Out of the Frying Pan

How many faces do you see?

There's a Facebook group to which I belong which is pretty much light-hearted. Pretty much, but occasionally things run off the rails into political territory.

This is a photo of one of the shelves that I see from my desk. Despite the bombast that sometimes occurs, it didn't seem quite in the spirit of things to post the photo to the group page. So I'm putting it here.

Saturday simmerings: take Mike Evans, please

Well, it's time for a mini-cooking marathon around here, with makings for chili, tacos, baked bean casserole and the tomato sauce that's good for pizza and spaghetti and ravioli taking time on the stove today. The sky is lowering, so it's a heart hamburger skillet dish tonight. One of my friends thinks of it as hamburger helper without the help. We think of it as tasty, unlike what's being served up weekday afternoons to sports fans dialed in to FM.

This week I heard some yahoo who was allowed airtime on 104.3 The Fan (no, not Mike Evans; this was a yahoo who called in) refer to University of Oregon as "Phil Knight University". There are an awful lot of folks who can't bear Oregon's ascendance in the football polls. Anyway, I thought: Yahoo, you don't know a bit about Oregon (he said he "know[s] people" who live there) or U of O. When it comes to that, you don't know Bill Bowerman, the next thing to diety Oregon ever will be able to claim. (Wikipedia has a decent article on him, but without the emotion of the previous piece.)

Surely Mike Evans is about past his sell-by date in the one-to-four, post-JR spot. At least Scott Hastings has reasons for what he purports to think (it seems like this is all pretty tightly scripted, although the dead air is sometimes... rather.... dead.... Looking for notes, fellas?). But Evans seldom gives much evidence of prep. I guess you could say he sounds like he's phoning it in. His rant last week about why the Peyton Hillis trade was relevant to the show is classic. Hey, bud, it's your show. If you say it's relevant, it's relevant until station management tells you otherwise.

Likewise for the stupifyingly inane chatter. JR does off topic well. Local guys, no, but apparently station management likes it. The riffs on some network TV show that sports fans are unlikely to watch don't sound unscripted. They sound scripted... badly scripted. Management, if Evans is making up his stuff, he would do better if you were scripting him. If he's scripting himself, he needs a better writer. If you're scripting him, you need a better writer.

I listen to 104.3 because of a late-developing interest in sports. It seemed like Sandy Clough became more and more curmudgeonly until he was made to go play by himself on the evening shift. I've always liked Alfred and Stink is great.

But an unhappy reality is that 104.3 is an outpost of sexism which, by their support, has the imprimatur if not the nihil obstat of advertisers such as McDonalds. Wanna know what McDonalds thinks of women? Take a look. The Facebook and Web pages drip with the drool of the 20-something males who tune in to turn on to 104.3's "contests" about which women are "hotter". Didn't we get over that in, oh, about 1973?

And how often does a woman make it across the call board? Seen, but not heard. Yeah, that's how 104.3 likes women. C'mon, advertisers. If you won't balk at the sleaze, at least let them know that sportscasting moved into the twentieth century at least five years ago.

This started out about cooking and I'll get back to that now. After dinner, there will be time to make another run at banana bread. Last week's experiment seemed to get good enough reviews from the taste testers, but there was room to improve. Time to go back to the simmerings on the stove.

A mom sings a mom's song

Oh, please watch this. Please, please, please.

The no-name flame

It has been a while since I've seen a good old flame war. Instead, bloggers admonish and denounce people, but without using names. This might be more destructive than the old bonfires of the Internet vanities.

What happens when someone reads your blog and concludes "S/he's writing about me!"? Chances are good that you've destroyed faith between yourself and the person about whom you are writing. And if you are blogging about a story told to you, count on destroying faith between the person about whom you are writing and the person who confided in you, as well.

The no-name flame is like a fire inside a wall. It is hard to fight and repairs, if possible, are complicated and expensive projects. The no-name flame is a fine method for arsonists.

Shopping list

Dear Tesco,

Grocers the world over are looking for opportunities to cut costs without sacrificing quality of goods or service. I believe the amount of ink required to print labels for your late-season blueberries could be considerably reduced.

