Tomatoes

Oh, wow.  I was visiting my friend in town, and had just been reading a FaceBook post that MSG (monosodium glutamate) should not be avoided, because it is naturally found in our food, e.g. in tomatoes.  Now that I find hard to believe, but there's no doubt that it isn't the most synthetic chemical we eat.  I shouldn't condemn that statement (that it's found in tomatoes) without evidence, but it's Thursday, and I don't have the energy. 

Anyway, my friend had obtained a tomato from somewhere, and we decided to slice it up and èat it, while the leftovers were heating in the oven.  Oh man; that was one fantastic tomato!  It wasn't bright red, like we would expect a fantastic tomato to be; it was just, you know, red.  I ate four pieces, and I could still eat more!

I happened to drink some diet Pepsi after my third piece of tomato, and then ate the fourth piece.  To my surprise, the tomato actually tasted salty!  I think that was due to the Pepsi, but still.  I had always known that a good tomato had a balanced taste, with tartness, sweetness and a little salt.  But this chunk was definitely salty.  I do love salt, so I was really pleased. 

The tomatoes are in peak flavor, around here, so if you live near north-central PA, go out and get some tomatoes, and just eat them.  You'll thank me later. 

Kay

P.S. Oh dear.  I learned that my friend had actually sprinkled a tiny bit of table salt on the tomato chunks!!!  Boo!  Salting fresh tomatoes is sort of SOP in many homes, and I had simply forgotten.

Kk

Iran

Dear citizens of Iran.

It is treason to provide comfort to the enemy.  However, there is no consensus among US citizens about whether Iran is an enemy to our nation.  Many of us shudder to learn about the death tolls from this latest round of attacks.

Arch

OMG. Peak / Peek Strikes Again

Not one but TWO instsnces of authors who haven't screwed up anything else, confusing Peek with Peak!!!

Peak is a hight thing.  Peaks of mountains.  Peak of someone's fame.  Peak of popularity.

Peek from behind a curtain.  Peek-a-boo.

Come, people, it's not that hard. 

Kay

P.S.  Jeeze.  'Gate' and 'Gait'.

Gate: a door set into a garden fence, or garden wall.

Gait: the style of motion, of a person, or a horse.  Gallops, and Trots, are two gaits of a horse.

I'm so depressed. 

Position Paper

Just this morning, I saw a post under Ron Howard's image; that implied that he supported what it said—and I thought he had written it, until someone clarified that it was written by a woman in 2018.  I have forgotten her name, but it really is a wonderful piece of writing.

It clarified a lot of the loose terminology that MAGA politicians like to throw around; especially what liking and supporting various Government services would, or would not imply.  Gratitude and admiration to both the original author, and Ron Howard for bringing the piece to our attention.

Kay

Added later:

I am a liberal, by Lori Gallagher Witt - by Nat Pernick https://share.google/BlNWJ0a5MXbeh2gIb

Death Tolls

I'm typically insensitive to large losses of life.  Though I feel sadness at deaths in school shootings, they don't set me back to the point of being unable to function.  But somehow, the news of deadly floods in Nepal are horrifying. 

In retrospect, I'm beginning to feel the scope of the killings in Gaza.  Israeli soldiers are responsible for these massacres, and they are terrible to contemplate.  The psychic consequences for the adults are going to be vast.  I'm not an expert in psychology, but I know that inflicting cruelty and horror is traumatic for the culprit as well.

I know that I'm conflating two types of disaster: natural, and human-inflicted.  But they're horrors anyway, and we feel the pain.

K

Rhiannon Giddens

Just got back from Chautauqua, NY, where The Silk Road Ensemble was performing, originally curated by Yo Yo Ma, but now under Rhiannon Giddens.

Thr basic idea of the Silk Road performances is to present  a sequence of (folk) performances from a variety of cultures, transitioning smoothly from one piece to another.  They feature nearly a dozen expert musicians—African, European, Oriental, Asian, Indian, and so on; I could not identify them all.

