Furoshiki

I have a mad hate for urban tumbleweeds. Y'know, those plastic grocery bags that blow around endlessly? Hate. I've found a way to take the ones I can grab and convert them into re-usable shopping bags. I crochet them into handy (strong!) shopping bags. I haven't done much else with them.

Believe it or not, my city council recently floated the idea of banning these. (Hooray!) Of course, in they were roundly defeated (Boo!) but it's a start. Of course I'll still use my reusable crochet bags, and I'll continue to steal more bags out of grocery store recycling bins so I can make more. I'm also looking for bag-alternatives for those times when I either forget to put the bags back in my trunk, or don't have a bag, etc.

Furoshiki looks promising. It's a Japanese method of using a square cloth (usually silk or nylon) and tying your bundles (wine bottles, groceries, melons, etc.) into a bag-like arrangement.
Here are some basic wraps. An article with more information and plenty of other links is at DIY Life

NY Times Story: The Anti-Restaurant

Do you like to cook? Do you watch too many Food Network shows? Do you think you could do better at running a restaurant than those idiots on Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares?

Looks like underground restaurants are all the rage in NYC. It has me pondering - would I be able to handle what is essentially a dinner party for strangers?

The Anti-Restaurant

I know that at some point I'd probably freak out a little from having total strangers in my house, eating food I cooked for them. The older I get, the more introverted I've become, and I don't think I could handle it.

However, it gives me a neat idea for a dinner party. What if I invited a bunch of friends to my house for dinner, and asked them to each bring 1 ingredient of their choice, in a quantity sufficient to feed a bunch of people? And then, when the ingredients and guests arrived, made up recipes based on what they brought? That might be kind of fun.

The late, lamented, Son of Thanksgiving festivities were similar to that. On the day after TD, we asked everyone to bring the leftovers from their family feast, and let their friends devour them. That was a ton of fun - one year we had enough half-and quarter-servings of pie to fill the entire dining table. (Fondly remembered as Son of Thanksgiving - House of Pie!)

So no, I'm not about to start an underground restaurant, but the article did remind me that I love to cook for my friends.

Reader Response: War Stories

Email received from Christy...

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I hate Generation Kill.

Byron has been on it from the beginning, and I watched the 1^st two with him, and I decided I didn’t have to tolerate the hatred and mean words used by the soldiers, nor did I have to blow it off as ‘entertainment’.

Oh yeah, and I was married to, and lived amongst men just like that for 6 years… no thank you. Agreed, people will always feast on war depictions as entertainment and that simply is what it is. However, I don’t.

Next; Bagdad Hospital. Possibly the single most important documentary I have ever seen. There is no bravery compared to what the EMT’s and doctors working Iraq are doing. To be murdered for treating both Sunnis and Shiites, wow. Our doctors refuse patients due to religious moral conflict and get away with it. Those doctors serve everyone because they are doctors. Our country could learn from them.

War Stories

My partner, "Beau" and I don't watch a lot of television. We're not the sort of people who turn it on for noise and let it screech and rumble in an empty room while we go about our lives. When we sit down to watch something, it's usually planned, recorded on the DVR, and we make a point to sit down and give the show our attention. A few weeks ago, Beau heard about HBO's miniseries "Generation Kill," and decided he wanted to watch it.

Over the next few days, he watched all of the previous episodes available via digital download, and he enjoyed the show. I watched a few episodes with him, and overall, thought it was time well spent. Six episodes in, and he's now chomping at the bit to see the next.

Thursday evening, we sat down and he called up the list of "Generation Kill" episodes hoping to find the newest posted. It was not. He was disappointed, so I took over the remote and took a look through HBO's available documentaries. One of them was "Baghdad Hospital: Inside the Red Zone." I selected this for viewing.

"Is there anything else on?" He asked.

"I think this looks interesting," I replied.

He hesitated and mumbled something.

"Hey," I said, "This is a documentary. This is real. This is a guy with a camcorder in Baghdad. This is the war through his eyes."

Beau replied that "Generation Kill" was adapted from a book written by the Rolling Stone reporter portrayed in the series so it was also real. I pointed out that the series was a TV show, all of those people were actors, the blood was fake and the gunshots were squibs, and it had certainly been idealized at some point in the process. "This is as close to real as we'll get," I said, pointing at the television. "If you're going to be entertained by war, then sit down, watch this, and be entertained."

It was an engrossing documentary, humanizing the daily reports of market-bombings and militia violence. It showed the faces of doctors who are trying to do everything with nothing. It showed people who are living at the hospital because they have no safe place to go. When the credits rolled, we sat together and talked about what we'd seen.

I have no doubt we'll continue watching "Generation Kill." But at least in my case, I'll be watching it with the images from Omer Madhi's video camera still fresh in my memory.

At first, I was taken aback at how quickly the media scoops up war stories and churns out American heroes with a side dish of patriotism. I cringe at what feels like exploitation of soldiers and civilians alike. But on second thought, cloaking war in entertainment is universal human nature.We know the names and exploits of centuries-old kings and heroes, knights and generals, warlords and invaders. We are still entertained by their legends. We aren't the first civilization to be entertained by war stories, and will certainly not be the last.

Lost and gone forever

I used to have a blog before Blogger got eaten by Google. I tried to go back to it after several years of not posting, but for whatever reason, Google doesn't want to turn loose of the old blog, so I'll just back away and let it disintegrate into the ether. It doesn't matter - there's nothing to see here. Move along.