Grandparenting, Year One

And what a fabulous year it has been.  While Our son and DIL do not live very near, they arte also not too far away, and they have been far more adventurous about traveling with their young daughter than we were at that same point in life.  If you wanted to see out first child, you really had to arrive on site, or you were SOL.  So long story short, we have seen our grandchild quite a bit this year, and it has been so much fun.
I know. People say that.  We were not amongst the convinced before it happened to us, but in retrospect, we completely missed the boat on how fabulous this was going to be.  Through this that and the other thing, we were there the day she was born, and while it could have been an incredible pain to have us there, we were graced with the good luck to be able to be useful, not in the way in the least, and to meet her on her very first day of life.  We find her endlessly fascinating and cannot wait to see what year two will hold.

Da Vinci, Koblenz, Germany

 We have not had what you might all spectacular food on previous trips to Germany, but all of that changed with this trip.  We ate at four one star Michelin restaurants, which is our sweet spot for meticulously prepared food, lots of bites of flavor that we would largely never recreate at home, and skipping alot of the foam and and the chemistry lab components of two and three Michelin star places.  My only desire in this whole thing would be to know whether the restaurant is content to be a one star or are they gunning for two, and in this restaurant's case they are looking upwards.
The meal from start to finish was absolutely spectacular.  It may be a function of our age, our jet lag or something deeper, but we have a strong new preference to eat such a  meal at lunch time.  That way it can serve as your only meal for the day, and you don't go to bed so full of wine and food that you can't sleep.

The meal was perfect.  The sommelier was young but very knowledgeable, and the pairings were a bargain.  The food was repleat with seafood, and each of the many courses was well prepared, had many component parts and a lot of attention to detail.  We shared the restaurant with a Danish couple who were on a wine tasting and buying trip through the Rhine region, and it was an extremely pleasant atmosphere, not to mention a memorable dining experience.
Highly recommended.  Koblenz if a UNESCO World Heritage site as well, so well worth seeing, and strolling along the Rhine either before or after the meal.

The Rabbi's Cat (2011)

This is one of those definitely not for children animated movies.  It deals with racism, tensions in the Middle East, the hatred between Muslims and Jews and why it makes no sense since they share a god and a history, and then why you sometimes have to go on a quest even when you are pretty sure that it will not end well.
The title character is not your everyday cartoon fluffy kitty. He's scrawny, apparently hairless and unapologetically disputatious. The animated world he inhabits is no kid-friendly adventure but a philosophical quarrel in the form of a frenetic road trip through 1930s Africa to find Ethiopia, the "African Jerusalem".
Based on several volumes of the graphic novel series by Joann Sfar, the hand-drawn film uses a rich palette and a mix of visual styles ranging from blunt to dazzling to tell the story in a way that is somewhere between comical and horrifying.

Sweet by Yotam Ottlenghi and Helen Goh

This is the last of the Ottolenghi cookbooks that I do not have (until the new one comes out in October) and while I have had a reputation for baking over the years, and I love all things Ottlenghi (even the cocktails.  Especially the cocktails), I somehow wasn't ready to get into a whole new dessert cookbook.
I took this out of the library and I have tried three things and I have to say, they have all been pretty spectacular.  What I like in a dessert is a moist flavorful cake, not a lot of sweet icing, and fruit is a plus.  I prefer pound cake over a drier style cake with a fancier assembly.  This cookbook delivers in that arena in a way that is inspirational.  The cover is a bit deceiving, because it looks like you are going to need to find fresh fruit that is hard to come by and then assemble it in a way that may or may not test all of your decorative skills. But so far that is not my experience with this cookbook, and it may be that this cover is like the cover of Plenty; beautiful to look at, but not ridiculous to put together.  I highly recommend this to try a recipe out for a dinner you are having for eight to twelve people and see what you think.

August Macke Haus, Bonn, Germany

 While I have always liked what I have seen of German Expressionism, I really know very little about it beyond Max Ernst, and even he is a bit vague in my head.  No more, after my recent trip to the Rhine region of Germany.  While Bonn is not hailed as a tourist destination, I would argue that there is a lot to be seen there, and this museum, in the house where August Macke lived with his wife and children, is a good example of what not to miss.
Macke was a vocal supporter of German Expressionism, which is a parallel but later movement linked with French Impressionism.

