Usually, I try to write something comprehensive (and ideally, comprehensible) to post the next morning. I have maybe a half dozen things in draft form, not quite ready to go. So as a one-off experience, I have gotten up at 5:03 a.m., slightly foggy, and will write for 20 minutes, and post whatever at 5:30.
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Doing the March Madness thing. For those not familiar, it’s college basketball. I think the idea that, theoretically, ANY ONE of the 65 teams (well, 64 now), can win lends a sense of democracy to the proceedings. I have our local team, Siena, winning their first game, over Purdue, just as they won their first first game the last two years as an underdog. Still haven’t finished my picks, though, tentatively, I have Kansas over Syracuse, west Virginia over Baylor, and because I believe WV got jobbed out of being a #12 seed, WV over Kansas. Anyone who actually FOLLOWS basketball with insights, please comment. SOON.
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Gave blood on Tuesday, BP was uncharacteristically high for me. It’s usually 100 to 120; that day, it was 138. What changed has been a habituation to caffeinated cola; I mean one a day, not multiples, but I’ve just stopped. Yesterday about 4:30 pm, I went to the bathroom and threw cold water on my face.
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Anyone out there use that free wifi searcher from Makayama? I downloaded it, put it on my thumb drive, but couldn’t get it to work on my laptop at home.
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I was checking Dead or Alive this morning.
Knew Peter Graves died. He started on the second season of the show Mission: Impossible, and those two or three seasons with him, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, were among the best in television. He was also in my top three favorite comedy, Airplane!
Merlin Olson died. I never saw a single fill episode of Little House on the Prairie. I knew him as a football player for the LA Rams, back in the days that Los Angeles actually had a pro football team. I mean besides UCLA and USC.
Caroline McWilliams died last month, which I never noted here. I used to love her in Soap and Benson.
Corey Haim died, and I don’t know that I ever saw him in anything.
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Ah, nuts. Time’s up
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EDIT:
Roger Ebert on Glenn Beck and Beck’s “I beg you, look for the words social justice or economic justice on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can.”
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Bummer: Alex Chilton died at the age of 59.
ROG
No Salt
New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has recently introduced a bill that would ban the use of salt in the preparation of restaurant food. I appreciate the import of a low-sodium diet, I must agree with virtually all of the comments that this is one of the dumbest, most overreaching pieces of legislation to come down the pike. Unenforceable, too. Chef secretly throws some substance in the pot – what was THAT?
Besides, it says here: Larousse Gastronomique insists that “seasoning includes a large or small amount of salt being added to a preparation. Salt may be used to draw out water, or to magnify a natural flavor of a food making it richer or more delicate, depending on the dish. This type of procedure is akin to curing.” I can imagine that some foods would end up so unsatisfying that the customer might well use too much NaCl from the shaker.
What I DO favor, whenever possible, is for restaurants to indicate the nutritional breakdown. We have gone to both Friendly’s, the Massachusetts restaurant chain, and McDonald’s this month, and it was startling. The menu at Friendly’s now indicates the calorie count on all its foods, much to the dismay of our waitress, who has noticed people deciding that the 1400-calorie banana split may just not be worth it. On the McDonald’s food wrapper, not only are calories listed, but like any food you’d find on the grocery shelf or in a vending machine, it ALSO has information on protein, fat and sodium. And there seems to be a LOT of sodium.
Cutting back on salt wouldn’t be such a bad thing. One can, for some items, season without salt. There are only two items that I actually add salt to: popcorn and chicken giblets. I should make sure I don’t consume them at the same meal.
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The Meatrix.
ROG
I is for Irish Migration
One of the cliches one hears in the United States this week is that “Everyone’s Irish!” People who couldn’t find Ireland on a map of the British Isles will be doing the Wearing of the Green, to the delight or irritation of many.
So how many Americans ARE Irish? According to the 2000 Census, of the 281.4 million people in the country, 30.5 million, or 10.8% self-identify as Irish. In a more recent calculation, 36.3 million U.S. residents claimed “Irish ancestry in 2008. This number was more than eight times the population of Ireland itself (4.4 million). Irish was the nation’s second most frequently reported ancestry, trailing only German.”
Most people are familiar with the potato famine of the 1840s which generated much of the emigration from Ireland to the US. But in fact, the trend started earlier than that.
“Between 1820 and 1860, the Irish constituted over one third of all immigrants to the United States. In the 1840s, they comprised nearly half of all immigrants to this nation. Interestingly, pre-famine immigrants from Ireland were predominately male, while in the famine years and their aftermath, entire families left the country. In later years, the majority of Irish immigrants were women.”
The Irish-Americans suffered some definite hostility. For instance: “In the Questions for Admittance to the American Party (1854), inductees committed to ‘…elect to all offices of Honor, Profit, or Trust, no one but native born citizens of America, of this Country to the exclusion of all Foreigners, and to all Roman Catholics, whether they be of native or Foreign Birth, regardless of all party predilections whatever’.” There were also racial pressures: “…the Irish and Blacks had reason to feel they were treated unfairly in the workforce, and often at one another’s expense.”
