Whey To Go

A struggle has been brewing between two warring factions of the Department of Agriculture, and no clear winner has emerged, except for the American consumer, who now averages one-quarter cheese by volume, and boy, is he happy.

The Department of Agriculture is interested in promoting good health, and its subsidiary, Dairy Management, is interested in promoting cheese. The dilemma arose when the agency promoting health stripped the fat out of the milk. Something needed to be done with the excess fat, and cheese ensued. The government bought it up and stockpiled it in cool caves in Missouri, to the tune of over four billion dollars' worth. Additional semi-liquid Brie deposits are thought to exist in the shale layers.

The problem was exacerbated by cow enhancement. Early cows were very different from the ones we have today, which have been engineered to be giant udders stabilized with hooves on each corner. These new bovoids are further stimulated by special lighting, in the same manner already proven effective in Las Vegas. They bounce into the barns and hit the slots, ultimately resulting in yet more cheese.

I thought I knew where milk came from when I was a child. God dropped it off cold in a bottle with a cardboard tab and left it on the back porch. Later in the fifties I made acquaintance with some of the early evolutionary forms of cow at my Uncle Cliff's farm in North Dakota. Uncle Cliff maintained a small herd of terrifying black and white cows. I was small and easily stepped on, and I regarded my Uncle Cliff as a giant among men, based on his willingness to wade into the herd and slap rumps to motivate them towards the barn, and also because he was taller than my dad, which, in retrospect, was no big feat. I was able to observe milk being extracted, before it was brought to the kitchen in a bucket for the grownups visiting from the city to ooh and aah over. It was revolting. It was warm and creamy and had little flecks of grass floating in it, instead of cold in a bottle on the back porch, per God's previous arrangements.

Anyway, to recap, the Department of Agriculture has now been forced to contend with the excess of fat brought on by the skimming of milk as recommended by the Department of Agriculture.

Domino's Pizza was one of the first to benefit, when Dairy Management made the recommendation to discard the old recipe, in which tomato sauce product was veneered directly on the cardboard container and dotted with cheese-like nurdles, and introduce the new, in which cheese replaces the bread/cardboard layer, the tomato layer, and the layer on top primarily responsible for strip-mining the roof of your mouth. It was a hit. As the Department maintains,  "cheese can fit into a low-fat, healthy diet," as long as it's wearing its fat pants.

Then a scientist who stockpiled pay from Dairy Management discovered that cheese could help you lose weight, and if a little cheese could do that, just think of what a lot of cheese could do. Advertising was rendered out, cheese sales soared, and when all subsequent efforts to replicate the original scientist's results failed, Dairy Management immediately withdrew its claims, after a few years and a bomb threat from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. Current research is focusing on the ability of cheese to foster hair growth and erections.

Meanwhile, cheese consumption continues to expand. We must move to protect this vital national resource before the big corporations buy up Missouri and drill down our cheddar reserves.

Labors of Love

Mary Ann Dabritz

We've all heard of a labor of love. This refers to any task so odious, so frustrating, so destructive of the temperament that no amount of money could ever induce you to do it. Only love could make you this miserable. Labors of love might include cutting a pattern out of silk. Or knitting (anything). Or, in my house, the annual production of the hazelnut-huckleberry pie. Pie-making in general needs a lot of love behind it, because some of it is going to be destroyed in the process, never to return, and you want there to be some affection left over. They're all a pain. A blackberry pie is preceded by a loss of blood and some scarring. Apple pie always ends up looking like fruit sludge with an attic over it.

The particular treatment of huckleberries in this household comes down from the amazing Mary Ann, who whomps up her own recipes out of sheer exuberance and disdain for standard ingredients. Huckleberries are particularly dear due to their scarcity, and a plain crust does them less honor than a crust made with hazelnuts, which, in spite of what you may have guessed, is the State Nut. Mary Ann makes up things on the fly and uses anything available as long as it's not sugar, in spite of which they taste just fine.

