Category Archive

Last year my Dad, Jennifer and I took a trip to visit my sister Camy in Washington State. While there we visited Vancouver to see The Buchart Gardens. We took a ferry over and in the wait for the ferry to leave I was reading all the signs posted. The most hilarious is in the picture below, it was notice #2 that made me laugh.  Switchblades and Plums are prohibited. *

Apparently, handguns and apples are equally dangerous when you go to Canada. I wonder if you need a concealed carry license to put your potatoes in a grocery bag.

*I am aware that the prohibition is to prevent to transfer of parasites and plant diseases.  It’s just dang funny that the list is all one sentence, just commas.

Yesterday the guy behind me at the checkout in Safeway piled the belt high with all organic product. Organic juice, organic milk, organic toiletpaper (I’m not kidding.) Most of what he purchased were organic convenience foods. Organic macaroni and cheese, enchiladas, etc. All stuff you can heat in a microwave. All crap.

On TV I heard a celebrity state, in tones of hushed wonder, that she bought the organic apple because that’s what she believes in! Alice Cooper wears organic cotton shirts on the golf course (in the dessert mind you).

The first guy accomplished nothing for the environment by purchasing all that prepackaged food, he gets no street-cred for that. Not unless he can effectively compost all the packaging. Even then he loses because of the production and shipping costs. He’s also lost any gain he may possibly have had from eating food because it’s all pre-packaged. It’s rather like smoking organic cigarettes.

Want to accomplish something for the environment? Something really meaningful, something that will make a difference now and a difference in your wallet? Plant a garden. Grow your own organic tomatoes, radishes, brocolli, strawberries, etc. There is no shipping involved, no oil or corn is burned in a combustion engine getting the strawberry from your patio to your lips. Another thing you can do is learn to cook. It’s not difficult, really, and the benefits far outweigh the time/cost. Most of the time, ingredients are cheaper than a finished product. Most of the time the food I make from scratch is of far better quality and far tastier than anything Annie’s or Stouffer’s can muster. Plus, my leftovers go into reusable bowls, I compost the vegetable waste.

Want to accomplish something local? Buy local produce, shop from the farmer’s market and in roadside stands. Even if it’s not ‘organic’, it’s better for you, fresher and more nutritioney.

Just because it says organic on the label doesn’t mean anything much, especially not if that organic food is wrapped in layers of plastic, cardboard and print. Conventionally raised products won’t kill you.

I love shopping at farmer’s markets and roadside stands; they carry many more types of produce than the supermarket does, it’s fresher and I get to meet the people who grow it.

If you’ve spent any time reading this blog you will have discovered that:

• I think Global Warming (as stated by Algore, many Newspapers, and many others) is a crock, an attempt at a new religion that requires throwing virgins into volcanos (metaphorically, it’s the economy of every first and second world country that gets thrown in, not to mention the effect on all third world countries when everyone else is in the crapper).
• I believe that the earth is a planet, not my mother.
• I do not think that climate/weather/shifting patterns of weather are controlled because I use one or two squares of toilet paper. (Thank you, Sheryl Crow, for that most cringe inducing suggestion. I just vomited a little.)

This is how I will celebrate Earth Day:

• Lobbying for more drilling in the US of A, please pretty please can we just drill in ANWAR already?
• Nagging my congress persons for more local nuclear power plants. (For crying out loud, if the French can manage to build safe ones, and since no one was actually hurt at 3-Mile, can we just get on with building safe, productive, CLEAN, nuclear power plants?)
• Lobbying for more coal burning. (Why? Because the less oil we burn for electricity the less we import, the less we import, the….well, you figure it out.)
• Driving, alone, in my own personal vehicle to work. Both ways. AC on, windows down.
• Mocking all the hilarious hippie types who dance barefoot worship a large, molten cored, spherical spinny thing. (That would be the earth.)

More importantly, I’ll be celebrating the lovely Charlotte’s Birthday. Since Charlotte lives in South Africa and I can’t drive to her home, both ways, alone, in my car with the AC on and the windows down, I’ll be doing something much more funner. Toasting to her health! YAY for Charlotte! YAY for her Birthday!!

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Sooo, New Blog Again. This hosting service seems to be better, with more helps.

My old blog: http://vivianlouise.journalspace.com/

I’ve imported my old blog from Blogger, I’ll pull over all the Journal Spacey stuff and then I’ll be done.

For today.

