Where an outfit on Ocean Isle Beach, N.C. gets trout I don't know, but they do and they sell caviar from the roe that is incredible!

This stone was  erected in Ireland in the megalithic era.

Some erection, eh?

It was discovered by Sean and Mac in what would come to be known as BC 1,503.

A startlingly clever man who had learned to write recorded their discovery and decision.

Sean: 'Ere naow! What's is?"

Mac: "It's a rock."

Sean: "Aye, but it's of a shape ...?"

Mac: "Aye. Shape of that."

Stones like this are hardly unusual in Celtic areas

We got this tree in 1972. It was seven feet tall then so it's probably about eighty years old. It lived in the kitchen under a skylight but went out on the deck behind the kitchen in the tropical heat of the Alexandria summers. It must be four times as big now as it was back in 2000.

Our Christmas Card for 2005

P. 1

It's kind of blurry because it's a bunch of screenshots, but it conveys our meaning.

Far away, you rollin' river!

Oh, Shenandoah, you floods cause grievin'.

Thanksgiving in a power loss, Thursday, November 24, 2005

We gave thanks on this windy day for something old in our cottage:

Because a windstorm cut our power. High winds do, out here, and we had gusts of about 40 MPH. So we were thankful, too, for something new:

November 20, 2005

Blowin' in the wind

How many leaves must our Mary blow

Before she can call her yard clear?

Yes, ‘n how many hours must her blower roar

Before it can go from from her hand?

Yes, ‘n how many leaves have to just disappear

Before she has done what she’s planned?

The answer, my friend, is blowin’ cross the ground.

The answer is blowin’ all around.

Soon, she'll have more leaves to blow

Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005

The golden days of Autumn, saddest of the year.

A little too warm for whiskey,

A Little too cold for beer.

More pretty leaves in our woods

Below, the musings of Roxy, whom we feed on the deck most days.

For several years we have been buying Alpo and saving bones for pet foxes. Our current fox is "Roxy." Sometimes "Foxy Roxy." We think she's a she, though it's hard for anybody but foxes to tell.

The other morning when we set out on our "constitutional" walk we saw a pretty fox not far from the culvert where "our" foxes tend to make their dens. It was breathing raggedly and its eyes were blinking but we were only a few feet from it and it should have run away. Mary ran back to the house and called the Blue Ridge Wildlife Center and left an urgent message on their answering machine. We wiped tears away and continued walking on the dirt road. When we got back home we called the center again, this time getting its director on the phone.

BRWC takes in wounded wildlife, heals it when possible, and releases it back into the wild. It's in a nearby house on a  conservation trust property. It has wing-damaged ducks in the bathtub, backyard cages with hawks, coons, possums and a flying squirrel in various stages of disrepair and several damaged hawks and owls in the bedroom of director Peggy Coontz. (She's sleeping in the living room.)

Peggy came over when we called and by the time she got here, the pretty fox had died. She hauled the creature away from its deathbed and inspected it and found that it died of a head wound, probably from a car hit. She found, too, that it was male. It had three black feet and a white left rear foot.

No fox came for dinner that evening, but the next day this fine fox appeared on our deck:

Her left back foot is black as earlier pictures show that Roxy's was.

We think our friend has never left and not been hurt. We're sorry for the slain fox. Maybe we shouldn't form friendships for wild animals, but the need for humans to do so goes back to when people all lived in caves and made friendships and partnerships with wolves.

In the picture above, woodworker extraordinary Mary demonstrates why you should NEVER nail the  back of a bookcase to one of its sides BEFORE  you drill the holes for the shelf supports.

Her husband, all excited because he had cut the pieces for one of three sections of a bookcase, stupidly decided to assemble. Luckily Mary stopped Pye after he nailed and woodscrewed one side to the back. Unchecked, he would have attached the other side and the top 

I call this picture "Burquette and Hatguy." Son Ed sent us the finery so he wouldn't miss Afghanistan so much when he comes home from the wars this summer.

He also sent us the neat Afghan rug shown below.

The rug is from Qhunduz, in Northern Afghanistan, up near Uzbekistan, as you can see in the map below. Qhunduz or Kunduz is the blue province in the upper middle of the map.

The area where the rug was hand-woven is deathly poor, ravaged by twenty years of recent war. It has been the object of conquest since Alexander the great fought there. It was there that America gave gold and guns to the Taliban and Al Qaeda to fight the Russian invaders. It was there that America killed Taliban warriors and produced "collateral damage" of dead civilians to prosecute a "war against terrorism."

The villagers who wove that rug would have been lucky to get ten percent of what the ultimate consumer, our son, paid.

If I had my way, I'd dispatch experts on farm collectives in, say, Minnesota and Wisconsin to teach the Afghan weavers to form collectives to control the marketing of these glorious rugs. That could undercut the ugly, machine-woven Chinese, Indian, Turkish and Iranian rugs that dominate the trade today. It would bring wealth, medical care and education to a region poor in most resources but rich in people. People could make more weaving even than growing poppies. Peasant farmers don't make much on poppies. The people they sell to do. Maybe the poppy growers need a collective. What else are cartels for?

That really WOULD fight terrorism. Idle hands are Quaeda's workshop. If money began to flow to the villages, enterprises would spring up. Jobs would be created. Rugs would provide the seed money for a capitalist way of life. We'd export Springsteen and P. Diddy concerts. You'll never convince me that Osama can outdraw P. Diddy.

Afghan Rap

I want those girls 'fore I get to heaven.

