Love Me Tender

A California chef has been tried for murder after accidentally killing and boiling his wife. The case had been simmering for a while. Jurors were not persuaded on numerous fronts. It was difficult to make the case that the man had accidentally boiled his wife, inasmuch as he confessed to sticking her in a fifty-five gallon drum head first, keeping her submerged with weights, and slow-cooking her for four days. This, the jury felt strongly, had intention written all over it, even though--as the defense pointed out--the accused was a professional chef and yet failed to add the celery and carrots at any point. By chance or no, once he discovered he had boiled his wife in a vat, he disposed of most of the remains, by now quite flavorful, in the grease pit at his restaurant. Only the skull was left, and that, he says, he stored in the attic at his mother's house. This had the ring of truth, because the attic is where you store everything you don't really want anymore but can't bring yourself to throw away. Police dispatched to the location were unable to find the skull, but no one ever finds anything they're actually looking for in an attic. If they had gone up there to look for the Christmas ornaments, they might easily have stumbled across the skull. However, to date, no portions of the body are in evidence or, to put it another way, there are no leftovers.

Boiling a corpse is not unprecedented. In 1796, fierce General "Mad Anthony" Wayne sat down and died in a chair of gout. (The local museum still has the Chair Of Gout.) He was buried under the blockhouse and remained there for 13 years before his son arrived to unearth his remains and take them to the family plot in Pennsylvania.  To everyone's surprise, most of him was still in nearly mint condition, preserved by the cold, when he was dug up. The son, who had been counting on a clean set of bones, had him stripped, dismembered, and boiled, and the meat was discarded. Nobody trusts gouty meat.

It is only natural for someone aiming to dispose of incriminating remains to fall back on the knowledge of his own experience--in the case of the California chef, cooking. Rare is the mailman, for instance, who has not given at least some thought to how to hide a body. Practices change over time. In my early days as a letter carrier, we would probably have gone with the old standby, misdelivering the corpse to a vacant house. Everybody does something like that sooner or later. Or, bodies can simply be stacked in the mailman's own garage with the rest of the mail. Modern carriers need only slap a garbled barcode on the remains and slip them in the mail stream, where they will loop endlessly around the country being stamped "undeliverable" until they fall apart.

The jury also had trouble believing that the murder itself was not deliberate, although here the defense was stronger. The accused admitted he had duct-taped his wife and then fallen asleep, and to his dismay she was dead by the time he woke up. Tellingly, he gave several different versions of why he duct-taped his wife, including to keep her from getting into her car while she was drunk and high on cocaine--a public service, if you will--and to get her to quit talking so he could get some sleep. The latter version is the more plausible. Anyone who drops dead when prevented from speaking is probably a pretty noisy individual.

He got away with his crime for two years, but panicked when it appeared that the police were closing in on him. He threw himself off an 80-foot cliff but succeeded only in tenderizing himself. But he was wise to try to avoid apprehension.

They were going to grill him.

We Should Count

All over the nation, citizens are getting ready to vote, have already voted, or are watching reality TV. The only thing that unites us is our disgust at the current Congress, but we are allowed to vote for only our own familiar wretched portion of it, and so the entire despised cast will be reinstalled more or less intact. Flyers paper the country featuring unflattering photos of politicians touched up in blood red and variously described as job- or baby-killers, or champions of vulture capitalism and the progeny of rapists.

Some citizens will be targeted by robo-phone calls informing them that we're voting alphabetically this year and if their names end in a "z" their votes will not be counted. Others will be told the election is in December, or that they will be turned away at the polls without an affidavit signed by both their mistresses and their wives. A Democratic congressman will be welded to his seat until dead by virtue of his newly-drawn district with tentacles wrapped around every reliable vote for fifty stringy miles. A Republican will too, and also buy a voting-machine company. The machines may or may not have a paper trail, but any mysterious vote-flipping or vote-cancelling glitch inserted into them will be undetectable. It is not a sure thing that the majority of Americans will make the best choice, but it is an even dicier proposition that the choice they actually make will be reflected in the results. Jimmy Carter is nowhere in sight. Something about this system smells pretty bad.

But here in Oregon, democracy smells like bacon.

Fourteen years ago, when it was first proposed that we conduct our elections entirely by mail ballot, I was appalled. I had always found it bracing to stride through the slanting rain to the church basement, sign my name for the smiling matron manning the "A through M" line, and snick the curtain shut in my booth. It was a sacrament. Vote-By-Mail would be like taking communion with a scratch 'n' sniff card. But the proposal passed handily, and in the next election, my ballot arrived in the mail with the Voter's Pamphlet.

