This article made me think of Mom

Mom was liberal to the core (in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt New Deal sense and also the anti-war sense), although she rarely talked about politics. But despite, or perhaps because of that, she despised the Kennedys. It was Aunt Mary who regularly used the term "whoremasters" in referring to politicians; but the fact is that the Kennedys (Jack, Bobby, Teddy and many of their politically involved children) really were whoremasters, as well as thorough cynics who considered themselves above the laws pertaining to ordinary people even as they loudly trumpeted their supposed love for the little people to attain and hold public offices.

Mom would have loved this article and commented on it. After which Aunt Mary would have delivered her classic line, "They're all whoremasters." Then they would have laughed together at the very best sort of joke, the bitter joke that simply states the real, though crazy, truth of things.

Ravioli and stuffed olives for a bunch of people

I mentioned the other day that Linda found Aunt Mary's recipe for a whole lot of meat ravioli after Angela and I semi-finalized the mad plan for December 19th.

Here it is:

For the Dough:
5 pounds flour
8 extra large eggs
12 oz warm water
Knead approx 20 minutes
Roll out dough into tube and cut into slices
Press slices flat and dust flour on both sides
Run through pasta machine first on 1 and then on second to last slot
Put in meat, fold over and shape

For the meat filling:
8 pounds of cooked chicken and pork total weight
1 cup bread crumbs
1 cup cheese
4 cups chicken broth
4 eggs
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 tblsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder
1tsp parsley
Grind pork and chicken mixture together and fill pasta

(The recipes for the dough and filling are next to one another on a card, so I assume the meat mixture is designed to fill the amount of rolled dough that the dough recipe will produce. Assuming it's a recipe for about 200 ravioli that would mean about a half ounce of meat in each ravioli.)

On the back of the same card is a recipe for cheese filling:
1 pound of ricotta
Cheese to taste
1 egg
1/2 tsp parsley
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbl bread crumbs
Mix together and fill pasta

(Clearly the Ricotta recipe is not in proportion to the dough recipe, so my guess is that she wrote that on the back of the card for reference and it isn't meant to be used with the 5 pound dough recipe.

On the other hand Angela remembers the old time dinners consisting of fried meat ravioli, boiled meat ravioli with cheese and cinnamon, and then boiled cheese ravioli with gravy. So perhaps this is a recipe card for those occasions. But even that doesn't explain the problematic proportions since 1 pound of ricotta filling would not have made enough cheese ravioli with the sauce for the dinners for 15 or so that they used to have, even on the assumption that we had already eaten fried and white meat ravioli..

We'll learn the truth on December 19th. I'm figuring we'll do fifteen pounds of flour for dough and then fill with 16 pounds of meat and 8 pounds of cheese so as to end up with about 600 ravioli.

In addition we're going to do six times the following recipe for stuffed olives that Angela sent me so as to end up with about 450 olives:

2 1/2 lbs spanish olives (about 30 olives to the pound)
1 1/2 lbs ground veal and pork
3 eggs
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp parsley
2 tbsp romano cheese
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp garlic powder
3 tbsp bread crumb

Don't like the cost of new drugs? Use generics!

Many years ago Aunt Mary A angrily told me that her eye operation had cost $3,000 and only took a couple of hours. I shocked her a bit, and made her laugh, by telling her that the next time she needed a similar operation I would read up on it and then do the operation for her for a lot less money.

Another time I was talking with Frank A at a reunion and he mentioned indignantly that a friend's mother was taking a heart medicine that cost (I think) $300 a month. What really burned him, he said, was that the same company sells the same medicine for dogs for only a few dollars a month.

Always willing to fuel a good argument, I pointed out to Frank that his friend had an easy solution. If the dog medicine was truly the exact same thing as the human medicine he could save a lot of money by buying the dog medicine and giving that to his mother instead of the human medicine.

In both cases I was being facetious; but there is a great truth in these incidents that relates to the current debate about health care. One of the things the health care "reform" boosters are arguing, and have argued for a long time, is that pharmaceutical companies often make minor changes to existing drugs and then charge a lot more for the new formulations, which are often only slightly better than the old drugs. This is viewed as somehow exploitative, even though everyone agrees that pharmaceutical companies spend huge amounts of money on research and development precisely in order to refine old drugs and develop new ones.

If it's true that a new drug is only a little bit better than an older drug that is now a generic and available for much less cost, why shouldn't people who can't afford to or don't want to pay the price asked for the new drug simply be satisfied with the older drug?

In every other area of life that's the way things are. I would very much like to drive a nice new Cadillac or Lexus every year; but I drive a Ford until it pretty much craps out because I don't want to pay for a Cadillac or a Lexus, and it would certainly cramp my budget to buy a new car every year. I would like to eat nothing but tenderloin and lobster prepared by great chefs in fine restaurants; but I eat chicken and tilapia prepared at home because I don't want to pay restaurant prices for tenderloin and lobster.

Someone who relies soley on much cheaper generic drugs is, at worst, trusting his life to the very best drugs that existed in the world as of about seven or eight years ago. It's true that doing that means taking a slight but significant risk with your life; but then most people take much more substantial risks with their lives by driving cheaper cars that don't have the super sophisticated safety systems that are installed in the most expensive cars.

Why is health care viewed so much differently than the other necessities of life? Why do people beat up on pharmaceutical companies when it's the pharmaceutical companies that have provided both the generic drugs and the slightly better newer drugs?

Here's an article by Tevi Troy that appeared in the June issue of Commentary Magazine that goes into other aspects of the health care, and specifically the pharmaceutical cost, debate:

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the-end-of-medical-miracles--15162?search=1

Here are some quotes from it for those too lazy to click the link:

"Americans have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the life-sciences industry—the term for the sector of the economy that produces pharmaceuticals, biologics (like vaccines), and medical devices. These days, the mere mention of a pharmaceutical manufacturer seems to elicit gut-level hostility. Journalists, operating from a bias against industry that goes as far back as the work of Upton Sinclair in the early years of the 20th century, treat companies from AstraZeneca to Wyeth as rapacious factories billowing forth nothing but profit. At the same time, Americans are adamant about the need for access to the newest cures and therapies and expect new cures and therapies to emerge for their every ailment—all of which result from work done primarily by these very same companies whose profits make possible the research that allows for such breakthroughs."

"Liberals and conservatives appear to agree on the need to unleash the possibilities in medical discovery for the benefit of all. But it cannot be ordered up at will. It takes approximately ten years and $1 billion to get a new product approved for use in the United States. Furthermore, only one in every 10,000 newly discovered molecules will lead to a medication that will be viewed favorably by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Only three out of every ten new medications earn back their research-and-development costs. The approval success rates are low, and may even be getting lower—30.2 percent for biotech drugs and 21.5 percent for small-molecule pharmaceuticals."

"It is the very nature of scientific discovery that makes this process so cumbersome. New developments do not appear as straight-line extrapolations. A dollar in research does not lead inexorably to a return of $1.50. Researchers will spend years in a specific area to no avail, while other areas will benefit from a happy concatenation of discoveries in a short period. It is impossible to tell which area will be fruitless; so many factors figure into the equation, including dumb luck. Alexander Fleming did not mean to leave his lab in such disarray that he would discover that an extract from moldy bread killed bacteria, yet that is how it happened. Conversely, if effort and resources were all it took, then we would have an HIV/AIDS vaccine by now; as it stands, the solution to that problem continues to elude the grasp of some of the most talented and heavily funded researchers."

