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]]> http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/28/for-you-mom/feed/ 1 http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/24/weekend-audio-thirty/ http://www.thefryside.com/blog/2010/07/24/weekend-audio-thirty/#comments Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:40:47 +0000 Fry http://www.thefryside.com/?p=2556 “Night in Tunisia” – Boyd Raeburn and his Orchestra

(Found via The Kitchn.)

Whether he was in San Francisco savoring Olympia oysters, rafting down Germany’s Neckar River with a cold beer, or in Hawaii tasting flying fish for the first time, Mark Twain had a love of food that was inseparable from his love of life. Remembering the fried chicken, cornbread, and fresh garden vegetables served on his Uncle John Quarles’s prairie farm, he wrote, brought him nearly to tears. Whenever he recorded in his journal that he’d enjoyed a trout supper, it was certain that he’d ended the day content. And when he recalled stage coaching through the Rockies, he reflected that nothing helps scenery like “ham and eggs … ham and eggs and scenery, a ‘down grade,’ a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.”

But the joy Twain took from food was most vivid in a long fantasy menu of favorite American dishes he composed towards the end of his 1879 European tour . Having suffered through more than a year of dismal hotel cooking, he wrote down the 85 dishes he said he wanted waiting for him the moment he arrived home. The menu ranged from fresh American produce like butter beans, asparagus, pumpkins, and “green corn, on the ear” to meats like porterhouse steak and broiled chicken to regional dishes like Southern-style hoe-cake and “oysters, roasted in the shell, Northern style.” But of all the fresh, local dishes of his imagined feast, the most deeply rooted , the most inherent to specific American places, were wild.

(Found via The Atlantic Food Channel.)

Another blogger responds to the guest post.

I fall into the latter camp, personally. I feel she puts forth such a false persona that regularly varies from ill-informed to bald-faced lying, often with a healthy smattering of damn near illiteracy thrown in. I will not take Palin at her word without significant evidence.

Since no journalists are remotely close to being allowed to investigate (or, frankly, slightly question) her, and she wasn’t that far from being leader of the world’s superpower, this is one conspiracy that I’m willing to give some weight.

This all leads me back to a point I have been making about Palin and her Tea Party movement supporters: it’s not even a matter of relative fact or truth, it is a matter of blatant absence and denial of fact or truth. And when there is no allowance for simple, proven fact, there can be no conversation, let alone compromise.

From July 4th. Little Miss Em gets up early, ready to play around; M decides to put her hair up.

Em has taken to tucking herself in with her blankies.

Just kidding! There was no chance I was napping.

The look of disapproval will never die. Her kids are going to love her.

The now-ubiquitous roaring. Someone has decided to really take after her big brother.

We had M’s sisters and niece over for dinner. Em loves taking pictures with her Auntie.

Taco night and smiling faces.

Em makes sure her cousin is in the picture.

The boy is grinning about something. Who knows what.

So click on to see what greatness has arrived.

From July 3rd. First, M needed a test subject, preferably a still one.

I like the ball opposite the sleeping Tyrone.

That’s our grinning boy!

His feet really are that large. He’s a disturbingly big six-and-a-half-year-old.

“Hey honey, could you look up something in the manual for me?”

Let’s see what sharp object Daddy has left too close to the edge of the counter…

Oh my God, Mommy has a new camera! I’d better scream!

(By the way, we’re potty training, hence the strolling in just the skivvies.)

Well, now Mommy is taking pictures, so we better pose some model shots. Have to love the detail in the hair, right?

Daddy and Daughter.

Daughter who can make Daddy do anything she wants.

Contemplation.

(I like to think she’s contemplating what to throw a fit about next.)

There’s my handsome boy!

No, actually, there’s my handsome boy.

For some reason, this is my favorite picture of my kids since Em was a mere baby.

Mommy worked hard to get a shot of those teary blues.

Thug life, or just cleaning food off a finger.

Bath time at the end of the day.

Plenty more to come. This is just the tip of the iceberg. M has been waiting to use this level of photographic equipment for as long as we’ve been married.

“Okay Dad, I’m ready!”

“Um, for what?”

There’s a brief pause.

“Nothing!”

“What?”

A great big grin slides across is face and he hops away.

I hear Mommy’s laughter coming from the living room. Finally I crack and start laughing too. He’s so proud that he’s laughing as he hops into the living room to tell Mommy the prank he pulled. Twice. Without taking a breath.

You think I was proud of the bike thing the other day? Hah, I scoff at thee.

The moments that he shows beyond any doubt that he’s my son prove the very air in my lungs is worth something.

In a child’s life, before a driver’s license or a kiss, this is the biggest moment there is. He was cruising around with the training wheels raised from yesterday. After some time barely touching them to the ground, he finally asked for them to be removed. I removed them, and off he went.

Riding circle after circle, a whole new world of adventure opened up to him. Suddenly, he could travel fast and without restriction. It was the official turning point of being a big kid.

I wish that moment was just the two of us. Him spinning circles in the street and I proudly watching and smiling. As it was, I was also chasing a little sister around, who desperately wanted to ride her tricycle into the street. I blocked the trike, but she still wound up walking in the swampy gutter a bit.

It was a special little moment, though. I still have recollections of losing my training wheels and blazing around our street in Oakdale, California. Of course, those memories are quite fuzzy, though my Gram (the Queen Mother for those in the know) was apparently there for the event that weekend.

Austin was surely beside himself. He would come back into the driveway and tout how amazingly well he was doing after having his training wheels raised only the day before. Then he’d be off again, wheeling quietly around our street and down a block as Em and I took a walk.

The lad’s still plenty wobbly, as one would assume my son would be. But man oh man does he want it now.  I guess I’ll have to get either my running shoes or my bike up and ready for when he wants an adventure.

I think for posterity’s sake, it’s worth mentioning that about half an hour into losing his training wheels, Austin ran into a parked car.

No damage except to his pride.

The end.

Happy halfway mark for the year. Your assignment: listen to the entire album. If you have the LP, you better be listening on vinyl.

All that is really tough to keep in mind when trying to console a six year old boy. The toddler can say goodbye, not understand that its permanent, and forget it all in a month. But it’s hard for a little boy to forget the great big cuddly cat that would snuggle at his feet all winter long.

He won’t forget him, as well he shouldn’t. I still remember (very vaguely, and I’m sure incorrectly) the big black dog that was my first word, and all the other pets that passed through my life. It is a part of life.

What is really hard is not to eulogize Puma. He’s not dead; far from it. And it’s odd, because it’s usually the farm story that gets told to hide the truth of death from children. In this case, though, Puma is off to a friend of the family’s place in the country to live out of their barn. I really do hope they’re pleasantly surprised at how nice Puma is.

I’ve done my best to hold a stiff upper lip for the sake of the family. It’s the father’s place, I would say, to be the solid, sorted person in times of stress. A father keeps rowing the boat, long after anyone has passed out from exhaustion. That’s not to say we have a heart of stone. Of course things hit our souls, and hit us hard. It is simply part of the job to get people safely where they need to be before finally resting and breaking down a bit.

I wish we did not have to find him a new family. I love that cat a lot. But there was no way we could get through another decade of Puma and Tyrone going after each other, me cleaning the carpet at least weekly (and usually as soon as I get home from work with kids in tow), or me fending off the door from two animals every time I try to leave the house. We will all miss him, but we all, even Puma, will be much better off.

Truly farewell, my silly fat cat.

Silly kids.

That is why I’m eating an egg roll at 10 at night.

And a cupcake.

And drinking a beer.

(Found via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.)

This was a really great debate between the two camps of whether or not to add nuclear power to our arsenal of energy sources sans fossil fuels. The big piece wrong is that they are talking about two different sets of numbers. The pro side is talking about overall current energy needs, whereas the anti side was speaking about replacing transportation energy costs. Once you see that, it undercuts the anti side quite a bit.

Still, it is great to hear those points out. It does seem that with our knowledge, wind can and ought to be a strong power source, and solar ought to be on all suburban and rural rooftops. Hell, you can farm underneath wind turbines, so you might as well plug your tractor in and remove even more of the black energy required to generate our food.

Both points, though, miss a big step: transportation of energy. We lose tons of electricity over our power lines. Superconductors aren’t viable for mass production. Battery power keeps getting better so long as we keep wanting Internet access in our pockets. But how do you think all the electricity is going to get from 10,000 wind turbines to a town?

The first speaker was right that we can hold onto our nuclear waste materials while fourth-generation generators (waste burners, essentially) are developed further. And who wouldn’t love the idea of burning our kill-Earth-ten-times stockpile down to a simple kill-Earth-twice stockpile? That right there should be the front retort of any anti-nuclear energy argument.

So the future is nuclear for base load, wind for topping off that base and for sale (windy in one place, calm in another), and solar for the extra daytime use? Sounds reasonable for me. Now if we can either quit burning fossils for creating and moving our foods (oh yeah, and packaging them), we may do better. Plastics aren’t going anywhere, but I wouldn’t mind going back to a world of mostly wood, metal, stone, and glass.

It would help us all out if we made our food more short-range, for certain. And if I could take a train to anywhere in the region. But if we can at least kick the black energy for using our computers and lights and toasters, we’re at least going to be in a better place.

As I began my first round around my property (easy to find since the neighbors had already mowed this week), a neighbor kid and his friend came and played basketball using my hoop in my yard. The previous owner of my house had athlete daughters, so he installed a professional, adjustable hoop that hangs over into the cul de sac. Neighbor kids regularly come out and use it, especially this teenager, so I thought nothing of it. He waved hello at me while I passed by.

