Kumquats

This post is to celebrate our excellent kumquat harvest.

An uncertain number of years ago, maybe 25 or so, Leslie bought me a kumquat tree because she had discovered that I liked them.  For roughly half those years Kumquat Tree lived in a big pot.   Then we replanted it in the ground next to our driveway.

The tree went through some difficult years until we discovered that it needs lots of water.  More water did the trick and we started getting a lot more fruit.  This last winter was very wet rain-wise in Pasadena.  Our kumquat harvest was exemplary.  This picture shows about 40 pounds worth, about 75% of the total haul.

The English name "kumquat" derives from the Cantonese gām-gwāt 金橘, literally meaning "golden orange" or "golden tangerine".  Kumquats are apparently symbols of good luck in China.  I was told by our friend Richard that the name can be translated as "orange fortune".  Or something.

Are you wondering what we did with all those little kumquats?  Leslie took them to her friend and colleague Regina who supervised the production of kumquat/orange marmalade.  Here's the after picture.

Good stuff.  Thanks Regina.

I created a video showing the piles of these little bursts of citrus, often in extreme closeup, before they met their jellied fate.  You'll see Leslie's hands doing the washing.

TRIGGER WARNING: if you find that exposure to bright orange color disturbs you, please use caution.

Kumquats © 2019 David Ocker - 176 seconds.  (I suggest that you use hi-definition mode if you can.)

---

---

Here's a link to my previous MM post concerning Kumquat Martinis.  (I drink my martinis considerably less dry these days.)

Here's a link to a post at the blog The Indigenous Bartender with a recipe for Kumquat Marmalade Martinis.  Gonna try it once I get some Triple Sec.

And here's an LA Times article about making candied kumquats for cocktails.  (I couldn't try this because we used up all our kumquats, so I'm posting the link as a reminder during our next kumquat harvest.)

Kumquat Martini Season

Here's a picture of our dog Chowderhead contemplating the kumquat bush in the driveway.

Kumquats are among the few foods Chowder doesn't like.  He does sometimes help out by watering the bush - in his fashion

As you can see we have a good deal of fruit this year and that fruit has been ripening nicely.  Experience has revealed that if I pick them in large quantity they'll go to waste inside.  So, instead, I leave them on the bush as long as possible.  That way I can enjoy a few freshly picked bursts of citrus each time I walk by.

Yes, I like kumquats.  I'm like the dog in one respect; there are very few foods I don't care for, but our opinions about kumquats differ.

And I am the reason we even have a kumquat bush.  Leslie planted it.  She has occasionally attempted to grow certain plants simply because I like the produce.  She herself doesn't care for kumquats any more than the dog does.  She planted it for me.  The kumquats have been a great success.  Not so great successes have included strawberries and blueberries, those are both ill-suited to our climate.

One thing I've acquired a taste for as I've grown older is martinis.  I noticed that these always tasted better to me in restaurants than when I made them at home.  So I set out to make a better martini.

To this end, several years ago, I took an informal martini making lesson from composer Bill Kraft.  Bill makes a great drink.  I've experimented with his method and lately my recipe has formalized.

I realize that tastes and dogmas vary when it comes to cocktails.  This is just how I do it.  If this doesn't sound good to you, at least you'll know not to ask me to make one for you.

Mix together:

• 4.5 ounces (3 shots) of gin (Lately I've been enamored of 114-proof Few gin.  It's potent stuff.)
• 1/4 teaspoon vermouth (Yep, this is a dry martini.  I try to ignore Tom Lehrer's recipe: "Hearts full of youth, Hearts full of truth, Six parts gin to one part vermouth.")
• A dash or two of Fee Brothers Orange Bitters (you might already have McCormick Orange Extract in your spice cabinet.  That'll work too.)
• Crushed Ice  

Shake well.

Pour into a super-chilled martini glass.  I use a wine goblet from my Grandmother's etched pink depression stemware set.  My Grandmother was not a martini drinker.  The small size of this glass determines the quantity of gin in the recipe.

Garnish with two or three fresh-picked kumquats.  (In the off-season I settle for green olives.)

Drink up.  After all 'tis the season.  Best wishes for a prosperous new year to all three of my readers and everyone else as well.

