tbentley.com

I’m making black-bean soup with rice.  Taught to me by a Mexican-American friend in Denver, Colorado. Like his mother used to make.

I started at 11:00 in the morning; we usually eat around 2:00 in the afternoon. It’ll be very ready by then.I chopped up into small pieces:

1 medium sweet onion
2-inch piece of sweet potato.  Should really be a piece of pumpkin, but any kind of squash will do.
1/4 of a green pepper
3 cloves of garlic
In a deep-sided skillet, I made a sofrito (sautee) of the garlic and onions, then added the pepper and squash.  To this I stirred in a good portion of dried oregano (mine is Mexican from Penzy’s), a large pinch of red chili flakes, a pinch of salt and of pepper. Get these things working all together, so the onions are soft, and then dump in two cans of black beans.  You could cook your own black beans from dried, but that would take another day.

Add some water–about 1/2 cup or so.  Then add about the same amount of red wine.  Don’t worry about the alcohol, it will all be cooked away.  But worry if you must…just use a good red wine, not one of those horrid “non-alcoholic” types.)

Let it all come to a boil, then turn the heat down to real low, so that the stuff is just barely bubbling. Don’t let it boil over the sides.

Stir it often. When it sits their simmering for a while, you’ll get a skin on top; just stir it back into the mix.

Taste: if too mild, add some (1/4 tsp) of Sriracha.  Stir it in.  Add some sugar to bring out the vegetables’ flavors (1/2 tsp).

When the beans are done, the squash or sweet potato will have bocome really soft or even unidetifiable, same with the green pepper, or at least able to be severed with the edge of a wooden spoon. The soup will be thick and dark with the black beans, not watery.

I just checked mine–it’s 12:30, and doing great.  When we eat, in an hour and a half, we’ll each get some  in a bowl, and sprinkle a generous portion of rice on top, and also a lot of raw, finely-chopped sweet onion.

[When I was a senior in high school (1959), as a good little politico (I was raised  a Republican) I wanted to know more about the political action of the day.  So I subscribed, through free offers found in the back of The Saturday Review of Literature ( the New York Review of Books of its day), to four publications, two ultra-liberal, and two ultra-conservative.

The two conservative were the newsletter of the John Birch Society, American Opinion, and the National Review, just started up by William F. Buckley.

The two liberal were I.F. Stone’s Weekly, and The Weekly People, an organ of the Socialist Workers Party.

After my sophomore year in college, I applied for the U.S. Navy’s “NavCad” program–I wanted to be a fly-boy (years before Top Gun–no, I didn’t just want to get into a cockpit with Tom Cruise). Despite a morbid fear of heights, I wanted to serve my country.

I went through all the aptitude tests, and intelligence tests, and was waiting for the results of the physical, when I had a visit at my home from two FBI agents.

The blue-suited, white-shirted agents came into my parents’ living room, and started questioning me.  Why was I getting all this commie socialist literature?

They were very insistent.  I explained about how I was curious about the political extremes. I pointed out that I had subscribed to right-wing, as well as liberal, publications; but that fazed them not at all.  They hadn’t even known about the John Birch Society connection, or Buckley’s rag–they were just out to get us commies!

I’d re-enrolled in college before the Navy accepted me, so in the end I declined to sign up. But I’ll not forget my FBI caper.

As a side note, this was not the first run-in with the FBI for my family.  Back in 1947, after my father left the Navy (he was a navigator in the Pacific), he applied for a job working in Human Resources at the Army Supply Depot in Chicago. Before he got the job, the FBI came by to check out my mother, Phyllis O. Bentley.

Phyllis E. Bentley was a British novelist, accused, during those anti-commie years, of being left-wing.  My mother, who was twenty years younger than that author, was a Bentley only by marriage.  Yet intrepid FBI had to check her out, just in case.

Boggin had a cleaning woman, who came in twice a week.  The cleaning woman, let’s call her Kathrin (since that was her name), was of German origin; she spoke with a thick German accent.  Not unusual in upstate Illinois, an area that had been settled, despite the French name of Des Plaines, by German farmers, toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.

Boggin was relatively liberal, for her age and time.  Both politically and religiously.  An Eisenhower Republican, I guess she’d have been. She didn’t let her prejudices show, though I’m sure she had some.  But as a Congregationalist who had married a Jew (Oppenheimer changed to Opper some time around the First World War), she really couldn’t afford prejudices.

She loved to talk politics with Kathrin, who was almost a Nazi throwback; Kathrin could rant, and Boggin would goad.  One day, they got into religion; the subject of Jews came up.  You can imagine Kathrin’s stand.  Finally, Boggin said, “Well you know, Jesus was a Jew.”

“Ach ja,” replied Kathrin triumphantly, “until he turned Cat’lic!”

Sour Cereal Recipe

1/2 cup millet
8-9 cups water

Wash the millet, add to a 4-qt pot with the water.  Turn on the heat.

Ginger == about 1-inch piece, chopped finely (cuisinart works).
½ medium-sized onion — chopped fine (cuisineart)

Add ginger and onion to the pot.

3 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp salt
1 pinch ground fenugreek

Add cumin, salt and fenugreek to the pot.  Stir the pot to prevent its foaming over the side.

2 ½ tsp chopped green chillis, canned

Add chillis and coconut to the pot.  Stir, scrape off the foam.

1 ancho chilli pepper
Break ends off the chilli, dump out the seeds, cut into small pieces with scissors.
6 pitted dates (will be too sweet if you use too many), chopped fine.
½ tsp Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce
2 Tbsp medium-heat bottled Salsa
1 Tbsp Butter

Add chilli, dates, sauce,  and salsa to the pot.

1/3 cup unsweetened coconut  — add

The Sour Cereal is cooked when the millet seeds are split open.

1 bunch chopped Cilantro

Turn off the heat, add chopped cilantro.

Serve when hungry.

This may be a long and difficult post, at least for the poster.

Here’s the entry for OK from etymonline:

1839, only survivor of a slang fad in Boston and New York c.1838-9 for abbreviations of common phrases with deliberate, jocular misspellings (cf. K.G. for “no go,” as if spelled “know go”); in this case, “oll korrect.” Further popularized by use as an election slogan by the O.K. Club, New York boosters of Democratic president Martin Van Buren’s 1840 re-election bid, in allusion to his nickname Old Kinderhook, from his birth in the N.Y. village of Kinderhook. Van Buren lost, the word stuck, in part because it filled a need for a quick way to write an approval on a document, bill, etc. The noun is first attested 1841; the verb 1888. Spelled out as okeh, 1919, by Woodrow Wilson, on assumption that it represented Choctaw okeh “it is so” (a theory which lacks historical documentation); this was ousted quickly by okay after the appearance of that form in 1929. Okey-doke is student slang first attested 1932. Greek immigrants to America who returned home early 20c. having picked up U.S. speech mannerisms were known in Greece as okay-boys, among other things.

From Wikipedia about Occitan languages:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occitan_language

The word òc came from Vulgar Latin hoc (“this”), while oïl originated from Latin hoc illud (“this [is] it”). Old Catalan and nowadays the Catalan of Northern Catalonia (France, Catalunya Nord) also have hoc (òc). Other Romance languages derive their word for yes from the Latin sic, “thus [it is], [it was done], etc.”, such as Spanish sí, Eastern Lombard sé, Italian sì, or Portuguese sim. In Modern Catalan, as in modern Spanish, sí is usually used as a response, although the language retains the word oi, akin to òc, which is sometimes used at the end of Yes-no questions and in higher register also as a positive response.^[15]

Coverture (sometimes spelled couverture) was a legal doctrine whereby, upon marriage, a woman’s legal rights and obligations were subsumed by those of her husband, in accordance with the wife’s legal status of feme covert. An unmarried woman, a feme sole, had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name. These terms are English spellings of medieval Anglo-Norman phrases (the modern standard French spellings would be femme seule “single woman” and femme couverte, literally “covered woman”).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture

“The first reaction to truth is always hatred”

==Tertullian

“It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”

–Victorian philosopher and mathematician W. K. Clifford

Getting a constant “site not available” response to  page requests, time and again,  is a great pain in the ass.  It’s caused by a full or corrupt dns cache in your computer.  The way to solve it is to flush your dns cache; to do this:  (1 reboot your computer, or (2 detatch, then re-attatch to your network, or (3 use ipconfig:

The command to flush the dns cache is ipconfig /flushdns

You can type  this in a command window, or in the command line at the bottom of the start menu; but it’s easier to create a batch file to issue the command.  Then you can just click on the batch file to execute it.

Batch (command) file method

Create a new text file on your desktop, rename it “flushme.cmd” (or what you wish, so long as it nds with “.cmd” ), and save it.  Now edit that file, and enter these two line:

ipconfig /flushdns
pause

Save this file.  You should now be able to make it run with a double-click.   Hit return to make the command window go away.

Pin it to your task bar:  Create a shortcut to the batch file (the thing you just created), then make the target read

exe /C “path-to-your-file-flushme.cmd”

You can now pin this shortcut to your taskbar, so it will run with a single click.  The original batch file can go into a subdirectory on your desktop, if you wish to keep things tidier; just make sure the shortcut’s target is changed (unlock from taskbar to edit) to reflect its new location.  The “pause” command in the batch file can be removed, once you know it’s working.

To imagine what it is to shift your perspective from the “I”-centered consciousness to ego-less, think of driving on the opposite side of the road.

When I went to Proviciales, an island in the Turks and Caicos,  I rented a car.  It was a fairly standard Ford automobile, with left-hand drive.  But in this formerly British colony, driving is on the left side.  So, I was driving on the left side, but with the steering wheel on the left side–the wrong side for this situation.

It was the wrong meme.  Driving on the left requires a right-hand-drive car, and vice versa.  The meme was, “driver on the left”.  But the driver did not work out too well on the left.  “Driver on the right” was the right meme for this situation.

There was a lot more to it than that, of course,  It just didn’t “feel right” driving on the left with a left-hand-drive auto, because it wasn’t right (no pun intended).  The whole thing felt out of joint, and really was.

This is the problem in trying to shift from the “I” conscousness, to ego-less.  At first, it just doesn’t “feel right”.