Sorry, guys, been very, very busy. Somebody asked me why I only talk about the weather, but on the internet, when you put stuff out, its public and you are done for. I don't put anything out there that's worth pirating, but hey, who knows? Since last post I put in some time at the Regal money pit. Saw Last House on the Left and Watchmen. Last House was really good, even though it started slow. Now, I make a distinction between bloody and gory. It's a fine line, so here's the deal. Bloody means a lot of people die hard, but to me, gory means that people's innards are spilt all over the place and vital organs float around like Macy's Thanksgiving balloons. I put Last House in the bloody category. The last scene was borderline gory, but your mileage may vary. The rest of the shootings, stabbings, bludgeoning and hand stuck in the garbage disposal (you didn't see anything, just him screaming until his hand came out and it was only gashed). The hardest thing was rape. A young girl gets brutally raped then shot. If rape upsets you, don't go see this movie. While I felt bad for the girl, it was the key to the plot. My wife and I sat through the whole thing and we both enjoyed it as a good thriller with a good ending.
Watchmen was a different story. Ironically, there is a rape scene in it also, but its dealt with less explicitly and again, its central to a plot point. Having said that, the movie is too long and too complex. I read the original story in the 80's and had to really concentrate on all the stuff because the plot explodes in all directions from superhero psyches to alternate history (Nixon elected 5 times????). It does paint a more realistic picture of how the world may have been if there really were super-powered beings, but it is not a black and white story like Batman or Superman where the good guys are good and the bad guys bad. I think it should have been done in two parts, like Lord of the Rings, that's how much story is in it. Having said that, it is a fairly faithful adaptation of the comic series, the effects are cool and it makes you think not only about good and evil, but about the greater good.
On the home front, I am working on a sequel to Ghosts of the Eastern Shore and have been visiting a remote area where the owner is not only haunted, but hexed. That's right. More info coming out of this area as it seems to be a hotbed of activity (which may explain no cell phone service).
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
A beautiful day on Delmarva
This has been a week of roller coaster weather. First snow, now near summer-type temperatures. Not sure whether to believe in global warming or not. I am hot and cold about it (snicker). OK, its been a week since the last post and so let me see what's been happening.
I had a great time at the Outdoor Show. Everybody was very friendly and the food was delicious. Met some great folks, including past and present muskrat skinning champions. The show made the newspapers coast to coast and I barely had time to leave my table. It was great! It was drizzly all day, but not too bad. Sunday it turned nasty and I stayed home Monday (hey, I'm getting too old to play on ice).
Friday I taped another chapter of the Write Stuff for PAC-14. I interviewed the crew from PLB comics and Gianni interviewed Tom Taylor, the president of the Writer's Bloc. We need a webmaster bad. If anybody reads this, drop us a line.
It was a blah week in politics. The Stock Market continued to tank (I used to think 2000 was a high number, now I am scared we may end up back there.), no peace in the Middle East, and the Obama haters said he was too ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. So, are they all, all honorable men. I guess we'll just have to stay tuned. This week's message is short. I don't have much coming up, but keep an eye out for the PAC-14 shows and drop me some comments!
I had a great time at the Outdoor Show. Everybody was very friendly and the food was delicious. Met some great folks, including past and present muskrat skinning champions. The show made the newspapers coast to coast and I barely had time to leave my table. It was great! It was drizzly all day, but not too bad. Sunday it turned nasty and I stayed home Monday (hey, I'm getting too old to play on ice).
Friday I taped another chapter of the Write Stuff for PAC-14. I interviewed the crew from PLB comics and Gianni interviewed Tom Taylor, the president of the Writer's Bloc. We need a webmaster bad. If anybody reads this, drop us a line.
It was a blah week in politics. The Stock Market continued to tank (I used to think 2000 was a high number, now I am scared we may end up back there.), no peace in the Middle East, and the Obama haters said he was too ambitious, and Brutus is an honorable man. So, are they all, all honorable men. I guess we'll just have to stay tuned. This week's message is short. I don't have much coming up, but keep an eye out for the PAC-14 shows and drop me some comments!
Friday, February 27, 2009
Local eats (not for the faint hearted)
I work in an office with people from other states, or folks who were city bred. I was talking to them about the Outdoor show and that they were going to have muskrat on the menu and most of them were disgusted by the thought. Eat a rat? Yecchhh.... OK, so I don't care for them either, but I could tolerate them. Tonight, let me run down the wonderful foods that folks love or hate.
Muskrats. OK, my grandfather trapped them for years. I tried them didn't like them. Didn't get ill, but just didn't care for them. My mother and grandmother ate them til the days they died, but would only buy them with the heads still attached so that they knew they were getting the real thing. Seeing them on a platter stewed with those enormous teeth kind of put me off on them, but hey, they are edible, so why not?
Squirrels. Never saw them cooked, never ate them, have no clue.
Rabbits. Same deal, but think they are probably tastier than squirrels
Raccoons. Tried them once. Meat was tasty but boy were they greasy
Deer. Nothing wrong with their flavor once you get past the "Bambi" factor.
Wildfowl: Ducks and geese, have eaten both, they taste delicious. Pigeons, doves and other small birds, have not tried. I assume they are like chickens.
Fish: Have not eaten blue fish or Drum, but well prepared are supposed to be edible. Have eaten farm raised catfish. Love the creative labeling for shark (steakfish) and ocean perch (blow toads), both of which are delicious, though I found blow toads to be a bit chewy. When I told one city boy that ocean perch was blow toads, he actually turned green. Oh, well....
Shell fish: Love them all, including those little black mussels
Arthropods: Crabs and lobsters are wonderful, including soft crabs, but non-coastal raised folks seem aghast at eating softcrabs. Hey, they cut the eyes off!
Prepared meats.
Scrapple: I grew up eating scrapple and have even eaten raw (but not in 30 years). I still love scrapple and just had some a few days ago. Mid-westerners seem to be disgusted if they are told what its made of first. Oh, well....
Souse loaf and head cheese: Yeah, you know what part of the pig it comes from. Souse is less meat carried in a transparent gel of rendered fat that is delicious on crackers (so I am told). I am not adverse to eating either, just never have done so. Ate plenty of liver loaf and liverwurst, so figure its about the same
Pigs feet. My grandmother loved pig's feet, but seems like a lot of trouble for little meat.
Chitterlings: I can eat pork rinds all day long, but the insides? Man, it smells strong unless its properly rendered. Some ladies got some today and I was OK til I got about three feet from them and then that smell wafted up and my stomach flip flopped. Visually, they looked sort of like creamed chip beef, but the nose knows. I ate them many, many years ago and while it stayed down, it was not an experience I plan on repeating.
I am really looking forward to a big oyster fritter tomorrow at the Outdoor show. Has to be on Sunbeam sandwich loaf with lots of ketchup. Yep, now that's a treat. Well, if I survive the show tomorrow, I'll try to give you a report. I'll get to see who is champion muskrat skinner this year. So, visit Your Humble Scribe and I'll see if I can post something on Sunday.
Muskrats. OK, my grandfather trapped them for years. I tried them didn't like them. Didn't get ill, but just didn't care for them. My mother and grandmother ate them til the days they died, but would only buy them with the heads still attached so that they knew they were getting the real thing. Seeing them on a platter stewed with those enormous teeth kind of put me off on them, but hey, they are edible, so why not?
Squirrels. Never saw them cooked, never ate them, have no clue.
Rabbits. Same deal, but think they are probably tastier than squirrels
Raccoons. Tried them once. Meat was tasty but boy were they greasy
Deer. Nothing wrong with their flavor once you get past the "Bambi" factor.
Wildfowl: Ducks and geese, have eaten both, they taste delicious. Pigeons, doves and other small birds, have not tried. I assume they are like chickens.
Fish: Have not eaten blue fish or Drum, but well prepared are supposed to be edible. Have eaten farm raised catfish. Love the creative labeling for shark (steakfish) and ocean perch (blow toads), both of which are delicious, though I found blow toads to be a bit chewy. When I told one city boy that ocean perch was blow toads, he actually turned green. Oh, well....
Shell fish: Love them all, including those little black mussels
Arthropods: Crabs and lobsters are wonderful, including soft crabs, but non-coastal raised folks seem aghast at eating softcrabs. Hey, they cut the eyes off!
Prepared meats.
Scrapple: I grew up eating scrapple and have even eaten raw (but not in 30 years). I still love scrapple and just had some a few days ago. Mid-westerners seem to be disgusted if they are told what its made of first. Oh, well....
Souse loaf and head cheese: Yeah, you know what part of the pig it comes from. Souse is less meat carried in a transparent gel of rendered fat that is delicious on crackers (so I am told). I am not adverse to eating either, just never have done so. Ate plenty of liver loaf and liverwurst, so figure its about the same
Pigs feet. My grandmother loved pig's feet, but seems like a lot of trouble for little meat.
Chitterlings: I can eat pork rinds all day long, but the insides? Man, it smells strong unless its properly rendered. Some ladies got some today and I was OK til I got about three feet from them and then that smell wafted up and my stomach flip flopped. Visually, they looked sort of like creamed chip beef, but the nose knows. I ate them many, many years ago and while it stayed down, it was not an experience I plan on repeating.
I am really looking forward to a big oyster fritter tomorrow at the Outdoor show. Has to be on Sunbeam sandwich loaf with lots of ketchup. Yep, now that's a treat. Well, if I survive the show tomorrow, I'll try to give you a report. I'll get to see who is champion muskrat skinner this year. So, visit Your Humble Scribe and I'll see if I can post something on Sunday.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
New Pac-14 shows air
That's right. The latest Pac-14 episode of the Write Stuff will start airing next Thursday and feature my cohost Gianni Hayes interviewing Ann Foley, author of Having My Say about Wiley "Gator" Abbott, the 13 time champion muskrat skinner, and other Dorchester County Books. Next month, Gianni and I will discuss tips on getting publishers to look at your stuff once you write it. Be sure to check the Pac 14 website for times. This is only for Comcast viewers in Wicomico, I think.
National Outdoor Show next weekend
The 64th National Outdoor Show will be this weekend (Feb. 27 and 28) at Golden Hill, in Dorchester County. Besides crowning some kings and queens of the outdoors, there will be contests, including muskrat skinning, and lots and lots of food, including those savory rodents, oyster fritters and other local delicacies. Your Humble Scribe will be there along with fellow writer Ann Foley, on Saturday only, but the opening until we are near exhaustion. Please come by and chat with us, tell me your ghost stories, and check out our books.
Another week ends, more uncertainty begins
Just got done with a pile of dead limbs in the backyard with the family. The smell of burning wood sure takes me back to when I was a kid down in Mt. Vernon. I was talking to the head of our office's cleaning service today and he grew up in the country just like me. His experiences were similar to mine. Let me share some of the stuff about 45 years or so ago.
We first talked about chickens. Both of our families raised chickens. His was the standard production chicken house while we raised ours mostly for eggs and consumption. We both remembered getting the baby chicks or biddies in and how cute they were, little balls of yellow fluff. I remember going to the old Cohn and Bock feed mill in Princess Anne to get chicken feed and how it smelled in there, so rich and exotic. Todays kids would just think it stunk, but smells were a unique part of any experience for me.
Anyway, our methods of getting chickens ready for a meal were similar. Our mothers held them chickens down on the chopping block and we used the cleaver or axe to behead them and then let them run around until their nervous systems realized they were dead. I have heard that people that were guillotined during the French revolution talked a bit after their heads rolled into the receiving baskets. That was parodied in the film version of Whitley Streiber's The Wolven.
Next, the bodies would be put in scalding water to loosen the feathers and the chickens would be plucked. Feathers would pile up around the back of our house and would blow around for a while. Once plucked, there were still fine, hairlike pin feathers left. My mother would take a piece of newspaper and roll it into a cone shape, then light it and singe off the feathers. The other fellow's mom would use paper grocery bags. We also found out that we liked the hearts and livers from the chicken. I still like chicken livers and miss the old Bonanza in Delmar.
We heated by wood until I was a teenager. We had two stoves, a big one in the dining room and a smaller one in the living room. They were nice for the room you were in, but beyond that, the rooms were cold. In the winter time, we all slept in the living room by pulling the mattress and box spring out of the bedroom and my grandmother slept on a studio couch. After my grandmother died, I got her room, but by then we had oil heat and you could sleep in the bedrooms during the winter. Mother kept a woodstove in the dining room up to the end, though.
I see by the papers and blogs there is a big scandal down in my old Somerset. My advice to readers is not to believe everything they read. Blogs and newspapers get viewers/readers by gussying up trash and innuendo. Remember the old Glen Frey song "Dirty Laundry"? Some things never change. Like William Randolph Hearst, one of the original Yellow Journalists said when it was reported that there was no civil war in Cuba: "You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war."
I also see that nobody wants to give Obama a chance. He's be president for less than a month, handed a worse crisis than any president has faced since Pearl Harbor, and nobody will cut him any slack. I am not happy about all in the stimulus package, but hey, he did something and he admitted that he wasn't perfect. Better than some other folks claiming unrealistic stuff like "Peace in our time" and "Mission Accomplished". If things aren't better by the end of this year, well, maybe I'll change my tune, but for now, I am willing to wait and see. If the folks I see at the office are any indication, its very, very bad and we need to pull together as a community and a nation to help the folks who are worse off than we are. I thank God I have a job and a roof over my head. I get a handful of people each week who have neither. What good would more tax cuts do them? Their houses are being foreclosed on and their usually guaranteed year round jobs have gone to seasonal.
Maybe the Tribulation is starting? Who knows? When a day's wages only buys a loaf of bread, then I'll wonder about that. The pre-Nazi Germans under the Weimar government carried a wheelbarrow load of paper money just to buy a loaf of bread and Hell surely followed after them. Is it our turn next? I pray not. I really mean that. Come visit your Humble Scribe again.
We first talked about chickens. Both of our families raised chickens. His was the standard production chicken house while we raised ours mostly for eggs and consumption. We both remembered getting the baby chicks or biddies in and how cute they were, little balls of yellow fluff. I remember going to the old Cohn and Bock feed mill in Princess Anne to get chicken feed and how it smelled in there, so rich and exotic. Todays kids would just think it stunk, but smells were a unique part of any experience for me.
Anyway, our methods of getting chickens ready for a meal were similar. Our mothers held them chickens down on the chopping block and we used the cleaver or axe to behead them and then let them run around until their nervous systems realized they were dead. I have heard that people that were guillotined during the French revolution talked a bit after their heads rolled into the receiving baskets. That was parodied in the film version of Whitley Streiber's The Wolven.
Next, the bodies would be put in scalding water to loosen the feathers and the chickens would be plucked. Feathers would pile up around the back of our house and would blow around for a while. Once plucked, there were still fine, hairlike pin feathers left. My mother would take a piece of newspaper and roll it into a cone shape, then light it and singe off the feathers. The other fellow's mom would use paper grocery bags. We also found out that we liked the hearts and livers from the chicken. I still like chicken livers and miss the old Bonanza in Delmar.
We heated by wood until I was a teenager. We had two stoves, a big one in the dining room and a smaller one in the living room. They were nice for the room you were in, but beyond that, the rooms were cold. In the winter time, we all slept in the living room by pulling the mattress and box spring out of the bedroom and my grandmother slept on a studio couch. After my grandmother died, I got her room, but by then we had oil heat and you could sleep in the bedrooms during the winter. Mother kept a woodstove in the dining room up to the end, though.
I see by the papers and blogs there is a big scandal down in my old Somerset. My advice to readers is not to believe everything they read. Blogs and newspapers get viewers/readers by gussying up trash and innuendo. Remember the old Glen Frey song "Dirty Laundry"? Some things never change. Like William Randolph Hearst, one of the original Yellow Journalists said when it was reported that there was no civil war in Cuba: "You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war."
I also see that nobody wants to give Obama a chance. He's be president for less than a month, handed a worse crisis than any president has faced since Pearl Harbor, and nobody will cut him any slack. I am not happy about all in the stimulus package, but hey, he did something and he admitted that he wasn't perfect. Better than some other folks claiming unrealistic stuff like "Peace in our time" and "Mission Accomplished". If things aren't better by the end of this year, well, maybe I'll change my tune, but for now, I am willing to wait and see. If the folks I see at the office are any indication, its very, very bad and we need to pull together as a community and a nation to help the folks who are worse off than we are. I thank God I have a job and a roof over my head. I get a handful of people each week who have neither. What good would more tax cuts do them? Their houses are being foreclosed on and their usually guaranteed year round jobs have gone to seasonal.
Maybe the Tribulation is starting? Who knows? When a day's wages only buys a loaf of bread, then I'll wonder about that. The pre-Nazi Germans under the Weimar government carried a wheelbarrow load of paper money just to buy a loaf of bread and Hell surely followed after them. Is it our turn next? I pray not. I really mean that. Come visit your Humble Scribe again.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Happy Valentine's Day!
Just came back from being stuffed at JR's in Ocean City! I ate next to nothing all day in anticipation of eating out and was not disappointed. This was my first time eating there and their ribs were fantastic! Their onion loaf is delicious also.
OK, so Happy Valentine's Day to anybody who reads this. Traffic is so slow here that I have pretty much decided to go weekly until the comments pick up. Congress just gave a big heart full of candy to everybody as well, but it came with a high price tag so unless the economy picks up big time, we are in danger of passing along this debt for the next few generations.
Anyway, I'll keep it short tonight and hope everybody is well and that you'll drop some comments every so often.
OK, so Happy Valentine's Day to anybody who reads this. Traffic is so slow here that I have pretty much decided to go weekly until the comments pick up. Congress just gave a big heart full of candy to everybody as well, but it came with a high price tag so unless the economy picks up big time, we are in danger of passing along this debt for the next few generations.
Anyway, I'll keep it short tonight and hope everybody is well and that you'll drop some comments every so often.
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