Jew Food?

Category: dribblings

for dinner tonight i made potato latkes. i’d never had them before, but i saw a simple recipe and thought, “that sounds good. i bet i could do that.” plus, by substituting AP gluten free flour, jimmy could eat them too. boosh!

potato latkes:

2 cups peeled shredded potato
1 Tbsp grated onion
2 ½ Tbsp AP flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp Cavender’s Greek Seasoning (i added this. i love that stuff. i put it in everything.)
3 eggs beaten (i know, it seems like a lot of eggs, but it worked.)
½ cup peanut oil for the frying pan

here’s what you do:

i put my oil in the pan and put it on medium. i have an electric stove, that’s why i started the oil first.

now peel your potatoes. i used 4 small potatoes. then shred them with your cheese grater. i used the big holes. (that’s what he said.) then you’re supposed to take the shredded taters and put them in cheesecloth to squeeze out the 10 gallons of water that potatoes have in them. i did not have cheesecloth so i used paper towels. shut up. it worked.

i put the taters in a bowl. then i grated the onion using the small holes on the grater (what he said) and i used a paper towel to kind of dry that up too, but it was basically just mush so don’t worry about it and throw it in the bowl with the taters. using a small bowl, beat your eggs.

put the dry ‘gredients in with the taters and mix that up with a fork or something. then add the eggs to the taters and mix that up good too. it’s a bowl of stringy looking mush. DO NOT PANIC. IT’S ABOUT TO GET DELICIOUS.

now check your oil. is it hot enough yet? if you are using my stove, no, it’s not. so turn it up some more. “but jaimie,” you might say,” i’m not using your stove. how do i know if my oil is ready?” well, what i did was take a teenie pinch of flour and sprinkle it in the oil… if it sizzles then you’re ready to fry.

i used a slotted spoon to scoop out the potato glop and put it in the oil. when it browned good on the bottom i turned the latke to let the other side get brown. you’re wanting a crispy outside and a soft inside (the inside wasn’t gooey. was it supposed to be gooey? i didn’t want it to be gooey at any rate. if it’s supposed to be gooey then gross, i wanted the egginess to be done, you know?) check it:

 

it’s basically a potato pancake. serve it hot. you can then put a dolop of sour cream on it, but i got really clever at the grocery store and bought some french onion chip dip. oh hell yes.

right, so. i was also craving sausage. which, i know, screws up the Jewishness of my dinner. but i did use turkey sausage so… i don’t know. it was awesome though.

best of all, Mr. Fleegan, who is kind of particular about trying new foods, loved them! boosh! we’ve got a new favorite around here!

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crazy phrase #612

Category: dribblings

Random Acts of the Apostles

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EoT Painting and Adventure Club part IV

Category: dribblings

i totally forgot about this adventure. we went on this adventure in January. we loaded up in the jeep and drove to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia to visit the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park. i know, our adventures are badass. Part of this Civil War battlefield is in Chickamauga, Georgia and it goes all the way over to Chattanooga, TN. it is wicked huge. because of it’s hugeness it is impossible to see everything in one Adventure Day. so we did the museum (with a short movie presentation) and then drove to about three sections of monuments. there are over 700 monuments/statues around the battlefields. like i say, it’s impossible to do it all in one day.

oh, but Eric, there is a marathon that takes place over there, and that would probably be a cool one.

the museum had loads of cannons and guns and of course:

dioramas!


i thought this one was great seeing as how it was made out of popcicle sticks, macaroni, and tempera paint.

