Awww, man, lobster and foie gras again!

Let's turn off the air-conditioning and downsize the refrigerator, for people are suffering in South Africa.

To be fair, the current summit in SA is the World Summit for Sustainable Development. The World Summit for Food was held earlier this year in Rome.

Here is a Guardian story on that event. The menu of lobster, foie gras and champagne was much the same.

Why don't they skip those confusing Summit names and call it The Great International Moveable Feast?

Mr. Reynolds at Instapundit will be thrilled to read this story of complaints about security at the port of New Orleans and points upriver.

A top New Orleans shipping industry official blasted the Coast Guard Thursday for scaling back the post-Sept. 11 sea marshal program while boosting reliance on local private security guards with little or no training to guard ships or deal with terrorists.

Channing Hayden, president of the Steamship Association of Louisiana, said private security guards now boarding vessels deemed risky by the Coast Guard offer little protection from terrorists determined to enter the country or to stage an attack on a local port.

"Putting security guards on ships to watch a (potential) al-Qaida terrorist is like putting a canary in a coal mine," he said during a luncheon meeting of the Traffic and Transportation Club of Greater New Orleans in Metairie. "Rent-a-cops don't do the job." [...]

Hayden said his complaints are not about money. He said ship operators are willing to pay the government a user fee to cover the cost of guarding suspicious vessels, as long as those guards are trained military personnel capable of responding to a real threat.

I have a question for geology buffs or professionals.

We are gardeners and pay an inordinate amount of attention to weather. At least two periods in the past three years, we have watched storm fronts split right along the Mississippi River, resulting in rain for points east and west and none here. We live about eight blocks from the levee. When rain has deigned to fall, it has fallen more heavily at my in-laws's house, just five more blocks away from the river. It has fallen even more heavily three miles up the highway.

I contend that the Mississippi is a large, fast-moving body of water that has a direct effect on our weather because of temperature or evaporation or something else.

Am I being unsophisticated? Can someone knowledgeable give me a clue? What about a suggestion for a google search?

Smiley Anders today:

Shirley Fleniken tells of the little boy who was overheard praying:

"Lord, if you can't make me a better boy, don't worry about it. I'm having a real good time like I am."

Monday through Saturday, Smiley Anders writes in the The Advocate of Baton Rouge. His column is a gathering of items from the community including announcements, thanks, and humorous items. It's a must read for me everyday.

Today he includes an item about a father encouraging his daughter to give to their church:

Bob Hayes of Prairieville overheard this in church:

"A father gave his 4-year-old daughter his offering envelope and told her to put it in the plate.

"She asked what it was for, and he told her it was for Jesus.

"After the usher had collected her envelope, she turned to her father and whispered, 'That's not Jesus, that's Sophie's dad!'"

After wallowing around in the dust under the counter for a day and a half adjusting cables, we are now in possession of a working LAN system in our house that is DSL enabled. Didn't take but one call to tech support.

Now I can read such obscure sites as WarLiberal, TechCentral, WSJ Opinion.online and Yahoo.

Unfortunately, now I have to cope with tremendous feelings of guilt because I am not as good a housekeeper as James Lileks, and I don't have a job or toddler to look after.

The world is a changed place.

My housekeeping abilities are diminished by a short obsessive-compulsive writer in Minnesota. My cooking ability is diminished by watching the chefs on Food TV. My sexuality is diminished by my husband always saying of Rachel Ray (she's the one who can eat well on forty dollars a day) that that girl is "cute as a button".

Dammit, if I was that young again I could eat well on forty dollars a day, too, and it wouldn't be my money.

And yes, you nit-pickers, I know that the conditional is 'were'.

Back in November 2001, that boy on the left, Ken Layne, was bragging about how he would go to the desert and watch the Leonid meteor showers. He never made it to the desert. While he was sitting with his wife in his backyard in the City of Angels, I was propped in my lawn chair in Vidalia, LA, watching the most fantastic display of sky pyrotechnics I had ever seen.

