The balloon boy fiasco & aftermath

By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor



After yesterday's balloon boy news day, today we experience an amazingly pointless and endless postmortem of the balloon boy "story," including some serious rifling of the family's figurative underwear drawer. All in all, this was a pretty good installment of America's short attention span theatre...


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Strange Halloween Costumes 2

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OK. This one's pretty weird. It might have been funny without the kids. The daughter holding the costume junk just makes it flat out sick.



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Now, this one. . .show this to your youth if you want to be done with the whole tooth fairy nonsense. I don't think anyone wants this cat flying in through their window.


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Doll Man even gives me the heebie jeebies.


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Again, verging on the improper.
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Paella Recipe.

Although I often cook and come up with new recipes, I've only published a few recipes here in five years--mainly because I'm good at lists of ingredients, and bad at instructions. This is a tried and true one I often make for friends and family...

You can make this recipe using only the shellfish or the chicken and sausage, or any combination you like. It is gluten free. I have made a vegie one a couple of times. For 6-8 people:

Paella

12 pieces chicken (I usually use thighs and drumettes) or 1-4 lb chicken cut into 8-10 pieces
1 pound raw shrimp, shelled (if you have the time, simmer the shell, tails, and even heads for ten minutes in the chicken stock and then strain out the shells ).
½ - 1-pound Chorizo, cut into ¼ inch slices. I like the cured kind, not the grainy, bulk version you usually find.
1 lb small clams (steamers or manila) in the shell, lobster, mussels, or cockles, conch or snails.
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
½ tsp saffron, (more, if you love saffron: I do) soaking in 1/2 cup hot white wine
2 cups Valencia or Arborio rice
1 onion, chopped
1 green pepper, chopped
1 tomato chopped
4-6 cloves minced garlic
3 ¾ cups homemade chicken stock (canned/cartoned is OK but not the same)
optional: 2 tsp, smoked hot Spanish paprika (it’s good, and you can find it everywhere now)
1/2 to 1 cup of peas
1 1/2-teaspoon salt, a few healthy grinds of fresh pepper
optional: Spanish piquillo peppers – they only come jarred

I've made a vegetarian/vegan version for friends substituting a pound of mushrooms (halve them and saute them in butter or olive oil), green beans, artichoke hearts and piquillo peppers. But you have to make your own vegie stock, because commercial ones are almost all pathetic.

Preheat the oven to 375.

Brown the chicken in 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the paella pan. Set aside. Brown the chorizo in the same pan. Remove to a plate and keep warm with the chicken (cover it loosely with foil).

Heat the white wine with the saffron and let soften for a few minutes.

Add two-three tablespoons of olive oil to the paella pan and heat to medium.

Mince the garlic, and chop the onion, green pepper, and tomato roughly. Sweat the vegetables for a couple of minutes and add the rice. Stir for a couple of minutes.

Add the saffron-wine mixture, and, optionally, the smoked paprika. Coat the rice well and stir for two minutes more.

Add the chicken stock to the rice and stir. Add the salt and pepper. Now, add the chicken, and sausage. Stick it in the oven.

After fifteen minutes, take out the paella, add the peas and tuck in the shelled raw shrimp and scrubbed clams (or lobster or crab or mussels).. Toss in a handful or more of chopped piquillo peppers. Cook ten to fifteen minutes more.

After cooking 20-25 minutes total, remove from oven and let sit five minutes before serving. If it is too wet after 25 minutes, stir, and give it five more minutes.

Garnish with parsley and lemon or lime wedges and serve with a hearty red Spanish wine and a simple salad. I usually open the meal with a tiny cup of gazpacho. For desert, do a caramelized flan, or pears poached in white wine with sugar and vanilla (Julia would tell you to make a sabayon [zabaglione] sauce for this).
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Hallowe'en Costume Ideas 1

One of our favorite costumes. . .from All This Is That, October, 2007:

Jason Larsen sent this picture, found somewhere on the internet. I don't know if the youth in the picture was in training as a young Nazi, or if this was a Halloween costume. It reminded me a little of the time in South Park where Eric Cartman dressed up as Hitler for Halloween. The principal made him take it off and gave him a ghost costume instead. Of course, the ghost costume looked exactly like a Ku Klux Klan hood and robe...



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Poem: The Fog

I don't know if I'm dreaming or awake,
If I should go to sleep or wake up,

Quit dreaming I'm awake
Or imagining I'm asleep.

I don't know whether to
Spectate, participate, or abrogate.
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self portrait fortysomething and fortysomethingtwo

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Poem: Torches & Pitchforks

With crackling torches lit
And pitchforks raised,
The peasant horde

Marches ungoverned,
Searching for real
And confected monsters.

The posse is a mindless beast,
And the agglomerated mob
Brims with blood-lust

And madness. The whole
Is far less than the sum
Of its parts:

Each new body adds mass,
But each fresh outrage
Diminishes the hive's brain.

One if by land; two if by sea.
They're coming for you
And coming for me.
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A letter from Son of Sam during the Summer of Sam

When I moved to NYC, it was, as Spike Lee called it, "The Summer of Sam." David Berkowitz was nabbed in a few months, and deposited in the Brooklyn House of Detention, right across the street from our apartment. This is one of the letters he wrote to the press as his killing spree continued. . .


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Poetry Reading in Iraklion, Crete

This is kind of interesting, but possibly to only me. I wrote this when I was in Greece fifteen months ago and it was buried in the drafts folder on my blog. So, a year and change later, here it is...

Jack in Crete. July, 2008.

We stumbled into a Greek poetry bookstore today. We chatted with the owner, and I picked out a handful of books (being constitutionally unable to walk out of a bookstore empty-handed) I was surprised to see translated into English. Nikos Migiakis is the world-wise,and amiable proproietor of the Poetry Bookstore in Heraklion, on the island of Crete. We warmed up to each other and started asking questions back and forth. Keelin and I asked him where we would find some of those incredible honey doughtnuts/frittters we had on our last visit here. Guess what? They are just as illusory as the formerly ubiquitous barelled restsina, which he also confessed was now very hard to find. In fact on this trip to Greece, I never saw Retsina dispensed from a wooden barrel. Every single restaurant and bar served it in the bottle.


We kept chatting, and I would point to a book and we would both make these unlikely name drops of people we mutually loved. The owner looked up some of my poetry on the internet and then hauled out a big jug of home-made wine. He wanted to talk poetry. After a glass of wine, he rolled a cigarette and handed me two books of translations of Kazanstakis and Odysseus Elytis. He wanted me to read two long poems in English. He had never heard the poems in English. We both had a great time hearing them. The Elytis was a shorter poem, and later Del told me he thought it was a great poem. It is a very good one, I decided later when I read it. I couldn't tell while I was reading it in the bookstore, alond. Tourists stumbled in to buy the guidebooks he sold to fund his poetry enterprise.


Next, I read the long Sequel to the Odyssey. By now, we'd had two or three glasses of that fruity but crackling crisp home-made Cretan wine. People were smoking cigarettes. The owner, paused every few minutes to roll another.


Here we were, in the middle of the day, laughing in the store, drinking wine, and whenever a tourist came in to buy a book, he was glad to see them, but he didn't really want to get overly involved with their purchase of a Greek history book or a Lonely Planet guide. But alas, friendos, you don't think he makes a living selling Greek versions of Leonard Cohen or Garcia Lorca, do you? No. Thank God, he is across the street from the magnificent Heraklion Museum, and he has art books, tour books, books on Greece in general, in racks out front of his store. But none of those books seemed to enter the inner sanctum. . .the poetry bookstore proper.


Nikos had an amazing selection of Greek translations of modern poets...He also had me make a list of ten more people he should have. Of course, his mainstay was Greek poets in Greek, with a huge section of translations into Greek. His selections of the classics, and the beat and beat descendants was good, except he did not have Phillip Whalen, or Gregory Corso. Ginsberg, Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, Ferlinghetti, even Denise Levertov and Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan were represented. I urged him to find John Berryman, Emily Dickinson, James Wright, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas,
William Wordsworth--most of them he knew, but was often unable to secure them in translation into Greek.



I was limbered up by now, and although I hadn't read the Sequel for twenty-five years, I was totally swept up in the fantastic moment. . .me in this temple of down home culture, barely able to read the Greek letters this time around, and now jumping on the reading. Reading cold can so often be extremely harrowing. But in this reading, somehow I was filled with the spirit of Greece, and I channeled Kaz' and I felt Odysseus running through every single line. I kept almost stumbling, but the poem was so perfect for this wonderful moment, that I somehow pulled it off. What a great, random find and event. I have now had my first European poetry reading, and made a friend in the poetry world of Greece.

[1] Hi! This is a satellite data-cluster that is tangentially related to the subject in the article, but interesting on its own.

The homonym for Cretan is, unfortunately, cretin--which describes a person with severely stunted physical and mental growth , but, like such words as spastic, idiot, and lunatic, also is a word of less enlightened times (and believe me, I often have a hard time thinking of us as enlightened in the least). buse. Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common (see below); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then spread more widely in popular English as a markedly derogatory term for a person who behaves stupidly. Because of its pejorative connotations in popular speech, health-care workers have mostly abandoned cretin.

Cretinism is a condition of due to untreated congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones (hypothyroidism) or from prolonged nutritional deficiency of iodine.
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Self Portrait No. 42: jack brummet digital art

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Saturday Dean Ericksen, part 2

Dean Ericksen cuts a rug with a combo.

Dean Ericksen, plushie

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