"Scientific discoveries are neither inevitable nor predictable. What is more, they are affected, especially in our time, by forces outside the laboratory—in particular, the actions of politicians and government bureaucracies. The past quarter-century has offered several meaningful object lessons in this regard. For example, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration undertook a number of actions, both general and specific, that had a positive effect on the pace of discovery. On the general front, low taxes and a preference for free trade helped generate a positive economic climate for private investment, including in the rapidly growing health-care sector. More specifically, the Reagan administration engaged in new technology transfer policies to promote joint ventures, encouraged and passed the Orphan Drug Act to encourage work on products with relatively small markets, and accelerated approval and use of certain data from clinical trials in order to hasten the approval of new products. All of these initiatives helped foster discovery."

"That which the government gives, it can also take away. As the 1990s began, a set of ideas began to gain traction about health care and its affordability (it seems hard to believe, but the first election in which health care was a major issue was a Pennsylvania Senate race only eighteen years ago, in 1991). Americans began to fear that their health-care benefits were at risk; policymakers and intellectuals on both sides of the ideological divide began to fear that the health-care system was either too expensive or not comprehensive enough; and the conduct of private businesses in a field that now ate up nearly 14 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product came under intense public scrutiny."

"A leading critic of Big Pharma, Greg Critser, wrote in his 2007 Generation Rx that President Clinton picked up on a public discomfort with drug prices and “began hinting at price controls” during his first term in office. These hints had a real impact. As former FDA official Scott Gottlieb has written, “Shortly after President Bill Clinton unveiled his proposal for nationalizing the health-insurance market in the 1990s (with similar limits on access to medical care as in the [current] Obama plan), biotech venture capital fell by more than a third in a single year, and the value of biotech stocks fell 40 percent. It took three years for the ‘Biocentury’ stock index to recover. Not surprisingly, many companies went out of business.”"

"The conduct of the businesses that had been responsible for almost every medical innovation from which Americans and the world had benefited for decades became intensely controversial in the 1990s. An odd inversion came into play. Since the work they did was life-saving or life-enhancing, it was not deemed by a certain liberal mindset to be of special value, worth the expense. Rather, medical treatment came to be considered a human right to which universal access was required without regard to cost. Because people needed these goods so much, it was unscrupulous or greedy to involve the profit principle in them. What mattered most was equity. Consumers of health care should not have to be subject to market forces."

"And not only that. Since pharmaceuticals and biologics are powerful things that can do great harm if they are misused or misapplied, the companies that made them found themselves under assault for injuries they might have caused. It was little considered that the drugs had been approved for use by a federal agency that imposed the world’s most rigorous standards, and was often criticized for holding up promising treatments (especially for AIDS). Juries were convinced that companies had behaved with reckless disregard for the health of consumers, and hit them with enormous punitive damages claims."

"The late 1990s also coincided with an unpredictable slowdown in the pace of medical discovery, following a fertile period in which new antihistamines, antidepressants, and gastric-acid reducers all came to market and improved the quality of life of millions in inestimable ways. A lull in innovation then set in, and that in turn gave opponents of the pharmaceutical industry a new target of opportunity. An oft-cited 1999 study by the National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) claimed that the newest and costliest products were only offering “modest improvements on earlier therapies at considerably greater expense.”"

"The NIHCM study opened fresh lines of attack. The first came from the managed-care industry, which used it as a means of arguing that drugs had simply grown too expensive. Managed care is extremely price-sensitive, and its business model is built on cutting costs; executives of the industry were well represented on the board of the institute that put out the report. They were, in effect, fighting with the pharmaceutical companies over who should get more of the consumer’s health-care dollars."

"The second came in response to the approval by the FDA in 1997 of direct consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals. The marketing explosion that followed it gave people the sense that these companies were not doing life-saving work but were rather engaged in the sale of relative trivialities, like Viagra and Rogaine, on which they had advertising dollars to burn that would be better spent on lowering the cost of drugs. And the third element of this mix was the rise of the Internet, which gave Americans a level of price transparency that they had not had before regarding cost differentials between drugs sold in the U.S. versus Canada and other Western countries."

"These three factors precipitated a full-bore campaign by public interest groups that bore remarkable fruit over the next several years. By February 2004, Time magazine was publishing a cover story on pharmaceutical pricing, noting that “the clamor for cheap Canadian imports is becoming a big issue.” Marcia Angell, a fierce critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the FDA, wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2004 that, “In the past two years, we have started to see, for the first time, the beginnings of public resistance to rapacious pricing and other dubious practices of the pharmaceutical industry.”"

"Harvard’s Robert Blendon released a Kaiser Family Foundation poll in 2005 in which 70 percent of Americans reported feeling that “drug companies put profits ahead of people” and 59 percent saying that “prescription drugs increase overall medical costs because they are so expensive.” Overall, noted the foundation’s president, Drew Altman, “Rightly or wrongly, drug companies are now the number one villain in the public’s eye when it comes to rising health-care costs.” "

I was born under a waning gibbous moon, Pop was at a Phillies game

I was born 22,303 days ago under a waning gibbous moon. Pop was at a Phillies game, watching the Phillies beat the Pirates 2 to 1. Mercury and Uranus were in Taurus, Venus was in Gemini, Mars was in Leo, Jupiter was in Sagittarius, Saturn was in Cancer and Neptune was in Virgo. The Dow Jones Industrial Average stood at 190. The Dow has done pretty well since the world was graced with my presence.

Mom always said that Pop was at a Phillies game when I was born, which means I was born in the morning of May 28th since the Phillies played the Pittsburgh Pirates at home on the evening of May 27th. If Pop wasn't available to take her to the hospital she had to have gone there on the 27th. Pop would have been home to take Mom to the hospital on the 28th, because the Phillies were away that day playing the New York Giants.

Here's a great website where you can put in your birth date and find out what phase of the moon you were born under. If you put in "planets" and then your birth date it will tell you what signs of the zodiac they were in on that date. Same thing if you put in "Dow Jones Average" and then your birthdate.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

The website will also do all sorts of math stuff. For instance, if you put in "x cubed + y cubed = 17" it will solve the equation for x and y, graph it, and tell you the implicit derivatives, which you may vaguely remember from near the end of the year in algebra class if you weren't daydreaming. More usefully, it will tell you the probability of drawing a full house in a five card poker hand is 1 chance in 693. Or it will tell you that the probability of drawing specifically three jacks and two aces in a five card poker hand is 1 in 108,900, although I can't imagine why you would want to know that.

Talk about neat! It will also translate Roman Numerals into regular numbers, for those pesky situations when you see a long string of Roman Numerals engraved on the cornerstone of a building and can't remember your M's and D's and X's. Additionally, if you should ever be in a position to supply the cornerstone for a building the website will translate the date into Babylonian or Mayan notation so you can carve the date in a way that will really make people nuts.

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2021+to+Babylonian

And, talk about something that was invented too late. If you're like me you can remember Mom and Aunt Mary getting into a who's who discussion about relatives. One of them would say something like "She's your second cousin. She's Sia Gigette's sister's granddaughter," and you would be totally clueless. This site will draw you a picture of how you're related to someone if you put in things like "grandfather's sister's second cousin."

http://www17.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=grandmother%27s+brother%27s+second+cousin

Update: Alex called today to wish me a happy father's day, probably because Christina reminded him to do so, since he called on Friday evening and talked to me and Linda. Today he reported that yesterday's Tea Party up in Worcester had some interesting speeches but was a bit of a disappointment because it only drew a crowd of a couple of hundred people.

I find it amazing that there should be two hundred people in the most liberal state in the union, a state nicknamed Taxachussetts, who care about the fact that the federal government is on a spending spree that would make ten thousand drunken sailors blush. George Bush was a big disappointment in the government spending and waste department, just like his father; but Barack Obama is throwing around cash in a way not seen since the last time a ten ship carrier battle group of the Seventh Fleet pulled into Subic Bay after 65 days at sea.

