Episode 39: We Can Hope

In deference to the season, Geezer temporarily forswears anti-religion screeds.










Offer good this episode only.

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Democracy In Play
Three questions:
The nominees for president of the two major parties will be determined, for all practical purposes, after the South Carolina primary, following that in New Hampshire and the Iowa caucuses. Those states have a total population of about 8,200,00.
*Why does our system allow three small states to make decisions for a nation of over 300,000,000 inhabitants?
*Why is there not a single national primary day, preferably much later in presidential election years?
At the time our Constitution was written, most Americans were illiterate, so the framers strove to place a buffer of educated (or at least literate) legislators between the voting public and the designation of their representatives. Senators were to be selected by their state legislatures, presidents and vice presidents by an Electoral College. Senators have been chosen by direct vote for over three decades now.
*So, this procedure being responsible for the occupation of the Oval Office by the present incompetent, why does the College still exist?

*************************************************************************************** Girls Gone Wild
*Certainly you're aware of the queasy misadventures of the Spears known as Britney, she who keeps forgetting her underwear, her children, and the location of her latest rehab clinic.
Probably you know of her 16-year-old baby sister Jamie Lynn, she who plays a virginal teenager on TV and is now pregnant.
But did you know that the girls' mother, name of Lynne, has finished her memoir titled Pop Culture Mom. It's about parenting. They've delayed publication.

*A 33-year-old woman in Connecticut was arrested for sexual assault. More specifically, she was accused of groping Santa Claus at the Danbury Fair mall. Police were able to identify and capture her because she was on crutches. They were not able to explain how she came to be sitting on Santa's lap in the first place.

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Oops!
The restaurant chain Legal Sea Foods trumpets its slogan "If It Isn't Fresh, It Isn't Legal" in ubiquitous radio and print ads. In one that appeared in the Journal News, a large photo showed two happy fishermen holding a huge fish weighing probably 150 pounds. The caption relates that the two brothers, who have been"...commercial fishermen for over 24 years, finally caught a fish good enough for Legal Sea Foods."
Problem is, the scaly creature they gleefully display is a tarpon, unfit for human consumption.

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Borscht Belt Banter

*My wife and I went back to the hotel where we spent our wedding night. Only this time, I stayed in the bathroom and cried.

*We always hold hands. If I let go, she shops.

*Jewish women like Chinese food so much because Won Ton spelled backwards is Not Now.

*Jewish mothers don't drink. Alcohol interferes with their suffering.

*A beautiful young woman knocked on my hotel room door all night. I finally had to let her out.

*In Jewish tradition, a fetus isn't considered viable until it graduates from medical school.

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Back On Air
Geezer isn't of that demographic that gathers most of its information about what's going on in the world from late-night talk and comedy shows, but he's delighted that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are defying the writers union to return to the air. The hosts of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report announced their decision in the joint statement in which they said they would prefer to return with their writers. Since "we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence."

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A Public Service
Admit it - you have only the vaguest idea what a caucus is and not a clue about how the Iowa version works (coming this Thursday). Lemme 'splain.
Voters aged 18 and older gather at churches, libraries, and community centers. Registered Republicans and Democrats caucus differently, needless to say.

Caucus-goers of the G.O.P. (a.k.a. the Black Or White Party), simply drop the names of their preferred candidates in a the pot and tabulate the results.

Democrats, who see shadings of grey in every issue, break into sub-groups according to their candidate preferences. If any of those candidates have less than 15% of all the people at each gathering, his or her supporters must coalesce with other groups. Once everyone is in a group with at least 15% of the total, delegates to the county convention are apportioned according to the size of each preference group.
Got that?

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Zeytinyagli Pirasa (Leeks in Olive Oil)
Here's a useful side dish that provides both a starch and a veg. It's modified from a recipe in The Sultan's Kitchen, a Turkish cookbook. To cut calories, use Pam cooking spray instead of olive oil and a package of Splenda instead of the sugar.
Serves 4 - 6

2 pounds leeks
One-quarter olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and chopped
2 carrots, peeled and sliced
One-quarter cup Israeli couscous
One-quarter cup Italian parsley, minced
2 teaspoons sugar
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Salt
2 cups hot water

Cut off the roots and the upper two-thirds of the green parts of the leeks. Slice the leeks in half lengthwise. Discard the tough outer leaves and wash thoroughly , removing the dirt found between the leaves. Cut the leeks crosswise in one-inch slices. Set aside.

