarrassingly informed that I looked younger than the 16 year-old Pip, and JP was 20, but also must have looked innocent, younger and harmless.)
With their assistance, we spent a lovely day, in the sun and wind, in the uplands along the Ridgeway, examining the form of a running horse, cut into the turf on a chalk hillside, an ancient fortress, a legendary dolman tomb, and an ancient highway along the backbone of Britain… always thinking that just around the next bend would be the stairway into the hollow hills, and the giants and fair folk of old… Adventure and peril just as Grannie Dodie said it would be in the lands of our ancestors… always just around the corner.
In the summer of 1971, when the Girl Scout troop that I belonged to was doing a lovely and frivolous three-week excursion to the Hawaiian Islands, I talked to a man who said he was a Navy vet, and had been at Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. He was, he said, on Ford Island, on a bicycle and on his way to the mess hall for breakfast, when several sorts of heck broke out. And suddenly, everything changed… and nothing was ever quite the same again.
Pearl Harbor, December 7th , 1941….
(Turret of the Arizona, taken from the memorial, 1971)
My daughter says she has a new understanding of that… she was on her way to work, the morning of September 11, 2001, at Camp Pendleton, that the whole thing began to develop as she was waking up, in the shower, driving into work… and when she got there, the Marines at her unit were all in the parking lot, listening to their car radios. And that for two or three days, the base was weirdly, curiously quiet.
History… it’s the thing that is happening, when we are on our way to breakfast and have other plans.
(Again, another wonderful soup recipe from Nava Atlas’ “Vegetariana”)
Potato & Dutch Cheese Soup
Combine in a 4 qt saucepan, and enough broth to cover generously
6 Medium potatoes, peeled and cut in chunks
1 large onion, diced
1 cloves garlic, minced finely
2 bay leaves
2 Tbsp butter
Cover and simmer until potatoes are tender, and stir in
2 Tbsp dry white wine
3 Tbsp. dried or 1 1/2 Tbsp fresh dill
1 tsp. paprika
1/2 tsp dry mustard
pepper to taste
Thicken with 1 Tbsp. flour mixed with water enough to make a thin paste, whisking flour/water mixture into soup, and also breaking up potatoes slightly. Stir in
1 1/2 cup grated Edam or Gouda cheese
Simmer gently until cheese is melted… and enjoy. Like the Lentil and Brown Rice soup, this one is also very good warmed over the next day.
So there is a kerfuffle (expounded on here, with links) about small children behaving badly in public places, and how on earth two different sets of people can peacefully co-exist; those people who would like to enjoy a cup of coffee or a fine meal, or an excursion to someplace of interest in peace and quiet… and those people who would like to do so, accompanied by children. And there is the third set of people, those owners and proprietors of such places, who want very much to cater to both sets, and somehow avoid the incoming fire from both parties as well as lawsuits, should misbehaving little monsters somehow manage to injure themselves or others.
Honestly, it’s not really about children, actually – it’s more about parents who can’t or won’t insist on a certain degree of decorum from their offspring, little caring that while they will put up with a lot from their offspring, other people are not so obliged. I speak of one who has been there, in all three capacities; as the parent of a willful child of a particularly tempestuous nature, as a horrified witness to parental malpractice in public spaces, and as a contract employee in a department store, observing children who were charming, well-behaved and polite, and others who were clearly running amuck.
I worked once with another single-parent female NCO whose kindergarten age son was a horror— she would never, ever, follow through on a warning or a threat when he disobeyed. Every other experienced parent within earshot would cringe, whenever she said, in that uncertain, pleading voice “Sugar, don’t do (whatever he was heading straight for doing) – you don’t want to be in time-out, do you?” Whereas it was perfectly clear he didn’t give a shit for time-out or any other of her pathetic threats, and I would think, despairingly, ‘If he doesn’t have any respect for you now, what in the hell are you going to do when he is a hulking teenager and a foot taller than you?’ She never, ever, delivered on any threat made in public hearing, and of course, her son was a willful little monster – and one with plenty of company, as I saw in that brief season when I worked retail, and observed the horror of snotty-nosed, sticky-handed small children heading straight for the designer clothing racks. I had a special technique for those children, though; I would appear noiselessly among the racks, and murmur confidently; “Darling, you had best go back to your mommy – do you know what we do with unattached children at closing time? Security takes them away, and those who aren’t adopted by store staff are raised to be sales associates; where do you think we get new store staff?” This would usually reattach them to their parental unit as if they had been velcroed there, although there were a small percentage of children and parental units who upon hearing this, looked hopeful and said “Really??!!” (Working at the same department section, Blondie was much less subtle— she would tell the same sticky-handed small children that the fur coats were only sleeping, that they were chained to the racks to prevent them from waking up and leaping down to fall upon and eat small, disobedient children.)