The wisdom of the ages

We ignore folk wisdom at our peril.

For instance: I've always remembered Pop as saying that you shouldn't plant your garden until May 20th because of the danger of frost. Sam, on the other hand, has always claimed that Pop's edict was that you can plant anytime after Mother's Day. We've gone around about this for years; and for years Sam has maintained that I've been planting too late.

Like the slow drip. . . drip. . . drip of Chinese Water Torture, uh, Chinese Intensive Interrogation, Sam's constant negative feedback and Al Gore's incessant harping about global warming have weakened my allegiance to my own remembrance. So here I am on May 18th with all my carefully nurtured tomato and swiss chard and zucchini and cucumber plants already set out in the garden; and Linda mentioned this morning that they're predicting possible frost tonight.

Now, in a proper world, a mob of us peasants would rise up and go on a rampage with our shovels and rakes and hoes. We would put a dunce cap on Sam and equip him with a set of flimsy wings with which to stir the air over the tender tomato plants. And we would then storm off to capture Al Gore, the false Shaman, so as to render him down for fat to fuel smudge pots. The renderings from Al would fuel a lot of smudge pots and thus save a lot of crops.

But. . but. . . unfortunately we can't do those things, just yet. . . because the folly of the whole global warming hysteria has not yet become clear to enough of the population.

So instead we are reduced to reliance on our own singular efforts. In my own case I'm okay; because it happens that yesterday Linda replaced the living room drapes. The lining of the old drapes is a very thin material which will make perfect plant caps. You can bet that I'll be cursing later today as I go about tenting all the plants.

Meanwhile: in other news, Alec Baldwin has the Filipino segment of the great global multicultural community a tad upset. Alec was joking the other day about importing a Filipino mail order bride for breeding purposes; and it seems that Ramon Revilla, a senator in the Phillippines, was not amused. He threatened to open a big can of whup-ass on Alec.

For myself, I wasn't terribly offended by Alec's remarks about mail order brides because I'm not Filipino. But I was wondering how it is that Alec didn't get some negative feedback from the Gaia community for wanting more children, they being bad for the environment and all. And that got me to wondering how it is that Baldwin is still here in the United States. As I recall Alec was one of the lefty idiots who threatened to leave the country in the event George W. Bush was re-elected back in 2004. Why is Alec Baldwin still here in the U.S. spouting his racial hatred? Shouldn't he be, like overseas somewhere, like maybe in The Phillippines?

And another thing. How is it that President Barack Obama's continuance of George W. Bush's evil war in Iraq has not caused lefties like Alec Baldwin to go ballistic? Back before the recent election I distinctly recall being reminded that the war in Iraq was evil and that it was moreover causing terrible problems because it was costing $8 Billion per month.

Well, here we are, well into President Barack Obama's new Hope and Change regime, and Barry has found time to spend like many trillions of dollars on Hopey Changey stuff; but somehow he hasn't found time to end the war in Iraq, which was just funded by Obama's Democratic Party controlled congress for another eight months at the rate of, uh, $8 Billion per month. Surely the left still cares about that $8 Billion per month.

And surely President Obama wasn't lying back during the campaign when he constantly promised to end the war in Iraq and do a whole bunch of other Hopey Changey stuff like close the evil and illegal prison down in Guantanamo Bay where President Bush put all those misunderstood sons of liberty who our military captured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thinking about President Obama has me remembering some old wisdom of Aunt Mary R's. During virtually any discussion of politicians she would remind you that "they're all whoremasters." She couldn't get away with saying that today of course because calling Barack Obama a whoremaster, or criticizing him in any way, would quickly be denounced as racism by the baying leftist pack, he being half Kenyan and all.

If President Obama was half Filipino, apparently, anybody could go on national TV like Alec Baldwin and joke about buying one of his daughters with a credit card on EBay and having her shipped to his home for breeding, and none of the politically correct crowd of race hustlers would turn a hair.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D988KQ001&show_article=1

Update: In other news, our pal Alec Baldwin has suddenly discovered that he hates Detroit cars and wants to see U.S. auto workers out of work after shilling for Chevy Tahoes for years. And he goes on and on about global warming despite the fact that he wants to wants to buy and import a Filipino to make another carbon spewing offspring. Do the United Auto Workers Union and the National Organization for Women know about this guy?

http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MmU4YzVlYWExNzMxOTU2NDlhMDA2MjgyM2FjMTg5ZGM=

Hat Tip to Greg Pollowitz, of National Review's blog Planet Gore, who evidently has a strong enough stomach to keep a closer eye on Alec Baldwin than I do.

How come Matty and Sonny never played this sport?

Competitive firefighting. The best event is a combination of drag racing and ladder climbing. A verbal description of it can't be adequately comprehended by anyone who hasn't had at least a few beers. You have to see it done to appreciate it.

This video also has the drag racing, hose laying and hose control event.

You'll have to check out some of the other related videos if you want to see the competitive ladder climbing and bucket brigade event. That's pretty nifty too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0ZSSwTsmrY&feature=related

Incidently, I celebrated Earth Day by picking a couple of plastic supermarket bags of broccoli rabe. I steamed it for three minutes and then mixed it with a bulb of chopped garlic and a bunch of olive oil while it was still hot. I sprinkled on salt several times as I gently mixed it. It took a surprising amount of salt. I was careful with the timing of the blanching and gentle with the mixing because I took a lot of flak from Mom and Aunt Mary one time for turning a batch of rabes too mushy.

I saute'd a nice portion for a few minutes in olive oil to take the heat out of the garlic and we had that with dinner. The rest is in four freezer containers that will provide the makings of a lot of sandwiches. I like it with boiled ham on either a seeded hard football roll (which is the best as long as one has teeth strong enough to handle it) or on sliced seeded split loaf from Corropolese. I also like to put a little mayonnaise on that sandwich, which used to make Pop nuts when he saw me do it. Pop had a very negative opinion of mayonnaise.

Are you adapted to run for your dinner?

Here's an interesting article on the subject of why people can run such long distances. I think I'm going to go out and try to run down a deer one of these days.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_running_man_revisited/

Speaking of dinner; we had a very nice Easter dinner at Jas and Kathy's house yesterday. All the usual suspects were present and accounted for except for Sam and Deb and Delores W., who presumably went to the wilds of New Jersey to celebrate the holiday with Deb and Delores side relatives. Alex and Christina drove down from Boston for the weekend which made it really great.

Johnny, Jennifer and Kathy put together a combo of lamb, ham, lasagna and cavatelli that was excellent; and of course there were several fine desserts, of which Linda and I contributed Mom and Aunt Mary's rice pie, or at least that's what the 2002 recipe scrawl in Mom's handwriting calls it. It's really more of a solid egg pudding. It came out excellent, at least it did after we baked it for more than twice as long as the one hour that Mom's directions specify.

1 cup rice cooked for 15 minutes and then cooled
3 pounds of ricotta cheese
2 cups of sugar
1 dozen eggs
2 tablespoons of vanilla extract
(Mom's recipe also calls for "1 cup milk?". Fortunately I didn't put that milk in. If I had put it in we would probably still be waiting for it to solidify)

Blend the cooled off cooked rice and the ricotta. Blend the eggs and the vanilla with the sugar. Blend the two mixtures together. Pour into a greased 9x13 inch pan. I used a glass baking dish and I put it on a cookie sheet for fear it would spill over because it was pretty full.

Mom's directions call for baking it for one hour at 350. After one hour the middle was still liquidy. At that point Linda let it continue to bake at 350 for another 20 minutes. I came in and noticed that the middle was still liquidy, but the edges were starting to brown. So I reduced the temp to 325 and let it continue to bake for another 20 minutes. Finally I reduced the temp to 275 and let it bake another 20 minutes, after which I turned off the oven and left it in there for another 30 minutes or so.

People seemed to like it; but only about 40% of it was eaten by the crowd of twenty or so. Marianne and Kathy must have really liked it because they took another 40% off our hands. The remaining 20% has already been cut into by Linda (last night) and me (I'm eating a big chunk right now); but I think I'll cut this recipe in half when I make it again next Easter.

Reflecting back I recall that there was always at least some of this recipe left over even back at the height of holiday gorging when 40 or more would troup through 403 Walnut during the course of Easter Sunday. Back then of course Mom would have brought 4 apple pies or so and Aunt Mary would also have made cream puffs if she didn't make one of those huge four decker six inch high cookie sheet sized rectangular rum and cream cakes. And Aunt Nancy would have brought her nonpareil rice pudding.

And we would have eaten those desserts after a a marathon of ravioli and stuffed olive eating. Sam, Matty and me each at least once managed to down twenty of Mom and Aunt Mary's huge meat raviolis, very easy to take because they came in three distinctly different forms - flat ones fried and then powdered with sugar, curly ones served al dente and white with grated cheese and (can't remember the name of the spice right now - note to self, get gingko biloba before you forget its name, also write your name, phone number and address on a card in your wallet in case they find you wandering around confused one of these days soon), and finally with traditional gravy and meatballs. All washed down with as much soda as you wanted to drink.

It's surprising any of us survived those dinners. Of course, the fact that we did survive is evidence of another survival adaptation. After they ran the antelope to death those long ago ancestors of ours ate the whole thing raw if they could, or at least several pounds of its juicy liver and other innards, before the lions and leopards and hyenas could have a chance to steal the carcass from them.

Two ducks just waddled down from the pond and hopped into the creek near the bridge. And there have been a couple of geese hanging around; but I haven't seen any evidence of a nest yet.

Fish stories

Don A down in Florida helpfully provided a list of baccala recipes. The one below looks pretty much like the one Grandmon L and Aunt Mary R used to make on Christmas Eve, and which Angela made more recently, but without the green olives, capers and pignolis which are only appropriate if Don Corleone is coming to visit. There are some other interesting looking baccala recipes on the document Don sent me. If you want the full list send me an email or leave your email address in a comment.

A warning - If you decide to make this or anything else with baccala you need to remember, as I often haven't, that two pounds of dried salted cod is a lot, a very lot. After you soak it, it will swell up like a monster set loose in Phoenixville into something like four or five pounds of fish. I think this recipe must mean two pounds after it's been soaked; so it's a recipe intended for maybe half of one of the hard as wood dried cod fillets that you find being sold right out of the wooden box in a proper market.

One time I showed up at Mom and Pop's house with three dried cod fillets of which I was pretty proud because I had ignored the dirty looks of the clerk and leafed through the fillets in the box just like Mom used to do to get the ones with the thickest thick ends. Pop, who didn't like baccala, took one look at the maybe six pounds of dried cod and said, "What the hell are you gonna do with all of that damned stuff." Mom just laughed. As I recall she kept one of the fillets to use for Christmas Eve and one for later and sent me home with the third along with instructions about how to soak it. So me and Linda had a second Christmas Eve, at least from a baccala standpoint, in late January of that year. Come to think of it I made the red baccala that year myself, so Mom must have said something like, 'soak the fish, fry some garlic in olive oil, put in a can of chopped tomatoes, some potatoes and some raisins and cook it 'til it's done.'

You need to start forty eight hours before you plan to cook the fish by putting the dried fillet in a big pot of cold water. Bend it or cut it in half if need be so it's fully submerged and put the pot in the refrigerator. Change the cold water at least twice and finally change it again before boiling the now swelled up and soft fish. The fact that the whole house will smell like a Portuguese fishing boat for a day or so after you boil it is part of the fun, it adds atmosphere. The fish ends up looking pure and white, surprisingly like fresh fish, given that it starts out yellow and fibrous; but it has more body, more texture and bite, than fresh fish.

I'm always amazed that only me and Sam and Angela really look forward to the red bacalla on Christmas Eve. The rest of the family at best tolerates it and at worst takes Pop's attitude. Pop never met a fish he really liked even though he liked to fish when he was younger.

PESCESTOCCO ALLA MESSINESE
This classic bacalla dish includes potatoes and green olives, found in many sicilian dishes
2 lbs of bacalla (soaked, cleaned & deboned)
1 cup of olive oil
2 med onions - sliced
2 celery stalks - sliced
4 tomatoes - peeled, seeded and chopped
1 lb potatoes - peeled
10 green olives - pitted
2 tbls capers
2 tbls pignoli nuts
4 tbls raisins
Heat the oil in a deep skillet or sauce pan/saute the onions & celery and cook till softened/add the tomatoes and 1/2 cup of warm water/bring to a slow simmer/cut the bacalla into fairly large uniform pieces/cut potatoes into quarters/add the bacalla, potatoes, and the rest of the ingredients to the pot & simmer for 30-40 minutes

Mr. Tad's Thanksgiving; and some sappy stuff

We just returned home from Thanksgiving dinner. Quite a gathering, perhaps the last of an era because Jas and Kathy have been talking of spending a lot of time in Florida after they retire next August. The Thanksgiving gathering has been at their house for about the last ten years, so we may be getting toward one of those unpleasant junctions in life when old and familiar things change.

Today's gathering included Jas, Kathy, Johnny, Angela, Jenny, Doug, me, Linda, Alex, Christina, Sam, Debra, Samuel, Don, Delores, Marianne, Dave, Liana, Catherine, Mark, Linda and Mark. Dave A had to work, so he missed dinner, although he was around earlier in the day.

Twenty-two of us sharing the most precious thing of all to be thankful for.

Not the food, although the food, prepared mostly by Kathy and Jenny, was excellent - traditional turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, brussel sprouts, peas, a tart cranberry relish, a sweet cranberry mold and, of course, multiple desserts. The food was great, but Thanksgiving gatherings have boasted similar food for all of my sixty years.

And not the scintillating conversation, even though it was wide ranging. And even though Linda remembered that my frog once had a proper name, Mr. Tad. In observance of Thanksgiving I gave Mr. Tad a special treat today, a little pinch of bloodworms from the quarter of an ounce container out of which he has gotten an occasional pinch for about fifteen years. He likes bloodworms, a lot; and even frogs should have reason to be thankful.

And not the memories evoked as we older folks remembered the days of The Three Stooges and bemoaned the fact that the youngsters have no respect for the great old black and white movies. All leading, as such remembrance conversations sometimes do, to marvelling about how Aunt Mary R became fascinated with the story of Lorena Bobbitt, holding her up as an example to all womankind after the first little snippet about her appeared in The Times Herald, long before the story went national in a big way. "Good for her. . .That's what all you men deserve," was her greatest quote. A complex and interesting woman, Aunt Mary R, harboring some deep currents under the image of the dutiful Italian housewife.

But I was talking about being thankful. The most important thing we all have to be thankful for is the fact that Mom and Pop succeeded in raising the four of us in such a way that we have remained compatible one with the other, and as a family, for all of the past forty nine years since Marianne appeared. Even more miraculously, the four of us have all been fortunate enough to make good and lasting marriages to spouses who are also compatible.

