It’s been a good day for vegetating here in the remote fortress of Tildebunkport. It rained all day til it changed over to snow in the early afternoon and now we’ve gotten our first serious snowfall of 2006, just in time for 2007. 

We’ve been too unmotivated today to have a sit down dinner around a table, and yet not lazy enough to eat directly from the cooking pot while standing over the kitchen sink, so we’ve settled on the middle ground of grazing, all afternoon and evening, as we go from Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi channel to reading Bush family biographies to playing Knights of the Old Republic for a few hours then turning to the Marx Brothers marathon on TCM.

Today’s grazing fare has included: another round of Ingebretsen’s Swedish meatballs (we get about 8 lbs of meatball mix from Ingebretsen’s each year; roll it all up into meatballs and have one batch on Christmas Eve; freeze the rest to have on New Year’s Eve), with garlic mashed skin-on red potatoes, a nice big bowl of salad greens tossed with a raspberry vinaigrette, and cranberry oatmeal cookies.

I’ve been lying, sluglike on a couch in the living room for a couple of hours reading Kitty Kelley’s The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. If I should get tired of KK’s prose stylings (hasn’t happened yet — she’s really not too bad a writer) I also have Kevin Philiips’ American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush close at hand. Riveting reading that demands a strong stomach and, not insignificantly, the ability to fight down one’s rising gorge in the face of so much arrogance and pathological secretiveness. Yeah, they’re monsters, all of them, from charming runt of the litter Neilsie to uber harpie grandma Bar. With reading matter like this, guess I picked the wrong night to stop drinkin’, but I already had my 4 oz. limit of beer for the week out in Eagan yesterday after Ollie Ox’s most excellent blogging workshop/skull session.

As we bid a hearty good riddance to 2006, I offer a roundup of nifty links gleaned in the past two days’ lazy surfing, but first: more shots of the magical wonderland that is Chez Tild, plus the recipe for a truly vile Norwegian “delicacy” (shudder) called fattigmand. Keep your rising- gorge suppression skills handy; you’re gonna need them. Ready? Then onward we plunge.

(click the image for the full size version)

The Wall o’ Beatles in the family room. R-L: posters for A Hard Day’s Night, Let It Be, and Help!. On the far left is my favorite:a Hard Day’s Night poster from Poland.

(click on the image for the full size version)

My kitchen is decorated in Early Fruit Crate Label. With a touch of Flour Sack — “Minnesota Girl” and “Miss Minneapolis” brands of flour.

(click full size yadda yadda)

Here’s a close up: I especially like the Sleepy Eye Brand egg crate label with the portrait of Chief Sleepy Eye.

The box on the shelf says Climax Thick Tobacco. My mother’s home town up in Minnesota’s Red River Valley got its name from the brand of chewing tobacco that the farmers bought at the local post office. Climax Tobacco company marked each plug of tobacco with a little metal pin or marker that the farmers would leave pinned to the post office wall after they bought their plugs o’ chaw. Eventually the walls were covered with the little metal Climax Tobacco markers and everybody started calling it the Climax post office; then the whole town became known as Climax. The perfect name for a region that also had a town called Fertile, thus spawning a century of lame jokes such as “Valley Newspaper headline: “Fertile Woman Has Baby In Climax” etc etc ad nauseum. Oh those wacky Norwegians.

Ooh — time to go watch the ball drop. I’ll add to this post in the morning.

Happy New Year everybody!

 

Posted: December 31st, 2006 under General.
Comments: none

Oh thanks, Wege. Just what I was dreaming of : being tagged with this book meme thing which is oddly omnipresent  throughout every nook and cranny (and crook and nanny) of Blogistan, despite it being one of the most boring and tedious tasks ever devised.

How to liven it up? Alas, it can’t be done. Even if I try, I’ll most likely be competing for the gentle reader’s attention against totally unfair competition, such as ….oh, probably some shameless huckster pushing The Utterly Debauched and Oftentimes Icky Adventures of Santa Wege or something. Thanks, Wege.  Thank you very, very, very, very much indeed.