Jay Z's better than AK-47

Don't tell ME Quaeda knows best

Don't stick me in no dynamite vest.

Wham, bam, gimme Uncle Sam!

Just loves my fav-oh-rit Uncle Sam.

I ain't dissin' dat old Islam

But I wants to eat some chitlins and ham.

I'm fed up to here with kebab lamb.

Sick of bein' bossed by a crazy Swami

Gonna feed my girl some hard salami!

Come on girl, make me a happy fella

Grab a hold of the mortadella!

Cola straight from the can is OK on a thirsty Virginia summer day, but it's better with ice in a dimple glass like this. It's better yet if the ice is frozen lime juice as this is.

Limes are cheap now. You can get five pounds of them in plastic mesh bags for three dollars. In the off-season they're thirty-five cents apiece. They add zing to just about any soft drink, and to Tom Collinses and other not-so-soft drinks. Mary doesn't have wrist arthritis and she squeezed two ice cube trays full of lime juice manually.

I want an electric citrus juicer. Froogle shows a bunch of them. I haven't yet found a video that shows how they work. You'd think juicer makers would have videos.

It takes a tough man to make a tender chili

My fellow workers at the late, lamented United Press International or UPI often committed chili .. and often with ground beef!

That is no way to cook chili! (Except for Cincinnati three-way chili, which is a sweet, cinnamon-flavored chili that actually SHOULD be made with ground beef and is a worthy rival to the dish I'm about to describe.)

A good chili should start with beef shanks. Since I'm not Jewish, I use about a one to three ratio of pork shoulder with all the pork fat still attached. That fat offsets the leanness of the shanks, although the gelatinous quality of the meat makes it very tender when it is long-cooked.

The meat should be cut into large bite-sized chunks and seared in bacon fat. before you put any liquid in, throw chili powder and some jalapeños in the (very BIG) pot, add lots of chopped (not squeezed) garlic, cumin, dried oregano and dried basil. Onion will disappear but if you don't use any you'll have to put in sugar or molasses. I usually put in a little of all of the above.

You can get a similar result using all beef and olive or other vegetable oils, but I'd intensify the garlic and spices a little

Add enough masa harina to make a rough roux (Louisianans would shudder!) with the bacon fat and some rendered pork shoulder fat. If you haven't already got the beef shank bones in, now's when you should put them in. The bones will help to give the chili a shiny, gelatinous sheen.

When the roux starts to color, put in a handful of loosely crushed bay leaves. Put 'em in a little cheesecloth sack so people don't have to pick them out of their mouth or spit them out. Start adding liquid. I like to use home-brewed very dark, thick, high-alcohol, heavy-on-the-hops beer. I put in very strong coffee and usually use instant. People argue about tomatoes-vs.-no-tomatoes. I like drained canned Roma tomatoes.

Then let the chili barely simmer, covered, for at least eight hours. Turn off the heat when it's bourbon time. Put in some bourbon. If you use scotch and there's a genuwine chili head around, you're at risk of sudden death from gunshot wounds.

Let the chili stand all night. Start it back up before breakfast and it'll be good by supper time. An hour or so before serving take out the shank bones, extract the marrow and chop it up fine and stir it vigorously in the pot.

DO NOT PUT BEANS IN THE CHILI!!! A side of beans is good -- and try to make them interesting beans, Pintos or heirlooms. They all taste pretty much the same but fancy beans are pretty. They help the presentation, as the good chili cooks say in Arkansas, where the pork should be from a razorback. The salad should be coleslaw. Provide sour sourdough bread for dipping. Or La Brea baguettes.

For garnish, chopped onions brined for three or four hours in salt and vinegar (no water) and rinsed lightly, and grated very sharp cheddar. I prefer Vermont cheddar but there's some fine New York cheddar and I have had Wisconsin cheddar that was edible. There is probably some wonderful California cheddar, California is the premier milk state, you know, but I know nothing about California cheese.

The best chili I have ever had was suspended from a tripod over a very smoky hickory fire in a three-legged fat round cast-iron pot big enough for a small missionary. One of these days I'd like to get such a pot.

(A colorful use of such a pot is to fill it from the fat rendered from cooking a whole pig in a ten-foot long wood-fired barbecue so that kids can cook hush puppies in them. I think people lose their taste for hush puppies when they reach puberty, but it sure is fun to watch kids feed the fire under the pot and cook the balls of cornmeal dough, stirring the bubbling oil and greasing up their hands and face and clothes while they sting their fingers on the hot hush-puppies and dip them into the barbecue sauce on the slabs of pork.)

To drink with the chili: cold and preferably home-made beer to wash down straight shots of Tennessee whiskey or good bourbon on the rocks. Do not drink bourbon from Illinois. In fact, do not drink anything from Illinois unless you're a scotch drinker, in which case drink all the Illinois Scotch you can hold. Illinois Scotch is just as good as Scotch from Loch Ness or wherever they make the stuff in Scotland. Lord knows, it couldn't be any worse.

The longer you keep chili around, within limits, the better it gets. It makes a wonderful breakfast. It freezes well, too. A frozen tub of chili and a microwave oven and you got yourself some fancy fast food.

chrs,

pye

April 22, 2005

Passover bread mustn't rise but on this holiday season other things will: Viagra is kosher for Passover. Yummy Seders are great, but after the seder comes the sack and former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordecai Eliahu has provided for special treats there too in this season. Viagra had been denied Kosher for Passover status on grounds that its coating had been in contact with hametz or leavening ingredients, but The Jerusalem Post says: