Popeyes

The music at Oak Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Hernando, Mississippi, is pretty amazing, but it's not the funk or the faith that sets them apart in the Deep South - it's that fried chicken is banned from church socials.

Rev Minor enforced the ban after he became worried about his congregation's health - he was conducting too many funerals.

There goes another good thing!

You Are My Griping Team

I saw this story on the BBC News iPad App and thought you should see it:

TV star suspended for anti-gay views

Duck Dynasty's Phil Robertson has been suspended from the show following derogatory remarks about homosexuality.

This is typical for the liberal media. My view is that the guilt lies with the one who asks the question: do not ask, if there is a chance to get an undesirable answer. Unless they give me a list of questions with the desired wording of the answers, I will utter my own opinion. If their specified answers do not reflect my own views, I will not consent to be interviewed.

Read more:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25444631


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To Beauty queens and those who wish to compete, as well as to all gullible health nuts.

All around the globe there is talk about medications that will reduce wrinkles, one of the major concerns with people who wish to "remain young". Some of these treatments are truly effective. They use compounds that relax facial muscles which, in this example, cause one to raise one's eye brows which leads to wrinkles in the forehead. The treatment, of course, work on the flow of the appropriate signals to and from the brain. A study conducted in Zurich - my hometown! - indicated that in the test case not only the targeted muscles were affected. It turns out that very near the area of the brain that controls the facial muscles associated with forehead wrinkles lies the area that controls sensitivity and reflectivity in the hands! It should not come as a surprise that the study revealed a change in dexterity / sensitivity in the hands as a byproduct of the 'treatment to reduce wrinkles on the forehead'. The point is that chemicals (more approvingly known also and pharmaceuticals or medicines) introduced into our bio-system do not necessarily restrict their influence to the areas targeted by the designer. Of course there was no time lost to object by the various national and international health authorities and the manufacturer of the medication in question. One said the treatment in question has been proven safe and the other insists that the medication had been approved and the test sample was too small to be significant.

I have the feeling that the pharmaceutical world and the producers of iPhone and smart phone apps have the same problem: they must be out on the market before the competition, or they lose practically all the investment made in the preparation for the 'coming out'. In the case of an app, that investment is small. In the case of the pharmaceuticals it is often mind boggling huge. While the apps creators simply harass you with a never ending stream of 'updates' which simply address mistakes that could have been prevented if proper diligence had been exercised earlier in the game, there is also no time for the pharmaceutical industry to exercise proper diligence, so, once out on the market with a product, they keep their fingers crossed and wait for the complaints to come in. Then, they first take cover behind the  'authorities' who approved the product in the first place, and only next will they go to work on remediation.

So, my thought an my advise are: be aware of the snake oil salesman. His actions not only concern forehead wrinkles, but everything from anemia to zits.

Boccalino

A boccalino is a small ceramic vessel shaped like a little jug. Whatever its origin, it is used as a drinking vessel in the areas around the Veltlin. It is for the enjoyment of red wine, like the Veltliner, of course. We have twenty-four of then, one set in blue and another in a red pattern on white base. The pattern is  a sort of folkish design, like fern leaves wrapping themselves around the vessel. I'm telling you all this because I do not expect you to know about it. This is not part of a standard liberal arts education hereabouts, nor is it what one would seek out when traveling Europe. Guide books and booked tours don't get you there. I had the advantage to have lived thereabouts for almost thirty years, so it is part of my mother's milk.

The way we got two dozen of those is common. One day, coming home from work in NJ, I was received at the door by Tiiu, my beloved, then my wife of about four years. She wore a puzzled look on her face which noticeably contrasted with the usual glee she displayed on my return home in those days. She also began to hum and haw during the early stages of our reunion that evening, until I finally received my prompts and asked "what's the matter" perhaps even adding 'my love' or something to that effect but I do not remember things that clearly after forty five years. She led me into the family room where she pointed to a shipping box, open, with wrapping materials flowing about and said "Look!" As I looked and searched the packaging I came across a boccalino and, holding it up, exclaimed, "A boccalino, how nice! Mims (my mother's nick name) must have sent us these. Did she? How lovely! Let's open a bottle of Chianti (the closest thing to Veltliner one could find then and there) and try them. Tiiu's puzzled look increased. "Why," she asked, "would your mother send us twelve of those little creamers? And how do you relate this to opening a bottle of wine?"

