Greetings
bogAvasHskabs

Click for fullsize photo )

Hoopster, I can almost guarantee that Nicole will love it. I feel safe in predicting that she will have finished the book before heading back to school.

Hoopster, all. I had two seperate posts going. What got left out: “Hoopster, given what you wrote about your little girl, I suggest you and Mrs. H. buy her a copy of the book for Christmas. If that works for you of course.” Then I added the guarantee, & read b4 going back to school bit.

(Shifting tone here to humorous. Let’s see Hoopster, Jordan’s got the video, Nicole’s got a book, …ya got any more kids that I can help out with? )

Beautiful! Perhaps you might consider using some simulated gems in the future.
I don’t buy the real stuff anymore because I don’t know how it was mined, polished and such.

All, perhaps the greatest song of this war has been written: “Christmas in Fallujah” has been written. Billy Joel and Cass Dillon performed it in concert the other night. You can see it and hear it courtesy via YouTube. (Link below.)

Background: Cass Dillon is an emerging artist from Long Island. The musical legend Billy Joel is also from Long Island. I don’t know the story of how they linked up, but they did. Billy Joel could have sung it but, very wisely in my judgement, wanted a younger voice, someone the age of the servicemen and women in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I don’t know the story, but I think some of the proceeds are helping a nonprofit, Homes For Our Troops, that builds/modifys houses for wounded warriors. They have projects going on all over the U.S. of A. (Some group that monitors charities gave them an award which only a small percentage of charities get; some charities are a scam.) Link below.

(H/t to the veteran, Austin Moran who brought it to my attention on the Veterans For Peace, VFP, list. One of the greatest joys of my life is belonging to VFP. Anyone can be a member, veterans, civilians can be an affiliate member. Btw, that’s a big honker of a hint. Link below.)

http://youtube.com/watch?v=an7v6I2Bruo

http://www.homesforourtroops.org/site/PageServer

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/about_vfp.vp.html

I’m quoting from memory here:

“One day our grandchildren will sing great songs about us.”
Richard Perle, chief f*cktard of the neocons, at the beginning of this war, which he lusted & labored for so much.

Wethornet comment Richard: “You are absolutely right. And this is what they will listen to buckwheat. Ha, ha. (pause)…Oh, and btw, what Army Infantry outfit are your sons in? Didn’t think so.”

I wish I could say the same for the Texas “artisan” I met in May of 1990, when I attended a craft-fair in Austin. I purchased a colorful, patchwork leather top that was sewn together with black cording. The seller (a woman from Texas) proudly said she had made it herself. The following year as I disembarked from a cruise ship in Istanbul, Turkey, I was disappointed to see a Turkish vendor selling the EXACT same item at a stand just past the customs area.

Apparently, the dishonest woman in Austin took the same vacation I did, bought several of these items, and then passed them off as her own at the craft fair. This was my first, good look at how different ethics and values can be in a place like Texas as compared to the East Coast. We Americans are definitely NOT all alike.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.
by Barbara Kingsolver

Main Amazon.com review, which came from Publisher’s Weekly.

Michael Pollan is the crack investigator and graceful narrator of the ecology of local food and the toxic logic of industrial agriculture. Now he has a peer. Novelist Kingsolver recounts a year spent eating home-grown food and, if not that, local. Accomplished gardeners, the Kingsolver clan grow a large garden in southern Appalachia and spend summers “putting food by,” as the classic kitchen title goes. They make pickles, chutney and mozzarella; they jar tomatoes, braid garlic and stuff turkey sausage. Nine-year-old Lily runs a heritage poultry business, selling eggs and meat. What they don’t raise (lamb, beef, apples) comes from local farms. Come winter, they feast on root crops and canned goods, menus slouching toward asparagus. Along the way, the Kingsolver family, having given up industrial meat years before, abandons its vegetarian ways and discovers the pleasures of conscientious carnivory.This field—local food and sustainable agriculture—is crowded with books in increasingly predictable flavors: the earnest manual, diary of an epicure, the environmental battle cry, the accidental gardener. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is all of these, and much smarter. Kingsolver takes the genre to a new literary level; a well-paced narrative and the apparent ease of the beautiful prose makes the pages fly. Her tale is both classy and disarming, substantive and entertaining, earnest and funny. Kingsolver is a moralist (“the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners”), but more often wry than pious. Another hazard of the genre is snobbery. You won’t find it here. Seldom do paeans to heirloom tomatoes (which I grew up selling at farmers’ markets) include equal respect for outstanding modern hybrids like Early Girl.Kingsolver has the ear of a journalist and the accuracy of a naturalist. She makes short, neat work of complex topics: what’s risky about the vegan diet, why animals belong on ecologically sound farms, why bitterness in lettuce is good. Kingsolver’s clue to help greenhorns remember what’s in season is the best I’ve seen. You trace the harvest by botanical development, from buds to fruits to roots. Kingsolver is not the first to note our national “eating disorder” and the injuries industrial agriculture wreaks, yet this practical vision of how we might eat instead is as fresh as just-picked sweet corn. The narrative is peppered with useful sidebars on industrial agriculture and ecology (by husband Steven Hopp) and recipes (by daughter Camille), as if to show that local food—in the growing, buying, cooking, eating and the telling—demands teamwork. (May)Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why