PeaceBang

In Praise of "How To Cook Everything"

SisterBang got me this book for Christmas and it is sheer fabulosity:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0028610105/102-7791653-9284122?v=glance&n=283155

I learned how to make fiddleheads from this guy.
I learned how to make the most delicious savory white beans from this guy (the Southern kind of beans, I learned how to make from BoyInTheBands).

I learned from this book just yesterday that you shouldn’t try to grill shoulder cuts of London Broil for steak, but should upgrade to something loin-ish.
Well, you could have knocked me over with a feathah. There I was all prepared to grill my defrosted London Broil for the Bloggers Picnic, to accompany my proscuitto-wrapped asparagus and green salad with scallions, arugula, mandarin oranges and crispy pea pods.

What would I do?
Listen to Mark Bittman, of course, and make a garlicky beef daub instead!

People, let me just tell you that there is nothing more comforting on the sixth or seventh straight May day of freezing cold and rain than a garlicky beef daub over buttered noodles. I don’t even know what “daub” means, but it was the easiest recipe ever and one of the most delicious comfort food meals I’ve ever had.

I would ask you carnivores what your favorite cut of steak for grilling is, but since it’s never going to stop pouring and I won’t be taking my grill out of the garage at all this year, I won’t bother.

Sorry Alison, I Can’t Kill You Now

Poor Alison wrote in the comments section,

“After we found our basement flooded this morning, I decided to look up the 10-day forecast to find some hope. But it said the next non-rainy day in Boston is a week from Tuesday! Please kill me now.”

Well Alison, I do belong to an organization called Compassion & Choices which advocates for death with dignity and end-of-life choices
http://www.compassionandchoices.org/,

but I’m not sure that a forecast of rain from now through next Tuesday is a valid reason for me to hand over the cup of hemlock.
Be assured, dear Bostonian sister, that I DO FEEL YOUR PAIN.
I have considered driving to the zoo and throwing myself into the lion’s habitat a few times this week. Vitamin D deficiency can do that to you.

I got out of bed this morning at 8:15 a.m. More driving rain. Usually I rise at 6:30 or 7:00 on church days. The cat was most alarmed. She woke me at 7:00 explaining that she was trying to make me breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day, but since she doesn’t have opposable thumbs she couldn’t work the spatula to flip the pancakes. I said I understand and please go away, Human Mother is trying to sleep. We had cereal later.
Took the world’s shortest shower (for me) and did a quick primp.
Strolled into church at 9:30, joined the Second Sunday discussion on the Lord’s Prayer for twenty-five minutes, went and put on my robe, dealt with last minute details and led the service. I think my preaching, which I took in a more slow, considered and relaxed manner than usual, was at its best. I wrote the sermon between 10-12:30 p.m. last night.
Maybe water-logged crankiness and Vitamin D deficiency is good for me.

Coinky-Dink? Or MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE? You Decide!

This is molto bizarro.

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, this page came up on my blog just now as I was shutting down the computer:

http://peacebang.blogspot.com/2006_01_01_peacebang_archive.html

This page, as I am printing out my Mother’s Day service and thinking how close we are to summer.

Very, very strange and inexplicable. Is there a God of Blogs?

Burning Questions

1. What makes something “cute?” How do we really define cute, and does it include a component of humor? I think it must, because things I think of as really cute always make me laugh a little.

2. How do people without access to de-greasing dish soap really get their pots and pans clean? And does it matter?

3. When I thoroughly rinse out all my bottles and cans for recycling purposes, is all the water I am using a worse waste of natural resources than it would be to just throw those items in the trash? In other words, what’s worse: not recycling, or wasting water rinsing everything out?

4. What’s more fun than five consecutive days or rain and occasional torrential downpours in Eastern Massachusetts?
a. a bout of food poisoning or b. sticking pins in your eyes?

5. Why does the top of my cat’s head smell so much cuter than the top of your cat’s head?

Bonus Question:

How hard could it possibly be to write a decent Mother’s Day sermon between now and midnight?

