Bugs

I've been working in the garden a lot over the weekend. Ray and I are nearly finished in having everything tilled. The second half is nearly ready to be planted. In addition to my near "farmer's tan" I have lots of bug bites. I'm not sure what all bit me. Some mosquito bites, some black flies, one horsefly for sure. No chiggers I don't think but then I don't think I've ever had a chigger bite so I don't know if I could tell what its bite looks like.
Japanese beetles look like they are starting to arrive so I need to put out my beetle bag which attracts and collects them, keeping them away from the tomatoes. Some of the zucchini look like vine borers are digging in. We're picking out the larvae and covering the roots up with soil.
For the second summer in a row my house is plagued by gnats or gnits or some small flying bug. I call them "ghost gnats" since they are very pale gray and just flying around effortlessly. They have a real name I'm sure but I haven't talked to anyone who has seen these before. Literally thousands of them show up at a time for only a few days, usually after heavy rains. When they die they cover everything like dust. Last year I only saw them inside the house but this year they peppered my car driving home after a week of thunderstorms. They don't seem to bite just flit about but the main problem is the mess of dead bugs they leave behind. Not sure how they get inside the house.

Single Man Peeing in the Dark or Stream of Consciousness

Hmmm. What time is it? Man, 3:00 am. Shouldn't have had that chicken quesadilla so late...
I've got to take a leak. Can it wait till morning? Yeah...
No it can't...
Better get up...
Ok, I'm getting up...
Where's the bathroom light?...
Too bright. Turn it off.
The night light is bright enough to pee by.
Seat's down. Oh well.
I have good aim....
Well, my aim isn't as good as I thought.
I'll clean it up tomorrow.
Ahh, that's better.
Damn, 3:05 am.
Shouldn't have eaten so late.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, almost

"It's June 21st," said Dawn. "The summer solstice. The longest day of the year."
I took note. "I'll call tomorrow's blog 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and write about whatever I dreamed of. I'm so clever."
Well first off my dreams last night were unremarkable. I couldn't remember any of them a few hours after waking up. Later I recalled something about the color of my eyes, whether they are blue or green. I've always maintained that they are green and most of the time they appear so. But in strong light the blue comes out more than the green. In the light of this dream they were blue and I had to change my mind about them and become a blue-eyed man.
So much for the dream
Then I started to read some things online this morning about the summer solstice. For some reason I was thinking solstice = equinox which is totally wrong and the solstice marks the beginning of summer, not the middle. So my uneventful dream last night was not midsummer's. What a relief. What fools these mortals be!

I'm off to read the new Harry Potter book. Have a great summer day.

Growing

I saw the sign. "Clearance. Reg. $120. Sale price $60. Price good thru 6/7." A complete seed starting system with growing light, stand, tray and these little seed starting pods. Just what I was looking for. I had a bunch of tomatillo and pepper seeds I wanted to get started inside before transplanting them in the garden. Earlier efforts with just windowsill light were not very successful. This would be perfect.
But it was two weeks past the "good thru" date. Where's someone to ask? Nope, he doesn't work here. "Excuse me, ma'am. Is this price still good?" She didn't know and had to track down the manager. He was busy with someone else. "Sure," he eventually said.
"You better take the sign up with you though," said the lady.
I picked the whole thing up. It was covered in dust and the last one on the shelf. I hope this works, I thought to myself.
When I got to the checkout they rang it up. $32.00." Wow, I said.
I got it home, plugged it in and everything worked. Twenty-four of the six dozen pods now have seeds in them. They probably thought I was buying it grow pot indoors. Much more exciting than that. Some of the finest quality plants from south of the border. Three kinds of tomatillo: green, giant green, and purple. Ancho and poblano chiles. Epazote, a Mexican herb that I have never seen. We'll see in about a week if the results match the hopes.