Some years later, we were living in Switzerland then, Lulu came visiting and we took a trip up to Bivio on the Julier Pass. We stayed in the Post Hotel there, which I "knew" from the years before the war, when our family used to travel south for Easter to visit my dad's lather in Desenzano, Italy, on the south end of the Lago di Garda. Our plan then was for Lulu and me to hike across the mountains, south to the shores of the Silvaplana Lake, where Tiiu would pick us up, having driven the car over the pass into the Veltlin, bringing Iivo and Kaarin along. Bivio is a small place on the way up the pass when you come from the north. It is on a sort of a large shelf just before you get into the serpentine that leads up to the the mountain ridge and back down the south slope to St. Moritz. We always used split our trips south at that point. The owner of the hotel had a son of our age, that is just between Lulu and me, and we always had a memorable time playing outside at the back of the hotel. There was a little brook babbling down the rock-strewn pastures and it made a beautiful place to build dams and cause floods and get all wet and dirty. One visit we constructed a little waterwheel from twigs and scrap wood and mounted it of small rocks in the course of the brook and watched it turn in the bubbling flow of the clear water that we would unhesitatingly drink while playing, dipping our faces right down into the chill.

During this visit that I am talking about, some thirty years after the events I just related, Iivo and Kaarin were asleep in their beds upstairs, the three of us sat in the dining room of that hotel after a wonderful dinner of Bündnerfleish (the air-dried beef of the Grisons), dark, crusty bread, sweet, fresh butter, and Veltliner, which we drew from a large barrel set into the wall of the dining room, into our boccalini. It was an honor system maintained by the hotel management  and we kept tabs with a ballpoint pen on a coaster so we would not short the house. We saw our host come in and greet his guests and eventually he made his way to our table, introduced himself, and said to me, "I noticed your name in the registration book and it looks familiar. Can you give me some help in finding if we have met before?" Well, making the story short, he was the son of the owner who had hosted us before the war, the same boy we had had so much fun with some thirty years ago.

You see, life is full of discovery, and if you keep your eyes closed, you miss a lot of good stuff. So, sitting down in the dining room, I explained 'boccalino vs. creamer', opened a bottle of Chianti and reminisced with Tiiu, and we spent yet another a delightfully memorable evening together.

Later, Mims sent us another dozen, having forgotten that we already had a fair share of those treasures, and they all became part of our household, traveled with us from NJ to Switzerland and down to VA and up to VT and over to MA and back down to NC where they are now, with hardly ever any use for them except stirring memories.

Today, I prepared my dinner and decided to have my wine from one of those boccalini. Yesterday I used a red one. Today it is a blue one. The wine I have is neither Veltliner nor is it Chianti. There was a bottle of Rex Goliath Pinot Noir in the rack and it serves well. After cooking and dinner and all this reminiscing and writing, it is still more than half full. Who cares it is a 1.5 liter bottle? Memories - that's all.

Technology

There is the 'big Mac', and then there is the iPad and also the iPhone. I should be allowed to think that this is enough to keep me going.

But no!

There is also the HP air printer down here in NC and the one up there in VT and together they amount to a heap of trouble.

I just had an encounter with one great business I am dealing with. They had put completed forms relating to transactions I had initiate on my web account and I was expected to print them out, sign them and return them to their address. The law, apparently, does not allow electronic signatures in the present case, so we were locked in with USPS or Messenger Service.

Well, in anticipation of this important and time sensitive event I checked out my systems and found everything working just fine. The log-on worked and the site opened up and the place where the forms were going to be were accessible and a trial print with a document from another file worked very well to expectations.

D-day came and there was a conference call and the various steps were discussed and explained and the web site was opened and the forms were displayed and the print button was found and activated and - nothing. The printer that was supposed to spring into action and shake, rattle and roll before starting to produce an orderly print issued not even a faint hick-up.

It was decided to abandon the high tech path of action and engage a messenger service for overnight delivery of the documents to my door and I would receive, sign, repacka nod return by fax. This thing is time sensitive, you know, and if things don't happen, the law has means to transfer slices of the object to undeserving recipients.

So, to give greater assurance to eventual success, I started to trace the problems. First, I found out that my the 'big Mac' could not find the printer! Hear, hear, where did you find it yesterday? Well, today it was not there. I went to the HP hep site and was told to check for software updates. I did. Turned out that my Mac wanted to receive Mavericks X so the air printer would operate properly, and I spent about two hours to get that downloaded over the super fast network connection. Then, back to HP we went and I was asked to look for more software updates. There were five of them. Attempting to get them all, I hit the bitten 'Update all' and things really got rolling. Two of them started right away and spent some time calculating the length of time to complete the transfer of the updates. The first one reported in with a frowning lay accepted 4 hours and 20 minutes, the second one wanted one day, seven hours, and 45 minutes.

Forget the time sensitivity. I have sensitivities also. Mine come first. If I had not in time remembered the price tag attached to this communication system, it would have gone out through the window. But let's give it another chance.

Sometime day after tomorrow I should be back in business again, in the meantime, I expect that Mac to work without breaks, without water, without sleep . . . Which reminds me - my settings allow it to go to sleep after about thirty minutes without keyboard activity. If I go now to settings to eliminate this contract clause between and the Mac! Will I have to start this process from scratch?

