Herban Sprawl

24 March 2010

This morning it is my pleasure to report that the offending doorhanger-cum-decal was removed yesterday evening. The Rev. Dr. Bryan Smith, senior pastor of First Baptist showed up as Big Kitty and I were doing in the Shrimp Diavlo leftovers, Windex and paper towels, razor blade and good intentions in hand.

Aside from being appropriately apologetic, which I appreciated, he was genuinely flummoxed as to how the thing had gotten stuck to the door. But since it took his razor blade to undo the damage, he certainly understood why I was upset. (He had no clue as to Big Kitty’s growling and hissing and I wasn’t about to clue him in. Big Kitty made a cursory appearance, but disappeared to his bowl of shrimp.) I showed him the evidence of the decal-like behavior of them by means of the one I lifted from my neighbor’s when I took in her package.

I am properly impressed that the senior pastor came out to do this. In my opinion, it displayed the side of religion that appeals to me - that of genuine humility and a willingness to do the right thing. It’s the part everyone struggles with and it’s the part that makes the biggest difference in our human relations. That the head guy had the wherewithal to do it himself and not shift it off onto a junior partner in the firm spoke well of him as a leader.

He wondered about my concerns about door hanger things in general. (I despise them.) And I explained how they are a tip-off as to the presence or absence of a resident, such as my neighbor who is away this week. I spared him my diatribe on proselytizing, but I did indicate I didn’t care what the hangers were for, I’m the one who will go remove them in the neighborhood.

He wondered when the last time I had been to an Easter service and I replied that I had no idea, but that I wouldn’t be caught dead. Not being a Christian, I think showing up would be in poor taste, actually. He invited me to theirs. What for, I wondered, since I am not a Christian. Now here is where he thought he was being smooth. Others come for Easter who are not Christian. The unspoken piece: and we just know you’ll be a Christian when you leave.

Heavens to Betsy. I know Constantine underwent a deathbed conversion, but somehow I don’t see that in my future! I may be wrong, not being a clairvoyant and all, but given my rejection of all that stuff, the likelihood is pretty slim.

But, as I told the pastor, I like it when others keep their religion on their side of the fence. I will defend to my death their right to believe however they choose, and all I ask in return is that they not try to discuss it with me. He invited me to Easter service anyway. He’ll have to resurrect me from my LavAzza and newspaper first!

And last, but absolutely not least, a very groggy House Goddess rang me while I was cleaning the dinner asparagus and told me her surgery had been successful. She’ll recuperate with her son near Richmond, but I’m on stand-by just  in case, I told her. I am busy thanking all the various and sundry deities who had a part in this. My guess is that they all have a healthy amount of respect for her, so they made sure she came through okay. If she recuperates successfully, then I’ll know they were too scared to do otherwise!

23 March 2010

The House Goddess will not be here this week, nor for the next several weeks. Her surgeon in Charlottesville had a cancellation, so the procedure she was to have in May got moved up rather suddenly. It’s been a long time coming. She had to apply for financial aid to have this done by this particular surgeon so besides having to wait to see if her procedure would be covered, she’s had to wait for a slot in the surgical unit.

Knowing my liberal bent, I’m sure many of my regulars are thinking I’m going to go off on a tangent about the recently signed health care bill. I’m not. I’m just grateful our country has finally taken a step in this direction. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.

No, in this case, my reflections for today are focused on my friend who lost her sister to this same disease and who, thanks to this particular surgeon, has been followed carefully because she has the same symptoms. When she called and apologetically told me about the sudden change, I was thrilled for her. I know it’s a scary thing, but at the same time, I know she wants to get it over with. One of her sons lives in the Richmond area, and she thought she’d probably be released to his care afterward. What comes next is the part that broke my heart.

“Look,” I said, “if it turns out you need to come back here to recuperate, you let me know and I’ll come and see to it you have what you need and when your daughter’s at work, I’ll babysit you until you are cleared to move around on your own.” The silence was deafening.

“I knew you would say that.”

“And, I don’t know what I’d do without you, so I want to make sure you have what you need and that there is someone there to make your chicken noodle soup and tea.” More sniffles.

“Oh, shut up, girl. You crazy!”