Once I started making passes under the branches of my crabapple, the basketball rolled onto my driveway. I could see the kid coming up to get it out of the corner of my eye and continued to concentrate on not nailing my head on the one low-hanging limb of the tree. After emerging from this big tree’s low canopy, I saw the kid had walked up to me and wanted to ask me something.

“It’s okay if we use your hoop, right?”

“Yeah, totally. As long as you don’t make tons of noise after dark when my kids are sleeping I don’t mind.”

“I never use it after dark anyway.”

“So yeah, no problem.” I said.

“Well the guy from that house came up and said we weren’t allowed. I said you’d let me do it before, but he said it wasn’t your choice, it’s just for kids in the neighborhood.”

“It’s in my yard, I’ve known you for years, and you still live just around the corner. I’d say that qualifies you as a neighbor, don’t worry about it.”

So the kid went back to his friend and game. I put my earbuds back in and proceeded to start another pass.

Soon as I had got myself into a groove, the guy two doors down stomps across my lawn to me. Not the next-door neighbor who would’ve had a reasonable issue, since it’s feet from his driveway too. No, it’s the old guy, my height but twice the width, ragged t-shirt and a bent cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“You know those kids shouldn’t be using that basketball hoop. You know it’s not your hoop right?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I figured it was mine since it’s in my lawn.”

“Well it’s not. It hangs in the right of way. We put it up for the kids of this neighborhood.”

More backstory: I’ve known this kid since he was twelve. When we moved and I started work at the middle school, he had to have been around 7th grade. He’d come into the lab after school or during study hall to work on stuff. He introduced himself when he recognized me from both school and home. Not a straight-A, academic kid, but definitely not a bad apple either. He even chats it up with Austin when the lad comes out and tries to shoot hoops with him. My concern about this teenager using my basketball hoop is obviously quite nil.

“I live around the corner. Big red house.” The kid speaks up from the street.

“Yeah, he lives around here and I’ve known him for years.”

“Well the hoop’s in the right of way. Don’t you know we’ve had a couple of break-ins the past couple of years? Wake up and smell the roses!”

And he starts waddling off, cigarette having never left his mouth. You ever have that kind of person who walks up and said something then walks off? The idea of a conversation never entered their mind. It’s as if the concept of talking to someone you disagree with, even if you both end in disagreement, is completely missing. I find it odd, but more often than not, I know I’m an odd one in the world. This now makes two of five neighbors in the cul de sac who’ve done this to me.

“I know him and he’s fine.” I say as though the conversation was not going to unexpectedly end.

“Wake up and smell the roses!” he mutters again as he continues back toward his house.

I make a wave of disregard with my hand to let the kids know they’re fine to keep on playing. After less than 20 minutes, they head out. I would have too if I was a 16 year old neighborhood kid who just got talked down to by someone you weren’t even near bothering.

I finished my lawn, pissed that whatever was bothering this guy manifested itself against these kids. My sympathetic side tried to give my neighbor the benefit of the doubt. But then I remember that he’s the jerk who let his dog shit in my yard and never thought to clean up after it until I talked to the guy. And it’s his house that holds the shiny black truck without a muffler that is louder than kids playing in my yard and fireworks combined, the truck which wakes me up at night and which my daughter assumes is an airplane. Nuts to him.

And before I get off my soapbox, how dare he assume that teenagers playing basketball in our street is a bad thing. If teens are out and visible and active that means they arenot getting into nasty, stupid, or destructive stuff. This is what we ought to encourage in our society, you jackass.

Then, in the back of my mind, I also think: the neighbor kid is white and his friend was black or south Asian or something. I didn’t look to hard or ask because I didn’t care. But if this was a factor in this whole sorted saga, then I feel much more dismayed.

I am in fact still alive and well, my silly California-raised self in the Midwest. Due to magically unforeseen budget shortfalls (wait for it) on behalf of my local school district, we are closing eight (8) schools this summer. One of which is a middle school that is melding with my own. So they hired me and my closed-school counterpart to wipe out and pack up both schools in preparation for next year.

In short, I have been hired on for extra hours through the end of the month. So not only am I working when I previously thought not, I was also fully informed of it a week before I would begin. M and I have been scrambling to figure out where on Earth our children should go. And we, being the impoverished homebody black sheep that we are, have not yet established a strong network for impromptu child support.

At least this week has been very productive, to the point of being over halfway finished with a three-week project in four days. Best to tackle overwhelming projects like a well-trained wolverine, I suppose.

I am not in the process of going into blog-suicide by talking about not writing. I’m just busier lately, and shorter evenings are spent recovering from more intensely laborious work during the day (read: old computers are fucking heavy!) with a cold beer and attempting to remember to breath from the gut instead of the shoulders.

