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.