At the end of the day, my sympathies are split, but with a large chunk of it being with those parents who have children to do behave well in public (or mostly behave well) but catch it in the neck, anyway. There’s nothing quite as agonizing as going into an upscale San Francisco restaurant with a toddler — who for a change is behaving rather well — and being treated like some sort of leper by the waiter. Whom I left with a 25 cent tip, by the way. Unlike the waiter in a similar restaurant the night before, who fussed over my daughter, and brought her some crackers and finger food along with my menu, to while away the minutes until my order was ready. I have always counted myself lucky that Blondie’s terrible twos coincided with our PCS to Greece, where it seemed that children were admired, and petted and indulged universally – but usually managed to behave themselves in public.
The occasional horrific temper-tantrum— like the time she threw a glass on the floor in a pizza restaurant in Glyphada, screamed her head off, and bit me on the forearm so hard I had a lump there for months — were passed over with equanimity by the waiter and everyone else present. ‘Children— eh, they will be children,’ seemed to be the waiter’s attitude, as he swept up the glass, and no one turned a hair when I spanked her just outside the front door. I couldn’t help noticing how differently children, and their parents were treated in Greece, how much less nerve-racking going out into public spaces in Greece with her actually was, even though I still couldn’t count on much beyond fifteen or twenty minutes of good behavior from her in any one venue. I couldn’t help noticing how everyone noticed children, paid attention to them, petted them, indulged them with treats and admiration, gave extravagant notice of how important they were, how special and cherished – valued not just by their parents, but everyone, from the granny in the hardware store where I bought propane bottles giving her a bit of penny candy, to the priest in the square by the Metropolitan Cathedral, giving her a blessing and a little icon the size of a baseball trading card. I also couldn’t help noticing that children in Greece were confident and secure – sometimes a little brash – but almost always quite well behaved and out and about with their parents everywhere.
It was such a contrast to what it had been in the States, before we transferred. It just seemed like they liked children a whole lot more, and were a lot more indulgent about bad behavior – but there was a lot less bad behavior around. Were children liked and indulged because they were fairly well-mannered. Or were they well-mannered because they were liked and indulged? I’ll leave the sociologists to figure out that one.
…To consider the 153,00th way in which I do not resemble Martha Stewart… which is, as of 10:30 AM, Central Time, I was running a medium-warm iron over sheets of gold, green, red and white tissue paper, to take out the wrinkles and fold marks. Yes, indeedy, I am re-using Christmas tissue paper, stuff in which gifts that I received last year were nestled, or slightly crushed and added to the top of a gift bag… for pete’s sake, people, it is only slightly used! It’s perfectly good, and have you seen how much it costs, anyway?
I also re-use the heavy paper gift bags, but then all of our family does: until my parents’ house burned, two years ago October, there were some particularly sturdy bags which had been circulating for a decade or so. Honestly, do we look like we are made out of money? And never mind the cardboard cartons and the large bag of Styrofoam popcorn, out in the garage… with a little forethought a sensible and thrifty person with sufficient storage space need never be caught short of packing materials in this Christmas season… and have you seen how much they charge for packing materials at the post office, or at the Container Store, or your friendly neighborhood accommodation address/UPS Drop/ Kinko-Klone? Why pay for things that your spendthrift friends and retail outlets are sending you, gratis? Honestly, most people will never notice, and those that do, and will hold it against you… well, really, those are people whom you are best off without. If you are related to them by marriage or economic bonds, my sympathies… unfortunately, I do not think Amazon.com offers “A Life” or the means of sending such to them. At the rate things are going, however, this may be possible in the near future. Check back in a year or so.