"Pish", I said, having heard all my life of shooting stars and never having seen one. I saw over a hundred that night before I stopped counting.

So, the great show of the Persieds was to display Sunday night. I gathered my seat, and sat with my head tilting back at four o'clock in the morning. I'd had some wine. I was sitting there by myself in the dark, looking up to the sky, observing the stars, and it occurred to me, "We have West Nile in Louisiana. We have a serial killer. Is it smart for me to be sitting out here in the dark while everyone sleeps?" I went inside, checked on Lucy, and went to bed.

My boy Lyman is usually good for a laugh -- and he can cook, too (listen up young men) -- so today he introduced me to Odd Todd.

Best turn down the sound if you're at work.

Mr. Chris Bertram at Junius posts the niftiest article and movie about toolmaking by crows. Go here. The film is fascinating.

Of course, now PETA will be screaming that this poor crow is being forced to work when he should be free to pick over soybean fields.

Forget the stories of the day. This could be a picture of Lucy, our baby girl.

Lucy is just over a year old. She sleeps in a cage that looks like this, though considerably larger.

Sometimes, she plays on the tabletop model of this Parrot Tower. More often you find her on a 4-foot playtree Lyman built from ribbonwood, which is very hard and impervious to strong parrot beaks.

Lucy has many toys similar to these, but she prefers to play with the plastic lid from a bottle of vegetable oil, or her wooden spool with the soda straw stuck through the center. Go figure.

Lucy eats pellets like these. She also eats a 13-bean, brown rice mixture with carrots and sweet potatoes that I make up about once every three months and freeze in snack-size bags, in addition to fresh fruits and vegetables everyday.

When I have a question, I e-mail the woman who weaned her at J-Birds in Mandeville, LA, or I consult Land of Vos.

We are working on Lucy's speech. She can say "Hey, Lucy", "What you doing?", answers the phone, "Harro?", and, of course, "Nite, nite."

Pretty cute girl.

I'm ticked. I was just watching MSNBC, where they managed to make our governor, Mike Foster, sound like a crazy, gun-toting anarchist.

Mr. Foster has made the mistake of advising single women to arm themselves with guns while we are in the midst of a rash of rape-killings. It's a small rash -- only three -- but I have been questioning my husband about serial-rapist-killers in Louisiana. He is 55-years-old and can remember none.

I am from a non-gun house, probably because my father had five sons within seven years who couldn't be predicted to play nice with each other.

In Louisiana, from my observation of nine years, there is nearly no man who hasn't spent time hunting. Some are stupid, and some are drunk, but most of them know how to keep a firearm. They have daughters.

Mr. Foster is calling on these women, like my two dark-eyed, dark-haired nieces, to buy firearms through legal channels, take their safety courses, watch their doors, and blow the son-of-a-bitch away who won't answer their queries. They call it deterrence.

UPDATE: Lyman says no, keep your gun ready and call 911. If he bursts through the door, then blast him in the chest.

UPDATE: Terry Oglesby at Possumblog refers me to this excellent site for self-defence and gun safety.

How can I be so isolated? I have to read Joanne Jacobs in California to find a reference to this article in the New York Times regarding current sexual trends in the south.

Couples have been enforcing a period of celibacy just prior to their weddings to allow a period of "re-virginization" before the honeymoon.

Far be it from me to quibble about how these couples view their religion or their sex lives, however, I would point out that there is plenty of time to do without sex after getting married, what with jobs and houses and yards and children.

There is a little edge to this article, talking about these pretentious southern women, that reminds me of a Roy Blount, Jr. piece I read in one of those eastern magazines years ago. Mr. Blount was dreading the dinner party conversation that would ensue once New Yorkers had gotten wind of clay-eaters in the south.

Who knows though, he said. Maybe they'll turn it into a trend and create boutique clay eateries in New York.

Maybe they'll do the same in this instance.

Henri Bendel, the fashion designer, was from Lafayette? Who knew?

