Urban gardening dreams

Sunday morning is for lazy reading and coffee, and adding ideas to the "Maybe/Someday" project list, like "start a vegetable garden....next year."

This morning I read all the posts in "The Starter Garden", a blog in the NYTimes Gardening section by Minnesota novice gardner (and professional writer whose work I've enjoyed in City Pages) Michael Tortorello, in which he has been chronicling his adventures this summer creating a vegetable garden in the city. I've always enjoyed his writing, and he started some great conversations among newbie and experienced gardeners all over the country with his posts about about how to get started, germinate seeds indoors, get rid of the lawn, use manure or not, deal with rabbits and deer, face the triumphs and disappointments of gardening. It looks as if there are many other stories in that section that I'll enjoy ("Peter Rabbit Must Die" sounds like the response of many a gardener who has discovered how fast rabbits can raze your garden to the ground.)

I had given some thought to doing something like that this summer, but remembered how back-breaking the work to start a garden is (I've done it with others twice; once in Berkeley and once in Minneapolis), and I ended up buying a share with a CSA instead for my veggies, and trying to grow some herbs on my back porch (with mixed success--I am a lousy gardener by myself, but an enthusiastic helper with others).

I'm going to take it in small steps. First step is to read other people's stories! I thoroughly enjoyed this book: Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter. And she has a blog! and it's just as awesome as her book, which I loved, loved, loved and am willing to lend to anyone who promises to give it back eventually.

Mustard greens

In my CSA box from Featherstone Farms today, there were four kinds of tomatoes (little yellow ones shaped like pears, orange sweeties, a greenish-red heirloom, and several roma style cooking tomatoes), summer squash, bell peppers, basil, red onions, green beans, salad greens, cucumbers, and a bunch of mustard greens. I love my CSA deliveries! Opening the box is like opening a gift every week.
I often crave greens, any and all of them, especially bitter greens. I washed and ripped the leaves off the coarse stems, and cooked them down in the water left over from steaming the beans. I ate some with my salad, and put the rest in a container for later. There was almost a cup of broth left over, and I'm drinking it now. I like the flavor, and mustard greens have a huge amount of vitamins A and C, as well as other nutrients.
Nutrition has always fascinated me, and I just discovered asite called Nutrition Data, a good source of basic information presesented in the familiar USDA label format. An even better site is World's Healthiest Foods because it gives detailed explanations of the health benefits associated with the nutrients in specific foods. The entry on mustard greens explains why mustard greens might be particularly good for the lungs, the liver, and the joints, but not so great for people who have kidney or gall-bladder problems (because of the presence of oxalates). It reminds me of the kind of information that fascinated me when I started using Laurel's Kitchen to cook with, many years ago. The New Laurel's Kitchen is practically a textbook of nutrition as well as a cookbook.

Here is their list of the "worlds healthiest foods," (129) of them, according to these criteria: nutrient dense, whole foods, that are familiar, available, affordable and taste good.

Tutting (updated)

LOVE THESE GUYS!



Di Zhang (Moon), Phillip Chbeeb (Pacman) and Hokuto Konishi (Hok) here integrate waving and hand tutting into a dance they apparently created and filmed in just three days. Moon and Chbeeb teach and dance with a group called MarvelousMotion. Chbeeb was a very popular contestant on Season 5 of So You Think You Can Dance (sytycd), while Hok competed in Season 4 (and his crew auditioned together earlier). Hok and his buddies are now the Qwest Crew which won America's Best Dance Crew (abdc) last season.

Tutting (as in King Tut) is a type of hip-hop dance movement that emerged in the early days of hip hop dance, along with popping and locking. The group of dancers called The Electric Boogaloos had a huge influence on young kids who saw them on Soul Train (omg, awesome!).

