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TEST 05/12/13

Philly Mignons

Philly Mignons

Ahem. I'm back. I will not try to catch up with the missing months (years?) but will continue from here. October 2012.

Paris-August 2010

I guess no one is still reading this and I cannot blame them.Nevertheless, I feel impelled to report on a wonderful trip to Paris which has just concluded. Let me count the calories...There was the Table du Lancaster which would make Thomas Keller blush. Michel Troisgros, the Chef, prepared a four course menu that was ultimately 9 courses with many amuse buches and little bites. The deserts alone numbered three. He likes to juxtapose sweet and sour and he does it exquisitely. ...Then there was Chez Dumonet-Josephine where their Boeuf Boreguiginon stole the show but the crisp-skinned duck confit was a close second. The deserts, a millefuille big enough for four, and a tarted tartin enopugh for another four and a Grand Marnier Souffle also large enough for four were just exactly big enough for four. We mopped the plates. Les Papilles sells its wines off the shelf and rtacks on a small corckage charge. Suffice to say, you can drink moer wine less expensively this way!The highlight of the carte waws boeuf stew cooked for 10 hours with lavender, miniature potatoes, carrots and snap beans. Sacre Bleu! All this for less than a few burgers at Wendys!
...Much More to come...

Prunes Make for Regularaty

I am sorry. I will be more regular now that I am eating prunes.
F

A COLUMN TO REND YOUR HEART

A group of lowlifes at a Tea Party rally in Columbus, Ohio, last week taunted and humiliated a man who was sitting on the ground with a sign that said he had Parkinson’s disease. The disgusting behavior was captured on a widely circulated videotape. One of the Tea Party protesters leaned over the man and sneered: “If you’re looking for a handout, you’re in the wrong end of town.”
Another threw money at the man, first one bill and then another, and said contemptuously, “I’ll pay for this guy. Here you go. Start a pot.”
In Washington on Saturday, opponents of the health care legislation spit on a black congressman and shouted racial slurs at two others, including John Lewis, one of the great heroes of the civil rights movement. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, was taunted because he is gay.
At some point, we have to decide as a country that we just can’t have this: We can’t allow ourselves to remain silent as foaming-at-the-mouth protesters scream the vilest of epithets at members of Congress — epithets that The Times will not allow me to repeat here.
It is 2010, which means it is way past time for decent Americans to rise up against this kind of garbage, to fight it aggressively wherever it appears. And it is time for every American of good will to hold the Republican Party accountable for its role in tolerating, shielding and encouraging foul, mean-spirited and bigoted behavior in its ranks and among its strongest supporters.
For decades the G.O.P. has been the party of fear, ignorance and divisiveness. All you have to do is look around to see what it has done to the country. The greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age was followed by a near-total collapse of the overall economy. As a country, we have a monumental mess on our hands and still the Republicans have nothing to offer in the way of a remedy except more tax cuts for the rich.
This is the party of trickle down and weapons of mass destruction, the party of birthers and death-panel lunatics. This is the party that genuflects at the altar of right-wing talk radio, with its insane, nauseating, nonstop commitment to hatred and bigotry.
Glenn Beck of Fox News has called President Obama a “racist” and asserted that he “has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”
Mike Huckabee, a former Republican presidential candidate, has said of Mr. Obama’s economic policies: “Lenin and Stalin would love this stuff.”
The G.O.P. poisons the political atmosphere and then has the gall to complain about an absence of bipartisanship.
The toxic clouds that are the inevitable result of the fear and the bitter conflicts so relentlessly stoked by the Republican Party — think blacks against whites, gays versus straights, and a whole range of folks against immigrants — tend to obscure the tremendous damage that the party’s policies have inflicted on the country. If people are arguing over immigrants or abortion or whether gays should be allowed to marry, they’re not calling the G.O.P. to account for (to take just one example) the horribly destructive policy of cutting taxes while the nation was fighting two wars.
If you’re all fired up about Republican-inspired tales of Democrats planning to send grandma to some death chamber, you’ll never get to the G.O.P.’s war against the right of ordinary workers to organize and negotiate in their own best interests — a war that has diminished living standards for working people for decades.
With a freer hand, the Republicans would have done more damage. George W. Bush tried to undermine Social Security. John McCain was willing to put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the Oval Office and thought Phil Gramm would have made a crackerjack Treasury secretary. (For those who may not remember, Mr. Gramm was a deregulation zealot who told us during the presidential campaign that we were suffering from a “mental recession.”)
A party that promotes ignorance (“Just say no to global warming”) and provides a safe house for bigotry cannot serve the best interests of our country. Back in the 1960s, John Lewis risked his life and endured savage beatings to secure fundamental rights for black Americans while right-wing Republicans like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were lining up with segregationist Democrats to oppose landmark civil rights legislation.
Since then, the right-wingers have taken over the G.O.P. and Mr. Lewis, now a congressman, must still endure the garbage they have wrought