How does abridging the phrase Tangy and sweet with an intense flavour to Pucker up! work for you? A minor redeployment of alphabet would spare 24 little occasions of ink use!

To me, the punctuation in Pucker up! is a plus. But little would be lost in accurate description if, in efforts to maximize savings, you were to omit it.

Faithfully,
Mrs Patricia Out of the Frying Pan of the Front Range

Wah wah Wahaca

Tonight I went back to the little place I visited Sunday. Though less busy, the kitchen would not be cajoled into rolling cheese instead of chicken into enchiladas. Not that they weren't willing to adjust! The plate was a generous helping of chicken - maybe a cup and a half - in between two flat, raw corn tortillas. Tasty sauce, but...

Cheese and onion enchiladas are cheap and easy to make and could be sold at or within spitting distance either way of their other enchiladas. So why not? I was seated by the kitchen and got a good look at the ahem untraditional issued hence. Cheese and onion enchiladas, believe me, would not compromise a culinary ethos of this version of Mexican food. /snark

Foyles is a fine bookstore, but...

Foyles on Charing Cross is a wonderful bookstore. Great selection of books, certainly the best we've found in London, with the bonus of a few helpful staff. One gets used to the store perhaps believing too much the publicity about itself. And to the intimidating security guards stalking the aisles. It's too bad about the rather awful and sometimes out of order toilets. But Ray's Cafe or Ray's Café or Ray's Jazz Cafe or Ray's Jazz Café -- however you want to spell it -- is complete a contrast to the well-lit, clean aspect of the rest of the store. Fair warning.

Coach Brooks Thompson speaks: "Sometimes, things aren't perfect"

A young relative of mine had a miserable time last year playing college basketball. Or not playing it. Given little time on the court, he still managed fabulous stats for 3-point shots.

JohnMark Ludwick snapped up an opportunity to play for better team at a much better school -- and for a coach who values team play. The hometown paper observes what never registered with the coach: "Losing Ludwick may be the biggest blow."

“I was surprised. Sometimes, things aren't perfect.,,” the paper quoted Brooks Thompson philosophizing about JohnMark's transfer to William and Mary.

If a coach admits that "things aren't perfect", you can bet your house on the fact that "things" are a good deal worse than not "perfect."

Thoughts near Clarence House

God save the queen.

The mail looks a bit more Royal near a palace.

The lights are on...

but nobody's home.

Pretty good anniversary present

So today DC and I were already having a pretty good day when THIS happened. That, my friends, is very good news. Yes, the stock has tanked for today, and I'm not unhappy about that. It'll be back.

After much consideration

I believe that Eileen Fisher should be awarded a Nobel Prize. So what if the flash intro is so... ergh... that I won't link to her site. She is still the clothing champion of Women of a Certain Age and Body Type.

Singing suspiciously

StatGuy can sit by me in church; I agree that it would be no real loss to fire a lot of 20th century church music. But again today our opening hymn was "O, Christ the great foundation" and it's very stirring, especially the third verse. I bet Liu T'ing-Fang knew what he was writing about.  StatGuy can give you the words.

It's deferred action...

...not procrastinating. Anyway, this turned up tonight from an old shoot.

Treat

One of many ungracious aspects about me is that I absolutely loathe, despise and detest being sent flowers. Just don't like it. I've been known to dodge clumsily a question about our brick and mortar address to avoid receiving someone's beautifully intentioned gesture. Ungracious and largely inexplicable. Maybe it's that arrangements never really look right to me. The flowers are stuck into unnatural shapes and the whole business is hard to maintain. Live plants are hopeless. Everything deteriorates quickly and sadly, all the while reproaching my ingratitude.

But I adore going to a florist and saying "Yes! I'll have the orange and the purple and -- ooh! I didn't know you could get delphiniums..." And I bring an armload into the house, distributing the booty as I see fit. Below, the orchids arch against the prints and beside the sterling pachyderm. The orange roses (my favorites, except for  yellow or cream or pale orange or maybe a striated pink, or maybe it is orange) make a little shrine to Saint Pasquale. It's just the best treat in the world.