For those foolish enough to be playing along at home, here are the official rules of the book meme:

1. Grab the book closest to you.
2. Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
3. Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
4. Name of the book and the author
5. Tag three people

Oh brother.  How can this be made to be even slightly interesting?  Well, how about some visual aids…
Luckily (your choice of adverb may vary) I have just the thing:   In order to finish off the remaining exposures on one of those disposable cameras, I recently took a series of photos of the fabulous wonderland that is Tildebunkport.

Here we have a view of the mysteriously lovely environs of Chéz Tild…  In the center of the frame we see the quaint little glass-topped desk on wheels that holds the ancient laptop that launched a thousand photoshopped pictures (every one of them asparkle with wit and subtlety).   What’s this?  Why, by happy chance there’s a bookshelf right next to my desk! And what is on that bookshelf? Why,  who’d a thunk it? — Books!  Let’s take a closer look at them shall we?

 The stack of books on the first shelf seem to be equidistant from my desk. How to choose? Hmmm.  Okay, let’s just go completely berserk and take page 123 of three of the books, from the top, middle, and bottom of the stack:

1)
“This is the time for thinking and answering. Ask whatever you like.”
“Do you feel that you’re guilty of murdering six million Jews?” I said.
MOTHER NIGHT
Kurt Vonnegut

2)
I went up the stairs, and my mother turned to go into the bathroom, where she sat on the rim of the tub. A fleeting impression of her inability to assume an ungraceful posture sped through my mind, along with my dread of what she would say.
“You have no right to speak to Paul about George Bernard Shaw,” she said , without raising her head.
BORROWED FINERY
Paula Fox

3)
Sra. Morán recalled that her father was less strict with her younger sisters, suggesting that Americanization may have been weakening parental controls.  Federico Saucedo recalled that during his youth in the 1930s and 1940s, “regardless of everything else we had, we always had the church.   That was all there was at that time, besides the Neighborhood House… Most of us didn’t know anything over the Robert Street Bridge or the Wabasha Street Bridge.”
BARRIOS NORTENOS
St. Paul and Midwestern Mexican Communities in the Twentieth Century
Dionicio Nodin Valdes

But, not to ignore the shelf below.  Page 123 of the book closest to me on that shelf reads:

As in rural Norway, immigrant candle making constituted “an enormous undertaking,” which, says Veblen, “occupied the entire family long into the evening”: “In addition to the two or three candles that were to stand in the middle of the table for the whole family, individual Christmas candles would be dipped or molded for each of the older children. When they were all lit on Christmas Eve the whole house fairly glowed.
KEEPING CHRISTMAS
Yuletide Traditions in Norway and the New Land
Kathleen Stokker

There. Done.  Did the visual aids help at all?  No, of course they didn’t.   OK,  yeah,  I know I’m supposed to now tag 3 people to do this, but I categorically refuse.   This tedious meme must stop somewhere;  it must not go endlessly on and on, being inflicted on one hapless blogger after another with no respite in sight. 
Oh, if you really want to do it, go ahead, but I will not be the instrument of furthering this vile little timewaster.   Basta! (as we say in Andalusia).   Enough!   This madness ends with me. 

You’re welcome.

 

Posted: December 27th, 2006 under Chez Tild, General, the Reading Room.
Comments: 1

Darlene Love on Letterman in 2005, singing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”

Christmas Eve. Quiet night. Ate too much, earlier this evening: Ingebretsen’s Swedish meatballs, rice pudding with lingonberries, lefse with kummin-ost (a soft yellow cheese with caraway seeds). Watched bits of A Christmas Story and Miracle on 34th Street; drank a glass of egg nog with a hot cup of green tea as a chaser. It’s 10:30 now and I’m ready to keel over.

Presented here for your viewing and listening pleasure: the legendary Darlene Love, veteran of 60’s girl groups who worked with Phil Spector, appears on David Letterman on December 23, 2005, to sing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” as she has every year for 10 or eleven years now, I think. What a voice. She ’s 65 years old now, and she just keeps getting better with every year that goes by. (We should all be so lucky).

Watch and listen and enjoy. She is fabulous.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Oh, yeah.. I’m also spending a bunch of time working on PSP tutorials. This ‘peace’ graphic is one of the results. Old dog; new tricks. May your holidays be as restful and as therapeutic.

