While I'm Away...

I'll take advantage of the superior creative energy of others while I'm out of town:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Fancy feast? Check. Running shoes? Check. The entire staff here at BK is off to Seattle for a fun-filled week-long fiesta with The-Most-Awesome-Rock-Star-Of-A-Sister and her family. Perhaps we'll do some blogging from the top of the Space Needle, perhaps we'll just sit around on our cyber arses and do nothing. We've been there before so we know how to blend in: 

1. Don't wear anything stylish. It has to come from REI and no high heels.

2. Do outdoorsy stuff. We're planning to climb Mount Ranier -- for about 15 minutes. 

3. Know how to behave like a native. We plan on spending most of our time drinking tons of awesome coffee and doing socially responsible stuff.

Said Old Gentleman Gay, “On a Thanksgiving Day,
If you want a good time, then give something away.”
So he sent a fat turkey to Shoemaker Price,
And the shoemaker said, “What a big bird! how nice!
And since a good dinner’s before me, I ought
To give poor Widow Lee the small chicken I bought.”

“This fine chicken, oh, see!” said the pleased Widow Lee,
“And the kindness that sent it, how precious to me!
I would like to make some one as happy as I—
I’ll give Washerwoman Biddy my big pumpkin pie.”
“And oh, sure,” Biddy said, “’tis the queen of all pies
Just to look at its yellow face gladdens my eyes.

Now it’s my turn, I think; and a sweet ginger cake
For the motherless Finigan children I’ll bake.”
“A sweet cake, all our own! ’Tis too good to be true!”
Said the Finigan children, Rose, Denny, and Hugh;
“It smells sweet of spice, and we’ll carry a slice
To poor little Lame Jake—who has nothing that’s nice.”

“Oh, I thank you, and thank you!” said little Lame Jake;
“Oh, what beautiful, beautiful, beautiful cake!
And oh, such a big slice! I will save all the crumbs,
And will give ’em to each little sparrow that comes!”
And the sparrows they twittered as if they would say,
Like Old Gentleman Gay, “On a Thanksgiving Day,

If you want a good time, then give something away.”

—Marian Douglas.

Source: A Treasury of Verse for Little Children, edited by M. G. Edgar, illustrated by Willy Pogany

Mo Vengo!

We are on our way to Roma for the Grape Escape thanks to Cynthia at Muse Swings and Lavinia Ladyslipper at the Birdbath Chronicles. We at Blicky Kitty Mousing Around Tours take your cultural enlightment very seriously, so we have scanned the blickosphere for our humble contribution. All you'll need for the tour is an updated version of Quicktime and your Mouse. Oh sorry, could you wait here while I give the servants instructions for my absence (feel free to use your mouse to enjoy the view)?

Here you can see the great travails suffered by armchair travelers of yore; destined to squint into a small device for hours on end, only to emerge cross-eyed and tripping over the ottoman or the children. We, gentle readers, now have the advantage of miraculous mousing technology at our fingertips. Let us start our tour in the Vatican Square where we see the stunning scale and measured elegance of Bernini's colonnades. Be sure to press the green turning arrows then click where you want to view so you can have a good look around. Mmmm... I can almost smell those roasted chestnuts and the soft rustle as a flight of pigeons takes wing.

OK back on the bus. Lavinia, Cynthia stop teasing each other. Did Willow wander off to the opera? Stevie, oh no, she's being swarmed by a crowd hoping to see the sketches she's just made. Anna's being hounded by a tall dark stranger who thinks mustaches are hot. Next stop? Sant'Andrea al Quirinale, OK move your mice on the image to look around. This was built between 1658 and 1678 by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Giovanni de' Rossi and is one of the finest examples of Roman Baroque architecture. Here we see a masterful fusion of architectural form and sculptural detail.

Walking Along the Tiber, Rome

OK I think we've lost half the group. They've wandered into a local bar... Oh good Deb, Kat, Queenie you're still here right? Well let's just poke our heads inside of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, shall we? Designed by Francesco Borromini, this masterpiece of Baroque architecture was constructed between 1638 and 1641. Want some more classical antiquity? I'm just going to step into my new time machine sponsored by Google, just click the play button.

The Villa Doria Pamphili, Rome

On the way home we'll just stop in Florence to see the 15th century Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce designed by Brunelleschi. I love it for it's utter simplicity. Last time I was there I was too busy ogling the Giotto frescos and finding the tombs of Rossini, Alberti, Galileo, Michelangelo and Dante (whose mortal coil resides in Ravenna) to appreciate this space.

