Toad in the Hole

Winter Heat

It’s winter, by some reckonings.

We took a quick stroll in Tilden Park, on the lower path from the Nature Center parking lot (isn’t that a resonant phrase?) to Jewel Lake this morning. It’s stiflingly hot today, but a lot cooler in the woods paths.

It’s the local landscape’s tired, worn-out time of year, and someone had gone before us in the last day or two with a weedwhacker to keep the path passable, so the place looked like an old man with a bad shave.

Poison oak is showing some color, and willows are half-heartedly yellowing. Live oaks are dropping their three-year-old leaves, too—at one point, near a bench at the trail’s highest point on the hillside, we stopped to listen, and a breeze knocking those stiff little leaves down made it sound like rain. There were translucent red berries in pairs and clusters on the honeysuckle*, harder little red berries on the ground under the madrone, unripe and a very few overripe berries on the blackberry tangles, white berries on the snowberry and redtwig dogwood. Zillions of gnats in clouds along the path, and herds of waterstriders on still spots in the creek.

*Coyote the Typo God invented a sinister new plant just there: the hineysuckle

We heard what was most likely a deer in the willow-dogwood brush by the creek, and it was so klutzy I’d bet it was a buck with his new antlers getting in the way.

Birds: fox sparrows!—meaning it’s winter; hermit thrush and ruby-crowned kinglet, ditto. The Townsend’s warblers might have been passing through; the warbling and Hutton’s vireos most likely were. The song sparrow, robins, scrub and Steller’s jays, downy woodpecker(s), flicker(s), ravens, Anna’s hummers, and red-shouldered hawk were almost certainly the same resident individuals we see there ‘most every trip, and it’s always good to see them again. A great blue heron seems to have decided to spend a season at Jewel lake, among the turtles and dragonflies and assorted fish.

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Handsome Phrase

I’ll flesh this out with context and source when I check his spelling, but heard at the Cal Academy members’ lecture the other night:

“An organism is the hypothesis of its environment.”

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Everybody! Everybody!

You can’t do it until next weekend, but waste no more time than you have to. Do what we did this morning. Go to Memphis Minnie’s Barbeque on lower Haight Street in San Francisco and have brunch.

This isn’t your standard eggs Benedict. I got smoked-pork hash, made with sweet potatoes and laid on a bed of Minnie’s standard wonderful sweet-and-sour greens. It looked burnt. It was not burnt; it was perfect, an incredible combination, intense, filling, addictive, complicated crunchy and tender… OK, I want some more, now that I can think about food again.

Joe had what’s listed as Low Country Shrimp and Grits. The shrimp tastes fresh and snappy (no shells) and the grits are cheese grits. Joe used to have family in Savannah that he visited often when he lived in Georgia; he’s had good Low Country food to compare this to, and his own cheese grits are the food the gods would deserve if they behaved better. He was very very happy with his shrimp and cheese grits this morning, and when we swapped plates I was too. Also vice versa, with my hash. Oh yeah, nice li’l corn biscuit too, fresh fruit garnish, good coffee.

I’ve eaten various home-cooked meals with his family over the last 25 years and dragged a copy of Roadfood around the US and parts of Canada by way of dining guide, and I think I can vouch for this stuff myself.

Cheese grits doesn’t sound promising if you haven’t had them. Or it.  Whatever. I’ll leave the question “Is ‘grits’ plural or are ‘grits’ singular?” for another time. When Joe makes them (and evidently when Minnie’s chef makes them) they’re a lot like souffle. The recipe involves eggs, lots of butter, and cheese. They’re probably very bad for you. You don’t care, when you’re eating them. (“Two eggs, a stick of butter, a cup of cheese, a cup of grits; cook grits till no longer runny, mix in the rest, put in hot oven” just to summarize. “Should be enough for six” but…)

There’s other stuff on the menu, like pain perdu and, oh, I forget. We’re talking serious Southern breakfast here, though. I didn’t bother memorizing it because we’ll be going back for more and I can read it again. Holy jumping Jehosaphat Christofferson that was good. Oh my.

What are you waiting for? Get over there. If you’re in Alabama, I bet you could get there by 9AM Saturday when they open if you start driving now.

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I Think I’ve Just Had My Canada Moment

New FDA Appointee
FDA Appoints Official from Office of Veterinary Medicine to Office of Women’s Health

September 16, 2005 CONTACT:

Washington, DC —  FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford has appointed a man who has spent the majority of his career in the office of veterinary medicine to the position of acting director of the Office of Women’s Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Norris Alderson will replace Dr. Susan Wood, a key women’s health expert, who resigned on August 31 in protest of the FDA’s handling of the application to make Plan B emergency contraception (EC) available over the counter.

You know—that moment when you plot the fastest route to Canada and how much it would take to get that far—gas, lodging, whatever. What you could manage to take along. And then what.

It didn’t happen after the election, or any of the events since; it didn’t even happen after the hurricane, because I wanted to help instead. This is my country. But I think I’ve just been shown my place in the Sacred Order of Things, and while it’s not a surprise, or even news, it’s being made amazingly clear.

Here’s the thing: You can afford to look stupid and contemptuous, if you’re so powerful that it doesn’t matter. Somebody up there in the structure thinks that’s the case now.

For some of us, the scariest part of Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale is the first part.

(Later: Evidently They changed Their minds, and fast. If it weren’t for Google caches, one might think it had never happened. You’d think Pat Robertson’s recent faux pas would teach a lesson, but some people think the National Memory Hole is still functional.)

((Still later: Interestingly, of the Google cache links provided one didn’t work for me, and the other sent me to some memo about Canadian drugs.. If this in fact was a hoax, Salon fall for it and so did a few other moderately reliable sources. The only slender evidence I’ve found on the path is this sentence at the head of the memo about Teresa Toigo:

This is a revision of this statement posted earlier on September 16.

I’d sure like to see more, myself. Meanwhile, Ms Toigo’s qualifications are listed in the same memo thus:

Ms. Toigo has held various FDA positions in CDER, CBER and the Office of the Commissioner since joining FDA in 1984. Ms. Toigo has collaborated with the Office of Women’s Health on a variety of FDA initiatives related to the inclusion of women and minorities in clinical trials. Ms. Toigo received her pharmacy (BS) and business (MBA) degrees from Rutgers University.

Seems a tad vague. Would you hire someone based on this resume? If you live in the USA, you just did.))

The thing is not that this was a major blow,  the original announcement as I got it. As the nuns would say: In the face of eternity, what does it matter? It was just the last straw, the wafer-thin mint, the penny tip, the fart in the elevator. Or maybe it just hit me on the wrong day.

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The People, Yes

PZ Myers and company do a minifisk on someone named Timothy Birdnow on a site that calls itself The American Thinker.”

(The comments section has wandered all the hell over the landscape, but I can’t really grouch about a string that includes a Terry Bisson cite and a fast and elegant horror fiction story—well, its prologue, which is quite sufficient unto itself.)

When I see stuff like the post referenced, I get more amused than angry. OK, there is that sense of sinking depression and loathing I get whenever I’m confronting a pathological liar, a closed-loop religious fanatic, or any other such spittle-generator. But this stuff reminds me most of a paperback we got from the Museum of Jurassic Technology—it’s a compendium of crank letters purportedly received by the Mount Wilson Observatory from members of the interested public.

It looks to me like the intellectual equivalent of “Outsider Art.” Folk art like Grandma Prisbie’s Bottle Village, or the Hubcap Ranch, or those cobbled-together inspirational signs and wonders you see in isolated places (many of them in the Southeast) with somebody’s manic visions of the Second Coming or the Old Testament done up in massed oyster shells or ten thousand pounds of soap.

Of course it’s hard to keep one’s humor when people who actually swallow nonsense like this get political influence, or even come close to dictating what must be taught in public schools. And you really want to slap them when they take themselves seriously, or get all god-bothery on you. But the artifact, the mental constructions themselves, can be elegantly hilarious, and vice-versa.

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