In many ways, she's an artifact, an escapee from the nineteenth century who could have spanked a Conestoga expedition into shape. Once when a group of us went to our mountain cabin for a winter retreat and discovered it minus electricity, we all groaned and repaired to the nearest tavern for beer and pizza whilst waiting for the linemen to hook us back up. Not Mary Ann. She couldn't have been tickleder at the prospect of Making Do. She resolutely stayed behind to see what she could spank up, and as we scritched the ice off the inside of the windows, we told her to have a cake ready when we came back.

We returned to a crackling fire, a respectable sixty-degree temperature, lit candles that were probably made on the spot out of boiled shrew hides, and the unmistakable smell of cake baking over the wood stove. There were no particular cake ingredients in the place, and the contents were a mystery, some without a doubt scraped up off the forest floor. But it was delicious. If she'd have found a bigger mammal, she'd probably have had a wheel of cheese started.

So one of the problems with huckleberries is the picking. It's a pleasant-enough process, but you're an hour into it before you've covered the bottom of the bucket. At minimum wage, a pie's-worth of huckleberries should run you about forty bucks. Every year we go up on the mountain to scavenge our berries and in a very good year we might get enough for five pies. This was not a good year. Mary Ann and I picked for an hour and together we didn't get much more than pancake spangles.  I told Dave the sad news and he promptly donned the stricken look I last saw on him when we found out Roots Brewery was closing down.

The Entire 2010 Huckleberry Haul

When you really love someone, and he really loves hazelnut huckleberry pie, you'll do anything to remove that stricken look, and there's only one thing that will work. Pie crusts are crazy-making. They shouldn't even be attempted for all but about five days out of the month during a woman's reproductive years. A nut crust ups the ante. The crusts are rolled between sheets of wax paper to keep the tears of rage off the dough, and with great care and a hip-hop vocabulary, they can sometimes be transferred to a pie plate in one or two shreddy pieces. They will not be transferred to the state fair.

With a quick glance at our berry haul, during which I was able to get an accurate count of individual berries, I selected a two-inch ramekin from the cupboard and had at it. A single hazelnut huckleberry pie out of my kitchen would run you about a hundred forty bucks, including time in and the exasperation tariff. A two-inch pie? Priceless.

Although somebody's going to pay.

Mine. Go get your own.

Mary Ann does everything for love, but if you want to take a look at what she does for money, take a stroll around A Cast Of Characters. There is no better source on this planet for genuine bronze Otterhound door knockers, among many, many other things. And yes, I do have salamander cabinet pulls.

Something Old, Something New

I don't like to mess with something that's working for me. If looking like a scruffy pound pup moves people to bring me inside and feed me, I'm not going to change just for the sake of dignity. If I've racked up 57 years of continuous air breathing, I don't want to take up scuba diving. Even more adamantly, I will not change anything related to my computer if I've figured out a way to make it work. I may have done the equivalent of taking a document, walking it into a room, getting out the step-stool, hauling the box off the top shelf, grabbing a sticky label and applying it to the document, running around the yard three times and plopping it in the tool shed, but that's where I'll find it again. Don't start telling me I can hit two buttons and shoot it into a safe deposit box a foot away. I don't want to know.

Visual Park Bench #1

So what does my nice host site Blogger do but start making all kinds of template choices available to me? I hate choice. Choice is why we never get out of the grocery store. Choice is why it's almost certain that the latest whiz-bang electronic device we bought was the wrong one. Choice is the enemy of happiness.

Until recently, when I wanted to post a new piece on Murrmurrs, I went to the front door of the site like everyone else and used my key and went straight to the study and cranked one out. Now, thanks to Blogger, I can still get to the study, but not without going through a giant foyer with pretty pictures down the sides. "You can have one of these!" the butler says. "Any one you want! Any color you want!" I'd smack the butler and push on to the study. Finally, one day, I stopped to glance at the pictures.

There are about five new templates with lots of opportunity to re-jigger. Things get bigger, wider, pinker, brighter, right in front of your eyes. I like my old template. And I really hate messing with something that already works. Last time I tried to take a screwdriver to my template, my whole site blew up. You probably heard it from there. Why would I change?

Because it's fatter, and I've put a lot of mental capital in the notion that fatter is better.

Visual Park Bench #2

When I picked out this template, there were about a dozen choices. Mine jumped out at me. It was conservative, stately, a little rumpled, didn't put on airs. It had a name that I do not recall, but it might as well be called "Old Fart With Writerly Aspirations." If you do a casual cruise on the blogosphere and loop into a groove with a lot of author types, you'll see this template a lot. We're drawn to its old-parchment body. Spinster-lady wallpaper drapes down its sides. The blinds are always drawn, and the air is redolent of old books, African violets, medicine, and a little pee. No one with this template is planning to wow anyone with graphics. We are serious wordsmiths, and we don't want anything distracting people from our literary pearls.

Most do not even hang up pictures on their writerly sites. I do, because I worry that if I creep past 600 words a post, my audience will panic and click off. The photographs are little visual park benches. Folks can rest up and then find the stamina to push on to my last, perfect word. I think it's working for me. So why would I change?

Visual Park Bench #3

It's the damn wallpaper. I like it, but I have to squeeze every last thing in a narrow curtain down the center of the page. If a bigger photograph crowds my paragraphs, the words dangle down the edge like they're Chinese. My sidebar is smashed thinner than a passenger on the window seat. It looks like I don't even care about my blogroll. We don't want to put too much pressure on those Poop Posts.

So I've been tinkering with the new templates. I've tried to jigger most of the color and flash out of them. I haven't succeeded in getting them dull enough yet; we may be stuck with the wallpaper and parchment. If anyone has an opinion, hang it off the hem here, but try not to blow anything up.

Junior Trackers

Dave and I are now Junior Tracking Specialists thanks to a three-hour course we took with Ranger Dan. Ranger Dan is earnest, energetic and so thin he needs to bounce around inside his ranger suit to touch cloth. And he has powers. Otherwise I doubt that we would have found ourselves, on any given day, crouched in the sand with our noses a centimeter away from a pile of rabbit doots and worrying them with a stick. Ranger Dan left little doubt that he might have ingested said doots if that were what it took to make positive identification. Ranger Dan was also young and trifocal-free and saw things that (A) we couldn't see, or (B) weren't actually there, and that's powerful.

Our class was divided into three teams, each assigned a set of tracks in the sand to evaluate. Team One pored over a tableau of obvious deer hoofery in hard sand. Team Two had a collection of prints to peruse along with a pile of furry poop, all of it instantly recognizable as belonging to the dog family. They surmised coyote. Our team, consisting of us and a sullen eighth-grader who nonetheless failed to bring our average age down to within shouting distance of the other teams, was inexplicably assigned a patch of soft sand with something that may or may not have been tracks and looked like so much punctuation. We also found rabbit doots, and that's what we went with, even though we were never certain we were looking at any prints at all. "That might be a print right there," we said, pointing at a faint depression in the sand, while our teammate put on a thoughtful look that implied "I wonder if I'm missing any text messages."

Ranger Dan concurred. "Rabbit, most likely," he said, "do you see any claw marks?" We nodded ambivalently, unwilling to confess we couldn't really see any tracks at all. Ranger Dan was now a centimeter away from our tracks with his bony rear in the air and pointing at them with a stylus. "See that right there," he said, indicating a single displaced grain of sand in the correct rabbit-claw position. He stood up, getting the bigger picture. We were soon edified that one or possibly two rabbits had come over this way, paused, hopped around, and shot off that way, in something of a hurry. "Why might the rabbit be in a hurry?" Dan asked us, in the Socratic manner. "Something scared him," I postulated. "Thus the doots."