~

Posted: December 25th, 2006 under General.
Comments: none

The largest lizards in the world are capable of “virgin births”.
Scientists report of two cases where female Komodo dragons have produced offspring without male contact.
Tests revealed their eggs had developed without being fertilised by sperm - a process called parthenogenesis, the team wrote in the journal Nature.
One of the reptiles, Flora, a resident of Chester Zoo in the UK, is awaiting her clutch of eight eggs to hatch, with a due-date estimated around Christmas.

Kevin Buley, a curator at Chester Zoo and a co-author on the paper, said: “Flora laid her eggs at the end of May and, given the incubation period of between seven and nine months, it is possible they could hatch around Christmas - which for a ‘virgin birth’ would finish the story off nicely.

“We will be on the look-out for shepherds, wise men and an unusually bright star in the sky over Chester Zoo.”

[Read the rest]

The only other thing I’d want to add to this post would be the video of Bert Parks in The Freshman, singing “There she is…Your komodo dragon…”

Damn, that would have been the perfect finish. YouTubers, start your engines!

~

Posted: December 22nd, 2006 under Christmas, General, General.
Comments: 2

And They Cook, Too

• A Blogger Cookbook Fundraiser for
  Doctors Without Borders
• Compiled and edited by Ginger Mayerson and Kathy Flake
• Illustrations by Carol Colin and Robin Riggs
• Cover Graphics by Tild~

 

From the introduction:

Last year on October 8 an earthquake, measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale, hit Kashmir, the northern part of Pakistan. Being a native Californian, I know that’s no small cheese. Unfortunately, by October 8, 2005, I was tapped out from Katrina giving and could not give to my favorite charity, Doctors Without Borders, also known as Les Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). There was no doubt in my mind that MSF would be on the spot, doctoring in Kashmir, then and even now, and around the world wherever they are needed, as usual.

And so, partly out of guilt, but mostly out of admiration, the plan for this cookbook fundraiser was born. Now, I don’t cook very much and my basic culinary philosophy is “Shake it out of the box and eat it.” However, I very much admire people who make an art of cooking and even make it look fun. I also read a lot of blogs, all kinds of blogs from all over the world: political, art, culture, whatever, and I noticed many of these bloggers posting recipes. Sometimes I’d print them out and put them in my very neatly organized, but seldom consulted three-ring Recipes binder. Every now and then I’d think how nice it would be to have all those online recipes in a book format… And an idea began to take shape..   

– Editor Ginger Mayerson

 

Back in February of this year I was honored to be asked by Ginger Mayerson to contribute to this great project.  I did the front and back cover graphics for this terrific collection of progressive bloggers’ recipes and essays which went on sale in late March.  

By early July, sales of And They Cook, Too had generated nearly $400 in donations to Doctors Without Borders. 

See the Table of Contents and more…

…including the list of bloggers who contributed recipes and/or their time and effort in assembling this project.

As you will see, there are some pretty big names on the list:

Body and Soul, Majikthise, Mad Kane, The News Blog/Steve Gilliard, Sadly, No!, Dohiyi Mir, Elayne Riggs, Agitprop, Pam’s House Blend, and the list goes on…

Makes a perfect Christmas gift for the progressive people on your list.  Why not treat yourself and also buy a copy for your very own? 

Please support the worthwhile cause of Doctors Without Borders by buying a copy of “And They Cook, Too” today.

Thank you and Merry Christmas!

And They Cook, Too

• A Blogger Cookbook Fundraiser for
  Doctors Without Borders
• Compiled and edited by Ginger Mayerson and Kathy Flake
• Illustrations by Carol Colin and Robin Riggs
• Cover Graphics by Tild~

~

Posted: December 18th, 2006 under A Blogger Cookbook Fundraiser, And They Cook, Doctors Without Borders, General, General, Gift Ideas.
Comments: none

Oh.  Yeah.  There’s a blog here, isn’t there?   I almost forgot.  
I’m coming back to a Monday workday after a long weekend that featured DL Xmas festivities, housekeeping,  two shopping forays (ugh),  baking,  my annual physical & checkup, an hour or two or five watching movies on TV (The Mortal Storm, Dinner At Eight, Strictly Ballroom,  and parts of teh LOTR marathon on TNT)  and a couple informal seances to get in touch with what’s going on in my children’s heads.   In other words:  an action-packed weekend chez Tild.