And I was won over. I opened my ballot and spread it out on the kitchen counter. I knew who I was voting for in the major races. But there were problems. There was always a gaggle of judges to pass judgment on, people I'd never heard of. One boasts a commitment to fairness and integrity. His opponent is uniquely qualified by her intelligence, fair-mindedness and integrity.

Or, elsewhere, a "yes" vote on a ballot measure "reverses the existing law prohibiting the enforcement of the ban on mandatory coherence standards." Without a pencil, a protractor, and a piece of string, I can't tell if I'd be sending money to Darfur or clubbing baby seals.

Our ballots lounge on the kitchen counter as bacon fries in the pan, and bit by bit, as the details are clarified on public radio or by conversations with trusted friends, it gets filled in. We mail it off or drop it at the polls. If we do it early, political phone calls and mailings quit.

But, some worry, what about voter fraud? Doesn't this method of voting make that more likely? Just like everywhere else, dead people show up on the voter rolls, Dick Cheney inexplicably not among them, but they don't vote very hard. And voter impersonation in Oregon occurs between .0009% and .00004% of the time, just like everywhere else. In fact, it only works out to one dude every ten years out in Harney County, and they'd totally nail his ass if it wasn't always during bow-hunting season.

I am confident my vote will count in Oregon. Not for president, of course--that's up to Ohioans, and it's a whole different problem. And this year, in my state, bless its ferny little heart, I get to vote in favor of a ballot measure that amends the constitution by making "grammatical and spelling changes." Next year: jail time for apostrophe abuse.

For the rest of you, protect your vote. Demand hand-counting of ballots. It's important. Because depending on the results of Tuesday's election, we will have a planet uninhabitable in either fifty years, or a hundred.

And You Can Walk On Balls

My first team

A lot of people get confused about major league baseball because it isn't the way they remember it. They think their city has a team, only to find that come spring the league has metastasized and their team is no longer there at all, but has become the Las Vegas Sequins or the Mississippi Girth, and they just can't bring themselves to care anymore. Or, like me, they are Red Sox fans and their team starts winning and they feel disoriented and off-balance.

So let's do a little history. Baseball is a very old game. It has been around since before time was invented and is distinguished to this day by the lack of a clock. Olden baseball players used to keep playing until the ball hit a badger or a wolverine and then everyone got to run at once. A somewhat later version called "stool-ball," though open-ended, tended to be quicker. There was only one pitcher, no one volunteered to catch, and the game was over as soon as the stool-ball was hit, until a new ball could be produced the next morning. By the mid-1500s, the game resembled modern baseball in many respects. The ball was set up on a tee and everyone got a chance to whack it off, but the bat was much more splintery and everyone complained about players scratching their balls.

Preparing the stool-ball

It wasn't until 1845 that things settled down with the Knickerbocker Rules which prohibited, among other things, gunning the ball at a runner's head (where the term "out" originated). Around this time the first uniforms were invented by the New York Knickerbockers, which led to a lot of team spirit if nothing else. Finally another team, the Manhattan Nine, invented different uniforms and it was game on, or would have been, if either team had wanted to ferry across the Hudson, which they didn't. So both teams stayed put and played with themselves.

By 1876 the National League came into being and waited around for the American League to show up in 1901 so they could finally play in the World Series. Everything ran smoothly from then on, with the team with the best record in the National League facing off against the Yankees.

There weren't any teams in the West at all until the Interstate Highway System led to the discovery of California in 1958 and two of the New York teams moved there. This began a new era of expansion until by 1962 each league had ten teams. By 1969 the leagues had been dingle-balled up by two more teams each and something had to be done. Each league developed East and West divisions and the playoff series was instituted. For the sake of nostalgia, the Cubs are still eliminated.

But more teams kept coming. Two more in 1977, two more after that in 1993, and a new structure had to be put in place with three divisions in each league. By 1995 the leagues had swelled to an unmanageable 28 teams and the divisions were further partitioned into committees and discussion groups. Also, the Wild Card was introduced to allow losing teams to scrap for a playoff spot, and in response to accusations that this ruined baseball, more wild cards were added. The joker soon followed.

Finally we had the system baseball teams enjoy today, where the season begins in April and the playoffs in late May. By early October, the winners of the previous year's playoffs have been determined, and later in the month, the current year's playoff series is suspended for a week so that they can play in the World Series. Playoffs resume in November. The Red Sox will not be in it.

Go, Girth!