Ranger Dan also introduced us to the concept of our Zone Of Disturbance. This is the radius within which our presence affects wildlife, and if you're exceptionally loud, it can be a pretty big zone. Dave and I never knew what to call it before, but we have an enormous Zone Of Disturbance. We irritate birds miles away. Wolves stay in Idaho because of us. We never shut up. We were hiking a while back and just finished commenting on how we'd never ever seen a bear, even though Mt. Hood harbored them, and our friend Tony, who is British, and was five minutes ahead of us on the trail, waited up for us and said, "See the beah? Lovely, that. Pip pip," so there you go. Brits have had tiny zones of disturbance ever since the end of the Raj.

Sign

So when Dave and I took off on another hike on Mt. Hood the other day, and saw tracks, we strapped on our imaginary ranger hats and had at it. Cat prints, by the looks of them, accompanied by cat shit, furry and tapered, and in every respect like our own cat's, only far, far larger. We ruled out Domestic Cat from the range map. The shit was still damp and shiny, and there was lots of it, so whatever had left it was probably nearby and had a spring in its step. What could it be? Like a cat, only far, far larger? We decided to try shrinking our Zone Of Disturbance for the first time in our lives and crept onward, silent.

Sign

Then we came upon a new set of tracks. These were abundant. They looked just like deer prints, only huge. We followed them for miles. They were different sizes: either some hoofed animal that traveled in packs, or one large jumpy one with four different size feet. We searched for more sign, and found one nailed to a tree. It was another hint. What could it mean?

At some point we had reached the Timberline Trail and faced crossing Newton Creek, and we realized we might be lost, alone on the trail, with only three hours of daylight left. Cairns led us to the crossing, but the trail had vanished on the other side of the river. But we were Junior Trackers, not to be denied. Could that odd pile of rocks perched one atop another be significant? How about that pink ribbon tied to a branch? What ho, is that a rope hanging off the edge of the ravine? We followed all these clues to another clear trail, and when Dave, with unwarranted confidence, went bounding off in one direction, the final clue snapped into place: it had to be the other direction. Soon we were back in business, vowing the next time to use the old tracker's trick of dropping M&Ms along our path so we could, if necessary, follow the chipmunk doots back.

Yet more of the mysterious too-large deer tracks. We scanned the woods to no avail, until finally, a half-mile from our destination, there was a great crashing and thunderous pounding and three enormous brown animals burst across the trail and were gone, faster than a digital camera can wake up and decide to operate. So there are no photographs to aid us in our identification, only the observation that if one of the critters had broadsided us, as seemed possible, we would have been seriously dead or flat.

We conclude they were Buicks.

Erection Day

To better protect the homeland, the Transportation Security Administration has announced an enhancement of its pat-down procedures for airport passenger screening. The hand-pats of old are giving way to something described as "more of a sliding motion." The improved method is said to be more likely to reveal something on the person that might explode, or at least swell up a little. I know I feel safer, and also a little funny in the tummy.

The technique is employed when a traveler refuses to use the backscatter X-ray screen, which produces an image of the person naked for as long as it takes the screeners to scan for suspicious packages. As a third option, there will be a small stage and pole set up for the do-it-yourself crowd.

Airport screeners are divided in how they feel about the new procedures. A number of those who were highly enthusiastic have been taken into custody for one thing or another, while many who are not in favor have complained about their workloads. "My job keeps getting harder and harder," said one frazzled agent.  She reports that she responded to the pressure of long lines by improving the efficiency and speed of her sliding motions, only to find that her line became by far the longest.

The fight against threats to the homeland has even hit the ballot box. Yesterday, Oklahoma voters weighed in on prohibiting sharia, the Islamic system of law under which, for instance, a thief might have his hand cut off. The "Save Our State" amendment was proposed by Republican state representative Rex Duncan to protect against real threats such as higher taxes for the wealthy, health care for all and various efforts to mitigate global warming. Sharia, of course, like any system of religious law, is already prohibited by the U.S. constitution under the separation of church and state provision currently refudiated by leading Republicans. But that doesn't mean it's not a grave threat to our justice system. Under sharia, being stoned is the penalty for adultery, not the cause of it. Animals used for meat must be humanely slaughtered, which would destroy our pork and chicken industries. And every Muslim living above subsistence level must pay an annual poor tax, calculated by the wealth, not income, of the individual. Rep. Duncan is right to be alarmed.

