Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

Busking

My friend Linn and I are thinking about doing some Busking. After all, Washington DC has zillions of people out on the sidewalks every day. Many of them have money in their pockets that they’d be happy to toss in our direction if we ease the burdens of their day a bit with some nice music.

I’m guessing the best time of day for busking might be during lunch hours when people aren’t in such a hurry. And I’m supposing it’s better to target people who live and work in DC — as opposed to tourists.

If this develops into anything, you can be sure I’ll report back.

Tom Cruise is Nuts

Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Cruise has tossed off the shackles of Hollywood oppression and is piloting his Scientology-fueled funny car straight towards you. The tires are smoking and he’s screaming to the stands about Katie, psychiatry, sex, space aliens, and Brooke Shields. We invite you to grab some popcorn and watch for a few minutes before the crash…

A thoughtful reader directs our attention to TomCruiseIsNuts.com.

What a great site! Tom Cruise really is nuts, of course, but before now I didn’t realize there were actually people keeping track of how crazy he is!

The best part of the site is the Letters!Letters! section.

Deep Spinach/Paneer Samosas

I’m thinking an awful lot about food lately! There’s another REALLY delicious food I need to tell you all about, though:

DEEP brand Spinach & Paneer Samosas

They’re frozen and come about 25 to a bag. The only place I’ve found them around here is at the Giant grocery stores — usually in the same general areas as where they sell the DEEP brand frozen Indian entrees (which are also very good, by the way.)

DEEP makes other kinds of samosa but, after having spent a fair amount of time with each flavor, I’ve come to the conclusion that the spinach/paneer samosas are the best of the best.

If you’re unfamiliar with Indian food, let me explain what a samosa is (and what paneer is). A samosa is sort of like a triangular pizza roll (but with a better tasting outer crust). They can be stuffed with pretty much anything. I’ve tasted potato/pea, spicy lentil, jalapeno pepper with cheese and veggies, and — my favorite, spinach and paneer. Paneer is sort of like farmer’s cheese. It’s a simple, plain cheese. Spinach, of course, you know. The stuffing of these samosas is mostly YUMMY spicy spinach with just a little bit of the cheese to hold things together.

You might think you don’t like spinach. You haven’t tasted DEEP’s spinach/paneer samosas yet. They’re really REALLY good. I cook them up in the toaster oven. Usually 6 at a time. (I really should limit myself to 4, but I’m weak.) Set the toaster oven to 400. Cook for 7 minutes or so. Turn them over. Cook them for another 7 minutes.

You’ll be so glad you tried them!

Vegan Lunch Box

If you’ve got a kid you’re trying to feed right, this is the blog for you: Vegan Lunch Box. It’s pretty wonderful. The author is vegan (duh!) and the daily entries pretty much just consist of a photo of the contents of her kid’s lunch box with recipes where needed. I’m going to be a regular reader, just for the recipes! (Did you know you can make a ‘sweet and sour’ sauce by melting 1/3 cup grape jelly and mixing in 1/3 cup chile sauce? Stick in some Nates Meatless Meatballs and, voila!, Sweet & Sour Meatballs. Supposedly it’s LOT better than you might think!

At any rate, what a great site! And what a cool mom to go to the effort of serving her kid decent food!

Say Chreese!

If you’re trying to eat healthier food that tastes really good (what? are you nuts?? of course you are!), you should check out this “chreese” stuff made by Road’s End Organics. It’s vegan and fat free and is organic.

It’s really surprisingly good. Really!

Here’s what I had for dinner last night:

• Heat some Nates Meatless Meatballs (also vegan) in the microwave for 1 minute.
• Spoon some spicy Nacho Chreese Dip over the meatballs and nuke it again for…oh…30 second. Just enough to heat everything up.

That was it. That was all I had — and it was plenty. You could wrap it all up in a big flour tortilla and serve it as a burrito. Or you could also have a little salad on the side. I just wasn’t that hungry.

Damn! It was REALLY good though!

Truly, you’ve got to try this stuff. If you’re like me, maybe you’ve been a vegetarian for a really long time and you’ve thought about going vegan (because, honestly, the whole dairy industry is pretty creepy), but you’ve put it off because you like cheese a LOT. This chreese stuff could make the difference. Yummy! CHEESE-Y! But…uh…not!

The Forest in Winter

You must watch this short animation film: the Forest in Winter by Jake Portman

It’s strange and wonderful. And horrible — but in a good way.

You’ll like it. I’m absolutely positive.

Char Margolis — Psychic Intuitive

CHAR – Personal Readings
The fee for a 45-minute telephone consultation is $500.00 (U.S. Dollars).

That’s “Char” — as in “Charlatan”.

People like Char Margolis make me want to puke. She’s a psychic vampire — a vulture who feeds off the grief of vulnerable people. And she’s getting rich doing it. $500 for a 45 minute telephone “reading”! (Yeah, and YOU get to do the first reading — reading off your credit card number.) God only knows how much she’d charge for an actual “in person” visit.

She’s got a new show on the Sci Fi Channel. (Heh, at least she’s on the right venue: science fiction.) I like the Sci Fi Channel but, really, they should be ashamed…providing air time to that repellent creature.

For an interesting analysis of Char’s “cold reading” technique, check out this 2001 article by the fabulous James Randi.

