~b

barth anderson's journal

on fatherhood, writing, food, and what not.

swamped. road-weary. more soon. till then, read this why don't you?

bah humbug. here's the real story behind the writer who's house was raided, supposedly under a provision of the patriot act.

i should have vetted this better before linking to it.

i'm hungover today from a surprise birthday party last night. no time to go into it now, but it was so much fun that i barely have a voice this morning.

but i wanted to post this story and link, via my buddy pete, via resonant8. if anyone else has further info, let me know::

This is an excerpt from a roundup of brief news articles called "Jungle Beat" by Stephanie Bond, in the November 2004 issue of Romance Writers Report.

Patriot Act Hits Close To Home

In the previous Jungle Beat, I reported the narrow defeat of the Freedom to Read Amendment to the Commerce, Justice, State (CJS) Appropriations Bill. The amendment would have barred the Justice Department from using money appropriated under the CJS bill to search bookstore and library records under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. If you think that as women's fiction writers, we're immune from scrutiny under the Patriot Act, think again. Last fall, the home of a multi-published author for an RWA-recognized print publisher was raided and her writing materials confiscated. The writer, an RWA and PAN [Published Authors Network] member who asked to be referred to as Dilyn, agreed to be interviewed for this column to alert RWA members of potential risks when conducting research.

here's a paragraph from a recent blogpost of mine translated into pimp:

this story, "the parade of you," took only 5 days, mainly because midori snyda put a pistol to ma forehead. obviously tha byatch 'n editor windlin' liked da end result, but da quick "process" felt like gettin' cut off mid-conversation, typin' the end afta just 5 quick days, know what I'm sayin'? i don't think i can write dis way consistently, but i'll try dat shit again, 'n if da results be similar, i may ax midori to borrow dat pistol.

midori snyda in da hizzouse.

i almost laughed up a lung when i translated http://www.endicott-studio.com/jMA04Autumn/index.html into pimp. too many to choose from, but here's a taste: "Please help to support da Journal of Mythic Arts, 'n let us send yo' ass art prints as our tanks."

(original link swiped from nalo.)

i was just informed that i share a birthday with bruce lee, l. sprague decamp, and jimi hendryx.

yes, we're that karate-choppin, guitar-lickin, conan-resurrectin, baby-booty-wipin quartet.

i dunno. it does somehow takes the sting out of turning forty, knowing that i have something in common with bruce lee.

i just finished a story written more quickly than any i've written since attending clarion (gad, 6 years ago, now). normally, all i get out of speed-writing is raw material, but this one will appear on the endicott studio site some time in december or january - so apparently it wasn't just raw material.

for me, rapid-fire writing is only effective when i'm certain to what depths the story will go before i start writing. normally, i discover its depths from wading about with a preliminary draft or two, get my bearings and then steam forward - layering and layering and layering. without this, the prose feels thin to me and the story flat with a lack of resonance. once the story is "done," i let it sit for a week or so - a "proofing rise," as they say in the bakery biz. a quick story for me would be written in 3 or 4 months.

this story, "the parade of you," took only 5 days, mainly because midori snyder put a pistol to my forehead. obviously she and editor windling liked the end result, but the quick "process" felt like getting cut off mid-conversation, typing the end after just 5 quick days. i don't think i can write this way consistently, but i'll try it again, and if the results are similar, i may ask midori to borrow that pistol.

one thing is certain: speed-writing rocks on time-starved planet daddio.

a headline at the guardian reads, LARD CRISIS.

what's the crisis? there's not enough because britain is running out! indeed,

There are fears of panic buying [! - b.] in the run-up to Christmas when it is traditionally an ingredient in mince pies and Christmas puddings.

just imagine yourself, for a moment, buying lard in a panic.

in saner food news, we received the first shipment of johansen ranch satsumas at the co-op. heaven! and speaking of heaven, last night lisa and i had syrah-soaked pears that made me want to pray to jesus.

isaiah is big into the flop, or fop, as he says. he poms (climbs) onto the bah (bed) and then does these hilarious spread eagle, diving pratfalls on to da da da's head, all the while shouting, fop, fop!

