Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Bondsman, Plus the Weekend You Wished You Had

It’s not like I care that much about baseball. I used to care deeply, but that was before I hit puberty, and now I find it merely to be a decent diversion when I don’t have anything else to think about - which isn’t too often. Even so, I recognize that it is considered by many to be a perfect game, a microcosm of all that is meaningful in life and the universe, and whether I buy into that or not, as a USA-er I am immersed in it as a sport and a weltschmertz regardless. And since I live in San Francisco, I am now drenched in news of Barry Bonds having hit his 715th home run, a feat equaled by only one other player in the history of the game. Barry’s now number two on the all-time hit list, in a manner of speaking. But he’s taken a lot of flak lately and it’s all being revived in the light of this news. He’s on the juice, you know. It seems he’s taken steroids and has artificially enhanced his performance. He’s not a man, he’s a biomorphic creation of medical science’s evil shadow. Should we even credit his accomplishment, much less give him recognition as a great sportsman?

I am trapped into this controversy by my own sense of empathy.  Here’s a man who has accomplished something extraordinary, even if it’s not the sort of accomplishment that makes lives better or improves our planet or even makes much of a difference to me.  But he’s been working at it for a very long time, dedicating his life to it, and it may just come to pass that he’ll hit another 41 of those suckers and make it to all-time number 1 on the home run list.  And he’s getting no respect from most anybody.  That seems sad to me, and I find myself compelled to consider the equities and ask myself, is he getting what he deserves, or not?

I think he’s not.  Though it’s no sweat off my back, or whereever off of which one might sweat, I think Barry’s getting the short end of a 42 inch stick.  And since no one can stop me now, here’s my reasoning.  The first titan who needs to be considered here is the Babe - George Herman Ruth.  Ruth was and is an undisputed champion, even though he’s now officially #3 on the all-time list.  His record of 714 lifetime homers stood for nearly 4 decades, and no one came close to his accomplishments during his tenure.  He was a titan and deserves to be recognized as one.  But let’s face it: his achievements were won against a league consisting of white men from the United States.  He didn’t face anyone from the Negro Leagues, and he didn’t face anyone from any of the other nations that currently account for so many top performers.  If Bonds had been hitting only against white men from the United States, and only white men from the United States were in the field against him (which would impact pitching choices), how many homers would he have hit by now?  I bet it would be more than 715.  The Babe, for all his greatness, played on a radically uneven field, and his record deserves an asterisk for that reason.

Which brings us to Hammering Hank Aaron, who reached 755 by the end of his career.  Hank started in the Negro Leagues and fought his way to national prominence in the face of racism and bigotry.  His power and grace, even under terrible pressure, are beyond question.  He was the very last of the Negro Leaguers to play in the “majors.” And by the end of his career, there was even a smattering of Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, El Salvadoreans, and even the occasional Mexican playing alongside or against him.  He earned every accolade he received, and more.  And he did it, we’re pretty sure, without performance enhancing drugs.  Barry Bonds didn’t - he reached #2 with the assistance of Balco’s Little Helper, the “cream” and the “clear.” Why should we mention them in the same breath? 

First, Barry is playing in a truly internationalized league.  I don’t mean those weirdo Canadian teams - I mean that the players who are coming from the far East, from Latin and South America, from everywhere the game is played.  More foreign-born players are at the top of the game than ever before.  I must imagine that, the broader the pool of players, the deeper the range of talent.  Performance, on a purely technical level, has improved.  And therefore, the game is harder today than it was before. 

But let’s look a little deeper.  Barry is not the only player accused of juicing.  Many sluggers are enmired in the same issue, and so are many pitchers.  Hank Aaron didn’t face pitchers who were steroid-enhanced monsters, hurling pitches at consistently higher speeds, fielding with ever-decreasing reaction times.  If Barry was the only one to be drugging himself, I’d agree that he had an unfair advantage.  But the field is still comparatively even today, because the drug scourge is so damn common.  When so many players are juicing, the advantage fades from a competitive edge to merely remaining competitive, at some level.  I don’t think we should be giving Barry a pass on any illegal doping he may be guilty of - but given the realities of the game he’s playing, he shouldn’t be deprived of recognition on that basis.  He’s playing a tougher game against tougher, stronger, more doped-up competition.  I take my hat off to him.  He deserves full credit for what he’s done. 