Artificial Good Humor

Heavens of Mass Destruction

As I was running today I began to think about how in old timey times some people used to think that the space above the earth was the home to god or gods. This is seen in many languages' interchangeability of words for "heaven" and "the heavens", Himmel in German, ciel in French, cielo in Spanish. (I used to think that the word "firmament" as used in Genesis referred to land because it was "firm" but I looked it up and it means "the vault or arch of the sky: heavens".) Beyond the visible sky was a mystery, the unknown, and when human beings find a vacuum of the unknown they rush to fill it. Mythology is born.
But as the unknown becomes known some humans are wont to hold on to their earlier understanding. If it is revealed that the earth moves around the Sun and that contradicts our ancient beliefs then the new understanding must be wrong and be suppressed and those who espouse, "But it does move" must be silenced. Even when telescopes were seeing past the farthest planets, people held on to the notion of "heaven" out there. When more and more searches into deeper and deeper parts of space revealed no god looking back many simply changed their explanation of what "heaven" was. "Oh, heaven isn't out there as a physical place, but a spiritual plane beyond this one." Rather than alter the hypothesis to support the data or even refuting the data to keep the hypothesis they now begin to simply change the definitions of the terms they use to make any proof unprovable.
While running up some stairs I started to think about how this applied to the current search for "Weapons of Mass Destruction". For now they can argue that you cannot prove a negative, that the fact that you haven't found WMD or god or a unicorn doesn't mean they don't exist. Eventually what they have begun to argue is that what they meant by WMD was the ability to produce WMD or that the small arms they find (and were probably sold to Iraq by the US twenty years ago) are capable of massive destruction and hence qualify. Why, at the Baghdad airport, weren't there numerous commercial planes? And what was used in the September 11 attacks? See, they were under our noses all along.

Doctor's Advice

My doctor always has some pearls of health wisdom each time I visit. His one sentence diet is "If it doesn't swim or isn't a fruit or vegetable, don't eat it." This is strict but good advice I'm sure he himself doesn't follow all the time. But like any maxims of life the closer we stay to them the better off we may be. We may not have a lot of fun but we'll be pretty safe.
He had a new saying today about eating breakfast since it is shown, he said, that people who eat breakfast have a 20% higher metabolism than people who don't. "Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a commoner and dinner like a pauper." Of course most Americans have this flipped around which metabolically speaking is bad, bad news.

Week Ahead

Tomorrow I go in for my semi-annual physical. It was originally scheduled for two weeks ago after I had made the appointment six months prior. But I came into work that morning and the reminder popped up on my calendar too late for me to remember. I've decided not to make appointments that far in advance any more. Thursday I have my six months dental exam. I should also schedule my eye exam soon just to keep everything current.
The new Harry Potter book comes out this Saturday which means I have to try to wrap my current reading by then or put it on hold since I'll want to dive right into the Order of the Phoenix. I'm really enjoying Alexander: Child of a Dream, the first of three parts novel about Alexander the Great. What most fascinates me is the author’s ability to limit his vocabulary to words that existed in the fourth century B.C.
Back to Harry Potter, I just saw on the Internet Movie Database that the role of Sirius Black in the third movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is to be played by Gary Oldman. Not obvious casting as I had given considerable thought as to who would be a good choice (Alfred Molina and Viggo Mortensen came first to mind). We shall see. I also noted that Chris Columbus will not be directing, instead the director of "Y Tu Mama Tambien" and "Great Expectations" Alfonso Cuarón will be taking the helm on this one. That is exciting news.
On a totally unrelated subject, I learned today from Jacques Pepin that a bottle of wine, 750 ml, holds about three cups. This is good information to keep in mind especially in cooking if you need to add a cup of wine, add one third of a bottle.
Have a great week.

Out Googled

I mentioned a few days ago that my site was now coming up in a Google keyword search. Well today it no longer is showing up. Climbing back to number one is a question I posted on photo.net concerning the rs60-es remote switch for my camera and the snotty answer to that question by a member of the site. As much as I'm certain these search results will be of use to the general public, or as I like to call them, "my peeps", they are sure to give my hagiographic biographers a false sense of who I am. They need to be able to find this site easily to get the most accurate portrait of who I am.
It's a little unclear to me why I am now off the Google list. Maybe they objected to my lowercased use of their name as a verb. I'll keep trying to get back on.

Save the Lemons

I now own a tagine. A tagine (or tajine) according to the newest English edition of Larousse Gastronomique is "a deep glazed-earthenware dish with a conical lid that fits flush with the rim. It is used throughout North Africa for preparing and serving a range of dishes that are cooked slowly...." Mine of course is not glazed (too much worry about lead-based glazes I guess). Tagine is also the food cooked in a tagine much like a casserole is made in a casserole. Soon I'll be able to make lamb tagine or chicken tagine with preserved lemons.
Well maybe not so soon. First I have to make some preserved lemons (or should I say preserve some lemons?).
I have yet to find a definitive recipe for preserved lemons. They are a staple of Moroccan cooking and I have found a number of recipes for them. Problem is they all vary widely in terms of ingredients, technique and length of time needed to preserve them. Some recipes call for just lemons and salt. Some say cook the lemons in boiling water first. A few say to cut up the lemons into slices while most say leave them intact but cut into them for the salt to permeate. Several top off the lemons and salt in a jar with water, others say lemon juice, still others olive oil. One recipe used half salt, half sugar. Many included spices such as cinnamon, cloves and saffron.
Part of my problem is I have yet to find the recipe of someone I consider to be an authority on Moroccan cooking. Two chefs I respect on the subject, Matthew Kenney and Paula Wolfert, are eluding my search for trustworthy recipes.
My inclination is to be as simple as possible for my first attempt of this recipe. No spices on this go around. The idea of just lemons and salt, nothing else, seems the most logical. As far as length of time to preserve them, recipes range from one week to 30 days or more. Thirty days seems like a good number to me.
So I'll know in a month if I made a right choice. I'll keep you posted.

