Second Breakfast

Cthulhu for President 2004 - Why Vote for the Lesser Evil?

Seems apropos for some reason. Lets get the fully-concentrated evil on the ballot in 2008. No more years! No more years!

I just don’t want to be the running-mate.

I don’t usually comment on current events, because others do it better, but I’m having a hard time letting this one go. Fresh Air featured an interview today with a journalist, Cam Simpson, a Chicago Tribute reporter who has written a story about 12 Nepalese workers who were abducted and executed in Iraq in August. The full story is available at the Chicago Tribune Online.

So here’s where your tax dollars are going:

• Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a division of Halliburton (Dick Cheney’s company), supply most of cheap labor required for support services for the troops in Iraq.
• Because of (legitimate) security concerns, KBR sources most of its workers as so-called Third-Party Nationals.
• Many nations, including Nepal, have banned their citizens from working in Iraq because of concerns of safety and exploitation, but KBR looks the other way.
• KBR uses Middle-Eastern subcontractors to source these workers, who use the same fraudulent and coercive practices that the US condemns in other countries.
• US Federal law requires that companies like KBR provide death and disability benefits to workers in venues like Iraq, but KBR does not inform workers or their families of this, and isn’t paying against any claims.

So the 12 Nepalese workers that the story describes borrowed $3500 (a huge sum!) to work (they were told) in Jordan for $800 per month. Instead, they were taken to Iraq where they would have earned $300 per month, effectively in debt-slavery since they would never be able to pay off the loan given the interest they were charged. On the road from the airport they were given no protection (not cost-effective!), and were kidnapped, held, and gruesomely executed on video a few days later.

We heard very little about this story on the news, even on more serious and balanced sources like NPR.

I feel an enormous sense of anger and shame at my country when it condones and facilitates such exploitation and neglect of human life.

I’m in love with Laurie King’s “Mary Russell” books. I heard about these on (of course) some sort of NPR show, and was intrigued by these stories which centered on Mary Russell, a young woman who meets, befriends, and eventually marries Sherlock Holmes, the detective of literary fame. I ran out and got “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” and was hooked.

King’s Mary Russell character is a young woman, about twenty, who is an orphaned American and a student at Oxford. She’s ferociously intelligent, witty, and written with a great deal of both style and empathy by King. She encouters Holmes in the first book, and develops a friendship with Holmes over the series that quickly develops into a partnership, and then a marriage. I love the alternative take on Holmes himself, as King’s Holmes is amusing in his detestation of the treatment he received at the hands of Conan Doyle. Holmes insists he’s actually quite a bit smarter than Doyle made him out to be.

The books have a great sense of place about them — I thoroughly enjoyed reading “The Moor” while in London, and really wanted to get in a car and drive to the southeast to see the places King describes so well. The books are set just after World War I, and King employs a literary device to set the whole series, in that she tells of how she mysteriously received these manuscripts anonymously, and is simply editing and retelling the stories as she received them.

This latest book focuses on Mary Russell’s family, and the death of her parents that left her orphaned. Was the death of her parents an accident, for which she has been carrying guilt her entire life, or the result of foul play? Set in San Francisco, King looks back onto the events of the Great Fire that almost destroyed the city in 1906.

I’m not at all a fan of the mystery genre, but I find King to be a great writer and this series to be enormously entertaining.

Here’s the entire series at Amazon, but of course you should rush out and buy them at your local bookseller.

When the weather gets cold, there’s nothing better in my mind than good soup. And for the first soup of the cold-weather season, potato-leek soup I think is the best choice. There’s nothing particularly original or special about my potato-leek soup, except that this is how I make it, and Alan likes it.

The story about the soup itself is interesting. Apparently potatoes, a so-called New World crop, were thought to be poisonous, or inedible, or possessed by the devil, or something (sort of like the bad rap the tomato also had in Europe). So Augustin Parmentier was this French guy who was captured during the Seven Years War (which is different from all of the other wars that coursed across the face of Europe at the time in that it lasted seven years) and was a POW in a German camp where he was fed…potatoes. So when he returned to France there was a famine or two, and eventually Parmentier, who was fascinated by food chemistry and remembered his full belly in Germany, eventually convinced his fellow French folk that potatoes were good eats. Read the whole story at soupsong.com.

Items

• 5-6 medium leeks, white part only, cleaned well, cut in half lengthwise and sliced thin
• 3 medium russet potatoes, peeled, halved lengthwise, and also sliced thin
• 3Tb butter (potatoes love butter more than olive oil for some reason)
• 48oz (or so) of vegetable or chicken stock. I am a big fan of Imagine Foods’ “Organic No-Chicken Stock” which you can get at many supermarkets these days.
• 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream or half and half (or milk even if you’re really concerned about fat content)
• 1Tbsp salt
• 1/2 tsp white pepper
• 1 tsp paprika
• 1/2 cup scallions, sliced thin
• 1/4 cup fresh chives, chopped
• A stick blender to puree the soup, or you can do it in your blender (but messier!)

Method

1. Melt butter in soup pot over medium heat and add leeks. Turn heat down a bit and sweat the leeks, covered, for 10 minutes or so, stirring occasionally.
2. Add the potatoes (which you can peel while the leeks are cooking), and add the broth. You want to cover everything with about 2 inches of liquid. Turn up the heat to medium and bring to a boil.
3. Turn down the heat and cook for 15 minutes or until the potatoes are tender.
4. Puree the soup with the hand-blender (or whatever) until smooth.
5. Add the cream (or whatever), white pepper, and paprika and combine.
6. Add the salt to taste. Potatoes need a fair amount of salt, but you may disagree.
7. Serve topped with scallions and chives.

Serves 6-8. Reheats beautifully.

This is the sequel to “Wicked“, Macguire’s very popular debut novel, which retells “The Wizard of Oz” from the point of view of Elphaba, the so-called “Wicked Witch of the West”. In “Wicked” Macguire recreates Oz with a level of complexity, irony, and sophistication that makes the fairytale land in Baum’s version almost unrecognizable. Macguire’s telling has been produced into a wildy-successful eponymous musical, and the novel has been launched into the status of “cultural phenomenon” (whatever that means, I think marketing people make it up).

“Wicked” ends with the death of Elphaba (the “Witch”) at the hands of Dorothy Gale, the pig-tailed visitor to Oz from Elsewhere. “Son of a Witch” deals with the aftermath, and centers on the character of Liir, a teenage boy who may or may not be Elphaba’s son, who is struggling to find purpose and meaning in his life. What strikes me most about this book is the incredible tenderness and sympathy that Macguire has for his characters. He reminds me of LeGuin in his ability to use simple language in such a precise and expressive way.

Since “Wicked” Macguire has developed for himself something of a cottage industry in reinterpreting classic stories from alternate points of view: “Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister” as a retelling of Cinderella, “Lost” as somehow inspired by Dickens’ “Christmas Carol”. The latter book made little sense to me in that vein, and in general I think Macguire’s best writing can be found in these Oz retellings.

“Son of a Witch” probably doesn’t stand particularly well on its own, as too much of the focus of the book is on the consequences of events that took place in the first novel, and too many important notions are not at all explained for the naive reader (for example, the important difference between [talking] Animals and [dumb] animals, their political plight, and the discrimination they face).

A gorgeous, worthy successor.