Citizen Tryon speaks

At dusk I drove down Front Range Avenue and noticed an American flag on the road, flapping by its broken staff as cars drove over it. I turned the car around, retrieved the battered thing, and will take it to an American Legion post so that it can be disposed of with dignity next June 14. Losing respect for a symbol like the flag, you see, is terribly close to losing respect and gratitude for one's country. And if one has lost respect for one's country, to me it seems best either to work for its restoration or to take up citizenship elsewhere. Sounds like "love it or leave it", doesn't it? That's not my meaning, though since September 11th I have become awfully tired of those who, while nurtured by their American roots, run on about how the world perceives America: about how they, themselves, perceive her. Who, exactly, do they think America is? But I digress. My point was that the flag still matters.

Who owns the franchise on busyness?

Ever know someone who thinks s/he does? Tiresome.

Liturgy as photo op?

One James Baca is a pretty popular guy -- award winning and "beloved", even -- in the Denver Archdiocese. But not with me.

I wouldn't know his name except that I have had it up to here with his presence at liturgies. Yesterday we found ourselves at the annual "Red Mass". Not intentionally: it's just that we are regular communicants at the 10:30 AM Sunday liturgy at the Cathedral.

Oh, I'm not really annoyed with him for being at Masses. I AM TIRED OF HIS LONG LENSED CAMERA WITH ITS INFERNAL FLASH AND NOISY SHUTTER. Yesterday, during the Our Father alone, that flash went off at least four times. Yes, I counted. If it went off four times during the Our Father, it went off at least a hundred during the entire Mass. It went off many hundreds of times during Easter Vigil.

Guess what, people? Technology has moved along; with a decent digital camera and workmanlike post-production, it's possible to compensate for not using a flash. (Though using a flash in mid-morning in the jewel-box of the cathedral... what's THAT for?)

He bustles around the cathedral, taking pictures as if each Eucharist at which the local ordinary is present will be appearing as a cover story in the National Geographic. It is beyond disrupting; it is wrong.

I'm sure it's wrong and I am prepared to do the homework in canon law to prove it.

Yes, I'm worked up.

Looking at W as he is...

It's easy for me to send a room into shocked and stony silence these days. All I have to say is, "W is all right with me." My Bush-bashing friends should consider their positions; even the BBC is re-evaluating. I'm not really down with the analysis ("getting in touch with his feminine side"? Donnez-moi un BREAK), but this column looks at things as they really are these days.

...and in the category of "Most Likely to Disappoint Tourists"

It's the Eiffel, close followed by the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. Here's the list.

And here are my comments, having spent almost a year within walking distance of both of the above. The Eiffel is pretty dire if you happen to catch it just as buses belching small armies of camera-armed (yes, "armed" is the right word) tourists pull up. But late at night or in early morning or -- try this out -- in the mist, it's pure magic. In midsummer? Not so much. Midwinter? Marvelous.

What's even better is to consider that the prettiest views of la belle Paris are not those from la Tour Eiffel, but rather those that include her: from the tower at Montparnasse, from one of the bridges on the Seine, from the Troc, and -- I think, best -- from the #6 Metro as it passes over the bridge between the stops at Passy and Bir Hakeim.

At the Louvre, if you'd like to see Mona, go near the end of the day. I've never understood why people care so much about this painting, which is boxed in plexiglass. Some cynical folk think it is probably not even on display, that the original is stashed somewhere. Maybe under this? Who knows.

Anyway, here are just a very, very few of the other things worth seeing at the Louvre:

• Winged Victory of Samothrace -- okay, the location is such that she is usually mobbed, but she is worth the crush of schoolchildren, the bad perfume of tourists who are avoiding the creepy showers in their hotel rooms, the elbows of university students on their way somewhere else
  
• the Napoleon apartments
  
• David's painting of Napoleon's coronation - in fact, for people interested in Napoleon, there are few places better (any?)
  