For more than fifty years that I can attest to we've been gathering for dinners on Thanksgiving. And that's besides the gatherings for dinner on Christmas, New Year's Day and Easter, and for picnics, cookouts, on Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. We've been a close family even putting aside the run of the mill Sunday dinners and desserts, the Saturday morning coffee klatches, the weekday evening visits, the weeklong vacations together in Stone Harbor, then Chincoteague, then Corolla Light and finally The Villages, plus a couple of road trips out west.

Early on in that period we Augustines clustered with the hordes of ravenous Raimos and Luzis and Capones and Romanos and Piermarinis and DiAngelis's at 403 Walnut Street in Norristown. Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R did the honors for dinners that included thirty or forty, not counting those who stopped by after dinner to pay their respects to Grandmom and Grandpop L, and maybe stay for coffee and "just a little dessert."

At the very peak of decadence back then I remember Thanksgiving dinners that included turkey and all the trimmings as above, plus a ham, plus lasagna and meatballs, all topped off with one of Aunt Mary's signature four layer twenty pound rum cream cakes, several of Mom's apple pies, a couple of pumpkin pies and Aunt Nancy's nonpareil rice pudding which could not be resisted even if one was near to bursting. It's fortunate there were no seat belts in those days, because it would surely have been painful to put them on for the ride back home. Looking back from the perspective of this cholesterol aware age, it's amazing anyone emerged alive from those dinners.

After the gatherings switched to 2808 Second Avenue in Trooper the menu tailed off to turkey and the trimmings, most memorably topped off with one of Mom's cookie sheet apple pies during the period in which she decided that one huge rectangular pie was more efficient to produce than several smaller round ones. Has anyone ever made better apple pie than mom, with that flaky crust that can only be achieve with lard or crisco. There were, of course, always a couple of pumpkin pies that one had to at least sample as well; and sometimes lasagna sneaked onto the menu; but I don't think Mom ever added a ham to the mix.

After dinner and dessert in Trooper, of course, we had to go down to Norristown to visit Grandmom and Grandpop. And it was impossible, once there, to avoid having a couple pieces of rum cream cake and maybe another piece of pie. It would then have been impolite not to at least stop in and say hi to Aunt Carmella, and doubly impolite to turn down her offer of coffee and maybe some cookies to force down while Russos, Jackinskis, Prostocks and DiPrinzios ebbed and flowed around.

Gatherings for Thanksgiving at Mom and Pop's Hopwood Road house in Collegeville, are the most memorable, of course. For what previous occurrences could have competed with the joy at the successive arrival of the various cute little rugrats - John, Rebecca, Jennifer, David, Alex, Samuel, Donald, Catherine and Liana - who first crawled and then ran around in their diapers, and occasionally broke loose and ran around without their diapers, their fathers oblivious and their mothers in hot pursuit.

If each member of that new generation is one tenth as lucky in their relationships as Linda and I have been in the steady closeness we've enjoyed with their parents they will be lucky indeed in life.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Update 11/29: Marianne, my annoyingly watchful sister, reminded me last evening that Thanksgiving dinners after 1990 had come full circle and were down at 403 Walnut because Mom was then living with Aunt Mary R. The dinners moved up to Canci Court when Mom moved in with Jas and Kathy after Aunt Mary died. Thus Catherine and Liana celebrated their first Thanksgivings with the family at 403 Walnut.

Quit the whining

Lately it seems everybody I talk with wants to whine about higher food prices. And they're right; in the past few years it's been getting outrageously expensive to go to the market and buy ripe mangos air freighted from Brazil and fresh lettuce from Mexico and hot chutney from East Africa which sometimes I can't even get; so I have to be satisfied with the inferior stuff from India.

And don't even get me started on how expensive it's getting to top off the shopping cart with those little frozen creampuffs and cashew nuts and seedless cucumbers from England and that breakfast cereal with the crunchy freeze dried strawberry slices that are so delicious they're probably harvested exclusively by virgins working under the light of the new moon.

Then there are the Costa Rican plutocrats who must think their Hearts of Palm are made of solid silver. Madonna! I just want the things to fancy up a salad, for God's sake. And the Sicilians - just how much more do they think I'm going to pay for their fattening damn Caponata in the little cans. The Chinese are a bit more reasonable with their Mandarin Orange segments; but even they're getting greedy.

So this week Linda and I stepped back into the past. We stepped back to simple, healthful, slow food, you might say. Slow, economical food, if I may say so myself.

Early in the afternoon on Sunday I started a pot of Goya Great Northern Beans. Ignoring the ridiculous recipe on the label, I rapid boiled a pound of beans in eight cups of water. Mexicans have a lot of guts even proposing a recipe for Pasta e' Fagioli, if you ask me, even if Mexicans are a tiny bit Italian, being diluted Spaniards who are basicly diluted Romans.

After about an hour, I drained and rinsed the beans with cold water so I could rough them up a bit by rubbing them between my hands to loosen the skins and float them away. Then I put the beans on the stove again with eight cups of water, a couple of teaspoons of salt and about half a cup of olive oil to slow simmer for a few hours until they pretty much disintegrated. That's the way Pop liked them, the way his mom made them, more like bean sauce with little broken up soft chunks than like intact beans in liquid.

A couple of hours before I shut off the heat under the pot I broke up a bulb of garlic and peeled and sliced the cloves. Like Mom and Aunt Mary R, I carefully sliced the first few cloves nice and thin; and then the slices might have gotten a bit thicker and less regular as I got tired of the task. I threw the garlic into the pot to simmer with the beans and then turned off the pot at about ten to cool down a bit so I could put it into the refrigerator at about midnight.

It was then a simple matter to come home on Monday at about 5:15, start a pot of water with a half a handful of salt in it for the Ditalini, dip about a third of the bean sauce into a saucepan to heat up, dump in a box of ditalini once the salted water was boiling, let the Ditalini boil for precisely the eight minute minimum for al dente specified on the package, poured off as much of the cooking water as I could without letting any of the Ditalini escape from the pot, poured in the now just boiling bean sauce to join the remaining water in with the Ditalini, and ladled the completed Pasta e' Fagioli into shallow bowls by 5:35.

Between us, Linda and I ate about one-third of the Pasta e' Fagioli for dinner, so the pot contained about six meals. There were also two more potfuls worth of bean sauce that I froze later. Figure two bucks for the beans and two bucks each for three boxes of Ditalini. Add in about three bucks for a cup and a half of olive oil and a buck for three bulbs of garlic. Total cost of eighteen meals? About twelve smackeroos. Sixty-six cents per meal.

And. . . I defy anyone to make a better meal, both from the perspective of health and from the perspective of taste, if taken with fresh Corropolese bread and a nice salad dressed with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Plus the garlic will keep away vampires and other pests.

So quit your whining about the cost of food.

Food is costing us more because we're eating like decadent Roman aristocrats. No, that's not right. We're eating far better than pampered Roman aristocrats because we also get to enjoy Hearts of Palm from Costa Rica which add a nice crunch and flavor to our salads. And we have Cheetos and Mountain Dew, which are lots better tasting than flamingo tongues and sour wine.

Lucullus would have swooned with pleasure if given access to the foods we consider common; but they wouldn't have made him any happier.

I'll let Epicurus explain; "If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires."

Update: I forgot to say that I added a can of diced tomatoes to the pot early on in the process. I did that because I didn't have a little can of tomato paste or a medium can of tomato sauce. It's mostly for color anyway. Without something to make it a little bit red this soup looks pretty sickly. I'm too lazy to update the cost information above but a can of something tomato-ey costs about 60 or 80 cents, trivial.

