Do Marianne, Dave and the girls know what. . .

Do Marianne, Dave and the girls know what their kittens are doing when they're alone?

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2003/12/about_our_masco.html#more

Update 7/18 - Perhaps it's good that the kittens are armed. Buzzards are attacking joggers in England.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/5858407/Joggers-hurt-in-buzzard-attacks.html

Fawning slaves, unrepentent revolutionaries, socialists and bourbon

There were quite a number of unkind comments about my frog last week at Sam and Deb's anniversary party.

I'd like to point out a few facts for the record.

1. Doug spent some time at the party trying to teach his dog Roxie to bite socialists. Yet all of the socialists at the party remained unbitten at the end of the evening after the bourbon and the beer ran out. My frog has understood since birth that it's his duty to bite socialists, as any socialist who cares to put his finger near the water in the frog bowl will quickly learn.

What's more, my frog's cousins have an entire socialist city terrified. And they're too tough for the wimpy authorities of an entire left coast state, as you dog lovers will learn if you play the video at this link. Dogs have the mentality of fawning slaves; my frog is an unrepentent revolutionary. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/25/eveningnews/main619543.shtml

2. David mentioned finding it strange that I write about my frog as though he were a touchy feely pet. My frog is plenty touchy feely. He takes great interest in me when I give him his occasional food pellet, and he gets touchy feely whenever I put a finger within a couple of inches of the water, perhaps because he mistakenly thinks I'm a socialist.

3. In the course of the party I learned some pretty disgusting things about the eating habits of both Doug's Roxie and of Liana and Catherine's cute little Shih Tzus. If my frog is a coprophagist he is at a minimum discrete about it. What happens under the rocks in his bowl stays under the rocks.

4. At 23 years old my frog can benchpress a rock that outweighs him by several times, and he does it whenever I forget to feed him for a few days. Also, in his younger days, he demonstrated the ability to eat an entire tadpole almost as big as him in only two days. Plus, he can broadjump about 30 times his length, and he can highjump about 10 times his length, or at least he could a few years ago when he last escaped from the tank. Finally, he can hold his breath for at least twenty minutes, which is the longest I've ever had the patience to watch him closely. Tell me about your canines when they can do any of those things.

Update: Linda informed me that I may have unjustly identified Doug and Jenny's dog Roxie as a devotee of coprophagy. Linda says it is Rebecca and Matt's dog that goes in for pungent eating. Linda further said the women at the party all agreed that it's only logical that the girl dogs don't indulge and that only boy dogs are filthy pigs.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night

I've been told that some folks have been wondering why I haven't posted anything here for a while. Part of the truth is that my laptop, on which I'm writing this, has a virus that has been causing it to crash regularly. Another part of the truth is that I've been immersed in a couple of pretty good novels. And the final part of the truth is that I've started several blog entries that haven't worked.

So, I'd be working on a frustrating blog entry and the laptop would crash. And when the laptop crashed I would use it as an excuse to pick up one of the novels. Then when I returned to the laptop after it restarted, I would find myself facing the still unsatisfactory blog entry. So I would try a new start for it, or a new middle, or a new end, and then the laptop would crash again. And I would go off to one of the novels again.

The two novels were Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven, which I finished a couple of days ago and Playing for Pizza by John Grisham, which I finished an hour or so ago. Both were excellent, but now they're done. I plan to loan Playing for Pizza to Sam and Jas because it's about football, Italians and food; but Fleet of Worlds will go up on the shelf with the other science fiction since nobody around here likes science fiction.

We had a great Christmas Eve gathering here earlier even though we missed Al R and Angela. Al's down in Florida crowing about the warm temperatures every time we talk to him on Saturday mornings. Angie's out in San Diego waiting on a back operation that's now scheduled for New Year's Eve day, of all the days. Hopefully they'll get to cutting on her back before they get to partying.

Thankfully Catherine and Liana came over to help with the food preparation. Linda and I couldn't have done it without them. There is a tempo necessary to preparing the various fried foods.

Incidentally, the laptop crapped out after the line above and restarted itself. I went out and had a cigarette and read the beginning of The Godfather Returns by some schlemiel named Mark Weingardner. How can it be that the best writer they could hire to continue the godfather saga can't write one tenth as well as Mario Puzo? Well, at least this novel is set in the time of the original novel and uses some of the original characters.