or maybe he's calling me a fop? hmm.

he's also way into The Leap, too, which is a humiliating example of the depths to which i'll sink for a laugh. it's a complicated game: i crouch down at the end of the bed and scream LEAP at isaiah as i jump onto the bed. the first time i did it, i was certain tears of terror would be standing in his eyes. but iko thought it was hysterical and immediately shouted mah mah mah (more).

the other day i came home from work and couldn't hear lisa or iko anywhere. i presumed she was trying to get him to nap in the bedroom so i padded through the house carefully, so as not to disturb them. then, as i was delicately lowering my backpack to the floor, i hear lisa yell "LEAP!" from the bedroom.

forgive me, father, for i have pandered to a toddler for a cheap laugh....

i was talking to my buddy don, a college english prof in georgia, about fuckthesouth.com. i've also been emailing my friends and regular readers of this blog, lynn and larry in austin, tx. L&L hated fuckthesouth.com, of course, as they are ex-patriated from east tennessee and hate anyone who hates the south. don, an expatriot from wisconsin, however, loved it.

don teaches at georgia tech and found in the rant an angry voice that's been barking in the back of his mind for years. he says the lack of questioning in georgia, the adherence to patriotism and conservative norms, prevents his students from being able to think for themselves, let alone write a cogent, freshman-level essay (is that a uniquely southern problem? more on this in a moment.)

but i understand lynn and larry's knee-jerk reaction, too. i'd have a hard time finding value in a site called fucksciencefiction.com or fuckbaldguys.com or fucktallskinnybaldguyswithcutebabies.com. as lynne put it (blogged with her permission):

As if! As if New England created this democracy! As if Virginia weren't the true cradle of American democacy! Yankees make me sick. Fuck all of y'all and your tight-assed, liberaller than thou, crime ridden, self-absorption!

that last one was for my benefit - she knows fuck alla y'all is my favorite southernism (right up there with opening a can o' whupass, which came later in her email).

i have to admit to being naive. i sent the link to lynne and larry because they're radical progressives who've said, in the past, completely disparaging things about rural tennessee's inability to act in its own best interests. stupidly, i thought they'd think fuckthesouth.com was funny. consequently, i spent a long email apologizing. as lynne said in a less vitriolic reply, "To live in close contact with small town cops with small minds and good ol boys who think John Kerry is queer (no kidding around), you have to be long on pity. That's something you Yankees just don't have for your own."

and from larry: "Southern Liberals don't need Yankees telling us how frustrating the South is. We know it better than anyone."

after living in austin, texas for a couple years and then moving back to minneapolis, i believe that larry's right about that last point. but i also think my TN/TX friends let their southern chauvanism blind them to the real message in that potty-mouthed rant - a point i think they'd actually agree with if their knees weren't jerking so hard.

because, by my read, the site could just as easily be called fuckgreaterminnesota.com or fucknorthernwisconsin.com (don doesn't mention that we made similar complaints about small-town wisconsin life when we were in school together there) or fucktheupperpeninsula.com. those three states went to kerry last week, but each has an entrenched conservative voting block that's red as texas. in our last senate race in the great blue state of minnesota, the struggle between right wing "greater minnesota" and the left wing iron range/twin cities axis went the republicans' way. it was socialist farm-bill subsidy-land verses the economic dynamo of asphalt jungles - just as it was in the national election last week. evangelism can't happen north of the mason-dixon? look what went down in true-blue wisconsin this week.

so the cultural and economic split being addressed in fuckthesouth.com is actually rural v urban, not north v south. urban centers tend to understand what george bailey explains in the bank-run scene of it's a wonderful life, that common wealth, whether you're talking about taxes or a broken down ol' building and loans, must be seen as OUR MONEY, that our taxes are investments in to one another's mortgages, schools, highways, and libraries - which is what fuckthesouth.com should really be pounding in to its readers. without this understanding of federal government as the pooled resources of the downtrodden, our representative government becomes simply an annoying deterrent to corporate avarice and whim, a deterrent that can be swept aside all too easily. the sooner that middle class and poor americans stop voting for easy, measley money every april 15th and start demanding that their representative government act in the best interests of the people who do all the "working and paying and living and dying in this community" (to quote ol' moss back george), the sooner we'll create a society with a better quality of life for country mice and city mice alike.

