Carpe Diem.

Is that a carp in your boat, or are you just happy to see me?

P.

Chick Pic.

I know john already posted this on Facebook, but it's too cute not to pass on.

Luciya loves her little sister.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Voytek, The Alcoholic, Nazi-Fighting, Iranian Bear.

Sometimes history is way, way weirder than fiction. Case in point, this story of Voytek, an Iranian brown bear who was enlisted in the Polish Army in WWII and fought at the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy. Check out the link.

Artist's conception.

 

 That somewhat less sensational reality.

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When Jack Kirby Met Joe Sinnott.

Our friends at HiLoBrow are in the midst of another great series on Jack Kirby. In this series they are contrasting the original artwork that Kirby produced in his Marvel heyday, including his marginal notes to Stan Lee, with the printed pages from the comic books.

This panel from the 1960s shows the incredible synergy 

that resulted from the combination of Kirby's vividly 3-D 

composition and the impeccable linework of his inker, Joe Sinnott.

Unfortunately, much of the clarity and punch of the original art 

is irretrievably muddied by the cheesy 4/C printing and 

cheap paper stock in the final product.

Still, it was powerful enough to inspire a whole generation of artists and fans. Including me.

P.

Last Year At This Time: Heaven Or Hell?

It's very hard to believe, since it seems we've been in Boise for much longer, but on this date last year we were in Da Nang, roasting on China Beach. Looking back at our post covering that day makes me realize how far we've come in such a relatively short time. Here's the original post.

I miss our travels, but I'm enjoying this adventure, too.

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It's Friday, And I'm Feeling Bibsey, So I'll Commit Some Perissology.

If, like me, you deliciate in words, especially funny old words, you'll find this article illecebrous. If you're the kind of ludibrious hoddypeak who is easily jargogled, well, I can only kench.

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Our Bogus Friday.

Last Friday was a glorious, clear spring day with temps in the mid 70s (much like this Friday, actually), so O and I decided to skip out on our usual chores and take a short drive into the hills above Boise to the ski area called, amusingly enough, Bogus Basin.

We've had so much rain this year that usually brown hills were mostly green.

There were plenty of wildflowers. 

Thanks to Steve Smith, we now know that these are arrowleaf balsamroot, 

also called Oregon sunflowers. You're looking at downtown Boise 

with the Owyhees in the background.

Once we passed the ski area, the dirt road curved around 

to the north side of the Boise ridge, and we began to see 

patches of snow and lots of little waterfalls fed by the snowmelt.

Lining the sides of the road were patches of delicate glacier lilies (Erythronium grandiflorum).

Looking north, we saw a beautiful panorama of the back country, with the peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains in the distance.

Though the south side of Bogus was completely devoid of snow, the north slope was still covered.

We enjoyed the rocky scenery as we cruised along the empty roads, but eventually our path was blocked by a huge snowdrift that we could neither go over or around.

The wet winter left the trees covered in fluorescent green moss.

It was a lovely was to spend a Friday afternoon.

P.

The Girls Go Out For A Stroll.

John let the girls out to roam the back yard for the first time.

 They were a little hesitant at first.

 With Luciya's encouragement, they soon achieved free-range status.

 John certainly loves his girls!

P.

An Elephant And A Bible.

All aspiring comedians know that the key to writing a good set is developing a series of jokes that build on each other to shape a satisfying climax. Luciya has now come up with the second joke in her rapidly evolving set, a brilliant follow-on to her famous first joke.

L: Why did the elephant and the bible cwoss the road?

Her adoring audience: Why?

L: To get to the other side with the other bible.

I can't wait to hear her take on "The Aristocrats."

P.

Bun Cha For Father's Day!

John wanted bun cha for Father's Day, and that always sounds good to me, so we spent hours chopping ginger, garlic, chilies, cilantro, mint, and pork belly, getting just the right balance of fish sauce, lime juice and sugar, then grilling the seasoned and marinated pork patties to perfection. That laborious process was aided by a few rounds of classic mai tais made from scratch.

The evening was also perfect, 70s and sunny. 

The light didn't disappear until after 10:30,

but the bun cha disappeared rather more quickly.

For reference, here's the authentic Hanoi street version.

Our version is not the same, but it is delicious in the extreme. The key is getting good fish sauce. The best comes from Pho Quoc Island. You can find it at most Asian grocery stores. Even in Boise!