How Does Our Garden Grow?

Here are some pictures of my share-cropped garden that I'm working on with my friend Ray. (Click the photos for a larger view.) We have planted corn, English peas, snow peas, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, ocra, watermelon, asparagus and tomatoes. The tall plants around the edges are Jerusalem artichokes Ray planted last year.
We have raised beds with a thin fabric of material to help stem the weeds from growing. Now if we can just manage the deer.
Won't be long until we're swimming in produce.

Charlie, James and Tracy

Here are some photos I took this weekend while housesitting.
The cat is Charlie Brown who would bring me a dead, eviscerated animal every morning as a present. The two dogs are James and Tracy. Tracy is the small girl leader of the family while James is the adorable idiot.
Click the photos for a larger view.

My Google-plex

For months I have been trying to get my web site to come up in a Google keyword search for "kirk samuels". It seems only fitting I thought, this being the official home page of Kirk Samuels. Part of my reason for having this site was to give old friends a way to find me if they wanted to see what I was up to. Without a top listing on Google I didn't think that would be easy. But almost daily I would do a search for myself and turn up pages about a Texas football player or a message board where I posted an idea about freezing pesto in 1998 (put the pesto in ice cube trays, freeze, remove from trays and place in zip lock bag) or the movies of Kirk Douglas. At the bottom of the search was a link asking whether I got the results I wanted. Since they weren't I would tell them the site I was looking for (this one) and wait for them to update their site. Finally today I googled myself and my web site came up number one. Didn't have to pay them either. Good Google.

Sat on a House

I am house sitting for my friends Ray and Claudia et al. this weekend while they go to the coast. I thought it would be good to get out of the house for a couple days which it is. Also tempting was their pool. Too bad it has rained all weekend so far.
The other half of our garden which was yet mostly unplanted now has some asparagus, thyme, bell peppers and watermelon a growin'. I got them in and watered in a break in the deluge after which the skies opened up and haven't yet stopped. Once the rain stops and sun comes out I will take some pictures to post.
There wouldn't be much point to me house sitting without James and Tracy. They are two toy poodles that live in the house. Their pictures will be posted on Monday so you know I ain't lying.
I saw The Italian Job today. It was a very good caper movie (Italian capers instead of Spanish). What most impressed me was just how economical the movie was in its story and dialogue, only necessary words are spoken are they are pretty clever. If you've seen the trailer for this movie in theatres you've pretty much seen the entire outline of it. I wish they wouldn't do that. "The Italian Job" is still worth seeing ().
And I haven't mentioned yet that I saw Finding Nemo last week. The animation is spectacular, the characters fun, the story engaging in that Disney-plucky sort of way. There are some movies that are great that not everyone will like and I 'm sure not everyone will but it is a great movie that people from all different ilks will enjoy ().

Speaking with Authority

"To punish me for my contempt of authority, fate has made me an authority myself." - Albert Einstein

Listening to the BBC on the radio yesterday morning I heard an American woman from the South talking about Hillary Clinton's new book. She spoke with clear authority in everything she said. But I'd be willing to bet that much of what she said was mere opinion and plain wrong. Throughout my life I've had to deal with people who spoke with absolute certainty about things that were not true. I knew what they were saying was wrong or I was merely certain that the issue was far bigger than this person's grasp. Things were not so black and white and they weren't clearly standing in the light.
These types of failed authority include wrong statements of facts (A professor of mine once referred to Oklahoma as the "Big Sky State" which it is not. "Sooner State" is Oklahoma. "Big Sky Country" is Montana.), questionable opinion stated as truth ("The Boston Red Sox are the best team in the history of baseball."), and predictions of the future being stated as if they have already happened ("Hillary Clinton will run for President in 2008.").