I was around at the beginning of the computer age. I worked with the old, early IBM Machines that were programmed to perform their specified tasks, using peg boards. Do you remember peg boards? If you watch very old movies, sometimes you catch a glimpse of a maid operating the party line on the local telephone net. She manually establishes connections between phone partners using long wires with plugs on each end that were pushed into hole on a large board in front of the operator and so connected the calling party with the called party. That's how early IBM business computers worked. I wish we could go back to those simple days and get on with what really matters.

The Weather Channel: Pufferfish Love Explains Mysterious Underwater Circles

 How amazing this is. Share that with my grand kids.

Cynical side thought: Darwin insists that our evolution line goes through the fish. Is this then where we must originate our love for beautiful houses?

Small pufferfish make beautiful, strange circular patterns to attract mates.

http://www.weather.com/article/pufferfish-mystery-circles-20131003

This message was sent from a friend using The Weather Channel's iPad app!.

Poached Trout

http://blogs.kqed.org/essentialpepin/2011/09/19/poached-trout-in-vegetable-broth/

The other day, I got two brown trout from Chip. He had cleaned and frozen them, and, knowing Chip, they can safely be considered fresh.

We used to have a trout feast now and then in Switzerland. There was a fish farm near Sargans and that was not a far drive from Zurich, where I lived with our parents, and it definitely was not far from St. Gallen, where we lived all four of us when I was working in Switzerland back in the first four years of the 70’s.

Trout was always considered a delicacy. It has such a tender, sweet taste, and the only way it should be eaten is fresh (!) and poached. Pan fry and grilling and all other methods just toughen the meat and take the taste out of the fish and you never know what you eat. Some recipes will just try to put some taste back into it but they never succeed. They simply want to cater to those habitual fryers. You'll agree with me once you had 'truite bleu', or 'Forelle blau'. This name, French and German, means 'blue trout' which I have never heard used here in the states. The name comes from the fact that the skin of the freshly caught rainbow trout takes on a soft blue hue when it is poached. But it must be fresh! Wherein lies the problem for us.

Anyway, there were the three brown trouts Chip had caught one recent morning at the Harriman Reservoir down near the Whitingham water lock (where the water enters the pipe to the powerhouse). The first one I tried grilling - more for speed than expecting good taste and only I can be blamed for the relative disappointment. I grilled it in lemon butter and while the taste was not bad at all, the texture was totally wrong. I served it with stir fried peppers, yellow, green, red and orange, and a fresh spinach salad with Catalina dressing, of course. I also served some St. Michelle Gewürztraminer. As far as it goes, it was not a smash, but it was good.

So, for the next round, I planned my preferred poaching. The link above gets where I was while I prepared the meal. Since I usually have not much luck by cutting recipes down to 'serves one' I decided to serve four, the original recipe. After all, I had the fish for the four filets Pépin is asking for.

Let me tell you: Jacques Pépin tells you to serve the meal on a soup plate. That's OK, but choose a soup plate with a low rim, because you'll want to lick the plate. The four servings are so small, the little bit of fat you cannot show at all;) I did use only one potato instead of the two, which is prolly why the serving looks more like an appetizer than a meal. But then, we wanted trout, not spuds. Right?

Because I did not find anyone game to come and join me on short notice - that's because we all gallop through life instead of taking it at a comfortable canter - I wound up with four plates. And I ate two servings, and licked both plates. If you are alone, you can do that, even though - in my case I heard Mims call out her sharp 'Richard', which always meant that I had shocked her in one way or another. Quite a shake-up, if you think you are alone.

I used a South African Chenin Blanc in the recipe, to keep me from suffering in the kitchen, to stay with me for dinner.

This wine was produced by MAN Vintners in 2011. They give their address as Paarl, In the South African Republic. If you search for that on Google World, you see what an obviously blessed wart of our world this is. I won't give you all that talk of berries an fruit and oak and stuff. This wine is good! Balanced, pleasing bouquet, not overly dry and by no means sweet. Just beautiful. 

I send you this a a monument of a memorable dinner.