Anyway, we had a great Christmas Eve gathering of the tribe. Marianne and Dave managed to find the old pogo stick I wrote about a few days ago and gave that to me as a Christmas present. I was encouraged to try it out; but I'm not that stupid. Nor was I that drunk. I'm told that Samuel managed to do ten jumps on it when the younger and more foolish folks took it out to the driveway, so the darn thing still works fifty three years after I first got it as a gift. Meanwhile it's now propped out there by the front door, so I'm stuck with it again.

Rebecca brought very serviceable red baccala stew, although it wasn't a hundred percent Aunt Mary style, and Rebecca fessed up to messing with the recipe. Caramelize some tomato paste indeed! Mom would have said "quan de gatsa de mossa." But I think Mom would have approved of the flavor. Also, Rebecca gave Sam a Marche' cookbook which looked interesting. It had what looked like some of the traditional recipes in there. I have to borrow it from Sam and read it.

The fried foods were as delicious as they were unhealthful. And, as usual, the folks ate an unbelievable amount of garlic and oil spaghetti. Some of them corrupted it with a topping of the quite good tomato gravy that Deb brought, but all seemed to enjoy it. There is a segment of the family that refuses to recognize that garlic and oil spaghetti is too good to mess up with tomato sauce.

I'm always amazed when they compliment that spaghetti on Christmas Eve. Just for the record there's nothing magical about why it tasted the way it did. The secret is in the garlic, the fresh instead of dried parsley and the egg noodle spaghetti instead of water based pasta. It's an everything to excess recipe.

One bulb of garlic for each 14 ounce package of egg pasta even though your hands get cramped from chopping so much garlic. Buy a chopper if you don't want your hands to get cramped. Don't cut down on the amount of garlic. And one supermarket bunch of chopped fresh parsley for four packages of pasta, which is how much we went through tonight. Also, a couple of tablespoons of salt at least in the pasta cooking water and a tablespoon or so of salt in the couple of cups of olive oil in which the garlic is cooked until some of it is browning. Forget all that stuff you were told about not overcooking garlic. Some of the garlic has to be overcooked.

Truth to tell, in my own opinion, I could have browned the garlic a bit more than I did tonight. I was a bit too quick to put in the water and parsley. But things were a bit hectic over there what with the four packages of pasta being a bit too much for the size of the cauldron that Kathy loaned us. Also, I was getting a bit tired of cooking by that point, and I had forgotten the garlic and oil for a bit and they were on high. So I panicked a little when I saw the first brown bits and put the water and parsley in maybe a couple of minutes too soon.

Christmas is a comin'

Ha! The New York Times apparently just discovered the merits of organic Christmas trees.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/garden/04garden.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2

We've had the most organic Christmas trees that it's possible to have ever since Alex and I got Linda to agree to the idea of a big tree and we cut down that fir back beyond the pond several years ago. Rebecca's disapproval when she found out we had cut a forty or fifty foot tree to use the top fourteen feet made my enjoyment of the tree all the better. Note to self - don't let Rebecca find out that I have my eye on an even bigger fir tree that has a nice symmetrical top.

I still remember that first live tree quite well because of Linda's skepticism when we dragged it in and set it up in the living room. It looked a lot bigger inside than it had outside, a lot bigger. I also remember it because the bottom thirty or so feet of it is still over there in the woods. I've had no reason to cut up the trunk because fir gives off too much creosote when you burn it; and the lower branches are still holding the trunk off the ground; so it isn't rotting.

Plus, it bothers me that such a nice straight log is sitting there unused. At one point I was going to remove the branches and use it as a stringer for the bridge; but I ended up using four cedars for the stringers because I thought they would last longer. The upstart is that that's turned out not to be the case. There the fir is, mocking me, still solid each time I whack it with a machete; and the thin ends of a couple of the cedar logs in the bridge are rotting.

I may replace them with oak trunks when I get around to taking apart the bridge and rebuilding it. There are oaks which really should be culled from the grove off to the side of the house and the trunk of the dead english oak hasn't rotted in more than a decade even though it's sitting on the ground. Of course, it's possible that the wood of the white and pin oaks in the grove will not be as rot resistant as english oak.

Come to think of it we should get a carbon credit for cutting that fir tree and leaving it lay in a way which has kept all the carbon in its trunk bound up and out of the atmosphere all these years.

Sadly there will be no live tree this year because Alex won't be home for Christmas. So we're going back to our artificial tree that's been taking up space in the garage for the past few years. Which reminds me that I just got an email from Angie. She's not coming for Christmas this year either. She's going to be recovering from a planned back operation to relieve pressure on a nerve. That means me and Linda are going to be breading and frying on Christmas Eve all alone. . . unless perhaps Liana and Catherine want to help?

Arrgh! It also means no baccala with potatoes, raisins and tomato sauce unless somebody wants to contact Angie for the recipe. There's no way Linda or I will have time to make it on Christmas Eve. I'll provide the baccala if someone wants to make it since I'll be buying and soaking some for the white baccala recipe anyway.

Coincidences and Perspective

This morning I was drawn over toward Mom and Pop's old house across the creek by the sight of white shapes billowing in the grass just beyond the bamboo patch I planted in the middle of that field two years ago. I could have just gone into the TV room for the binoculars, but it was a nice day, so I took a walk. Fortunately so, for I found that the white shapes were "ghosts" fluttering from a framework that the S's had erected as part of an obstacle course for kids coming to a picnic today. And I had a nice conversation with Mr. S about a variety of stuff.

Now here's where the coincidence comes in. How many times in your life do you think about gargoyles two times within a few hours as a result of two separate incidents?

While talking with Mr. S I noticed that one of the high dead branches of the weeping willow tree down by the pond presents a perfect image of a gargoyle at it's very top when looked at from up by his house - and I mentioned it to him. It looks so much like a crouching animal that we both looked at it for quite a while before becoming sure it was just an aspect of the profile of the branch from that perspective. So that's one gargoyle.

Then later, about mid afternoon, Marianne M called to talk to Linda about plans for a cookie making day before Christmas. But Linda was napping, so Marianne and I proceeded to talk about a variety of things, one of which was art and her surprise at finding me writing about it in a previous blog entry. And that led to talk of the artwork that Catherine and Liana are doing in this class they're taking. And, naturally, one of the things was to model a gargoyle. So that's two gargoyles in one day.

Below are links to the girls' artwork. I liked the positive negative cutouts they did and I found it interesting that their work is so much different one from the other.

Liana's cutouts are very symmetrical, very controlled. At first glance they're reminiscent of parquetry or formal design, like an English formal garden. But then the first one started to look like a tribal mask to me, quite a good tribal mask, symmetrical but not symmetrical at the same time.

Catherine's cutouts are aggressively asymmetrical and interesting in a whole different way, reminiscent of cubism at first glance. And then I noticed the jester face within the teddy bear face on the left side of the first one. The first one is very, very cleverly done; but I still like the second one best for the way the angular cutouts on the left complement the rounder cutouts on the right and top, and especially for the way the little windy road at the bottom leads into the square.

That windy road in Catherine's cutout reminded me that Van Gogh painted a picture of a winding road entering a field from the foreground much like that. I think Van Gogh's picture is in Chicago with one of his greatest paintings - the one of the little room he lived in, in Arles, I think. Stand back from that painting and the perspective is perfect, the corners vividly sharp and angular. Move closer and you have to be amazed because the corners are just the barest suggestions sometimes suggestions made of lack of paint. Like when you get involved with a pointilist painting. You're forced to ask yourself, how did Van Gogh do that? He had to be close to daub on those little brushstrokes; but he had to be seeing the painting from far to see the corners in his mind's eye.

The standing in my shoes pictures are also interesting for the differences between them. Liana goes for bold colors and complex geometric shapes on the soles of the shoes, while Catherine goes for softer colors and softer, more restful, motifs on the soles of the shoes. It took me a while to figure out the logo on the soles of Catherine's shoes.

Only Liana has a gargoyle, which is what started this whole blog entry. Her gargoyle reminded me of a cow that was in one of the Disney cartoons. Maybe Catherine had a gargoyle but it came alive and ran off like the gargoyles in the movie Ghostbusters.

I'll have to remember to point out the gargoyle at the top of the tree to Liana and Catherine when they next come over.

Perspective is everything in life. What is obvious from close up is sometimes a mystery from afar. And what is obvious from afar is sometimes a mystery from close up.

You can sometimes see what Van Gogh saw by squinting your eyes just so when looking at a vivid scene like fall tree colors in bright sunshine, or a dark scene like the sky in moonlight. If you could paint what you see when you squint your eyes like that maybe your paintings would be the prizes of museum collections, almost literally priceless. The last Van Gogh that came on the market was a relatively small and not very good one, if such a thing can be said. It brought a price of $87 million from a Japanese fellow a dozen or so years ago, I think, for the information of you Philistines out there. Not that I have much room to criticize, as though that has ever stopped me. Aside from a very few artists that I recognize on sight, I read the labels in the museums just like most people to know which ones to look at more closely and respectfully than the others.

You can see Catherine and Liana's artwork at the links below.

Catherine http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=3679928

Liana http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=3679958