Keeping It Up

Issa, of Alberta Coop Grocery

"Organic" is one of those words that picks up connotations like a co-op hippie picks up odors in the bulk spice aisle. It's a word you can brandish. Or scoff at. It's loaded. So let's review:

Organic does not mean "sort of brown and nubbly." It does not mean "smelling like patchouli oil." It does not mean "more expensive." Okay, it does, but only because someone else is picking up the tab for the cheap stuff, in fertilizer run-off,  groundwater contamination, antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and algae plumes. Most of all, it does not mean "associated with liberals."

Okay, it does.

But that's the nature of things that become buzzwords, however legitimate they may be. People start reacting to them without a lot of critical thought. For instance, I have a visceral and bad reaction to the phrase "family values," even though I think they are a good thing. Our own family values elevated Scrabble and backyard badminton and summer cookouts with colored aluminum tumblers full of lemonade and walking in the woods and rolling logs for salamanders and putting the salamanders back and replacing the logs and singing in the choir and eating at the same time every night and getting put to bed with a chapter of The Wind In The Willows. Also, we were supposed to get good grades and not be racists.

"Sustainability" is another buzzword you hear a lot lately, and it's one of my favorites.  Unfortunately, a lot of people hear someone going on about sustainability and all they conclude is "that person doesn't want me to ever have any fun." And that's simply not true. We sustainability people want everyone to have lots and lots of fun! Only with Scrabble sets and backyard badminton. We think that should be an easy transition from blasting an ATV all over the desert or gouging up a mountain trail with a motorbike. We like Scrabble. We think you will, too.

So "sustainability" is another one of those words that is beginning to provoke a backlash, especially among fans of unrestrained capitalism. But it shouldn't. It passes no judgment and chooses no sides.

All "unsustainable" means is: you can't keep it up. You might find a politician who will tell you he can keep it up forever, and even provide evidence on Twitter, but trust this: he can't.

There are all sorts of things that are not sustainable. For instance, suppose you get in on the front end of a Specklebutt Corgi boom. You buy a matched set of Specklebutt Corgis for $500 and pretty soon you have another eight Corgis to sell for $500 per, and willing buyers snap them up in hopes they can turn them around at $1000 a pop. This happy circumstance plays out for a few more generations and then the bottom drops out of the specklebutts, and a sorry spectacle it is, too. Corgis are unloaded for free with crate on Craigslist. It's unsustainable. It can't be kept up.

Or say someone finds a huge underground reservoir of prehistoric Corgis in a kibble cave. They are enormous. They are brought up topside a few at time where it is discovered that they have great value as draft animals with their short, massive limbs. Two of them can pull a train by themselves but their antique balls fall off in the modern atmosphere and they cannot reproduce. Nevertheless, prehistoric Corgi futures soar, and the animals are hauled up as fast as they can be hauled. The potential seems endless, but it is not. There are only so many of them. Eventually people will have to figure out how to do without ancient Corgi power, but in the meantime, trainers and Corgi-yoke manufacturers are pulling down solid wages and brokers are making a killing. There's no incentive, in an unrestrained market, to leave any of the proto-fidos down there. And why, the brokers ask, can't we just figure out what to do after we've run through all the dogs?

No reason at all, if we weren't going to be nose-deep in Corgi shit by then.

So when Mitt Romney says, as though this is a good thing, that he will do everything he can to get the last dog out of the ground, I'm going to vote as hard and as often as I can for his opponent. His position is not sustainable, economically or in any other way, and a grown-up would know that and plan ahead. I don't care what the man straps his own dog to.

Space Balls

Felix Baumgartner

So a man ballooned right up under the short skirts of space, jumped out, and plummeted back to the ground. If that sort of thing were easy, it would happen all the time. It would be raining bits of abusive-husband ash, lecherous-boss nuggets, and flaming assholes. But it's hard to do, especially if you're interested in returning the man in original condition. It takes plenty of courage, or some quality that stands in for courage. Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner just accomplished this feat, operating out of the Testicle Proving Ground in Roswell, New Mexico. He was wearing a miracle suit to protect him, a suit five years in the making, emblazoned with his sponsor's logo--Red Bull, the official energy drink of flaming assholes. He was encased in a space-age capsule tethered to a massive helium-filled balloon made of dry-cleaning bags, and on October 13th, 2012, he rose into the air, leaving his sobbing mother behind.