Is it my imagination, or does the coding for Blogger look like word processing for the Data General mainframe in 1984?

A half-life ago, before I learned how to change a tire, lay floor or take green tomato stains out of white t-shirts, I was a young woman in a pretty white dress, escorted by an ambitious actor-writer, who joined a group for an evening of theater --Amadeus it was, with Peter Firth (not Tim Curry, blast it)-- and dinner at the Russian Tea Room.

It was a festive evening, with the most horribly patterned polyester jackets given the men in the party who failed to meet dress requirements. There were at least eight of us, and we were seated at a long table. We dined on blini with caviar and tossed back shots of ice-cold vodka served in tiny glasses the waiters settled in bowls of ice.

What a fantastic memory.

I have just been flipping through September's Food & Wine Magazine. On page 35 there is a paragraph extolling the virtues of a new product from California --Hangar One Mandarin Blossom Flavored Vodka:

So St George's next move was to turn wheat and Voigner grapes into a spirit that met the legal definition of vodka, but tasted, not surprisingly, a bit like eau-de-vie, with quiet suggestions of cherries, plums and pears.

No wonder the Russian Tea Room is gone. Where is the damned vodka?

Tony Woodlief at Sand in the Gears stands up for passengers against security at a Witchita airport in this post, and prevails!

I have no fear of flying since September 11, but real dread of standing in line for security checks.

To travel by plane from Vidalia, we must drive as far as Baton Rouge (1-1/2 hours), most often New Orleans (2-1/2 hours), or Jackson, MS (about 2 hours). Let's see, arrive, park and shuttle to the terminal (25? minutes), get ticket (20? minutes)--these are the things I have have already done--wait in security line (1? hour), board, hold on runway (???).

Sorry, out-of-state destinations are off the map this year.

What's on the calendar here?

Looks like a party! What about that Zydeco and Blues Festival in Mamou?

In all our research about parrots before buying Lucy, we found that parrots bind with humans with the same intensity that dogs do.

Unlike dogs, some parrots have extraordinary ability to mimic, as in this story of a birdkeeper's romantic evening.

We keep language clean in the front room, and romance stays in the back.

If that's too much of a strain, choose the dog as a pet. Your in-laws will like you better for it.

This article provides a perfect opportunity to illustrate how close life is in a small southern town.

Ms. Madaline Gibbs, candidate for judge, was referred to in a post below. My husband has done legal work for Investigator Dennis Cowan. Sheriff's office spokesperson Kathleen Stevens lives across the street, two doors up. Sheriff Randy Maxwell will be renting our condo in Orange Beach next month. And, well, Ms. Kathy Johnson was on page 3A of the Concordia Sentinel this week.

I don't know any James White. Why should I? He is from Jonesville.

My favorite school teacher -- Earth Science, Junior High -- has just told me that she had a bout of TIA. That is Transient Ischemic Attack, otherwise known as a mini-stroke. In one-third of cases this is a precursor to a major stroke.

This was not MY teacher. This is the woman who is two years my husband's senior, voted most beautiful in a class of about 70 in 1962.

Lyman has always said that if he could get rid of me and her husband of 40 years, she and Lyman would have a lovely life together.

I have a new concern.

It is a dark and thunderous day. Can I sweet-talk Lyman into cooking this recipe? It's from Jambalaya, a cookbook written by the Junior League of New Orleans in 1980. My mother-in-law, Girl Gore, gave us this cookbook shortly after Lyman and I married in 1994. It is one of the best short prep-time cookbooks I have on my shelves.