like this

no you're not supposed to like them so much
you're missing all these things that they've done that you're not seeing

cast-iron stove, how neat

Recipe for a Dream

Here's a transcript of a dream I had last night:
The phone rings at my house and my mom answers it. 'Who is it?' I ask. 'It's Martha Stewart. Said something about having a party.' Hmm, strange she would have a party with all the hot water she's in. 'She wants to talk to you' my mom says.
'Hello Martha. Oh sure I can come tonight. Thanks for thinking about me. I'll be there around 8:00.' Strange for her to call now. Last we talked was six years ago when I accused her of stealing one of my recipes without giving me credit. How nice of her to throw a party now with all the problems she is having.
I arrived at the party and had to park several blocks from the house, not about to trust her rented valet parking service. One of her assistants greets me. (Martha, always so many damned assistants. Who else would feed those chickens when she's out hiking the Andes?) This assistsnt was a short gay man with balding blond hair and headset like someone at the Gap. He puts a drink in my hand and instructs me that Martha will be around soon. She is making her rounds and wants to welcome everyone personally. How nice, I think to myself.
I see Martha a little later with a cool smile, talking about some china she found at an estate sale a week earlier. She catches my eye, excuses herself and comes over to shake my hand. Martha was never much of a hugger.
'How are you?'
'Quite well, thank you.'
'So glad you could come.'
'Thank you for inviting me.'
'Of course. Of course. Do you need a refresh on that drink?' she asks.
'That would be nice.'
She motions to the assistant who has been standing ready nearby. He takes my glass and gives me another filled with an iced beverage. 'Enjoy yourself,' she says as someone else gets her attention.
I look around the party at the other guests, everyone older, mostly late 50s in business suits. The assistant grabs my arm. 'Martha has presents for everyone. Did you get your present yet? No? Come with me.'
I'm led to a large room filled with wrapped packages, each bigger than a toaster oven, on many shelves. There are several people in a line waiting to get their gift. Someone at the front gives his name and his present is found on one of the top shelves wrapped in cream colored paper and a blue ribbon. He opens it right away and pulls out what looks to be a king size goose down duvet. 'How nice of Martha!' he says.
Finally I get to the front of the line and give my name. They find my gift but before handing it to me I am told, 'Sign here.' Looking down I see a list of signatures on lined white paper.
'What's this for?' I ask.
'Sign please.' There is no statement at the top of the page just the names of everyone who has already penned their name.
'Is this some kind of receipt?'
'Sign please.'
'I won't sign until you tell me what this is for.' The assistant quickly pulls me out of the line and escorts me to the end of the driveway.
'Martha will not appreciate this. She has done so much to help you people. Good day to you,' he says, watching me walk to my car.
I never saw what was in the present.

Jesus Saves Often

I hate it when I don't save my work. I was editing my last web log entry through my Movable Type web interface and put in a good 20 minutes of rewrite when my Flash installation finished and popped up a web page with instructions. Since I was busy writing I closed the window not realizing that it had sprung up from my current web browser window where I was working, so when I closed it I lost all the work I had done.
I know better than this. I deal daily with people whom I mock for not saving their files.
Well, as the saying goes, "If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough."
Excuse me. I'm going to go back up my computer now.

Just One Momemt

Things change. We hear this often but only recently did I start to think about it too deeply. It didn't come in any real profound revelation but rather from a bowl of cereal.
When I was young I really loved a Cap'n Crunch-like cereal from Quaker called King Vitamin. I hadn't had a bowl of it in over twenty years. Then one day I saw it in the grocery aisle among all the other boxes. Overjoyed I bought two boxes. When I got home a poured a large and dug in my spoon. It tasted awful. Bland and dry, it was nothing like the sweet golden stars I remembered. Could it have been the wrong cereal? Did they change the formula? Is it me or is it the cereal? It's the cereal, right? Whatever it was I now had over two pounds of this cereal that tasted as bad as the boxes it came in.
A few days later I started to think about other things I've enjoyed most of my life. Would Kraft Macaroni and Cheese always be as good? (It is one of the few food from childhood that I enjoy as much today.) What if they changed its recipe? Sure I would enjoy other dishes and foods as much but they wouldn't be the same. What is it about this nostalgia for things og the past that we hold onto? The only answer I find is to enjoy things now for what they are without the belief that you will be able to have them again or for much longer. This applies to friends, family, pets, jobs and numerous other things besides cereal and Kraft Dinner.
This led me to think about books and movies and my hunger to read and see as many of them as I could. Growing up I often felt I was missing out on movies I wasn't allowed to see and books that weren't on our bookshelves and vowed that when I could I would fill my life with as many as I could. But thinking about it much later I realized there would probably be an Academy Awards shows the year after I died and there would be great movies I would never see. Great books by authors yet to be born I will no nothing about. Think about what you love most in life and realize that it will either die or change for the worse before you die or it will go on long after you draw your last breath and have a life you will never participate in. It just gave me pause to try to appreciate things and people and experiences in themselves and not as pieces of some greater thing I'm striving for.
I cannot read every book, see every film, learn everything I want, spend every moment with people I love. This does not detract from the value of each but adds to their worth for they are tht much more precious.
It made me think, did the ancient Greeks or Phoenicians or Chinese live lives any less full than ours because they didn't know about subatomic particles, x-rays, or the Beatles? Is my life or the life of everyone now living diminished because we do not know now what those two centuries hence will know? The answer is no. We have to live our lives in the context we are given. That context is but a moment in all of human history, each moment a drop in the sea of experience without which there would be but a desert.

