A Taste of Forty

In forty days, I'll be forty years old. In anticipation of said event, I will be releasing a number of commemorative Top 40 lists. Over the next several weeks, look for 40 Books, 40 Movies and 40 Songs in this space.

Today's List: 40 Foods.
1. Big Red. Invented in Waco in 1937, Big Red was 30 years in the world when I first came along. I first drank Big Red from tall glass bottles on East Park Drive in Hillsboro, activated the contents while bouncing on Paw Paw's leg, and often exported the results onto the green shag carpet. I'm a Diet Big Redder now and have lost my desire to indulge in a Big Red float, but the Big Red smell still takes me back to Grandmother's fridge. She called them "sody waters."

2. Watermelon.
3. Fried chicken, "Original Recipe," legs and thighs. Watermelon and Original Recipe were standards on summer days at Eagle Mountain lake. Oddly enough, though the fast food recipe remains unchanged the watermelon has evolved. I buy the seedless kind today and eat it with a spoon so that I won't end up with sticky hands or cheeks. Part of the joy of the watermelon lies in its sculptability. Buy a round one, cut it in quarters and you can create watermelon towers and watermelon pools as you go.

4. Fried pork chops.
5. French fries. Fries and pork chops: the traditional birthday meal, prepared by Mom at my request. I don't believe we ever determined how many it would take for me to have my fill.
6. Corn dog. There are some who claim the corn dog was born in Minnesota, and some who claim it was Illinois, but I prefer the accounts of those who trace the corny dog to Neil Fletcher and the Texas State Fair of 1942 (see photo at left). Grandmother and I ordered them with cherry Dr. Peppers at the Hillsboro Dairy Queen. Today when I walk into Huey's, the local hot dog place, they know what I want. I like mine with a side of mustard now.

7. Nachos. January 15th, 1978. Cowboys 27, Broncos 10. My first Super Bowl victory. We watched The Sound of Music after the game. And ate nachos--Yellow corn Doritos, Frito-Lay bean dip and topped by melted slices of cheddar cheese. It doesn't get any better than that.
8. Chex Mix. Warm, with no pretzels. Watching Southwest Conference football game on cold, fall Saturdays.
9. Ground beef with help from a box (and/or a can). A bit of a cheat I needed to get under the 40-bar or a four-for-one bargain: Hamburger Helper Beef Stroganoff, Rice Oriental (with water chestnuts), Kraft Tangy Italian Spaghetti, and hamburger steaks with cream of mushroom soup.
10. Triscuits and Cheddar Cheese. I made platters of this after school snack when I got home from school in the sixth grade (and later) and ate them while watching reruns of Gilligan's Island.

11. Chips & hot sauce.
12. Tamale.
13. Sour cream chicken enchilada. A Mi Charrito Ray specialty.
14. Cheese enchilada. I've become something of a Tex-Mex snob, and by that I mean I like mine old-style, the way it was introduced to me at Tex-Mex chains liks El Chico, in the days before "salsa" went national. No black beans, burritos, or fajitas for me. Dos Gringos used to have the best chips and hot sauce (which they served warm). Now I get my fix at Mi Charrito Ray, Los Vaqueros and El Original, all in Fort Worth.

15. Thin 'n' crispy ground beef pizza. Even a post-graduation summer spent climbing the management ladder at soon-to-be-closed Pizza Inn on Berry Street did not wear me out on this classic.
16. Little smokies in biscuit blankets.
17. German pancakes at the Ol' South Pancake House. Like the little smokies, the German pancakes are a 24-hour breakfast food.
18. Guacamole, Jennifer Files-style. I had to go to Spain to learn to love Guacamole. Amy Stewart's roommate, Jennifer Files, a native of Tyler and an undergrad at Austin College taught me the recipe she used to make guacamole at the mexican restaurant where she used to work. My first Thanksgiving away from home.
19. KaseKrainer mit sharf senf. A staple of my Vienna diet. A got them at a KaseKrainer stand around the corner from my rented room in the city center. I liked the "sharp" mustard better than the sweet kind.

20. Popcorn. If I had to eat my way out of a room filled with a particular kind of food. . .
21. Gazpacho con tropezones. The best came from the take-home shop near the apartment I rented on Narvaez.

