spring flowers #3

More spring flowers. I like both of these as much for the habit of the seed head as for the flower itself.

It took me several days to correctly identify Centaura montana, commonly called Mountain bluet though in the Midwest it is sometimes referred to as Perennial cornflower. One of the problems was that I couldn't remember where I obtained the original specimen. Erroneously, I believed the plant to have come from a native plant sale and indeed it may have. However, I could never locate it in any of a number of native guide books. The reason? It is native to the mountains of Southern Europe but has been introduced into the US where is has established a fairly wide distribution. Although typically found in higher elevations than the great plains, it has acclimated itself very well to a sunny, well-drained spot in the garden. It's seed head always reminds me of a reptile because of its scalar appearance. Despite the flower's fragile appearance it is actually a decent cut flower and the profusion of blooms and length of the bloom period (as long a month) are a double bonus.


One of the real gems of the late spring garden are red poppies. The color on these poppies stops neighborhood walkers in their tracks; it's fun to watch them go in for a closer look like they're an insect searching for pollen. There are few other flowers with this vibrant of a red and when these blooms open they're about 6 inches across. When they close up (clouds or rain will shut them up) they form an almost perfect triangle. Their seed heads are so interesting they send some folks soaring.

This version corrects an earlier post.

free tickets to white house gala

Follow the link @ 7:45 EDST pm tonight for free access to a White House gala featuring among others, James Earl Jones, Michael Chabon, and Esperanza Spalding.
Biggie O's live poetry jam
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spring flowers #2

Irises. Totally dig them. Not just for the sexiness of the flower but for the aroma. Right now my yard is loaded with irises and the lilac is blooming so one can stand in the yard and get heady with spring.

spring flowers #1

What do you do when you can't give your mom flowers? Give them to someone else. So this week we are sending out spring flowers to my friend Kim who loves to grow flowers and lost her mom this past year. Damn moms. Can't live forever.

I've always liked columbine and until a few years ago could never really figure out how to cultivate it. The trick that I learned, which seems to be true of many native plants, is to not disturb them. For years I monkeyed with my flower beds almost year round. Adding compost, covering them up, uncovering them, loosening the soil the first sign of spring. All of that can be well and good but many native plants don't like being disturbed before it's time to rise in the spring. For the columbine, I've set aside an area at the edge of a large fir tree. After the flowers bloom, I take the seed heads and scatter them about in the pine straw. Then I wait until I see little sprouts popping up and those I carefully transplant as I expand the area that contains the columbine. It's a lot less painful than trying to raise them in flats indoors. And once you get a few plants established you can begin to generate lots of seeds.

mom always said

"eat you vegetables"
Seared haricot vertes, squillini with chunky tomatoes and red peppers, roasted yellow cauliflower drizzled with toasted sesame oil.

Now get to it.

kfc grilled beef-fat® chicken

Alternate titles:
How Oprah tried to kill her own people.
Beef-fat Chicken®. The new red meat.

KFC got a big boost from Oprah, who under the auspices of helping out her people, announced on her show that KFC was giving away free samples of its new grilled chicken. Normally, this would pass right over my head without a notice, except that my formerly vegetarian colleague who has recently gone Dave Ramsey insane and will stop at nothing (including his health) to save a buck, went to KFC, stood in line for 45 minutes so that he could save $6 on lunch and try and kill himself with crappy fast food.

Take a look at the ingredients in the new grilled beef-fat chicken. If it's been awhile since you grilled your own chicken you might recall that the only ingredients really needed are chicken, a little oil to keep the chicken from sticking to the grill, and spices. The spices can be as simple as salt and pepper. Anything else, including fresh lemon juice or herbs is only to add a little zip.

What does KFC add for the zip? Beef powder and Beef fat! And Sugars. Yum. Nothing like taking what could potentially be a healthy meal and making it a deadly killer.

And what exactly does marinating the chicken in this slaughterhouse marinade do for the meal? Check out the calories and fat content. The free meals give away the fattiest part of the chicken, the leg and the thigh. Over half the calories in these pieces come from fat, more than 25 percent of which is saturated. And you also get a 130 mg dose of cholesterol and a 520 mg dose of sodium to go along with it.

Image: Joe the Plumber gears up for a heart attack.