The resulting libation looks something like this:

I've been using Carpano Antic Formula vermouth, a strongly-flavored dark-colored liquid.  I selected this brand mostly because it came in a small bottle.  I had been told that vermouths get old once the bottles are opened and you can well imagine that I don't go through the stuff very quickly.  I've started keeping it in the fridge to prolong its life.  I'll try another brand next time.

Listen to the source of Tom Lehrer's martini recipe:

I Don't Know Why This Piece Is Called Whiskey

I like ambiguous and misleading names for my pieces.  The names I like the most are self-referent: the title mentions itself.

For example, I've written pieces called The Name Of This Piece Is, This Is Not The Title and This Is Not The Title EITHER.

It is factually true that I don't know why this piece is called whiskey.  When I started it I needed to save a sound file before I could start composing and for some reason the word "whiskey" popped into my head at that moment.  Maybe I needed a belt.  In any case I saved the sound file as WHISKEY.NKM and assumed that's what I would call the music as well.

Of course, the title of the piece did not turn out to be Whiskey.  The eventual title, I Don't Know Why This Piece Is Called Whiskey, is incorrect on that point; it contains a fundamental falsehood.  I did not end up calling this piece by the name Whiskey.

I did chose to spell the word "whiskey" rather than "whisky" because I do like a bit of single malt now and then.  There's even a bottle of Laphroaig in the cabinet although I didn't bother to pour myself any while I was writing.  Nor did I partake once I was finished.  Thus proving that needing a drink was not the reason I chose that particular name (or rather, didn't choose that name).

I promise you that I was stone cold sober the whole time.  Also I'm sober as I write this spiraling-to-nowhere essay.  I haven't had even a glass of wine for weeks on end.  You see, temperance is one of my many endearingly annoying traits.  I've just never had much desire to over-indulge.

My music also has annoying traits.  While temperance and sobriety are not among them, my music can be quite ambiguous and misleading.  I would love to find a way to make my music refer to itself somehow directly, using only music.  You know: the whole "This Is Not A Pipe" thing.  I haven't figured out how to do that without using words.  Titles always use words.  Sometimes they misuse them.

Click here to hear I Don't Know Why I Called This Piece Whiskey - © 2013 by David Ocker 42 seconds

Apparently John Maynard Keynes' last words were "I wish I had drunk more Champagne."    It would be a good thing if we were to learn from his mistake.

Self Referencing Tags: self reference. . . single malt. . . 30 second spots

My Mother, My Worm

Don't be fooled. This post is really about Mexican food.  I have two reasons for writing it.  These will be revealed.

Here's a picture of my Mother on the day in November 1948 when she married my Father.

Next is a headshot of "my worm" - Flabelliderma Ockeri.  Well, it's an example of the species of worm which is named after me.  Cute, huh?  It even has its own Wikipedia listing (which is more than you can say about the human me.)  Curiously, the listing is in Dutch.

As some of you may know I come by my scant biological knowledge solely through my marriage to a marine biologist Leslie Harris.  To be more specific, Leslie is an invertebrate taxonomist.  To be downright precise, she's a polychaetologist - a worm expert.  She doesn't deal with just any worms - certainly not with earth worms.  She only deals with worms found in the ocean.  (Personally I had no idea that worms even lived in the ocean until I met Leslie.)

And there are, it seems, an awful lot of worms in the sea.  Leslie works at one of the world's largest collections of polychaetes, housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  People come from all over the world to study these worms and Leslie and I have offered our guest room to many of these worm people while they're in LA.

One such visitor has been Dr. Sergio Salazar-Vallejo, a polychaete expert and professor at Ecosur, an institute of biological studies in Chetumal, Mexico.   He visited us enough that not only did he become our friend but we made him a member of our family.  (We even gave him a certificate to prove it.)  Sergio arranged for many of his worm students at Ecosur to study worms at NHMLAC.  All of them stayed in our guest room.  Not all at once of course.

Sergio apparently believed that I should be rewarded for allowing this steady stream of biologists into my home.  That is where the idea of naming a worm after me got its start.  In his scholarly paper cleverly entitled Revision of Flabelliderma Hartman, 1969 (Polychaeta: Flabelligeridae) published in the Journal of Natural History, he described Flabelliderma Ockeri.  In that paper he explained why I deserved this honor

Etymology: This species is named after Mr. David Ocker, in recognition of his long-standing generous support to polychaete workers, most having come from Chetumal. Thanks to his support, many extremely productive research visits have been made to Los Angeles.