This painting of asparagus from the early 1900's is very reminiscent of Manet's painting of asparagus twenty years earlier.  The richness of texture is similar, and the color is vibrating off of Macke's work in other paintings, only increasing in intensity as he moved forward as a painter.  Sadly, his life ended quite abruptly on a battlefield in France in September of 1914, just a few months into the war when he was 27 years old.  Fortunately for us, his wife took care to preserve his legacy, both as an artist and as a supporter of a movement, so we can look back on it today.

Zero to Ten with Duolingo

About two weeks before setting off on my most recent trip to Germany I decided to start to use the Language App Duolingo to try to get a sense of the language.  I have been to or through Germany on a number of occasions in the past, and have found the language to be completely baffling.  I know few words, despite the preponderance of things that sound close to English, and I always feel like I am floundering in a way that rivals my experience in Asia.
So how did it go?  I got to level 10 while I was on the trip, which is a modest something like 15 or 20 hours of studying, so nothing that would even come close to a semester of the language, and while I still looked completely blankly at anyone who actually spoke to me (I apparently appear to understand significantly more German that I actually do), I definitely felt like my time with Duolingo was time well spent.  I could decipher things that are important to me, which are museum cards and menus, and I got very facile with my Google translate app, which between the two, made me feel less at sea.  I spent a day completely on my own and did not flounder once.  So if you are looking to spiff up some language skills, I would recommend this.

Finding Your Feet (2017)

On a recent transatlantic flight, I watched two movies that deal directly with aging, death, and disappointment.  This is a largely upbeat one (although truthfully I cried through some of the ending, it was a good kind of crying).
One thing to note about it is that it is British.  When it comes to senior oriented cinema that glorifies the act of seizing the day and taking second chances in one’s golden years, actors who come from the United Kingdom are far more adept at the genre than their Hollywood counterparts.  They seem to have a well rounded supply of actors who are of a certain age and can act.  The script is well done, and there are no stars here, it is a shared stage for them all.
The story is almost secondary, but Sandra finds out at her husband's retirement dinner that he has been carrying on with a neighbor woman for several years, and now that she knows, they are going to have a go at it.  The errant spouse keeps saying he never meant to hurt her, but really, that doesn't hold water.  What did he mean?  Sandra is miserable, moves in with her estranged sister who finds her titled sibling tiresome, but she attempts to pump some air back into her, and low and behold, there is someone else who emerges.  A few bumps but overall very well done.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

This book comes triply recommended.  It was one of the five best works of fiction of 2017 in the minds of the New York Times.  It was also short listed for the Booker Prize, and finally, it was on President Obama's reading list.  So the only question is why did it take me so long to read it, not whether it was good or not.  It is a book about the war torn Middle East, the people who have to escape, and the life that they find in their adopted countries.  I read it while I was in Germany, which was very interesting, because they are a country who have taken in many refugees in recent years, and so i saw first hand some of the people who were most likely in situations at home like those in the book.
At the novel’s opening, the Saeed and Nadia live in “a city swollen by refugees, but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war,” in a country left deliberately ambiguous—it could be Pakistan, but also Syria, or Libya or any number of others. Saeed works for a company that places outdoor advertisements; Nadia sells insurance. They’re both attached to their smartphones, which we have come to learn can be a life line in cities with poor infrastructure and frequent travel hazards. As is normal for educated, unmarried men in his country, Saeed lives with his parents. Less typical is that Nadia lives alone and rides a motorcycle, and though she isn’t remotely devout, she wears long black robes as a measure of protection.  Their relationship is growing, but then the situation deteriorates dramatically and they are thrown together and are soon on the run, leaving the normal relationship development to be a thing of the past.  It is a good window into an all too common situation in our current world.