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You Say Tomato, And I Say Slavery.

As knowledgeable shoppers, we all are aware by now that the tomatoes we buy at the grocery store, especially in the winter, don't taste very much better than a comparable sphere of styrofoam. That's why many of us don't buy tomatoes in the winter, grow our own in the summer, or find stores that carry heirloom tomatoes.

Reading this article by Barry Estabrook, however, will convince you that the truth about tomatoes is worse than you think.

According to analyses conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, fresh tomatoes today have 30 percent less vitamin C, 30 percent less thiamin, 19 percent less niacin, and 62 percent less calcium than they did in the 1960s. But the modern tomato does shame its 1960s counterpart in one area: It contains fourteen times as much sodium.

Okay, not good news, but the tomatoes grown in Florida also have a lot of environmental issues.

Tomatoes' wild ancestors came from the coastal deserts of northern Peru and southern Ecuador, some of the driest places on earth. When forced to struggle in the wilting humidity of Florida, tomatoes become vulnerable to all manner of fungal diseases. Hordes of voracious hoppers, beetles, and worms chomp on their roots, stems, leaves, and fruit. And although Florida's sandy soil makes for great beaches, it is devoid of plant nutrients. To get a successful crop, they pump the sand full of chemical fertilizers and can blast the plants with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides, including some of the most toxic in agribusiness's arsenal.

And those toxic chemicals get dumped on the ultra low-wage workers in the field and find their way into the water supply and food chain. But that's not the worst of what happens to the workers. It appears that slavery has been quietly reestablished in Florida. Not figuratively, but literally.

In the last 15 years, Florida law enforcement officials have freed more than 1,000 men and women who had been held and forced to work against their will in the fields of Florida, and that represents only the tip of the iceberg. Most instances of slavery go unreported. Workers were "sold" to crew bosses to pay off bogus debts, beaten if they didn't work, held in chains, pistol whipped, locked at night into shacks in chain-link enclosures patrolled by armed guards. Escapees who got caught were beaten or worse. 

I recommend that you read the whole article, because this is something that it's easy to do something about. In the western U.S. most of our winter tomatoes come from Mexico. I doubt that working conditions in those fields are a whole lot better, but at least tomatoes are adapted to grow there. I pledge to check the origins of the tomatoes I buy and refrain from buying any from Florida.

I hope you'll join me.

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When Art And Spirit Were One.

We just went to see the new Werner Herzog documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It was truly a moving experience and probably the best use of 3-D I've seen. Herzog and his crew were given a few hours access to Chauvet Cave in France to film the oldest and best-preserved examples of cave art ever discovered.

The cave was discovered just a few years ago after having been sealed by a rockslide over 20,000 years ago. The cave has been under tight control by the French government ever since in order to protect the artwork from the kind of degradation seen at Lascaux where the breath of thousands of tourists has caused mold to grow over parts of the drawings. The drawings at Chauvet were done over the course of thousands of years, beginning about 32,000 years ago. That makes them twice as old as the similar artwork at Lascaux and other sites.

 The artwork is stylized, but remarkably accurate, indicating a sophisticated artistic style 

already in place. This is not the beginning of art, but the product of a culture 

with a tradition of drawing that whose first stumbling efforts we have yet to discover.

The use of 3-D is excellent, giving the viewer not only a good sense of space inside the cave, but also a greater appreciation of the way the artists used the contours of the rock to enhance the impact of their drawings.

Of course, this being Werner Herzog, you have to sit through a fair amount of guttural Teutonic maundering about the nature of man and art. Some of it is wonderfully apt, like the anecdote about the anthropologist who asks an Australian aborigine why he is painting. "It is not me painting," the man replies. "It is Spirit."

But then there's the sequence at the end with the albino crocodiles. Yep, you heard me. Nothing to do with the artwork in the cave, apparently Werner just likes albino crocodiles. "Perhaps we are like these albino crocodiles," he speculates in that patented basso profundo rumble. "But are we seeing our future selves or just our own reflection?" (Quotation guaranteed inaccurate, but not by much.)

Still I really recommend seeing this, especially in 3-D. It is genuinely awe-inspiring.

Check out the trailer.


















And my favorite Herzog parody.

P.