Slow

Driving to work this morning I saw a sign alongside the road I had seen the day before. It said "Slow Death in Family". A few yards further there was another sign "Thank You So-and-So Brothers Funeral Home". I had never seen such signs before then and was a little puzzled as to their intent.
Would the family be upset if they saw cars going by at normal or accelerated speeds? Would the every day pace of life be too harsh a reminder during this time of loss?
Were the drivers supposed to slow down to gawk at the mourners or was it a memento mori, a reminder to the driver in the fast lane that she too will be pulled over for good?
Maybe the dying was still taking place and by slowing down the person on his deathbed could get a better look at those passing by.
Maybe the sign was a way to get people to think and write about death and its affect on people unknown to the deceased.

Annoyance

I hate it when I miss a spot shaving around my mouth. There will be one small little whisker above my lip or just to the right or maybe the first sprout of a goatee that will annoy me all day long. My tongue is automatically drawn to the little hair and my lips will invariably end up chapped. I guess I'll either have to shave more carefully, grow a beard or just live with it.
But I thought you'd want to know.

Video Movies

I've watched a few movies on TV and video this week.
HBO's original movie My House in Umbria stars Maggie Smith as a modern-day romance novelist living in Italy who is one of several victims of an explosion when a bomb goes off on her train. After leaving the hospital she invites the other survivors back to her home in the Italian countryside. The wonderful cast includes Timothy Spall, Chris Cooper, Benno Fürmann, Ronnie Barker and Giancarlo Giannini. Focusing on the complexities of the characters, the story is refreshing modern tale of terrorism and redemption without sentimentality or loss of humanity ().

Last night I watched on video the much anticipated film Max about a Jewish art dealer Max Rothman (John Cusack) and a thirty-something year-old painter Adolf Hitler (Noah Taylor) in post-WWI Munich. What a major disappointment this film was. Hoping to intrigue us with the possibility of a "what if" scenario of Hitler taking the artistic rather than political track in life, the movie offers little insight into either Hitler's thinking or art. I could imagine the majority of the small audience seeing this film at my local art house theatre and raving about the subversive storyline but I know they don't stay in much and probably haven't seen too many episodes of Twilight Zone where this story could have been handled far more adeptly. Even the CBS miniseries Hitler: The Rise of Evil did a more sophisticated job of getting at the core behind Hitler's will to power. It also occurred to me that if Hitler were alive today he could be a successful artist selling his mass-produced paintings in shopping malls around the US with colorfully lighted lighthouses and churches as the subject matter. Max tries so hard to be avant-garde but fails miserably ending up with as much bourgeois kitsch as of one of those paintings ().

Something I missed in the theatres but also looked forward to was Secretary about the relationship between a young woman and her lawyer boss. I started to add some descriptives to that last sentence like "S and M" or "masochistic" or "domination" but realized that the film is about more than the outward shock of this seemingly unusual relationship. Maggie Gyllenhaal play a woman from a dysfunctional family just released from an institution where she had been sent because of her self-mutilation, perceived as suicidal, tendencies. She finds a job with a lawyer (James Spader) who has fired so many secretaries he has a permanent sign in front of his office to notify applicants of a vacancy in the position. Their relationship develops into one that fills both of their needs but they struggle with the saddle baggage that goes along with their cravings and desires. In the end it is a movie about the basics of most every relationship and the search for what everyone wants out of life and love ().

On the lighter side I watched a movie from Louis CK one of the writers of "The Chris Rock Show" and "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" called Pootie Tang. It's a really dumb movie but I laughed all the way through it. The main character is a famous crime-fighting man-about-town named Pootie Tang. Too cool for words, he speaks in a way no one can understand but no one would ever be so uncool as to admit they couldn't. Like Joe Dirt, my favorite stupid movie, it is utterly silly but has such a good heart I couldn't help but laugh and like it ().