This doesn't include the sides which can be healthy (green beans) or not (mashed potatoes with gravy or even worse the honey bar-b-que sauce) or a biscuit. The mashed potatoes can triple your calories and nearly double your fat intake.

kfc grilled beef-fat® chicken ingredients
kfc grilled beef-fat® chicken nutrition

kfc grilled beef-fat® chicken ingredients
KFC® Grilled Beef-fat Chicken. Fresh Chicken Marinated with: Salt, Sodium Phosphate, and Monosodium Glutamate Seasoned with: Maltodextrin, Salt, Bleached Wheat Flour, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil, Monosodium Glutamate, Spices, Palm Oil, Natural Flavor, Garlic Powder, Soy Sauce (Soybean, Wheat, Salt), Chicken Fat, Chicken Broth, Autolyzed Yeast, Beef Powder, Rendered Beef Fat, Extractives of Turmeric, Dehydrated Carrot, Onion Powder, and Not More Than 2% Each of Calcium Silicate and Silicon Dioxide Added as Anticaking Agents. Contains Wheat and Soy.

manny ramirez: world's biggest dope

Manny Ramirez's recent prescription for HCG, human chorionic gonadotropin, cost him approximately 7.5 million dollars--the amount by which his 50-day unpaid suspension reduces his 24 million dollar annual salary. While Ramirez's was purchasing the most expensive drug in history, the Dodger outfielder was also guaranteeing that he will soon be enshrined in the Guinness World Book of Records as the Biggest Dope on the Planet. Even if his prescription plan covers 80 percent of the cost of HCG, that's a pretty big hit for a guy who purports to know how to handle the bat.

cinco de mayo alien abductions

When you get tired of hearing how unwed teen mother Bristol Palin is the new spokesperson for Candie's Foundation Abstinence Only program take a look at the story of the 3-year old boy who was lost in the Ozark Mountains for 3 days and lived to tell about it. The boy, unharmed except for numerous tick bites, was apparently saved by two stray coon dogs, is recuperating. If there isn't an alien abduction in either of these stories, there really ought to be.



ozark miracle

lego of the war on terror

Here's a great web site that uses Legos to illustrate, among other things, the war on terror. I hate to have to be the one to remind some of the complacent, hopeful-minded (of which I am sometimes guilty of being) but this country is still very much in the midst of the war on terror. And, cowboys and cowgirls, if the current administration's plans are carried to fruition, we will be fighting the war on terror even more heavily in Afghanistan in the coming years. Remember, if you will, George Bush's promise that this would likely be a war that we might be fighting for 10, 20, even 50 years. Is that really what we want to do?

lego festo: we don't do body counts
waterboarding in legoland

warrior ant press and the rise of the twitterati

Warrior Ant Press, utilizing techniques, technology, and methods too sophisticated (and potentially contentious) to describe on this blog recently subscribed to it's one millionth Twitter feed. The result insures that m.o.i. will never lack for information, and will in fact, constantly suffer from information and media overload. During peak times, typically weekend nights, Twitter feeds arrive at a rate of about one a second. My wireless network, straining under the weight of this gregarious stream of thoughts, has threatened me with sanctions.

A random sampling of recent tweets:

I'm just mad about new jeans and Swine Flu. Dang.
less than 10 seconds ago from PandaBone

Desert Party is the biggest Middle Eastern threat to this country since bin Laden.
1:40 pm May 2nd from Kaintuck Julep

2009 HJ36, ~7m-16m in diameter, just passed the Earth at 6km/s, missing by ~three million, six hundred and eighty thousand km.
1:25 PM Apr 28th from lowflyingrocks

2009 CQ1, ~210m-470m in diameter, just passed the Earth at 8km/s, missing by ~twenty million, two hundred thousand km.
5:31 PM Apr 20th from lowflyingrocks

Quick mini-audit of my backpack confirms it; I have no idea what four of the straps do.
10:09 AM Apr 27th from hotdogsladies

hello mister deadline person don't mind me i'm just going to punch you in the heart until you shit yourself and die
about 5 hours ago from warrenellis

Swine flu reaches Australia: Australians unsure how to deal with something they can't fuck, drink, deport or barbecue
7:09 AM Apr 28th from warrenellis

Just landed in St Louis. Nice ride to say the least. This is a working office.
7:29 AM Apr 29th from clairemc

Off to Andrews to join the President on AF1 for flight to Missouri. Very excited. Will be back in time for the vote on budget later today.
2:58 AM Apr 29th from clairemc

Basecamp is running smoothly again. Sorry for those errors!
8:17 AM Apr 28th from 37signals

Thanks for your patience - Campfire is now back up and running smoothly.
9:56 AM Apr 27th from 37signals

who's the stupid vice-president now?