Haitian Art at the Figge Museum, Davenport

 The Figge Museum has an extensive collection of Haitian art, and while all of it is catalogued on line, a fraction of it is available to see in a gallery.  That said, it is well worth a peak.
Located on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Haiti has struggled with centuries of political oppression and violence that has left the country poor and vulnerable to natural disasters. Spain and France controlled the island from 1492 until 1791 when a successful slave uprising led to the formation of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Since independence, a series of corrupt dictators have replaced colonial rule and plunged the nation into constant political upheaval.
Wilmeno Domond painted this in 1925.  He was primarily a coffee planter and paints in his spare time. He was initially inspired to paint by his cousin, Castera Bazile, however, their styles are very different. Domond repeatedly turns to subjects from the Bible and from vodoo (this being the former) and is much more interested in the effects of pattern and detail. In this painting, Adam and Eve, who have clothed themselves with leaves, are expelled from the Garden of Eden by the archangel Michael who wields a sword. The lush garden is packed with dense foliage patterns and the flat profiles of various exotic animals.

This rendition of Eve, the snake and the garden of Eden is so vibrant and beautifully rendered that I would love to have something like this in my home.  A lot of art I see I think is beautiful but I am not sure that I want to live with it.  Even some art that I have bought to live with in retrospect can be a poor choice in the end, but I just love this style of painting, with a traditional story, a stunningly colorful palate, and a joyful feel to what we know was an act of trickery and the beginning of a fall from grace.  We can see just how tempting that apple was for poor Eve.

Black Panther (2018)

We finally get around to seeing this movie and seeing what all the excitement is about.  First, let's put this in the appropriate light, which is that it is not a civil rights movie, per se, but rather a part of the Marvel empire of movies made from comic books.  It is not supposed to be ground breaking work in that it's primary goal is to entertain, not more not less.
But that is where it leaves you.  First and foremost it a blockbuster that is almost entirely cast with people of color.  It takes place in an idyllic  African nation of Wakanda, the most advanced nation on earth, never colonized by white people and all in all who would want to leave such a place?  While there are numerous battle sequences that are staples of the genre,  they float on the surface of a deep ocean of character development and attention to details both grandiose and minute. Wakanda is a fully fleshed-out, unapologetically Black universe, a world woven into a tapestry of the richest, sharpest colors and textures.  So Marvel is not avoiding offending those who would not be so down with such a notion (bravo to them, and truly they have enough money to offend a few people and get away with it), and this is really very good.

This is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel

 This was a popular book last year that I would have missed completely if it wasn't for my niece.  She came to visit and dropped a lot of great reading ideas on us, and this was one of them.  Since I was about to leave the country, and am always looking for something that is manageable to read while I am a bit jet lagged and burning the candle at both ends, which often leaves almost no time for reading.
In this story, Rosie is an emergency room doctor and Penn is an author.  They have what will sound very typical to parents, which is once they have four children, all boys, they find that they lose themselves and are ruled by their young brood.  Then Rosie decides to have a fifth child, all the while hoping for a girl.  Her reasons are more deep seeded than most, in that her younger sister, Poppy, died of cancer when she was a child, and Rosie is seeking to recreate that relationship.  So, despite being a woman of science, she follows all the old wives tales and dreams of her daughter up to the delivery room, where her son Claude is born.  Claude starts wearing dresses as a toddler, and the book is largely about Claude becoming Poppy and all the hurdles that a transgender child faces, and never gets back to examine Rosie's psyche.  It is an easy route to thinking about what one would do should this come about in your house.

Multnomah Falls, Columbia River Gorge, Oregon

The thing about being a grown up who isn't living paycheck to paycheck is that I can now do things that I wouldn't have even dreamed of in my youth.  On a recent trip to Portland, my spouse and I woke up one morning, the only thing on the agenda being dinner reservations at six o'clock, and decided to rent a care and drive out to the Columbia River Gorge.
A waterfall as magnificent and memorable as any in the country is located just a 30- minute drive outside of Portland. Visiting Multnomah Falls, a 611-foot-tall roaring, awe-inspiring cascade of icy water, lets you experience the power and beauty of nature up close and with ease. From the parking area off of I-84, a 5-minute walk is all that separates you from the exhilarating spray at the base of the falls.
According to Native American lore, Multnomah Falls was created to win the heart of a young princess who wanted a hidden place to bathe. Although you can see the top portion of the falls from the highway, to view both tiers you have to walk to the viewing area located in a carved-out opening in the rock face. Tilting your head up in the narrow rocky confines of the steep cliffs, you get a mind-boggling perspective on the sheer magnitude of the falls.
  The Ranger Station is a little under powered with people who know what is and isn't open as a result of the fires last summer, so be patient if you go about exploring the sites around the falls, but it is a spectacularly beautiful site.