With love, and never fading wishes to share some of all this with you,

Isa 

Evening

The sun is setting. The sky is a beautiful azure blue, tinting to yellow and pink at the eastern horizon. Clouds are drifting slowly, sharply defined in white and black and all tones between by the sun, which is from our view already below the horizon. The cows are out on the pasture. Jason has opened another strip of unmowed grass and they are all crowding the new fence line. Slowly, this line is moved up the hill and soon will reach the fixed fence line up by our house. All is still. Once it is dark, the air outside wil vibrate with the calls of the croakers in the pond.
The 'Chipsters' have just left. We had Market Basket Pasta Salad mixed with hot Italian sausage, and fresh spinach with Catalina Dressing, Grüner Veltliner and Paisano, and lively talk and a good time.
Tomorrow, to my great surprise, the 'Dougs' will come for another evening of BBQ pizza - stuff heaped on factory made pies by Mama Mary. They are not bad at all. On the fire, they turn nice and crispy by the time the cheese on top starts bubbling.
After that, I think I should plan to get Winnie and Poo over here. Then Tiido and Anni, the super liberals. Gotta keep the talk away from social policies and politics! By that time, my social pool will be exhausted and I will probably start a fresh round. The DePalos will lead. With Italian and Allemanic genes, liveliness is assured.
I closed all windows. It is getting seriously chilly outside. The forecast calls for 32 degrees as the low for the coming night. In the house, the temp barely reaches the upper sixties. One does get hardened up here! How am going to take the balmy weather of the NC winter?

Protect the criminal!

When we got up in arms against Iraq, the talk about chemical weapons soon became the chief theme. There were the attacks by Sadam's forces on the Kurds and it was basically understood that in these attacks chemical weapons were used by the Iraqis. Nothing affirmative was done by the the West in response, except voicing regret over the loss of thousands of civilian lives. Other than 'humanitarian reasons', the second Bush war, as it sometimes was named, had one of the main objectives to capture Sadat himself and to find these chemical weapon arsenals and to finally prove that he actually had them, and their use against the Kurds was 'very probable' and the danger of their use against the US and UN troops was considered very likely as a last defense once the noose around the Iraqi troops tightened. Of course we never found this evidence and had to live with these traces of egg in our faces. By some 'sources' it was implied that we had been making war against an upright and honest leader of one of the world's nations. We became the bad guys.
Technology that came into use during this second war against Sadam was amazing, even in its reduced form in which it was presented to the public. Among other tools used was satellite communication and high altitude radar surveillance and troops were directed by their commanders sitting in front of computer screens fed by GPS systems, displaying the location of every vehicle and sometimes every soldier. In connection with other information about the enemy's position, they conducted their campaigns pretty much like playing a war game on the computer. So we were told.
Soon new reports about the imminent collaps of the Iraqi defense were heard. Also, it was reported that columns of trucks were observed moving east through the desert of Iraq towards the Syrian border. Speculation was heard that these transports were carrying the very chemicals the West was expecting to find in Iraq. No action was allowed. International law and bunches of other liberal arguments were used to justify the allied inactivity to stop these transports.
We now have to face the reality: Sadam, for whatever reasons he had, did not wish to use these weapons, and, realizing that his cause was lost, sent his arsenal to his brothers in Syria. We knew that, did we not? But we denied it or simply never again mentioned it. Now in the civil war in Syria we have to face up to the fact: Syria does have chemical wheapost. And the 'most likely' used them in an attack by the dictatorial regime against its native opposition. The UN, which has sent 'experts' to 'investigate' the 'truth' of these reports (of the use of chemical weapons against civilians) continues to 'investigate'.
I was a young boy when I overheard talk about the split tongue of the Nazi regime which eventually, with the aid of Chamberlain's umbrella diplomacy ended in WWII. And again, we watch the modern Chamberlains in action. Buckle up!

Evening

Evening

Last evening, sitting on the deck, I heard the bellowing of a cow down below. She was hidden from my sight by the dam of the pond. Some of her companions browsed in the grass, visible from where I sat. After a while, the bellowing stopped; Morse's farm was richer by one calf.

This evening - the same scene. The herd is browsing in a section of the pasture down towards the wood line, opened by Jason just today. I miss the ringing of the bells cows wear in Switzerland. There is nothing more expressive of peace than the soft clanging of the bells around a grazing herd's necks in the evening. The bellowing has stopped. Another calf is born.

The sky is covered with a grey haze, slowly turning pink in the setting sun. A gentle breeze rustles the leaves of the linden tree next to me. And sporadically the croakers holler up from the pond. Else, all is quiet. The low, constant roar I hear is but the rushing of my own blood.

There are trees that show unmistakable signs of fall in the woods. Some tree tops are brown. It cannot be the result of drought, as we claim in other years. this summer we had was so wet as to worry the farmers. Steve Morse must have lost tons of hay and much of what was gathered was of low quality because the seeds remained on the stalk too long before cutting was possible. On the side of the road leading down to the school there is a young maple fully dressed in the beauty of fall colors: red, yellow, some green leaves remain. The tree next to it, a mature, tall maple, it still fully green. Prosaic Chip's answer to my remark is a laconic 'bugs'. I look at him. He repeats 'bugs'. If he is right, it seems to me, the woods around here will not survive many years. This is just the end of August. Yet another four weeks before the end of summer. 

But the moment, today, tonight, are full of miracles.