Captured Summer

I hope.

This is peach country, and I do love peaches.  So this year I decided to see if I could capture a little bit of golden, peachy, summery goodness for a future wintry day.  The recipe for peach brandy that I found is simple:  peaches, sugar, yeast, water.  Cover, stir occasionally.

Decanted it last night.  Don't know what the alcohol content is but, hoo boy, those chunks of peaches pack a punch - I'm betting that lighting a match over them would produce a nice blue flame.  Couldn't bear to throw them out - I'm thinking they need to go over some really good vanilla ice cream.

The brandy is now bottled and put away.  In about 6 months I'll check and see if it has smoothed out and clarified.  Maybe I will have managed to capture a little bit of golden summer in a bottle.

They missed their target.

Erin Bonesteel over at Anti-anti underground is a great political cartoonist, and unlike the administration, she pretty much always hits her target.  Yesterday's offering says it all.

Is it time?

“There will be time for them to make profits, and there will be time for them to get bonuses — now is not that time. And that’s a message that I intend to send directly to them.”

So said the Prez in 2009.  Would that whole time to profit and get bonuses thing also apply to sending wifey and kids on a +$400,000 vacation paid for by the American taxpayer?

It's A-comin'

Guess it could have been worse.  While I was grumbling about the rain last weekend, the higher elevations in the state were getting an early dose of winter.  Up to 9 inches of it.

I guess I'd better get under the house and fix the insulation.  Winter's a-comin'.

I'm not exactly ancient, but I have some memories of winter that are probably a bit unusual compared to those of my contemporaries.  We lived on Wilson Hill in the Settlement, and that old farmhouse sits so it gets hit with winds six ways from Sunday.   The house leaked air around the windows something fierce. I can remember watching the curtains move in the breeze - when the windows were closed.  And it's in the higher elevations of West Virginia, so winters can be a bit crisp and snowy.  No such thing as a heat pump or furnace - we depended on coal stoves for cooking and heating.  I love coal, love the smell of it burning, but it has the same disadvantage as wood - without regular stoking the fires go out at night.  And that house would get COLD.  So cold that the contents of the chamber pots under the beds would freeze.  At which point the beds were moved downstairs next to to one of the stoves for the winter.

I don't have backup heat other than a big kerosene heater right now.  It's on my "to do" list, but it's a part of the "to do" list that's expensive and so I'm saving for it.  Eventually a wood stove will go in downstairs.  I could probably find a source of coal, but wood is really more sensible here, and a coal fire gets black dust into everything, anyway.  But a part of me will always wish it was coal.

The Rain, Rain, Rain

With the exception of the 5 days at the beach (for which I am grateful), it has been raining forever.  Or at least that's what it feels like.  Irene, Lee, "the instability in the west" - rain, incessant rain for a good month now.  At one point I shot an e-mail to my daughter saying that it was a good thing that there was no wind because we'd be losing trees like crazy if there was.  Shortly after that I looked outside just in time to see a tree pass my deck on its way down.  The ground is so saturated that it just toppled.  Oh, well, at least it will make good firewood for a friend of mine who can't get out and cut her own.  If it ever stops raining long enough for me to get to it.

But as my mind bounced around with "STOP!!!!  STOP RAINING!!!!" last night I remembered some old friends.

I have Pooh on my bookshelf, too.  I used to retreat to the Hundred Acre Wood when the world was seeming a bit too Lovecraftian.  Maybe it's time to take a walk with Christopher Robin.  Maybe slide through the back of the wardrobe and pay a visit to Narnia as well.

Viva Mexico!

Last week, the Mexican Supreme Court upheld a law passed by the state of Baja that states that life begins at conception and therefore deserves legal protection by the state.  Baja is one of 31 Mexican states that have passed such laws, and more are scheduled to appear before the Court.

I’ve often questioned how a human egg and a human sperm, both carrying human DNA, could come together to form anything other than a human being.  I have yet to find anyone who will tell me that at the moment of human conception a chimpanzee is formed, or a giraffe, or a rabbit and that these creatures then evolve into a human baby.   In fact, just the asking makes people angry, which leads me to think that they can’t sustain their argument against the existence of nascent humanity.   Yet, with the straightest of faces they will require me to render a “not guilty” verdict based on doubt in a jury trial.