Wiley Coyotes

Among Us
“It isn’t much fun to come out in the morning and find half of your cat on the front lawn…”

Of course, that wouldn’t be a danger if people would just keep their cats in the house. Jeez… I hate people who let their cats wander around loose. We’ve got a couple people in my neighborhood who do that. Their cats hang out in my back yard and snag unwary birds coming to the feeder. I don’t blame the cat, of course. Cats don’t know any better. It’s how they’re programmed. Even if they’re not particularly hungry, cats are going to hunt and kill birds and small rodents. It’s what they do. No, the problem is the jerks who leave the poor cats outside. It’s bad for the birds and chipmunks — and it’s bad for the cat. If the cat doesn’t get run over by a car — or get some awful disease — it’s going to be killed by another animal. Maybe a coyote. Maybe a fox. We’ve got both in our area — though I’ve only seen foxes.

This is a wonderful Washington Post article that mostly focuses on the work of a guy in Vancouver named Robert Boelens who’s part of their Co-existing With Coyotes program. It’s exactly the sort of program we need here around the DC area — or anywhere coyotes are scaring people. The focus of the program is 1) making your neighborhood less attractive to coyotes by cleaning up brushy vacant lots and securing garbage, and 2) teaching children in particular how to recognize and react to coyotes.

Vancouver’s Coexisting with Coyotes program is a lot like other Canadian programs I’ve heard of for dealing with black bears. Bears, like coyotes, are really only a problem when they come to associate humans with easy food. They’re both by nature quite timid. Make your neighborhood unattractive to them, learn how to scare them away when they show up, and they won’t be a problem. It’s not necessary to kill them.

Amen To All That

Modern Ministry Is Off to Raucous Start
“Who would have ever thought that God would decide to start a church at the Legend club?” the Rev. Tony Lee, founder of the new Community of Hope church in Prince George’s County, told his congregation from the club’s stage. “What in the world is God doing?”

Well, I’d have to say God is working through the Reverend Tony in a big way. This is the sort of thing Jesus would have been doing, I think — starting a church at a strip club. Where is the Good News needed more than in a place where lots of people may have lost hope? I’m thinking particularly of the strippers themselves. I doubt most women who become strippers do it because they really love taking their clothes off in front of lecherous drunk men. It’s because they can’t think of any other way of making money. Maybe they’re on drugs and need a lot of easy cash for that. Maybe they’ve got kids and don’t have the skills necessary for earning the kind of money it takes to provide food for the whole family. Whatever the reason — maybe some of those women will check out the Sunday service at the Legend Club and find some inspiration for a different way of living.

Yikes… I’m sounding so religious lately. Is it a little bit creepy?

There’s Nothing Wrong with Patriotism

Country boy – Salon.com Life
The school’s defining philosophy was traditional and conservative, starting with a sit-down-in-your-seat brand of discipline, leavened with a rafter-shaking reverence for country and flag. Every day the students gathered in the gym for the “Morning Program,” open to parents, which began with the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a patriotic song, and then discussion of a “word of the week.” During the first few weeks, the words of the week seemed suspiciously tied to a certain political persuasion: “Military,” “tour,” “nation” and “alliance” were among them.

Moron. Those words have nothing to do with “a certain political persuasion” — they have everything to do with the reality of life in Narrowsburg — where a good proportion of the adult population is active or retired military. Children learn best when lessons relate to things they deal with every day. And, incidentally, they also learn best with a bit of good old-fashioned “sit-down-in-your-seat” discipline. (I wish more parents would enforce that sort of discipline — particularly at restaurants and shopping centers.)

Hand over heart, my son belted out the Pledge with gusto every morning and memorized and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I never stopped resisting the urge to sit down in silent protest during the Pledge. But I also never failed to get choked up when they sang “America the Beautiful.”

What an ass. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the Pledge — there’s nothing wrong with patriotism. Reciting the Pledge and loudly denouncing the direction our country is headed are not mutually exclusive activities. Caring enough about our country to criticize it can be one of the loftiest expressions of patriotism. I’m happy to pledge allegiance to our flag — knowing full well that our current President and his administration are very bad for our country.

Liberty and justice for all, baby. That’s what the Pledge is all about — and that’s what I’m all about too.

Which reminds me… if you haven’t yet joined the American Civil Liberties Union, you can do it right now by clicking here.

My husband and I realized, though, that Narrowsburg did more than mold our boy into a patriot. He can, it turns out — despite the warnings of other city parents — read at a level twice that of his new peers.

Maybe that “sit-in-your-seat” discipline wasn’t such a bad thing after all, eh?

How soon childish national pride is shed, I sometimes think now, and not a little wistfully. Only once it was gone did I realize that, after our initial discomfort, my husband and I had begun to see our son’s patriotism as a badge of innocence. His faith was a reminder to us that the reason we are devastated by the war in Iraq and the Bush presidency is that we too love America. We too want to believe in its potential for good and brotherhood.

What a shame that it wasn’t until the second to last paragraph of a 2-page article that the author finally admitted that — just maybe — there wasn’t anything too terribly wrong with her son’s patriotism.

A better writer — a smarter person — might have focused on how the right has co-opted the idea of patriotism. And how the left has allowed that to happen.