Void Bladder Before Watching

Just for you, PeaceBangers, 3 minutes and 43 seconds of unintentionally hilarious musical hell from Finland…

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8610362188397291938&pl=true

Which one is Armi and which one is Danny?

What do I love most about this video?

Extreme Nordic blondeness
The wankiest dance moves since Olivia Newton John tried to keep up with John Travolta doing “The Hand Jive”
Tight satin pants+ open pirate shirt + huge medallion = take me now, Danny! (Or Armi!)
Pants-wettingly bad choreography
The fact that Armi (or Danny, whichever is the girl) can’t even walk in rhythm down the center of the “stroll” line in the middle of this fabulous dance extravaganza
The boy-and-girl-waving-in-the-car-as-it-flies-into-the-sky finale stolen from “Grease”
and the fact that the whole ensemble appears to be eating trail mix in the final thrilling moments.

Many thanks to PlanetDan

Most Unfortunately Named Product Of All Time

I always wondered what became of this product…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJy5zuNT8Wk&search=fipilele

I actually remember these commercials from the 80’s.
I wonder how much Joan Kelly regrets wearing that powder blue leotard get-up to this day?
And I think that Linda Parker might have had a lobotomy along with her weight loss.

Best line: ” The appetite surpressant in AYDS is not a stimulant!”

Thanks to PlanetDan!

The Pretty Good Samaritan

I was walking to my car in the T parking garage tonight after a concert –feeling “wicked tired” as we say in Boston, when a woman drove up in one of those ginormous Ford Behemoths and asked me if she was in the right spot to pick up passengers from the T.

Well, no, I told her, and then patiently explained how she was going to have to leave the parking garage, kiss $3.50 goodbye, and drive back through to the Pick-Up Only level. It’s confusing, there are no signs, welcome to Boston, no one gives a damn if you get lost or if you drive the wrong way down a one-way bus lane (and risk both death and a $50 fine — whichever comes first) or have to pull a treacherous U-turn to get where you’re going. We Just Don’t. Care.

The woman, a cute chubby middle aged lady, looked like she might gently and mildly have a nervous breakdown. It had just occurred to her that her family might be at ANOTHER T-station waiting for her. She quizzed me on those: were they nearby? Did I think her husband, who was from out of town, might be confused? I told her that both stations would be very hard to find in the dark and the pouring rain, and that her hubby might well be confused but if she had a cell phone she should call him and have him come to this station. I told her that she would have well nigh impossible task finding the other two stations.

She told me that her cell phone had just died. But otherwise she thought it was a jim dandy of an idea.

Oh, heavens. To make a long story short, I wound up phoning her husband with my own cell phone, leading her out of the parking garage (paying her $3.50 fee because I’m a nice gal) and around and around until we found the right entrance to the Passenger Pick-Up only level (this involved getting a bit lost and me rushing out in the pouring rain at a stop light to tell her I was sorry, just follow me!), and I hope, reuniting her with her husband and kids soon thereafter.
(Don’t think I just went and abandoned her or anything: she made me go home as soon as we established that her brood was on their way down the stairs from the train)

She was in town for her mother’s funeral.

Now, here’s what went through my mind when she drove up to me and unrolled her window.
Women: “Excuse me, can I ask you something?”
PeaceBang Interior Monologue:
“Let’s see. I’m all alone late at night at the T station garage. This woman pulls up in a huge SUV. There might be some guy in the back seat ready to abduct me and harvest my organs, or molest and torture me and then kill me. She could be his cute, harmless-looking accomplice. Maybe she got into terrible, crippling debt shopping for all that jewelry on QVC and she promised him that if he paid her credit card bills she would help him capture one juicy looking woman for his sadistic desires.
This could be true, and I could be in real trouble.
On the other hand, it’s probably not true, and even if it is, I do have good healthy organs and someone might be able to benefit from them. And people get tortured and killed all the time, and God receives their souls in the end and the torment doesn’t last forever.
And who do I want to be, anyway? Someone who helps or someone who is too afraid to help? How would I feel if this was me? I HATE being lost. I ALWAYS wish there was someone kind around to rescue me when I get lost. Now I can be that someone for this lady. I think I’ll help.”

