Something a little different

I was looking for a home for one of my crappy old overpriced book purchases (I need more shelf space) and took a walk down memory lane.

The book is a 1911 edition of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,  a Persian poet of the eleventh and early twelfth century, translated to English around 1858 by Edward Fitzgerald. I already have this book-- an earlier leather bound edition I picked up for $2 at a yard sale years and years ago. But it's fragile, to say the least, and although I rarely spend over $5 on a crappy old book, I thought it worth $7 to have a volume of the Rubáiyát I could thumb through from time to time.

Some years ago, I read this to Mr. Big Food:

LXXIII

Ah Love! could thou and I 
with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme
of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits
-- and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's
Desire?

 He responded by comparing me to a Summer's Day.

~~

So we have Re-moulded the sorry Scheme of Things entire such that we now enjoy Mississippi Summer Days! BIG Life!

Non! Absenter!

My name, Barbour, is an old French Huguenot name, and my great-great-great-great grandfather Louis LeFleur, a Frenchman, founded a trading post around 1800 that developed into Mississippi's capitol, Jackson, a quarter century later.

I wonder if we Barbour boys ought to set up a business to attract wealthy Frenchmen and successful businesses from France to Mississippi. As a low tax, pro-business state with a regime of rational regulation, we could roll out the red carpet and run up the tri-color over Fort Maurepas. Bienvenue, mes amis!

Says Haley Barbour in "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor French Millionaires." 

Says I, "No! Stay away!"

h/t Yall Politics

Put up

or shut up.

Corn on the cob

Sliced okra

Whole okra

Cucumbers soaking overnight in salt water. I'll rinse and chunk them tomorrow, and they'll soak tomorrow over night in fresh water. And then they will be packed in jars with some seasoned vinegar, and hot water bathed. And then, come winter, we'll have some pickles!

Having been blanched, the corn & okra are now in the freezer. As are two baking sheets of peppers. We'll pickle on Thursday. I hear we'll also be making escapeche (sp? pickled jalapenos and carrots and onions and such). 

Just FYI, in the coming days, I am going to have no sympathy for folks who can't find escapeche (sp), or a decent ear of corn, on the shelf.

I have a wringer.

More crappy old stuff

In the developed world, we forget that there was once a time when washday meant “day” rather than “toss it in the machine and come back in 20 minutes.” In many parts of the world without access to electricity and clean water, that time is still now. Design students Alex Cabunoc and Ji A You of the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles visited the the slums of Cerro Verde, Peru. There they saw women spending days on end hauling water and washing clothes by hand and they came up with a solution. They created the GiraDora, a foot-pedal washing machine that’s inexpensive and portable.

More on the pedal-powered washing machine here.

h/t Instapundit

Moo

 

I forgive cows' stupidity because they give me milk and are tasty when grilled properly.

Folks have asked why we don't have cows here at the Farm. Simple. I'd get too attached. Stupid critters.

Inside the Life of Your T-Shirt

A cotton flower

in a cotton field;

A cotton boll

in a cotton field

regulated by the Food and Drug Administration because cotton seed oil comes from cotton.

From that infallible source, Wikipedia (which is now back on line):

Cottonseed oil is a cooking oil extracted from the seeds of cotton plant of various species, mainly Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium herbaceum. Cotton grown for oil extraction is one of the big four genetically modified crops grown around the world, next to soy, corn, and rapeseed (canola), mostly Monsanto products.[1][2]

Ahh. Monsanto.

Mooooving on... .

Recipe: Cajun Stewed Okra

From Justin Wilson; Why it's called stewed is a good question

CAJUN STEWED OKRA

Okra, sliced

Eggs, beaten, equal in volume to amount of okra

Shredded cheeses (use your imagination)

Heat oven to 350^o. Put okra in a greased casserole dish and pour beaten eggs over. Top with cheeses to cover. Bake until set and cheese has melted.

~~

I'd have called it Oven Baked Okra Omelet.

We have so much okra. Tomorrow we freeze okra.

Recipe: Corn Stuffed Bell Peppers

Fresh!

Unit for unit, peppers have more vitamin C than citrus. And there ain't nothing like fresh corn.

Recipe below.

Stuff it!

Peppers and tomatoes picked this morning. Corn picked about 10 minutes before Mr. Big Food scraped the kernels from the cobs. 

Recipe shortly!

Red Roma

tomatoes

AFTERTHOUGHT: This is not what it looks like to my eye! Fun with color.

Picture this & that

This

That

This more closely resembles what the book looks like to my eye than that-- although this  still needs work. (I'm learning.)

I corrected the photo using GIMP, a free photo editing program for PC and MAC, and following Kat's video instruction at How-to-gimp.com. Kat blogs about photography at Pare and Focus. (Links to all stuff GIMP at at Pare and Focus.) Here's a taste

You can make great pictures with almost any camera. There, I said it.

Here’s the thing… Every time I say that, I can hear people thinking “Oh yeah? Says you with the fancy pants camera…” or “Sure you can with a NEW camera, but not my old camera…”

So last week, I gave myself a challenge. I thought I would put my money where my mouth is by taking some pictures with my husband's 4 year old, 7 Megapixel point and shoot camera instead of my fancy pants DSLR and macro lens. I wanted to make a picture with the point and shoot that I might confuse for a DSLR picture. And I have to say… I think I got close!

I used a little in camera technique, and some tricks in GIMP to turn that point and shoot picture into a photo that almost looks like it was taken with my fancy pants DSLR!