Update 2: 80 86 64 88 :<(

Dusty work and translation services

Whew! I just came in from mowing the prairie areas that I've been leaving alone all summer. Dusty work - there was a lot of ground up dried grass and weeds flying around. Even my tractor won't mow twenty-four inch tall growth neatly the first time or the second time through, at least not now, late in the season, when the blades are dull and all dinged up from me using the mower deck like it was a brush hog out in the woods. So I mowed the prairie about ten inches high last week, and then took it down to about six inches high the other day. Today I finally took it down to match the four inch or so height of the grass around the house.

While I was mowing I had my best guess at Mom's old recipe for string bean and little meat ball stew simmering on the stove. I'll give you the recipe for that tomorrow after I see what what it tastes like.

While I was mowing I was also thinking about why I started to mow the grass the way I do. And it came to me that the original reason was the rug Dory and John Hamano had in their living room back in the 1970's. The rug was all they had in the living room that first time when we went over to their house, but what a rug it was. It was a Chinese made oval carpet about ten or twelve feet long, very colorful and very neatly textured. The pattern of the colors and the varying depths of the pile made it fantastic, like a picture in three dimensions.

We lost touch with John and Dory decades ago but I still remember their rug, and I still texture the lawn to be like that rug. Or rather every spring I have a vision of texturing it, cutting it to various depths in patterns, to be like that rug. And then I hate so much to mess up the luxuriant growth of the areas where the grass and the wildflowers are getting tall, that I never cut the high growing areas until I absolutely have to in late summer. Linda, of course, has an opinion or two about all this, so I cut the area within about a hundred feet of the house like a regular lawn. But I let the farther away areas grow tall so the grass can sway in the wind, except for mown paths that lead here and there.

John and Dory were interesting folks. I met Dory at work where she was a salesperson briefly. He was a salesman with IBM. Their living room was bare of furniture because their idea was to fill the house piece by piece with really fine furniture. If that rug was an indicator they must have a house full of some really great furniture by now. Thinking of them I'm reminded that they were somewhat unusual. She was Jewish American, but she spoke Japanese fluently from college and then some time in Japan, teaching English I think on a sort of work study basis. He was Japanese American, but he spoke almost no Japanese. She interpreted when he talked to his grandmother. She could interpret in real time, as though she was a machine and not even involved in the conversation if she wanted to.

Mom used to interpret when I talked to Grandmom L, but she was a terrible translator because she was never not involved in the conversation. It used to make me crazy. I would ask Grandmom a question. And Mom would answer for Grandmom without even interpreting what I asked. Or Grandmom would say something long and obviously interesting and Mom would have a little conversation with her in Italian and then tell me something very short in English. Or I would ask a question and they would have a conversation with lots of grinning, and then Mom would tell me Grandmom said something not funny at all.

It was obvious my access to important information was being restricted. So I would try to talk to Grandmom on the sly, but we could never really communicate across the language barrier. Trying to talk to her as she was cooking or whatever would get you some great treats because she and Aunt Mary R always, always!, had something good either baking or else in the refrigerator, but talking to Grandmom seldom yielded information. And Aunt Mary was as bad as Mom as a translator, although Aunt Mary could tell you some pretty good stories on her own if Mom wasn't there to inhibit her.

With Aunt Mary you could always get a great piece of cake and hear something very interesting about who did what to whom and when. Sometimes even why and where. And with names too. One time a person Aunt Mary had just said was a horse's ass happened to visit, and she offered him a piece of cake, and had a nice smiling little conversation with him. Then, after he left, she said, "See, like I said, a real shtunad; but whataya gonna do, you can't pick your relatives."

But it was Grandmom who I wanted to communicate with. So I would try to get Pop to translate, but he would claim not to be able to speak Italian well enough, even though I knew from observation that he could understand it perfectly well. He very rarely said anything in Italian, but he would get the jokes just as fast as everybody else did when he listened in to Grandmom L and Aunt Mary R and Julia, Mom's Goomah, and Sia Gigette, Pop's aunt from the other side of the family, when they were sitting around the kitchen table talking.

The really old ladies, Mom's Goomah and Sia Gigette, were already like a hundred years old then, at least, and they knew a lot. Mom's Goomah, Julia, was usually pretty quiet, but when Sia Gigette was around she would get rocking and rolling just as well as the others.

Sia Gigette was a special and interesting case. One time when they didn't know I was listening I heard Mom tell Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia that Sia Gigette would never die. "She's too nasty to die," Mom said. And Aunt Carmella and Aunt Tavia laughed and agreed, even though Sia Gigette was their aunt, just like she was Pop's aunt. "She's a bitch on wheels all right," Aunt Carmella said. And Aunt Tavia said, "You can say that again." And then they laughed about the time Mom asked Sia Gigette, "How's she different from your daughter?" or something like that right in front of Grandmom A after Sia Gigette made some remark about, uh, one of my relatives on Mom's side.

Anyway, when Mom and Aunt Mary and Julia and Sia Gigette were together in the kitchen down on Walnut Street they said the best stuff, stuff that made Mom look around to see who was listening; but they said it all in Italian. They said stuff that sometimes made her and Aunt Mary laugh so hard they would be like they were crying. Sometimes one of them would say something that would even make Mom break briefly from Italian into English.

"No!" She would say, and then "Goomah! Be good," or "Sia Gigette! He did not!" Or she would make that shh gesture and say "Mom! Little pitchers have big ears." Then they all would turn to where me and Matty were looking in the door and they would laugh and laugh. And if they were really loud in there Grandpop would mumble that phrase that Pop later told me meant "chickens in the barnyard," or something like that. Me and Matty would see that Grandpop was shaking his head with a little smile on his face in the living room, and Pop would have a big broad smile.

But Pop would never translate, or he would tell us something that was a little funny, but not something funny enough to have made Aunt Mary scream, "Stop! You're makin' me wet my pants."

Of sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings

When I started thinking about this post it was going to be about Harold W heartily welcoming me and my dad as new neighbors in 1979 or so. I was going to title it “Guns and Poses” because Harold was carrying a rifle that day even though it wasn’t hunting season. I know it wasn't hunting season because after saying "Hello Neighbors," and shaking hands Harold saw me glance at the rifle and he said he was going down to the woods to see who was shooting down there since it wasn't hunting season. In Norristown and in Trooper where we used to live people didn't carry rifles when they went to talk to people.

Then I got to wondering how Pop could have been with me when I met Mr. W the first time. I remember the meeting taking place up along the swale between Harold’s corn field and our property. But that’s across Doony Brook from Pop’s house, so how could Pop have gotten there?

That got me to thinking about Doony Brook, and the incorrect sign the township politicians put down on Route 29 that labels it "Donny Brook" even though I told them when they were talking about it that it's labelled "Doony Brook on the plat for our property. Years after I first met him Harold said he also told them it was called Doony Brook when I asked him about it. Mr. C, who was old as dirt, also said he told them it was called Dooney Brook but that's no surprise because we bought the property from him so he had seen the plat. For a little while then this post was going to be titled “Doony Brook, Dummies and Donnybrooks,” but then I got to trying to remember how Pop was dressed at that first meeting with Mr. W. My idea was to use my mental image of him as a memory aid to decide whether he was really there. And that got me on the subject of the various images Pop presented in different places at different times.

After thinking about that for a while I decided to title the post “Pop and Hip-Hop,” because it was going to be about the possibility that Pop started an important if regrettable social trend. Pop, you see, was from the hood, and he was always of the hood even after he moved away from it, although you would never guess that if you saw him in a suit at a funeral or a wedding looking more like Johnny Carson than Johnny Carson. But at home in Trooper or Collegeville, or even for a quick trip to the Wawa, when he was in relaxed mode Pop occasionally wore the elastic top of his boxer shorts smartly pulled up way above the waist of his sagging shorts. And he did that long before those rapper gangstas started wearing clothes with that kind of style and flair. Pop was every bit as capable as Mr. W of presenting a memorable image to new neighbors.