 


hey, that’s the face i make! no fair, Johnny Reb. now i’ll have to make a dumb face.


see?!

i happen to not be an expert on Civil War statuary. i know that stacks of cannonballs mean something. if it’s a short stack it means one thing, if it’s a tall stack it means something else. one means it was the site of an HQ the other means a general died there. that’s my dodgy knowledge of CW statuary.


see? that’s a short stack out in the middle of somewhere marking something.

one thing that i did not notice until i came home and started looking at my pictures is that acorns seem to feature in lots of monuments. i’m not good at symbiology (or nameology) (ha!) so i don’t know what the hell they mean. i could take a guess though, and better yet, i could totally just make up something: These acorns are not regular acorn size. they are big. and they are probably modeled after the acorns that fall from the Great Southern Colossal Oak tree. it’s common knowledge that these large acorns (or megacorns, as they were called back in the 1860s) were often used as ammunition in the Confederate trebuchets. this led to the popular phrase, “the acorn don’t fall far from the tree, it falls far from General Beauregard Culpepper Jackson, you cussed Yankee reprobates!”

my public school education has served me well.


can you spot the acorn in this one? it’s either an acorn or one of the Confederate army’s flying saucers. what? you’ve never heard of H. L. Hunley and his secret saucer Hunley II which was part of the CSS Saucer Brigade? for crying out loud, did you even go to school?

“but you ain’t got no hands, Lieutenant Dan!”


there’s no acorn on this statue, it merely portrays a soldier who had his hands blown off my a megacorn.

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clever cokes

Category: Uncategorized

remember the supermarket snowman?

well, dig this:

i know it’s a Coke display, but if they could’ve used some Pepsi boxes it would’ve been awesome.

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EoT Painting and Adventure Club part III

Category: dribblings

last week we had to go to Anniston to price out a paint job. we decided to make a day of it and go to the Berman World History Museum (or Berman Museum of World History, i don’t know what they call it). if i had to descibe the Berman Museum in one word it would be: guns.

they had things other than guns as well. museum-y things like:


suits of armor. i thought the middle one looked like he had to wazz.


no museum must be without a life-size diorama of some sort. i think it’s in the bylaws of museumship.

also at the Berman there were quite a lot of Remingtons. i’d say a dozen or more. i’m not sure if they’re part of the permanent collection or on loan.

they had some Napoleon stuff and quite a bit of Mussolini stuff. they had a kit of combs and brushes and other hair setting stuff that supposedly belonged to Napoleon. they had Ns on them anyway.

more guns!

they had lots of little figures/statues from all over and about all over.


Cossack!


Conquistador!


Zouave!

remember how John Surratt, Lincoln assassin co-conspirator, escaped to Canada and across the Atlantic and made it into Vatican City and joined the Papal Zouaves there? and remember how, you’d think that back in the 1860s that would be a great way to escape because who and how in the hell would they ever find you? but that they did catch him? and then he escaped again, this time to Egypt. but remember how they caught him again? and then, remember how he was tried, but kind of got away with it all even though HIS MOTHER HAD BEEN HANGED FOR THE SAME CRIME?

OH SURE, ACT LIKE I’M THE ONLY ONE.

what?

oh yeah?! WELL MAYBE YOU SHOULD READ A BOOK ONCE IN A WHILE.

the museum had lots of WWI&II displays. and i especially liked to see all the medals from the different countries.

yes, there was a dead wasp in the display case. i can’t tell you the glee i felt when i saw it, knowing i’d get to pull the thorax gag again. (heh. thorax gag.) (READ A BOOK)

there was a whole section of Asian jade, statues, and glassware. but the lighting was really dark, and most of my pictures came out a bit blurry.


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‘brary ‘blog

Category: dribblings

i haven’t blogged about the ‘brary in a long time. the patrons must be behaving themselves.

this year’s Big Read (for Alabama, anyway) is The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. i’ve tried to get excited about it, but i just can’t. in fact, when i found out it was Tom Sawyer my first reaction was a very whiny, “nooooooooo.” which led to a tirade, “is this because we’re in the south? do we ALWAYS have to go to Twain JUST because we’re SOMEwhat close to the Mississippi? can we pick our own book?”

look. Mark Twain is a national treasure. he’s probably THE MOST FAMOUS American author of ALL TIME. i appreciate that, i do. but from middle school to college i had to read Tom Sawyer twice and Huckleberry Finn thrice. and i blame this on lazy/uncreative teachers AND the fact that i went to school in the south. i’m not sure what other regional equivalents there are, but perhaps if i had grown up in New England i’d be sick to death of Thoreau? “if i have to read that hippie manifesto one more time i’m going to cut down and pave a forest!”