OK that's about it! Hope you enjoyed your tour. Feel free to email Blickykitty@comcast.net if you've experienced any mouse-related or technical difficulties on our tour. For those of you whose flights connected in France, you might want to make a quick pit stop in Amiens to see the cathedral architecture (click on any of the bulls eye shapes to view). Or if you've always wanted to soar through the clouds like Daedalus into the apse of a gothic cathedral while a wicked smart English dude provides a personal tour but never knew how, click here.

Blicky; the Baleful Scourge of Your Inbox

I try not to let this get out, but you know those email forwards you get? "Forward this to seven people you care about in the next ten minutes and you will have good luck." As some of you know, I love to devour a good book just as much as good cuisine. So... if Light in August by William Faulkner is a nice roasted chicken in bitter orange and garlic deglazing sauce, and the Sedaris book you fished out of the dump book swap is like a decent pizza, the email forward is the literary equivalent of a week-old pile of fritoes found next to an old pair of shoes in the garage. Well, Blicky actually authors the majority of them. He is out of town this week. I think he and some undisclosed associates have hired a psychic to help them channel the ghost of Lee Atwater so Blicky can make his big comeback in DC. He asked me to write a few in his absence and left me some pointers.

1. Meow lay on the saccharin.

2. No font size is too big, meow.

3. Meow never have too many wiggling animals.

4. Include cute animal or spurious political claim -- or both.

5. Meow, don't be a slave to coherent thoughts.

Ok let's give it a whirl. Feel free to chime in with your own ideas and we can start circulating it. I'm embellishing things from actual email forwards:

Just think, if the entire population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction. 

Which, apparently they can accomplish while staying in line which is a little disturbing but nevertheless impressive and...

Did you know that  111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321? Weird huh?

I believe that children are the future and they will have a future as long as the president isn't a secret Muslim bent on our destruction. 

And we all love children, especially if we've given birth to them while being cruelly forced to stand in line with your entire country.  Always remember that the love that you carry in your heart is many a splendid thing and, like a festering illness, will grow if you pass it along.

Send this to five people you love. If you do, you'll receive an email telling you which common vegetable might be poisoning the children in your life. If you don't, then you probably don't love them anyway. Ok, now I just need a cute animal.

Ljubljana, March 1990

Ljubljana is a lesser-known artistic gem of a city. These pictures were taken in March, 1990 about a year before the Ten Day war that established Slovenian Independence and I have often wondered how that war and the strife in Serbia and Croatia touched the lives the people I met there. Dragons are the symbol of the city because, according to Greek myth, Jason and the Argonauts sailed up the Danube after finding the Golden Fleece in Colchis. Jason slew a monster in a lake between present day Vrhnika and Ljubljana. Dragon sculptures grace the whole city. All I really wrote about in my travel journal of a sophomoric 20-something a were the tall handsome men. My journal wouldn't be anything like Eat Pray Love. Maybe a better title would have been  Wander, Drink, Flirt.  Or maybe Drink, Flirt, Behave-Stupidly followed by Wander, Wander, Wander.

This is the marketplace. Countless stalls lined the square selling fresh flowers; daffodils, roses, narcissus as well as fruits, vegetables, herbs, sweaters, baskets and pottery. We stayed with a woman who looked a bit like the vendor pictured above. She rented rooms in her lovely little cottage with an overgrown garden and a little shrine covered with ivy. She was a diminutive person with a broad, warm smile. She wore a black kerchief on her head, a woolen shawl tied around her waist and heavy black woolen socks. She moved so slowly I remember, even when she spoke. German was our only common language. My abilities are usually only good enough to find out someone's zip code, but my friend was able to discern from her the admonition, "be sparing." Yeah didn't make much sense to us either.

This is Ljubljana castle in the background. A year later it would house a TD, (Territorial Defence forces) air defense unit.