Featured instruments were a Cello, an Accordion, several Violins, a Flute, Marimba, a Banjo-like instrument, a guitar, and several Drums of different sizes, from different traditions, including a Tabla set, a pair of Indian drums.  There was also a digital keyboard, that provided a drone background.

Rhiannon Giddens led a column of the performers, right through the aisle, leading a sort of audience participation routine.  (The chant she got the audience to join in sounded vaguely African, which made me wonder who this woman was.  It was only later I learned who it had been.)

Kay

Peak vs. Peek

This is a repeat.  I've already written about this pair of words. 

OK.  The word should have been 'peek.'  You don't sneak a peak.  It's peeks you sneak.  Sneaking a peek at the television screen.  Don't let me hear you making this mistake again.  <grumble, grumble.>

Reading Books I've Already Read

There is [yet another] book I've read before that I'm reading again.   It's called Suddenly, by M. E. Tudor, and it has some interesting features.

Firstly, it's about a cheerleader who unexpectedly falls for girl with a rough past (who 'runs with a bad crowd,' as they put it), but who has turned over a new leaf, and walks a dramatically new road.  Her past crowd begins to pester the main girl, and the other girl defends her very vehemently.  I like these two characters very much, and, of course, that's half the battle of writing a successful story: to create believable, engaging characters.  They have to be so convincing that the reader just can't abandon them!  I've written a few stories, as you know, but the main one—the extended story of Helen, split into a half-dozen separate pieces—was so specialized, that only a few readers could relate to the main character of Helen, and I sort of gave up.  (The subsidiary characters were a lot more relatable, and I focused on them.)

Secondly, there's the matter of voice.  The story is written in the first person, the cheerleader.  But the speech of the narration is that of a very middle-class teenager.  I've gone online, and read what Ms. Tudor has written in a lot of places, and in every case, the grammar, the vocabulary, the content of what she writes is most definitely adult, and humorous, and very different from what that cheerleader says in the book.  I've tried that—to write a first-person narration in the voice of a character—and it is very hard indeed!  (That's how I wrote Yraid, and I don't think I pulled it off.  Another story like that, Eyebrows, remains unfinished.)

The girl's (narrator's) mother is problematic.  She comes from money, and has very bourgeoise, superficial values: money, clothes, family, real estate, cars.  The cheerleader herself is far more down-to-earth, compassionate, values, streets ahead of her mother.  Her father is a much more reasonable person, and supports her friendship.  You have to wonder how the child of such a pair of parents could acquire such liberal values.  In my experience, most of our values are inherited from our parents.  Anyway, in the story it's a synthetic family; the father is a step-father.

Well, I encourage you to read this story; I have trouble inserting links, or I'd give you one.  It's on Amazon (though we 'antifa' people hate Amazon on principle).

Kay

Being Christian

I'm not a Christian in the sense of believing in a God, but I grew up in a Christian family, and to me, the objectives of a Christan life are almost the only objectives worth aiming for. 

But recently, I read that the murder of John Kennedy was very likely linked to his serious, no nonsense attitude towards the state of Israel.  Remember the book Da Vinci Code?  The religious leaders kept their hands clean, but managed to convey to unscrupulous operatives what they wanted—even up to murder—and the killings were carried out.  In the book (which was presented as fiction, and was probably mostly fiction) the assassins were given religious absolution in advance, so that they could plan their killings without the fear of eternal damnation hanging over their heads.  In the case of Israeli operatives, I doubt that the calculus of sin and punishment was as finely worked out as it was among the catholics, but the brutality of how they torture poor Palestinian children, performing surgery without anesthesia, etc, seems almost too brutal to be true.  But when I was a kid, hearing about the Kennedy assassination, I didn't have the slightest inkling that the state of Israel was even tangentially connected with it. 

