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. . .


click Sam's letter to enlarge
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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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Mini-editorial: Pablo Fanque weighs in on BHO's surprise Nobel Peace Prize

By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor

Yes, I too think BHO's Peace Prize may be just a tad bit premature, but that aside, it's been well worth it to enjoy the agony and apoplexy of the pundits and foot soldiers on the far right. A couple of them--I am pretty sure--were on... the brink of achieving self-ignition. Flame on knuckleheads! Spontaneous combustion can actually be a good thing!

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Digital art: Keelin Curran

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God, The Moon, and F***ing With The Formula

Appropos of the space agency dropping a spent rocket on the moon about three hours from now —



Although, in many ways, I think NASA is one of the coolest things we have ever done, I am always slightly mystified at the way they relentlessly search our corner of the universe for carbon-based life forms, and for water. All this seems to presume that God, as he created Life in other sectors, wouldn't have been somehow tempted to "F*** With The Formula."


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The Day Lady Died by Frank O'Hara

Frank O'Hara is one of my favorite American poets, not only did he pioneer a loose, but wisely and charmingly idiomatic verse form, but he also happened to be a curator of the Museum of Modern Art, probably my favorite museum in the United States. And Billie Holiday is by far and away my favorite jazz singer of all time, even 'though I usually tend to think of jazz vocals in the same category as rock instrumentals. . .

The Day Lady Died
by Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it





and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
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All This Is That Art and Images

Many or most of the photos, images, and art in All This Is That can be found at my Picasa photo site. I don't know if everything is there, but there are several thousand images...
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Megan Fox's vagina

By Pablo Fanque,
All This Is That National Affairs Editor


Megan Fox hints at the location of her pride and joy

I don't know much, really, about Megan Fox (I've never seen her in a movie, or even on TV), or her vagina. I do know she is extremely popular with young men, and has made a lot of provocative statements about her sexuality (not really provocative...she just stated that she is a switch-hitter). She is often listed on "men's magazines'" hottest lists, and while she is not yet on the A list of babes with Britney, Angelina, et al, she seems to be making a run for it.

I do know that over the last few weeks, I've seen various articles, blog posts, and stories in which Megan Fox discusses the power of her vagina, and vaginas in general. In the last issue of Rolling Stone, she goes on at some length about the power of the vagina.

“Men are scared of vaginas,” [Ed's note: apparently not just the dentata variety] she said. She told Rolling Stone that a woman is most powerful when she's “completely in charge of her sexuality."

As for her own nappy dugout? Fox says she possesses a "powerful, confident vagina.”

There does seem to be something of a double standard at work here. You can only guess what kind of storm would hail down if a young male actor began touting the power of his penis.
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Poem: 3 A.M.

The house is still as a painted boat
On a painted sea,

Quiet as the pond
In Monet's Water Lillies,

And as dark
As Mephistopheles' rectum.
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Alien Lore No. 159 - The Russkies open up their Grey/UFO motherlode

Thanks to Jeff Clinton for the tip on this story.

The Russian navy recently declassified its records of close encounters with The Greys and with UFOs, according to the Svobodnaya Pressa news website. Only a few months ago, France also declassified and released their own UFO files....

The records from the Soviet years were assembled from navy reports of close encounters with submarines and ships. The group headed by a deputy Navy commander, Admiral Nikolay Smirnov, uncovered numerous cases of possible UFO encounters, according to the website.

Vladimir Azhazha, former navy officer and a Russian UFO researcher, says “Fifty percent of UFO encounters are connected with oceans. Fifteen more – with lakes. So UFOs tend to stick to the water,” he said. A nuclear submarine, on a combat mission in the Pacific Ocean, detected six unknown objects. After the crew failed to leave dodge their pursuers by maneuvering, the captain ordered to surface. The objects followed suit, took to the air, and flew away.

Dozens of mysterious events went down near the Bermuda Triangle, according to a retired submarine commander Rear Admiral Yury Beketov, in which instruments malfunctioned with no apparent reason or detected strong interference. On several occasions the instruments gave readings of UFOs moving at 240 miles per hour. Underwater.

Navy intelligence veteran, Captain 1st rank Igor Barklay says “Ocean UFOs often show up wherever our or NATO’s fleets concentrate. Near Bahamas, Bermudas, Puerto Rico. They are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, in the southern part of the Bermuda
Triangle, and also in the Caribbean Sea.”

The archives contain numerous reports of UFO encounters near Russia’s Lake Baikal, the deepest fresh water body in the world. Fishermen tell stories of powerful lights shining up from the deep and objects flying up from the water.

In 1982, military divers at Baikal spotted a group of humanoid creatures dressed in silver suits. The encounter happened at a depth of 170 feet, and the divers attempted to catch the strangers. Three of the seven men died, while four others were severely injured. Greys 1, Russia 0.