Joe Biden's ridiculously uninformed comments about the swine flu epidemic, are further proof (like a Cheney/Hannity interview) that there are absolutely no intellectual qualifications required in order to become Vice-President of the United States.

closet minded

The Fox Network, which stills bills itself as a news corporation, has decided not to carry the Presidential address tomorrow evening, but will instead air an episode of Lie to Me. Lie to Me, for those who may not know, isn't another appearance by the mope Dick Cheney on Hannity, but rather more like a lite version of 24. Lie to Me attempts to offer the same demands for the truth as the wacky 24 but without the torture, threats, and explosions.

Speaking of Hannity. He now offers a service, called Hannidate, that purports to bring like-minded conservative singles together. A quick check of the site revealed that there are no single conservative women within a 25-mile radius of the Warrior Ant Press World Wide Headquarters. Is this because all the true conservative women are all happily ensconced in dutiful marriages?

But strange thing; Hannity must be a bit of a hypocrite. Try this for fun. Change the search terms to search for same sex encounters and viola! a huge list of willing prospects comes out of the wood work, or in Hannity's case, out of the proverbial homophobic closet.

privatizing the imagination

Artists played a largely unheralded role in Obama's victory. But they had been tugging the national unconscious forward for decades, from the multiculturalist avant-gardes of the 1970s and '80s to the hip-hop rebels of the '90s and 2000s, plying a fearless, sometimes even unruly kind of polyculturalism. By the final months of the election season, these artists had secured Obama as the waking image of change.

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon's 1968 election sealed the backlash of the "silent majority" were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven't community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?--Jeff Chang writes in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation

I won't pretend to speak for community organizers. Or artists for that matter. But I will say this. Many artists are engaged, enthralled, even moved by the opportunity to effect change. However the Office of the Presidency is a centrist collective that defines America around an abstract, advertisable notion of America. Change has permitted us to color these advertisements with a broad swatch of diversity but as a whole it's the family value meal that graces our tables.

Interestingly enough, the number of Americans who claim to be full-time artists is nearly equivalent to those who claim to be farmers (about 2 million). Real farmers, those with a isolationist view of their lifestyle and a second job in order to maintain it, have more in common with most artists than the typical farmer depicted on television. Seed corn hats, cotton print dresses, and children who respect their elders cross all demographics. People who fail to understand that are the only ones surprised to learn that courts in Iowa have upheld same-sex marriage. That said, the farmer, or at least his corporate surrogate with the K-street lobbyist, is still given a place in the national dialogue. This while the collective conscious seems to believe that artists take pride in selling their drawings on the street corner to keep themselves in cigarette and beer money.

All this could change with in a hurry with a President, or First Lady, who had the temerity to befriend artists, invite them to the White House, and give them a stage to talk about their work, what it means to them, and to America.

Everyone has to eat. That's frequently the rationale for why farmers are so important, which is true, but sadder still when when what's for dinner is so often pre-fab food. Since pre-fab America is still tottering on verge of bankruptcy let's just go ahead and bury it for good.

I propose a weekly dinner at the White House. Or a luncheon. Call it Farmers who Lunch and the Artists who Cook for them. Every week the White House kitchen is turned over to artists who then, in cooperation with small, independent farmers who grow food that isn't livestock feed, cook a meal together and following that, sit down at the table, the big kitchen table in America's White House, and discuss the matters of importance to America. The First Family, White House staff, and a rotating group of Congress are invited to join them, to listen, and to learn.

the creativity stimulus

Images:
Minnie Black, luffa sponge man.
Shawn and Clarissa Langley Family of the Fresh Breeze Organic Dairy Farm.

eric rosen is waiting for guffman

So says my daughter. And she might know. Let's hope for Mr. Rosen's sake that the wait is still on for Guffman.