I'm reading a book by Caren Werlinger, about a monastic order of nuns, and how their vague interest in (pre-internet) news from the outside world swelled to a flood after the Kennedy assassination.  Of course, the nation as a whole viewed Catholics with dislike and distrust, and some Protestants would have been pleased to remove a catholic president.  But the Israelis had the money (actually, American money) to exert the sort of pressure that works so well in this country.  Just the fact that this order of monastic nuns, who would never hurt or harm any being (other than each other!) would be horrifying themselves listening to the news on the radio, and being shocked at the murders of Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, makes me deeply sorry. 

I forgot where I was going with all this. 

Well.  Having religious beliefs helps to simplify life to a great extent.  But not enough to deal with Trump.  That wasn't the point of my Blog post today, but there it is. 

Kay

Sugar and Yet More Smoke

OK; head over to our sister Blog.  It's over there. 

MAGA Families and Children

Not all MAGA family members cheer for MAGA.  MAGA dads, I suspect, keep very tight control of what the family can, and cannot do.

Throughout the decades, it has become unAmerican for the so-called patriarchs to keep an iron grip on what everyone is allowed to do.  This is a large part of making America 'great again': let's go back to those long ago times when dads called all the shots.  But those were not good times; things were often settled with a good gunfight, but the heroes often did not win. This testosterone-infused style of storytelling, though Trump and MAGA see it through rose-tinted glasses, does not represent the truth of history. 

MAGA dads frequently do not understand the contributions of blacks, and women, and foreigners and immigrants, to the amazing developments in American science and art and education.  All of you who grew up with non-MAGA dads must be grateful. 

Recently, it appears that MAGA believe that the only way to win is through cheating.  It's as though they're saying: "Winning is important.  If we have to cheat, then that's what we must do!  If we cheat, it's not really cheating."

No, it is; it's cheating.  We're keeping track of it.

Kay

Wise and Wonderful Cats

I have been studying my friend's little white cat for a while now, and I'm puzzled. 

You know how, in fairy tales and children's literature, cats are so intelligent and wise, and always cautious when going into any reckless adventure, and a source of great wisdom, to offset the headlong enthusiasm of the dog, and the young boys in the party?  They're depicted as the Gandalfs, in those tales. 

But from all I've observed of actual cats, they do hardly any actual thinking at all.  In fact, this cat—whom I know the best—does everything purely on impulse.  You can almost see some idea suddenly arrive in it's head, and completely displace what it was doing, only to be displaced by yet another impulse!

They don't seem to be bothered by thinking and planning of any sort.  Just decide, in the spur of the moment, and go ahead.  The very opposite of a sage.

I think it's their great stillness that gives the impression of profound thought; they're not thinking, as such; they're simply observing.   They're comparing the layout that they're seeing now, with how it had been laid out before, and making changes to their mental map of how it was.  That's all.  It's not drawing any conclusions; just noting. 

I have to say that, in modern children's literature, cats are depicted quite differently.  They're presented as enigmatic creatures with whom it's impossible to communicate.  That's certainly true; information flows to the cat in a very unreliable stream, if at all. 

Kay

Trump and Stolen Elections

Because Trump is throwing so much of his weight to show that elections are being stolen, I'm suspicious that this is only a pretext to make it harder for the people to vote. 

But I have a fabulous idea. 

Why do passports have to be $165 each?  That's the sort of price you put on something if they're only intended for Elites.  If everyone needs them, they should be priced so that even people on food stamps can afford them.  This suggests a very reasonable project for Liberals / non MAGA to get behind: make acceptable voting ID as cheap as $10 each, and have teams of volunteers going house to house, helping people get their forms filled out, and their documentation ready.  Of course, if the âdministration learns that such a project is underway, they'll insist that only a gold- plated passport manufactured by a company headed by Donald, Jr, costing $500 each, is acceptable.  But then it becomes clear that it is clearly a poll tax. 

Kay

Red Cards and Peace Prizes

Everyone knows, by now, about how Trump requested a review of a referee's call.  It looks as though the president of FIFA, who had allowed Trump's request to go forward, will now have to step down.