This sports-rant has come courtesy of a long, delightful weekend that I got to spend with
Tara, Phil, and the Natelet.  For three days straight we didn’t turn on the television or get into the car - except to buy groceries.  I made pancakes, and bacon, and Chilean corn-and-meat pie with a huge “leche asado”
flan

for dessert, and grilled black-forest ham sandwiches with jalepeno jelly, and overall we
ate ourselves into a stupor

on a regular basis.  We visited the
museum

and the
beach

and the conservatory of flowers, and
lounged

and laughed and let the
munchkins

get to be good friends.  I’ll have some sort of more typical Chucklisms coming up later in the week.  Hope you had enough fun since Friday to last you to the next one, too....

Thursday, May 25, 2006

Choose Your Poison

I’ve long enjoyed eating a strange British breakfast cereal called Weetabix.  It’s a compressed biscuit of grain flakes that totally falls apart in milk to the extent that, made soggy enough, you could suck it through a straw.  It’s the perfect medium for the consumption of granulated sugar.  Lately it’s been more widely available here in these States of United, and since it’s so delightfully mushy we’ve been getting it for Zachary as well as for ourselves. 

On the back of the ‘bix box (that’s kind of fun to say actually) there is a sort of contest-y thing in which consumers are encouraged to share their favorite ways of eating ‘bix.  Traditionally I’ve just poured milk over them, dumped in a few pounds of the white granule, and slorped away, but the box also identifies such curious options as trying it with yogurt and fresh fruit(s), using warm milk, using warm milk and feeding it to a baby, or slathering it with butter and jam and eating it like a cracker.  I must admit, the first of these sounds fairly pedestrian, and the second and third don’t sound too different from each other; the last one just sounds nasty – and the photo of it doesn’t help.  It looks like it will just collapse into a dry, crumbly mass of sticky buttery crumbs in my mouth.  And if I’m going to get a mouthful of buttery crumb first thing in the a. of m., they’re going to have to make it worth my while. 

The box also invites us to check here (or here) for more ideas on alternative bix-consumption protocols, but I’ve scoured those sites and I can’t find any reference to “favorite ways to eat ‘bix.” They do tell me that Weetabix is chock full of “prebiotics,” and that the maximum number of ‘bix to be consumed in a day is four (which I can easily double, or triple if I’m home sick), and how old a child must be before being fed bix (they’re apparently unsuitable for those under six months of age), and what prebiotics are (it’s what Steve Austin was when he was an astronaut, before the crash and the surgeries and that unpleasantness with Oscar). 

Needless to say, though I enjoy my ‘bix, I am bitterly disappointed with this lame-ass failure to tell me more and better ways to enjoy these fascinating wads of grainy goodness.  And of course it got me to thinking of more ways I might eat my Weetabix – ways that the good people at the Weetabix Food Company LLP (Kettering, Northamptonshire, marketed domestically by Barbara’s Bakery) might not previously have anticipated.  After all, it’s been manufactured since the early ‘30s, and after such a long time you can get stuck in a stuck in a stuck in a rut.  Thusly.  So, in the interest of wasting your goddamn time as thoroughly as I’ve wasted my own, I am overbearingly proud to disgorge upon you, BETTER WAYS TO EAT WEETABIX THAN THEY TELL YOU ON THE BOX:

* Drowned in the blood of my vanquished enemies
* Sprinkled with platinum leaf, on a bed of thousand dollar bills
* Fed to me in a hot tub by a stable of mega-geishas
* From the cold metallic hand of my own personal killer robot slave
* Clandestinely injected with steroids and cereal growth hormone (CGH)
* Off the calloused knuckles of Chuck Norris’ fist
* Enriched to a weapons-grade radioactive isotope (BiX²³⁷)
* Under a cloud of unproved allegations of official misconduct
* Tossed into my mouth from just outside the three-point line, hitting nothing but tongue, baby, nothing but tongue
* During a painful and embarrassing medical procedure that’s being broadcast live to a nationwide audience
* Through my gaping glistening gills
* Lightly toasted in the furnaces of Mordor
* During re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere in my own private intergalactic spacecraft
* Sdrawkcab
* In proud defiance, with a sprinkling of poignant regret
* With a goddamn spoon.

That’s all for me today.  Good breakfast to ya.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Freaky Zoom-In Action

My good friend Charles sent me this link.  He always sees more than the average fellow; maybe this will give us an advantage next time we need such skills… enjoy

Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Spidey and the Good Pot

The impending death of my desktop bamboo shoot reminds me of the plant I didn’t kill – my spider plant from college.  I’ve forgotten so many details of that incredible time and space, but ol’ Spidey isn’t one of them.  That was a damn fine houseplant. 