This happened over six years ago.  You'd think I would have blogged about this long before now.  One of the purposes of this post is to belatedly thank Sergio for this signal honor.  Thanks, Sergio.

Here's another picture of "my worm".

If you have no idea what you're looking at in these pictures, don't feel bad.  Neither do I.  At my request Sergio provided an explanation.  I felt it was too complex for Mixed Meters.  He obligingly provided a second, simpler paragraph.  I felt that was still too complicated.  Here's his third revision.

Living specimen of Flabelliderma ockeri, anterior end, dorsal view. The thin filaments are branchiae and the thick ones are palps. The dark brown central area is the group of eyes.  The family name, flabelligerids, indicates that their members carry a fan (L. flabellum). The fan is made up with fine chaetae, often included in a thin layer of a fibrous matrix, which can also include some sediment. The genus Flabelliderma was proposed because the body wall or skin (Gr. derm, skin) differs from other species belonging to Flabelligera.

I needed to look up some of the words:

• anterior - front
• dorsal - top
• branchiae - organ of respiration (kind of like a gill on a fish)
• palp - organ of sensation or feeding
• chaetae - bristles, organ of locomotion  ("polychaete" means "many bristles")

By the way, F. Ockeri is a Southern Californian.  It has been discovered only in the area roughly from San Diego to Santa Barbara.  Here are more pictures - including a full body shot - which were included with Sergio's paper:

---

This Spring Sergio and his wife, Emilia Gonzalez-Salazar (she studies molluscs) visited us again for several months.

In this picture you can see Dr. Luis Carerra-Parra (another polychaete person and one of Sergio's students), Emilia Gonzalez, Sergio Salazar and Alejandro Salazar (he's an offspring of Emilia and Sergio.)  Notice that they are sitting at a dinner table.

When Emilia and Sergio stay with us they take over our kitchen.  Leslie and I don't mind.  We are not particularly familiar with their strange idea of preparing an evening meal and then gathering the entire family around the table to eat it together.  Very curious.

Naturally, when gathered around the table in the presence of a freshly prepared meal, the discussion often turns to food.  That's how it happened at one meal that I told a story about my Mother's Midwestern encounter with Mexican food sometime in the early '80s.  (Remember my Mother?  Check back to the beginning of this post.)

Here's a picture of me with her in Sioux City Iowa in June 1986.  Sioux City is where I grew up and where she still lived.  We're standing in front of the Green Gables Restaurant on the corner of Pierce and 18th Street.  I wonder if they still serve kreplach soup one night per week.

Here's that story about my Mother and Mexican food that I told at dinner:

At that time I was living in California and periodically she came out from Iowa to visit me.  Although Sioux City has an airport of its own, flying to California was cheaper if you first drove to Omaha Nebraska, about 100 miles south.  

When I grew up there weren't many ethnicities in the Midwest.  Beyond a few Jews (that was us), a few black people and a very few Native Americans (who mostly kept to themselves on reservations), there were only seemingly countless varieties of Northern Europeans.  

Sometime after I moved to California apparently things began to diversify.  Latinos began moving to the Midwest, many of them to take the difficult, dangerous jobs in meat processing plants.  As their population increased, services geared to Latino customs followed.  I remember the surprise while visiting of seeing not one but two Latino grocery stores in Sioux City.

And that's why my Mother could have the experience of eating at a Mexican restaurant in Omaha Nebraska before she flew to California: because there were Mexicans running restaurants there.  Later I asked her what she had eaten.  Her answer - she pronounced the unfamiliar polysyllabic word very carefully - she had eaten an entomatada.

I told her that she must have gotten the name wrong.  I had been living in Southern California for nearly 10 years and thought I knew all about Mexican food.  I rattled off a list of the possibilities for her.  Could she have had an "Enchilada" or even a "Burrito" perhaps?  "It had to be one of those other things," I told her.  "Entomatadas don't exist."

Now, cut back to the present, a few weeks ago.  Twenty-five years or so have gone by.  Leslie, Sergio, Emilia and I are having dinner.  I tell them this story.

Imagine my surprise, my astonishment, when Sergio replies that my Mother had indeed gotten the name correct, and that entomatadas are not some mythical culinary chupacabra.   Entomatadas are a Mexican speciality made by dipping lightly-fried tortillas into tomato sauce and then filling them with cheese or meat or something.  The word tomato is easy to find in "entomatada".