This is one of those provider/client relationships that probably crosses all kinds of boundaries it shouldn’t cross, but you just have to know that when The House Goddess comes into your life, she envelops you. She folds you into her heart and soul while she brings order to your life and straightens out your bad ass when necessary. Nothing escapes her. She laughs and says she’s psychic, but what she really is happens to be an extremely gifted reader of people.

I’m not given to prayers like other people pray. I tend toward prayers of thanks, rather than the begging kind. I’m sure my Christian friends wonder why I even bother, but there is divinity all around us and it is to that spark I will appeal for her safety and a positive outcome. I’m also sending word to the Bubbas in Reno, as they adore her, and reminding my tax guy, who sent her to me in the first place. I figure there is enough diversity in that crowd to insure some divinity or another hears us!

And maybe, if we are all really lucky, maybe one of these days people won’t have to apply for financial aid to have surgery in a teaching and research hospital. We can only hope - and pray.

22 March 2010

We enjoyed a lovely day yesterday, and I got a lot done in the front yard. I had cleaned up and was about to try out Ellie Krieger’s recipe for Shrimp Fra Diavlo (So Easy cookbook) when Big Kitty and I stepped out onto the front porch to admire my handiwork and to discuss a couple of ideas we had. There was a tribe of noisy young people accompanied by some equally boisterous adults stampeding down our little street. They were holding #10 envelope shaped something or anothers and BK and I popped inside in a big, fat hurry. We closed the front door to signal our disinterest in whatever it was they were trying to hawk.

This morning I opened the door to discover one of those things STUCK to my storm door window. First Baptist Church was trying to tell us how very welcome we were at their establishment for the veneration of a cult hero. I tried to peel the thing off and it left a mess, with the message on the backside still visible from inside the door.

Let’s just say I went up in flames and leave it at that.

I had errands to run, and while I performed my ablutions, I considered the insult that was still stuck to the door. Years ago I had gotten a letter in the mail courtesy of a woman at work who used our contact sheet to proselytize, and come to think of it, it was around this same time of year.

I still had part of the offending junk mail and lo! I beheld their phone number so I rang up. I informed the woman who answered that I had a thing stuck to my door, it was left by someone from their church, I was offended and since they’d made the mess, they needed to send someone out to clean it up. She took my name and number and address so “Someone can call you back.” I acidly informed her I did not require a return call. What I required was a person from that church to deal with the mess.

I left to run my errands, and when I was locking the car door upon my return, I realized the elderly Jewish lady across the street still had one of those things stuck to HER door! Oy gevalt!

Up the hill, someone has a sign in the yard informing all that they should come see them about attending their Baptist church. A sign in the yard like a political sign or a For Sale sign. Yep.

Mythology of many different civilizations includes a god figure that is killed off and then comes back. The ancient Mideast is rife with those kinds of stories, and they exist in Greek and Roman mythology as well. So that whole resurrection business, which was pretty hard to swallow even when I was forced to be confirmed in the nice, liberal United Church of Christ (aka Unitarians Considering Christ), certainly is amusing to me now in my dotage.

It’s an important part of the Christian liturgical year, and to the faithful it carries great meaning. But then there are the Baptists, who are forever trying to shove their version of religion down your throat. For a group who pride themselves on their religion, they are amazingly devoid of A) any semblance of diffidence regarding respect of other people’s beliefs (or lack thereof) and B) disregardful of that verse in Matthew when Jesus told his followers to exhibit better manners and to pray in private.

This kind of thing obviously frosts my shorts, but I’m not the only one. They have gotten their hooks into a nice Episcopalian girl of my acquaintance and the entire business is rather vexing to those of us in her family circle. She was looking for a little social life and now her Facebook page is full of her new convert blither. She doesn’t have a clue, having led a rather sheltered life up until now, and because she wants to fit in, she’s busy writing her personal Jesus story and planning to be baptized. Her parental unit was experiencing a moderate case of diaper rash over this, and when he realized she was eliminating certain things like hair salon visits because she didn’t have money, it finally sank in that this was a serious case of cult-like behavior.

I’m all for freedom of religion, but I am also in favor of freedom from religion. No one should have to sit in the hairstylist’s chair getting grilled about religion and pressured about one’s personal beliefs. (I changed hair stylists, by the way.) No one should have to receive religious literature unbidden through the mails. Likewise, when the door-to-door people come calling, one has the right to leave the door closed or to tell them to please move on. Personally, I find that door-to-door thing to be in poor taste, but I’ve gotten my share of free Books of Mormon that way. (Now talk about some wild mythology!)