The Death of Stalin (2018)

This is flat out brilliant.  It is a movie set at the end of Stalin's life, after decades of purges of every sort imaginable.  At dinner one night, the Russian elite are drinking and telling macabre tales, and at the end of the evening, Lavrenti Beria, the sadistic head of the secret police, turns to Georgy Malenkov and tells him that he is on the most recent list of purges, and urges him to drive his car into a tree and be done with it, it will save them all time and money.  Once Stalin dies, there is the inevitable jockeying for power that would occur in any such government, and oddly, Malenkov is suddenly up on top, ever so briefly.  The back room deals, the ruthless killing of anyone who knows anything to save face is stunningly pulled off, culminating in a Red Army coup and Nikita Khrushchev somehow, almost improbably, out on top.  Crazy like a fox, he is, but the bitter laughter that pervades the movie is very similar to the tone that I got when I was a visitor in modern day Russia.  The vast corruption and the inequities that are outside of the control of most pervade the country today.

Dams on the Columbia River

 Dams are complicated.  What we get is pretty green, pretty affordable power.  What we loose is wild rivers.
The Columbia River is a mighty powerhouse of a water way.  It is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest.  The Columbia and its tributaries have been central to the region's culture and economy for thousands of years. They have been used for transportation since ancient times, linking the region's many cultural groups.  It is the pathway that Lewis and Clark took once they left the Missouri River and went westward to the Pacific Ocean.
Woody Guthrie wrote a song about the Grand Coulee dam, and in Bob Dylan's tribute to Woody, he also mentioned it.  We did not get up that far on the Columbia on our last trip to Oregon, but we did see the Dalles Dam.

Humans have inhabited the Columbia's watershed for more than 15,000 years, with a transition to a sedentary lifestyle based mainly on salmon starting about 3,500 years ago.  So when damming the river, the legacy of the salmon as both a food source as well as a cultural icon needed to be preserved.I hadn't thought about fish ladders in a very long time.  Here is the fish ladder around the dam.  It is possible to watch very young fish through a glassed window making their way up the ladder--which is remarkably difficult to manage, it turns out.

Lady with a Parasol, Hiroshige, 1815

The Figge Museum in Davenport has a large collection of wood block prints by the two most famous Japanese artists.  It is true that while the men designed the prints, it was largely left to women to craft them, but the scenes and the styles are quite magnificent.
This particular print was in the Frank Lloyd Wright display at the museum.  That is fitting, as these prints influenced lots of artists that came after them, and are in many ways timeless.
Hiroshige grew up in a minor samurai family in what was then Edo. His father belonged to the firefighting force assigned to Edo Castle. It is here that Hiroshige was given his first exposure to art: legend has it that a fellow fireman tutored him in the Kano school of painting, though Hiroshige’s first official teacher was Rinsai. Though Hiroshige tried to join Utagawa Toyokuni’s studio, he was turned away. In 1811, the young artist entered an apprenticeship with the celebrated Utagawa Toyohiro. After only a year, he was bestowed with the artist name Hiroshige. He soon gave up his role in the fire department to focus entirely on painting and print design. During this time he studied painting, intrigued by the Shijo school. Hiroshige’s artistic genius went largely unnoticed until 1832.

In Darkness (2011)

I have been quite thorough in watching most if not all of the Academy award nominated movies of the last couple of years, but going back a bit further, I have not been as complete.  The Best Foreign Language film nominees can be tough to watch.  They deal with difficult topics often, and while they are incredibly well done, they are often a challenge.  This is one such example.
Socha is a sewer worker in Lviv and he was no saint. An anti-Semite who before the war was exploiting and cheating Jews, he used the sewers to stash his loot and realized he could make money by selling food and supplies to these survivors. He started off as  a thief but he changed.  He used his occupation as an excuse to come and go in the Nazi-controlled city and even had a plausible reason to go down into the sewers.
The film doesn't inquire too closely into how Socha found adequate food, blankets and medicine for so many people, at a time when such things were strictly rationed. The black market was his domain, and he knew where to look. But the time came when this arrangement was no longer convenient or profitable for Socha. By then, he had witnessed unspeakable atrocities carried out by the Nazis and had come to know the Jews as individuals. He had a change of heart and then became determined that they must survive no matter what. This involved many risks and much danger, and he was responsible for saving their lives.  No one is without sin, but the story is both a true one and one that makes you grateful even in these difficult political times.

Kilaeua Caldera by Thomas Moran, 1886

I have loved the Hudson River School of painting for an awfully long time, and they were a productive lot.  In the past month I saw this and others in the San Diego Art Museum in Balboa Park, and another painting by Moran at the Figge Museum in Davenport, Iowa.  This particular one seems timely, in that the Kilaeua volcano is once again erupting and causing no end of havoc, but is good to remember that Mother Nature has a long trajectory.  Don't forget that.
Thomas Moran is possible the best known of this school of painters.  He returned to England, from whence he came, to study Turner's use of light, which is evident in much of his work.  Moran's trip to Yellowstone in 1871 marked the turning point of his career. The previous year he had been asked by Scribner's Magazine to rework sketches made in Yellowstone by a member of an earlier expedition party. Intrigued by the geysers and mudpots of Yellowstone, he borrowed money to make the trip himself. Numerous paintings and commissions resulted from this journey, but the sale of his enormous (7 by 12 feet) Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872, National Museum of American Art) to Congress shortly after passage of the bill that set Yellowstone aside as the first National Park, brought Moran considerable attention.  He painted many more throughout his career, and this is a nice example of his work.

A Handmade Life

There is so much to be unhappy about, and I feel like it is even worse for people my children's age.  A corrupt government, making all the wrong decisions and for the wrong reasons, a president who cannot speak for more than a minute or two without lying, and elected officials who ostensibly are there to represent the people instead cow towing to big oil, the gun lobby, and oh so much more than only makes their future bleak.  And they are trying to cut off healthcare to the elderly and the poor, while sucking Social Security dry.  The one ray of hope that they have that I admire is that they are valuing things that are made by hand.  They are growing vegetables and making bread.  These glasses are made by a housemate of ours from college, Marcia Wiley at Wiley Ware, and they are to me a great example of bringing beauty and art into your life in simple ways that matter.  There is hope, but you really have to vote. 

The Good Lie (2014)

This is a movie that is a little bit too long on the front end, and just about right from then on.  It is not a feel good movie, but rather a feel right movie,  where lonely people in America help refugees of an African conflict.
The movie does not settle for being simplistic and condescending, rather presenting an honesty of the struggles and barriers that everyone involved faced that compensates for any of the more obvious tugs on our tear ducts, most of which arrive in the latter part of the film.  The primary source of this authenticity is a cast populated with South Sudanese actors who captivate without pretense. Two of the three male leads, as well as the actress who plays their sister, were caught up in the conflict before fleeing their homeland for asylum elsewhere. One was a child soldier, the other two lost relatives in the war.  These are traumatized people who need some luck and some hard work and some aptientce to make progress.  A good watch.

Beast, Portland, Oregon

My spouse and I have been on an incredible (and probably unsustainable) year of eating great meals in great restaurants around the country.  When in Portland we had the chance to eat at Beast, which used to be a pop up establishment and now is on the first floor of a house in a funky neighborhood in Northwest Portland (a solid five miles from our downtown hotel, which is only relevant in that we walked there).
The thing to know about this place is that the ever changing menu is delicious, the atmosphere is very funky and informal, and you are going to be sitting with strangers unless you come with a big party.  As a not very social diner, this is okay with me occasionally, but not as a general rule--on this occasion one of our fellow diners was someone who could end up in my first novel.  