I’m sitting here watching Dean Martin in The Wrecking Crew.  This has to be one of the worst movies ever.  I’m super cereal!  The plot, at least that’s the technical term for the drivel I’m forcing myself to watch, is entirely about a bunch of young, sexy women falling in lust with Mr. Martin.  They fall over him, swoon over him, commit treason, commit adultery, commit bad acting.  One even gets herself blown up. (that gave me hope for the movie, but no one else has exploded, spontaneously combusted or even gotten a paper cut.)  It seems more a morality play on the effects of smoking your arch supports.

Do I buy that these young ladies find Dean Martin irresistible?  Yeah, um, not so much.  He could sing, but I think the French made the better choice in the duo when they fell in love with Mr. Lewis.  At least he’s funny.*  Maybe it’s just the jadedness of me being me, but he’s just not all that.

I’ve found that there aren’t many movies from the 60’s that I like and that the ones I like all seem to have Yul Brenner, Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen in them.  Now, THOSE were sexy men.  I just can’t buy a bunch of babes falling all over Dean Martin.

Plus, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape and A Fistful of Dollars actually had plots.

Did I mention that the soundtrack and costumes have given me a ripping headache?  I was thinking it might be preferable to stick pins in my eyes.

Anyway, blech on The Wrecking Crew.
(*I was kidding about Jerry Lewis and the French.  I don’t think he’s funny, it was a moment of self-pitying weakness that made me envy the French.)

 You’ve seen it as many times as I have, the obnoxious commercial selling some purely cosmetic solution to some “affliction”. ‘They’ promise to save you from “suffering” from any number of horrific conditions like male pattern baldness, wrinkles, gray hair, etc…

Suffering? I just can’t bring myself to use that word for something like baldness or wrinkles. And since baldness is a visible testament to testosterone I’m not quite sure why any man would want to cover it up. Comb-overs are not allowed in any universe, but surgery and drugs are needlessly risky ‘cures’ for what is essentially a sign of virility. The only circumstance I can think in which actual suffering occurs in a bald man is that he forgets to use sunblock and gets burnt. Other than that, it’s just his vanity that suffers nothing else.

The same is true of wrinkles; they just are what they are. You can and should take care of your skin, use sun block regularly, moisturize, etc, and you won’t get damaged skin, but all skin wrinkles. I like them, you can read a lot in a person’s face. I’m especially enchanted by the older faces of happy couples, they have a lovely wrinkly radiance that no amount of botox, chemical peels or surgery can replace. Frankly, the stretched and unnatural look of plastic surgery patients creeps me out. But again, I would question using the descriptive “suffer” for what happens when a person wrinkles.

Suffering is limited to actual pain: grief, sickness, starvation, injury, and trial. Having wrinkles or a bald pate just doesn’t qualify as suffering. Watching your child die from starvation would.  Not liking what you see in the mirror is a different problem, the kind that needs addressing in your heart not your surface.

Next time you are tempted to think you are suffering for something merely cosmetic, stop, drop and roll in the reality.  You aren’t experiencing suffering, you are experiencing AGING.  Say it with me, AAAGGGGIIINNNNGGGGG.  Really, you want to age, it means you’re alive, and that’s a good thing.  So save the money you might have spent on unnecessary surgery and cosmeceuticals and give it to, say, an emergency relief fund for the victims of Darfur; the Tsunami or even cancer research. 

If I have to have a nanny I want one that possesses magical abilities, can teach me to fly and makes carousel horses run across fields. I want to dance with Dick Van Dyke and hop in and out of chalk drawings.

What I don’t want is some government agency to tell me what I can and can not eat, drive or say. There was a report this morning on the radio that the FDA is considering regulating portion size in restaurants. That’s outside the pale. The government has absolutely no business telling us how large our portions can be. They can, and do, make recommendations, but at no time do they have any business mandating portion sizes. It’s already disgusting that they regulate smoking they way they do, and tax cigarettes prohibitively the same way they tax gasoline. I don’t smoke anymore, and actually have no intention of taking it up again, but still, unless they ban the substance altogether, tobacco users should be free to smoke where they want to. I can chose to go to a restaurant that is voluntarily smoke free, or I can choose to put up with smoke. What I don’t get to do is dictate to other people what they can and can not do with a legal substance.

I readily acknowledge drinking and driving is an obvious exception to that rule, so don’t yell at me.

Anywho, I don’t elect politicians to babysit me or my neighbor, to tell me what to eat, what cars to buy, what things to wear. I expect my politicians to read the constitution, get to know it real well, pass as few new laws as are absolutely necessary, strictly enforce the ones that are, repeal old bad laws as needed and to refrain from spending my hard earned tax dollars on stupid frivolous crap like regulating portion size at The Outback. If I needed a nanny I voted for, I vote for Mary Poppins. If I want a steak bigger than is good for me, I’ll eat it and pay for it too.