Thinking about Pop in his glory got me on a long riff about Pop’s colorful pals. Like Louie Jiggs and Louie Hop. Louie Hop also presented multiple memorable images to different audiences. I remember him as a friendly man in slacks and a loose shirt who would walk us kids down to Babes and buy us an ice cream or a lemonade. And I remember him as a very big and daunting man when he was sitting, scowling, on his stoop in a wifebeater tee shirt while his wife was singing, that’s what Mom told us she was doing, in the house. Sitting on the stoop at such times Louie Hop was a sort of Luca Brasi looking character, scary, with an unfriendly face and a far away look and lots of black hair on his arms and chest - lots of hair.

Uncle Froggy had lots of hair on his back when he had his shirt off at the beach, and he sometimes scowled and acted like he was mean. And he had a gruff and very loud voice, but Uncle Froggy wasn’t scary, at least not to me. He was never gruff and mean acting at the beach. He was just like a big kid playing in the surf with me and Matty and Sonny. I think Sam and Jas were a little scared of him, but they were really little kids then.

When Uncle Froggy was working the counter at Babes and me and Matty went in for lemonade Matty would give him a dollar for two big lemonades and he would give us each two quarters back as change, sometimes even three quarters each. I was pretty good with money even as a little kid and I asked Matty about it one time when we were walking back up to Grandmom L's house on Walnut Street. He told me not to worry about it. And he surely knew about such things because he was older.

Louie Jiggs used to do stuff like that too. Pop would give him a dollar or two for giving me, Sam and Jas haircuts, and he would give each of us a quarter or two quarters. Pop almost never asked us to give him those quarters, so we would go to Babes for lemonade, and if Uncle Froggy was there you would give him a quarter for a lemonade and get three dimes or six nickels back as change, sometimes even some extra pennies as well. Pennies were important in those days. You could buy a little pack of red hots for a penny, or was it two pennies? Sometimes Pop would borrow our quarters if he and Mom had been quietly talking at the kitchen table about money being really tight, but money wasn't often that tight. And even if Pop borrowed our quarters we would still get the lemonade if Uncle Froggy was at the counter at Babes, or we would get a soda if Lou was at the counter at Lou's.

I saw Pop maybe save Louie Hop’s life one day. Mrs. Hop, you see, was chasing Louie around his car in front of their house, two doors down from our house, and she had a little gun in her hand and it was going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Or was it bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang? At any rate Pop went out after Mom sort of peeled me away from the screen door, and he took the gun off of Mrs. Hop after saying something like, “Come on Florence, you don’t really want to shoot him.” I think I remember him saying that, but Mom or Pop might have told me what he said to Mrs. Hop. Mom always said to us that "I grabbed you kids" to pull us away from the screen door, so that would mean that Sam must have been there with me. Jas was much too small then to be standing at the screen door. I don't remember Sam being there. But I remember that little gun.

I also remember how funny Louie Hop looked running around that car. But I can't remember what kind of car it was. There's a funny thing about the Hops. I can't remember their real last name. I remember that Florence was Mrs. Hop's real first name but I don't remember her last name because I never knew Louie Hop as anything but Louie. The "Hop" was to distinguish him from Louie Jiggs if Pop and Barber and The Count and Lardy and Cappy and Worm and Doc and Chink were talking about him at the corner.

I seem to remember that I called Mrs. Hop "Mrs" and not Florence. That was odd because I only called a few people "Mr." or "Mrs." back then. Mrs. G was definitely Mrs. G for instance. None of us kids would have dared to call her Florence. But I called Betty P "Betty" even though she was Frankie Jiggs wife, for example. And there is another oddity, because sometimes Pop and the boys called Frankie Jiggs "Barber", but he wasn't a barber, he was a politician, which I know because of the way Pop used to kid him about it. His brothers Louie and Charlie were both barbers, but Frankie wasn't. Come to think of it Frankie and Louie and Chollie had another brother, or did they?

I say Pop may have saved Louie Hop’s life because to this day I don’t rightly know if Mrs. Hop shot five or she shot six before she handed Pop the little gun. I also don't know whether she was really trying to hit Louie. Roy Rogers always hit whoever he was shooting at, and from a lot farther away than Mrs. Hop was from Louie. Another thing I don't know is whether she would actually have killed him if she had hit him. Roy Rogers never killed the people he shot, he just wounded them. Another thing, Louie Hop was a very big man and the gun was very little. It was a revolver that looked smaller than my cap gun, but it wasn't shiny like my cap gun. That I definitely remember, I think. It was probably a twenty-two caliber, but it might have been a thirty-eight. I was only four or five or six years old at the time.

I can’t remember whether I ever heard Mrs. Hop singing after that day. I don’t think I ever did. Much, much later Mom told me that she didn't think Louie ever hit Mrs. Hop after that day. Mom liked that story a lot. She thought Mrs. Hop was trying to hit Louie that day when she shot at him, but Pop always said he didn't think so. She was pretty close to him when she was chasing him around that car, but he was moving pretty quick. She was screaming something at him also, like she was mad or something, now that I think about it, but I can't remember what she was screaming and Mom and Pop never told me. There was lots of stuff I wanted to know that they never told me. I really wanted to know what Grandpop L sort of whispered in Italian that time everybody laughed so loud, but they wouldn't tell me. Pop always told me he would explain it when I was older. And then I forgot to ask him about it when I was older.

Pop also wouldn't tell me what it meant when Harry M yelled that sentence and waggled one finger at that woman when he was really mad. That sentence contained something like "Puttano" and "Du Leeowlo" and some other other Italian that I can't remember anymore. Pop smiled real broad when I repeated that sentence to him, but he never told me what it meant. Pat M also wouldn't tell me what that sentence meant even though for years after that he would waggle his finger and say "Pu. . . Pu" to his dad when Harry was acting cranky. And Harry would say, "Go ahead Patty, just go ahead."

Well, anyway, by this time I was well on the way to the barbershop, excuse me, salon, for my monthly clip. And I had to turn off the Donald Westlake audio book in the CD player because with all of the above rolling around in my head it was impossible to pay proper attention to Westlake’s silly tale about two groups of small time hoods that are both preparing to rob the same corporate malefactor of great wealth. That crime is going to go way wrong, like Westlake’s crimes always do.

I had to turn off the booktape because the thoughts in my head were swimming faster than Michael Phelps as I drove to the salon, but not as straight. They were swimming around as fast as they used to back when I would have occasion to be talked to by Mrs. M, not Harry's Mrs M, John's Mrs. M who owned the luncheonette. Mrs. M was one of the world’s great talkers but her plot lines and time lines interweaved as capriciously as those of V.S. Naipaul, whose autobiographical pastiche I am again trying to read.

Anyway, I got thinking about the time Mom did Mrs. M's laundry when Mrs. M's washer broke down. Mrs. M was so pleased that she talked her way around to believing that she had hired Mom to do her laundry every week, and Mom didn’t realize she had maybe agreed to do Mrs. M’s laundry every week until a little later when her thoughts slowed down and straightened out. And Mom went over and apologized to Mrs. M for a long time because she didn’t have time to do her laundry. Mom was working then at Farm Credit for Mr. K, who limped even though he had that one special shoe with the big thick sole and heel. That was before Mr. K retired and the Egyptian became the boss at Farm Credit. I never saw him. I wonder if he really was an Egyptian. An Egyptian would have been pretty exotic in Trooper in those days although I guess that was in the 1980's so maybe he really was an Egyptian.