I kept him during junior year; he sat on my heavy moderne-blonde desk next to the rotating jughead captain’s throne, near the center of my bedroom’s powerful conversational nexus.  People spontaneously gathered in my room – sometimes, even, when I was sleeping, or sick.  Folk’s’d just show up and I’d pull on my bathrobe and pass around tabs of chewable C.  That room was a neverending party.  This sets the stage.  Let’s move on.

Among the other non-human inhabitants of that storied edifice, was Kashmir the cat.  She was barely out of kittenhood at that time; Jon and I had adopted her when we were sophomore suitemates.  We’d gotten her from two young women who were apparently too high-strung and self-involved to care for her.  Jon and I had our share of problems but these weren’t among them, so we gave her a home.  It appeared, though, that Kashmir’s personality had already been permanently altered by early exposure to intensely JAPPY conditions.  She was a beautiful dark grey semi-Persian, fluffy and smallboned and correctly persuaded that we’d do anything and everything to keep her happy.  Her imperious yowl ruled the roost, and all six of us living there then were just her catering/housekeeping crew.  She was, in truth, a feline American princess. 

That’s the set-up.  Here’s the payoff: a few of us were sitting around my bedroom one afternoon, enjoying the sunlight and each other’s company.  We sat in the traditional conversation circle, next to the windows and the throne and the desk, just letting time pass.  Kashmir entered the room, her long tail flicking the air with bored disdain.  We greeted her; she stepped over into our klatch for some fawning.  Since we were all on chairs and she was on the floor, we towered over her, so she crouched, pounced, and leapt in a single bound to the top of my desk, right into our very midst. 

I kept a tidy room during that phase of my life, and I maintained my desktop like a zen monk his rockyard.  I don’t now recall what-all I kept there, but there were things, all right, and they had an order to them.  Paperweights, novelty items, and a spider plant.  Yes, Spidey.  My faithful accomplice. 

When Kashmir leapt atop my desk, it just so happened that she launched herself unerringly from the floor right into the eight-inch wide circle of Spidey’s flowerpot, into which all four of her feet landed solid, square, and simultaneously.  She straddled the plant in an uneasy crouch, her feet resting on potting soil that was about half an inch short of the actual lip of the vessel.  She had no room to maneuver.  She was stuck.

Her leap had been graceful, truly a performance designed to make us mere humans envious of her perfection as an example of divine handiwork.  But now she found herself hunched nervously over a potted plant, staring at us with hunted eyes and kitty flopsweat.  And she could feel that things were getting steadily, progressively worse. 

Spidey’s pot was one of those old-fashioned ones with an outward slope of the side walls, so the mouth was somewhat wider than the base.  It’s a pretty sturdy design.  Sturdy, that is, unless something untoward happens.  As, for example, a cat jumping into it from three feet below.  It turns out, the sudden jumping of even a small, lithe, fuzzy, imperious catlet, smack into the middle of a pot such as this, will cause said pot to suffer a serious lack of stability. 

I’ll admit, I didn’t know that about this kind of pot when I got it.  Maybe it’s not good for a pot to start to tip, with excruciating slowness, backwards, while the cat trapped in it stares at you with an unspeakable curse, her momentum gradually but inexorably shifting her backwards, the forward edge of the base of the pot in which she’s balancing lifting higher and higher off the desktop, until the proverbial tipping point is reached and she tumbles clumsily to the hardwood floor with a stifled thump and catgrunt, and the plant crashes down on top of her.  Maybe this is not good for the pot, or for the plant, or cat.  It’s hard to tell so far as the cat is concerned, because she will flatten herself completely against the floor and retreat as rapidly and discreetly as possible, a grey streak flashing from the room, mortally shamed by our hoots of laughter, knowing that there was no way to pass this off as anything but a humiliating embarrassment. 

As for the plant, it lived happily in that pot for another year with me, suffering, apparently, no ill effects.  Had I known, at the time that I was buying that pot, that this had been one of its characteristics, I’d probably have considered it a selling point.  Damn, I’m still laughing at that one.  That’s a quality flowerpot.  And a damn fine houseplant, too. 

Friday, May 19, 2006

Eat Dessert First: PieMan Comes to Brunch

Sometimes I write things out to try to make a point.  Sometimes I’m just being snarky and looking for an easy laugh.  Sometimes I am commemorating a particularly pungent moment among my general stock of recollections; sometimes I suddenly imagine something – a glance, a retort – with such clarity that a whole world builds up instantly around it, and I can be its god if I write it out properly. 

And sometimes I write as an exercise in exorcism.  I write things out to get them out – an earwig tune or a vapid pop reference, or sometimes a moment of such excruciating reality that the experience of experiencing it seems to go on well beyond the actual event.  These moments reverberate in my experiential landscape, reappearing unbidden and unwelcome until they are depotentiated via transmission: by sharing, in rich, glorious detail, these overstuffed moments, I can “unpack” them – render them powerless, no longer able to haunt my idle moments.  At which point, I can finally move on with my life.  I can finally move on.

It is in this spirit that I share today the legend of PieMan.  I can’t call it a story because there really isn’t enough there to justify the use of so rich a word.  It was nothing more nor less than an encounter with a different side of human behavior, and it went something like this:

We used to have these monster brunches, back in the day.  We’d get over to the DogHouse around 11 am, a fairly standard bruncheoning hour.  And we were young, and many, and fabulously gluttonous.  We’d cruise heavily through all the normal brunching foods, and lots of them, and dishes would keep coming out as old ones were taken away, and eventually a huge sprawling lunch had taken over from brunch.  Lunch was consumed with cheerful determination, old plates being replaced again by new ones, until the sun was setting and we’d segued inexorably into a sort of rolling supper, on which we gorged until, by the end of the evening, we’d been there for 12 hours of non-stop feasting.  It was a punishing ordeal, yet the 20 or so of us kept it going on a semi-regular basis for quite a while, month after month. 

I think that things changed, though, when MaryAnn invited PieMan along.  He was one of those guys with really pink skin, which was so sensitive that he couldn’t go out in the sun.  Also, he had no hair – not even eyelashes, which looks a lot weirder than you might expect on bright pink skin.  His skin condition had killed all his follicles.  But the big thing about PieMan, the thing that got him an invitation to brunch with us, was that he had this thing about pies, and having women push his face into them.  He described himself as “pie-sexual.” MaryAnn had invited him to the brunch that afternoon so we could watch that being done to him.

As I recall, about three or four of the young women there that day stepped up to pie the PieMan.  He sat on a library chair in the center of a tarp laid out on the floor, and one at a time, the women came to him with a pie tin full of chocolate pudding topped with whipped cream.  He was dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, but the smooth lobster-red skin of his face and head seemed to glow radiantly in the murky depths of the DogHouse living room.  He sat patiently, smiling, still, and he asked the ladies to say something to him as they buried his face in a pan of sweet viscous goo. 

Kelly declined to participate in the main event, but did help with the cleanup and found herself suddenly presented with a pie pan full of shaving cream, adjacent to PieMan himself.  With a little encouragement, she smashed it into his face, without comment, and when she pulled it away he twisted his face into a googie or some such funny thing.  The point is, he made her laugh.  Afterwards, Andy P informed her that PieMan records all his public pie-ings, for more thorough appreciation at some future time and secluded place.  Apparently her laugh was especially gratifying to him.  I’ve heard that laugh, low and throaty.  I can see how he’d be glad to have a recording of her creaming his cranium and chortling that particular chortle. 

PieMan eventually told us, at some point, that the sexiest thing ever said to him at one of those fulsome pie-moments was the whispered breath of a single word.  “She said ‘pie,’” he told us, and raw arousal burned in his eyes, gleaming red in his red face.  No matter how much I ever enjoy anything, how much it moves me or reaches any hidden part of my libidinous topography, I will never look so intensely passionate as he did at that moment.  And frankly, I find that to be a great relief. 

Thus is the legend of PieMan.  May your weekend be full of sweets and giggles.  Just try to put down a tarp before things get out of hand. 

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

The Boxer Rebellion

* Well, that’s thinking outside the box.
* You think so?
* Sure.  Way outside.
* I don’t think so.  I think that was really in-the-box thinking.
* Really?
* Sure.  Like, if there was a box, that thinking would be right in the middle of it.  Right square in the middle of the box.
* Well okay then.  Good job with the in-the-box thinking. 
* Hey, no prob.  It’s what I do. 