• David's painting of Madame Récamier - compare her look to that of Josephine's
  
• the seated scribe in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities (a good wikipedia page)
  
• The Department of Islamic Art, a breathtaking collection in the coolest museum space you've ever seen
  

There is so much other than Mona to love at the Louvre: so much more than I can begin to say.

We "lay eyes on" things in so many ways before we "lay eyes by" them that it is almost inevitable that they will disappoint. They are smaller, grubbier, more worn, more peopled than we imagined. But maybe it is useful to travel with the idea of "I wonder how this will look to me" instead of believing that we are going to be knocked off our pins because we have seen Mona freakin' Lisa.

How?

Today someone mentioned a concept that makes sense to me: structured flexibility or, slightly differently configured, flexible structure. Lately it often seems like I'm trying to cram a size 14 life into a size 2 day. That's pretty much everyone's task, I think. How does one do it effectively, without becoming rigid?

Forgetting?

When someone has behaved really badly, in a way for which there is no remedy, I know there is a duty to forgive, but what about forgetting?

Years ago, maybe a dozen or so, a woman with whom I was to become acquainted uprooted her life to follow her husband many miles from where they had established a family life and where she had a promising, apparently fulfilling career. As is often the case, she and their children followed the husband and father by some months. They began to settle into a new home, with all the trials and difficulties that tend to fall unequally on the spouse who is not engaged in the exciting new job.

After a time, this woman was diagnosed with breast cancer. And it came to light, as well, that her husband had developed an extramarital relationship. It might have been that the relationship began when the husband was on his own, i.e. before his wife and their children arrived in the new town.

Well, you can write the rest of the story from there.

Tonight I was browsing the weekly paper of our old hometown. In one of life's predictable turns, this man has now taken what is probably the last job of his career: 70 miles from the job he left all those years ago.

There is something of a kerfuffle about his departure, but his admirers and detractors seem about even in number. Someone called him the "rock star" of people who hold jobs like his; others have been less fulsome in their praise. He leaves behind a ginormous, difficult problem that appears to have only wildly expensive and complicated solutions.

Leaping to his defense in the comments thread was someone who, following his signature, added a post script that he is proud to have this man in his family. From the distinctive last name, it is clear that this is a relationship of the latter marriage, not of blood.

There was a simple, entirely correct response to make to this fellow's remarks and I made it. And I followed it by noting that his post script stirred sad memory of the foundations of his familial connection. I left it at that but, reader, I was unwilling to leave unanswered that part of his comment. All these years on, I have not forgotten and I do not expect that I will. It offends me that a relative would boast of this relationship.

Some say that the breaking up of a family is an entirely private matter. It is not. It is a private matter in its genesis, I suppose, but the consequences are painfully public. In fact, the community bears some of the impact. That's what I haven't forgotten: the public humiliation of a wife who was in the midst of coming to terms with a terrifying illness; the chaos further visited on children so recently uprooted; the contempt shown by the behavior of the husband and his co-worker.

It was a terrible event, a terrible time. If the statute of limitations on bad public form has expired, as it apparently has even for the Prince of Wales and his consort, it still seems like desperately poor form for relatives of the current wife to remind the community that it is their family that now claims him.

Almost no one signs his name to online comments; I do. I like Seth Godin's old piece about what's wrong with an "anonymous" Internet and I have come more and more to agree with his view. I take responsibility for what I write and sometimes try to explain it further.

But I won't argue about it. If that's what you've come for, expect polite acknowledgment and nothing more. You have your view and I, when prodded to remember, still have mine.

Not for the kids

Stand in the Fire with Warren Zevon, but put ear muffs on anyone under about 25.

In other things the kids shouldn't know about, Boston Legal has had a huge cast change. The only part I'm happy about is Christian Clemenson becoming a regular. But letting go of Rene Auberjonois, Mark Valley, Julie Bowen and Constance Zimmer? I don't know if I'll like that show any more. (Go to the clips page to find the bit with Warren Zevon's "Keep Me in Your Heart for a While; it's part two of the Michael Fox bits.)

When wishes are not going to come true

Sometimes, knowing that you're not going to get something you really wish for can be a way of understanding what someone else really, really wishes for -- and making sure that she gets it.