Coconut, Almond, and Blueberry Cake

I love all things Ottolenghi, and since one of my sons has been ramping up his baking game, I got his dessert cookbook out of the library and this one was intriguing because of how little flour it has.  So it is an option for both gluten free flour substitution and for Passover.

• 200g/ ¾ cups plus 2 tbsp. unsalted butter, melted, then set aside to come to room temperature, plus extra for greasing
• 180g/ 1 2/3 cups ground almonds
• 60g/ 2/3 cups desiccated coconut
• 250g/1 ¼ cups caster sugar
• 70g/ ½ cup plus 1 tbsp. self-rising flour
• ¼ tsp salt
• 4 large eggs
• 1½ tsp vanilla extract
• finely grated zest of 2 lemons (2 tsp)
• 200g/ 1-1/4 cups fresh blueberries
• 20g/ ¼ cups sliced almonds

Directions

• Grease and line a 9 inch spring form or 23cm round cake tin. Preheat the oven to 350F 180C/160C.
• Place the almonds, coconut, sugar, flour and salt in a mixing bowl and whisk to aerate and remove the lumps.
• Place the eggs in a separate medium bowl and whisk lightly. Add the melted butter, vanilla extract and lemon zest and whisk again until well combined. Pour this into the dry mix and whisk to combine. Fold in 1 cup/ 150g of the blueberries, then pour the mixture into the tin. Sprinkle the last of the blueberries on top along with the flaked almonds and bake for 50-55 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the centre of the cake comes out clean. Keep a close eye on it towards the end of cooking: the large number of eggs in the mix means that it can go from still being a little bit liquid in the centre to being well cooked in just a few minutes.
• Set aside for 30 minutes before inverting out of the tin, removing the baking parchment and placing the cake the right way up on a serving plate. It can either be served warm with cream or set aside until cool.
• This will keep for up to 3 days in an airtight container or wrapped in aluminium foil. It also freezes well for up to a month.

Gifted (2017)

This is a movie that sounds like it would be terrible, but it is not.  Chris Evans (really predominantly known to me as Captain America) takes in his sister's infant daughter after she commits suicide.  She was a brilliant mathematician who was isolated and bullied by her mother to do nothing but math.  The mother gave up her career in math to become a mother, and she very clearly sought to live in the reflected glory of her daughter, to the detriment of her child's ability to enjoy life.  The daughter was shunned by the mother when she gave birth to a child out of wedlock, and then left the child without a parent by taking her own life.
The story changes when it turns out the child is a math genius as well.  The uncle wants her to have a normal life, to have friends, to have the childhood his sister was denied, but the grandmother comes back and tries her damnedest to have history repeat itself.  The quality of the cast makes this story that could be told badly really quite good.

Marquee Pizza, Coralville, IA

I have been to this restaurant three times now, once for lunch, once for an early dinner, and once for a late dinner of Saturday night when the place was hopping.  In all of these situations the food was consistently good.  The service was better in a less full restaurant, but truthfully, we were four people with a baby with only one seat at the bar ordering food once and we were treated very well.
The pizza is the thing here.  The crust is excellent and they have a good variety of topping combinations to keep it interesting.  I recently lunched with my parents here and had a speck, fresh mozerella and mushroom pizza that was spot on savory, and then a shaved asparagus, prosciutto, and lemon creme fresh pizza that was bright and sparkly in flavor.  They have a range.  The Brussels sprout side is good, the salads are a good side, but focus the bulk of your efforts on the pizza and you will be quite happy here.