In one of his accounts of the marketing of the legal abortion trade in the U.S., Dr. Bernard Nathanson, one of the founders of NARAL, described the motive behind legalized abortion:

A favourite pro-abortion tactic is to insist that the definition of when life begins is impossible; that the question is a theological or moral or philosophical one, anything but a scientific one. Foetology makes it undeniably evident that life begins at conception and requires all the protection and safeguards that any of us enjoy. Why, you may well ask, do some American doctors who are privy to the findings of foetology, discredit themselves by carrying out abortions? Simple arithmetic at $300 a time, 1.55 million abortions means an industry generating $500,000,000 annually, of which most goes into the pocket of the physician doing the abortion.              

He also described the tactics that were used:

We persuaded the media that the cause of permissive abortion was a  liberal  enlightened, sophisticated one.  Knowing that if a true poll were taken, we would be soundly defeated, we simply fabricated the results of fictional polls.  We announced  to the media  that we had taken polls and that 60% of Americans were in favour of permissive abortion.  This is the tactic of the self-fulfilling lie.  Few people care to be in the minority. We aroused enough sympathy  to sell our program  of permissive abortion by fabricating the number of illegal abortions done annually in the U.S. The actual figure was approaching 100,000 but the figure  we gave  to the media  repeatedly was 1,000,000.  Repeating the big lie often enough convinces the public.  The number of women dying from illegal abortions was around 200-250 annually.  The figure we constantly fed  to the media  was 10,000.  These false figures took root  in the consciousness  of Americans  convincing many that we needed to crack  the  abortion law.  Another myth  we fed  to the public through the media was that legalising abortion  would only mean that the abortions taking place illegally would then be done legally.  In fact, of course,  abortion is now being used as a primary method of birth control in the U.S. and the annual number of abortions has increased by 1500% since legalisation.                                                                           

We systematically vilified  the Catholic Church  and its  "socially backward ideas"  and picked  on the Catholic hierarchy  as the villain  in opposing abortion.  This theme was played endlessly.  We fed the media such lies as "we all know that opposition to abortion comes from the hierarchy  and not  from  most Catholics" and "Polls prove time and again that most Catholics want abortion law reform".  And the media drum-fired all this into the American people, persuading  them that anyone opposing permissive abortion must be under the  influence  of the  Catholic hierarchy  and  that Catholics in favour of abortion are enlightened and forward-looking.  An inference of this tactic was that there were no non-Catholic groups opposing abortion. The fact that other Christian as well as non-Christian religions  were  {and  still are)  monolithically  opposed  to  abortion  was  constantly suppressed, along with pro-life atheists' opinions.

Dr. Nathanson estimated that his abortion mills were responsible for 75,000 abortions.  Ironically, in 1996, after repudiating abortion, he converted to Catholicism, baptized and recieved into the Church by one of the very bishops he had so vilified.  He passed away earlier this year – may his soul rest in peace.

We may have many issues with Mexico, but the Mexican citizens who are acting through their governments against the core lie behind abortion "rights" deserve to be applauded.  And our own country needs to recognize a fundamental truth: the words “Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” are meaningless if the word that precedes them in that famous phrase - “Life” - is not protected.

Dialog

I figured that any show that had dialog good enough to be traded back and forth on the blogs I read had to be interesting. So I couldn't stand it anymore - I checked Netflix and sure enough they had "Firefly". So much to like about the show, but the dialog is flat out fun - quick and clever and it comes out of characters you can't help liking. So when I came across these examples of not-so-sparkling dialog today the difference was really clear. These are the actual translations used in Kung Fu movies that were translated for English viewers.

1. "I am damn unsatisfied to be killed in this way."

2. "Fatty, you with your thick face have hurt my instep."

3. "Gun wounds again?"

4. "Same old rules: no eyes, no groin."

5. "A normal person wouldn't steal pituitaries."

6. "I'll burn you into a barbecue chicken!"

7. "Who gave you the nerve to get killed here?"

8. "Quiet or I'll blow your throat up."

9. "You always use violence. I should've ordered glutinous rice chicken!"

10. "I'll fire aimlessly if you don't come out!"

11. "You daring lousy guy!"

12. "I got knife scars more than the number of your leg's hair!"

13. "Beware! Your bones are going to be disconnected."

14. "How can you use my intestines as a gift?"

15. "The bullets inside are very hot. Why do I feel so cold?"

16. "Beat him out of recognizable shape."

I actually kinda like #1.