Plus I fell behind in my online reading — but with me that’s pretty much the usual state of affairs; I don’t know why I even mention it.    Several of the blogs I managed to read were posting about family matters, which  isn’ t blogging as usual for any of them, and so reveals from a different perspective the courage and maturity they all possess in spades.  You think that self-disclosure and a willingness to share the often-messy  emotional dynamics of one’s family is easy? or fun?  Think again, my dears.  Sometimes it’s just necessary. 

Evil Bobby, our favorite Minnesota blogger in Istanbul, learned that his father is very seriously ill, and so EB and Missus EB have returned to the States to be with family for the difficult days and weeks ahead. Hugs and thoughts and prayers to you all. 

Flash of Centrisity is rejoicing that his Marine is home.  In this case ‘home’ means still being hundreds of miles from Minnesota, but at least back in the US for a while; a respite before the next deployment.
Flash, as a fellow parent I don’t know how you do it:  find the strength and the calm to be able to balance the joy about the present and apprehension about the future.  Hugs and thoughts and prayers to all. 

The Wege went home for a family anniversary celebration and lived to tell the tale.  The surprise encounter with a kamikaze bambi daddy and accompanying herd on the road back to MN wasn’t even the most harrowing part of the journey. Holiday gatherings with family members steeped in the Fox/Rethuglican/Neocon/Bushco koolaid to varying degrees are brutal experiences I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies, much less my dearest friends.  Hugs and thoughts and prayers to both Wege and the (bloody but unbowed) Wegemobile.

 

Posted: December 18th, 2006 under General.
Comments: 1

Quizzes, we love quizzes.  Especially when they laser in on the truth of our innermost being with pinpoint accuracy like this one does.   (via)

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!

A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other’s language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry’s underskirts.

This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.

In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout “boo!”, upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.

A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.

Which Historical Lunatic Are You? 

~ 

Posted: December 14th, 2006 under General.
Comments: 2

Or:  How I spent my weekend

(burning my fingertips slaving over a hot krumkake iron and what thanks do I get, huh? Huh?)

No, I’ll never be Rachel Ray, grinning maniacally out at you from every box of Triscuits on every shelf at every grocery store in the universe

(not to mention haunting the Wege’s nightmares with her patented recipe for fast-acting saltpeter.) 

On the other hand, I’ll probably never inspire the volume of online idolatry and loathing that Our Little Miss Ray-Ray does

(altho I recently found out that I’m a goddess to the world’s few but devoted waterbuffalo fetishists, so that’s something.)

No, what I’m getting to is that I spent several hours of this past weekend making at least 8 dozen krumkake for the annual office Cookie Exchange.  Yep, I’m a regular trouper; a real team player. I’m just thankful it wasn’t a Lutefisk Exchange.   Tild don’t play dat. 

I invoke my namesake, my Swedish grandma Tild often enough in this blog, but you may not be aware that — me being the tragic product of a mixed marriage —  I also have a Norwegian grandma. Her name was Betsy Dallelie, and this krumkake recipe is hers.

Grandma Dallelie’s Krumkake

6 eggs, room temperature
1 C. sugar
1 C. melted butter
1 tsp. whipping cream
1 C. flour
1 tsp. (rounded) ground cardamom

Beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl until frothy.  Add the (cooled) melted butter, whipping cream and sugar; mix well. 
Sift the cardamom together with the flour. Add 1/2 of the flour and cardamom mixture to the eggs and sugar mixture; stir in completely, then add the other  1/2 of the flour and cardamom;  mix well. 

Heat up your krumkake iron.  Lucky me — 20 years ago my inlaws gave me a  nonstick electric double krumkake iron like this one.  Even tho it’s nonstick, I still season the griddle surfaces with a little Canola oil cooking spray while the iron’s cold.       

Drop a generous teaspoonful of batter in the center of each krumkake design on the heated iron surface and close the iron lid; cook for about 10 seconds, then open the iron and using a fork slide each krumkake out onto a paper towel on the table next to the krumkake iron.  Let the krumkake cool for a few seconds, then roll into a 2″ diameter hollow tube shape (it will end up looking kinda like cannoli or manicotti). 
Don’t let the krumkake cool off too much or it will be too crisp to roll up.

Finally, I mix about 1/2 tsp cardamom into 1/2 C. powdered sugar and dust the tops of the finished krumkake.  