Ceding the Moral High Ground

As Americans we had a place on the world stage after WWII.  Admittedly, we entered the war late, we were largely not invaded, and the manufacturing windfall of making weapons made us richer, better positioned to compete, and with a highly trained work force.  We took that and ran with it for quite a while.
I would say the beginning of the end came around 9/11, when we started to slip back towards our Japanese internment days.  As a nation we curtailed freedoms based on creed and religion, but somehow managed to make enormous strides in the area of LGBT civil rights, so we were on precarious ground with some complicated inconsistencies milling about and then we elected a president who is a xenophobic, racist, elitist misogynist who is easily manipulated by the likes of Stephen Miller, a man whose formative trauma is still unknown but you don't get that dead inside without something bad happening to you.  And now we, as a nation, have very unfairly and inappropriately vilified those who come here to immigrate.  My family, arriving centuries ago with the Puritans, were certainly not here legally.  Native Americans wanted no part of them, I am quite certain.  Many of the rest of us came here on shaky grounds, either smuggling in, bribing to get visas, enslaved, indentured, or otherwise not completely on the up and up.  So he who is without sin should throw the first stone, I say. 

He Named Me Malala (2015)

We have been on a mini-documentary run of late.  One a week.  It is modest, but yet another way to expand what we know and how we learn it.  College is over in our house, so it is time to find another way.
This is the telling of the story of Malala Yousafzei, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the girl who was shot by the Taliban because she advocated the education of women.
 First off, let me just say that it is a great and inpirational story, but the telling of it is a little bit unsatisfying.  The very best part of the story is the retelling of an ancient traditional tale involving a girl named Malala that inspires her people to rise up in battle.  That is wonderfully told and the parallels are left to the viewer's imagination.  Not so with the rest of the movie, which has a bit of a heavy hand about it.  All in all, well worth watching and marveling at a remarkable young woman who became an icon for good.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is both painful to read and very important to know and think about.  This is the James Baldwin of our time.  This is the beginning of a discourse on what it is to be a person of color in America.  Coates has won that position for himself with this book, and  the competition is not even close to him. In an America consumed by debates over racism, police violence and domestic terror, it is Coates to whom we can turn to mold our views from the clay that is our culture.
This book is written as a letter to the author’s teenage son, conveying the personal and historical struggle to “live free in this black body,” a body that faces the constant, exhausting threat of state-sanctioned violence. But the book also reads like an open letter to white America, to the well-meaning sorts who at some point might have said, “Yes, things are bad, but they’re getting better, right?” It is to them that Coates is delivering this stern, fatherly talk.  The hell it is.  On the one hand it is no longer acceptable, in most of the country, to talk openly about lynching people.  Not all of the country but most of the country.  The realities of where we were and where we are and where we should want to go are all succinctly laid out. 

Kiwi Daiquiri

We got some kiwis over a month ago from Costco, and while they haven't rotted on the counter, they have failed to get substantially riper either.  I wanted to put them in the compost bin, but my spouse that that a daiquiri might be a good way to use them.
The one caveat is that the color does not look this green without adding food coloring, which we did not do.
Overlook the muddy green and enjoy the delicious flavor.

3 oz. white rum
2 kiwis peeled and quartered
2 Tablespoons lime juice
lime zest
1 1/2 tablespoons agave syrup (honey would probably do)
2 cups crushed ice

Put in the Vitamix or the blender, then serve.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

Yes, I went to see this in a theater.  My husband's comment?  I wish I had seen this in my living room.  Even though we had a happy family evening out and lots of popcorn, it was just not enough.  The family themed super hero genre seems like one that would appeal to us, I admit. 
Super heroes have been in hiding due to some sort of bad PR that they have gotten, and a brother sister team are out to bring them back into the world's good graces.  In a nod to the changing social landscape, Mr. Incredible stays home with the kids while Elastic Girl goes about saving the day.  As you might imagine, super hero kids are exhausting, because they have both the usual childhood challenges and then they also have super powers, all of which rings true.  The CGI is incredible, there is not question about that, but in some ways it is so good as to feel, well, almost ordinary.  This movie has none of the charm of either Coco or Isle of the Dogs, so while I think I probably have now seen another Oscar nominee for next year (always good to knock a few of them off ahead of time), it didn't wow me.

Does Freedom RIng?