Monday, May 15, 2006

Another Unbeatable Weekend

Ah yes, another weekend distinguished by intense experiences and memorialized by intense visuals.  Not including Saturday, I mean.  That’s not to say that we had a bad time with the Paiges when they came over for pizza on Saturday - quite the opposite, it was a very pleasant evening altogether and I really needed the “down time” with good friends.  But we were gearing up for Sunday - Mother’s Day - Kel’s first official one - and after a heavy breakfast of:

* French toast (made with stale bread so it soaks up more custard, and special coconut-milk custard for up-soaking, and then you bake the slices after they’re fried to turn the interior of the toast into ambrosia, and garnish them with banana slices simmered in rum and maple syrup) and
* Bacon (lots of it, which it turns out is okay with Zach), plus
* The obligatory mango-lemonade-seltzer-rum spritzers,

- we (awoke from a semi-intentional nap and) took a drive out to Point Bonita to see the scenery. 

Here’s Kel cruising up that first big headlands hill.  It was, as they say, a “nice day.”

Here’s what it looks like heading down the other side of the hill.  It’s a pretty impressive drop to the ocean; it still kind of freaks me out every time.

Out at Pt Bonita, we strolled over to the edge of the continent, where rocks form a promentory. 

At the end of the promentory is a lighthouse, but it was closed.  It’s reached, when it’s open, through this neighborly iron gate in the face of the cliff. 

Near the lighthouse is a small cluster of buildings.  Two have been restored, but one is still interesting.  Here’s some of what I mean:

Zachary had a delightful time with all of this, but since I was wearing him on my back there are not many photos of him out there.  However, here’s one of him in the kitchen, showing you what it’s like to get facemashed by an euphoric munchkin.  (it’s fun.)

Supper on Mother’s Day was a couple platters of hot steaming cheesesteak sandwiches with home-grilled top round steak and provelone cheese and grilled onions and pickled jalepenos, tater tots with gravy, and cupcakes for dessert.  But, after all that family togetherness, we were really just getting started.

Mother’s day officially culminated on Monday, a day Kel and I both spent at home instead of at work.  Well, “home” is a figure of speech.  We started at Dept 405 of the Unified Family Court at 8:45 a.m., where Judge Hitchens fixed a teensy problemette we’d been having vis-a-vis living in sin.  Yes, even though Kel and I formalized our relationship all legal-like back in the 1980s, we’d been cohabitating without official sanction in a three-person household since Zach came into our lives last August.  But now we sin no more, as this photo amply demonstrates - we’ve completed the adoption process and this family is now 100% legal, like various beagles or eagles one might mention.  Zach was appropriately cute during the brief ceremony and he scored a teddy bear from the bailiff.  Afterwards we took him home and he napped, and then we went out for a celebratory lunch at Delessio Cafe and Market, where I ordered so much food that the proprietor came over and made a comment to me about “eating for two.” It wasn’t funny, so I ate him.  And then I had two desserts - tres leches (best I’ve ever had) and brazilian french toast (which is so unutterably good that I am not even going to mess with trying to describe it to you). 

Once we got back home I took a nap (or it took me, more like it) and the rest of my day was calm and relaxing.  That should give me a nice head of steam for the remainder of this work week.  I’ll be back in a day or so with an essay or something.  Right now it’s probably time to finish my beer, load some more old live dead into the ‘pod, and get my bearings.  For a weekend with a lot of down time, I sure feel like a lot has happened. 

Thursday, May 11, 2006

Pinky and the Blaine

In light of the amazing popularity it’s garnered David Blaine to suck a tube in public for a week, I hereby announce that, starting monday, I will spend seven full days - 168 of your earth-hours - entirely submerged in my own ego.  I will breath through a dank shaft and excrete through a crazy straw, but that’s SOP around here anyway.  At the end of my ordeal, I will hold my breasts for nine minutes, until I escape from my own sense of self-importance, or until I black out or start to chafe, whichever comes first.  Given that the responses to Mr. Blaine’s feat seem to range from apathy to disdain, I’m figuring chafing may have a quick onset.  I’ll have some serious technical challenges to overcome, in that I’m working with mere man-breasts, but I’ll work up to the challenge by holding other bits of myself for increasingly long periods of time, or until I get thrown out of the public library.

Finally, for once in my life, I can stop being the little castle in the fishtank, and take on the role of the helmeted diver dude.  It’s all part of my vast plan to make and use bubbles in new and exciting ways.  Well, exciting for me, anyway.  You’re on your own. 