Four Seasons of Argentine Cuisine
I learned to love the seasons of Argentinean cuisine in La Cocina de Mi Suegra, on Doce de Octubre in Madrid. Late-night suppers on Tuesdays and Thursdays nights after class and mid-day dinners on Sundays. I also took some great classes in "sobremesa" and "ropa vieja."
22. Niños envueltos. Winter. Stuffed cabbages, wrapped with a bacon slice (stuffed with ground beef).
23. Milanesas. Summer. Breaded beef filet.
24. Shepherd's Pie. Fall. Ground beef with a mashed potato roof.
25. Tarta de carne. Spring. Ground beef in a flaky crust (anybody see a pattern here?).

26. Una zapatilla (ham steak sandwich).
27. Pimientos de padrón. The menu at Madrid's Bar Melos introduced me to two listings. We can now get pimientos de padrón at Café Ba-Ba-Reeba, the best Spanish restaurant in Chicago, but zapatilla sandwiches at Melos are one-of-a-kind.

28. Cornbread. It used to be the mash under my red beans. Now it's the supporting actor who steals the scene

29. Cornbread dressing with gravy. The highlight of the high holidays (although deviled eggs have lately become an insurgent threat).

30. Route 44 Diet Limeade from Sonic.
31. Sonic chili burger--mustard, pickle, chili and naught else. Chile's does a nice job when given the ingredients.
32. Soft-serve dipped cone.
33. Dr. Pepper. Another Waco original--born in 1885, a year before Coca-Cola came out of Covington, Georgia. It was Cherry Dr. Pepper for me in the early days. The summer of my sixth grade year my first ever surprise birthday party began with the sound of a throng of friends marching through our Wichita Falls living room singing "I drink Dr. Pepper, don't you know . .. " I suffered from Dr. Pepper withdrawal-symptoms on my first trip to Europe in 1982. These days my body runs on Caffeine-Free Diets. Best served over Dairy Queen ice.

34. Argentine-style empanadas.

35. Bife de chorizo. En su punto. I had bife de chorizo in Buenos Aires in December, 1999. Almost 2000 years earlier, St. Paul was hit by a bolt of lightning on the road to Damascus. I suspect the sensation was similar. (See the 1600 painting by Caravaggio at left.)

36. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop in Hyde Park and Evanston.
37. Sweet Tea. Tea-colored sugar water. First served to me at the children's table in Grandmother and Paw-paws bedroom in Hillsboro.
38. Heaven on Seven gumbo. Everyone who goes to Heaven comes back saying the same thing: "You've got to try the Gumbo."
39. Corner Grille chili. No beans. With cheese on top.
40. Chocolate molten cake. The love-child of a dipped cone and a warm piece of chocolate cake.

We're Moving!

Half a mile southwest of the third story apartment on Foster, where we've lived for the past 8 (!) years, to the two-story (plus attic and full basement) house on Carmen Avenue. (The photo at right looks west down our block-to-be from Ashland toward the T-intersection where Carmen runs into Ravenswood and the commuter rail line which goes to Ravinia among other places; our new residence is on the south side of this street).

About a week ago, we started looking for new digs and saw half a dozen places in the neighborhood over the course of the week. Then Julie Lewis (of Jack, Julie and Nathaniel fame) forwarded me the following listing on Monday (it had been posted to Craig's list the night before):

"Vintage Andersonville home: 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 baths, finished basement, free laundry, large yard, vintage woodwork, hardwood floors, stained glass windows. Available 6/1."

That's it in the photo at left. It was built in 1909. Below on the right is the view of the backyard as seen from the alley.

I called the landlord that afternoon and that evening Mari and I and Emilio met him there to check the place out. We knew right away that we wanted it and asked for an application. A short time later, the landlord called me on the cell to see if I could bring back the application that same night. He said he would be up until 11 and I showed up on his doorstep at 1o:45 (he lives next door to the house he's renting). The next morning (Tuesday) at 11, he called to ask if we could come back that afternoon to meet with him again and told us to bring our check book. We did. And we will take possesion of the place in two weeks.

The rent is 127 percent of what we're paying now and that doesn't include monthly heating bills in winter that can get up to almost $300 (heat in included in the rent at our current apartment), and a central air-conditioning system that may produce big bills in the summer. That's a steep upgrade for us, but we had to move and we are thrilled to have found this place (or, to be more precise, that Julie found it for us). We also look forward to handing over our rent money to what appears to be a decent guy and not the sanctimonious [insert your favorite naughty insult here] who has lorded his land over us these past eight years.

In addition to having a lot more space, we will be moving from a noisy city artery with lots of bus traffic to a much, quieter one-way residential. Now that I think of it, Emilio may miss the buses. I won't, though.

We're holding on to our current apartment through June, so we'll have a full month to transition to the new place.

And I won't have to install a window unit air-conditioner in a third-story window! Good news for pedestrians on Foster.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Last: The Cemetery

Molly Ivins and Kurt Vonnegut died. I have written about Vonnegut elsewhere. Here's a little bit on Molly as I knew her:

Ivins, who grew up in Houston, worked for the Star-Telegram between 1992 and 2001. I met her on the editorial pages of The Nation. It was there, in a review of The Liar's Club, written by fellow Texan Mary Karr, that Ivins introduced me to this memorable description of "southern gothic" literature, which always tells the same story about "why Bubba raped Sissy after Daddy blew his brains out on the night the hogs ate Grandma." Glen Brookshire and I shook her hand when she spoke at the Women and Children's bookstore near our house(she signed a book for Glen's wife, Renee, a big fan). She made a career out of mocking Republicans.

In April, the Apiary Inspectors of America, a national group that tracks beekeeping estimated that more than a quarter of the country's 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost. A third of the food supply in the United States - and actually the world - is directly related to the honey bee (fruits, vegetables, nuts) and another third is indirectly related to the honey bee (cows need hay, clover and alfalfa to produce milk). Apparently, part of the mystery is that beekeepers aren't finding millions of dead bees in the hives and on the ground; they are flying away from the hive and not returning. The image at left is taken from the Book of Hours. It was published in the 14th century, so the fellow with bee-catching bag should not be on the list of suspects.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Six: The Middle East

In January, the Bush Administration announced plans to send another 20,000 U.S. troops to Iraq and named Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, an expert on counterinsurgency, as U.S. commander of troops in Iraq. Petraeus (on the right in the photo at right) replaces Army General George Casey. Throughout the spring, Bush urges the country to get behind the Petraeus plan.

In February, British Prime Minister Tony Blair announced that he would bring home more than 1,600 of the 7,100 British troops in Iraq. In March, British troops pulled out of Basra; two days later, rival Shiite factions began battling over a government building that had been evacuated by the military. In April, the British government announced that it would no longer use the term "The War on Terror" to describe its foreign policy aims.

On the 4th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, icasualities.org estimated that 3,476 coalition troops and 62,474 Iraqis had died as a result of the war in Iraq. A year ago, the numbers were 2,536 coalition troops and 38,576 Iraqis. On average, then, according to this count 15,000 Iraqis have died each year since the start of the U.S. invasion in March of 2003, with almost 25,000 dying over the last year (an average of 68 per day). (Meanwhile, between 50,000 and 100,000 are dying each year in Darfur).

But the casualty count in Iraq may, in fact, be more than ten times as high as the estimates of icasualties.org. As was mentioned in this blog in December, according to an article published in the Lancet more than six months ago, "Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey", a study done by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health estimated that between March 2003 and July 2006, 655,000 Iraqis (2.5% of the population) or 540 per day died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation. On April 18th, The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq criticised Baghdad for concealing casualty figures.

The men in the AP photo at left, which was taken a week ago today, are mourning relatives who were victims of a car bomb that exploded the previous day in the Shiite holy city of Karbala when the streets were packed with people heading for evening prayers. The bomb killed 58 and wounded scores more near some of the country's most sacred shrines.

In March, the United Nations reported that 2 million Iraqis, including the judge who sentenced Saddam Hussein to death, have fled their country since the war began. Iraqi refugees were flooding Syria and Jordan, where they now account for 5 and 12 percent of those countries' total populations. According to the State Department, by late March, the United States had accepted 500 of those refugees. The Bush Administration agreed to reverse its policy of the last several years and discuss stabilizing Iraq with high-level diplomats from Syria and Iran.

In April, former CIA Director George Tenet published a book accusing the Bush Administration of taking his phrase “slam dunk”—referring to intelligence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—out of context in order to justify a war that the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense had resolved to wage before September 11, 2001.

On April 19th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declared that the United States has lost the war in Iraq.

The day before Reid's announcement, a senior U.N. inspector revealed that in the past two months Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Five: The Americas, Beyond the Beltway

On January 15, 2007, Rafael Correa (who got a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) was sworn in as the 56th president of Ecuador, and the seventh since the legislature removed President Abdalá Bucaram ten years ago in February 1997 in the midst of a debt crisis that devastated the country. That's Correa on the right with Venezuelan President and fellow leftist Hugo Chavez in the photo at left. See the map on the right, put out by the BBC, to get a picture of the leftward swing that has engulfed Latin America.

In his inaugural address, Correa stated his belief that much of Ecuador's $11 billion external debt is illegitimate, because it was contracted by military regimes.[21] Correa's administration has suggested that the new government will not sign an agreement allowing the International Monetary Fund to monitor its economic plan.

On April 15th, Ecuadoreans voted overwhelmingly (78 % in favor) to support the election of a constitutional assembly that will bolster the President's powers and curb the influence of traditional political parties. Congressional representatives of the traditional parties are resisting this effort.

In February, Harvard University named historian Drew Gilpin Faust as its first female president.

A Stanford study concluded that pollution from ethanol could be a worse health hazard than that from gasoline.

On April 16th, at Virginia Tech University, 23-year old senior English major Cho Seung-Hui opened fire in a dormitory and in classrooms, killing 32 people and then himself.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Four: The Americas, D.C. Division

Under the leadership of Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, America's first female speaker of the House, the new Democratic majority in the House passed legislation to raise the minimum wage, allow the federal government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare recipients, expand federal funding for stem cell research, lower interest rates on federal student loans, and remove tax breaks for oil and gas companies. The Senate, where the Democratic caucus holds a slim 51-49 majority, has failed to match the House's efficiency and, as a result, none of these legislative efforts have become law. The House and the Senate did reach an agreement on a spending bill that sets goals for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. On May 1st, Bush used just the second veto of his presidency to kill it (the first killed a stem-cell research bill).

The House Energy and Commerce Committee, now chaired by Democrats, invited Al Gore to return to Capitol Hill to testify that global warming is a planetary emergency. The leading Republican on the committee, Joe Barton of Ennis, Texas (who represents Mansfield in the U.S. Congress), denied that carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming, telling Gore "You're not just off a little, you're totally wrong." According to greenwire.com, Barton has declared on another occasion: "I cannot imagine any objective finding that CO2 is a pollutant. If that's true, God is a polluter." According to the National Journal, just 13 percent of Republican congressmen believed humans caused global warming (see photo at right).

It became clearer from congressional testimony that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales fired eight federal prosecutors because they had resisted pressure from Karl Rove's White House to subordinate law enforcement priorities to partisan politics.

An appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the writ of habeas corpus does not apply to prisoners in the American concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In March, a U.S. district court in Washington, D.C. found Vice-President Cheney's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, guilty of obstruction of justice and perjury in the Valerie Plame investigation.

The Supreme Court told the Environmental Protection Agency to stop shirking its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gases. And later ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that the 2003 Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act is legal. Pro-choice advocates fear that the ruling signals a turn in the judicial tide against a woman's right to choose, a consequence of Bush's selection of Samuel Alito as a replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor, who retired last fall.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Three: Europe

On January 19th, Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink (that's him in the photo at right), who wrote extensively about the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, was shot dead outside his office in Istanbul, allegedly by Ogün Samast, an ultra-nationalist Turk. Pictures of Samast holding up a Turkish flag, flanked by smiling Turkish police and gendarmerie officers, have triggered a wave of investigations and the removal from office of those involved. Samast is now in custody.

Jurists in The Hague ruled that a genocide occurred when Bosnian Serbs massacred Bosnian Muslims at Srebrinca in 1995. Serbia, said the court, was responsible for not preventing the genocide--but not directly responsible for the genocide itself--and is thus absolved of any obligation to pay reparations. According to the BBC , at least 100,000 people died in the 1992-1995 war, triggered by an effort by Bosnia's Muslims and Croats to cut ties with Belgrade, a move opposed by Bosnian Serbs.

In March, a new French law made it a crime--punishable by up to five years in prison--for anyone who is not a professional journalist to film real-world violence and put the images on the Internet.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene Two: Asia

In early March, Vladimir Putin installed Ramzan Kadyrov, a 30-year-old reputed warlord and torturer, as the acting president of Chechnya. He was sworn in on April 5th.

A little background: On September 13, 2004, following the Beslan school hostage crisis, Putin launched an initiative to replace the direct election of the governors of Russia with a system whereby they would be proposed by the President that is, Putin) and approved or disapproved by regional legislatures.