As I finally drove away and thought to myself, “Well PeaceBang, you’re not always such a bad kid,” I remembered in a flood a sea of faces of people I’ve helped in just this way over the years. The old woman I met in college when she fell on the sidewalk and I helped her to a bench and talked with her until she was less shaky. The kids I stayed with at the side of the road until help came following an accident. The pregnant woman I stayed with on the side of the highway until her husband came along to fix the flat tire (I can’t fix a flat) and to drive her home. The woman who hit the deer on the street in front of my house and who was clearly in shock, who I steered gently into my house and let her stay there for hours while I called the tow truck and filled out the police reports, and then drove her to her job and explained everything.
The necklace I took off my neck and gave to the young Navy recruit who so admired it, and for whom the symbol had greater meaning than it ever had to me. None of these people friends, none of these people parishioners.

The next time I fear asking for help, I hope I remember how much joy and deep feeling of love and connectedness I have had with strangers who have allowed me to help them in some way. It’s a wonderful feeling. I should remember that the next time I’m accusing myself of being a miserable sinner or snarky beeyotch.

Best, Last Statement on Easter

An excerpt from the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter Sermon this year. It sums up quite perfectly how I feel about Easter:

“For the Church does not exist just to transmit a message across the centuries through a duly constituted hierarchy that arbitrarily lays down what people must believe; it exists so that people in this and every century may encounter Jesus of Nazareth as a living contemporary. This sacrament of Holy Communion that we gather to perform here is not the memorial of a dead leader, conducted by one of his duly authorised successors who controls access to his legacy; it is an event where we are invited to meet the living Jesus as surely as did his disciples on the first Easter Day. And the Bible is not the authorised code of a society managed by priests and preachers for their private purposes, but the set of human words through which the call of God is still uniquely immediate to human beings today, human words with divine energy behind them. Easter should be the moment to recover each year that sense of being contemporary with God’s action in Jesus. Everything the church does - celebrating Holy Communion, reading the Bible, ordaining priests or archbishops - is meant to be in the service of this contemporary encounter. It all ought to be transparent to Jesus, not holding back or veiling his presence.”

This ought to be sent out to every Unitarian Universalist minister on Ash Wednesday to give them 40 days to think about how to bring a living Easter to their people, and not a dead academic analysis or a total avoidance of the powerful Jesus story.

Amen and amen.

Frank Rich Does the Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert has notoriously brutal former NY Times theatre critic (and now op-ed columnist) Frank Rich on his show right now and Rich is actually giggling and muffing all over the place. He just said that President Bush isn’t doing much right now, “he’s just sitting around lactating.” LOL!

It’s hilarious. He’s nervous! But Colbert, an actor himself, just asked a great question. He said, “You’re a former theatre critic. Why are Republicans so much better at the theatre of politics than the Democrats?”
At which Rich responded, “They’re so much better at it, it’s not even funny. They like the simple plot line better…” At which point Colbert broke in, “‘Oklahoma.’ ‘The Pajama Game.’ ‘Annie. The sun’ll come out tomorrow.’”
And the Democrats? Rich and Colbert agreed that they prefer epics like “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night” or “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” or “Sweeney Todd.”

Great point, and Rich is blatantly admiring of Colbert and happy as hell to have gotten through his mock grilling without too many gaffes. The lactating remark, though, will live on. I can’t believe I just saw the infamous FRANK RICH blush and giggle. I mean, when I was growing up he totally made and broke careers. He closed Broadway shows with a a withering glance.

"King and King"

I wanted to love this book, which I read at the store yesterday,

http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?ID=23077

I love the idea, but I found the book itself to be misogynist. All of the women are cruel stereotypes, especially the big, fat, overbearing queen mother.