Yesterday’s photo: I miss you.

No picture again yesterday - Excuse #3: Bob Barker’s final taping of “The Price Is Right” had me all lost in time.

When I was a kid, I visited my Grandmother pretty regularly on weekends and summers.

We’d go to the knitting supply store she owned in her little teeny tiny town. While Grandma minded the shop, I would crochet one long chain that would stretch from the counter out the door, and she would tell me it was beautiful.

In later years, we’d go to the library where she volunteered. I would spend the time copying Peanuts cartoon characters, and Grandma would pretend to believe me when I told her they weren’t traced.

Grandma would make me fudge that was so good, I would eat, be sick, and not care.

At night, we’d eat our home-cooked dinner on TV trays and watch “The Price Is Right.”

I haven’t watched that show for years but the sight of Bob’s smiling face and his microphone with the old-fashioned cord brought back all that unconditional love.

This photo of my Grandmother was not taken yesterday, but it’s my blog and I’ll cheat if I want to. It was taken in Denmark at a cousin’s wedding in 2004. I am really hoping that I inherited whatever genes she has that make her look so good at 80-something.

Grandma lives in Nebraska now, and I am too old to be shipped off to relatives by my parents every summer. She has email, but it’s just not the same. Grandma, I miss you.

Technorati Tags: The Price Is Right, Bob Barker

Tallest in Seattle

My office is in a building across the street from one of Seattle’s landmarks, the King Street Station. When this structure was built in 1904 to 1906, it was the Tallest Building In Seattle. It lost that title in 1914 to the Smith Tower, which you can see just behind it on the right.

Coincidentally, in this photo you can also see the current Tallest building, the Columbia Center Tower, which is the the black monolith on the far right. At 967 feet and 76 floors, it claimed the title of Tallest in 1985. (Personally, I think it’s also the Creepiest in Seattle; it sways like a tree during wind storms.)

For an almost exact copy of this image, check out the King Street Station’s page in Wikipedia. I guess the photographer and I park in the same garage.

Technorati Tags: Seattle, historic landmarks

Unmentionable

Is that pasta you’re cooking or are you just happy to see me?

Pasta puttanesca is one of my all-time favorite dishes which pleases Kevin because he knows the recipe by heart. This perfect combo of tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, and anchovies does have rather, uh, unsavory origins. As this foodie explains:

The first interpretation is that the intense aroma, (harking back to the “stinking” Latin definition), would lure men from the street into the local house of ill repute. Thus, the Napolese harlots were characterized as the sirens of the culinary world. Three additional accounts all hinge on the fact that Puttanesca sauce is easy and quick to make. The first is that the prostitutes made it for themselves to keep the interruption of their business to a minimum. The second is that they made it for the men awaiting their turn at the brothel. And the final version is that it was a favorite of married women who wished to limit their time in the kitchen so that they may visit their paramour.

Or if you are Rachael Ray, you can be demure and succinct at the same time: “It comes from the Italian for ‘fast and easy.’”

Or if you are Uppity, you can say, “Pass the stinking pasta sauce, you white male oppressor!”

Technorati Tags: Italian food, puttanesca

Colored Pencils

Summer at the park

Once again, this was supposed to be yesterday’s photo. Excuse of the day: weekend stochasticity. How’s that for a ten-dollar word? It means, “the lack of having one’s shit together.” I get so used to the 9-to-5 routine that sometimes a free Saturday can short my circuits. It’s even worse when it’s sunny out - my brains can only take so much unfamiliarity.

Not that I’m complaining. Unfamiliarity can be great once you get used to it.

Stay tuned for today’s photo… famous last words?

Photo: Boats moored at Coulon Park

Racist Fucktards Is Us

OK, you’re probably really tired of pictures of plants by now, so I promise this is the last one for a while (barring the irresistable, like a 400-pound tomato in the garden or something). This is a hens-n-chicks I’ve had for a few years, and it keeps growing tentacles and stuff. I’m waiting for it to leap onto my face and deposit eggs in my mouth.

You may also wonder what’s with the disappearance of all the Deep Thoughts on my blog lately. Well, I’ll tell ya. I’ve been taking a break from the insanity for the past couple of weeks. Usually when shit gets me down, I just reach into my trusty Fucket Bucket, grab a piece of candy, and keep on blogging. But the other day I ran across something that made me crawl head-first into the Bucket and not want to come out.

Around about the last week of May, the writers of the blog Pandagon informed me that there are still some racist fucktards in the good Old South. I know, I know - like, duh. But it’s always hard to face racist fucktards, and even more so when some of them are children. You may have already heard about this, but in case you haven’t and don’t have the stomach to read the (excellent) blog post itself, here’s the gist:

Some black students in a high school in Jena, Louisiana decided to partake of the shade of a tree that grows in a part of the schoolyard traditionally claimed by the white students. The next day, a noose or three were hanging from said tree. The white kids who hung them were suspended for three days for “playing a prank.” Then some of the white kids got into fist-fights with some of the black kids. Within hours of one such fight, three black kids were arrested and charged with attempted second-degree murder. If convicted by their all-white jury, they face probable life imprisonment.

So the hoisting of nooses is a prank that gets three days, and the fist fight is attempted murder that gets life. Right.

The tendency when reading about atrocity is to shake one’s head and mutter, “How horrible. Those damn racist southern fucktards.” It’s a way of distancing, an attempt at self-protection which is ultimately quite delusional. As Lydia Bean, founding member of Friends of Justice, put it so well on their blog:

Many bloggers across the nation are clicking their tongues about Jena as a vestige of the old Jim Crow, and despairing that progressive politics could ever flourish there, in that muggy, exotic, backward place we call “The South”. What progressives don’t realize is that the South is Us. Repeat after me, progressives: The South is Us.

[There’s] nothing exotic about Jena, Louisiana, except that the white kids got away with hanging three nooses in the public school. The sad truth is that young black men are routinely demonized by police and prosecutors all over America. Our nation has set up a direct pipeline from high school to prison for young poor black men, so that we have more black men in prison than in college. And for the most part, nobody cares unless someone does something exotic like hang up a noose. Without the nooses, nobody would have cared if these young men had been prosecuted on bad evidence on a petty charge, and thrown away for life like so many of their generation.

Ouch.

The silver lining in all of this, I guess, is that due to the awesome power of this newfangled Information Highway the internet, this incident is getting a lot of really bad press which is reaching a lot of people, and maybe in the long run, it will help things get a little better.

Maybe the fact that this kind of slavery-era shit - black kids facing life sentences for fist-fighting with white kids - will make us realize that it’s our children that pay the price of adults’ hatred, and as their protectors we are obligated to climb out of our Fucket Buckets, step up to the plate and enact federal hate-crime legislation.

That’s what I’m gonna do. I’m all out of brandy truffles anyway.

Technorati Tags: Jena Louisiana, hate crimes, racism

“Group hug!” - Helmet Head

As you may know from all the hype, “Star Wars” recently had its 30-year anniversary. I was seven when that film came out and I remember going to see it in the theater. When my Aunt Barb, with whom my sister and I were deposited as usual that summer, told us what movie we were going to see, I remember thinking, “‘Star Wars?’ How do stars go to war?”

Flash forward thirty years to Kevin digging around under the house and unearthing an old Star Wars action figure, complete with sweet-embraceable-you arms and two black eyes. He’s a groovy retro addition to my otherwise modern collection. (Hey, Jesus on rollerskates is modern.)

Technorati Tags: Star Wars, action figures

First rose of the summer

This was supposed to be yesterday’s Rib Eye. What’s my excuse this time? Kevin backed up our computer to the external hard drive yesterday, and apparently he forgot to make the required blood sacrifice because something got all hosed up and iPhoto wouldn’t import my digital files. He fixed it by about 9:30 pm last night (what a mess those sacrifices make, oy) but by then I was asleep, dead to the world.

For you see, the weed pollen is Very High in our area and I am experiencing technical difficulties.  Physical activity (like getting out of bed) brings on fatigue that resembles thirty-seven elephants standing on my chest.  You can’t rollerskate in a buffalo herd, and you can’t type with elephants on your chest.

The good news is…

… my magnetic wall works.

Technorati Tags: magnetic chalk board, The Tick, allergies

Do not adjust your screen

This is my new magnetic chalk board. For a good approximation of the creation process, stare at your computer screen for three hours.

Photo: Magnetic chalk board, 05/28/07 10:15 pm