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September 26, 2007

Warren Jeffs Found Guilty

I was triumphantly relieved to read that Warren Jeffs, "prophet" of the Fundmantalist COJCOLDS or whatever it's called, has been found guilty in Utah of two counts of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl. He faces more charges in Arizona as well.

The arguments of the defense in all this just sound so gross. I'm glad the jury focused on the fact that the girl was 14, and that she was told that if she didn't submit to this marriage she didn't like, she'd go to hell. Those are, I think the most relevant issues in the matter.

Posted by Holly at 11:34 AM | Comments (1)

September 22, 2007

shock doctrine, the movie

Posted by Holly at 9:55 AM | Comments (2)

September 21, 2007

Aluminum Foil Whaaat?

For about ten years now, I've been complaining to chiropractors, massage therapists and acupuncturists about some weirdness in my left hip. It's not a pain, exactly, and it's not a joint problem; it's... like some weird congestion. Every new practitioner I've seen swears s/he can fix it, but no one ever has. The procedure that did the most good was, believe it or not, the colon cleanse I wrote about in August. (Which, by the way, my site meter reveals is currently one of my most popular entries--a lot of people really like to google the phrase "nasty shit.")

But there's still some weirdness in my hip, maybe from a lifetime of standing wrong.... I don't know. I just know that sometimes my hip feels wrong and the wrongness radiates down my leg and my knee feels wrong and my ankle feels wrong.

So today I saw my acupuncturist, and her way of treating the hip weirdness was one I have never before encountered: she put half a dozen tiny needles on the left side of my ass, then got a sheet of aluminum foil and taped it to my butt--supposedly the foil intensifies the energetic whatever it is the needles do.

Now, I love acupuncture--if you click on the link above, you'll get to read about a fabulous treatment from two years ago. But the foil-taped-to-the-butt thing.... Even I am skeptical about that. I haven't noticed any marked improvement in my hip, but we'll see if anything changes in the coming week.

Posted by Holly at 4:44 PM | Comments (3)

September 19, 2007

Peanut Butter Fingers

So anyway, as I wrote Sunday, Chinese cuisine isn’t as big on sweets and desserts as American and European cuisines are, but as I wrote yesterday, peanuts and peanut butter have been integrated into the cuisine, and are elements of American food you can easily find in Taiwan. Which is why one of the main things my first companion liked to make was this very easy bar cookie recipe called Peanut Butter Fingers. I must have been introduced to this recipe my first week in Taiwan.... and I must have made it dozen of times in the 70 or so weeks I was there. It’s not just that missionaries like it: most Chinese people who ate them thought they were pretty decent too.

A week or so ago, I was invited to a pot luck picnic, and I signed up to bring a dessert. I was going to make these no-bake cookies because they’re SO EASY, but then I remembered that one of my good friends pukes violently if he consumes tree nuts, and I find something distressing about serving food to people that makes them vomit. I thought about making these chocolate chocolate chip cookies, because they’re SO YUMMY, but they take a lot of time, and I didn’t have it.

And then I noticed this recipe for Peanut Butter Fingers, which I hadn’t made in ages. Luckily I had a jar of peanut butter--it’s not necessarily something I keep on hand--and it was that tenth time when peanut butter just sounded good to me, so I made them. And given that the pan was almost empty by the end of the picnic, I think they were a success.

So here, finally, is the recipe for Peanut Butter Fingers.

Cream together

2/3 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar

Add

2 eggs
2 heaping tablespoons of high-quality peanut butter (in other words, just plain old ground up peanuts)
1 tsp vanilla

Stir in

1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 cups flour
2 cups oats

Spread evenly into lightly greased 9x13 inch baking dish. Cook at 350 degrees for 20-25 minutes, depending on how done you like your cookies. (I like them kind of on the mushy side, but that makes the next step a bit tricky.) Remove them from the oven, then take

two more heaping teaspoons peanut butter

and drop evenly over the top of the cookies. Depending on whether you prefer milk or dark chocolate, get

either 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips OR 1 regular size plain chocolate bar, chopped or broken (something like a Hershey bar is what I used to use)

and distribute evenly over the cooked batter. Wait five minutes until chocolate is melted and the peanut butter is soft, then get a knife and GENTLY spread the stuff around until it’s marbly and pretty and covers the entire top of the cookies.