After the frisky staging of Mary Zimmerman's telling of The Arabian Nights, the Rep has turned in two dreary performances that have left me befuddled. Granted Mr. Rosen, as the Rep's Artistic Director, has every right to bang his own drum. Rosen did have the conviction to turn Sherwood Anderson's classic novel, Winesburg, Ohio, into an unlikely musical, but unfortunately for audiences, the sound and fury of the recent Rep staging of this show was muffled, dreary, and uninspired. Anderson's work served as an iconic inspiration for many teenagers, myself included, seeking a path out of the close-mindedness of Midwestern small towns. Rosen's musical, on-the-other-hand, reminded me of why I seldom return to visit. It's just not that interesting of a place.

Rosen and the Rep deserve credit for working hard to bring new and younger audiences to the theater. Eleven pm performances at the Copaken Stage are a smart approach to liven the Power and Light District with real culture. The typical Rep crowd, which appears to be composed mainly of folks who got close to, but never achieved incredible wealth, scares me with its excess of tweed jackets and designer pantsuits. But as a whole, this doddering crowd has never frightened me as much as the mediocre production of The Borderland at the Copaken Stage.

More than once during the second act I keep thinking that a mass execution will occur and redeem The Borderland from the plodding, unsympathetic characters that moped around the stage during the first act. No such luck. If only the script could have kept up with the sound and lighting in this show it might have been worth a late night. Instead, the plot was completely improbable, the characters unlikeable, and the catharsis irredeemable. Lacking theater, there wasn't much reason for the effort.

muscle up

Invicible from DTroit. A smaller carbon footprint than the Pontiac TransAm and the ablity to shapeshift.

whatever it is we did, errr do...

the long-term pain and suffering inflicted on the USA by the Bush Administration

The recently declassified Bush Administration torture memos contain startlingly precise descriptions of the proposed interrogation techniques. The memos, prepared by Bush lawyers to justify the techniques, read like one giant cover your ass corporate document for a litigious society.

Before the written memos that gave the OK to torture, there were a couple of face-to-face (alluded to in the memos themselves) meetings between Bush lawyers and the CIA client and no doubt, a few phone calls. One can only imagine that at some point during these talks the Justice Department lawyers politely asked Bush Administration operatives,

"now let me see if I understand exactly what you're describing. You're going to strap someone to a board so they can't move, cover their face with a towel, and then slowly pour water into their nostrils. Is that correct? And from what I understand you've said, the prisoner, no matter how much training they have had, no matter that they may be aware of how the process works, the prisoner will react as if being drowned? Correct? The reflex can't be stopped? The prisoner will believe they are drowning, about to die, and will react according except they are strapped to a board. And you also say that you'll do this technique, 'waterboarding is your preferred term?', for about 30 seconds until the prisoner thinks they are about to die and then you'll stop, lift the towel just long enough for the prisoner to gasp three or four breaths, and then you'll pour water down their throat again so the prisoner again has the sensation of death-by-drowning. Correct? And this process will continue for as long as 20 minutes or until the prisoner capitulates? And you wish to know if this is torture?"

The lawyer then goes on to explain that even though water-boarding is designed to, and will result in, the prisoner believing that their life is threatened by imminent death, the technique does not "inflict severe physical pain and suffering". The reason--here is where the fancy lawyering comes into play--is that the term severe physical pain and suffering has been defined by the Bush Administration as one that has lasting mental or physical manifestations. How one can expect a prisoner to believe they are getting ready to drown, spill their guts, and the process NOT leave a lasting mental mark on their pysche is a little unclear. Under this scenario, the process is designed to be so scary as to extract a confession, yet subtle enough that the prisoner wakes up the next morning with no memory of the event.

One really has to wonder about the logic that went into the Bush Administration conclusion that these interrogation techniques weren't torture. The rationale that waterboarding doesn't cause long-term pain and suffering is based on the notion that the US military subjects some of it's own operatives to intense training to let them know what they might expect to happen if they were captured and tortured by the enemy. Waterboarding is used an example of the kind of torture they might have be expected to endure. We expose them waterboarding as an EXAMPLE of torture.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty but at some point it would have been nice if the 'family-friendly' Bush Administration had taken a poll of what they loved to call real Americans. The could have described the process to the mother of a US service member who's either going to, or currently serving in the armed conflict, and then asked the parent, OK, if your son/daughter is captured and these same techniques applied, would you consider waterboarding to be a form of torture?

Note to the Obama Administration. The President, regardless of the precedent the Bush Administration tried to establish, does not decide who gets prosecuted for violations of US laws. That decision is better left to the Department of Justice.

half-hearted torture

Recent revelations about the CIA engaging in torture indicate just how far US hegemony fell during the Bush Administration. Despite the yelping dogs who crave a bloody fight, the memos prove that Cheney and his pasties repeatedly lied to the American public about engaging in torture. But YOU already knew that. To the same end, Puppet-Boy Bush may have repeated lied to the American public but his excuse may just as easily turn out to be, as with the weapons of mass destruction, that he was too gullible to know the truth, not intellectually engaged enough to demand a proper answer, or just too dumb to be trusted by Gepetto who was yanking his chain.

That said, if the best the US could do in a 7 year long war to end-all-wars, a war-like-no-other, a war-with-no-borders, was to only torture 2 combatants and then to have to resort to torturing them over 200 times just to extract whatever information was extracted, then maybe we should just give up the practice. One could almost imagine at some point Donald Rumsfeld going over the numbers and then deciding that it's just not cost-effective to torture the captives so let's continue with the bombing missions.

elvis costello's christmas album?

Let's hope this doesn't come to pass but one has to wonder if Elvis Costello's recent appearance on Praire Home Companion doesn't mark his slow decent into musical obscurity, sorta of the equivalent of making a Christmas album.
Sure Elvis has a Sundance channel program (Spectacle) and an album (Secret, Profane & Sugarcane-June 6 release) to promote, but busking to the PHC crowd doesn't seem to follow from Elvis' tendency to take musical chances.

warrior ant press: spring reading list

Even though we've spent way too much time in front of movies and vintage tv shows over the last few months, we've still managed to read a few books. Here's some you might want to check out.

Topdog/Underdog, Suzi-Lori Parks. Theater Communications Group, 2002. This play, about two black brothers named Lincoln and Booth, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. The play remains fresh and poignant as we celebrate the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth and the rise of the Obama nation. The clumsy, younger Booth hopes to follow the success Lincoln, his older, wiser brother, as a smooth operator of three-card monte. The reluctant Lincoln though, has forsaken the street life for an 'honest' life as an Abe Lincoln impersonator in an arcade show, even though it is one that requires him to wear whiteface. The audience acts as the mark as the brothers perform a bit of street theater.

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson.2008, DigiClassics.com
Growing up in a small town and reading Anderson's character tale, I was charged to find a way out of the 'burg and into the world. But after seeing Eric Rosen's musical of the same name and re-reading this classic, I found that even if you can go home again, all too often, it's just not that interesting.

Snuff, Chuck Paliacke.Doubleday, 2008. A quick read that wavers on the edge of political incorrectness and a feminist view of sex as an aging porno star vies for lasting celebrity (and personal redemption) by attempting to break the record for most sexual partners (600)in a day.

The Forever War, Dexter Filkins.Alfred Knopf, 2008. OK. This book came out last year and made a bit of a splash. With good reason. It's about the war in Iraq which may, or may not, be winding down as promised. However, considering that it seems likely that we'll be in Afghanistan forever, it's still worth reading.



The Farther Shore, Matthew Eck. Milkweek Editions. 2007. More resonant and universal than Tim Obrien's The Things They Carried, more real and intense than Meditations in Green, this is one book you'll want to keep in your library.





Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line, Martha A. Sandeweiss. 2009. The story of Clarence King, the first Director of the US Geological Survey, who first found happiness in the golden California hills and then later in the arms of a black woman. King lead a secret life of philandering that neither his wife nor his professional colleagues was aware. The exception to the mystery appears to have been former Secretary of State, John Hay, who make payments for years in King's honor to keep his illicit family from the poorhouse. Makes John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Colorado River raft-runner and 3rd director of the USGS, seem provincial by comparison.

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink. Vintage International Paperback, 1997. Just because Kate Winlett won an Academy Award for her role in the movie adaptation of the book and just because it's been translated into 37 languages doesn't make this book any better. Mediocre books make for mediocre movies.

Lush Life, Richard Price, Picador Paperback, 2008. With this novel, Price sets the tone for the street patois he would later master in writing for the HBO series The Wire . There are some differences. The novel is set in New York's lower East side and centers around a robbery gone awry; the series plays out in the Baltimore drug trade. Unfortunately for readers, the series is better than the book.