It is hard to be furious enough about the separation of children from their families by Border Patrol.  The President said he had no choice.  Democrats will not give him what he wants and he is left with no choice.  He is like the sadistic father who says that he is forced to beat his children until his wife does what he demands. The fault lies squarely with him, and with no one else, with the exception of Stephen Miller, architect of said plan.  Anyone reporting on this issue needs to squarely place the blame where it belongs and point out the bait and switch.  Children will be with their parents, but they are incarcerated indefinitely.  
This isn't about the law.  The law is that refugees have the right to present themselves for asylum.  This is about not just power and control but also dehumanizing people.When the administration says that they are not people but rather animals, they are walking a very familiar path.  The first step in committing inhumane acts is to cease to see our fellow man as just that, our fellow man.  Once they are not people, what we do to them can parallel how we treat our livestock, right up to and including what we are doing to families seeking asylum.  The intentional traumatizing of children and potentially far far worse is what happens in a nation of barbarians.  Not a land of the free.  Rise up, speak out, and most of all, vote.  The freedom awarded us by our forefathers is in peril.  Not for the first time, true, but let's make sure we don't go the route we did with internment of the Japanese.

Crawfish Fetticcini

We have an occasional really good source of crawfish, and while my favorite way to have it is ettuffe, but every once in awhile you just have to mix it up a little.
This is on the rich side, but delicious.

• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 teaspoons Cajun seasonings
• 1 pound crawfish tails
• 2 tablespoons minced shallots
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon Crystal Hot sauce
• 2 cups half and half
• Salt and pepper
• 1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese
• 1/4 cup chopped green onions
• 1 pound fresh fettuccini, cooked al dente and tossed with olive oil

• In a large sauté pan, melt the butter. Sauté the crawfish tails in the butter for 2 minutes. Season with Essence. Add the shallots and garlic and continue sautéing for 1 minute. Stir in the Worcestershire sauce, Crystal Hot sauce, and cream. Bring the liquid up to a boil and reduce to a simmer. Simmer for about 8 minutes or until the sauce thickens.
  
• In a mixing bowl, toss the pasta with the crawfish sauce. Season with salt and pepper. Fold in the grated cheese and green onions and serve immediately.
  

The Insult (2017)

This is the very last movie that was nominated for an Academy Award in 2017 that I had not seen--so now I have seen all 59 movies, and I have to say, this one would be my choice for Best Foreign Language film (although I thought the one that won was very good.
Lebanon is the home to a diverse religious and ethnic groups, which is shorthand for saying there is a lot of division and violence around it.  The beginning of the story starts small.Yasser is a Palestinian doing street repairs.  The Palestinian's are shunned everywhere, and treated much like immigrants in the United States--they do jobs that no one else does, and are spit upon for it.  Tony has an illegal spout coming off his second floor patio that spills water on Yassers head.  Yasser is very annoyed, yells, and Tony is belligerent.  Yasser then fixes the pipe, and Tony destroys it.  Yasser swears at him.  Neither comes off well, but Tony is definitely entitled and unreasonable, demanding that Yasser apologize to him or be fired.  The situation escalates between them, and when Tony takes Yasser to court, it ignites the country.  What begins as a local dispute leads to rioting in the street, and then in the end, Yasser and Tony see that they are not all that different after all.  A close up look at pointless violence, something that we are experiencing in the US as well.  History is doomed to be repeated.

Celebrating Canada

 The Canada Confederation, which took place on July 1, 1867, united the British colonies (which became Quebec and Ontario) with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.  The United States was just a couple years past the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had been assassinated, and things were in a bit of a mess for us then.  It is a good perspective, because as bad a things are now with our government, back at the beginning of Canada it was considerably worse.  The United States then, and to a lesser degree now, disagreed about race and what equal protection of the law meant.
One difference between us is that the enslavement of Africans brought against their will largely did not occur in Canada.  There were no routes between Canada and Africa.  There was some slave ownership, both of native people and of Africans, but nowhere near as common as it was for their southern neighbor.  Canada outlawed slavery in 1833, and it was a safe final destination on the Underground Railroad from the 1841 through to the end of the Civil War.  They ended up on both the moral side of the war, and the winning side.
Canada is 151 years old now, and it looks remarkably good these days.  Why we are picking a fight with them, I do not understand.  They have been a  good ally for us, but who could blame them if they got mad about their southern neighbor's behavior.