Number 1 or 2 in the ways in which I do resemble Martha Stewart… Ummm… I am organized, and do my Christmas shopping early. Way early. All during the year, in fact…ever since I bought a Japanese porcelain tea set for my sister Pippy and stashed it under my bed in the barracks in Japan for six months until it came time in October to mail it home. This may actually be what have done it for me, instilled a rigorous sense of what was required, giftwise, and the knowledge that it had better be done in time to mail it to CONUS by the October deadline. You know that Christmas is coming, every year. You know that gifts are obligatory, to those you are bound to, by ties of blood and affection or duty. You know that you will have to buy them something… why not be sensible and organized, and pick up things for them throughout the year, as you see them by chance, or on sale, or as opportunity presents, rather than be bludgeoned into buying any old thing at the last minute, or even… gasp (the last resort of a person who has no clue at all) dashing off a check dated December 25th. Even a gift certificate is better than that, at least showing a grasp of what, and which retail outlets the giftee prefers.
It’s Christmas, people. It comes every year, about this time. It’s not like it is a surprise, or anything. Of course, if you really enjoy being packed into a mall or big-box store, searching for a parking place, and jammed in cheek-by-jowl with a million other shoppers, and being attended to by exhausted retail associates who are wearing tennis shoes because Friday after Thanksgiving is a day they can depend upon being run out of them… well, whatever floats your boat.
I shall think of you as I wrap my own Christmas presents in slightly used tissue paper.
You probably don’t want to hear about how the thrift store is the best place for baskets and picture frames… or that Half Price Books and the grocery store is the best place for books to build pretty Christmas baskets around.
(Buy a basket at the local thrift store, and a cook book at an off-price outlet. Mark a nice recipe, and fill the basket with all the ingredients to make it. Package and ornament as your budget allows. When all else fails, buy people on your list something to eat. This does not fail. Number 3 in the way that I do resemble Martha Stewart.)
Due to the Thanksgiving Day holiday creep— you know, how it used to be just a Thursday off, but then everyone started taking Friday, and then Wednesday, and now the entire week is shot, for meaningful working purposes— the chances of me getting any paying temp assignments this week are pretty close to nil. Ditto any promising interviews…. which leaves me sitting at home, looking at a computer and waiting for the phone to ring.
And I have my property tax due date coming up after the first of the month, which motivates me to throw out an offer to write… well, whatever. For an fee of $13.00 USD hourly, of course. Essays, articles, letters to the editor, comic monologues, your family Christmas letter… I will even ghost-write blog posts. (I will not do school term papers or doctoral dissertations; one does have to set limits!) I will assign all rights to whomever has paid me to write a specific piece, and you can do whatever you like with it.
Paypal is fine, and tips for superior work will be graciously welcomed. Just let me know how many words, the topic and format preferred, and I will work up a quote based on about how long I think it will take me to write it.
Questions? Comment below, or email by clicking on my name at the top of the post.
(This was a recipe from the Caribbean for a different sort of Christmas fruitcake, for those who didn’t like chewing on lumps of fossilized glace fruit, which was published (re-published?) in the European version of the Stars & Stripes sometime in the mid-1980ies. I copied it out into my personal recipe book, but did not keep or recall any information on it’s source. A very dear friend of mine loved the resulting cake very much, and kept several wedges in her deep freeze, where it remained soft and un-frozen, due to the incredibly high alcohol content.)
Moisten with a little rum from a 1-quart bottle of same;
1 lb dark raisins
1 lb dried currents
1 lb pitted prunes
1 lb glace cherries
Put the rum-flavored fruit through a meat-grinder, equipped with a medium blade, and combine with remainder of the quart of rum in a glass jar or other sealable container, and allow to steep for at least two weeks or up to one year.
Cream together:
1 lb butter
1 lb brown sugar
1 lb eggs (about a dozen)
The ground and steeped fruit.
