What Do I Know?

For Your Eating Pleasure

Dieting? Don't give up the Krispy Kremes just yet: a new diet claims sugar and fat will help you lose weight.

Or you could try the cellular diet.

Most Americans unaware of fat-cancer link. Must be Fox News viewers.

The economics of organics. (And don't miss the soy vs. meat ecological cost analysis.)

Make your own veggie loaf. (See? Vegan cooking is so easy it's like following a formula!)

Five a day is not enough. Try going on a Veggie Venture!

Mumbai is where I want to be, where meateaters have a taste of living in the southern U.S.

Wednesday Food Blogging: Imam Bayildi

Eggplant, peppers and tomato sauce recline on a bed of couscous.

When they first served this dish to the imam, he fainted. That's why it's called Imam Bayaldi, which means The Imam Fainted. Or so they say.

I served it to my family, and they liked it pretty well too, so it's become a staple dish here at Chez Flake. It's kid friendly, too, or at least my teenagers seem to like it. My oldest daughter had me make it for her French class, and we pretended it was from Tunisia, where they speak French sometimes. (I later heard someone in the class fainted, but I'm not sure about that.)

Different recipes for Imam Bayaldi follow different procedures for assembling the dish many are more of a stuffed eggplant. I figure the Imam really doesn't care how it's assembled, it's the ingredients that count: eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, and mint.

Serve it with couscous, and keep your smelling salts handy. It's been known to cause lightheadedness.

Amen, Al

Al Gore makes a point about global warming to a bunch of white people in Hay-on-Wye.

Ah, Al. Why didn't you say these things years ago? (The jokes, I mean. That environment stuff, I read all about in Earth in the Balance, which is the only place it got any print.)

Which was exactly what one young man in the audience asked after the event, and Al, unlike his old prevaricating self, acknowledged his own inability to articulate the problems besetting the environment. He now wishes to make us all articulate enough to make the message our own, to go out into the world and preach the gospel of global warming.

Indeed, the whole thing reminded me of a sermon. Not one I ever heard in the Church of the Male  Patriarchy I grew up attending, but the southern cadence of Al Gore's delivery did sound more Baptist than academic. If we had been anywhere but a few miles from the border of England and Wales, the audience would surely have punctuated the address with a few well-placed amens.

The Hay Festival would have been well suited to host a revival meeting. The overwhelming impression was of whiteness: large white tents, connected by boardwalks that lifted festival goers above the muck of the field where the event took place. Nor did I see a non-white face, despite the fact the Hay Festival is billed as the "Woodstock of the mind." Again, we were in the Welsh countryside, where there are more black sheep than non-Caucasians.

One point about the festival, before I move on to Al: Unless you have tickets to an event, which cost between £5 and £35, don't bother making the three and a half hour drive from London. While there are plenty of events—mostly talks by authors—there's not much else to do at the Festival itself. I don't know about here, but in the U.S. talks by authors are a dime a dozen. Actually not even that much. Every mid-sized American city has a steady stream of writers who'll talk for free. But I highly recommend a visit to Hay-on-Wye, preferably when there aren't thousands of visitors clogging its charming streets. With 41 new and used bookstores in the tiny town, it's a bibliophile's mecca.

But I hadn't come for the books; I came to hear what the blogosphere is buzzing about: Al Gore and his "The Glaciers are Melting; the Earth is Hurtling Toward Hell in a Handbasket; Quick, Repent and Buy Carbon Offsets!" sermon. Er, speech.

Al Gore has a great comedy routine, which surprises a lot of people who thought the press had accurately nailed him as being stiff and pedantic. I never thought that, but then I find pedants rather charming. The opening lines of his speech were actually funnier than his SNL performance. He told the story about how he and Tipper were seen at a Shoney's in Tennessee. The next day the rumour had started that they'd opened a chain of restaurants. The audience laughed at this, but would probably have found it funnier if they'd known just how much the press had mangled every word Gore uttered while he was a politician.

He did again joke that he's a recovering politician, on Step 9 of his recovery program. I wish him luck, though the American woman in front of me, who was one of the ones chosen to ask a question, used her time to beg him to run again. We were all a bit uncomfortable by this display of raw emotion in a sea of British reticence. A British crowd is very different from a fervent American audience. When Gore finished his talk, a few people stood up, while the others remained seated, clapping as unstrenuously as possible.

I won't restate everything he said about the crisis facing the planet; nothing surprised me, but one thing really did crystallize the problem we face.

He said that in 1998 a team of scientists reviewed 928 peer-reviewed studies on climate; none disagreed with the consensus that global warming exists and is man-made.

They then reviewed 14 years of major news articles on the subject, amounting to 626 articles, and 53% disagreed with the concensus.

Let me say this again, brothers and sisters: 53%.

(Ironically, on the way over we listened to a radio program where someone claimed individual attempts to save energy—double glazing, efficient appliances, etc., would not recoup their costs in energy savings over the lifetime of the product. According to the energy expert I consulted, who happened to be driving my car, the guy was reciting 25-year old research, and is flat wrong.)

The argument culture of the media is responsible for a lot of wrongheaded thinking, the kind you hear your neighbors, in-laws, and anonymous airport passengers spout off. Thanks to the press and their urge to present both sides, even when one side manufactures their facts out of thin air (which is, by the way, "good for you!!!") most Americans are totally ignorant of the truth, which is simply that our Earth has never been in more danger.

It's as if a comet is hurtling straight at us, and half the world refuses to believe the evidence despite a huge shadow growing bigger with every hurricane season.

Don't run for president, Al. Preach to us instead. Scare the pants off us with your tales of fire and brimstone, charm us with your self-deprecating humor, wow us with your PowerPoint slides. That groundswell you hear may just be another rumbling from Gaia Earth, or it may be evidence of a real sea change—in thinking, not melting glaciers. I'm a cynic, especially when it comes to religion and politics, but maybe you're the right guy to lead us out of this darkness and into the solar-powered light.

I hear there's nothing like a recovering sinner for preaching the gospel.

For a Jerk, He Looked Rather Tanned and Well Rested

I'll tell more about the Al Gore event in Hay in a minute, but for now I want to publicly chastise the man sitting behind me.

He was British, and I overheard him say that he liked Al Gore because he was "so articulate, for an American." This was because, he told his wife (who I never heard say a word), that Al Gore traveled a lot, whereas most senators didn't even have passports. (Now, I know one senator has bragged about not having a passport, but the others must surely be using passports when they travel to their Abramoff boondoggles.)

It's true that Americans don't travel as much as their British cousins. Brits are constantly catching EasyJet flights to the Canary Islands, Spain, Mallorca, or else Majorca, Spain, and generally anywhere with sun and a beach, like Spain (where you can get a full English breakfast just about anywhere). My neighbors have a house in Spain, where they spend their summers, but as far as I can tell it hasn't improved either their English or their Spanish.

I guess all that sun does wonders for the articulation. Surprising, then, that my fellow New Mexicans are lumped into the inarticulate American masses by the bigot sitting behind me.

What I wanted to tell this man was that most Americans, a) can't afford to travel abroad. A ticket to Europe costs far more than EasyJet fare to Barcelona. Most Americans don't have the disposable incomes that the average Europeans does, and what little they do have goes to save for a medical emergency, not for inflated London hotel prices. And b) most Americans don't take days off for something like travel. We don't have bank holidays, or even in most cases more than two weeks vacation (and many Americans spend even that at work). British children—and often their parents—get long breaks every season: the last spring break was 19 days. I know of very few American professionals (who are the only ones who can afford overseas flights) who would want to spend 19 days away from their jobs, even if their Scrooge bosses offered it to them. Our ancestors, remember, were Puritans who left England and subsequently invented the work ethic.

And further, if we do wish to travel, there are lots of places in the Americas where we can travel without a passport. Six Flags, despite coming under the province of six nations, doesn't require a passport; neither does Juarez. So there are lots of well-traveled, well-read Americans who—horrors!—don't have a passport.

I took careful note of this man's further discourse, none of which was particularly articulate, despite his tan. Of course, the glare I gave him after his statement might have been enough to stifle any inclinations toward articulation he may have possessed. (I barely refrained from smacking him across the brow. My husband hates it when I break into fisticuffs with the locals.)

I would say something about how all British people are bigots, but I refuse to judge a whole nation of people based on a sample of one. I'm particular like that.

I would go on, but I'm not feeling very articulate right now. Maybe I should go lie in the sun a bit.

Must See TV

I've never watched Boston Legal but this clip (via Andrew Tobias) is stunning. (Go click under the video link to view it.)

And I think the Adlai Stevenson speech James Spader is referring to is this one. Here's an excerpt:

The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.

I could add, from my own experience, that it is never necessary to call a man a communist to make political capital. Those of us who have undertaken to practice the ancient but imperfect art of government will always make enough mistakes to keep our critics well supplied with standard ammunition.

There is no need for poison gas.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how Americans are a bunch of scaredy cat wimps. I'll post more on that  later. Meanwhile I'll let Adlai say it:

Men who have offered their lives for their country know that patriotism is not the fear of something; it is the love of something.

Off to See the Wizard

Tomorrow I'm going to Wales for the Hay-on-Wye book festival. I probably won't get there in time to hear Christopher Hitchens babble on about this:

The Rights of Man
The contrarian traces the history of The Rights of Man from the publication of Part One in 1791 in London and its rapturous reception across the Atlantic. He analyses the meaning it has acquired since its creation, and its significance as the cornerstone of contemporary debates about our basic human rights.

Oh well.

Instead I'll be seeing Al Gore talk about the weather:

And Now The Weather
The former American VP examines the nature, effects and potential catastrophes of global warming. ‘We face a planetary emergency. But it’s crucial to avoid being paralysed by that knowledge and instead feel empowered by it in order to bring about the changes that are imperative now’.
Introduced by Graydon Carter

I will of course be asking him if he plans to run for president, since I don't imagine anyone's thought to ask him that. If he says "yes" you'll be the first to know.

C.R.A.Z.Y. for French Canadians?

While in London today I saw a film at the Prince Charles Cinema, an artsy venue near Leicester Square that shows cheap (£3-4) films. (That's cheap for London; most are over £9 these days.) C.R.A.Z.Y. is sort of like a French prequel to Brokeback Mountain.

Pretty good film, but I couldn't figure out why it seemed they were living in America yet the film was in French (with subtitles). They drove American cars, listened to American music, and wore American clothes with that unique '80s American tastelessness. (Mullet alert!)

But now I'm pretty sure the film was set in Quebec. Have my Canadian readers (well, reader) seen this and do they (he) wish to weigh in? Are Quebecians really that much less exotic than their French cousins?

Amber Waves of Rapeseed

Rapeseed field.

It's raining again, so I'm at home playing with TypePad. I added my photo albums to the right sidebar.

Above is a photo of the rapeseed field we walked through the other day. I've seen dozens of rapeseed fields from the car, but up close they're huge. The plants were about waist high or higher, and at one point we were separated from half our group and could not see them over the rape.

In another field, the grass was so high all you could see of the dog was her tail.

I love spring. Except when it rains.

Friday Cow Blogging

William Penn's pacifist cows

On our hike Wednesday through Penn, we came upon the friendliest herd of holsteins. They seemed eager to follow us as we walked past their pasture, down a quiet wooded footpath, until we reached the end. There they posed for photos.

When we left, several mooed loudly, sad to see us go.

The estate across the way was Penn House*, owned by William Penn's family.  So I guess these are the decendants of the Penn family herd. That must be why they're so friendly; Quakers tend to be on the nice side.

*Also the location for Nanny McPhee.

TypePad Issues

Does anyone know what's up with TypePad? Last night it took forever to upload a photo, and now it's impossible: The proxy server could not handle the request.

Sort of like my server at The Hinds Head the other day when I asked for tea.

I've got some great cow pictures to share. If I can't post them tonight, I'll try again tomorrow.

Don't Eat Your Cousins

You can add HIV to the list of human diseases caused by our exploitation of animals. Scientists have found evidence of a "missing link" between a chimpanzee virus and HIV. The article doesn't speculate about how the virus was transmitted, but bushmen in the Congo eat chimps (and capture their infants to sell as novelty pets, if they survive the voyage to Europe and Asia) which makes mutation and transmission of the virus almost inevitable.

In this month's Veg News magazine, there's an article about a woman who, after watching her mother die from CJD, gave up animal products entirely. (There was a time when I thought my mom might have CJD; the symptoms of HD are similar, but she would have died a lot sooner with CJD. It's a truly horrible disease, that affects both the mind and body.)

I gave up eating meat because of the damage caused to non-human animals, but there is plenty of evidence now that the meat industry causes damage to human animals as well, not least of which is the antibiotic resistance we've promoted by giving huge doses of antibiotics to factory farmed animals.

For more inspiration to get off the dangerous factory farm meatrix, check out The Meatrix Blog.

Food Not-So-Very News

Rapeseed, up close, from my hike yesterday.
(We actually got lost in the rapeseed field, but like I always say, what better place to be lost?)

Now, for some foodie links I didn't get around to posting yesterday:

Canola, rapeseed, what's the difference?

Vegan junk food: no, that's not an oxymoron. Apparently in the U.S. (not here in the U.K.) vegan goodies like donuts are becoming easier to find. When I was home recently, in my small southern town there was a sign advertising "we have vegan cookies" at a smoothie shop. Unfortunately the rest of the town was a wasteland for vegans. (Note to O'Charleys: your menu is ridiculous. I cannot imagine ever coming back.)

Some Da Vinci-ness, in honor of that movie everyone can't stop talking about:

"As long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other."
"The time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."
-Leonardo Da Vinci (a vegetarian)

Last time I linked to "How to make tempeh." Now, here's "How to make seitan," from the Vegan Lunchcast.

I forgot to link to this in yesterday's Banana Bread post, but it has come to my attention that your bananas may be radioactive.

World News: Crawl Back Under the Bed Edition

The Guardian says the word is a dangerous place. Actually, independent defence experts said this:

Launching the International Institute for Strategic Studies' (IISS) annual assessment of global security threats, John Chipman, its director general, said: "Many parts of the world are engaged in brutal combat ... Overall, the dangerous triptych of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran continues to dominate the security agenda as do the wider, iconic problems of terrorism and proliferation."

Well, that gets your attention, doesn't it?

If not, try this from Moscow: Russia Has “Asymmetric Response” to U.S. Missile Defense Plans. Is it just me, or does this sound like the Cold War is just around the corner? (Or possibly already here: we spend as much now on defence as we did during the height of the Cold War, fyi.)

Our team in the next Cold War will be a different lineup: Poland is poised to allow (defective) U.S. missile shield interceptors in its borders.

And then there's bird flu.

All this bad news have you reaching for your Xanax? Never fear, our leaders have a plan. "The axis of feeble" will not let world events sway them from their goal: building their legacy.

Wednesday Food Blogging: Banana Bread

A perfect day for Banana Bread.

I can't believe I haven't posted a recipe for banana bread before. It's practically one of the major food groups around here, with chocolate, tea and potatoes being the others.

If I ever really do write The Rotten Fruit Cookbook, banana bread will be featured prominently. There are almost always bananas turning brown around here—I told my husband one day when he came home from the grocery store without bananas, claiming they weren't on the list I gave him, that a bunch of bananas is always a default purchase.

But inevitably bananas turn brown, and no one likes to eat brown bananas. Fortunately that's the best kind to make banana bread with.

So, if it's A Perfect Day for Banana Bread, here's a recipe, which is conveniently vegan for those moments when you don't have or don't want eggs.

Let Recovering Politicians Recover

Al Gore calls himself a recovering politician. Progressives who are calling on him to run in '08 ought to listen.

A lot of us are really digging what Al Gore's had to say in the last few years. We are especially grateful that he's drawn attention to global warming, when the cause seemed almost lost. He's also given some stirring speeches to MoveOn, and elsewhere, criticizing the excesses of the Bush administration. This fire in the belly makes our liberal hearts race, like a shot of espresso when we're used to Folgers.

Yet the Al Gore of 2006 sounds a lot different from Senator Al Gore, or Vice President Al Gore, or Candidate Al Gore. In fact, it's precisely because he's not a candidate that he has been able to speak his mind these last few years.

And yes, I do believe his mind and his heart are in the right place, unlike some potential candidates. He's long been a friend of the environment, as anyone who read Earth in the Balance can testify. (The five of us weren't actually called on to testify to this, since the environment didn't come up much in the 2000 election.)

But as he says, he's a recovering politician. I have no desire to see him fall off the wagon. There is a part of me, and I'd bet a large part of him, that wants to see the wrongs of 2000 set right. Al Gore should be our president right now. We should be worrying about those threatening glaciers he joked about rather than listening to Osama bin Laden's threats.

Al Gore the politician, however, has never shown any indication he'd address these problems with any more vigor than he did while he was a senator or a vice-president. I was so disappointed with his go-along-to-get-along performance as VP that I almost didn't vote for him in 2000. I supported Nader, until I saw the Democratic convention. It was the kiss that did it for me. There was fire in that there belly!

If he did become the Democratic candidate, of course I'd vote for him. I  actually think he'd be a much better president than he'd be a candidate for president. Some of the behind the scenes books I've read about the Clinton presidency suggest Gore was a calming influence to Clinton's rages, even a cut-up at times. (No, that's not a typo; I didn't mean "cut out" as in cardboard. I never understood the cardboard references about Al Gore anyway. Or maybe I've got a fondness for cellulose.)

So don't count me in on the Draft Gore movement. I like Al just fine the way he is, beard or no beard. But for president I'm supporting the guy who'll never need to be a recovering politician, since he's never acted like a politician, despite 14 years spent as a senator. Russ Feingold has never hesitated to speak or vote his mind. (Just like some people seem immune to the danger of alcoholism, he's not affected by the demon drug of campaigns the way some politicians are.)

Let's let Al Gore recover in peace.

It's Raining Cats and Dogs Outside

Spent the day in Wales, at Chepstow Castle and Tintern Abbey. The camera's in the car, and it's raining, otherwise I'd download my photos and show you.

Meanwhile, here's a photo of a dog I met at The Royal Standard, the oldest pub in England, the other night. We thought a small lion or bear had come in, but when we asked it turned out to be a Leonberger. His name was Chewie and he was Best in Breed at Crufts. Quite the gentleman, too. While sitting, he came past my friend's waist. His paws looked exactly like the paws on the lions in Trafalgar Square (which isn't surprising, since the sculpter used a dog as his model after the lion he'd had in his studio got too smelly to keep any longer).

Chewie, the Lion Dog.

The dog and I are off for our hike tomorrow, unless it's still raining. Have I mentioned we're in a drought? Many more of these droughts and they'll have to issue us with dinghies instead of rubbish bins.

When I Am Old I Shall Grow Purple Flowers

These lilacs are a deep shade of lavender. Wisteria wanna-bes.

I've been taking photos of flowers the last week or so. If you want to see them, go here. Many are of the wisteria that climbs up the walls of many houses here in the Chilterns. (If you prefer roses and dahlias, you'll have to wait a while.)

I think I'll write a book called The Wisteria Hunter. Maybe Meryl Streep will play me in the movie....

Purple and blue flowers seem to be my favorite. The lilacs here are also blooming. They seem exotic to me, since when I was growing up in the American South I never saw one. We had redbuds aplenty, and dogwood and azaleas, but when I was given the book Under the Lilacs I couldn't imagine what they looked like. Then I moved to Ohio and we had boring white lilacs. What's the point?

One day I'll have a garden full of purple lilacs, bluebells, and wisteria. And I shall wear purple too.

Must Read: Our Brokeback Army

Stop whatever you're doing and read this. Larry Johnson at No Quarter posts an exchange of emails between Joe Galloway, longtime military reporter, and the spokesperson for Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Di Rita.

It began with one of Galloway's columns for Knight Ridder wherein the following statement was made:

Van Riper told Knight Ridder that in looking at Rumsfeld's
  leadership he found three particular areas of inability and incompetence.

First, he said, if any battalion commander under him had created so "poor a climate of leadership" and the "bullying" that goes on in the Pentagon under Rumsfeld he would order an investigation and relieve that commander.

Even more than that I focus on (his) incompetence when it comes  to preparing American military forces for the future," Van Riper said. His idea of transformation turns on empty buzz words. There's none of the scholarship and doctrinal examination that has to go on before you begin changing the force."

Third, he said, under Rumsfeld there's been no oversight of military acquisition.

Mr. Rumsfeld has failed 360 degrees in the job. He is incompetent," Van Riper concluded. "Any military man who made the mistakes he has made, tactically and strategically, would be relieved on the spot."

DiRita objected, and called Galloway some names:

You're just becoming a johnny one-note and it's only a couple of steps from that to curmudgeon!!

Galloway responds, eventually with a laundry list of what Rumsfeld's Pentagon has done wrong, including this:

and in the latest QDR, his last, he made none of the hard choices about wasted money on high dollar weapons systems that make no sense in the real world today. the same QDR quite correctly identifies an urgent need for MORE psyops and civil affairs and military police and far more troops who have foreign language training appropriate to where we fight.  and we budget a paltry 191 million, i say MILLION, bucks to do all that.  not even the cost of the periscopes on those oh-so-necessary submarines, or the instruments on one of those f22s. this is what has my attention;  this is what has me in a mood to question over and over and over, waiting for answers that never come, change that never comes, course corrections that never come. you wanted some specifics. there are some

Di Rita's response:

This is tough stuff, and we're all hard at it, trying to do what's best for the country.

Then Galloway brings tears to my eyes with this: (warning: have tissues at the ready)

i can wish that your boss had surrounded himself with close advisers who had, once at least, held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, over and over, "You are going to be all right. Hang on! Help is coming. Don't quit now..." Such men in place of those who had never known service or combat or the true cost of war, and who pays that price, and had never sent their children off to do that hard and unending duty. i could wish for so much. i could wish that in january of this year i had not stood in a garbage-strewn pit, in deep mud, and watched soldiers tear apart the wreckage of a kiowa warrior shot down just minutes before and tenderly remove the barely alive body of WO Kyle Jackson and the lifeless body of his fellow pilot. they died flying overhead cover for a little three-vehicle Stryker patrol with which i was riding at the time. i could wish that Jackson's widow Betsy had not found, among the possessions of her late husband, a copy of my book, carefully earmarked at a chapter titled Brave Aviators, which Kyle was reading at the time of his death. That she had not enclosed a photo of her husband, herself and a 3 year old baby girl. those things i received in the mail yesterday and they brought back the tears that i wept standing there in that pit, feeling the same shards in my heart that i felt the first time i looked into the face of a fallen american soldier 41 years ago on a barren hill in Quang Ngai Province in another time, another war. someone once asked me if i had learned anything from going to war so many times. my reply: yes, i learned how to cry. Jg

You can probably guess what the reply was. Go read the complete exchange, including the KR article that started it all, and Gen. Barry McCaffrey's instructions to Joe to print it all online. (It's easier to read if you make the text bigger. And try to control your anger, I found it distracting when I chanted curses at Rumsfeld and Bush as I read.)

Big Girls, It Turns Out, Are Really Good at Recognizing Bullshit

I was sickened yesterday when I read a post by pseudo-liberal blogger John Aravosis calling Senator Pat Roberts, who'd acted in a cowardly way, a "big girl." Now I see there were plenty of others who felt the same way, though you wouldn't know it by reading his blog comments—he deleted most of them.

(For background, go here and here and here and here.)

I expect Aravosis is feeling some heat, but hey, he's a big girl, he can take it.

See? There I go using the term for what it really is—a compliment.

I've been a parent to two little girls, who are now big girls. We used to tell them, when they did things like use the potty or tie their shoes, "You're such a big girl!" It was never, ever, a phrase that implied they were cowards, or acting like a senator who was willing to trade civil liberties for a safe life.

It's because I've raised two girls I'm especially sensitive to language that attempts to put them in their place. Even though one competes in basketball and track, all the while maintaining straight A's and a wicked sense of humor, her gender is being used to imply that a cowardly senator is less than "a man".

And my comments to that effect are deleted.

And worse, other commenters decide we should just shut up already. "Move on." We're "in the minority." We "have become increasingly nasty and shrill."

When someone uses sexist language to make a point—a point that a leading Republican Senator is a coward—those of us who object are told to shut up and get over it. Our issues are, perhaps, valid, but not that important when there's a bigger picture to be painted.

Bullshit. I can talk, chew gum, and kick ass at the same time. The use of sexist language "all for a good cause" is not okay. Just because we aim our guns at the same target doesn't mean I'll keep silent when your behavior is offensive. And those who tell me I should do so—well, they deserve pie in the face.*

I can't respond by removing AmericaBlog from my blogroll, because it's not there, but I did have it bookmarked. I used to enjoy reading the posts from Chris in Paris—he kept the same hours I do—but I can get my Euro news elsewhere.

I just hope the next time Aravosis calls someone a "big girl" it's because she's just used the potty. Otherwise I know some really big girls who'll give him the shit he deserves.

*A reference to the famous Kos "pie fight" that began when women objected to an ad at DailyKos depicting Ginger and Mary Ann in a pie fight. The resulting put downs of women and their "unimportant issues" caused many a blogger to de-blogroll Kos. (See? Us liberals can actually think for ourselves without help from our blog daddies!)

Cymru, Here I Come

Another trip to Wales is in my future...to the Hay Festival. Bill Clinton said it's like Woodstock, with books. I managed to score tickets to see Al Gore—not difficult: they were still available last Sunday.

My question for Al Gore: When does An Inconvenient Truth open in England? I can't find the answer anywhere on those internets he invented.

But before that I'm traveling to Wales to see Chepstow Castle with my Norman class. I'm thinking Al Gore could learn a few lessons from William the Conqueror. If only he'd had more archers during the 2000 election...we'd all be driving hybrids.