Amen

I am so sorry to have left this site blank since March 7 but perhaps when you hear my tale of woe, you will forgive. Let me work backwards:
On March 13, my Father-in-Law died in Tampa. He was an inspiration to me, having accumulated a wealthy position with virtually no education and then, having become blind ten years ago, continued his zest for life, employing technology to enhance his life and his ability to communicate. Gene Davis was an inspiration to me, to his children and to all who knew him.
So I managed to be in Tamps, ten miles away from the Phillies' ballpark, for weeks on end. However, there was no appropriate time to escape to Clearwater. God knows I tried.
However, when it came to the reading of the Will or the reading of the lineup, the Will, of course, took precedent. Missed the Yankees game,too.
And when we had to pick up the Lubavitcher cousin or go on to the cemetery, I got the honors, having been pronounced the Shabos Goy, which I took to be an honor. Missed the Blue Jays game that time.
Gene Davis, my esteemed father-in-law, would have sympathized, being a Tampa Bay Rays savage himself.
In my most reverent Goydom, I bless his name and kiss his head. Amen.
To be continued...

THE EPHEMERA AWARDS

IF YOU HAVE EVER FELT OUTSIDE THE SCOPE OF AMERICAN CULTURE, THE ACADEMY AWARDS WILL CAST YOU INTO DARKNESS. UNLESS, OF COURSE, YOU ARE STRONG ENOUGH TO RESIST THE PIPE AND DRUMS. FORTUNATELY, I HAD JUST RETURNED FROM MEXICO, A LAND OF SUBSTANCE AND REALTY, WHEN I WAS FACED WIT THE KODAK THEATRE RIDICULOUSLNESS.

I DON'T THINK I FIT IN HERE ANY MORE. FLOUNCES. PIPERONES. WHAT THE HELL?

I REFER TO ZIHUATANEJO, MEXICO, WHERE I SPENT THE LAST WEKK AMIDST PEOPLE WHO WERE GENUINE, ENLIGHTENED, AND SINCERE ALL THE THINGD THAT THEIR COUSINS IN SANTA MONICA LACK. I MEAN REALLY...AVATAR OR THE HURT LOCKER? WHO GIVES A SHIT? WHO HAS SEEN EITHER? WHY?

I NEED A NEW START.

DON'T YOU?

AH, WEEKEND

I have given up the weekday martini because, frankly, I was missing too many good times, zoned out to the delights of Hendricks, Tanqueray or Bombay. I am now just zoning out on the weekends when a cold, crisp martini still signals a celebration. It's Friday! It's Saturday!

As Ogden Nash put it, in "A Drink with Something in It":

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth-
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

Is it Friday yet?

SEEMS LIKE OLD TIMES

Though we have begun a new year and a new decade, it sure seems like the same old times to me. As the Washington Post pointed out last week, in the decade between 1999and 2009, our economy created exactly zero job growth. We have a staggering number of people out of work, but Washington bails out the wealthiest bankers while pouring billions down the rat hole of General Motors. There are no plans at all to create new jobs and, while we fight wars on two fronts, we can watch our national treasure travel to China.