Combine in another bowl, and stir into the butter/sugar mixture
1 lb flour
¼ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg
Add 3 oz burnt sugar (melt sugar until deeply caramelized, or nearly black, and dissolve with an equal amount of water to make a dark, thin syrup)
Grease and flour 2 10-in spring form pans, and bake in a pre-heated 350 deg. Oven for two hours, or until cake-tester comes out clean. You may need to cover the cakes with tinfoil to prevent burning. Remove cakes, and allow to cool. Poor ¼ of a 1-quart bottle of tawny port over each cake, and allow to absorb. (You may need to take a bamboo skewer and pierce cakes about an inch apart all over to facilitate absorbing of the port.) When absorbed, pour on remainder of port onto each cake, wrap tightly in plastic (not tinfoil!) and allow to age at room temperature for at least a week. The resulting cake is very heavy, and dense, rather like gingerbread, and might be considered a sort of “pound” cake, since it calls for a pound of just about everything but the spices. Drive at your own risk, after consuming a slice or two.
This is a lovely recipe for a whole chicken, butterflied and baked on a layer of seasoned, sauteed onions and slices of stout artisanal bread. I found it in “Cuisine at Home”, where it had been taken from Ari Weinzweig’s “Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating”. Enjoy… but take note that the bread has to be very sturdy. My local supermarket bakery does a very nice ciabetta loaf that works well.
Sautee in 1/4 cup olive oil in a cast-iron skillet or oven-proof skillet approx. 12 inches in diameter:
3 large onions, halved, and sliced into half-moon shapes
3 cups celery, sliced
Stir in:
2 tsp. minced lemon zest
1 3/4 tsp. coars sea or kosher salt
1 tsp. minced garlic
1/2 tsp. freshly ground pepper
1/2 tsp. dried thyme
1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes
1/4 cup chopped fresh Italian parsley
While the onion is cooking, butterfly one 3-4 lb young chicken, snipping along the backbone with kitchen shears on either side. Spread out the chicken flat, and press down with the palm of your hand on the breastbone to crack and flatten it. Rub the butterflied chicken with 2 Tbsp. olive oil, 1 tsp. freshly ground pepper, and 1/2 tsp. salt
When onions are soft and translucent, empty the onion mixture from the pan, remove from heat, and cover the bottom of the skillet with slices of the bread, cut 1/2 inch thick. The recipe calls for about half a baguette, or two ciabatta rolls. Spread out onion mixture on top of the bread, and top with the butterflied chicken, arranging it to cover as much of the surface of the onion and bread as possible. Pour over the chicken:
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice.
Roast uncovered, in a pre-heated 375 deg. oven for about an hour and a half, until beautifully golden-brown. Let stand for ten minutes after being taken out of the oven. To serve, cut chicken into quarters, and serve over a lavish spoonful of the vegetables and the bread, which will be almost caramelized on the bottom.
I’ve already warned my friends that this is what I’ll be bringing to T-giving dinner, this year. A friend of mine bought a San Antonio cookbook from the BX in 1991 before she ETS’d. She says this one recipe was worth the price of the cookbook. When she takes it to potlucks, she makes a double batch, and never brings any leftovers home.
SAVORY GREEN BEANS
1 1/2 pounds fresh green beans
1/4 cup cooking oil
1 clove garlic minced
1 tablespoon chopped onion
1 cup diced green pepper
1/4 cup boiling water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon basil
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, gratedWash and trim ends off beans and cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces. In a saucepan, heat oil and garlic. Add onion and green pepper. Cook for 3 minutes. Add beans, water, salt and basil. Cover and simmer for 15 minutes or longer until beans are tender. Stir in 1/4 cup parmesan cheese. Turn into serving dish and sprinkle with remaining cheese.
YIELD: 6 servings.
Notes:
The friend who gave me this recipe cooks the beans for about 45 minutes – they think that’s just the right amount of crunchy without being too crunchy. I find 40 minutes work for me. You may prefer something different.
I use both red and green bell peppers, for extra color. I’ve also added diced fresh mushrooms.
6:32 PM CST, and only three parties, ringing the doorbell.
A little boy in glasses, with a lighted magic wand and Hogwarts robes, another in Army cammies, and one in some sort of super-hero ninja dress.
A very tiny toddler in a stroller, dressed as a cat. Her mother expressed a fondness for chocolate.
A small ninja, accompanied by both parents, who took one single packet of glow-in-the-dark Skittles, and was pressed to take an additional Reeses’ Peanut Butter Cup.
I was thanked lavishly by all, or by their closely-hovering parents.
I went out to look up and down the road for other TrickerTreaters. None in sight, although there are a number of dogs barking from other streets. Probably safe to sit down and eat dinner.
7:34 CST: A party of four, one dressed as a Star Wars Trooper, the other four as something indistinctive. The glow-in-the-dark Skittles are the most popular. As they go down the walk, one of them loudly chides the other three for not saying “Thank You”. There is hope for this younger generation, after all.
8:00 CST: Party of 5, mostly dressed as ghouls. Most want the glow-in-the-dark Skittles. I am running short of those, and begin to push the Reeses. All 5 line up neatly, take no more than two packets of candy each, and chorus thanks.
8:05 CST; Party of 6, middle-school age, most of whom , like the previous party are dressed as ghouls or ghosts. With only one packet of glow-in-the-dark Skittles left, the taller of the two children remaining nobly yields it to the smaller. Two of them voice a preference for Reeses’ and Twix anyway.
The last two packets of candy goes to the last TrickerTreater. Wonderful how these things work out.
I turn off the porch light, and take the iron-dutch oven– in which I have stashed the candy, inside. The oven, a broom and two pumpkins on the front porch constitute my Halloween decor. When I have gotten tired of answering the door in previous years, I have just put out a sign telling them to help themselves. Would that I could train Little Arthur and Morgie to sit on the pumpkins and glower threateningly— that would have kept the greedy from taking more than two or three candy bars each.
But everything worked out even this year— just enough candy, just enough kids.
A day or so after Thanksgiving of the year when I was in the seventh or eight grade, and hated gym class above all the other torments that junior high school offered in bounteous measure, I had a short conversation with another girl in my gym class. We were not particular friends, only that our lockers were adjacent, and we would be changing out of our school dress, into the black shorts and short-sleeved, snap-closure white blouse that Mt. Gleason Junior High dictated to be proper gym class attire. I don’t even remember her name, only that she was sturdy and somewhat stocky and like me, blue-eyed with dark-blond, brown-sugar colored hair and a fair complexion… and like me, not particularly enthusiastic about gym class, and all its’ works and all its’ ways. Both of us were of the devoutly un-athletic sort who picks a team position based on the likely chances of having little or nothing to do with the ball.
So, on this first day of gym after the Thanksgiving holiday, I struck up a conversation about it, about how my family Thanksgiving had gone— how all the constellation of great-aunts, great-uncles, and grandparents had gathered for the ritual feast. The family Hayes had gathered at either Grannie Jessie’s little white house on South Lotus, or Grannie Dodie and Grandpa Al’s house in Camarillo. I can’t recollect which, so unvarying was the rotation, so regular the attendance of the senior members and devout their interest in JP and I, Pippy and our new baby brother. Most of them being for one reason or another, childless, I lamented the lack of cousins, for it meant their concentration on the four of us as torch-bearers of a new generation was as focused as a laser-beam, and I assumed that the same was true of my gym-dressing room friend.
“Oh, no,” said she. ”It’s just my parents, and my brothers and sisters. We don’t have any cousins either. All of my parents’ families… they all died. We don’t have any cousins, either.”
“None of them? None at all?” I asked, in disbelief. No fond grandparents, no doting great-aunts, no eccentric great-uncles? None of them at all, nothing outside the usual parents and sibs at the dinner table, nothing special, relations-wise, about the holiday table, with roasted turkey, crackling-fat and richly stuffed with brown-bread dressing? About this time in life, my peers had begun to lose grandparents to the usual span of human mortality— I had lately lost one, Grandpa Jim, and thought myself lucky to still have three, all of them still healthy, cantankerous and good for another couple of decades. To have none at all, though… that went beyond misfortune. That was a catastrophe.
My gym-friend shrugged.
“My parents met after the war, in a DP camp. They were just kids. It turned out they were both the only survivors of their families. They got married and came here. There was nothing for them to go back for, anyway.”
Nothing to go back for, anyway, in Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Ukraine… somewhere in Middle-Europe, wherever her family trees had sprung up and been pruned with brutal finality of all but two last little shoots. Transplanted, new-rooted in America, but haunted forever by a ghostly range of empty chairs around the table at those family gatherings so universally assumed to me multi-generational.