Trump has no instincts to handle these sorts of diplomatic decisions.  Maybe he thinks that how so many of us think of the settling of international disputes are 'the old-fashioned ways' of doing things.  Yes, they have settled into this pattern because it has smoothed international relations for so long   The new ways that Trump, Musk, Boris Johnson, and other bullies want to do things will probably not work.  The dignity and the pride of peoples and governments must be preserved, and the 'strongest' nations cannot run roughshod over the others.  This is the foundation of the UN (though too many traditions really give the biggest nations a little extra procedural power), and we must decide whether we allow the bullies to do what they want. 

Kay

Another Oxford Story

This one is a whole series by an American author, Lynn Morrison, who has settled down in the City of Oxford, and is clearly ensorcelled by that magical city!  In addition to the usual over the top adoration of Oxford University, this author has incorporated magic into the stories.  It's nicely done, but ends up giving the story a slightly Harry Potteresque feel.  Not terrible, but if a reader is familiar with Oxford—which I'm not, at all—they might feel like, come on, it's just a university.  It's weird, but not that weird!

There's a baby dragon- like critter—a wyvern, to be exact—that attaches himself to the main character, and very cleverly pretends to be a cat, so as not to blow this main character's cover to the muggles.  The name of the wyvern is Humphrey, but he hates his name, and wants to be called H.

The main character is Natalie Payne (rather an American-sounding name for a British heroine) but she's nice, and gets along well with the wyvern.

June 14

Apparently it's trump's birthday!  Nobody is celebrating it around here; Trump prolly doesn't care what happens in our town, and there's likely going to be a lot of fussing near Washington D.C., or Maralago.  Well, as long as everything is on Trump's own dime, can't complain!

How about Chuck E.  CHeese?

I'm reading a story, where, again, one girl in a couple wears a dress, and the other wears ǰeans, for a party.  This is getting to be just too much of a cliche in books on Amazon.  In going to have start looking elsewhere for more satisfactory stories. 

Kay

Lindsey Pennington: Soft Lips ...

I've just finished reading another book by Lindsey Pennington.  The previous books by this author I had read were exceptionally good; very literary, would have been my verdict.  Since I'm so picky about careful language, and grammar, I guess that those aspects of the writing must have been really good. 

This latest story, though, started out very promisingly, but sort of became a little scattered as it went along; actually the entropy in the writing got very bad indeed.  But I had made a connection with the characters, so I just had to finish the story. 

There are two women, the older one of whose marriage has broken up, but who is a very determined, very giving, very lovely person; and the younger a psychologist and counselor, patient and understanding, but just discovering that she is getting multiple sclerosis—still only minor symptoms, but eventually going to be serious. 

They love each other very much.  But the older woman is diagnosed with cancer, which eventually kills her, and the younger, the caretaker, is left devastated, with the only child of the deceased woman, a boy, to look after.  She is eventually persuaded to seek companionship in a lesbian bar. 

Also at the bar, with her crazy friends and her sister, is a young lawyer.  She's straight, but these girls are her friends, so she tags along with them, always to this same bar.  For a bet, she's asked to kiss a girl, a one-time exercise.  Of course, she ends up kissing our other protagonist.  It's a good kiss; neither of them can stop thinking about it.  The young lawyer runs home from the bar. 

The story revolves around the lawyer's clumsy attempts to deal with her unexpected new attraction to a woman, after a decade or more of being only interested in men.  She finds out the home address of the psychologist, Kerry, and bursts into her home, uninvited. 

There are some interesting circumstances; the lawyer—an attractive girl—is half Scottish, half Korean; and her mother is a typical, interfering Korean mother.  There are four children, all girls, all different, and all real characters. 

The biggest character of them all is the lawyer herself, who was extremely picky about the men she wants to date; she has a checklist, and she scores them all on a 100-point scale.   (She's even got a scale for women, to help her lesbian friends out.)