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Salad Days and Bonzo Nights: Revenge of the Recipe Corner

Here’s a tasty recipe that happened to burble to the surface of this very blog, when I started paging through my notebook looking for stuff I haven’t posted yet.  This one was buried way, way down at the very front of the book, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less blogworthy.  Well, maybe it means it’s a little less blogworthy, but it’s still an excellent salad, so shut up and start heating up a cast iron salad bowl and sterilizing your lettuce-deboners.  There’s salading afoot!

The thing about salad is, it sounds easy.  “Oh, I’ll just make salad.” All you think you really need to do is deep-fry a quarter of a head of iceberg lettuce, float it in ketchup, and drape some bacon on top.  That’s a great salad, you think, till you sit down to eat it and as soon as you try to bury your fork in its glistening flank it does a half-gainer off your plate and into a wall where the ketchup makes it stick and it just slowly slides down to the floor leaving a stain like from the kitchen in the Shining or something.  And that’s when you realize it’s harder to make salad than they told you in boot camp or wherever the hell it was you were being misinformed about salad making and how easy it is.  Or isn’t.  And then you cry.  Pathetic, really.

But then again, if you have a particular salad in mind, it can be pretty easy to make salad.  Of course, you still have to chop and slice and grind, painstakingly turning vulgar vegetables and crude itays into a glorious julienned synthesis, but that’s your damn problem, you’re the one who promised to bring salad.  Next time, promise to bring lunchmeat, and you can just buy packages of it at the supermarket and cut it open with some scissors and be done with your whole wonderful contribution to the meal.  But this time you promised salad, and damned if you aren’t going to make it a good one.  So here, make this one, and enjoy.  I dare you.

PYWRONG SALAD with Goat Cheese

Julienne some pears - l like bosc, but you know, I’m sort of bosky.  Toss them with baby spinach and golden raisins (not “fool’s raisins,” aka raisin pyrite).  Top the salad with sliced toasted almonds, goat cheese, and a panful of fried proscuitto and caramelized onions.  Eh?  Proscuitto is what Carmella is always offering Tony Soprano when he wanders into his mobster kitchen - it’s paper-thin slices of cured pigmeat.  Cut it into strips (make sure the knife is sharp, this stuff is tough) and fry it over medium heat in a little skillet with just a little olive oil till it’s starting to get brown; then turn the heat to low and dump in some thinly sliced onion.  Stir it all around till the pigfat is all over the onions, and then let them slowly cook down to a nice mellow brown color. 

Notes: For julienning and onion slicing, get a mandomoline slicer already.  I tell you every time and you STILL. DON’T.  LISTEN.  Jeez.  Okay, the sliced toasted almonds come that way in a bag - do not try slicing your own almonds, or putting them in your toaster.  Baby spinach is better because the stems are smaller and it can’t fight back as hard (hence the popular saying, “like taking spinach from a baby).  Also, you will want to put dressing on the salad before you top it with the various goodies - I suggest olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, tobasco, sugar, and celery seed (premixed in a flagon, or, alternately, a ramekin). 

This is a delicious salad and anyone who eats pigmeat, curdled goat milk, and jailbait Popeye-crank will love it, and that’s mostly who-all eats salad anyway so you should be as golden as your moist plump raisins.  But just in case, for one more shot at cooking veggies, here’s what I found scrawled under the salad recipe on that long-lost page of my nearly-finished notebook:

CRIPSY FIRED GARBONGOZ

Get a can of garbonzo beans ("chickpea" is a demeaning, but entertaining, synonym), open it, and rinse those suckers off.  Then put them in a bowl lined with some paper towels and pat them dry.  In another bowl, mix some cayenne pepper and garlic powder, and then pour in the dried-off bonzos. Mix it around till the bonzos are covered with spices.  Then heat enough olive oil to come halfway up the bonzos in a skillet till it’s pretty damn hot, and pour in the spiced beans.  Let them fry for a few minutes, till they’re browning on the bottom, and then flip them over with a chefly wristflip, sending NO superhot oil up your arms and spilling NO half-cooked bonzos all over the kitchen floor and into hard-to-clean areas under your shelving unit.  When the bonzos are uniformly browned, remove them from the pan and drain them off on paper towels laid over newspaper or a paper shopping bag.  These are delicious eaten directly with your knife, or mixed with green beans that have been panfried with just a little oil and then steamed in a tablespoon or two of rice vinegar. 