The risks were many. His goal was to reach the very top of the atmosphere at the edge of deep space, where all the blue runs out, a distance of about 24 miles. At 63,000 feet, the blood begins to boil. At 90,000 feet, the temperature is minus-90 degrees Fahrenheit, which is even colder than it would be in Centigrade, and that's without taking wind chill into account. Mr. Baumgartner stepped out of the capsule and shot back to earth. He probably lightened his load right off the bat, unless he took care of that before he left. And he succeeded in one of his goals, which was to surpass the speed of sound. His screams began arriving several minutes after he did. It's hard to imagine anyone having more guts than Felix.

But. It turns out that human blood does not actually boil at 63,000 feet, because if it did, the smaller bones in the skeleton would be al dente by 100,000 feet, and the human would stick to the ceiling of the atmosphere, but he doesn't. He comes right back down. The skin and muscles and other standard wrappings keep the lid on the pot, as it were, although the blood might fizz up a little. Still, it's hard to imagine a braver man than Felix.

Joe Kittinger

But. The other reason we know what happens to a guy's blood at 63,000 feet is that some other guy did this exact same thing fifty years ago, pre-Gatorade, let alone Red Bull, only he went up in a handbasket wearing tin foil and a snug hat. Joe Kittinger was one of the stout pioneers of the space program, and he was testing the proposition that someone who fell out of a spaceship, in those early days before the door latch was perfected, might be returned safely to ground. Joe was not fearless. He had claustrophobia, but apparently was okay with heights. These were the heady first days of discovery, and much was not known. They learned things bit by bit, using such means as setting astronauts on fire. In a test flight, Mr. Kittinger stepped out of the balloon, and the first parachute to unfurl--a stabilizer, designed to keep him from going into a spin, which is only fun for the first few seconds--promptly wrapped around his neck and rendered him unconscious.

On his ultimate flight, he noticed a bit of a rip in his glove on the way up, considered aborting, and then, in words straight out of the space-pioneer handbook, he bellowed "oh, well" into the waning atmosphere and continued up to an altitude of 107,800 feet. By this time his hand had swelled up to the proportions of a Macy's float and he had to complete his descent with one hand tucked into the opposite armpit.

But. His blood did not boil. He survived his death-defying leap, went on to fly 483 missions in Vietnam, was shot down, and was taken prisoner in Hanoi, where he told his captors that they didn't particularly scare him. And I'm thinking they didn't.

Irreverends

Due to the same archaic niceties that lead us to refer, inexplicably, to the "Honorable Justice Clarence Thomas" or to Mitch McConnell as the "distinguished Senator from Kentucky," I am now known, in a certain small circle, as "Reverend Murr." In a sensible world, I would be "Irreverend Murr" at best. Nevertheless I take this as a great honor bestowed upon me by my neighbors Beth and Dean, and also the internet. Beth and Dean wanted to get married and, for reasons known only to them, mine was the name they came up with when casting about for an officiant. They trusted me to come up with suitable oratory for the occasion. Did they know what they were getting into?

"Just don't mention poop," Beth said.

They knew.

There were several outfits willing to ordain me as a minister with no muss, fuss, or money, and I selected the sturdy Universal Life Church, hoping it would allow me to pretend to sell insurance, too. The Universal Life Church has been up and running for over fifty years. They're not big on dogma, and neither am I. The Church believes in "the rights of all people...to practice their religious beliefs...be they Christian, Jew, Gentile, Agnostic, Atheist, Buddhist, Shinto, Pagan, Wiccan, Druid, or even Dignity Catholics."

So it's the Holy Church of Whatever.

The state of Oregon is fine with all this. The state of Oregon does not have the resources or desire to probe officiants for holiness. So I'm not sure why the state of Oregon even cares if an officiant is a legally ordained minister or justice of the peace. Seems like it could be anybody. The mailman, say.

Because when it comes to matters of God, I am officially without opinion. I am an Apatheist. I don't believe, or not believe, or wonder. I just don't care. When presented with a slather of splendors from duck dicks to spittlebug farts, I'm all "ooo! Ooo!" not "author,  author."

None of this bothers Beth and Dean. Beth and Dean are grownups in love, and they know what they're doing, and it's just a small step beyond their mature regard and devotion for each other into the state of Wholly Matrimony. If Oregon is fine with my contribution to this event, that's all we need.

Super profile pic.

So God didn't make it into any of the vows or pronouncements, either, by intelligent design. No one associated with the wedding believes this is a miscalculation. God is busy. Not busy busy, just busy the way all the rest of us are. He joined Facebook on August 6, 2010, and probably hasn't gotten much done since. So far he's gotten 3,332,975 "likes," which is a lot, but not nearly as many as Eminem has. Someone has posted on His page that "God needs a 'love' button. Click 'like' if you agree."

Shoot, everybody needs a love button. I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Anyway, Facebook isn't having it, and that's why there is also no "love with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind" button either.