Keep reading Kat's Getting Great Point and Shoot Pictures… The Set Up.

By the way, I've seen Kat's fancy pants camera and if she can get close to the quality of her camera with a four year old point and shoot... I have a lot to learn.

I paid ninetyeight pennies (+ a few more for state tax)

but it's worth one hundred times that.

Edited by Bradley V. Smith; Published by Bantam Books (New York/Toronto/London); 1964

Powers -- Roots -- Reciprocals

Ha. 

Sort of makes my point, doesn't it?

See also Anthem, available in full online here. (See, you don't really need Wikipedia & you don't need the World Wide Web if you own the book!)

Chapter Ten

After hiking deep into a mountain range, Equality 7-2521 and the Golden One discover a house, left over from the Unmentionable Times. It seems exceptionally small to them, and when they find the bedroom, they realize that only two people lived there. They are amazed that two people would live by themselves. They claim the house as their own. Tomorrow, Equality 7-2521 will begin to read the strange books from the house's library.

[my emphasis]

NOLA: Final Thought

The trip home was uneventful. Turns out, when you are anxious to return home, 46 miles of causeway, give or take, turns into just 46 miles at 76mph, or about 2/3 hour, give or take, of road over water. I'm cured. 

After doing all of the getting back home stuff, I sat down to catch up and found that folks at one of my go-to site were discussing Lost Children.

I look at so many of the really nice kids that I meet in our neighborhood and in our church and they are, to put it simply, utterly, totally, hopelessly lost! Many of them have college degrees and still have no idea of what they want to do. They have no idea of how the world works. They are college graduates and they live at home. They wait for someone to help guide them (i.e., parents). Many of them are hopelessly in debt. I would have to conclude that our generation’s parents have failed them.

I purged my thoughts about the kids and parents in the comments. 

RELATED: I wish the dogs could talk b/c I'm curious about what Daughter C's 46 guests cooked here this weekend. 

Back where we belong!

And none too soon!

I bought three crappy old books at the bookstore that kept me from loosing my mind. Two were over priced by my standards-- $7 & $10-- but were definitely worth it. The one that was 98¢ is worth about 9800¢ to me. Funny what folks value, isn't it?

As it turns out

there is a God. He plopped this down in front of me just when I thought I was going to lose my mind this afternoon. It's not that The French Quarter is different than it was 15 years ago-- or is it? Or that the people are different-- or are they? Or that there are more children, or it's hideously more expensive and more vulgar. What was bothering me when I stumbled upon the book store was that I couldn't even list the relevant factors for a poorly framed question. It's so chaotic that it's hard to latch onto a coherent question. 

In the past, New Orleans-- The French Quarter-- had been a place where I tested for, and found,  order.

A store with some over priced crappy old books

The food has been great. For starters tonight, we had an oyster taster platter. Followed by red beans & rice & sausage. Good stuff.

But I do not understand why parents are holding their children's hands outside a strip club on Bourbon Street at 7pm. Wait. I do understand why parents are holding kids' hands. I just don't understand what the parents and kids are doing there in the first place. 

But hey. I'm a Libertarian, not a Victorian. Do what ever the hell you want.

Panorama

Pirates Alley

Color me skeptical

Psychic: a person who is allegedly sensitive to psychic influences or forces; medium.

because I would have thought she'd have seen these wrinkles in her future and have acted in her past to prevent them in her present.

40,000

That's how many men flew helicopters in Vietnam. I've been told by a fellow I chatted with that there are about 1000 here at the reunion, not counting spouses. They are a friendly lot, but they don't seem to be venturing too far from the hotel or planned activities. It would appear they are enjoying eachother's company. 

The first thing the fellow said me after he'd told me the number of pilots was, "of course, a lot of them died, or have since died."

War related: Did you know the National WWII Museum is in New Orleans?

VHPA / For somone my age, it wasn't all *that* long ago

Reunion

The Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association is holding its 2012 reunion at the hotel in which we are staying. Some first thoughts after a few hours of lobby/elevator/(rarely) street interaction.

These are some old guys. Some look older than others.

It is low budget. See the screen shot from VHPA's web site page about the reunion-- that little white box really doesn't load. Almost all of the signs to sign in, reconnect, etc. are hand written. (I wasn't comfortable taking pictures today. Maybe tomorrow.) It's August in NOLA. Cheaper hotel rates. 

I saw a number of kids-- grandkids, I presume. Not a lot. But enough to notice. It looked like some were on holiday that just happened to coincide with Grandpa's reunion but in one instance, I saw a Grandpa introduce a Grandboy to another Old Guy. The Boy and the Old Guy shook hands and then all three were off to talk war stories. I guess.

Both the Pilots and their spouses have very nice name tags-- as hang tags around their necks-- printed with their first names in very LARGE LETTERS. Can't miss 'em if you try. 

I'll pay more attention to this tomorrow but it looks like a number of the former pilots sport metals on their caps. 

Scheduling problems

Typically, when we travel I pen a few posts in advance and schedule them to appear later. As you can clearly see, I did not do that this time. Sorry 'bout that.

But... . 

There was the crossing of Lake Pontchartrain on over 40 miles of causeway.  

There is a meeting-- a big meeting-- here at the hotel of United States Veterans who flew Helicopters in Viet Nam.

There is really nothing quite like the aroma of the French Quarter on a warm August afternoon.

There's Mr. B's Bistro for dinner tonight. 

There's all day tomorrow to wander around.

So stay tuned.