And let it be recognized, that this is a healthy and delicious blog post, full of the fruits of nature’s bounty and the bounty of nature’s fruits.  Plus, I mentioned both “boner” and “unit.” That’s some quality blogging, there.  Drape your bacon over that.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Shorebird Marsh: Claimed by Zach

Sunday we took a short drive to a little wetlands I’ve seen off the 101 for years and always wanted to visit.  In the springtime it sprouts thousands of tiny ground-hugging yellow flowers, and the little islands and fingers of land that extend across it at low tide look like they’re made out of pure sunlight.  This year the heavy rains have made the marsh fuller than usual and there wasn’t so much exposed land for the flowers to call home, but it was still startling to see what had been left over the waterline, and the whole area was beautiful and serene, full of many different kinds of birds and arresting views.  The area, as it turns out, is called “Shorebird Marsh,” and it’s in Corte Madera, just in from Mill Valley.  Here’s some photos of the area, and its most esteemed visitor, enjoying the crap out of himself (not, thankfully, literally). 

There was some kind of tented activity going on at the south end of the marsh.  Here’s what it looks like, across the mudflats and golden shores and the lake and such.  We do not know what was happening in the tent.  Secretive bastards.

Zachary enjoyed his outing.
(please excuse the snuffly crud - he’s been getting over a bit of a cold.)

Talk about an “arresting” view: Just east of our oasis for migratory birds and other avian wildlife, you get a particularly good view of this charming facility.  When you’re named after a saint whose other most famous namesake is responsible for producing Reservoir Dogs, you know you run with a tough crowd.

Zack is now starting to take a few steps on his own every so often.  This unstaged depiction conforms to all network protocols for non-fiction photography; all events, real or depicted, represent verifiable facts.

Here’s a final shot across the marsh looking out to Mt. Tam, where we were last weekend. 

It’s hard sometimes to believe I live here.  Hell, it’s hard sometimes to believe I, but you gotta work with what you got. 

Thursday, May 04, 2006

What Is Hip?

They announced on the radio this morning that medical science has resolved one of my most pressing concerns.  For years it’s troubled me - hindered me - held me back.  It’s made my days painful and my nights shameful.  Drugs didn’t help, nor exercise, nor diet - not in any meaningful way.  I thought nothing could help, but now I know the research dollars have finally paid off.  Doctors can now slick up my hip. 

I’ve always known my hip was sadly lacking.  Whether I was dancing, fitting myself into clothes, or simply walking down the street, unhipness hung over me like a shroud of dorkitude.  There was no way to hide it as I stumbled between tables at a cafe or steered conversations with beautiful women toward military history or old Monty Python episodes.  I use three latin words when a simple hand gesture would suffice.  I hum commercial jingles in crowded elevators.  Me and hip have long been estranged. 

For a while now the medicos have been able to replace hip.  They somehow go in and insert hip where, theretofore, hip was not.  People do say it’s an effective procedure, returning their ability to undertake many ordinary life functions without humiliation or stigma.  However, the undeniable truth is that it’s not actual, personal hip that’s being installed - it’s an invented product, some sort of syntho-hip, developed in a laboratory by chemists and engineers .  And, needless to say, such persons are not renowned for their inherent hipness.  I’ve never felt comfortable having some tech geek’s version of hip being imposed upon me like so many D&D hit points.  Maybe I wasn’t hip, but it was my own unhipness that dangled like an albatross with a mullet around the collar of my Member’s Only jacket.  I owned my nerdhood and could take comfort in that - cold comfort though it might have been.

But now, the orthopedic brain trust has developed a procedure to revitalize one’s own natural hip.  Using space-age polymers, they can create smoothness and flexibility where previously there was only the stiff-legged waddle of the inveterate waffle-stomper-wearer.  They can inject discretion, subtlty, and grace into a joint that once could only be counted upon to embarass me in the most public possible way.  And when it’s all over, the hip will be intrinsically mine.  It will be the hip with which I was ostensibly originally endowed, but which I’ve always struggled clumsily to access and utilize.  It’s better than drilling for oil in my own national parklands.  It’s the end to a long national nightmare.  It’s the beginning of a bright, new, hip tomorrow - and I want in.