There were relatively few American tourists in Yugoslavia in 1990 because countries were just starting to open up after decades of Soviet control. Two young women (one of them six feet tall) attracted some curiosity and this became more pronounced as we traveled further east towards Hungary. Lacking the proper transit vista, we were unceremoniously dumped off the train late at night in downtown God-Knows-Where Yugoslavia. There was a little hotel not far from the station where a large group of people gathered to celebrate the Festa della Donna (like Mother's day). Two very nice women vouched for some young men willing to drive us the 30 KM to the border station in Gorbican where we could obtain vistas. "They are nice boys," they said in lightly-accented English. We had no Yugoslavian money left to buy a train ticket or a hotel, so I guess we thought our best bet would be to get the vistas, then come back to wait for the next train. All I wrote in my journal of course was that one of the boys was good looking, but now it strikes me as an extraordinary kindness. 

We made it safely to the border station and left all our stuff with the boys, who remained in the car and drank. They only had an hour to spare so they asked us to hurry. The Hungarian vistas were relatively easy to obtain. My companion had struck up a conversation with an Italian truck driver whom I was trying to ignore. When they informed us that our vistas were only good for crossing then and there, he offered to drive us in his 18-wheeler to Budapest. Only one of us was allowed to cross back over to get our stuff. I volunteered, yelling "You better love me for this." This apparently earned me some derisive snorts from the Hungarian soldiers who were yelling "Bye-bye, I love you!" after I had run off. I ran the entire way, knowing that the Yugoslavian boys who had helped us would need to get going.  At one point I heard a loud shout and the sound of a rifle being cocked so I slowed down to a walk. Only then did it dawn on me that I was running from one communist border station towards another at full clip in the middle of the night. Later Alberto (the Italian truck driver) informed me that he had heard about someone being shot dead for doing the exact same thing. I guess the important thing is that we made it to Budapest safely (after sharing a meal with two middle-aged Italian truck drivers in the kitchen of a recreation hall in rural Soviet Hungary while a wedding reception took place outside) and that the kittens will not be permitted out of the house until they're 30.

A Mother's Haiku

Photograph credit: Mopsy

Sippy cup under

The carseat has made cheese

I call shamenbert

The Gallo Nero

Pour a glass and pull up a chair! In our eager anticipation for the upcoming Grape Escape hosted by Cynthia at Muse Swings and Lavinia Ladyslipper at the Birdbath Chronicles, Blicky and I thought we'd crack open a nice bottle of Chianti and tell some stories we learned from Blicky's Italian friend, no he's not Joe Sixpack, he's Giovanni Damigiana. Not translating for you? Probably not, because most of the working class Joes I met in Tuscany were (*gasp*) socialists. Ruuuuunnn! Hide the children! Here's a damigiana:

 You lug it home (getting un ernia in the process) and bottle it yourself. It holds a few months worth of wine, or a month for the truly sodden and committed. After capping about thirty bottles, Giovanni Damigiana told us a wonderful tale about Chianti.

The story hearkens back to the medieval days when the Ghibellines (behind their swallow tail crenelations) warred with the Guelfs. Italy was not yet Italy, but an unruly conglomerate of city-states presided over by petulant and ostentatious dukes and lords. The Italian language had come into use only recently when Dante wrote the Divine Comedy, establishing the Florentine dialect as standard Italian.

The Florentines and the Sienese had been locked in a long, often bloody territorial struggle. It was finally decided that the dispute would be settled in the fairest way possible. A party of men would depart from each city at dawn when the cock crowed and the point at which they met would constitute the border between their territories. Now the Florentines, being an extraordinarily clever people, had a beautiful rooster ready to serve this most important task. They took this black bird and starved it half to death in the days leading up to the contest. When it was at last the appointed night the poor creature woke up in the middle of the night, screaming for food. The Florentines lost no time setting out. They met at Fonterutoli, which is only about 12 kilometers from Siena. All the area that they acquired through their ruse became known as the gallo nero region; some of the best wine growing land in Italy.

You can always tell a good Chianti from the black rooster, or gallo nero on the bottle. The red background indicates a good, solid Chianto Classico, and a gold background indicates the higher quality Riserva. In order to bear the gallo nero, vineyards must adhere to stringent standards. We here in the states often associate wine with privilege and culture, so I was surprise when Giovanni Damigiana just looked at the alcohol content to see whether the wine was good. "Oh 13, must be good." For those who really want to taste the best, the Brolio Ricasoli is the standard by which all the other Chianti wines are judged. But if you're like me, you'll just look for a high alcohol content and a black bird. Now for our toast: "Qui non beve in compania è un ladro o una spia." (He who doesn't drink in the company of others is either a thief or a spy.) Hey Blicky, why aren't you having any?