In a large skillet or saucepan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the onion and cook for about two minutes, or until soft. Add the leeks, carrots, parsley, sugar, and lemon juice. Add the salt and stir. Pour in the hot water, cover the pan, and simmer for ten minutes. Add the couscous and simmer another ten minutes, or until the leeks are tender.

Transfer the mixture to a serving dish, cover, and refrigerate for one hour. Serve chilled or at room temperature.

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Jo thinks talking too often about our travels is boastfulness bordering on vulgarity. I shan't say another word.

Episode 38: Making Merry in Margaritaville

A winter-shortening visit to the Florida Keys is an unfailing antidote to the the assorted physical and intellectual madnesses of life up in America. That pleasure is kicked up a few notches when South Florida TV meteorologists gleefully chart the progress of historically awful winter storms back where you were a few days earlier. It is not enough to be blissfully warm and sighing with pleasure under banana palms and frangipani, one's friends and family must be buried beneath snow and ice.

We start discarding items of clothing almost as soon as we hit Card Sound Bridge arching over to Key Largo. Socks are the first to go, the better to wriggle in the sand of the nearest beach.

Key West is another 120 miles down Route A1A. It's the largest town in the Keys, and by far the most popular with the snowbirds who funnel themselves down the Overseas Highway every day of the year, especially from December to April. The effects of the hurricanes that swept over the island two years ago have been all but erased. Then, towering heaps of destroyed refrigerators, washing machines, carpeting, and broken branches and entire trees piled up at curbside.
Now, all that has been cleared away, leaving only more For Sale signs than normal, planted by people victimized by the mortgage crisis and fear of future storms. The flowering vines and trees are as profligate as ever. Our buddy Michael opines that if everyone left Florida for three months, the plant growth would obliterate every last sign of human habitation.

We are impressed, yet again, by the tolerance and good will of this most disparate accumulation of residents - beefy, fearsomely proportioned bikers, gays both hyper-flamboyant and as conventional as a family-friendly Cleveland suburb, heartily boisterous blacks with origins in The Bahamas, Cubans whose grandparents arrived long before Fidel, latter-day hippies denying the last three decades, as well as drugged-out and booze-poisoned dropouts and their suppliers. Just about everyone, the drunks slumped in doorways included, salute strangers, ever ready to chat at the merest sign of interest. A sense of humor is obligatory.

It takes a full day to get to Key West. As ever, the worst thing about the island is having to leave.

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Choices

The G.O.P. has just the candidate for you, if....

*You'd really like, at the start of the 21st Century, a president who believes in Creationism and rejects Darwin.

*You want a president who will be 73 years old when he takes the oath of office, committed to continuing our Iraq adventure.

*You admire a man who changes positions on political whim and who proclaims with his bare face hanging out, that there can be no freedom without religion.

*You feel that a guy who married his cousin, divorced her, had a press conference to announce he was leaving his second wife for a woman with whom he conducted a public affair, then charged the resultant expenses to various city agencies is a fitting moral leader.

*You're amused by an actor-politician who says that his most cherished possession is his "trophy wife."

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Butterflies or Papa
The big-deal sightseeing attraction in Key West is the house where Earnest Hemingway lived from 1931 into the 1940s. He wrote The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls there. The 150-year-old house (907 Whitehead St., 305-294-1575) sits beneath lush palm and flamboyant trees and behind an astonishingly ugly brick wall Hem had built in haste to defend his diminishing privacy. Lounging around the property are the descendants of Papa's own six-toed cats. Geezer has walked through the house and yard often, over the many younger years when Hemingway was a personal hero. Then he re-read Across The River And Into The Trees, a painfully sentimental, nearly plot-less mess that was - is - a waste of paper and ink.

So much for Papa. Our favorite attraction now is the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservancy (1316 Duval Street, 305-296-2988). We enter a glass-enclosed conservatory alive with dense tropical plants and blooms that are home to scores of butterflies and a corps of brightly hued small birds. They flutter freely by, coming to rest on the ankles and shoulders of the bipeds among them.















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Key West Limonade
Transport yourself to a warmer, sunnier place with this take on a popular rum drink. Most recipes call for Sprite as a central ingredient, but I'd sooner use Tang. Makes one.

3 ounces Bacardi Limon
3 ounces vodka
One and one-half ounces cranberry juice
One and one-half ounces lime juice
Framboise

Place Bacardi, vodka, cranberry juice, and lime juice in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly. Pour into a squat rocks glass with ice. Carefully fill a soup spoon with Framboise and gently it lower into the drink until the Framboise floats. Remove spoon without stirring.

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Irony has no place in Key West.
Or maybe it does.
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