They’re especially good while they’re still warm.

Posted by Holly at 9:50 AM | Comments (2)

September 18, 2007

Peanut Butter Is OK, I Guess

Tomatoes, potatoes, cocoa beans and chilies are among the food plants indigenous to the Americas that have been thoroughly appropriated by other parts of the world, to the point where they seem integral to certain nations’ cuisine or history: think of Italian food with tomato sauce. Think of Belgium without chocolate. Think of Ireland with a potato blight and crushing famine. Think of Indian food without the searing hot bite of a really potent chili pepper or two.

Peanuts, not so much. Plenty of the world has never taken to peanuts or peanut butter or any number of peanut-flavored things. As Chanson notes, the French find peanut butter pretty damn vile, and as I remember from my time in the UK a couple of decades ago, the British didn’t much care for it either.

The Chinese and their neighbors, however, managed to dig peanuts and their by-products and do some pretty great things with them, as anyone who has enjoyed spring rolls or noodles with peanut sauce will know. I prefer peanuts in savory food to any sort of peanut-y dessert.

Frankly the thing I like best about peanut butter is its history. In elementary school I read this fabulous biography of George Washington Carver, explaining how he convinced all these farmers to plant soil-enriching peanuts instead of just soil-depleting cotton as part of his crop rotation program. Once the peanuts were harvested, the farmers came to George and said, “OK, what do we do with these peanuts? ‘Cause there’s no demand for them at all.”

And George looked at them for a moment, then said, “I’ll be right back,” went into his lab and invented about 50 million uses for peanuts, one of which was peanut butter. (Does anyone besides me still have very fond memories of hearing Eddie Murphy describe how “George Washington Carver died penniless and insane, still trying to play a phonograph record with a peanut” as part of a "Black History Minute" on Saturday Night Live?)

Anyway.... I’m not nuts about peanuts. They’re OK, but I prefer other nuts, real nuts. (Peanuts, after all, are actually legumes, as you probably learned in fifth grade.) Pecans are my favorite nuts for baking--I like them in cookies and pies and cakes and streusel or whatever. There are pecan trees all over my hometown of Thatcher, Arizona--the church I went to as a child was in the midst of a pecan grove--and I would regularly pick a pecan off the ground, crack it and eat the fresh nut meat.... No nut tastes as good to me as a fresh pecan I’ve just cracked. I like walnuts and macadamia nuts for cooking too. I also enjoy roasted and salted almonds, cashews and pistachios. (I especially like cracking pistachios and sucking all the salt off the shell.) If all the other, better nuts are gone from the nut mix, I’ll eat Brazil nuts. I don’t like hazelnuts for some reasons.

I didn’t really like peanut butter when I was little because it tasted too peanut-y and the texture was weird and it wasn’t sweet enough, so my mother’s solution was to mix it with honey, which made it pretty damn good. I really liked spreading that mixture on saltines. Yum! Honey’s much better with peanut butter than jam.

And in general I like it even less now that I’m grown. Nine times out of ten, I’ll pass up any sweet that is peanut or peanut-butter flavored, but there’s always that tenth time....

OK, this is still running long, and I have more to say before I get around to sharing the cookie recipe. But I promise, I’ll post it soon.

Posted by Holly at 11:20 AM | Comments (4)

September 16, 2007

This Wasn't Going to Be About Cheese

A sweet tooth is not the easiest thing to satisfy in China. I had to work very hard in both Taiwan and Shanghai to assuage my sugar cravings. I couldn’t find any decent Chinese sweets in Mainland China; I had to content myself with buying a bag or two of Skittles or M&Ms (both of which were imported and therefore very expensive) each week. Things had been markedly better in Taiwan, though I still had to make some accommodations. I ate a lot of chocolate O’Smiles, this sandwich cookie with a truly great name; there was also this flavored powdered milk drink I thought was OK. And then there were bings, these concoctions of fruit, shaved ice and sweetened condensed milk--they were pretty lovely, especially on a very hot day. And there was passion fruit juice--I’ve never tasted anything quite like fresh passion fruit juice, which was sold in baggies with a straw dropped into them, around which a string was tied so you could dangle the bag from the handlebars of your bicycle. There were also these sticky rice things that I found revolting if they had red bean in them--they were so very vile--but quite liked if they contained a paste of sweetened black sesame. But ain’t none of it the same as a really moist chocolate chip cookie or a nice big square of fudge so rich and sweet it makes your teeth hurt.