Meanwhile, the foremost saint in my pantheon, Mark Twain, has only 397,294 "likes." If I and the Church of Whatever have any influence, those numbers are going straight up.

Congratulations, Beth and Dean.

Thanks Again!

Hey Cousin!

Great time over at your house the other night! Sorry about Little Earl. Kids! They're so curious at that age. And clumsy? I don't need to tell you! LOL!!!

Anyway I'm just writing to thank you for the Marionberry-Blueberry pie recipe. Best. Pie. Ever! I couldn't find any marionberries, but I did get plenty of blackberries from over there behind the sewage treatment plant--SO juicy. And I thought I'd go ahead and substitute huckleberries for the blueberries, because I picked a bunch a few weeks ago. Not the sweet blue ones, the red ones. Nobody ever picks those for some reason, that's why I was able to get so many. They'll put a pucker on you, that's for sure. I like them in my pancakes, they're like little tartness bombs going off. You put a mess of red huckleberries in your pancakes, and man, it makes you appreciate the pancake that much more! The parts in between the huckleberries. Anyhoo.

So I really don't know what you mean by "two dry pints berries." What's a dry pint, anyway? I mashed up the blackberries real good and sopped them up between a bunch of paper towels, so I hope that was good enough. Didn't bother with the huckleberries, they're already like little BBs.  Did you really mean to say "juice of two lemons?" That's a lot of lemons. I guess it makes sense if you've got sweet berries, but I got to thinking, I thought, Marly June? Maybe your berries aren't really sweet so much as they're a little ornery. So I put in Kraft caramels instead. And that yummy crust? So I didn't actually have as much butter on hand as you called for. I thought we had some Crisco, but we must have gone through that the night Earl came home from his convention. Uh oh! Did I type that out loud? Ha ha!

Anyhoo. So the crust called for two eggs, and mine were only large, which as you know is the smallest size they come in, so I thought, Marly June? You might just as well put in three, and since I didn't have as much butter as I needed I put in a fourth just for bulk. I must say the dough came out kind of soupy, not that I'm blaming you or anything, LOL! So I had to put in a little more flour until it stiffened up. Unfortunately I ran out of flour before I'd gotten it where I thought it should be, so I threw in some garden lime, and then that puppy just stood right up and barked.

I'm such a silly goose, though, you know me, I didn't even notice that the recipe was enough to make "two thick ten-inch pies," and my pans are all nine inches. And just between you and me, not that your pie wasn't the Best. Pie. Ever!, but I'm not all that big on thick pies since the volcanic cobbler incident. The kitchen never really was right after that one. We just left the oven door open for a few nights and let the mice take care of the worst of it. So then I had this terrific idea: why not make one really big thin pie? Since I had all the filling and crust made up. So I "did the math." I love that expression! What I mean is I kind of guesstimated with my hands what two thick ten-inch pies put together would look like, except thinner, and then I hunted around for a pan. That's when I got my big inspiration. Garbage can lid! I know, right?

I had to roll the dough on the floor, because it wouldn't fit on my cutting board, but it transferred like a dream. First time I've ever regretted getting that shag carpet, but we could all use more fiber, Earl especially. LOL! Slid in the berry filling, and the tapioca for thickener--oh, I didn't have quite enough tapioca, and I was a little worried about that, the last thing I want is for the juice to gang up and lurch out like before, so I just laid in a couple dryer sheets in the middle to give it some structure, and we were good to go. Well! I'll bet you can see what comes next. Sure enough, the garbage can lid was just a little bigger than my oven, but only by a couple inches, it was so close. I don't mind telling you I was miffed, but I'm not going to be outsmarted by a giant thin pie. I closed the oven door as much as it would go and then tented it around the edges with tinfoil. Wallah!

Well, the tinfoil didn't work all that well and the oven never really did get up to temperature. I checked it every hour for a while but it was taking its own sweet time baking up, and man but the kitchen got hot! Ha ha! We decided to just mix up a bucket of margaritas and wait it out on the patio. You know, we could argue the rest of our lives whose turn it was to check the pie, but the important thing is we did wake up because of how chilly it got, and also the sirens.

Anyhoo. Little Earl is thrilled that we're camping in the back yard now. The things he finds and drags into that tent! LOL! And I just want to thank you so much for the recipe. I'm sure that pie is going to wear real well and last us a good number of years, even more if we can get it re-soled. Dinner at our place next time? Just say the word!

((Hugs))

Marly June

Thanks to John D. for the recipe. Really. Best. Pie. Ever.