Yes, We Can.

I grew up near a small town in Northeastern Pennsylvania that didn't have a traffic light but had hitching posts for horses in the lone grocery store's parking lot (and this wasn't so long ago, people - it's not like I'm 80, you know).

The KKK once came through town and left copies of the Klansman (their newspaper) on people's lawns. We had one teacher in the school district who was African American. There were no other kids of color in my graduating class of 160.

A local minister once told me that I had a flat, funny-looking face, like I had run into a wall. And then he told me I should be proud of who I was. His daughter, whom I considered a friend, called me a chink on more than one occasion.

And then, today, we all got to experience this:












Does that make it all better? For me, for now, yes.

(Though if I ever run into Rev. Sollenberger again, I'm gonna give him a piece of my mind.)

Northern Exposure

“I just want it to go in the history books.”
Mary Boudukofsky, Aleut American internee.


Am watching this documentary on PBS right now (narrated by President Bartlet). I didn't know anything about this...


Aleut Story
In 1942, as World War II invaded Alaska, Aleut Americans were taken from their homes and removed to abysmal government camps 1,500 miles away... An estimated 10 percent of the men, women and children sent to the camps would die there—a death rate comparable to that suffered by Americans in foreign prisoner of war camps. As the Aleuts prayed for deliverance, "friendly forces" looted their homes and churches in the Aleutian and Pribilof islands.

Those who survived would fight for their rights... In a historic action, Aleuts joined Japanese Americans in seeking wartime reparations from the federal government.

Really, am quite sad I didn't know about this. Did you? I know about the Japanese-American internment and reparations, of course. I heard Barney Frank speak about that a few years ago, and I saw the exhibit that was at Ellis Island (which included info on other ethnic groups that were interned along with the JAs), but I don't remember any mention of the Aleuts...

Beverage du jour

8:00PM, Central Time. Watching the debate on MSNBC.

Our beverage of choice:












And no, there was no drinking game. We have to work tomorrow. We'd be pretty tipsy if we had!

If only.

See. I'm not the only one fantasizing about this.

From the Times:

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet
by Maureen Dowd
published Sept 20, 2008

Watching material

African American Lives (parts 1 & 2) is one of the most amazing documentary series I've ever seen. I miiiiight even say that this one tops Frontier House. Watch it!

Also - coming soon! Food news! I promise!

VOTE

Happy Super Tuesday!













Now go vote.

I had no idea...

... that writers don't get paid for web content, because it's all considered to be "promotional."

Every time I watch Heroes episodes online, I have to sit through many commercials.

Promotional? Hmph.

Ronald D. Moore (Battlestar Galactica): "... the studio's position was they didn't want to pay anyone to do it (webisodes) —they considered it promotional material. They weren't going to pay any of the writers or the actors or the directors to do it, which we thought was crazy. We refused to do it, and eventually came to an accommodation where they said they would pay us, but then when we were almost done, they decided they weren't going to credit anybody... Ultimately, that's why we're here, because that's just wrong."


On a completely unrelated note, the Cook's Illustrated Holiday Baking issue includes two of my recipes that formerly ran in 2002/3. And no, I don't get paid for stories they reuse.

Hmph.

What curse?

Mmm hmm.

A bit of history

What:
The old St. Louis Courthouse, located conveniently near our hotel

When:
Built in the early 1800's




Notable fact:
Location of the Dred Scott trials of 1847 and 1850

If you, like me, were napping during your American history classes, read this.





















No, really. Go back and read the stuff on the link.

Seriously.

Tahlequah, Oklahoma...

...capital of the Cherokee Nation.

We happen to arrive in time to see the Keetowah Band (band as in tribe or clan) Celebration, which features, among other things, a dance competition.































































Since we have some time off, we also go to the Cherokee Heritage Center, where we get a taste of traditional Cherokee life.

Robert, our guide, shows us some traditional dances...


















...and how to hunt (I got the rabbit in the neck, which was very satisfying)...


















...and how to play stickball. The original Cherokee version was a war game, so there were basically no rules. You had to get the ball between two goal posts, but you were allowed to whack at people's heads, knees, eyeballs, etc.



The modern version is slightly less violent - you're supposed to hit a wooden fish, perched waaay up on a pole.


















Franco hit the fish, so Robert gave him a certificate. He was only the 5th person to hit a fish this year!




Robert also talked about basic Cherokee laws and customs. Did you know that the Cherokee women were the ones who owned everything? Read all about it here.



The Cherokee alphabet.

In the mid-1800's, the Cherokee had a higher literacy rate than the European settlers.





Robert's wife, Veronica, shows PJ how to spin.











This is Fred, the extremely antisocial museum cat, waiting for us to leave.







And here we are, back in our rooms at Tenkiller Lodge, which is very quaint and in the middle of the woods.

For you Madeleine L'Engle fans...

...and I mean serious fans, check out this article from the New Yorker.

This will only be interesting to those people who have read her Crosswicks Journals, the Austin books, and the Time series.

Explains why she never wrote about Vicky or Charles Wallace/Rob as adults.

Hm.

In memoriam

Madeleine L'Engle
1918-2007


















One rainy, gloomy day, when I was about 12 years old, I discovered a dusty copy of this in my attic. I read it in one day. Since then, I've read this (and all of her other books) many times over.

This article from the Washington Post says it more eloquently:

L'Engle's 'Wrinkle' Smoothed Our Way

By Monica Hesse

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 10, 2007; Page C08

It was a dark and stormy night, and we fell in love with Meg Murry.

She was a sour social misfit, an underachieving mathlete -- the improbable antihero of Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time" in an era when most kid-lit heroines were wholesome Nan Bobbseys. Though L'Engle, who died on Thursday, wrote more than 50 novels, to those who loved the Murry family her other works seemed interesting side projects, the equivalent of discovering that Beethoven had also enjoyed cooking. "Wrinkle" and its four fantastical sequels were her masterpieces and our revelations.

"A Wrinkle in Time" was not the sort of book you were assigned in school; with its New Testament quotations and witchy supporting characters it was at once too Christian and too blasphemous. It was the sort of book you discovered on your own, shelved as it was in the big kids' section, and that you read ferociously into the night with a mug of Swiss Miss -- a replica of Meg's homemade cocoa. You didn't talk about the book at school. Meg's awkwardness, her anger, her imperfections were too intensely private, too attuned to your own gangly self-loathing. As with "Bridge to Terabithia" or the Ramona Quimby series, you wondered, perhaps, if it had been written for you.

And so you bought a ticket for every sequel, for every time-hopping adventure. You learned about tesseracts -- those convenient shortcuts that made dimension-skipping possible for Meg, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and her boyfriend, Calvin, who saw behind her dorky specs a pair of "dreamboat eyes." You also learned about Einstein's theory of relativity, a smattering of Latin and a goodly amount of Shakespeare...

...Years after you first read "A Wrinkle in Time," after your braces had been removed and your skin had cleared up and your self-loathing had mostly disappeared, you probably referenced the book, to a college roommate or a fellow trainee at your cruddy after-school job. You unthinkingly threw the word "tesseract" into a sentence, or called a wildly dressed older woman a "Mrs. Whatsit." And when you did that you learned that "A Wrinkle in Time" hadn't been written for an audience of one, because your roommate had read it, too.

All those years ago, with your patchwork quilt and your instant hot chocolate and your despairing belief in your own monstrosity, you hadn't been alone after all.