Early spring inspiration.

Only doing this because bad cramps are keeping me holed up in bed.

Add some color.

And I want this short hair:

BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES.

I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.

Repeat.

Unwritten novels.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

REBECCA WEST.

NYC.

Thirty-one, 10, zero.

Before 2004, when the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired, the shooter never would have been able to get off so many shots before pausing to reload.

The city hung in my window, flat as a poster.

I think this feeling is the one I fear the most—flatness, disconnectedness, being incapable of escaping from my own head. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced. I can only guess at how it would feel. What if one day I couldn’t immerse myself in the world around me and feel better?

The silence depressed me. It wasn't the silence of silence. It was my own silence. I knew perfectly well the cars were making a noise, and the people in them and behind the lit windows of the buildings were making a noise, and the river was making a noise, but I couldn't hear a thing. The city hung in my window, flat as a poster, glittering and blinking, but it might just as well not have been there at all, for the good it did me.

SYLVIA PLATH.

This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization.

Zagreb has its own quality. It has no grand river, it is built up to no climax; the hill the old town stands on is what the eighteenth century used to call a moderate elevation. It has few very fine buildings except the Gothic Cathedral, and that has been forced to wear an ugly nineteenth-century overcoat. But Zagreb makes from its featureless handsomeness something that pleases like a Schubert song, a delight that begins quietly and never definitely ends. We believed we were being annoyed by the rain that first morning we walked out into it, but eventually we recognized that we were as happy as if we had been walking in sunshine through a really beautiful city. It has, moreover, the endearing characteristic, noticeable in many French towns, of remaining a small town when it is in fact quite large. A hundred and fifty thousand people live in Zagreb, but from the way gossips stand in the street it is plain that everybody knows who is going to have a baby and when. This is a lovely spiritual victory over urbanization.

REBECCA WEST. BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

Is it really controversial?

Swearing off the rhetoric of violence.

But while we wait to learn the motivation behind Saturday's shooting, which killed six, including federal Judge John Roll, nine-year old Christine Taylor Green and Gabe Zimmerman, Giffords' community outreach director, is it really controversial to suggest that the overheated anti-government rhetoric of the last two years, with its often violent imagery, ought to be toned down? Really?

Sadly, to my knowledge, no conservative leader has yet called for dialing back the rage on the right in the wake of the Giffords shooting. Sarah Palin sent condolences to Giffords' family, but said nothing about her unconscionable SarahPAC map putting 20 House members, including Giffords, in actual crosshairs for supporting healthcare reform, or her infamous Tweet telling conservatives "don't retreat, reload." Giffords' 2010 Tea Party challenger, Jesse Kelly, hasn't apologized for inviting supporters to "shoot a fully automatic M16" to "get on target for victory" and "remove Gabrielle Giffords from office." Nevada GOP Senate candidate Sharron Angle hasn't yet recanted her statement about the need to pursue "Second Amendment remedies" if political change lags behind the Tea Party's dreams.

NYC ahead.

Hitting up NYC January 20-24.

Flickr.

I turned my sweet cat into a milk monster. Oops.

Keira Knightley in Italian Vogue.

The ability to speak exactly is intimately related to the ability to know exactly.

Meatless Mondays on The Center for a Livable Future:

Meatless Monday has the potential to not only improve the populations’ health, but could also reduce unsustainable levels of demand for meat products, particularly industrially-produced meat, which use huge amounts of valuable natural resources and pose significant public health and environmental risks.



And Blackie.

When I was twelve years old, my family ate dinner a friend’s home and midway through the meal, our host commented on our hamburgers – “They’re pretty tough! Blackie was all muscle and he loved to run around in the fields.” And my preteen self was silently mortified—we were eating an animal with a name! Try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to finish my hamburger and hid the last few bites of meat under my napkin. And now—wouldn’t it be something to eat a cow or a pig or a chicken that lived such a full life, been the recipient of such attentive care that it bore a name of its own, that its keeper remembered it fondly and particularly? I've been reading about industrial farm animal production and may never eat anything again, just to be safe...

Eating is an agricultural act.

I spent a few minutes last night appreciating a red onion grown and handled with exquisite care: the weight of it in my palm, the way the skin crackles as it parts from the firm moist flesh, the crispness of the layers sliced by a sharpened knife in a steady hand. Incredible that something you can select for yourself at your neighborhood co-operative at $2.79 a pound can be as magnificent in its own way as an old cathedral.

The miracles of endurance and ingenuity.

They have lost sight of the importance of process; they have forgotten that everything which is not natural is artificial and that artifice is painful and difficult, that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize the miracles of endurance and ingenuity that had to be performed before the wheat grew, and the mill ground, and the oven baked. This condition can be brought about by several causes: one is successful imperialism, where the conquering people has the loaf built for it from the wheat ear up by its conquered subjects; another is modern machine civilization, where a small but influential proportion of the population lives in towns in such artificial conditions that a load of bread comes to them in a cellophane wrapper with its origins as unvisualized as the begetting and birth of a friend’s baby.

REBECCA WEST.
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON.

Spicy Egyptian lentil pot.

Chop in large chunks:
2 carrots
1 green pepper
1 red onion
2 tomatoes

Place vegetables in a large soup pot with
5-8 cloves of garlic, peeled and left whole
1 1/2 c. red lentils
5-6 c. water
1 chicken bouillon cube

Cover and boil 20-30 minutes without stirring. Cool slightly and strain or puree.

Return to pot and add:
2 tsp. cumin (more)
1 1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. ground black pepper
Red pepper flakes to taste

Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, to blend flavors.

Serve with lemon wedges to bring out flavor. (Haven't tried this.)



From Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook.

Indian curried mashed potatoes.

Boil 8 potatoes, peeled.
Cool slightly and mash.

Saute 1 onion and 1/2 tsp. ground black pepper and 1/2 tsp. red pepper flakes in olive oil.

Mix with mashed potatoes and add 1/2 tsp. tumeric and salt to taste.




I halved the onions... the first time, it was onion overload. This tastes awesome inside a spinach wrap.

Skeeter.

He looks like a less good-spirited ogre.