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The Angriest Justice

Mr. Potato Head in Ecstasy Bust

When I was up visiting Arielle last week she mentioned that a couple friends of hers had been involved in parking day, down here in the City the week before. I was confused at first, envisioning raunchy protest PDAs committed in broad daylight on these city streets or something. But no, PARK(ing) Day, as it turns out, is an attempt to "rethink the way streets are used, call attention to the need for urban parks, and improve the quality of urban human habitats." Originating, unsurprisingly enough, in San Francisco a few years back, this concept of (legally) taking over urban parking spaces and turning them into miniature gardens has spread all the way across this vast land and ended up here on the east coast in this veritable concrete oasis that is New York City. Pretty cool, eh? Read more here.

Quote of the day: "The fun thing about this stage in politics is that almost everything that's being written will be proven wrong." -Mitt Romney

Other quote of the day: "“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women. It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care -- and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’” - Ann Coulter

Picture of the day: ecstatic Milford

talk of the town

This week's New Yorker, already graced with the best cover ever, also has an entertaining tidbit on the Isiah Thomas trial.

anita hill on clarence thomas

Appropriately enough, in the context of the jury's findings against Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden, Anita Hill today has an op-ed piece in the Times responding to Clarence Thomas's just-published memoir.

Clarence Thomas, back in 1991 during his nomination hearings, accused Congress of conducting a 'lynching' against him. This would have made more sense to me had Anita Hill been a white woman accusing him of inappropriate behavior, I guess. But the fact is that she was, is, African American. This would also have made more sense to me, or at least been somewhat more justified, were Thomas a man who supported affirmative action. But he is an adamant opponent of affirmative action, voting against it again and again. And yet here he was flinging around racially charged phrases, turning a Congressional committee into a lynch mob, in order to avoid having to answer awkward and embarrassing questions. As he so eloquently put it, "...as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree." So, according to one of our Supreme Court justices, a woman speaking out against a sexist boss is instigating a lynching. I found him to be disgusting back in 1991, and he seems even more so now, at least in as much of his recent 60 Minutes interview as I could stomach in one sitting. I guess some things never change.

So I am glad that the jury sitting in judgment of Isiah Thomas this week decided that perhaps a woman should be able to accuse a man of mistreating her, to accuse an entire establishment of mistreating her, and not be strung up and lynched for it, figuratively speaking.

best new yorker cover ever

tastes like fall

Got back yesterday from a beautiful weekend upstate. Fell hard for a beautiful tiny baby girl, watched the sun set over a farm after gathering tomatoes, basil, ground cherries, hot peppers, sweet peppers, and sorrel. Spent hours cooking, sipping wine, playing with the cats, crazy Kali & kamikaze Crash, and as always, talking, talking, talking with Ari (only somewhat disagreeing about the follow-up prosecution of the child bride's husband, in the wake of Warren Jeffs' extremely satisfying conviction last week).

This visit's menu, spread over two days

Tomato soup: chop an onion and a bunch of garlic and saute in butter or olive oil with some cayenne or other hot pepper (Ari harvests, dries, and grinds her own hot peppers, tasty but you don't quite know what you're getting); chop up a whole bunch of tomatoes very coarsely (this is a very chunky soup), add with juices to the onions & garlic and let simmer; add a bullion cube (we used a Rapunzel vegan cube); add water if too thick; coarsely chop some fresh basil and toss that in; season with salt & pepper to taste; serve with rosemary kalamata bread, local cheddar cheese, and dry salami.

turnips: wash, cube, roast at 425 degrees, stirring occasionally, until crispy, in a little olive oil & butter, sprinkled with fresh ground pepper and garlic salt

squash mash: one acorn squash, halved, roasted cut side down with a little bit of water at 425 degrees until very soft, then seeded, smashed, mixed with a tablespoon of butter, a dash of nutmeg, and a bit of maple honey

apple sauce: core and dice a bunch of apples (one mixed bag's worth at yet another local farm stand), peeling some of them and leaving on some skins; toss in a pot and pour in some apple cider; add a bunch of cinnamon, a little nutmeg, allspice, ground cloves, and some brown sugar (I also used some buckwheat honey); let simmer for a long time, an hour or so maybe, stirring occasionally, adding more cider if too thick; when apples are good and soft, mash 'em up a little with a wooden spoon; serve. This is delicious served warm over plain boring old vanilla ice cream.