When we elected Barack Obama, the nation signaled that it was ready for change, even great change of the FDR kind. Investments in education, green technology, WPA-type programs to employ those who want to work would have been cheered. Instead our leaders bowed to idiots like Joe Lieberman, whom we allowed to gut needed health care reform which, need we remember, has not yet passed.

No one in Washington, especially the President, seems willing to take an unpopular stand. No one cares to admit the realty of a nation which is declining in wealth, youth, vigor and principals. Instead we call for new educational initiatives while we cut funding for education. We rail against bankers while we feed trillions into their coffers.

Once we were a nation that rewarded risk-takers. Now we applaud hypocrites.

CITY SIRENS

I spent six hours with my wife in a hospital emergency room Friday night.
My wife fell on our stairs and, after X-Rays and a CAT scan; they discovered that she had broken two ribs in her back. Morphine and Percocet finally relieved her pain and they sent her home at 4 am
But the experience was humbling. A big city emergency room is an amazing eye-opener. The guy in the room to our right was in critical condition with head wounds from a gunshot and the woman on our left had abdominal pains which the nurse finally figured out was caused by hunger. They gave her a sandwich and released her.
There were 40 emergency cases admitted while we were there last night and Karen said she was almost embarrassed to take up their time with broken ribs caused by her own klutziness.
The people who work in hospitals like the ones who helped us last night-the ambulance guy who lifted my wife out of bed and carried her down the steps to a stretcher-the porter who gently put her in a wheel chair and escorted us to a taxi where he warned the driver not to drive too fast over our streets' old cobblestones-the doctors who looked like they'd had less sleep the we had - they are all such special souls.

DEAR MR. PRESIDENT...

Are we really going to fight over abortion again? Didn't we do that decades ago? Maybe the evangelicals weren't paying attention. So here's a thought: As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed not long ago, abortion rights “center on a woman’s autonomy to determine her life’s course, and thus to enjoy equal citizenship stature.” In a New Yorker essay, Jeffrey Toobin says, "every diminishment of that right diminishes women. With stakes of such magnitude, it is wise to weigh carefully the difference between compromise and surrender."

Mr. President, we know that you are a compromiser and a consensus builder but issues such as this one demand you to stand up, face the heat, and refuse to budge. Let's remember that you won the election and you will win the next one in a landslide if you remain true to the principals that got you there.

THE WARRIOR NATION

I could be wrong about this and, if I am, Gogolplex will certainly set it right, but it seems to me that these United States of America have been at war for my entire lifetime.

That would take us back to 1943 - World War Two, the Greatest Generation and the hundred and seventy five movies that followed it and glorified our part in it. Then came the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War and Afghanistan. Lest we forget, our troops also fought in Somalia, Lebanon, Haiti, Kosovo, Grenada, Cuba and El Salvador during this period, although some would dispute these as "not wars" and others would argue other fine points.

Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that we have become a Warrior Nation, replacing the Brits, the Germans, the Romans, the Egyptians and even Genghis Khan himself. We are it, Baby. The nastiest bastards in the playpen.

Without this unchallenged record of carnage, would we have the standard of living we – at least some of us - now enjoy? Without Boeing, Dow, Blackstone, Lockheed, DuPont, and the entire military/industrial complex we have built, could we have political correctness, arugula, and vegetarians?

We are truly steeped in blood, brothers.

SCRAPPLE V. APPLE

In Philadelphia yesterday we did the expected and elected Democrats to the positions of District Attorney and City Controller. Across the river in New Jersey they did the unexpected and ousted sitting Governor Jon Corzine, he of the once powerful firm of Goldman Sachs. I believe if Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner had to stand for election, he'd be ousted too, so strong is the public revulsion toward big banks and their big bonused bankers. Bloomberg in the Apple, seems to have beat the trend. In Virginia a Republican was elected Governor and people will read in these events some sort of referrendum on Obama's Presidency thus far. I think this is more about the collision of powerful forces, like the Yankees and the Phillies.

The Apple and the Scrapple meet again tonight in game six of what has been a remarkable World Series. Each team takes turns dominating the other, and every pitch hold the promise of disaster or joy. This is what makes baseball such a great game. It is a lot like politics, although politics has more foul balls.

Go Phils!

WORLD SERIOUSLY

Tonight begins the end of the baseball season and I will be sorry to see it go. Only seven games remain, unless you believe, as my friend Paul does, that the Phillies will beat the Yankees in six games, in which case only six games remain, leaving us with no real team sport (Football, like boxing and wrestling, is not a sport in my view) to engage in until March, when baseball resumes.

Go Phils.

TRAVELS WITH CHARLIE

With apologies to John Steinbeck, these travels are with Charlie Manuel, the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, not a raggedy dog travelling across the country, although I would like to do that some day. And more, this note is about baseball itself...

Despite the concerted effort of the rich guys who own the teams to ruin baseball, it endures and it sustains itself by memories and nostalgia. You have to be raised in the United States and, maybe, Japan, to appreciate baseball. France won't do it. Belgium, maybe. But they'll have to pronounce BAULLL more clearly.

I once tried to introduce baseball to my girlfriend, Beatrice, an exchange student from France, in the summer of 1960. The Phillies were futile and the old ballpark, Connie Mack Stadium, once known as Shibe Park, was a wreck, but it would continue to host major league baseball for another 10 years. Typically the Phillies would fill about 10,000 of the 55,000 seats available and many less for a day game. I took Beatrice to a day game; a Sunday afternoon match against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

I parked on 21st St. and paid the kid who propositioned me $1.00 to "watch my car, mister," a way to insure having wheels and not milk crates propping up the vehicle after the game. I drove a 1953 Chevy then, purchased with the lucre of my summer job the previous summer on the boardwalk in Ocean City NJ, all $500 of it. It was worth a buck ransom.

We sat along the third base line, I remember, and we played the Dodgers, who had moved to L.A. only two years before, but who were still the team of black America because they had brought Jackie Robinson to the Bigs. Most of North Philadelphia was seated along the third base line too. Everyone had a brown paper bag. And Beatrice and I were treated to every form of booze for the first two innings – Night Train, Baltimore Club, Strawberry Blonde, Jack - we sipped them all. It wasn't long, though, before our newfound friends vacated the seats around us and it wasn't much longer until I realized that I was the reason they had left.

By explaining baseball in front of a crowd who knew everything about baseball, I had alienated my entire section. Telling the infield fly rule might have been acceptable, but who wants to listen to a callow white kid explaining the foul lines? I might have gotten away with strikes and balls, but double plays made them leave in droves and find new seats.

Charlie Manuel would understand this. They left the seats in droves when he came to town too. Beatrice, who has returned to Strasbourg, might not.

RIVER RUN

This has nothing to do with Philly. That's the point.

The Zambezi River runs along the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. Where it crashes over the Victoria Falls, both countries have erected a bridge from which to view the cascade and, incidentally, to cross borders. Below the Falls, the river foam dissipates, the crocodiles sleep on little sand bars and the flow deepens into a meandering river that could be anywhere – Mississippi, Brazil, Paris.

Suddenly, though, a herd of elephants appears on the Zimbabwe side and I know we are not just anywhere. There must be seventy of them. Our guide, who has been managing the outboard motor in our aluminum boat, suddenly shuts it off and whispers at us to be quiet. "I think they may want to swim across," he says, "Don't spook them."

So we sit silently in the hot African breeze as mokurues, dug-out canoes, glide by paddled by native people. They wave at us, careful to be quiet too.

A massive elephant, the herd's matriarch, steps out into the river, proceeds about twenty yards and stops to look around. We are only 50 yards away, but we don't appear threatening and we don't make a sound. Slowly, other elephants join her and they wade out further into the river. Then come the babies, cradled in the crooks of their mothers' trunks. They don't swim but they sure appear to be enjoying the ride.

And now the first elephants in the parade are reaching the Zambia side of the river, where they either shake themselves like poodles or role on the ground, making happy grunts and bleats.

The herd takes about a half hour to make the crossing from Zimbabwe to Zambia, where they continue their trek.

The Guide powers up the outboard and we continue our trek too. But we will never forget the moments.