Mom was very precise sometimes and not so precise at other times. Some of her stories changed over time and then changed back, and some of her stories contradicted other stories. Mom liked the story about Mrs. M and the laundry a lot because she could never figure out just how she came to agree to do that laundry. When she told the story about the laundry she would always tell about the time that Sam took a big swig from the sweety bottle that was filled with used cooking oil. Sam thought it was soda. The sweety bottle story connected to the laundry because Mom used a sweety bottle to sprinkle her clothes with when she ironed. The sweety bottle also connected to Sam because he was late off the bottle when he was a toddler and mom used to say she ended up giving him his milk in a sweety bottle with a nipple. But that never made sense because the laundry sweety bottle and the used oil sweety bottle were no bigger than the baby bottle that Marianne was sucking from by about that time. Or was that later? Sam is much better than me with ages and years things happened.

Well, anyway, after a while I reached the Great Clips Salon by courtesy of the mysterious autopilot that handles things for me when I'm paying no attention to the road and yet still manage to get somewhere without getting things like bicycles and highway cones and pedestrians stuck onto the front of the car. But the autopilot wasn't working perfectly today because first it took me past the CVS instead of stopping to pick up my prescription and then it took me past the Redners shopping center where the Great Clips is even though the purpose of the whole trip was to get a haircut. So I had to turn around at the Acme and go back. All in all the autopilot was working like crap, but not as badly as the time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd to the empty building where I had my old job when it knew that I had been working in Fort Washington for almost two years. I wasn't too irritated that time it took me down to Bala Cynwyd because I was listening to a really good book tape that day.

Anyway, it was lucky the autopilot got a little turned around because then my whole plan for this post was turned around. I arrived at Great Clips just as one of the stylists was going home and a new stylist was coming back from her break. So I drew the new stylist, who was shaped like Louie Jiggs, but who talked like Mrs. M. Not that I need a stylist. I’m a number three clipper for the sides and a number four clipper for the few stray hairs on top. Anyway this new stylist wasn't a walrus, and she didn't talk about sailing ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings; but she did talk and talk and talk about wonderful things that took me right back to the old days.

She talked about going to Jersey with her father and brothers to buy pick your own tomatoes by the bushel. At first I thought she was talking about long ago but I later realized she meant now. She talked about hair dressing in Naples and in a couple of other cities in Italy. And she talked about her relatives in Rome and in Naples. And she talked about her brothers and her father and her making sauce, she called it sauce, she's from South Philly. She talked about them making enough sauce to put up a full year’s supply for several families. Great big vats of sauce put up in hundreds of jars. And this is now, not way back then. She threw in the names of people in Rome and in Naples and in Philly and how they are related and she even threw in some of that old who did what to whom and when. Just like Mom and Aunt Mary or Aunt Carmella used to when they really got cranked up. She talked about living in Lafayette Hill with her dad, and how he still makes wine and she cranks the grinder that pulps the grapes. Thirty boxes of grapes last year.

Grandpop L used to get a lot of boxes of grapes to pass down through the little window into the cellar. I cranked the grinder for him one time. But I didn’t crank it long. Matty did most of the cranking. Or was it Sonny? Matty and Medio used to go down and drink the wine sometimes because Matty knew where Grandpop hid the key. But they couldn't have drunk much of that wine. Nobody but Grandpop drank much of that wine.

I drank it a couple of times when I went down to the cellar with Grandpop to help him fill up one or two of the bottles with no labels that he had. We filled the bottles from the little brass spigot on the barrel after he unlocked the padlock. I never saw where he got the key because I was always looking at the press with its big gear and those slats on the sides and the heavy iron bottom with the little lip. I helped him one time when he squeezed the grapes with that press and I remember the wine running over that little lip. It tasted really sour to me when he gave me some in a glass he filled right from the little lip of the press. It tasted a little better when it came from the barrel but I still didn't like it.

Anyway I couldn’t think about that very well because the stylist was still talking about wonderful things. She makes sausage at home with the intestine for the skin. She uses a hand grinder. Her wrist hurts after she grinds the sausage. Her brother has a motor on his sausage grinder. He makes a lot of sausage. He likes hot sausage. She likes the sweet. She told me his name, but I can’t remember it. She has been a stylist for thirty years but she just started at this Great Clips. She used to work at another Great Clips a couple of years ago. Her and Dawn, I think it was Dawn. Or was it Cheryl? Her and Dawn or Cheryl started three weeks ago at Great Clips in Collegeville. She doesn’t mind the long commute from Lafayette Hill because it gives her time to think. And sometimes she listens to booktapes! So she must have an autopilot too. But I don't think she told me the names of any books.

And now I can’t remember her name so I’m not sure I will be able to get her to cut my hair and talk at me when I go again to Great Clips in a month or a couple of months.

The surprise of the week - Not!

I’ve had a couple of surprises over the past couple of days. First an old friend of mine who lives in Ohio sent me an email asking what I thought about the, uh, passionate public relations work John Edwards was doing on the side while he was standing by his wife like a moral paragon after she was diagnosed with cancer. Then two other friends asked why I haven’t written on this blog about the little package that apparently resulted from the extended game of “Squire and Milkmaid” that John and his PR honey were role playing to get their creative juices flowing, so to speak, when they were working on videos for his Presidential campaign.

My biggest surprise was learning that there are actually two people who read this blog. My second biggest surprise was learning that anyone was surprised that John Edwards was hypocritical enough to be privately conducting relations with his blonde public relations specialist while he was publicly professing everlasting devotion to his brunette marital relations specialist.

You see I think almost all politicians , and almost all other people who organize their lives around seeking power over other people, are users. I think being a user is practically a qualification for attaining power over other people. And I grew up hearing my Aunt Mary R periodically refer to politicians as whoremasters. So I’m hard to surprise about the result when men attain enough power to think they can keep it secret when they, uh, gather a few rosebuds while they may.

When the historians and geneticists revealed that Thomas Jefferson was playing “Who’s wearing the shackles now Massa” for a long time with Sally Hemings I wasn’t surprised. When I learned that Franklin Roosevelt was playing “Warm up the springs” with his secretary when he was supposed to be soaking in the warm springs I wasn’t surprised. When I learned that Dwight Eisenhower was playing “Bend over Beethoven, here comes the bratwurst” with his aide while he was planning the defeat of Nazi Germany I wasn’t surprised. And when I learned that Bill Clinton was playing “Moisten the cigar” with an intern in the Oval Office I wasn’t surprised about anything except the fact that Monica Lewinsky (Monica Lewinsky?) could get him excited enough to put a stain on her dress while he was talking to Yasser Arafat (Yasser Arafat!) on the phone.

So I’m certainly not surprised that John Edwards was playing “Sock it to you baby” with his PR gal while he was making a big show of loyalty to his wife and working on a plan to sock it to all of us by becoming President.

What did surprise me about the Edwards thing is that he’s only been paying her $15,000 a month to keep quiet despite the fact that he’s worth tens of millions from his years of suing and harassing and ruining honest doctors for providing the best care that medical science knew how to provide to mothers and infants. That $15,000 a month number surprised me because last year when he was still in the running for President and she was pregnant with expectation of their love child she could have presented him to the media trussed up over a barrel wearing only wingtip shoes and knee length black socks and she could have freshly paddled his scrawny ass cheeks so they would have a nice rosy glow in the pictures.

I can only conclude that she’s a poor negotiator.

Update - If you can't picture who John Edwards is you may want to go to this link, but only if you have a strong stomach - What a maroon! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q