I asked Emilia and Sergio if they could make entomatadas for us some night.  And they did.

Here's a plate of entomatadas ready for consumption in our kitchen.  They were very good.

And so the second purpose of this blog post is to apologize to my Mother.  Sorry, Mom.  I should have believed what you told me.

---

For Further Reading:

My Mother, were she still alive, would turn 101 next month.  Click here to see a genealogy which lists her.  (It also lists Leslie and myself.)

Sevens, a MM post, has one story about my Mother's pregnancy with me and another about the massive pile of manure in Sioux City.

Reagan Says Give Chesterfields for Christmas, a post about my Mother's cigarette habit.

An obituary of Ben Shuman, my Mother's brother.

Yelp lists 19 Mexican restaurants in or near Sioux City Iowa right now.

About growing up in Sioux City and listening to Mahler.

About Oscar Littlefield, an artist I knew in Sioux City.

Google search for entomatada.  (lots of recipes)

---

Mother and Worm Tags: polychaete worms. . . mexican food. . . Sioux City Iowa

Aspics of Shostakovich

I was in my early thirties when I first encountered anything served in aspic.

I had gotten a job doing revisions to a large symphonic piece for orchestra and jazz ensemble by the composer John Green.  He was better known as Johnny Green.  Every day for about a month I'd trudge over to Beverly Hills to work in his music library housed in a backyard outbuilding.  Occasionally I was invited to the main house for formal lunch, usually prepared by the composer himself.

One day lunch included a salad with some sort of vegetable floating in jello.  I had no idea what it was. John's secretary helpfully informed me that this was "aspic".   I was not impressed with my first encounter with aspic - although I tried hard to sound like I was.

Today, while reading Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich (as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov), I read a passage about aspic (on page 30).  Given my mental association of composers with aspic I could not help but have a desire to share Shostakovich's comments.  I'm pretty sure they have lost something in translation.

A man dies and they want to serve him up to posterity.  Serve him, so to speak, trussed up for our dear descendants at the table.  So that they, napkin tucked under chin and armed with knife and fork, can dig in to the freshly deceased.

The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly; they're burning hot.  So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them - the best form of gelatin.

And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down.  The nose, say, is served separately, or the tongue.  You need less gelatin that way.  And that's how you get yesterday's classic as freshly cooked tongue in aspic.  With a side dish of hoofs, from the horse he used to ride.

I'm trying to remember the people I knew without the gelatin.  I don't pour aspic over them, I'm not trying to turn them into a tasty dish.  I know that a tasty dish is easier to swallow and easier to digest.  You know where it ends up.

A page later this paragraph seems to better explain what Shostakovich means:

It's so unfair.  People suffered, worked, thought.  So much wisdom, so much talent.  And they're forgotten as soon as they die.  We must do everything possible to keep their memories alive, because we will be treated in the same way ourselves.  How we treat the memory of others is how our memory will be treated.  We must remember, no matter how hard it is.

In light of some of the historical events of Shostakovich's life (notably the Great War and the Stalinist Purges), the need to remember those who were killed or simply disappeared would have been a duty of the highest importance.

---

Here's an interesting article about Johnny Green where I found the picture of Johnny's Oscar ceremony badge which identifies him as "Musical Director and Shmuck".  He was a super-talented, super-loquacious, super-egotistical fellow who always wore a carnation and most likely would have enjoyed wearing a badge marking him as a shmuck.  He once told me that if he had been Italian his name would have been Giovanni Verdi.

The book Testimony suffers from a certain controversy about the authenticity of the great composer's memoirs.  I won't know for sure until I finish the book, but I don't think the dispute will do anything to challenge the book's overall insight into what life was like for a world-class Soviet composer.

The L.A. Philharmonic is producing a series of concerts devoted to composer Thomas Adès called Aspects of Adès which, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with Aspics of Shostakovich.

Tags in Aspic: aspic. . . Johnny Green. . . Dimitri Shostakovich. . . Testimony

F-holes and the Women Who Love Them

I clicked on a photo feature in the Telegraph about high fashion clothing made from chocolate.  One picture attracted my attention because the model is wearing a the dark chocolate nude torso breastplate adorned with f-holes and strings.  And breasts.  The hat seems to be milk chocolate. 

Of course, this is a reference to the famous photo by Man Ray which is possibly the first ever public association of the similar shapes of women and stringed instruments.

I looked for other pictures of women, preferably naked, with f-holes on their bodies. They weren't too hard to find.  Here are a few:

Want more?  There's an entire gallery of (mostly) women showing off their f-hole tattoos at a site called BMEZINE. 

The other pictures came from here and here and here and here.

You can buy f-hole merchandise here.

Want to read another MM post from 2006 where high fashion and musical esoterica are combined? Try Magazine for Renaissance Brass Players.  But it's mostly about a tune called Popcorn.  And Crazy Frog.

Also of possible interest: Charlotte Moorman, Topless Cellist

F-hole Tags: f-holes. . . tattoos. . . high fashion

BLOBS

Here's a short piece of music, a 30 Second Spot, combined with some simple video to distract you. The title is BLOBS. The reason for the title should be obvious. Other things are less obvious.

But this haiku will explain everything:

Pure Cholesterol,
Floating, artery clogging.
Can you get the phone?

Copyright © 2009 by David Ocker - 125 seconds


Blobs Tags: Blobs. . . David Ocker. . . 30 second spots

Got no clue why I call this a "30 Second Spot"? Read this.

In which I remember the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959

I would have been eight years old in 1959, fifty years ago. The government announced that year, just before Thanksgiving, that some cranberries should not be eaten because of possible contamination. Here's the November 9, 1959, press release:

The Food and Drug Administration today urged that no further sales be made of cranberries and cranberry products produced in Washington and Oregon in 1958 and 1959 because of their possible contamination by a chemical weed killer, aminotriazole, which causes cancer in the thyroids of rats when it is contained in their diet, until the cranberry industry has submitted a workable plan to separate the contaminated berries from those that are not contaminated.

As a result of this announcement a nationwide panic ensued.

I, a highly impressionable and not-too-savvy-about-matters-of-food-borne-news-inflamed-misinformation eight-year-old living far from Oregon or Washington, resolved never to eat cranberries again. It was years, decades even, before I could securely eat any cranberry product. Even now, every Thanksgiving as the dish of red goo gets served, my childhood fears return: those little red round berries could kill me. I've learned to keep my mouth shut about it.

Of course, since then, I've even discovered that I like cranberries - including cranberry bagels (which ought to be an affront to nature, but aren't).

I was reminded of this little shading of my personality by a front page of the Los Angeles Mirror (an evening newspaper) from November 11, 1959, reproduced in a recent LA Times blog post about policemen damaging an LA restaurant because of a typographical error. The massive headline is pure scandal rag. But those pesky contaminated cranberries are front and center a few inches down.


A little research into the subject reveals that this event was an early example of food panic. The genre has gotten rather more sophisticated since then.

If you go to the Times blog you can enlarge the newspaper page enough to read the other stories. But here's the text of the cranberry story to help Mrs. Google run up my hit counter.

Go Ahead and Eat, Say Cranberry Expert

Claims Even Tainted Crop Safe

WAREHAM, Mass., Nov. 11 (AP) - The scientist who presides over the world's leading cranberry agricultural experiment station said today he can see no reason why people should not eat cranberries now and during the holiday season.

Dr. Chester E. Cross of the University of Massachusetts directs the Massachusetts agricultural experiment station to which agricultural scientists of the world come to learn about cranberry growing.

[Sidebar: For tasty cranberry substitutes, see story, Page 19.]

This station is largely responsible for the Massachusetts cranberry production, which this year totals 595,000 barrels or half the world crop.

Dr. Cross points out that weed-spraying has been questioned only in a small fraction of the nation's crop in two Pacific Coast states.

He said he would eat a helping of even the suspected West Coast cranberries with no more concern than he would feel over smoking a cigarette.

He chided Welfare Secretary Arthur S. Flemming for stating Monday that improper use of the weed killer aminotriazole had contaminated portions of the Oregon-Washington crop.

Timing Blasted

He said that Flemming's statement at this pre-Thanksgiving time is damaging to the entire industry and that information upon which it was based was "miserable and meager".

In nearby Hattson (?) the National Cranberry Assn. said that all suspected West Coast cranberries already have been segregated from the market.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government sent 100 inspectors and 60 chemists to all parts of the country to test cranberries for possible contamination.

Few Contaminated

Only limited quantities of berries from Oregon and Washington have been found to be contaminated, the government says. But it is making safety checks on cranberries from all producing areas.

Ambrose E. Stevens, executive vice president of Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., said in New York that Flem- (turn to Page 19, Column 4)

The National Cranberry Association is now known as Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc., and apparently it survived the 1959 panic thanks to a government subsidy on unsold cranberries. They now sell nearly $1.5 Billion dollars worth of cranberries per year. An early version of "Too big to fail"? Read more than you want to know about the cranberry business here.

Scare Tags: Cranberry Scare. . . 1959. . . contaminated food

Ice Cream Wishes

A lot of this post deals with Yoko Ono.

One night many years ago when I was a freshman in college I spent what seemed like hours, stoned out of my mind, standing in front of the menu board of the school's late-night snack bar, The Tea Room, trying hard to pick the perfect munchie-crunching taste treat.

Suddenly There It Was - Chocolate Marshmallow Ice Cream!! I knew instantly that it was my favorite flavor even though I can't remember ever having tasted it before that night.

And so it was - Chocolate Marshmallow was indeed my favorite flavor of ice cream for many years afterward. When I arrived in California I found that chocolate marshmallow ice cream was called Rocky Road and made with bits of real marshmallows. How bizarre. Yuchh. It had been the swirls of sweet marshmallow creme inside the chocolate which sealed my passion. Life went on and new flavors replaced chocolate marshmallow on top of my fave list.


Years later -- many years later -- at Tutti Gelato, a small ice cream spot hidden away in the corner of an off-street courtyard in Old Pasadena - I again studied the menu, completely straight this time, searching for the perfect after-dinner taste treat. Here's a picture of the menu. Click it to enlarge. What would you have picked?


My choice? A combination of mascarpone and sour cherry gelato in a cup. In my mind the smooth creamy cheesy mascarpone and the tart bright citrus sour cherry instantly became the perfect flavor combination - just as chocolate and marshmallow had years before. I decided that I must have it.

Alas, they were out of one flavor (or the other). I returned to Tutti Gelato many times over the years - okay it was about a half dozen times over two years - and either they were out of one flavor (or the other) or they were too busy or I was too stuffed after dinner or something.

But then, a couple weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, just at opening time, I scored the perfect cup of gelato: half mascarpone and half sour cherry. Here's a picture I took just before my first highly anticipated bite.


Disappointment. The mascarpone wasn't cheesy enough. The sour cherry wasn't terribly sour - more like a watered down cherry soda flavor. My taste bud imagination had let me down big time. I was highly dissatisfied. Plain old chocolate would have been so much better.

To be fair Tutti Gelato serves great ice cream and sorbet. I would not hesitate to suggest that you try it. The problem was that I had imagined such a high level of unobtainable perfection in the synthesis of flavors.

Disillusioned, I wandered around that off-street courtyard (click here for satellite view). In the courtyard there's a Crate and Barrel at one end, a trendient Italian restaurant at the other. There's a micro-brewery and a Johnny Rockets and a sushi bar. There's a movie multi-plex. There are a couple more even more trendient boutiques and a sculpture of plexiglass workmen digging a trench. Click on the next picture for a panorama shot of the whole courtyard.


What I found in the middle of the courtyard that Sunday was an ongoing interactive art project by Yoko Ono. It's called Wish Tree. Here are Yoko's old fashioned fluxian instructions:

Wish Piece by Yoko Ono (1996)
Make a wish
Write it down on a piece of paper
Fold it and tie it around a branch of a Wish Tree
Ask your friends to do the same
Keep wishing
Until the branches are covered with wishes

Each tree has a little set of steps so the top branches can be reached. Pencils and little tie-on cards are provided. From a distance the trees look like they are blooming a lot of white flowers. In my imagination the cards were provided in many different colors: chocolate, sour cherry and the like.


Here's some description of the project at Yoko's website. She tells of tying wishing papers to trees as a young child in temples in Japan. The notion of supplicating the higher powers with a words on a small piece of paper probably exists in many religions. Here it is, in action at the Western Wall, serving an important function in the religion of U.S. presidential politics. The ancient Jews didn't have many trees to tie their wishes to. But they had plenty of rocks.


I wandered around the courtyard reading peoples wishes. No one folded their cards as Yoko instructed. Most, as is predictable, ask for health or wealth for themselves or for loved ones. Peace for the world. Love. A few, however, were much less predictable. I snapped photos of my favorites.