And no one should have religious junk mail glued to one’s front door. Any bets on whether First Baptist will man up and come clean off my door? Any bets on a forthcoming apology? Trust me, if they haven’t shown up tonight, they’ll be getting another call tomorrow…but I’ll be asking for the senior pastor!

Ya gotta love BGF. He took a snippet from my news round-up of the other day regarding my disdain for the Democrats running for city council and decided I needed a lesson in the constitution. He raised the specter of St. Atticus Finch in reminding me that his friend, who I criticized for defending the white supremacist, did the right thing by providing a capable defense for an accused person.

I mulled this for all of three seconds before shaking my head. (He warned me he was going to blog about it, so I’ve had time to consider the issue. See Rossiferous.blogspot.com.) With all due respect to my learned friend, I’m going to butt heads with him. Won’t be the first time and I certainly hope it won’t be the last because he is too much fun to spar with!

Atticus Finch defended a man who was about to be shanghaied in what amounted to a kangaroo court. He was defending him in view of a future that he fervently hoped would not include the racism that the poor man was experiencing. The man was accused of doing something he had not done. I believe that Atticus took the moral high ground in agreeing to represent the man.

Now the question for me, as a voter in the Star City, boils down to whether the candidate took the moral high ground in defending a white supremacist who had plastered his website with the personal information of a number of people he’d targeted, among whom was the columnist Leonard Pitts.

The witnesses in the case, all of whom had been made to feel unsafe and anxious due to the man’s online diatribes, have a right to privacy. One could argue he only posted information that others could have found, as well, but that certainly wouldn’t make me feel any better if he had targeted me. Besides, he phoned these people at home, which was probably pretty darn frightening. I’m sure he felt mighty powerful that he had that kind of effect on their lives.

We do have the right to free speech, but normally we self-edit in the name of decency and respect for the rights of others. We know we can get into trouble for shouting, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. But what happens when someone crosses that line and harm comes to the target? Does this man bear responsibility?

I say he does for the same reason Hitler bore responsibility for giving anti-Semites permission and the means to murder millions of Jews. It’s a matter of acknowledging the fact that mob bosses don’t generally get their own hands dirty, but they bear responsibility for instigating harm to others. After someone else has done the deed, our supremacist can sit back and say, “But I didn’t do anything. I only exercised my right to free speech.”

What we’re painfully aware of is that this kind of pretend innocence on the part of someone who seems to have an excess of narcissism has the potential to invite harm to any citizen he deems worthy of his attention. Proving intentional malice is difficult, but then again it comes down to a matter of what we, as the body politic, are willing to accept as protected by the law. Americans have the right to sue for defamation of character, but what suits can people like Leonard Pitts lodge for the violation of their sense of safety?

The first amendment protects me as I write this, but it is my own moral compass that serves as a check on what I write. The delete button works wonders after one has vented.

The point is: we have a right to free speech according to the U.S. Constitution. We don’t have the right to inflict harm on others. The drunk driver didn’t intend to hit and kill anyone else, but we willingly jail drunk drivers for that crime. Seems to me a neo-Nazi could be charged as an accessory in the event some nut case decides to make him happy by killing one of his targets. Maybe if he knows there would be consequences, he’d realize this is attention he doesn’t need.

Regardless, this was not a matter of being a court appointed attorney. The city council hopeful was paid to defend this man. He had a choice. He didn’t have to take the case. I’m not buying the fact that he believed so fervently in the man’s right to a fair trial. His war chest for this council election is enormous. He has a wife, two daughters and a brand new McMansion. I believe he did it for the money.

I am not saying the candidate is a bad person, but I do have a lot of reasonable doubt as to the man’s true reasons for taking that case. BGF says the guy is well-intentioned and he may well be, but I grew up reading the Chicago Tribune and I own a healthy amount of Tuscan cynicism when it comes to people who want to be on any city council. That big fat war chest for a stupid city council election unnerves me. Agreeing to defend a sleezeball and then turning up as a city council candidate has me scratching my head. Something is fishy here…

Like I said. Atticus Finch was taking the high ground and trying to right a moral wrong. There was no moral high ground in defending a guy who intentionally was guilty of playing Hitler games, and who paid for the services. I just cannot bring myself to vote for this candidate. He may well be a nice guy. I will never doubt BFG on that score, but the Ick Factor just will not let me support his candidacy. It would be so easy to blow it off by saying that I won’t vote for a lawyer for city council, but I’ve always voted for our current mayor, so I’d be called out on that one. No, I have to pass on this one so I can still look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and into the faces of my African American friends.