Some point out that this is merely a resurfacing exercise - that the hip repair procedure won’t do more than put a gloss over ruined, riddled, cystic material, merely hiding essentially diseased unhipness under a patina of smoothness. I’m okay with that.  Hipness may run a bit more than skin deep, but not that much deeper.  Once I’ve achieved slick, though superficial, hip, I can move on to other inherent personal deficits.  I do have a few that require attention.  So, when are they going to beta-test that tact implant?  In the alternative, I could use an injection of athletic capacity.  I understand all the cool kids are doing it.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

I Don’t Know Why The Penguin On The Television’s Exploded

In 1973 I watched my share of television and maybe a little more.  I made up for it though, by watching with my family, by making the programs a starting point for discussion and creative thought, and by watching, along with the typical drek, a number of programs that were, in theory, supposed to expand my “mind,” such as it was.  Shows like the news, and 60 Minutes, and Nova, and such like that.  But there was one that definitely stood out among all the others: the BBC documentary series, The Ascent of Man. 

TAOM was a 13-part series hosted by Dr. Jacob “Bloody” Bronowski, an émigré from Poland via Germany who was the very image of the wise professor.  He led viewers through the history of human intellectual evolution, from upright stature through the transition to tool use, agriculture, geometry, astronomy, physics, chemistry, relativity, and on to the present time, which was at that time 1973 – and discussed, at each step, how we as a species were changed in our relationship to each other and to our universe. 

I was really excited about this program before it even aired.  After a single episode I was hooked, and I watched it thereafter as many times as I could: straight through for 13 weeks with two showings per week, and then straight through with repeats again – four times while still in the fourth grade.  My parents watched every episode with me and stayed up, once nearly to midnight, talking me through some of the concepts.  The rudimentary understanding I have of relativity theory really comes from a long conversation with my dad after watching episode 7 for the first time. 

Then one year when my parents joined the local public television station the bonus gift was a copy of the book of the series.  They gave it to me and I’ve still got it.  I’ve read it six or eight times, most recently only ten or so years ago.  It was still a great read – provocative, evocative, all-encompassing, inspirational.  But it has probably been 25 years since I’ve seen the shows themselves.  Kel almost saw an episode once, when she woke up late at night and channel-fanned into it, but the reception was weak and the episode was ending, and then that channel disappeared and I’ve frankly given up hope of stumbling upon it ever again.

And now I don’t have to.  Kel gave it to me for my birthday – four brand-thinking new dvds with a special booklet of production notes.  I’ve barely gotten into it, but these programs are already proving to be subtle beyond my appreciation, or my parents’, back during the old days.

Example: I’ve only seen the first episode so far - Kel has prohibited my watching without her.  In it, our species evolves into a creature that uses intelligence and unique capacities to transform its living conditions, so that it can conform to more different environments than any other mammal.  This was first tracked through changes in the skull, with the rotation downward of the spinal insertion and the favoring of broad stereoscopic vision over olfactory input, leading to an upright gait and the freeing of hands from locomotion so as to be available for tool fashioning and tool use…. From there communities began to develop and we began literally to manipulate our environment, living from it instead of purely with it. 

At one point he’s talking about the immersion of the animal mind in a hunt where it attacks with tooth and claw, versus the concentration of an African tribesman who hunts to survive with a spear and is focused and attentive but can separate himself from his actions even as his quarry falls dead before him, further versus a pole vaulter or javelin thrower, who commits the same kind of energy and focus as a sustenance hunter, but without being driven by sustenance, acting as a purely voluntary agent of an intellectual, not survival, goal.  The camera cuts from a big cat on the hunt – a civet or jaguar, to tribesmen hurling a spear and killing a gazelle, to an athlete gripping a javelin and sending it skyward.  And the music they chose to play during this fast-paced quick-building montage that depicts homo sapiens’ increasing intellectualization of pure brute activity and the will to struggle for survival?  Yes, I didn’t notice it in 1973, and my parents kept it from me for some reason, but the music choice for that sequence was Pink Floyd’s classic of pure psychedelia, “Careful With That Axe, Eugene. 

Damn but that Bronowski’s cool.  I cannot wait to get into episode two.  It’s about agriculture, so I’m hoping for some vintage Tull. 

note: anyone who understands the title to this post deserves a big prize.  good luck getting one from me, though.

Monday, May 01, 2006

Superfluous Kid Pic

because mondays can be hard without a forcible injection of cuteness: from a hikelet atop Mt Tam on Sunday.

Now go on with your respective bad selves.