I wish I had a rocket propelled corgi! Adorable.

I wish for my sunglasses to make me look sexy!

I wish to swirl forward

I wish I had another wish - Nathan

I wish I wans't dyselxic

I wish for the chance to make a difference with
my music and go to music school - Melinda

(Poor Melinda. Someday she'll find out how little effect music has on the real world.)

A lot of ice cream!
(I suggest you avoid combining mascarpone & sour cherry)

How to make marshmallow videos: here (yuchh) or here (yuchh yuchh yuchh)

Search for the phrase "chocolate marshmallow ice cream"

Mascarpone and Sour Cherry Tags: ice cream. . . gelato. . . Wish Tree. . . Yoko Ono. . . Pasadena CA

Fallen Avocados 5

Fallen Avocados, an ancient Mixed Meters regular feature, is back from its long hiatus. Sort of like Indiana Jones.

See all the Fallen Avocados episodes by clicking on this sentence.

For those of you who don't remember what Fallen Avocados was, the format is to combine a picture of an avocado which has fallen from a tree (and is often half-eaten and which I photograph just as I find it) with some video or other link, the sort that you might get in an email from an annoying friend.

Fallen avocados are a common sight in Pasadena. And in other places as well, I'm sure. The avocados have often been a meal for wild animals such as squirrels or raccoons or possums or our dog Chowderhead, who isn't actually wild. Our neighbor's avocado tree drops avocados into our back yard and I say "the backyard feeds our dog automatically".


This video link is to a compendium of all the Simpson's television show couch gags. The "couch gag" is that little bit of the Simpsons introduction just after Homer is chased through the garage by Marge's bad driving and the whole family tries to sit down on the couch in front of the television. Generally each episode has a different couch gag. The compilation goes on for a while. It's like the funniest episode ever.

Be sure to listen to the sound track as you watch - the constant repetition of the same bit of music from Danny Elfman's brilliant theme is interrupted occasionally by bits of pop culture music. What a wonderfully unpretentious minimalist score. Too bad minimalist pieces in concerts don't have a similarly free spirit.

Here and here and here are some MM posts which reference the Simpsons.

Fallen Couch Gag Tags: fallen avocados. . . Simpsons. . . couch gags. . . video

Christmas in October

This story also discusses the root causes of Halloween, stuffed penguins, various types of snowmen and green table grapes.

It all began nearly 2 weeks ago when I walked into my local Vons supermarket and was confronted by this small choir of snowmen.


Seeing this full-frontal Christmas marketing before I had yet come to terms with Halloween silliness was disconcerting. I'm glad there was no Christmas carol playing. Hearing "It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas" at that same moment would undoubtedly have given me a seizure.

But it IS beginning to look a lot like Christmas. In spite of the two major national holidays we will yet celebrate before Christmas, corporate America seems to be doing everything it can, as early as it can, to ensure a good bottom line at the bottom of its stocking. (Here's an article.)

And, of course, when big business prospers everyone benefits. Uh-huh. Higher corporate profits mean working people get bigger bonuses and longer vacations. More taxes are paid so welfare checks increase and more guns are shipped to Iraq (which eventually are stolen by terrorists so replacements can be ordered from defense contractors.)

As an article of faith, retailers believe that next year's Christmas season will be the most profitable ever. So they increase orders for shoddy Chinese merchandise and sweat shop workers in lead-paint factories can buy motor scooters and raise the demand for gasoline worldwide.

Christmas marketing makes it just one big win-win world.


Meanwhile I've been trying to suss out why Halloween has become such a huge adult holiday in recent years. Some of the solutions I've suggested to myself are:

• Adults really truly DO believe in witches and goblins and ghosts.
• Adults really don't believe in witches and goblins and ghosts but their irrational fears are alleviated by giving candy to children.
  
• Adults are jealous of their children getting all the goodies.
• Adults need a chance to get drunk and/or act silly.
• Adults need one (more) night a year to believe in pre-Christian paganism
  
• Adults are not happy with their own personalities and need a chance to pretend to be someone else.
• Halloween is one big practice party for Christmas and New Years - minus gifts and you spend it with friends instead of family.
• Adults are just being manipulated by retailers to waste money on Halloween junk.

I think the last one is the most realistic. Halloween really IS Christmas in October if you're a retailer - another chance to separate us suckers from our money over a Pagan-inspired holiday. According to the National Retail Federation, Halloween spending in the U.S. will top Five Billion Dollars this year. (Click here.)