And finally, I did NOT grow up near Chicago. You’d think that after 40 years BFG’d get that straight! Chicago was a long way off from the cornfields of north central Illinois!

...and into a dry martini.”  Robert Benchley

I’ve picked up on a trend in the foodie world - that of offering cocktails to complement the dinner about to be presented. I’ve always been curious about cocktails, but too cheap to fork over a lot of money for them. They pad one’s dinner tab unnecessarily. Then I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized how nice it was to serve Giada’s Sgroppino (try saying that fast three times!) with some little goat cheese turnovers before a dinner party.

All of the Food Network types throw in cocktails for some of their shows. I had a recipe for margaritas that came from Ina Garten, so I mixed up a pitcher. They are lethal. So much so that at the ripe old age of fifty-something, I wound up clutching the porcelain convenience for the first time due to alcohol ingestion! No more of those!

Then I read that Rachel Maddow heads home to the country and her artist partner on weekends and that she mixes classic cocktails for her partner. Apparently it has become quite the rage. I decided to investigate.

When Anna moved back to Rome, she cleaned out her kitchen and I was the lucky recipient of her cache of liqueurs. Many of those enhance dishes, and at least one, Cynar, is artichoke flavored. You read that right. Artichoke. And it’s really good, too! When I needed a bottle of brandy for a recipe, I had a hard time digging through all the bottles, so I decided to clean out and see just exactly what was in there. It turned out to be a rather respectable bar!

So, with a nod to Rachel, and armed with the Mr. Boston Platinum book, we were off and running. With all due respect to Bond, James Bond, I had never had a martini. So I read up on them. What I learned is that cocktails, as they began in our liquored up history, generally consisted of a spirit, a bitter and a flavoring. And, as ever, the back story fascinated me. Booze in the days of yore was pretty rough stuff, so the addition of other ingredients made it more palatable.

I learned also that the martini Mr. Benchley drank probably bore little resemblance to the cocktail glass of vodka of today. It seemed appropriate to begin with that knight of the Algonquin Round Table. Mr. Boston had a recipe that put modern numbers on the original proportions, and here it is for your evening pleasure:

1 ounce gin, 1 ounce dry vermouth, 1 dash orange bitters*

Stir with ice, strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with a lemon twist.

*About orange bitters. Here in the Commonwealth, the ABC and grocery stores do not sell real orange bitters. They must be acquired elsewhere. I bought both Regan’s and Angostura’s orange bitters, and it is the latter that I have tried for this particular recipe. I used Martini & Rossi vermouth and Tanquerey gin.
This, my friends, bears no resemblance to the so-called dry martinis that lack vermouth, save its fumes. I heartily recommend it to you, but as with all cocktails, do please be responsible and have a plate of nibblies available because liquor at this level will knock you for a loop.

Another interesting thing I discovered is that martini glasses weren’t always the size of beer schooners. In the early days of special martini glasses, they held around 2 or 3 ounces. Compared to the 6 or 8 ounce cocktail glasses one currently finds in retail establishments, this is a rather modest drink. Hence, those Mad Men three martini lunches probably meant the same amount as one martini from today’s bars. I served ours in some two ounce Waterford Colleen liquor cocktail glasses I scored, and it was perfect. Just enough to take the edge off a busy week and make us hungry for our dinner.

The campaign to try new cocktails continues, and Big Kitty has suggested I make it a regular feature of The Sprawl. I don’t know whether that is to encourage the study, or what. I invite you to participate in this and please do send me your recipes! Better yet, you locals, invite me over to try yours! (BFG: I still want a taste of your legendary juleps!)

15 March 2010

Today’s paper heralded the bad news for Virginia’s schools. The General Assembly has gutted their budgets to the tune of $645 million. Our delegate, Bill Cleaveland, another of those who opposes “Big Government,” said “My expectation is that if we can just rally through this hard time, and just understand that we’re going to try to work together and to the extent possible depoliticize the process, I think we’re going to be better off and we’re going to get through this.”