Born in 1976, Kadyrov is the son of former Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov, a muslim imam, who was assassinated on May 9, 2004. In the early 1990s, the Kadyrovs--father and son--fought against the federal forces in the First Chechen War and then defected to the Moscow side in the beginning of the Second Chechen War in 1999.

In August 2005, Ramzan declared that Europe's largest mosque would be built in place of the demolished ruins of Grozny's shattered downtown (the photo at left shows the work in progress). When he became the acting prime minister in December 2005, he banned the use and production of alcohol and spoke in favor of polygamy. In March 2006, he decreed that women would be forced to wear headscarves.

The German human rights group the Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) has alleged that up to 70% of recent murder, torture, rape and kidnapping incidents in Chechnya have been committed by Kadyrov's thousands-strong paramilitary forces. On November 13, 2006 Human Rights Watch published a briefing paper on torture in Chechnya that claimed that torture "in both official and secret detention facilities is widespread and systematic in Chechnya." In many cases the perpetrators were so confident that there would be no consequences for their abuses that they did not attempt to conceal their identity.

Aught Seven, Act One, Scene One: Africa

This year, like last year, I hope to put out a trimester blog report on the affairs of the world (for my own benefit as much as for anyone else's). Last year I posted these reports as single blog entries, released in May, September and December. This year, in the interest of making the reports shorter (though I doubt they'll be sweeter), I'll roll them out in a series of seven posts released over the course of a week (again in May, September and December).

I'll start with three stories worth following in Africa (as I've said before, a lot of stuff is cut and pasted here directly from wikipedia, TIME, and Harper's Weekly Review):

1) After the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina) filed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sudanese officials for the massacres in Darfur, Sudan's Minister of the Interior said that any party who tried to enforce the charges would be beheaded.
According to an April 15th article in the New York Times, the four-year-old crisis in Darfur (which began, roughly, at the same time as the U.S. invasion of Iraq) has sent 2.3 million people fleeing their homes (many are going to Chad), killed at least 200,000 — some say as many as 400,000 — and set off a broad conflict in one of the most unstable parts of the world. These are the same casualty numbers that were reported by the official UN News Service seven months ago in September 2006.

A little background on the Sudan: It is the largest country in Africa and has a population of 32 million (approximately that of Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas together). Wikipedia says two million were killed in the twenty-year civil war that lasted from 1983 to 2003, which initially pitted black Marxist rebels in the South against the Arab-Islamic political leadership in Khartoum in the North. The militias doing the government's dirty work in Darfur (western Sudan) are Arab nomads.; they have been killing black farmers.

Click here to donate to Oxfam's Sudan Crisis Relief and Rehabilitation Fund.

2) On March 11th, Zimbabwe police arrested and beat opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Reports from the BBC News indicate that Tsvangirai suffered from a fractured skull and received blood transfusions for internal bleeding. After Tsvangirai's release on March 28th, President Robert Mugabe claimed responsibility for Tsvangirai's treatment, adding that Tsvangirai, "asked for it."

A little background on the Zimbabwe: according to TIME, in the 1980s, Zimbabwe was the second largest economy in southern Africa. Millions of tourists visited each year to see hippos, lions and Victoria Falls and the nation gave black Africans the best education and health care on the continent. But over the past two decades, Mugabe has devastated the economy and turned the country into a police state. Unemployment is at 80%, living standards are back to their 1953 levels, and the World Health Organization says life expectancy is the lowest in the world: 34 for women and 37 for men.

In 1999, Tsvangirai founded and organized the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), an opposition party opposed to Mugabe's rule . On September 30, 2000, he vowed to use any means necessary, including violence, to topple Mugabe. He lost a presidential election to Robert Mugabe in March 2002.

TIME's Alex Perry (that's Alex in the photo at right) makes a persuasive case that both of these stories have their roots in the global warming crisis . And there's more where that came from.

3) Finally, a little over three months after Ethiopia's U.S.-backed invasion of Somalia, Mogadishu is engulfed in some of the most savage fighting it has ever seen, according to TIME (Alex Perry, again).

As Ethiopian guns pound insurgent positions in the capital city, more than 300,000 residents have fled "leaving dead bodies in the streets."

"In 16 years of civil war," Perry writes," Somalia had known only a few months of peace and order, which came during the brief rule by the Islamic Courts Union (I.C.U.)" that the Ethiopians overthrew.