Please notice the two Pumpkin Snowmen in the pictures; both are denizens of front lawns in our immediate neighborhood. Next year will we be seeing Halloween polar bears and reindeer as well? Or maybe ghosts of polar bears and skeletons of reindeer? I hope so.


Meanwhile, Mixed Meters' favorite crypto-zoological beast - the Christmas Penguin was out in full force in a Southern California drug store recently. I found three different soft cuddly Christmas penguin toys.


Here is a previous MM post Stalking The Christmas Penguin explaining why I'm so amazed by Christmas penguins.

Here is a positive-spin article about the Polar Bears Meet Penguins Coca-Cola Commercial which I discuss in that posting.

Here you can watch that very commercial online.

Here you can read about a musical for kids entitled How The Penguins Saved Christmas. The penguin has a great future as a Christmas animal when those kids grow up. Be sure to listen to some musical samples at the bottom of the page.


There's more to my story about the Vons supermarket.

After I controlled my surprise at the snowmen I shopped and purchased food. One thing in my basket was a 2 pound plastic box of green table grapes. The price was very reasonable. Here's the label on the box. Click it for enlargement.



When I got home I read the label more closely. Notice the line "UNITED STATES PLANT PATENT NO:PP17504". The grapes were uniformly large. They lasted a long time without spoiling. They had an intensely crispy crunchy consistency. They were ever so slightly, just barely a little tiny bit sweet - sorta, if you used your imagination. I hated 'em!!

"Yeah, so?" I hear you say ...

What better way to celebrate Halloween than by eating FRANKENFOOD.

The organic grapes I bought more recently from Whole Foods were completely delicious.

Here's the full text of the franken-grape label:

PRISTINE SEEDLESS
UNITED STATES PLANT PATENT No:PP17504

Green Seedless Table Grapes
Raisins Verts De Table Sans Pepins

Product of U.S. / Produit des E.-U.
Net Wt. 2 lbs. (907 G) / Poid Net 2 lbs. (907 g)

Distributed By/ Distribue Par:
Sun Fresh International
Visalia CA 93291-5143

Grown and Developed by
Anton Caratan and Son

Treated with sulfer dioxide for fungicde use / Traites ave dioxyde de soufre comme fungicide.



ADDENDUM:
Here's an article about these grapes which indicates they probably aren't genetically modified. Even so they are clearly an engineered product, created more for the producers benefit than for the consumers. Here are two descriptions of the little beasties from the article:

large, crispy grapes that have characteristics retailers covet, including long shelf life.

the taste profile -- starting with a sweet vanilla streak and ending with a zesty Granny Smith apple finish -- is unique.


.Franken-Tags: Christmas. . . Halloween. . . Christmas marketing. . . pumpkin snowmen. . . Christmas penguin. . . Frankenfood

Interdependently Celebrating Independence

Composer and friend Art Jarvinen and his lovely spouse Lynn Angebranndt (Cellist and friend), host a Fourth of July BBQ every year which is held in their backyard usually about the time of the July Fourth Holiday. This year it was the Sunday before the Wednesday.

In the past, the celebration has often included a whole pig, roasted Cuban style. This year reason prevailed and we feasted on creatures that had been converted into foodstuffs by professional butchers. It's delicious either way.

Click here for my previous post describing last year's celebration - where you'll see

• a picture of Trixie, last years pig,
• closeups of the pantsleg of Art and corkscrew of Art
• a short movie of Art performing on the Simantron, kind of like a long wooden jousting stick, only it's a musical instrument. Something that only a percussionist could really love. This year featured a performance of a Simantron trio by the Antenna Repairmen, with Moses Eder, guest artist.
• an unkind comparison of the facial expression of Art to a now-departed bad guy
  

Here are some pictures I took this year.

Art Gives the Barbecue Invocation on Tam Tam - then he gave the benediction "Let's Eat"


A Close Up of the Shirt of Art


Animals of the Backyard


Technology of Art


Some Times A Phallic Symbol is Just A Phallic Cymbal


Click here for the Homepage of Art

As always, click the pics and they'll enlarge.

BBQ Tags: Arthur Jarvinen. . . Fourth of July. . . Independence Day BBQ. . . barbecue. . . simantron. . . phallic cymbals