Tut movements were inspired by Egyptian images and meant making right angles with the arms; these movements have been refined into various types, including hand tutting, which you can see here. Click on some of the links below for some more You Tube videos:

pacman chbeeb hok hokuto konishi di zhang moon tutting waving popping sytycd abdc
The masters break it down for us:

Grizzly Bear song, fan video by Gabe Askew

Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear from Gabe Askew on Vimeo.

Everyone's passing this around, for good reason. Charming and lovely!

Spamblog? moi?

I was away for a week, a whole week! and kind of off the grid, but while I was on the road, I casually deleted a terse email purporting to be from Blogger, claiming that my blog was acting like a spamblog and it would be frozen until I contacted them. And that if I didn't contact them in 20 days my blog would be deleted! I always assume this type of email is phishing, so I hit delete and thought no more about it. But when I went to write a post, it turned out that for some reason, which I have yet to discover, this blog had indeed been locked down. After requesting a review, I can now have access to my blog, but this is the message I see:

Your blog is marked as spam

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

We received your unlock request on August 25, 2009. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

According to their description, my blog does NOT have the characteristics their algorithm is supposed to detect, and I am not a spammer or a bot, but what a curious incident. In the first moment, I felt guilty, the way I used to feel decades ago when they first installed those anti-theft gates in bookstores and libraries; even though I wasn't stealing, I was sure the alarm would sound and I would be hauled off and searched. As with the annoyance of car alarms and malfunctioning security systems in stores, that initial guilty reaction long ago gave way to exasperation, then resentful acceptance. And as with the security protocols in the airports, where I have been searched and questioned and some folks I know have wrongfully been placed on watch lists, the seemingly random nature of being singled out makes me mistrust the security efforts themselves.

Two seconds later, I didn't feel guilty, I felt annoyed, especially as the notice on my dashboard said my blog would be deleted if I had not responded in 20 days, and I can't remember how long ago I deleted that email! Of course, I haven't backed up the blog; I'm not a business, this isn't work, and I'm lazy. Now, I feel a slight panic: Why was Blogger messing with me when I was so obviously NOT a spammer? What automated detection system had they set up to catch spammers that would catch innocents like me in its trawl? How often will I have to mail in proof of my non-spammer intentions in the future? Is it time to move from Blogger to WordPress?

Poking around, I see I am not alone and that many others have commented, ranted, or analyzed this situation already. Google, which owns Blogger, is trying to control the proliferation of spam and malware, but its response has triggered many of the kinds of reactions I've had: why me? One site, which is politically paranoid in nature, assumed this was part and parcel of an ongoing campaign of political censorship, and who knows? How can we tell? I don't make that assumption in my case because I'm a little nothing in the big blogoverse, but an automated bot can scoop up krill like me along with larger fish, and with our greater reliance on cloud computing, we are also exposed both to malicious spam and the sledgehammer response.

Off to San Francisco!

I go home to San Francisco as often as possible, at least once a year, so that I can live happily in the upper Midwest the rest of the time. Here are some SF nostalgia songs I haven't already posted to this blog as I pack for my trip.

Jesse Fuller performs 'San Francisco Bay Blues,' a song that has been covered by lots of others. Later, Eric Burden and the Animals advertised going to San Francisco in 1967 with "Warm San Franciscan Night" (probably not performing it live in this clip, but that's how they did music on TV in those days).

One of my favorite travel songs, although it's not about SF I heard it when we first moved there in 1968, is "Going Up The Country" by Canned Heat (who are clearly "lip syncing" in this video as well, but not taking it too seriously!).

If you like your nostalgia sweet, try this song "San Francisco" by
Maxime Le Forestier, French singer-songwriter, a huge hit from his first album Mon Frère (1973). I love this song--I listened to it over and over when I was in lived in France in the 70s.


Here are the words in French:

San Francisco

by Maxime Le Forestier

C'est une maison bleue
Adossée à la colline
On y vient à pied, on ne frappe pas
Ceux qui vivent là, ont jeté la clé
On se retrouve ensemble
Après des années de route
Et l'on vient s'asseoir autour du repas
Tout le monde est là, à cinq heures du soir
San Francisco s'embrume
San Francisco s'allume
San Francisco, où êtes vous
Liza et Luc, Sylvia, attendez-moi

Nageant dans le brouillard
Enlacés, roulant dans l'herbe
On écoutera Tom à la guitare
Phil à la kena, jusqu'à la nuit noire
Un autre arrivera
Pour nous dire des nouvelles
D'un qui reviendra dans un an ou deux
Puisqu'il est heureux, on s'endormira
San Francisco se lève
San Francisco se lève
San Francisco ! où êtes vous
Liza et Luc, Sylvia, attendez-moi

C'est une maison bleue
Accrochée à ma mémoire
On y vient à pied, on ne frappe pas
Ceux qui vivent là, ont jeté la clef
Peuplée de cheveux longs
De grands lits et de musique
Peuplée de lumière, et peuplée de fous
Elle sera dernière à rester debout
Si San Francisco s'effondre
Si San Francisco s'effondre
San Francisco ! Où êtes vous
Liza et Luc, Sylvia, attendez-moi

"I dreamed my whole house was clean"

Ann Tainter's use of vintage ads with sly captions is highly entertaining. On the company website, they have a section called "Meet the models" with the stories of the women who posed for the original ads. The all-time customer favorite image is apparently one I have on a postcard in my bedroom:

"I dreamed my whole house was clean."

For a long time, this was not even in the category of aspirational, but now I'm approaching a moment when it may actually come true!

TV Party Tonight!

My nephew is off to continue his college education at Berkeley. I know that he will not be partying like this (he doesn't drink) but this song is the quintessential frat boy party song from back when I was at Berkeley (it came out in '81 and was recorded in 2-3 versions). Pre-gaming, pre-internet, DVDs, back in the stone age, man! we were still listening to vinyl and I still had a reel-to-reel tape recorder!

A very young Henry Rollins is singing with hardcore band Black Flag "TV Party Tonight" more fun than some of their hardcore ragers, but just as testosterone fueled. It's been trotting around my head lately, so I wanted to remember all the names of the shows they shout out:


Lyrics
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!
T.V. party tonight!

We're gonna have a T.V. party tonight!

Alright!

We're gonna have a T.V. party alright!

Tonight!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

All our friends are gonna hang out here tonight

Alright!

We're gonna pass out on the couch alright

Tonight!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Don't talk about anything else
We don't wanna know!
We're dedicated
To our favorite shows!

(That's incredible! Hill Street Blues! Dallas! Quincy!)

We sit glued to the T.V. set all night
And every night!
Why go into the outside world at all?
It's such a fright!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

T.V. news shows what it's really like out there
It's a scare!

You can go out if you want
We wouldn't dare!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Don't talk about anything else
We don't wanna know!
We're dedicated
To our favorite shows!
(Saturday Night Live! Monday Night Football! Dynasty! Fridays!)

I wouldn't be without my T.V. for a day
Or even a minute!

Don't even bother to use my brain anymore
There's nothing left in it!

We've got nothing better to do
Than watch T.V. and have a couple of brews

Wait a minute! My T.V. set doesn't work!
It's broken!
What are we gonna do tonight? This isn't fair!
We're hurtin'

We've got nothing left to do
With no T.V. and just a couple of brews

What are we gonna talk about?
I don't know!
We're gonna miss our favorite shows!
NO T.V. PARTY TONIGHT!

Cleaning house and finishing the job

In 20 years of living here, starting with 36 boxes of books and not much else, I've accumulated too much stuff. Much of it was from garage sales, Savers or Good Will, donations from friends or family. My living room furniture is from my mother's house, a piano I bought from a friend, several large items like bookcases and chairs were given to me by people who were moving. And then there are the things my child has hoarded, because there were years when we had to save everything. That phase seems to have passed, and this year we determined to repaint her bedroom and get rid of a very large, dark piece of furniture that was not really serving its purpose and which made her very small room feel even smaller. But that job was not one I could tackle by myself.

Over the last few years, I've been making steady progress in reducing the mountains of clutter in my small apartment: I've sold, recycled or given away baby toys, books and clothing; several carloads of stuff have been taken to Good Will or Savers--odds and ends, furniture, clothing, books; I've cleared out cupboards, closets, drawers, and shelves. But there was still a lot sitting around, waiting to be disposed of in one way or another, and between work, travel and laying around on the couch reading the New Yorker, my tendency toward inertia meant there were piles of stuff accumulating cat hair. Some of the piles had become invisible as such, but they were just clutter.

When Fresca took care of Leo and my place while I was away, she kindly cleared some junk off the porch to turn it back into the lovely bower it can be when it is clean and has a few plants. This was both kind and inspiring. We all stood and looked at it, and since the guys had promised their help with painting R's room, we put our heads together and came up with a plan of operations for transforming the rest of the place in the same way.

First step, I finally gathered 20 years of old electronic gear and brought it to one of the Hennepin County "problem waste" disposal sites, where I could leave it without paying a fee and knowing it would not be put into the landfill or burned with toxic parts still in it. There was my first and only TV set, the VCR, several phones I'd inherited or bought but which are now obsolete or interfere with my broadband signal, an ancient camera, batteries, Compact Flourescent Lightbulbs, and assorted parts of computers past.

Now, with the guys, we are undertaking a massive project that involves a domino-like transfer of stuff: we've removed everything from my daughter's bedroom and we'll rip out the old carpet and paint it today. She has sorted out all the old clothes she's outgrown, and the stuff she no longer needs or uses, and we've packed up the nostalgia items suchs as Halloween costumes and some dress-up items. The rest is bagged and off to Good Will or will be turned into a sewing project (t-shirt pillows!). We also pulled all the stuff off the porch, including an old desk that went to the basement, and a bookcase that will go into her bedroom, and did the same sort-and-purge. A lot fo what needed to be sorted were odds and ends of recycling abandoned there during the winter.

We moved a very large bookcase/drawer thingie from her bedroom onto the porch, where it looks splendid and holds my sewing project materials, and other boxes of stuff like holiday ornaments. We removed another bookcase that was holding the computer and are doing the same sort-and-purge in the living room office space. All the loose CDs, DVDs, magazines, and electronic gear and peripherals (iPod cables, rechargers, etc) have been coralled and given a garage of some kinds, many with boxes I got from Ikea. Being from Ikea, they all had to be assembled, so I have punched out little cardboard holes and put together a zillion boxes with little screws in the last two days.

The guys repaired one file cabinet whose drawers had lost their front panels, and I got another one at Ikea so my files can move out of the milk crates in the dining room. I tell you, it's a delicate operation! In order to move one set of things, another set has to be displaced. Every piece of paper, book, envelope, paper clip, pen, coin, battery, old toy or art project has be to sorted and given its new home: recycle? donate? move? discard?

But the results, although we are still in the middle of the process and my dining room is the temporary holding area, are already making me extremely happy. I've been meaning to do these things for literally years, and to have two strong and handy guys to help me muscle things around, and to have my daughter's complete cooperation in sorting her stuff (which I am not allowed to touch and rightly so) means this is happening!

Thanks, Fresca, for inspiration, and thanks to Blas and Loren for patiently assembling something from Ikea, moving big cabinets, helping me bring things to the basement and being willing to paint and grub up the carpet. By the end of the day, we will be done painting. It finally looks as if it will be possible for me to finish the job I started about three years ago of divesting m myself of the things I don't want or need anymore.

So you think you can dance on Youtube?

Have you seen the famous Jill and Kevin Wedding entrance dance?

It became an internet sensation, and inspired this equally awesome Divorce dance parody:

Love how she throws the flowers at the end!

Happy Birthday, President Obama!

How are those beer summits going?


I'm happy my president thinks that talking things out is a good idea.