Eventually, though the “Irish influence resulted in increased power for the Democratic Party as well as the Catholic Church. William R. Grace became New York City’s first Irish-Catholic mayor in 1880. Four years later, Hugh O’Brien won the same position in Boston.
“Irish-American political clout led to increased opportunities for the Irish-American. Looking out for their own, the political machines made it possible for the Irish to get jobs, to deal with naturalization issues, even to get food or heating fuel in emergencies. The political machines also rewarded their own through political appointments.”
I happen to think that there are actually more Irish in America than have been reported. The mixing of the races has probably made tracking lineage difficult in some cases. A prime example is delineated in the book The Sweeter The Juice about an Irish woman and a mulatto man marrying after the Civil War. Many of the descendants, especially those living as black, have holes in their family trees.
Where are the Irish-American enclaves in the US? According to the ePodunk site, the concentration is in the Northeast, plus in and around the state of Illinois. Interestingly, Albany, NY is NOT on the list; given the partying that goes on after every St. Patrick’s Day parade, such as the one from Saturday past, maybe it’s the faux green wearers who are the most vigorous celebrants.
(A not so subtle reminder for Americans to fill out the Census forms they received this week.)
ABC Wednesday
ROG
I AM Happy, Damn It!
Since I still feel like I just went through the spin cycle in my clothes washer, and since Jaquandor wouldn’t mind seeing this meme spread out through Blogistan, I thought I would list ten things that make me happy (minus the obvious mentions of The Wife, The Daughter, and music). Even stole his title; shameful.
1. Being touched – I don’t mean that in any sordid way. I mean hugs, hand holding, massage. (There was some recent studies that showed that when people are touched, they have a better perception of the event.)
2. White noise to go to sleep by – fan, my daughter’s air filter, even a vacuum cleaner if it’s far enough away. (There was at least one night in the Daughter’s first two months that the vacuum got HER to go to sleep.)
3. The fact that when I write, it takes me to often unexpected places.
4. Learning new things almost daily.
5. Being able to pull out some obscure piece of information, whether it be at work or helping someone on the bus figure out the best route or watching JEOPARDY!
6. Racquetball – nothing like beating up a helpless piece of rubber.
7. The English language – its amalgamation of such diverse sources, from Latin and Greek to Tagalog and Arabic.
8. Black and white photographs; they seem to have such character.
9. Baseball. It’s not just watching it. It’s the history, the obsessive use of statistics (batting average against left-handers in night games, e.g.)
10. Card games – hearts, pinochle, bid whist, spades. It’s the social aspect of games I like the most; playing on the computer is just not the same.
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Time to drink some English tea.
ROG
The 50th Anniversary Celebration
I can only blame it on the fact that I was feeling lousy – still feeling lousy, actually – that I forgot until Friday night that Friday was ten years since my parents’ 50th anniversary. It would be their last one.
My sisters and I decided to surprise them for the event. We called their church, trying to arrange for a room. There was only one problem; someone else wanted the room for the same day. This was months before the date; couldn’t the other party change the date? This is our parents’ 50TH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY! Well, no, because the other party, it turned out, was our father, wanted to have a surprise gig for our mom himself. So we decided to join forces.
I came down with my wife and my parents-in-law, who had met my parents at Carol’s and my wedding only the May before, when my father did all the decorations and floral arranging. We all wanted to help, and did somewhat, but he had a vision, and it was difficult for us mortals to fulfill it in the way he had in mind. So he did most of the church hall decoration himself, with my sister Leslie’s help since she had worked with him on these types of things decades earlier. The rest of us did some of the heavy lifting. The difference between this event and the wedding ten months earlier was that my father had to rest occasionally, maybe more than occasionally.
Sunday, March 12, 2000, we all went to church, diverting our mother from the building’s assembly hall. We attended the church service, during which a peculiar thing happened: my parents were invited to renew their vows. I don’t know if my father knew about this, but my mother, my sisters and I certainly did not. I think my sisters and I gulped a bit. Would she actually say yes? My father could be…well, let’s say, five decades of marriage always has its complications. There was what seemed to be an interminable pause before she replied in the affirmative.
Afterward, we had the party. There was singing and tributes from various folks. My sisters and I had put together one of those video montages of photos that ran throughout the event.
The next day, the wife, the in-laws and I went home. Well not quite home. We left Charlotte at 6 a.m.. got to the in-laws’ house in Oneonta, NY, 715 miles away, at 9 p.m. and just crashed.
What had been a family tradition was to get a family photo every time the Greens got together if it had been a while. The last one we sat for was on their anniversary in 1995, but for some obscure reason – probably the contentiousness of that day (but that’s another story) – we didn’t in 2000. Since my father died that August 10 from prostate cancer, the lack of the family photo became one of those “coulda, shoulda” things in the family lore.
ROG