I do want to apologize for the lack of pictures of the local offspring. We’ve been lax for sure, but May into June is simply second only to the Thanksgiving to New Years gauntlet in terms of ‘things going on’. I hope to make it up to you soon.

Through it all, though, I make room to be creative. Here is the email I sent out to my building’s faculty today, warning them of impending doom:

Greetings One and All Summerites!

Starting today and through a fortnight, I shall be declaring war on information by calling forth the demons from the fiery pits of our servers, flinging their evil across the Ether(net) to destroy everything held dear on each and every computer at our institute of learning! MWAHAHA! If you wish to save your precious Data, I will listen to your pleas, whither electronic or vocal, with utter delight and amusement! Rest assured, though, my wrath shall be wrought no matter what you say!

Nutshell:

I’m erasing the computers. Talk to or email me if you need help saving stuff or need use of your computer for a longer time. Don’t call, I won’t be at my room much.

Have a fun summer. Don’t forget to read a book.

A good book. None of that Twilight nonsense.

Best,

Evan

PS, MWAHAHAHA! (Sinister laugh)

Actually, looking back, I’ll probably take some shit about the Twilight thing.

Creativity and smarts ain’t the same thing, is they?

A great clip from his World Science Festival appearance the other night, especially the bit toward the end:

“One thing I think that as a nation we should be embarrassed by is that the scientists– you can do this experiment yourself, I’ve done the experiment– the scientists, by and large, know more liberal arts than the science that is known by liberal artists.”

Or you can read my longer, less funny version from a couple of years ago. Either way, it’s an important message: It should be exactly as embarrassing in educated company to say “I’m no good at math” as it would be to say “I’m no good at reading.” The fact that it isn’t– that it’s ok to laugh off innumeracy– is a major problem for us as a society.

Read the comments on this post…

This is actually a point I had never really thought about, and even I’m guilty of it. Of course in my family the line was closer to, “Oh, I could do any Algebra or Trig, but hit the wall at Calculus.” And of course, my family is an odd duck. I’m going to go ahead and claim I am not one of those liberal artsy folks who chuckle about being bad at math. But I’ve never called anyone out for laughing at being bad at math. Maybe it didn’t come up as much, because I grew up within music circles and music and math have a very strong relationship.

Back to their point: Orzel and Tyson are precisely right. Math should be a function like literacy. And it’s not even complex math. Arithmetic and basic Algebra should be proudly ingrained in all American brains. We don’t all need to be calculators. My wife regularly comments about how quickly I can multiply through things, but I attribute that to being quickly able to tear down problems (23 x 5 is actually (20×5)+(3×5) in my head) and having being the loot roller for more Dungeons & Dragons games than anyone else I know.

These guys don’t expect that either. They expect that it doesn’t matter what speed you can figure out a problem, they care that you can figure out the problem at all. Tyson properly goes into this with science as well. Organic Chemistry? Nuts to that. Asking how exactly something works, where it comes from, what are its limitations? Reasonable. Even if you can’t understand the specifics, you should at least be able to cut through the bullshit and see if the claim someone is making could actually be valid.

Actually, that ties into what I try to explain to my son. He’s following what advertisements are and it’s easy to see him get tripped up. He’s a knowledge hound, a precise knowledge hound, and I love him endlessly for it. So when some commercial makes a claim that its product does some amazing feat, I have to methodically walk him back and explain that ads, while not fully lying (usually), are shiny exaggerations of what something is actually capable of.

My favorite example: a box of Kix cereal. Right on the front, it claims to be a good source of Calcium and Vitamin D. Know what milk is chock-full of? Calcium and Vitamin D. So what does the Kix give you? Briefly crunchy filler. And yes, it tastes good and is easy to snack on so we still give it to the kids anyway.

To wrap up, I again agree: if someone makes the claim of being ‘bad at math’ and proud of it, remind them that it’s not okay to be illiterate in the basics of our civilization. We depend on it. I know I’m not touching on the fact math is probably not taught in the ways to reach all learners, but that’s a separate fault. I am sick of people being proud of being ignorant.

My dad is a brilliant man, double mastered in science and engineering. Knows something about everything. He’s why I’m abnormally adept at so much. But he’s a bad speller. He got screwed by an experimental method of teaching phonetics when he was a kid. He’s not proud, it’s just something he has to cope with. Doesn’t mean he can’t string a clear paragraph together or talk to someone about music or literature. So even if you’re bad at math, that’s no excuse for not being able to calculate my change at a coffee shop.

Huge advert on the side of a bus: “FIRST AID IN WARTIME. FOR HEALTH, STRENGTH AND FORTITUDE. WRIGLEY’S CHEWING GUM.”

I’m reading Orwell’s Why I Write right now. He is our grandfather’s generation’s Jon Stewart. I’m working more on this concept as it goes.