Shrimp and Crab Etouffe

2 pounds peeled shrimp

1 and 1/2 sticks butter

1 cup finely chopped onion

1/4 cup finely chopped green pepper

1/4 cup finely chopped celery

4 cloves garlic, minced

4 teaspoons cornstarch

1 to 1 and 1/2 cups chicken stock

1/2 cup white wine

4 teaspoons tomato paste

1/4 cup finely chopped green onions

1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Salt to taste

Pepper to taste

Tabasco to taste

1 pound crabmeat

3 cups cooked rice

In a Dutch oven, melt butter. Add onion, green pepper and celery. Cook until tender. Add garlic. Dissolve cornstarch in one cup stock. Add to sauteed vegetables. Add wine, stirring constantly. Add tomato paste, green onions, parsley and Worcestershire sauce. Blend well. Add shrimp and cover. Simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. If necessary, add more stock. Add salt, pepper and Tabasco. Add crabmeat, stirring gently, and continue cooking until thoroughly heated. Serve on cooked rice.

Just returned from the Vidalia (pop. 4700) Public Library where Mr. Ken Layne's book, Dot.con, scored two rave reviews. The librarian and I were pining for about 5,000 more books as entertaining.

Keep it up, Mr. Layne. We'll make you as famous as Jimmy Swaggert!

I might point out that Mr. Swaggert and Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley grew up in Ferriday, the next town over.

I am a Weevilette!

I haven't felt so honored since ... the University of Alabama's Homecoming Queen of 1967 (or so, Dottie isn't free with her age) attended my anniversary party in January!

Dottie is still a cute girl. Told me she always carried a packed overnight bag to football games featuring Joe Montana, just in case.

Working on the tag, Mr. Possum. HTML is best pronounced 'hatemail'.

Baby possums aren't very pretty, are they? (See http://www.possumrescue.com/foundababy.htm. The link won't work from here.)

Greg Hlatky over at A Dog's Life admonishes us:

Please, I beg of you, don't get any dog unless you're willing to make a lifetime commitment to be its provider, its master, and its friend.

That goes double or triple for parrots. Provided she is properly nourished, attended and does not fall to disease or accident, Lucy can live at least 35 years. African Greys can live 50 or more. Larger parrots can live even longer. I have read of a 75-year-old Amazon.

When Lyman brought up the subject of owning a parrot, I said, "Good grief, Jason just graduated from college, and you want a lifetime toddler?"

Mr. Betta bit the dust.

Did your town go through the phase of the "War and Peace" arrangement, you know, the shapely vase with the rocks and a Samurai Fighting Fish and a cup in the top with more rocks and a Peace plant?

When we returned from a trip to Italy two summers ago, the first thing my friend Cossie asked was if I wanted a fish. Ask somebody in Louisiana if they want a fish and the Louisianan will ask "Is it cleaned?" Cossie, who is a wonderful cook, but not given to other crafty pursuits, had been bitten by the "War and Peace" bug. She had made arrangements for all of her other friends and wouldn't hear of me being without one.

It was actually very pretty and made a nice ornament for the coffee table. Mr. Betta survived a bout of the "ick" and a crashing fall to the floor that broke his jar. Now Mr. Betta is dead of old age.

RIP, little Betta guy.

The short article I referred to below in the Concordia Sentinel has a tag to page 3A. Hon, on page 3A there is no alligator, but there is a large picture of the first woman judge elected in Concordia Parish. (Isn't that an idyllic name, Concordia Parish?) Said judge has alienated every lawyer in the Concordia Parish courthouse.

Why, you ask? Is it because we are idiot sexist Deep South racist bigot fat-eating cigarette-smoking woman-haters? No, it's not. In the words of a woman lawyer campaigning for Miss Madaline, a female assistant district attorney, said judge has "set the women's movement back 50 years with her PMSing and tantrums and general lack of jurisprudence". My husband, a lawyer who was told to "get [his] ass down to the jail" the sole time I have ever attended court (my, was that ugly), and others in the district concur.

Miss Madaline herself, who is in contention with PMS judge and two other candidates for the judgeship, said, "We are running a very positive campaign, because we all realize that we need a change". She is vying against a very competent male ADA whom my boy Lyman has worked with for many years. Miss Madaline makes it a hard choice. She, too, is competent, though she has far less experience, having gone to law school after a twelve-year career as a school teacher. Me, I like school teachers.

The big question here is "Did the editor tag the article wrong on purpose?"