Makes at least 4 dozen, with plenty of  miscellaneous mistakes and discards left over for the in-house Taste Test Team, which in my case means two teenagers and one only slightly older spouse.  

There.  And I didn’t say “Yum” even once. 

~

     

  

 

Posted: December 11th, 2006 under General, General, the Tild Test Kitchen.
Comments: 6

In the January 2007 issue of Vanity Fair that arrived today:

Hmmmm: “brit hume stilettos photos”…

Posted: December 9th, 2006 under General.
Comments: none

WHAT:  The 27th Annual John Lennon Tribute featuring Curtiss A with a little help from his friends

WHEN: 7:00 PM, Friday December 8th, 2006

WHERE:  First Avenue, located at 701 First Avenue North, Minneapolis, MN 55403-1327.    General Information:   612-332-1775 or  info@first-avenue.com
 

 

This year I’ve got Friday the 8th off, so I’m heading downtown early to get to First Avenue well before 7PM, in hopes of staking out a spot on the main floor in front of the stage.

Wish me luck; by 7 the place will be jammed to the rafters.

Now in its 27th year, the annual Curtiss A  Lennon tribute show, as always on December 8th, seems to get more popular with each year that passes.  Rightly so, too, because for  people who cherish John Lennon’s memory and love his music it’s one of the most tremendous nights of Lennon celebration on the planet. 

Since the spouse works downtown now, he’s going to head over to First Avenue after work and join me in the midst of the ravening horde.  I predict that the number of under-40s in the crowd will be countable on no more than two hands, and may very well be outnumbered by the walker-equipped geriatrics. I can’t remember ever feeling more at home and more comfortable at First Avenue or 7th Street Entry.  At the Curtiss A Lennon show, being 54 years old means being on the young side of the demo.

…Well, in the middle of the demo, anyway.  :)    

 

Roll up for the mystery tour:

Yes, my droogies.  Many years and many pounds ago,  back in the day when I had permed hair and a discernible waistline, we spent a week in Blighty.  

Armed only with unlimited- use- for- 7- days Explorer Passes for the London underground, and unlimited- use- for- 7- days Brit Rail passes for the rest of England, we raced around the country like maniacs, going up to Salisbury to see Stonehenge one day and down to the seaside at Brighton the next.   Of course we went to every Beatles-affiliated location in London that we could find, such as Abbey Road (Duh. And yes, we do have pictures of ourselves walking across the famous crosswalk.)

 

My favorite part of the trip was the day we made the pilgrimage to Liverpool and spent the day 

being driven all over town by an enterprising Liverpudlian who parked his  Studebaker station wagon in front of the local Beatles museum, down the block from the original Cavern Club, and offered a four-hours-long Beatles Tour of Liverpool.  We said Oh Boy, Yeah! and jumped right in, along with a couple from Switzerland who didn’t speak any English other than Beatles lyrics, which they sang instead of speaking.  We sang too.  One of the first stops was (see above) the house where John Lennon lived with his Aunt Mimi.  

All during the tour I kept thinking about what our tour guide’s  life must be like:  every day driving around town from morning til night with his car full of delirious yokels from a hundred different countries, all singing PENNY LANE IS IN MY EARS AND IN MY EYES! HERE BENEATH THE BLUE SUBURBAN SKIES! at the top of their lungs….

Speaking of which, this is the real Penny Lane:

 No sign of a fireman with an hourglass, (and in his pocket is a portrait of the queen), who likes to keep his fire engine clean, but as you can see there is a taxi with a “Flaming tasty!” Burger King ad on its side, which will have to do. 

 

And so, as the sun sinks slowly in the west, we bid adieu to grimy, overcast Liverpool with a picture of one of the last stops on the tour, Strawberry Field (as in “-s Forever”), one of John Lennon’s favorite places.  Please be assured, all evidence of the spouse’s  early-80s perm has been pixilated for your protection.    

We will be found at First Avenue on Friday night — not looking very much like those kids in the pictures, but yeah we will still be singing  LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN CUZ I’M GOING TO …. STRAWBERRY FIELDS at the top of our lungs.

~~~

 

 

Posted: December 6th, 2006 under Curt Almsted, General, General, John Lennon.
Comments: 4