Talking back to the Catho-bloggers

There's a species of blogger that judges its experience, wisdom, and information to surpass that of mere cardinals. They are the Thersites of true religion in Web world: the Catho-bloggers.

Catho-bloggers report as fact things that they don't know took place ("the Cardinal approved [emphasis mine; there is no reliable information that he did any such thing] Hilary Clinton's speech at...") and, from their heights of holiness, rain judgment on men they don't know about circumstances that they don't know about.

I've mentioned before, if not here at least IRL, that there was some real merit to the practice of "pay, pray, and obey", not least because fewer occasions seemed to lead to calumny or detraction.

Here's something nobody seems to have thought about. How does the Archdiocese of Chicago do the best damage control on the Mercy Home's quite inexplicable decision to provide a platform for this political candidate? By giving her supporters a martyr card to play? "Cardinal muzzles candidate": good headlines, not to mention cartoons.

*sigh*

Some weeks you're the windshield...

...and some weeks you're not. After having two separate (worlds apart, literally!) folks contact me about things that have to be done "immediately", I'm ready to start changing nameservers on them. It isn't quite the moral equivalent of changing someone's phone number without telling them the new number; it's more like telling them that they have to answer their own phone :-)

Sheesh.

Rain, rain...

Well, it's not snow, snow.

A couple things have been on my mind. In my photog course, some students have been fulfilling assignments by going out and taking candid photos of strangers. Although the law allows such photos for news and editorial purposes, beyond that it's real sketchy. "Art", as one of the students (rather ostentatiously to my thinking, but we know what I'm like) styles her work, doesn't meet the news and editorial standard, in my thinking.

When I mentioned in a classroom discussion that, historically, some peoples viewed photographs as "stealing a person's soul", this woman said, "That's what I want to do!" She aspires to own a "90 degree angle" camera, the purpose of which is to take people's photos while it looks like the lens is focused elsewhere. In effect, that's lying to people.

I think having people out snapping photos on the street intrudes on the reasonable amount of privacy we should all have when we are sitting peacefully on a park bench reading a book. I think we should be able to carry our groceries to the car without hearing the shutter's whir. And, yes, I think we should even be able to steal a kiss on the sidewalk from our lover without it being recorded for the ages.

In the bit of work I've done for a few organizations that serve the poor, I've refused (often to their annoyance) to take or publish photos of their clients. My belief is that their clients, who often suffer some kind of brain impairment, are not able to give fully considered consent to having their images used.

What think ye?

While I'm at it, it annoys the hell out of me when I see a long extract of a person's writing or speech reproduced on the Web -- okay, I'll say it: on a blog -- attributed, but unsourced. It stretches the limits of fair use. Maybe it breaks the limits. I think it does.

/rants, for now

But I do think about grabbing my camera some fine day and heading for Pearl Street Mall to capture all the photographers out doing their business.

Don't color me GOP...

...or any other political affiliation. But I applaud these youngsters for bringing to light another demonstration of Francis Cardinal George's extraordinary stature as a consistent voice for what is right.

It sticks in my craw that it is hard to find public appreciation of his moral, religious, and spiritual leadership across the political spectrum. From the google alerts I've set up, if it were there, I'd be seeing it.

More than once it has occurred to me that my frequent mention and praise of him could cast me as a sycophant. Here's why I do it. We're all bombarded with names and faces and words upon words upon words. I'd like you to know that when you hear the name of Francis George, it's worth allowing whatever medium bears it along to penetrate your consciousness, however briefly. He is smart, wise, spiritually and morally astute, and he cares deeply about living rightly, himself. I am sure he is aware of the importance of a leader's example, but he repeatedly makes clear his desire to become ever more closely conformed to the beliefs he promulgates.

Listen up. His words and, perhaps even more importantly, the way he lives his life will help you.

Sometimes...

...I think I should be nicer to people who email me to admonish our writers or complain about page design. But mostly I think they should leave me alone and devote their energies to publishing what THEY would like to see on the Web. The suggestion box is open for nice ways of saying that.