LA VIE EN ROSE

It was in the summer of 1960-something and I was living in Paris at 10 rue Guy Patin, in an arrondissement you don't want to visit, when I ran out of flints for my Ronson cigarette lighter. Despite the finest French language instruction at my prep school in Germantown and at college, no one had specifically covered the word for "flint."

I borrowed Lee's, my travelling-roomie's, LaRousse, and learned that the translation is "pierre a briquet" which, back-translated literally means "stones of brick." I also inveigled Lee into accompanying me one morning to the local "Tabac" where stamps, envelopes, cigarettes and such things were sold.

Upon entering the Tabac, we were surprised to see so many local Frenchman drinking liquor on their way to work. We assumed that café noir was the morning drink and Courvoisier was reserved for the evening. But we had never seen the poor side of Germantown, where "Baltimore Club" was breakfast.

The bar man takes my order – "je veaux des pierre a briquet, s'il vous plait," says I.

"Oui, oui," says lui, and he ushers outside the bar to a sidewalk table.

So, we sit. I light a Gauloise with the very last spark of my spent Ronson. It is 9 am and Lee and I admire the Parisians on their way to work, a place we will not have to go for many years.

And, here comes the garcon. He has on his tray two bottles of beer that he ceremoniously unveils, and pours into two frosted mugs. "Messieurs," quoth he, "deux bierres a brequenoes" as he bows his way back into the bar.

Lee looks at me. I look at him. We are nineteen years old. It is too early in every way to begin drinking alcohol. Tough brickees.

Ca va.

WHAT JUST HAPPENED?

• It has been not quite a year since we replaced a Presidential buffoon with an educated, articulate, multi-ethnic young man who spoke from his heart about "change." What has happened?
  
• At his confirmation hearing for Director of the CIA, Leon Panetta said that "extraordinary rendition," where we have sent prisoners to foreign countries to be tortured, was a tool he meant to retain.
  
• The President has announced that past crimes by Bush officials would not be investigated – not even by a "truth commission" just trying to establish a record.
  
• Gay military personnel continue to be dismissed at the same rate as before.
  
• Despite consternation when Dick Cheney refused to divulge the names of energy executives who had come to the White House in 2002, the Obama administration refused to release names of its visitors until forced to do so by a lawsuit.
  
• Ours is the most virulent society since Britannia ruled the waves. We maintain more than 1000 military bases in other countries, so many that President Kennedy did not know, until the Cuban missile crisis, that we had nuclear weapons in Turkey.
  
• We have become a national security state bent on imposing our will and our culture on the world. The Bush Administration called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" in a memo written by Alberto Gonzales. Maybe our leaders, the present ones included, think of the Constitution as "quaint," too.
  
• In the words of, sheesh, Nancy Reagan, maybe it is time to "Just say 'no.'"

IN GREED WE TRUST

How did greed become the defining characteristic of the United States of America? When did capitalism, a rather bland 18th century formulation of the obscure British philosopher, Adam Smith, become the money grubbing I-got-mine-screw-you credo of our nation?

How does a country where 30% of its people prefer that the others get sick and die without affordable health care also produce the Peace Corps? How do those Christians, who know very well that Christ healed the leper, rationalize that the person who cleans their hospital room is not able to afford a hospital bed when she is ill?

What kind of two-faced hypocrisy does it take to vote a $1.7 trillion tax cut for the rich in the George W. Bush administration and then to stand on the same Senate floor now and say we cannot afford universal health care Senator Grassley, Senator Hatch?

How, indeed, did greed become the defining characteristic of our country?

HAPPY NEW YEAR

I know, it is not really a new year, except for many of us, it is. For kids returning to school in a new grade, this is a new year. For companies whose fiscal year ends in September, the new year is less than three weeks away. For teachers, this is a new year. And for those of us who love summer and dread winter this is, alas, a new year. Let is put up our tomatoes and peaches and basil. Let us store our tubersand bulbs and dream of next Spring's catalogues.

So happy new year to you and let it be so. Let go of the old year's barriers and tear down your personal walls. Lift up your goals for this year and set a new charge in your ambition machine.

Let the New Year Begin!