It's sort of fun, though nothing really unexpected happens.  The comic attitudes of the young women, and their zany conversation kept me hooked, though I thought the long-suffering psychologist was just a little too patient with her rude lawyer client. 

But there are just so many mechanical errors that I strongly suspect that there was a very capable editor for the previous stories, but not for this one. 

Kay

Terpsichore

The last few days I have had a strange experience—actually, a whole series of strange experiences—similar to some that I've had in earlier years.  Having so little to do, I spend a lot of time on Facebook.  And I get sucked into these so-called reels, which are simply videoclips.  And some of them are just girls dancing. 

They have a happy smile on their faces, and they've got pretty dresses on—I guess they know my taste in clothing, by now, so they can select videoclips keeping that in mind, or ... anyway—they're dancing away; and in my mind I'm so depressed, because I never learned this sort of dance!

I can certainly dance ballet; I took many years of it; I can dance the Waltz, but was seldom called upon to waltz with anyone.  But these hip-swinging Latin dances are completely out of my reach, and they're the best for dancing by one's self.  Then, there are these Tik-tok type dances that are so cute; and I'm so consumed with envy.  If I had to do it all over again, from my early teens, I'd dance up a storm!

Dancing is natural for girls in these times. 

Irene Idänvalo

OMFG.

A Facebook 'content creator' from Finland has made herself at home on my Fb page.  Her name is Irene, and she's the heading of today's post. 

Irene

It seems very much as though she's posting from Finland, though she's completely at home with English idioms, her slight accent notwithstanding.  She has a side buddy, her sister, who is often featured in Irene's video posts (they're always video clips; in fact their main content home is Instagram, I believe), and the sister's name is something like Snuikki.  [Added later: it's Snuikku.  If think Snuikki sounds a little more convincing.  But I don't know Finnish, unfortunately.]

Many of Irene's (which is pronounced 'I-re-neh')'s videos start with

"LISsen!!" screeched out at the top of her voice, after which she will go into the main subject, which is often The Finnish Word of the Day, which is quite often something multi-syllabic and intimidating, such as (yelled out) "Kurkku kipu!"

"Say it with me: kurkku kipu!  But what does kurkku kipu MEAN?"  So she would break it down, and say: kurkku means cucumber, and kipu means pain, so naturally kurkku kipu means a sore throat!  (Finnish etymology often takes an unexpected turn.)  She has a sidekick, namely her sister, a redhead, who seems marginally more sane than Irene herself, and an all-round softer person.  But this Snooky girl has her own posts—some of which also involve Irene—in which Snooky comes across as a lot more assertive and confident than she does in her sister's videos, when she's playing second fiddle.  They are fascinating people, and their choice of subjects are exactly calculated to suck me in!!

These videos—probably qualify as podcasts—are generally hilarious.  People all over the world tune into them, apparently, and they have a huge following.  I've only watched them for two days (Fb algorithm is sending me their video clips multiple times the last two days), so I'll have to report in more detail once I see more of them. 

Kay

P.S. She puts on a really convincing Southern / Texas accent!  They're (the two sisters) are very serious about their posts—I guess Instagram posts—but sometimes they're a little casual about the actual content.

One time, Irene badmouthed tortillas.  I was quite disconcerted.  This has to stop. 

Kay

Food

Does anyone else have a passion for feeding people or animals?  I Just loove to feed my friend's critters!!!  I simply go nuts, and she has to stop me.

Well, thank you for your attention to this matter. 

Kay

Added later (May 28, 2026):  Gosh, this little cat has cornered me again.  I'm in my friend's house in downtown Williamsport.  She's on my lap, purring like fury, asking for pets!  She keeps butting my hand (while I'm trying to get this post written), which means Pet me now, please!  Loud purring!  I Just got here; I didn't do anything.  I have no idea what I do to get her into this frame of mind. 

A dog this friendly would try to follow me home.  But this cat sees me getting ready to leave, and miaows once or twice, conveying something like: come back soon!!  So this is her territory.  I'm just her principal Petter, that's all.