Vladimir Azhazha says “Skepticism is the easiest way: believe nothing, do nothing. People rarely visit great depths. So it’s very important to analyze what they encounter there.”

Russian Navy officials deny that a collection of UFO encounters exists. Really?
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We're freakin' out, Mr. President

By Pablo Fanque, All This Is That National Affairs Editor
Jack Brummet, Illustrations

President BHO is largely doing the right things--making the right initiatives, making the right friends, searching out the right boogyemen, and working on a nightmarish, hydra-headed number of fronts. but. But. But. He is sometimes, apparently, publicly side-tracked from unblocking the myriad bottlenecks and logjams and from implementing policy. It's beginning to impact his mission, or more correctly, people's perceptions of How's He Doing? Do we think that flying to Copenhagen to throw a Hail Mary for his home town, or having his old Professor and a rogue cop to the White House to settle their differences over a few brewskis has thrown him off course from health care reform, the egg-shell fragile economy, depressing unemployment statistics, and pursuing his double wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? No, not really. But the perception among the public is another story. Every time BHO appears sidetracked, he throws raw meat to the Republicans, Fox News, the neo-con crowd, and even faithful supporters, like us.



It didn't help that the Obamas' speeches in Copenhagen seemed oddly off-point, and, at times, shockingly ego-centric. Michelle Obama, of whom we are big fans, gave a touching speech about her father that couldn't have been less germane to the big question: "Why would we give the Olympics to you? Because it would be such an honor to have them in America? In this town, that has been spattered across the headlines this month as violent, corrupt, and heartless?"

Barack Obama's speech wasn't much better, offering little of substance, and sounding suspiciously jingoistic.

Hey folks, this was a fool's mission. Rio, Tokyo, Madrid, Chicago? Which city would you want to spend a week in? That and the fact that many of the deciders were no doubt treated to trips to Rio, spending a few days fried to the hatline on free booze, great food, and topless white sand beaches. Even BHO couldn't put Chicago over the top in what some insiders say is the tightest race for the Games in its history. Many believe that when Obama elected to go to Copenhagen to deliver the closing remarks of Chicago's final presentation, the move would seal the deal to send the games to Chicago. The President, flying home, received the news that Chicago didn't have a chance. Incidentally, before leaving Copenhagen, BHO held a meeting with one of his military leaders, flown in from the front. This sadly transparent dodge, in the end, did nothing to lesson the avalanche of criticism of The President. It will all die down quickly, of course. It is a tempest in a teapot. . .but it also adds up over time


It's baffling to us why The President is expending his precious political capital on these lesser issues. Michael Steele, the GOP chairman, and a man with whom we almost never agree, hit it on the head (and that is a rarity!):

Michael Steele called the president’s trip to Copenhagen meant to boost Chicago’s chances of hosting the 2016 Summer Games a “noble idea.” He refused to answer if he thought it was a mistake, but said it’s “in the eye of the beholder.”

“If it’s [health care] that's important, Mr. President, then stay home and get it done,” Steele said.
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drawing: face-off

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Poem: Platoon

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We all have a platoon
Of partly-contained,
Spooky and multiple personalities
Ready to burst from the clown car confines.
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Alien Lore No. 158 - The Apollo 12 UFO sightings

Apollo 12, with Charles Conrad, Dick Gordon, Allan Bean was airborne-- less than a minute after blast-off, when it was hit by a bolt of lightning . All electrical equipment shut down, but within three minutes , power was restored. The source of the bolt remained a mystery to space experts. No one could ever really explain where the lightning came from, if it was lightning.

As Apollo 12 rocketed at the Moon, observatories throughout Europe began reporting sightings of two bright flashing unknown objects in the craft's vicinity. One UFO semed to be following the spacecraft, and the other seemed to be traveling in front of it. Both objects were blinking on and off rapidly. On November 15th, the three Apollo 12 astronauts told Mission Control/Houston that they had in fact sighted two "bogeys."

The rest of the story? Crickets, so far.
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Poem: The Jitters

The Jitters

1
We almost always feel less
Safe than we actually are.

And not feeling safe uses
Vast swaths of bandwidth

With its high noise to signal ratio,
Leaving nothing redemptive

In the wake of paralysis
By the jitters.

2
It comes like a hit and run driver
Shooting through the crosswalk

As you stop
To tie your shoe--

Luck and circumstance
Conspire to save you.

3
Every throbbing second you spend here,
You engage in a game of dodge ball,

And bob and weave through a multitude
Of objective hazards, walls, and shoals

Over which you have no control―
And only a fraction of which you ever see.

4
If we knew of every near-miss,
It would be tough to keep shuffling on,

And somehow, we learn just enough
To mostly keep us on our toes.
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