The genocide against European Jews is as much of a challenge today to get ones’ sensible American head around as it was sixty years ago. Us Indian-massacring (sorry, Native American massacring!) slavery-enabling, Negro-lynching (Sorry— Persons of Color lynching!) religion-addled, brutally-capitalist, petty-small-town minded uncultured Jacksonians are forever being lectured about our shortcomings by those cultured Europeans. Europe was, after all, the place where they did everything better than us… more cultured, more tolerant, and oh-so-much-better in every civilized way. And yet, pogroms never happened here. Social prejudice, country-club anti-Semitism, distrust of the “other”— oh yeah, all of that…but never pogroms. Russian and Polish Jews came here to get away from pogroms, ungrateful and unappreciative of the cultural advantages to living in Europe.
The clamor of the lectures by our so-called moral superiors pretty much swamps the observation that the Native American and Black American communities still exist in a far more vibrant state than, say, the Jewish communities of Poland… and that Paris, the city of Light has a suburb torn for the fourth night running by what we, in our uncouth American way, used to call race riots. Ah, well, Europe— they do things with so much more style, over there. Sixty years ago, under German occupation, ordinary Europeans watched their neighbors, their friends, coworkers, classmates, employers and employees, their doctors, and cleaning women rounded up and marched away to oblivion. Some eagerly assisted; some benefited from participating, most watched and turned away and did nothing, not wishing to risk what might happen to them, should they be too open in objection. A very few righteous, possessed of a fiercely refined moral sense, and courage of the sort usually termed “crazy-brave” did what they could… that there was anything left of European Jewry by 1945 was a sort of miracle in itself. On a national level, only the Danes can be credited for behaving in a way that we hope we could ourselves be equal to, given the same situation. They refused, categorically, firmly, and in a manner most breathtakingly effective, to turn over Danish citizens of the Jewish faith to the occupying German authorities… of course, the Germans had gone easily on the Danes, hoping to win them over to the benefits of the Thousand-year Reich… but still, and all… German blandishments did not tempt them to sell out their fellow citizens.
So, during a week in which the elected leader of Iran, which has done everything it can to acquire or develop nuclear weapons, has publicly and in terms quite straightforward and understandable, vowed an intention to wipe Israel off the map… a small and pesky nation formed in no small part from the survivors of the European-wide holocaust. What would a single nuclear hit do to a tiny and democratic survivor-state? Nothing good, that should go without saying. So, what will Europe do, this time? How stalwart will be European resolve be to intervene, given that Israel was referred to as “that shitty little country” by a French diplomat at an English dinner party, that anti-Semitism (now charmingly called anti-Zionism) is at a revoltingly open, all-time high? No matter what they call it, it’s still used for the same old purpose, to kill Jews, or at least, justify their murder by a third party. How nice. How amusing, that European hands would be kept clean of the murder of Jews. This time, anyway.
Oh, yeah… if I were a Jew, I’d think twice before depending on Europe to keep my ass safe… especially given how effective they were, overall, about that the last time.
The eastern world, it is explodin’.
Violence flarin’, bullets loadin’
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’
You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin’But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.Don’t you understand what I’m tryin’ to say
Can’t you feel the fears I’m feelin’ today?
If the button is pushed, there’s no runnin’ away
There’ll be no one to save, with the world in a grave
Take a look around you boy
It’s bound to scare you boyAnd you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.
I promised in comments to Timmer’s recipe post last week that I would post my favorite cold-weather soup recipe. It’s from Nava Atlas’ “Vegetariana”
Combine in a large pot:
1/2 Cup dried lentils, washed and picked over
1/3-1/2 Cup brown rice
2 TBSp olive oil
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBSp soy sauce
2 Bay leaves
3 Cups water, or which is much better, 3 Cups vegetable broth
Bring to a boil, cover, and simmer over low heat for 7 to 10 minutes. Then add:
2 additional cups water or broth
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 medium carrots, thinly sliced
1 large celery stalk, finely chopped
Handfull of finely chopped celery leaves
1 14-oz can chopped tomatoes with liquid (for better yet, make it the tomatoes with chili peppers, like Ro-Tel)
1/2 Cup tomato sauce or tomato juice
1/4 cup dry red wine or sherry
1 Teasp dried basil
1 Teasp paprika
1/2 Teasp dried marjoram
1/2 Teasp dried thyme
Salt and pepper to taste.
Cover and simmer for half an hour or so, until lentils and rice are done.
It is especially splended when made with a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes with chilis, and with a rich vegetable broth…. and you can take the onus of being vegetarian off it by adding about half a pound of kielbasa or other smoked sausage, sliced into rounds, towards the end of the cooking time, and serving it with a little grated cheddar cheese on top. I made it once with imported green lentils from France, and people almost swooned.
And like all really splendid soups, it is even better when warmed over the next day.
It’s sweeter when you’re from Chicago…even if it is the wrong side of town.
Jermaine Dye, Juan Uribe, may you never have to buy another beer for the rest of your lives.
Update: BTW, if you’ve grown up in Chicago, the White Sox winning the series has always been unlikely but it is NOT one of the signs of the apocolypse. That’s saved for the Cubs.
A gal holding a sign saying:
“Houston, YOU have a problem.“
I’m sorry, I have no idea if Tom Delay is guilty or innocent. Personally, I think he looks like a snake oil or used car salesman and I wouldn’t play cards wth him.
However, if you’re over 15 and people are still calling you “Ronnie,” then dude, you got issues no matter how many people you’ve indicted. It doesn’t make you “one of the boys,” it doesn’t make you “just plain folk,” it’s creepy. Grow up already.
Just sayin’…
With the holidays around the corner and Mom throwing down, I declare RECIPE WARS!
This is an easy one…I can make it and people love me for it.
—
Chess Cake
Preheat oven to 350
Mix together:
1 box Yellow cake mix
1 stick Butter (melted in microwave)
1 egg
Spread evenly into the bottom of greased 9×13 pan
Mix 1 box confectioners sugar (Yes the whole Pound)
Two eggs
1 8 oz package cream cheese (I cheat and buy pre-whipped)
Blend until smooth and creamy
Pour over cake mix
Bake 35-45 minutes (depends on pan type, keep an eye on it so it doesn’t overbrown, you want about an inch of golden goodness around the edges)
And now the hard part:
Let stand in pan overnight to set firm before cutting. Do NOT stick in the ‘fridge to speed it up, bad things happen. You may refridgerate after it sets.
Cut into 1 or 2 inch squares. Any bigger and you have to use a plate instead of your fingers and it’s WAY too rich anyway.
Yes, I have a lot of cookbooks, probably more than any person not actually in the restaurant-chef business perhaps ought to have.
( William teases me unmercifully about this: on a day trip to Fredericksburg, trying to get me inside one of the shops on Main Street full of dubious Texas-themed tschochkes: �Look! They have cookbooks!� �Bite me, sweetie!�)
But the fact is, each one of those cookbooks has at least one or two sterling recipes in it, and the ones I use the most have a dozen or so— those cookbooks are on a special shelf, as the ones I use all the time. I used to make this cake from leftover Halloween candy— and I would make sure to deliberately purchase Milky Way bars, just for this. It�s from Jane and Michael Sterns� �Square Meals� Cookbook.
Milky Way Cake
Melt together in a double-boiler, and allow to cool:
4 2.1 oz Milky Way Bars
8 Tbsp. (one stick) butter
Cream together:
8 Tbsp. butter
2 Cups sugar
Add, one at a time
4 Eggs
Add to the butter and sugar mixture alternately
1 Cup buttermilk
And
2 � Cups flour mixed with
� Tsp baking soda.
Add the melted butter and Milky Way mixture to the batter, along with
2 Tsp. vanilla
Fold in
1 Cup coarsely chopped pecans
Pour into a greased and floured bundt pan, and bake in a pre-heated 350 degree oven for about an hour, or until cake tester comes out clean. Cool for 15 minutes in pan, before turning out onto cake rack. This cake is supposed to be superb with ice cream. When I baked it, it came out a pale chocolate color, like German chocolate cake, but very rich. Pay no attention to the sound of your arteries clogging….