If you’ve ever looked at the “Desserts” section of a Chinese cookbook, you might have noticed that there’s usually not much there, and what is there doesn’t quite live up to our standards of an impressive finale to a good meal: you won’t find the Asian equivalent of a dense chocolate cake or a caramel souffle. That’s because something like chocolate cake--particularly if it’s frosted and accompanied by a dollop of ice cream--is cloyingly, unappetizingly sweet to the traditional Chinese palate. When I’d been on my mission about a year, a Dairy Queen opened in Taichung, the city I was stationed in. Of course I went to the grand opening.... and then I went back the next day. At one point I ended up talking to one of the western managers, who told me that all the recipes had to be revised to accommodate Chinese tastes. Otherwise, the local population might try a hot fudge sundae once, just for novelty’s sake, but it would be so unpleasantly sweet they’d never come back, and you couldn’t turn a profit someplace like Taichung catering only to expatriates.

Now, I’m not saying there’s anything genetic going on, that the Chinese have different taste buds than people with ancestors from Europe. No. I mean, I guess there might be, but I think it more likely that it’s a matter of what tastes are reinforced by the culture, what people are trained from infancy to think is delicious. As someone pointed out to me, many tastes are acquired, and historically the Chinese found it silly that westerners spend so much time acquiring a taste for things that are really bad for them--diabetes isn’t nearly the problem in China that it is in the US--or else bad for them AND thoroughly gross if you stop to think about it, i.e., the fetishized, manipulated, clotted old baby food of other species, known to us as cheese.

It’s hard to realize just how revolting cheese is in the ideology of Chinese cuisine. (And yes, Chinese cuisine does have an ideology about the proper way to eat, just as we have a food pyramid and notions about what you need to eat each day to be healthy.) In that philosophy, only babies and barbarians consume dairy products, and at least babies consume it while it’s still fresh, instead of letting it get curdled, hard, and in some cases, moldy. Worst of all, this is done with something intended only for the young of other species--it’s not like we make cheese from human milk. (Think how you’d react if someone served you cottage cheese made from the milk of cocker spaniels. That’s getting to the visceral revulsion cheese in general often arouses.) The average Chinese person is as grossed out by the sight, smell and taste of blue cheese as the average American is by something called chou dofu, which literally means “stinky tofu,” and which you could buy in Taiwan as easily as you can buy a Starbucks mocha in the US. I never tried chou dofu myself; watching one of my friends take a bite and then retch violently into the sewer at the side of the road was enough to convince me I wouldn’t like the taste any better than the smell.

I didn’t really like cheese when I was a little kid. I would eat it when it was served to me, provided it was melted (it had to be melted), but I didn’t really enjoy it and I couldn’t see why people always put it in things when most foods were just as good without it. But at some point I learned to love cheese, except for American cheese, which I won’t even go near. I also don’t care for blue cheese and the other really stinky, moldy ones. I’ve tried--I tried for the better part of two decades, in fact, to acquire a taste for those weird moldy cheeses grownups are supposed to enjoy. Starting in my teens, when I was served something with Gorgonzola or Roquefort, I’d tell myself that the reason it didn’t taste good was because I just wasn’t in the mood for a stinky moldy cheese on that particular day. But one day I realized that if I’d reached my mid thirties and didn’t really enjoy stinky, moldy cheeses, I probably wasn’t going to acquire a taste for them, ever. So now I just admit that I don’t like stinky, moldy cheese, the same way I don’t like raw tomatoes or organ meat, and I’m much happier.

I had this one boyfriend who once went off on this tirade about the inferiority of American culture. It’s not like that’s a topic I can’t get jazzed about discussing, but he had this particularly stupid way of demonstrating said inferiority. “It’s like this professor I had in college once told us,” the boyfriend said. “He said that a good gauge of a country’s maturity and its contributions to the rest of the world was the number of cheeses it had invented. And France has invented, like, five hundred or a thousand or something, and the United States has invented, like, three.”

“And then there’s China,” I replied. “It’s invented zero cheeses. The Chinese don’t even eat cheese. They just invented, oh, gun powder and paper money and toilet paper and porcelain and pasta and the printing press, like, a couple thousand years ago. But of course none of that stacks up to leaving sheep’s milk in a wooden bucket for long enough that it gets stinky, hard and moldy.”

Which pissed the boyfriend off. But he deserved it.

This wasn’t going to be about cheese, because after all, I posted something about cheese already this month. This was going to be a recipe for a peanut butter bar cookie. Oh well. This was another of those times when I got all caught up in my introduction. So I guess I’ll post the recipe tomorrow or the next day. Check back then if you want a really easy recipe for an ideal bar cookie to tote along to your next picnic.

Posted by Holly at 8:39 PM | Comments (3)

September 12, 2007

Hormone-Mimickers Produce More Girl Babies

Here's a very upsetting story announcing that "Man-made chemicals blamed as many more girls than boys are born in Arctic" because high-levels of gross toxins (particularly those in flame retardants) in the food supply "can change sex of child during pregnancy," and here's another saying the same thing, but with slightly different details.

It's horrifying, how nasty and icky we've let our food supply get, and there are definite challenges to be faced in the village in Greenland where only girls have been born. But I can't help thinking that if the chemicals worked the other way--if they changed the sex of the baby from a girl to a boy--walrus carcasses absolutely laden with this gross stuff would be sold in certain countries as a way to avoid having to abort unwanted female babies--just turn them into boys during the first three weeks of gestation!

The only comfort is that the world so loves its baby boys that there will probably be swift action now to clean this nasty stuff up.

Posted by Holly at 9:18 AM | Comments (2)

September 11, 2007

Baring Their Chests and Testimonies

I got this link from my friend Troy, who sent it to me with the note "as if missionaries weren't gay enough...."

It's for Mormons Exposed: Men on a Mission, a retailing enterprise promoting a calendar featuring a buff, bare-chested RM (returned missionary) every month. The faq page (an acronym I always read "fag" unless it's capitalized) states that "the calendar celebrates these missionaries' great looks and beautiful bodies, as well as the amazing stories of service of these deeply spiritual men," adding that

Behind the eye-candy, this calendar has a deeper story - one that can reshape perceptions, heighten awareness, and perhaps encourage and inspire a broadened acceptance of human and religious diversity. The fact that twelve young returned missionaries are posing shirtless will certainly raise eyebrows, but may also help to sort out some common misconceptions about Mormons. The shock value of what these traditionally conservative young men have helped to create has the power to build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance.

It also notes that the "This product may be the must-have stocking stuffer of the year, or even be the gag gift of 2008"--or do they mean the "gay gift" of 2008?

You'll see what I mean if you go to the "meet the missionaries" page, click on the little photo of each missionary, then run your cursor over the larger photo that appears on the plaque on the right of the screen: each missionary appears in his shirtless pose! What cracks me up is that they simply removed their shirts and posed in their dress slacks, with their belts still on. But you must check out Matt, who holds is scriptures in his fully-dressed pose, but has his thumb tugging down the waistband of his pants (just a bit of his garments peek out) and his hair coyly disheveled in his shirtless pic.

I shouldn't be so snarky, I know: it's not like most Mormon men know much of anything at all about how to be sexy, since all they're taught for most of their lives is how to repress.

But they do know how to be pompous and white. I must point out that while the twelve young men who posed for the calendar served all over the world--Ukraine, Japan, Mozambique, Argentina, Las Vegas--they're fairly homogeneous in their origins: four are from Utah, two are named Brandon, one is a Matt and one is a Matthew, and they're all white, white, white! Not a Hispanic, Asian, Native American (or, in Mormon-speak, "Lamanite") or African-American (or, in Mormon-speak, "seed of Cain") in the mix. Not one.

If you ask me, that's a pretty serious lapse for an enterprise that claims it wants to "build a dialogue that encourages people across every belief system and walk of life to defy stereotypes, step out of judgment and embrace tolerance."

They're so entrenched in their own view of who they are that they can't even realize the extent to which WHITENESS is part of the stereotypical ideas about Mormons, and that seems to be one stereotype they have no wish to defy.

(And oh yeah. There's also the "deeply closeted" stereotype. They're not doing much to defy that one, either. Which is why you need to read Troy's essay on embracing queerness.)

Posted by Holly at 9:11 AM | Comments (4)

September 10, 2007

Using Your Granddaughter as Pin Cushion

Here's a story that has so upset me I scarcely can articulate all the reasons why: a 31-year-old Chinese woman went to the doctor because she had blood in her urine; turns out she has 26 sewing needles embedded in her body; and the likely explanation is that when she she an infant, her grandparents stuck all the needles in her because they were upset that she wasn't a boy. Some of the needles have worked their way into vital organs; one needle has broken into three pieces in her brain.

OK, I'm really distressed by the fact that female fetuses are so often aborted in India and China; I'm horrified by female infanticide. I realize that what I'm about to write is obvious, but those aborted fetuses and murdered infants don't have to live with the knowledge that their families didn't want them because they were female. I'm not saying it's better to be killed as an infant than to discover, at age 31, that your grandparents (whom you were probably trained to love and respect) were disappointed enough by your sex that they'd try to kill you, but I am saying that I find it hard to wrap my mind around how that might alter your view of yourself, your family and the world.

Of course, women do have to live with the knowledge that the world considers them of secondary importance, and largely disposable. But hey, we have our ENTIRE LIVES to come to terms with THAT fact, because basically not a day goes by when that message isn't communicated. But there's something about finding out one day that you have a needle in your brain put their by your grandparents that just takes things into a different realm for me--I can't imagine how that would change your fundamental experience of yourself and your world. I think it would make me afraid even to lie down and put my head on a pillow.

The world is a sick, sick place.

Posted by Holly at 1:01 PM | Comments (1)

September 8, 2007

A Little Curl

I haven't had bangs in well over a decade, but somehow or other, I recently acquired a few stray hairs that are significantly shorter than their neighbors. I would never have noticed them except that they're right at the hairline off my forehead. I don't know if they were weakened last time I got it colored, and so broke; or if the stylist somehow cut them off during my last trim. But they're there.

And they form a little ringlet that sometimes escapes when I pull my hair back, and sometimes I think it looks really cute and sometimes I find it really annoying.

Posted by Holly at 9:57 AM | Comments (1)

September 7, 2007

A Raging River of Molten Cheese

The other day I heard that song "One Headlight" by the Wallflowers, which reminded me that I used to own whatever album it's on. (I got rid of the album because I’m not all that interested in guys who want to be Bruce Springsteen. I mean, I love the boss, but that’s because he’s him, not because he’s part of some larger musical movement.) That reminded me of Eve, this woman I knew and was sort of friends with in grad school until she dropped out to drive a school bus, because she's who gave me the album. And that reminded me how after she got tired of getting up before 5 a.m. five days a week so she could drive a bunch of eight-year-olds to school, she decided to move to Wyoming or someplace cool out west to become a forest ranger, but before she left, she had a going away party at which she divested herself of stuff she didn't feel like schlepping the better part of a thousand miles, including a few mediocre pop albums. And that reminded me of the time we had coffee a few years earlier and I was complaining about all this damage my car got in this really horrible hailstorm--there were huge, horrid pock marks all over that thing. "Oh! I loved that hailstorm!" Eve said. "It was dramatic and scary, and it put money in my pocket!"

See, Eve had thought to call her insurance company after the storm and report the damage to her car. She got close to two thousand bucks out of the business, and because the damage was merely cosmetic and her car was a piece of crap, she didn't bother to have anything repaired, just kept the cash.

And that reminded me of how I called my insurance company and did the very same thing. But first I had to talk to this stupid young woman who knew what I was going to do and didn't approve, and tried to make sure I actually took my car to a body shop and spent the $1002.50 (I remember that amount because it was a thousand bucks, plus the cost of a decent latte, which I wanted to buy for Eve because after all, she was a big reason I got the other thousand) getting the dents hammered out of my doors and hood and roof. "I just want the money so I can deal with this myself," I told the stupid young woman.

"But really, it's no problem to send a payment to a body shop and get the work done for you," she said. "Let me just find a body shop we work with." There was a pause, and then she said, "How close are you to...to...to Cheddar Rapids?"

"I am no where near a raging river of molten cheese," I said. "However, I'm only 30 miles or so from Cedar Rapids. But it really doesn't matter because I just want the cash. I can take care of this myself."

So that's how hearing a Wallflowers song reminded me of a raging river of molten cheese, which I sort of wish really did exist because it would be a sight worth seeing, and a funky way to make cheese fries.

Posted by Holly at 10:26 AM | Comments (2)

September 6, 2007

Happy Birthday, Mom

Today is my mother’s birthday. She was born 70 years ago today in Tucson, Arizona.

I’m kind of freaked out by this--not that it’s her birthday; I’m used to that happening every year--but that it’s her 70th birthday, because 70 is kind of old, particularly if you have health problems, and my mom does. Back when she first started manifesting some of these problems, I would say, “But she’s young! She’s only 59!” I really can’t say that any more, and not just because she’s not 59. Fifty-nine is young for certain problems, but 70 really is not. My mom’s health problems are not going to kill her tomorrow, but they will kill her eventually, and it’s not unheard of for people to die in their 70s of things like liver disease or a stroke.

I don’t know that I want to stick around for as long as some of my relatives have done, who, especially on my dad’s side, are a very long-lived group of people; I have plenty of ancestors who hung on into their mid to late 90s. I watched some of them get frail and feeble and cranky and forgetful. It didn’t look like fun, and I’d rather skip some of that. But I don’t want to bow out particularly early, either. Nor do I want my mom to go any time soon. But the fact of the matter is, she might.

At least she isn’t forgetful yet, though recently I’ve been stricken at how frail and feeble she can be, considering how vibrant and strong she always seemed before. As for cranky, well, she had a formidable cranky streak even when she was young. I won’t say it’s part of what we loved about her, but it was part of her, and we dealt with it.

I seriously doubt my mom reads my blog--at least, I hope she doesn't; I’ve done my best to protect her from it. My blog, like my tattoo, is primarily a source of pleasure and pride for me, but I know from experience that making my mom confront certain things about me just leads to unhappiness for the both of us.

So even though I already sent her a gift and called her this morning to wish her “Happy Birthday,” and even though she’ll probably never read this, I want to say “Yo! Mom! Congratulations, and I hope you celebrate a few more milestone birthdays!”

Posted by Holly at 3:02 PM | Comments (2)

September 5, 2007

He Was Morrissey's Drummer

Here's a fun little radio piece someone sent me by and about Andrew McGibbon, about his stints as Morrissey's drummer (hence the title). If you are clever enough to completely love the Smiths, you should enjoy this.

Posted by Holly at 8:36 AM | Comments (0)

September 4, 2007

Naked Guys at the Johnson Museum

A couple weeks ago I took my last trip of the summer: I went to Ithaca, NY, to visit dear friends.

Ithaca, in case you didn't know, is in a singularly beautiful part of the world. It's part of the finger lakes region of New York and has both rolling hills and steep valleys. At the Wegman's in Ithaca you can buy t-shirts proclaiming that it's "gorges." It's worth going just to survey the scenery, but there's also stuff to do. There are state parks, for hiking and swimming and boating. It's the home of the Moosewood Restaurant. The downtown is decent for hanging out. There's also the art gallery at Cornell university: the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

Admission is free, and the top floor of the museum (which houses a decent collection of Asian art) is a great place to get a panoramic view of the entire city, including Ithaca's own personal lake (the name of which I forget). But what will really stick with me are the statues of two naked guys that are the first piece of art you encounter when you walk in the door.

They're these life-sized bronze figures arranged to illustrate the name of the sculpture, which is "Conflict." To be frank, it's not an especially remarkable piece of art, but for some (OK, well, a fairly obvious) reason it has become the mascot of the museum, and the coffee cart and pastry case in the lobby of the museum have been dignified by the name of "2 Naked Guys Cafe," because they're only feet away from the naked guys.

The museum sells t-shirts for the cafe, and of course I bought one--I owed a birthday present to a gay man, and what gay man wouldn't want to walk around West Hollywood in a t-shirt like this?

Posted by Holly at 9:23 AM | Comments (1)