am i close?

to get the funding or freebies or whathaveyou you have to use the book They pick. and They picked The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

so our ‘brary had a creative event. we had a Not Tom Sawyer’s Fence decorarting fun time event. people (all ages) came out and decorated a piece of white poster paper (that had lovingly been cut into the shape of a pointy fence picket) with collage and/or magic markers. it was a hit with the public.

some poor sap had pre-cut many pictures out of many magazines for the event. this clever person rightly guessed that it would be really convenient to have pictures to choose from as well as have magazines on hand for people to search through to find pictures of their own. most people used the pre-cut pictures. this was vindication for when the clever person’s coworkers would tease her saying, “are you playing with paper dolls again?”

the event was a success! the adults had more fun than the kids. they even wanted to know when we were going to do it again!

note to self: plan some kind of Art Night at the liberry.

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George Washington did what?!

Category: Uncategorized

i watch [adultswim] cartoons all night long because i like that the last thing i do before i fall asleep is laugh at cartoons. the past two nights have been a little different. last night there was a Tina Turner concert on the Ovation channel, and you know i watched that before i flipped back to [adultswim]. this concert wasn’t the one in England, but the one in Amsterdam. it was great, but i had tears in my eyes the whole time because my love for Tina is bittersweet.

the night before that i watched the last part of a George Washington doc on the History Channel. It was one of those So you Think You Know George Washington, Huh? Yeah, Well You Don’t Know! You Don’t EVEN Know! kind of documentary. the show is trying to shock and awe with it’s NOT ONLY DID HE CHOP DOWN THAT CHERRY TREE, BUT HE LIED ABOUT OTHER STUFF TOO. and LOOK AT THESE FUCKED UP DENTURES HE WORE. that kind of thing.

the the show starts falling all over itself all, “WHAT DO YOU THINK HE REALLY LOOKED LIKE?! omg!”

then came this conversation:

“he was one of those asshole Virginia slave owners, y’know.”

“yeah, he fucked ’em.”

“no, no. that was Thomas Jefferson.”

“he fucked Jefferson too?!”

“HA!”

“thank you.”

“i’m putting this on the blog.”

“i know.”

to be sure: those dentures were fucked up.

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6. Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder, and the Case of Anjette Lyles by Jaclyn Weldon White

Category: 50 Books

6. Whisper to the Black Candle: Voodoo, Murder, and the Case of Anjette Lyles by Jaclyn Weldon White

Ah, the first true crime book of the year. I usually read true crime in the summertime as my Summer Book Junk Food, but one of my coworkers read it and told me it was good.

It’s a compelling story. Anjette Lyles lived in Macon, Georgia in the 1950’s and owns/runs a popular restaurant downtown. She’s popular. Everyone loves her. They all eat at her diner. Over a period of time she poisons two husbands, a mother-in-law and one of her daughters. She goes down for murder, and was supposed to get the death penalty, but times as they were, people were freaked out about it because she would have been the first white female to be executed in Georgia. So she’s decalred insane (which she pays up, big-time.) and there you go.

It was crazy to me that she was into voodoo. Unfortunately the voodoo part in the book isn’t really investigated much. It mentions that she had parephenalia (roots, potions, candles) but it never mentions how she got invoved in it. This lack of voodoo stuff (seeing as how it’s mentioned IN THE TITLE) was the only disappointing part of the book.

It’s a quick read. No draggy slow spots. Even the court scenes are quick.