Plus it would be fun to jump into that carpet bag of hers. OH, and to steal her umbrella and play pranks.

A teacher in Colorado has been suspended for comments made in class. He is a geography teacher, in geography class, and he harangued his class on the evils of the current administration, calling George W. Bush Hitler. I’m not sure what that has to do with geography, but I’m glad he’s not a history teacher.

It happens constantly, especially lately, someone calls Bush Hitler, says someone else is a Nazi, likens something to a concentration camp, calls the people killed in the Twin Towers “Little Eichmans”. All these descriptions are incorrect, all of them used for the shock value alone, all of it horrid propaganda to try to guilt people in to agreeing with a view that is questionable in it’s logic and so must resort to name calling and labeling to get a misguided point across. And they get away with it. How is that? It’s because people have a myopic view of themselves and a twisted view of history. How else can it be? If you think you are put upon, censored, and discriminated against, it follows that you would make that analogy. But are those feelings valid? Are you just being required to face the natural debate of a free society? (I have a censorship soapbox speech for another day.)

Hitler and the Nazi’s were a singular evil, they are not “like” much of anyone else. They used German industry, know how and 400 years of building anti-semitism to produce a war machine that systematically slaughtered millions. Nazis were voted into power and then took over in a coup. They outlawed being a Jew, a gypsy, a homosexual, senile, insane; retarded and deformed people were also outcast. The Nazis deliberately and with great precision rounded up all the “undesirables” and shipped them off to work camps, and if they couldn’t work, to death camps. The goal of the Third Reich was to dominate the entire world and make everyone else a slave to the Aryan race.

That isn’t George Bush or the Republicans. You may not agree with the policies of this administration, you may not like what they do or say, but you can not begin to honestly compare the two. To do so is to so greatly inflate your feelings about an issue so as to have committed a war crime yourself. By comparing the two and calling them the same you have cheapened the truth of the holocaust as to render it a little thing. It was not a little thing. 12 million people were ripped from their homes, divested of all they owned and murdered. That number is only the dead, remember that it does not include the millions upon millions who survived the death camps, the marches, the slave labor, or the ones who hid, living as fugitives, in the hopes of surviving hell on earth.

There are no medical experiments, no vivisections, no tortures for the joy of torturing a Jew, homosexual or Christian caught hiding Jews. None of that is going on.

To play the Nazi card you have to know what the Nazis did, actually did, even then, you had better be careful. Robert Mugabe is such a one. Look him up. Just because you feel something strongly doesn’t make it so. Calling a person a Nazi is an insult that is nearly unforgivable. Don’t do it.

The microwave is a lovely thing to reheat food but it’s useless when it comes to cooking in the first place. It’s too fast and uses the wrong kind of heat to properly get the best flavor out of a product. The internet and satellite communication does the same with news. Great for repeating accurate information, not so great for getting out accurate information in the first place. Rumors start quickly and easily, humans love them and love to repeat them. Now when everyone is a phone call/email away from everyone else it is just too easy for the wrong information to get loose. Trouble always comes from rumors, among the worst is that correcting the wrong information is nearly impossible to do, people have moved on, are thinking of other things, have cemented the first erroneous reports in their heads and nothing else will stick. Two things reminded me of this today.

The Sago Mining Disaster:
Early this morning family members waiting anxiously to hear if their father/brother/husband/son was alive were told joyously, but falsely, that they were, only to hear the true and tragic news several hours later. I have no idea who is to blame, but fact checking could never be more important that when delivering such personal and life changing news. Read more here.

Katrina Victims:
There have been so many epithets thrown, so many accusations made and all before the information was complete. See the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Study Here.

Dry turkey is a cursed thing, one that can not be cured no matter how much gravy you throw at it. If your Thanksgiving turkey is dry you may as well just give up on the dinner and head for the pie table.

Every year, I dread the thoughts, nay, fears, of being responsible for a dry turkey on Thanksgiving Day. This year I was perusing Nigella Lawson’s excellent FEASTS and came across a recipe for Brined Turkey. Yup, brined, as in pickle. Water, salt, sugar, maple syrup, honey, lime, herbs & spices were mixed to form a highly fragrant bath for our 18 pound turkey. Then we dumped it in and let that sucker sit for two days. Chilled of course, stirred, not shaken. Then an hour before lift-off we take the turkey out to dry it off and warm it up to room temperature, cause apparently everything likes to be treated like a frog. That is, food likes to be room temperature before you apply heat to it, it cooks and tastes better if you do that.