for a less anti-southern rant on similar material, read this.

i can't explain why this gets to me but it does. a soldier from my home town was killed in iraq this week: staff sergeant todd cornell (listed last under wisconsin). i didn't know him, even though he was just a year younger than i.

i feel like a total rube when i read how civilized britain is. for example, here's a glimpse at where battle-lines are forming in britain's upcoming election.

either plan for compensating fathers, the liberals' or the conservatives', is just absolutely astonishing to me. i had six weeks of paid leave when isaiah was born, only because i happen to have put in many years at a progressively minded cooperative. but most dads? fuggetaboutit. they take a couple days, even if they have the option for more, because they're the main bread-winner and the family can't afford the cut in pay (i effectively received half of what i normally earn per week - it was a stretch for us to make this work, but it was a very high priority for me to spend as much time with the bambino as possible). when i had to go back to work at the end of that six weeks, it felt wrong, wrong, wrong. in my irrational, reptilian, protect-the-spawn-at-all-costs brain, i felt like i was abandoning my kid to wolves in the wild.

six months of paid paternal leave? and that's the conservative party's proposal?? no wonder they think we're barbarians.

meanwhile, be an american rube with me and giggle at the titles in britain's opposition-party cabinet.

from now on, i want you to call me. . . . .shadow chancellor of the exchequer!

here's my last and final take on the election.

scorsese's cape fear. remember the scene where genteel lawyer nick nolte hires the thugs to kick the shit out of robert deniro? nolte is so eager to get the evil max cady (deniro) out of his life that he actually trails the hired leg-breakers to watch them do his very dirty work for him. while nolte hides behind a dumpster, the thugs corner deniro in an alley and go to town on him with bats. it's probably the best scene in the movie, shot and blocked in a way that makes you realize, oh man, scorsese has actually seen this shit. anyway, nolte is delighted that things are going his way, but soon, deniro, beaten to the ground, disarms one of his attackers. the tide turns. there's more scuffling, but another is tripped up, and deniro savagely beats two of his attackers into unconsciousness and chases off the third. (i think. it's been a while.)

think about it. george w bush is max cady! he's standing bloody and beaten in a back alley and nick nolte is all the democrats, all the blue states. they sent in their hawk with his war credentials to beat this bastard down and, damn it, he got away!

back to the movie. to nolte's horror, deniro figures out that the lawyer has come to see the deed done, and calls out "are yew out there, counselor?" (in an absolutely atrocious example of a blue state actor trying on a red state accent). and there you are, liberals. you've been found out. you're all back there, all you blue states and george soros and paul newman, huddled together behind that dumpster and quaking in fear. puffy-eyed and swollen-faced, bush is shouting over kerry's busted up body, "i will outfight yew! i will outsmart yew! i will out redneck yew!"

and thanks to diebold's voting machines, this max cady knows where every last one of you live....

the samurai shopper takes his bushido code into whole foods, which he calls, "a corporate cavity masquerading as a culinary paragon." ahh....music to my co-op ears. the SS goes on to snarl, "Of course, there is some entertainment value in pesticide-free honey, home-style vindaloo and raw-milk cheeses. But along with that comes the implicit claim that Whole Foods has cornered the market on transcendental mastication."

which, of course, it has not. indeed, WF's very structure prevents it from pressing the agenda it seems to embrace. if you want to buy slocal product at whole foods here in minneapolis, you must first realize, grasshoppa, that WF buys it in the twin cities, ships it to chicago so that the corporate tumor can be sufficiently fed at the regional hub, then your minnesota-grown organic corn gets shipped back to minnesota. tres transcendant! (that same corn comes straight to your area co-op's receiving bay, picked, probably within 12 hours).

is it enlightened to eat good food that actually nourishes your body? is it transcendental to purchase your food from independent farmers who live outside your town? i dunno. it's not so much a spiritual thang, in my mind, as a cultural thang. the great leveling force of corporate food companies plough small systems down, clear-cutting the way for stream-lined cults of enormosity that dictate to you the contents of your pantry and the relative peculiarity of your pallette. if you celebrate the energy of your cities' music scene, your galleries and theaters and cinema, the independent alternative weekly, and the local politics which resist national trend, then also ask yourself, how energetic is the local food scene? is your city resisting or acquiescing to conveyer-belt grocery stores? and which side is your kitchen on?

we saw some absolutely stunning northern lights last night, clearly visible from our place deep in da city. probably the brightest i've ever seen despite the cityshine.

this pic was taken west of the twin cities last night at about 930pm (gakked from le strib). from our place, you could see curtains of aurora shifting and fading over the minneapolis skyline. quite lovely.

i blogged the first part of our birth story over a year ago, always intending to tell the grueling finish, but i never got around to it. well, after a year of asking our pediatrician to get a hold of isaiah's birth records, he finally received them from the hospital and we got the pleasure of reliving that harrowing week after isaiah was born through clinicians' notes from the NICU (newborn intensive care unit) emergency team, the ever-hateful dr sifuentes, and others. so the story is on my mind. so you get the wow finish, at last.

from the end of birth story numero uno, where we join the delivery, all ready in progress:

Then the whole head. Iko (still the gender neutral name at this point) had a scrunched up face like an Olmec head unearthed from jungle turf. And he had one big head, man. Better to compare it to an Easter Island totem. Then one more push and he was out, a slippery thing in the world, all blue-grey with unoxygenated blood.

Someone yelled "A boy!"

And I looked at Lisa and shouted, "It's Isaiah!"

the key detail that i didn't mention in story numero uno was the meconium staining. in brief, meconium is the baby crapping into its own amniotic fluid. it's rare, but dangerous, since the kid can breathe it in upon birth, aspirate it, and infect its own lungs.

we knew something was different/wrong right away when lisa's water broke. she passed little pods of what looked like stuffed grape leaves - meconium pellets. the nurse on the hotline knew what it was and told us to get in right away. we had arranged for lisa to have a water birth, but meconium was too risky, nixing that plan. so we had to settle for a typical birth, and by the nervousness in the nurse's voices about the meconium, it sounded like we were lucky to get that.

the midwives at hennepin county medical were great. they told us we could have a non c-section, non-medicated birth as long as lisa kept dialating and the birth kept progressing at a reasonable pace. only a couple of times did we feel like we were getting rushed, and in retrospect, it was just the midwife staff looking out for our baby's health. one of lisa's brothers aspirated meconium when he was born and had to remain in the hospital for 3 weeks upon delivery. so iko was in "some heavy shit," as we said often that day.

considering what could have happened, the birth went great. but right at the end, as lisa was pushing and iko was emerging, the NICU emergency team came in: two nurses with all their dr seussian gadgets and air of tension and dread. she was so out of it that i don't think lisa was even aware that they had entered our birthing room. but i knew it. they represented everything we were trying to avoid by going with midwives in the first place.

but thank god they were there, because the meconium staining was worse than anyone could have predicted. as soon as isaiah's whole head was free, maggie the amazing midwife jumped on lisa and began hoovering isaiah's nose and mouth with a thin sunction hose to get all the meconium out of his respiratory system (later she told us, "oh my god, there was so much. i can't believe i got it all!"). and as soon as he was born, they whisked iko over to the NICU nurses who started to sunction him some more.

this was a very scary moment. the classic "WAAAH!" wasn't coming. he wasn't breathing. our baby's whole body was a sickly blue-grey color and i had no context fo rthis, so of course i thought he was dying. he twisted his arms in this wretched little pose of struggle, the backs of his wrists pressing together, like he was wrenching himself to take a breath. this scared the nurses - you could hear it in their voices as they air-bagged him with a little oxygen mask (puff....puff...puff...i can still hear it) and saying things like "was that a seizure? is he seizuring? come on....breathe....breathe!" this was my son. my new son. i watched the nurses work on him and i was very, very close to the brink of terror.

the nurses had isaiah on his side, rubbing his legs, pumping them like he was a drowing victim. finally, he coughed and breathed, and i watched his blood oxygenate, turning his skin from that horrible grey to a ruddy pink, as if he were a lil black-and-white dorothy passing into oz. they rolled him in my direction to pat him on his back and get the goop out of his lungs, and i swear, i SWEAR to you...

he looked....right...at me.

it wasn't just his eyes drifting in my general direction either. he looked at me with total recognition, eyes pooling with the sight of me. it drags a sob out of my chest now just to remember it.

but you know? isaiah never did cry the big WAAAH. he just started breathing like, "ho hum. what's a fella got to do to get a drink around here?"

the two nurses took him to see his mama, all too briefly, and then whisked him out to the newborn intensive care unit itself. and this was the beginning of the nightmare. i raced after the nurses and iko and watched as they pumped him up with about 24 shots of god-knows-what. my hippie, organic, chemical-fearing brain just buckled while i watched. the only word i remember during that moment was "phenobarb" - they gave that baby phenobarbitol to suppress his "seizures."

dr. sifuentes, who was managing isaiah's case, decided to keep him in NICU for observation - which was smart, in retrospect, but at the time, i felt like he'd stolen my child and so dr. sifuentes will always be the villain of this story in my irrational telling of it (don't mind me, doc, that's just the instincts talking). luckily for us, HCMC values breastfeeding as integral to newborn health, so they had rooms for mothers/parents to sleep in while their babies were in NICU. the first two days were total zombie time, as we shuffled from that little cinderblock room, to the wash station where we'd scrub and put on hospital gowns in order to enter the incubator-warm NICU where isaiah slept with all the teeny preemie kids in their incubators and too-big diapers.

god, it was absolutely heart-breaking to see him in there, the first time we went in. isaiah had an IV, and his little wrist was taped to a board to keep the needle in place. he kept knocking himself in the face with it and scrathing at it to get it off. he had sensors stuck all over his chest and legs, and he even had a machine that went ping. so sad and pathetic. he didn't even have a blanket on him (it was an incubated, warm "isolette" so he wasn't sitting there shivering - but still).

for a couple days, this is how we lived, visiting iko every 2-3 hours so that lisa could breastfeed him, copping sleep when we could, and fencing with the nurses and doctors. the medical staff kept swimming in logical eddies, saying things like "he seems sluggish." yeah, well maybe you'll have that when you pump a kid full of phenobarbitol. whenever i said such things, they would remind me that isaiah must have had a seizure because the nurses gave him phenobarbitol to begin with. this made me want to start barking at them, or meowing, or screaming with mad laughter. it was like alice in wonderland in that damn NICU. plus, they would say horrifying things in total off-handed ways, like, "you'll have to watch for brain damage as he gets older. he was oxygen-deprived, you know."

meanwhile, the days passed, and the staff kept watching for signs of meconium infection and seizures. isaiah was born sunday night, and by wednesday morning, lisa and i were seriously contemplating just taking him and leaving. i didn't believe that he'd had seizures. i believed that what we saw was isaiah struggling for breath, not a "classic seizure pose" (to this day, he has a "seizure" every morning when he yawns). luckily, the same day we were planning a prison-break, dr. sifuentes said that if isaiah was doing better by saturday morning, he would consider releasing him. which was better than the weeks upon weeks that originally had been predicted.

we sang this song frequently over the next three days:

when iko was in egypt land

(let my iko go)

sifuentes played his evil hand

(let my iko go...)

then there was the head nurse who said to lisa, "never nurse a baby with a hat on" (which still puts an orbit of question marks around my skull) and who told dr. sifuentes that isaiah had a "dysfunctional suck" when he had trouble latching on - even though all kids have trouble latching on at first (but hey, she may have provided iko with the name of his first garage band). this nurse seemed to be our biggest deterrent to getting iko out of NICU on saturday. what if she told sifuentes about the dysfunctional suck? would that damn us to 3 weeks in this kafka-esque hospital? all these dorky scrutinies of our parenting were weighing on us. it seemed like any little hassle, which would be routine if we were at home and out from under the medical staff's paranoid eyes, was getting blown way out of proportion. luckily we talked to a night nurse who listened to our complaints and reassured us, saying, "you're kid is fine. you have to remember that these nurses rarely see healthy babies, so they lose perspective very quickly." to our undying gratitude, she left a note putting in a good word with dr. sifuentes for letting isaiah leave in the morning. she, along with maggie the amazing midwife, were a couple of guardian angels for isaiah.

because in the end, dr sifuentes seemed to listen to the night nurse. saturday morning, he consulted with his little gang of clinicians and heard the head nurse's description of Iko and the Dysfunctional Suck, and said, "well, we'll just leave that to his parents to address." i take it all back, sifuentes. you're not so bad after all.

a few hours later, greggy arrived and helped us haul our clothes, provisions, gifts, and baby home. it was a mere 5 days of NICU and zombified parenting, but when it's your baby's health, that translates to 5 weeks subtracted from your ultimate lifespan.

fast-forward to yesterday. our pediatrician thumbed through the year-old notes on isaiah's birth and told us that if the hypoxia (oxygen deprivation) had been longer, it might have had an ill effect, but really, isaiah was only deprived for less than a minute (seemed more like a half-hour, as i remember it). and that's not unheard of for a newborn. indeed, iko's lack of breathing in that crucial moment may have actually saved him from meconium aspiration and infection. our pediatrician also said that, as for the phenobarb, it would take numerous doses over weeks to impair a kid's development and that if there had been any developmental problems resulting from hypoxia or the medications administered at birth, they would have shown up by now.

so.

there we are. parents with a healthy boy.

this morning isaiah crawled into my lap, and i read where the wild things are to him. he loves that story and listens to every word, rapt. when i roar the wild things's roar, isaiah roars too, and he waves good-bye to max when max sails away from where the wild things are, in order to go back home where someone loves him best of all. and when i get to the end where the story goes, "and max's supper was waiting for him," i pause and cue iko, saying, "and it was still....?"

and isaiah says, "hot."

i could not be more proud, relieved, humbled, ecstatic to be this boy's father.

i come to praise the squash. hear me! for today i praise to highest the sweet and luscious winter squash.

i have to, because it's also about the last of the fruits and veggies that are actually grown here in minnesota. yep, it's getting grim. soon we pasty upper-midwesterners will be wrestling over parsnips like prisoners in a gulag. (strawberries? what are these strawberries of which you speak?) fortunately, winter does a sweet lil number on squash. once temps dip below 32 degrees at night, the squash fruit says, "ohmygodohmygod! protect the seeds!" and metabolizes its starches into sugars with which to feed itself through the bitter winter months, creating not only a wealthy array of complex carbohydrates, but a sugar-sweet flesh as well (this is why you shouldn't waste your time with squash from mexico or california. it never gets cold enough).

mother winter is nice enough to sweeten up the squash, but if a little sugar is nice, then a lot must be better: dowse those babies in maple sugar, says me, and bake yerself up a dessert squash. delicata and sweet dumplings are the squash of choice for an affair to remember. cut and de-seed the fruit. slather in softened butter, maple syrup, and orange juice (the squash, not you). then slap em cut side down and bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes. serve with dessert wine and a tasty smoke.

in celebrity news, loretta swit was in the co-op last night. the poor, 20-year-old cashier had no idea who swit was and asked for ID with hot lips' credit card purchase. sounds like hot lips was a bit chagrined, though not rude.

quite different from bridget fonda's trip to the wedge a few years back. when she produced ID for her purchase, fonda begged the cashier not to make a big deal out of it. the star-struck cashier rang her up, sent bridget on her way, and then made an overhead page to let the whole store what had just happened.

cheer up, lil democrats. kerry very nearly pulled off what no other challenger in US history ever has: he almost unseated a war-time president!

that's a tall order, even when faced with a war-timer as corrupt as this one. however, the guy who voted for the war in question while voting against the money to fund it, just wasn't going to be the guy to unseat bush. i hold that a true critic of the war (not necessarily a pacifist, mind you) would have had a better shot than kerry and would have won handily enough to nullify any press from the conservative-christian, political machine or the folks who think bin laden is going to sneak into their homes and eat their young.

but kerry was a shew-in because democrats in primaries ask themselves first and foremost "how can we become more like the right so we can win their votes in the general election?" which really translates as this: how can we be more attractive to corporate wealth? how can we distance ourselves from our traditional base of ag and labor? how can we be seen as pro-war? and how can we ditch that whiff of progressiveness?

oh...they'll figure out a way.

hey! whoa! look! elad has a story up at fortean bureau!

that's it. i'm gonna start drinking and watching the polls....

the next time you're driving up 94 through wisconsin to Our Fair Cities:

The Norske Nook in Osseo, Wis., up near the Twin Cities, is pie paradise. The cheerful, red-pinafored waitresses there will serve you apple pie if you like: standard-issue apple, Dutch apple or harvest apple. You won't be sorry if you order it ["sorry"?! you'd be a screaming imbecile if you made it to the NN and didn't order it! - b.]. But there are far more exceptional items in the Norske Nook's repertory of more than two dozen pies, all made from scratch every morning according to the recipes of Helen Myhre, who founded the place. This is the nation's premier dairy state, remember. So go ahead, take the plunge, and order the Farm Belt favorite, sour cream raisin, made from rich, tangy, extra-thick Wisconsin sour cream, with a short, flaky crust and a fine pompadour of meringue, or maybe the lush banana cream, which won the National Pie Championship in 2003. (via the NYT)

pompadour of meringue? food writers...heh....

livertheness, it's all true. but we must invite the times up to mini-applesauce some day. crema cafe dishes out not only the best ice cream in the american empire, but a chocolate bombe that could make your spleen buckle and smoke. via city pages:

I tried a slice of a chocolate bombe ($4.25) that was as rich and plush as a golden yacht on a satin sea, each bite of the chocolate mousse dissolving in an intensity of pleasant, bitter, and shadowy. A blueberry tartlet held fresh, vividly ripe fruits on a pillow of homemade vanilla custard atop a buttery crust. Even without a single dish of ice cream, Crema Café would be one of the best places in Minneapolis for desserts.

is dara moskowitz's first sentence missing one final noun, or is that her stab at foodie poetry? ah well. we forgive her. the bombe is le bombe.

scuttle-butt has it that cheney and rove are at each other's throats. here's an email that's making the rounds - can't say if it's real or when it was written exactly (looks like late last week), but it's making democratic hearts throb around here:

my friend in the kerry campaign spoke late last night with mark mehlman of the bush team. mehlman was a roomate of my friend when they were both at the harvard law school. they are at opposite ends of the politcal spectrum, but are very good friends. mehlman says the bush team is in "major melt down" because their polling has them losing in ohio and florida, so they are in a mad dash to pull something out in the upper midwest. michigan isn't really in play. he called it a "head fake". wisconsin is slipping away, bush spoke in green bay today to less than 5,000 people (kerry drew 80,000 in madison on thursday). iowa has the numbers potentially but they've focused on it way too late, after the dems had a massive absentee push, so iowa is unlikely. they can't win with minnesota alone and even that state doesn't look good.

mehlman says that there is incredible discord at the top. cheney is absolutley livid with rove on the overall strategy ("we peaked too soon you bastard") and with karen hughes for not adequately preparing bush for the debates ("he looked like a g** d***** mental patient"). cheney is apparently a "real monster". the rnc doesn't know what to do because they can't get any clear direction from the top.

have fun cheering the iraq occupation, you crazy democrats!

in iko news, he carried his little american flag to our polling station today, as his mamasan and i cancelled out each other's votes. big numbers here in wellstone country. our polling station had no fewer than 100 people in line before 9am.

movie quote of the week:

"Sew! Sew like the wind, very old one!