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5. The Moment of Psycho by David Thomson

Category: 50 Books

we “ran out” of internet here last week. that’s what i told people, anyway. we really just changed providers, but it sounded much more hiilarious to say that we ran out of internet. i couldn’t update the blog without at least half a bushel of ‘net, which means i did some fancy book readin’ instead.

the actual title of this book was: The Moment of Psycho: How ALFRED HITCHCOCK Taught AMERICA to LOVE MURDER. That’s how it was written on the cover and title page. I’m not sure if that was on purpose? To visually “hack up” a title all: Italics! CAPS LOCK! Italics again! YELL! I mean, this is a book about Psycho.

You can tell the author really knows his stuff about movies and popculture. But this book didn’t quite gel right for me. At the beginning of the book the author seems to really like Hitchcock’s work and Psycho in particular. He knows a lot about both. And I do love that he puts together the idea of Psycho being the first mainstream slasher flick and that after that it seems America was open to that genre.

In fact, that whole idea inspired a conversation I had with Mr. Finlayson about things being the first in a genre. And we thought that would make an interesting class of some sort.

The first half of the book the author talks about Psycho and Hitchcock and America At That Time, and that’s all great. But then the book sort of changes. And it seems like Mr. Thomson changes gears and seems to blame Psycho on all the bad movies that come after it. And he seems kind of sneery about it. And I couldn’t tell if he likes or dislikes Psycho and Hitchcock. I kept thinking, “Wait. Weren’t you just saying how great Hitch was for pushing the censor envelope? And now you wanna be all, “Way to go, Hitch. Texas Cahinsaw Massacre is all your fault.” I’m not sure you get to have it both ways.”

On one hand I get it, Hitch started something and then others picked it up and made it even more violent and gross and to what benefit? But on the other hand, isn’t this the point of the book?

I did like the part where he talks about the movies that came after, and gives a brief synopsis and what parts they “borrow” from Psycho. However, he gets a bit too clever in some, and while I’m a sucker for clever, there is a line, and that line is: don’t be a show off. He does come off as a know-it-all, and he probably does know it all, but I found it kind of annoying that at one point he’s all, “And yeah, Tarantino probably saw all of Hitchcock’s films, but when’s he going to grow up anyway?” (i’m paraphrasing, i don’t have the book in front of me. but he did ask when Tarantino was going to “grow up”. This book came out in 2009.)

Really? You’re going to pick on Tarantino? I would like to point out that Tarantino writes AND directs his films. And? I’m willing to bet that he ALSO carefully sets up his shots, perhaps just as if not more than Hitchcock.

I was really miffed about that, partly because I really like Tarantino films, but also because it seemed really pointless to talk about a movie as important or groundbreaking, and then put down films that came after it. Or if not put down, then to treat them like they’re sophomoric.

But that’s just me.

Like I say, he gets too clever towards the end and at one point he even calls Norman Bates a diva.

I know, right?!

Now, while it’s implied that Norman Bates is a homosexual (and perhaps well-known that Anthony Perkins was homosexual-ish.), I don’t think anyone could really call Bates a diva. Yes, he’s in drag, but he’s not singing a Diana Ross song as he slash and hacks.

I love snarkiness, but the diva line just doesn’t work. Probably because it’s wrong.

Mr. Thomas ends the book talking about how he’s driven the desert road in California, and that while the motels could be seen as creepy now that Norman Bates is in our minds… that really they are very nice places and you shouldn’t be afraid. This last bit doesn’t fit at all. If it was going to fit (or, I should say, if it could fit) then the book should have started off with a personal bit about driving the roads blah blah blah creepy whatever, while easing the book into YOUR POINT. then tell about the Psycho bit, (then cram in The Birds bit you put in, for what, i don’t know, but it’s there, THEN talk about the slasher flicks to follow Psycho (although you don’t have to make it sound like a bad thing. [He actually criticizes The Silence of the Lambs. THIS IS WHAT I’M SAYIN’.] homages aren’t all bad, plus I happen to like visual quotes.) THEN end it on the last bit of your road trip advice bullshit.

Or just leave the road trip out.

This book had an interesting idea, I just don’t think it was executed very well.

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and in other news:

Category: dribblings

Jenara, i snapped a pic of this in case you didn’t get to see it. it was only up for a few days.

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