Dad freaked out a bit about the turkey soaking, but after reading the recipe, he calmed down and rolled with it.

Then pop that bird into a hot oven, 450, for 1/2 an hour, then set it to 350 for the rest of the time it needs. 3 1/2 hours to cook an 18 pound turkey to perfection. I mean perfection, it was golden brown and oh so yummy. It was juicy and TASTY stone cold out of the fridge the next day too. The gravy was a breeze also, but then I make stock ahead of time and use that to be sure that we have plenty of that nectar of the gods around for leftovers.

I recommend that book. The recipe and timing was dead on. Plus her commentary is hilarious. I’m using her recipe for our Christmas Goose this year.

Former FBI guy, Mark Felt, revealed this week that he was “the man” who leaked all that information to Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post (henceforth WaPo.) Mr. Deep Throat came out of the closet. Great. Expessly for money. Even better.

Mark Felt was J. Edgar’s poodle at the FBI, groomed to take over when Hoover died. When that happened, Nixon passed him over for the top spot and soon after Mr. Felt was breaking every oath he had ever sworn to out him. Funny, to me it doesn’t look like heroism, just a big case of poopy pants. There were other, and legal, options. Today it’s easy to say it just would have been too hard to take that evidence to the Grand Jury, or to say that if he had, the information still would have been suppressed. The problem is that Mr. Felt didn’t even try to do things the right way and through proper channels. He had taken an oath not to reveal classified information. He broke that oath.

Bob Bradlee, editor of the WaPo, has some interesting ties to JFK, cover-ups and such, that in light of the evisceration of Nixon on his watch are rather hypocritical in nature. He too is looked as a hero, as are Woodward and Bernstein. Whatever.

The left has often pointed at Nixon as proof of the corruption on the right, and in a gesture of fairness, I’ll give them that Nixon was unprincipled and uncouth, actually, not even a nice guy. But now in that same gesture of fairness I’d like to point out that nearly every democratic president from FDR on has acted the criminal. FDR stacked the Supreme Court, Truman overlooked and condoned Soviet spies in our midst, even to the highest levels of government, JKF, a drug addict, used his fathers methods and brother RFK to get things done that shouldn’t have gotten done including murder, LBJ, well, ick, there’s just too much. Carter’s missteps have come from bullheadedness and a petulance not seen often this side of the woobie, but as far as I know he hasn’t been charged with anything. Okay, except a case of stunning and stellar blindness, like when he said that Venezuela’s recent election is more democratic than our own. (What planet is he on anyway?) WJC, well, it starts with sexual harassment, misappropriating FBI files, the rape of Juanita Broaderick and we can just keep going from there. Remember that he was disbarred, you know, lost his lawyers license because he broke the law and lied under oath. On the Republican side you have Ike, one of the most honest politicians ever to inhabit the White House, Reagan, say what you will of Iran-Contra, he ended the cold war, and 41, he got us into GW1, and got us out again, but he made that “read my lips” mistake. Say what you will of W, his tenure is unfinished, and we still have to see what the WMD thing was all about.

One thing has always baffled me, the left’s hatred of the Vietnam conflict. All the protests, all the anger, all the “hawks and doves” junk, and it always looked to me that the left forgot who started, promulgated and LOST that “police action”. It was the left, that was their baby, if you look closely at Somalia you will see Vietnam on a smaller and shorter scale. That same fight-but-don’t-fight thing. We were in Vietnam because of the policy of “containment”, a leftist idea and a poor idea at that. It took Reagan’s vision to stop that silliness and bring an end to the coldwar. I just never understood all the anger from the left at the right over Vietnam when it was the left’s doing. Why didn’t those radical kids all go Republican?

Okay, so, back to Mark Felt. Is he a hero? No. And just to clarify, I’m not saying that Nixon didn’t commit crimes and wasn’t a mediocre president. What I am saying is that selling out your boss because you didn’t get a promotion and then outing your self as the mole for profit doesn’t fit the definition of a hero. Like I said, poopy pants. If Mr. Felt was still on the playground he would have been roundly pounded.

A hero looks like the firefighters who run into burning buildings when every one else is running out. And like Abdul Amir, who gave his life to protect his fellow Iraqi citizens so that they might vote. And like Amy Carmichael, who bought children being sold into prostitution and raised them as her own. And like the Ten Boom family, who built a secret room in their home so they could hide Jews from the Nazi’s and get them to safety. And like the men and women in uniform fighting a world away to give a people not their own a chance at peace. All these people are just ordinary folks who act admirably and bravely to aid others at great personal and physical peril. That is the definition of a hero.

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=8254
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/kessler200506010934.asp