ground cherry pie: mix together in a large bowl 4 cups husked ground cherries, 3/4 cup brown sugar, 2 tablespoons small-pearl tapioca (soaked in hot water for 1/2 hour), 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, and 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon rind; pour into pre-made pie crust (yes, we cheated, but damn it was good), dot filling with butter; cover with a second pre-made pie crust, bake at 400-degrees for 4 minutes, lower temperature to 350 for 40-50 minutes or until top crust is golden.

on the farm

sweet gyrl

helen rose & me

text messaging update

Verizon has apparently changed its mind

text messaging

I recently got a new cell phone under the auspices of the vast and ever-expanding Verizon empire, and have been very pleased with the service thus far. So you can only imagine my disappointment this evening when I saw this headline in the NY Times: Verizon Rejects Text Messages From Abortion Rights Group. What, exactly, did this mean? In my naivete, I pictured Planned Parenthood obsessively sending text messages to Verizon CEOs or something, but no. Apparently while I wasn't looking, texting has become an increasingly popular way for people to sign up to get regularl updates and reminders and such about various and sundry topics, ranging from the weather, to sports, to politics. And NARAL Pro-Choice America is one of the many groups that use this particular medium, and among the many mobile networks, Verizon alone apparently finds abortion so offensive that they refused to carry NARAL's text messaging program.

Now, I may be relatively new to the world of cell phones, so please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that individuals subscribe to these text messaging programs, that they sign up for them, and are thus choosing to receive the information being sent out. It's not like NARAL would be sending inappropriate messages to young children, or attempting to solicit donations from Concerned Women for America members, right? So what's the problem? And if Verizon can randomly decide to prohibit sending out topic-specific messages en masse to people who asked to receive them, can they also start keeping tabs on the rest of us, picking out individual text messages to crack down on? It just seems so blatantly wrong, not to mention economically stupid. And here I just started a 2-year commitment with these people. Damn.

more on ahmadinejad

"But it should never be thought that merely to listen to ideas we deplore in any way implies our endorsement of those ideas, or the weakness of our resolve to resist those ideas, or our naiveté about the very real dangers inherent in such ideas. It is a critical premise of freedom of speech that we do not honor the dishonorable when we open the public forum to their voices."
-Lee Bollinger, Columbia University President, 9.24.07

this from Salon: Ahmadinejad, Big Man On Campus
also Bollinger's remarks
also Ahmadinejad's remarks
this from CNN: Ahmadinejad Speaks; Outrage and Controversy Follow
this from the NY Times: Mr. Ahmadinejad Speaks
this from the Times of London: US threats are the real danger to peace, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tells New York
this from Time Magazine: Why Ahmadinejad Loves New York
this from the New York Daily News: Grinning Madman Squirms at Columbia
this from Slate: Ahmadinejad's Dangerous Game
this from the New York Post: U. Da Man! Boss Hits Iran Prez With the Ol' College Fry
and lastly, from the Onion: Putting Pressure on Iran

recently watched films

I've been making poor Mako watch movies with me lately, my usual cheerful genre. Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, a quirky, upsetting, yet oddly beautiful tale of a disintegrating middle-class Brooklyn family in the 1980s, and Stanley Nelson's recent (and self-explanatory) documentary Jonestown: the Life and Death of People's Temple. Both highly recommended, though the latter was almost impossible to sit through, even given my fascination with the horror of Jonestown as a child.

a hero of mine

This weekend's Times Magazine has a wonderful article about Justice John Paul Stevens, well worth reading.

controversy on campus

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, of the lovely nation of Iran, will be speaking here at good old Columbia in a couple days during his whirlwind trip to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly. His request to lay a wreath at Ground Zero has already been soundly slapped down.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about all of this, about his speaking here, his request to honor the dead of 9/11, the rejection of said request, the fact that I will have to go through security to get to work next week to protect a man who would probably argue that people such as myself should be in prison. Or executed, what with the feminist tattoo, short hair, and unfortunate tendency to ridicule and condemn religion of all ilks.

I wonder, too, if Saudi Arabian leaders wanted to lay wreaths at Ground Zero, would we let them? The hijackers were not, as far as I know, from Iran, but Ahmadinejad is more publicly offensive, and a part of the Axis of Evil and all, and Saudi Arabia is not, even though most of the hijackers were Saudi Arabian. It's just so much easier to hate Iran, and its strange and sometims funny leader, than it is to hate a country we are dependent on for our oil.

See the article here, which I am pleased to say will be accessible to everyone now that the New York Times has finally given up their annoying online restrictions. As they so modestly put it in their ad campaign promoting their new open-access policy, "Now everyone is entitled to our opinions." Sounds a little like me.

'Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.'

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex