F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

Police were out in the middle of the day looking for a nine year old girl who decided to walk downtown-in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Police? Two in the afternoon? Oh my god! I’m surprised they didn’t call out an Amber alert.

I hate to say it, but when I was nine years old I was taking trains and busses alone, into a much more dangerous city than Lincoln. Nine years old is a little to old to be calling out the cops because she wandered away from the house. I have to wonder how much of this is because the parents were concerned they’d be cited with neglect if anyone saw her alone? Unless the girl is somehow mentally disabled, or handicapped, it does not strike me as unreasonable to walk downtown on a summer afternoon (though that’s a hell of a walk from where she lived).

(Imagine me using my "old lady reminiscing voice" here) Why, when I was nine I got on my little yellow Schwinn bicycle and pedaled it all the way to Evanston. And back. And no one called the cops to report me missing. 

(Still staying with the "old lady reminiscing voice") In fact, on a summer afternoon, my mother would have expected me to get away from the house, and if I didn’t, odds were pretty good she’d tell me to get lost. That’s what children did. They got on their bikes and left the house in the morning, came home for lunch, and then stayed out until dinner. The only restriction I remember was that I needed to be home by the time the street lights came on, which was pretty late.

Of course, I never carried a bible with me on my adventures. Sometimes, I took comic books.

"Oh noooo, something could have happened!"  Really people, something can happen anywhere, anytime. At some point, you have to teach children some basic street smarts without resorting to the scary idea that there is danger lurking five steps away from your front yard.

Oh never mind, just teach them to be terrified, it’s easier.

Anyone want to buy the old central post office in Chicago? The one over the highway? Starting bid is $300,000. but the utility bills are murder. Oh, and you can’t tear it down (due to the being over the highway problem) or change anything because it is an historic landmark.

Still, it would make one hell of a performance space like they did with the old library.

Come on, how many buildings have an expressway running through it? How cool is that?

Canning and home preserving are becoming popular again. That’s kind of neat-I won’t be the only weirdo shoving food into jars all summer. A quick look at my plum tomatoes taking over the garden has me thinking I ought to pickle some green ones. No, I don’t like pickled green tomatoes (or anything pickled for that matter) but everyone else I know does. Canning and preserving makes you a popular person around the holidays.

It is a bit surprising that people are taking up canning as a way of economising. I can see it if you already have the equipment, jars and understand the techniques, but there’s a pretty substantial up-front investment. You wouldn’t be saving much the first year out-unless you have fruit trees, which is like growing gold. We planted Concord grapes this year, but I wouldn’t expect the vines to take off and bear fruit for some time-and hell, by then I hope the economy is in better shape. No, I can’t see preserving as a money-saving effort, but I can see it being a way to enjoy superior quality to what is in the stores.

Where you can save some real money is baking bread. Even a crappy loaf costs a couple bucks, and a poorly baked homemade bread is going to be better. You can prolong the shelf-life of most bread by adding vital wheat gluten to the dough, or ascorbic acid. That’s still much less preservative than store-bought bread.

Anyway, here are some basics for getting started with canning that I’ll pass along in the event anyone wants to try their hand at it. I do recommend getting a copy of the Blue Book, or So Easy to Preserve, and reading first. Get familiar with how the equipment works, and then decide if you really want to make the investment. Then, think about what sort of food you will be preserving. If you think there is the slightest chance you’ll want to can low-acid foods, just buy a pressure canner. You’ll save the expense of having two canners (you can use a pressure canner as a water-bath canner) save space, and they are generally better made. Then, decide what size jars you’ll be using. Also, consider your stove-you cannot use a canner with a ridged bottom on an electric stove. Glass-topped stoves really aren’t good for canning either from what I hear.

I knew I wouldn’t be canning half gallons of food, so I bought a smaller pressure canner. When canning, there needs to be at least a few inches of water covering the tops of submerged jars-a small canner is only suitable for pints and half pints. For my family, that’s a good size for most foods, but if you have a large family that can plow through a quart of chutney at Sunday dinner, you might want the larger canner. Many of the pressure canners double as pressure cookers which is helpful if you ever find yourself taken with the idea that you’re going to cook a massive quantity of beans. If you do cook a massive quantity of beans in the pressure cooker, be sure the valves are clear when you go to use it for canning-beans can be pesky.

These are the sorts of things I wish someone had shared when I was first starting to can, and I’m sure there are a million other things worth noting. Food safety is important, but if you follow the directions, keep things clean and store the food carefully, you shouldn’t have any problems. Given that there is a massive recall at the moment of powdered milk-an item I use and have always considered "safe", the chances of getting ill from food prepared according to safety standards at home look slim compared to the corporate food culture. Remember when they recalled puffed rice? Puffed rice and powdered milk-and you’re worried about home canning?