He’s a lawyer. He can say absolutely nothing with more verbiage than just about anyone else in his field.

He needs to explain exactly how the teachers of Virginia are supposed to work together to get through this when they lose their jobs? And just how is the Jobs Governor going to find work for them in other sectors?  Furthermore, I didn’t see anything that said the commonwealth would suspend the SOL testing program that costs the taxpayers a ton of money every year. Talk about a no-brainer in the budget cutting department…

In any case, I think the only thing to do is start looking for state politicians who will be willing to serve just long enough to raise the state income tax by one percent, and then be willing to lose the subsequent election because the tax haters - the people who don’t seem to understand that if you want to live here, you have to pay your dues  - will then steal the following election. At least it would get us some much-needed revenue. It might actually cause us to have a few nickels to put into our decrepit transportation needs. For a few years, anyway.

Right now, I want to offer my deepest sympathy to the schoolchildren of Virginia. As I told Sen. Deeds, the future of our country goes to public school every day. Bless their hearts. We’re saddling them with an enormous debt left over from Bush the Second and his Big Swingin’ Dick Invasion for Weapons of Mass Destruction, the debt we’ve been forced to incur to try to get the country back to work after gutting our domestic manufacturing and now we’re going to handicap them by shortchanging them with their educations.

Yep. Too bad there won’t be enough reading specialists to insure they will be able to read Shakespeare so they know to beware the Ides of March.

After spending two months trying in vain to get help with what was going on with the look of Herban Sprawl, I tried a very simple thing. I deleted the post and pasted it in all over again! It seems to be fine. As Louie the Lip, my late paternal unit, would have said, “Good God, Gertie.” Well, he might have added some more colorful verbiage, but you get the drift.

I have no clue as to what went wrong, only that the day I was posting the good news about my big Cub hero, Andre Dawson, Firefox was pitching some kind of fit and everything was behaving weirdly. I don’t know html, so of course I couldn’t go in and find the error lines and fix them, yada, yada, yada.

Anyway, it’s time for some short takes on the news here in The Star City and elsewhere:

Okay, I’m done with Tiger and his big driver. Who cares. Enough already.

We need a health care plan and the Democrats need to get some balls and just do it and get it over with. If they’d worry more about getting something accomplished while they are there and less about running for the next election, we’d be fine. The people of this country want them to take care of business.

Speaking of taking care of business, that needs to be addressed, as well. Record unemployment…now how are we going to put people to work with all our manufacturing still being sent overseas? That giant sucking sound has more to do with the lobbyists’ business behind the closed office doors of the GOP members of the United States Congress.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like President Obama. I’d like him even more if he wasn’t playing it safe.

The Star City’s city council race should be interesting, but, sadly, it’s the same old same old. The only difference is that the Republicans managed to get three people to run, and one guy is running as an independent. The Democrats are running three people who have no business on city council. One defended the local white supremacist y’all have been reading about…yeah, you got that right. The supremacist’s lawyer is running for city council. And every lawyer in the Star City has his signs on his/her front lawn. OMG.

Of the other two Democrats, one runs restaurants and owns a large office building that he’s about to renovate…but his day job is that of geriatric psychiatrist. He’s got too many mistresses and ain’t a one of them having any orgasms. He needs to stick to what he’s good at: doctoring. The other guy was on council once before. I supported him until I took a really huge issue to him regarding the big rigging and payoffs that were going on in the city schools way back when. It wasn’t the fact that he blew me off that frosted my shorts. It was the fact that I had contributed to every single one of his campaigns and he blew me off in a very patronizing, dismissive fashion. If he was gonna blow me off, he could have done it with some class. I deserved that much. The irony is that every single damned thing I told him was going on was finally revealed. And he lost an election anyway. Now who’s the eejit?

The Cubs are playing 500 ball in spring training, Duke is hanging in there with March Madness, and the Olympics were great. What does it say when Americans are happy when their neighbors win gold?

Texas’s state board of education has been hijacked by the right wingnuts who are going to screw up their kids even worse than they already are with their latest curriculum decrees. And here in the Commonwealth, our governor, a Pat Robertson accolyte, is busy trying to dismantle every single public program of worth. He’s gutting public education and every social service he can get his mitts on. And then there is the attorney general, a bigot of the first order. He brings shame on the rest of us Italian-Americans.

And so it goes. Glad to be back.