You can certainly feel free to pick my brain for canning advice, and if I can’t answer your questions, there are home economists at most Extention offices that can answer just about anything (ours is fantastic, though she only works three days a week now). I know my way around bread as well, so please feel free to ask. I’m not being paid to say this, but I prefer Ball jars for canning. I know there are some very attractive European jars out there, but for reliability, and just fitting well into the limited pantry space, I like jars with rubber-rimmed lids and rings. You can buy used jars and rings, but lids cannot be re-used. When buying jars at yard sales, run a finger along the edge and make sure there aren’t any chips or nicks, and look closely for any cracks. Rings should be free of dents as they might cause the seal to fail. I put everything, including high-acid fruit jams through a water bath canner. I know some people do not, but they are idiots. Sorry to be so frank, but it is true. You need to put everything you can through either a water bath (high acid foods) or a pressure canner ( low acid foods). If you can’t handle this, make use of your freezer. There are very good freezer jams, lemon curds and the like that can be made and frozen right in the canning jars.

Finally, don’t use paraffin to seal jars. I don’t know why they even sell it in the canning aisle anymore-it seems like inviting food borne illness.

Happy canning!

The next time a journalist sneers about "bloggers" and their lack of credibility, just give them THIS link, penned by a gen-u-ine, degreed, capital "J" journalist at the Lincoln Journal Star. I can believe someone wrote it, but I have a more difficult time understanding how this dreck made it past an editor.

In eight years of living in Nebraska I can honestly say I’ve met a total of two individuals I could describe as having any degree of intellectual curiosity. One is a Fundamentalist and the other (I’m pretty sure) is autistic. I might be wrong, but I’ll go out on a limb and assume neither would stay home to watch Nebraska’s favourite son, Larry the Cable Guy, who filled 50,000 seats at Memorial Stadium last weekend for a 4th of July show. I know, that’s a broad brush-but in a city of 250,000 people 50,000 isn’t statistically insignificant. Again, I’m not being a snob-I used to watch Hee Haw, and found it amusing, but I didn’t embrace Hee Haw as a way of life. I didn’t find in Minnie Pearl some sort of role model. Sometime between the 70’s and today we lost the ability to grasp parody. The fact that Bush was elected in 2000 based on his appeal as "A guy you’d have a beer with", should serve as a frightening example of where this sort of lacking intellectual curiosity can lead us. 

The anti-intellectualism everyone found so shocking during the election seemed only more of the same from my daily existence here. Thankfully, the population is sparse, and I live on a farm so my dealings with people are mercifully limited. Lest you think I’m taking a cheap shot at those without degrees, let me assure you I am not. There are plenty of degreed idiots walking around, or sitting in newsrooms publishing rubbish like what is linked above. You don’t need a degree to crack a book, or give something more than ten seconds of consideration before forming an opinion-or better admitting that you can’t form an opinion. When was the last time you heard someone admit they didn’t have an answer or a conclusion to be reached? I swear, people treat it like they will lose points or something for saying: "I don’t know."

No, I’m talking about people who, when engaged in conversation respond with gems such as:

"Carter? Was he like a president or something?"

I don’t know, maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy but I think that someone in their thirties with a university degree ought to know that Carter was president. I don’t think that’s setting standards too high. I’ll bet he knows what time Larry the Cable Guy comes on the telly.

I don’t know why the elitist smear works, as it ends up being cast at unlikely "elitists" like union organisers, and Catholic Workers. Perhaps it is simply a convenient, all-purpose insult like "Pinko" designed to marginalise anyone that might question whether they are as content as they’ve been told they are. I’m not convinced it has to do with money, or social status, or educational level. I do however worry that it is dangerous, if only because time and again we can see examples of how the mentality turns into witchunts. Elitist mobs might be irritating, but they don’t tend to get violent and burn crosses on people’s lawns, or beat them up because they feel threatened by their sexual orientation.

Obviously, it was a business decision to begin running stories like the one above in newspapers. These stories wouldn’t run if they didn’t generate page views. I clicked on it too, so I bear a good deal of responsibility in keeping the beast alive. The difference is that I don’t take the content seriously, and can still be mortified that the journalist treated the subject as though it had merit. If that makes me an elitist, I won’t shy from the label.

My first thought reading THIS article about a woman reading her way through a collection of 6,000 books was:

"6,000? That’s not very many books."

Just last evening we were discussing the possibility of an outbuilding, or a trailer to house our continually growing collection. When you give serious consideration to building a free standing library to house your books, you know you are a serious book collector.

Pageturners is an excellent used book store, she’s picked a great place to purchase books.

"Mama?" Danny asked from the back of the car, "have we tooken lunch with us?"

Seeing an opportunity, I informed him that "tooken" isn’t a word.

"Well, Mama, how do you know?"

"I’ll tell you what, we’ll go home and look it up in the OED and if it isn’t in there, it isn’t a word."

"What’s the OED?"

"The Oxford English Dictionary. You know those big brown books on the two shelves by the stereo?"

"Yes."
"That’s the OED. If "tooken" is a word it will be in there.

Later:

"Uh oh. Well, isn’t that interesting, tooken is indeed a word, obscure, but a word."

What’s more, he used it correctly, and is now prepared to inform anyone that dare correct him that "tooken" is in the OED.