This is a serious issue, reminiscent of the great leprechaun panic at the turn of the 20th century, during which tiny little signs were posted at Ellis Island stating "you must be this tall to enter here." Already reports have surfaced of bundles of sharia being smuggled inside checked luggage, with the address tags cleverly altered to read "Oklahoma State Courthouse." The entire Muslim population of Oklahoma, Qusay and Rahib, protested that they had only planned to impose sharia in the little skinny portion of the state hanging out on the left side, but they appear to have been thwarted. In an interview, Rahib, disappointed that he will not enjoy the four wives he might have been allowed under sharia, says he plans to spend a lot of time in line at the airport.

The push to redundantly outlaw sharia law in constitutions across the country is becoming widespread. Americans had been relatively calm about their own Muslim population until agitated by the likes of Rep. Duncan and Newt Gingrich. This has led to counter-efforts on the part of liberals to repeal Newton's First Law of Motion, which states that "every body remains in a state of rest unless it is acted on by an external, unbalanced force."

I think it is a shame. There are some aspects of sharia law that might come in handy. I believe that if some politician is able to come in and stir up the rankest emotions of our populace to no purpose other than personal advancement, we should be able to cut off his money.

Nothing Guns Like A Deere

It is a sad fact of human nature that, when faced with a gathering threat, we dismiss or deny evidence of impending doom until it is blatantly obvious, when it might be too late to do anything about it. This was never more clear to me than when I opened up the Sunday paper and found not one but two articles about people who had been murdered by their riding lawn mowers. Wake up, America. Our garden tools have been conspiring against us for a long time.

I'd become aware of this menace years ago. It starts in all innocence with bulb dibbles and trowels, but soon enough a couple hoes are leaning up against the wall of the shed and the neighborhood goes all to hell. Pruners and loppers move in, followed by gangs of hacksaws and chainsaws, until eventually the shed is all blades and teeth. Leaf blowers inspire sensitive people to homicide. And yet no one seems willing to put two and two together and mount a defense.

The only time I ever dared to operate a riding lawn mower was at my sister's house in Maine. Something in the water there--lobster sweat, perhaps--has led all rural residents to blanket their considerable acreage in lawn, each abutting the neighbors', stretching for miles in every direction. Even with a riding lawn mower, the task of mowing begins on a Monday and culminates on a Sunday, by which time it needs to be started anew. One member of the household is dispatched to deliver periodic sandwiches and no one rests until late fall. My sister's mower had five speeds, and I planned to get familiar with only the first. The topography seemed certain to tip me over if I tried to get the speed up, and I am not a courageous soul. I rumbled off on my first pass trailed by a fleet of curious snails and promised to check back within the month.

Sadly, it was black fly season. We western Oregonians are unfamiliar with black fly season, but the learning curve was zippy as hell. Plugging along in first gear, I gaped in horror as tiny flies swarmed onto my face and chunked divots out of it and injected anti-clotting juices until my blood trickled freely in such a way as has not been seen since the Crown of Thorns incident. What fresh hell is this? I jammed the shift into second, then all the way up to fifth, before outrunning the flies. I got a little air time over the quince bush hummock and had the whole acre scalped in no time, bailing out at the backdoor and vaulting into the kitchen on the dismount. The mower was on a trajectory to return in a few weeks, by which time it would be mosquito season. Maine has its charms. But.

The woman in Oklahoma who was done in by her mower had six speeds on her machine. She had taken it out on the city streets after 10pm, hit a pothole and overturned. This is what happens when the voters care about nothing but tax cuts. I believe a person should be able to gun her lawn mower down the street after dark without worrying about potholes, but I'm a liberal. She was subsequently run over by her own mower, suffering a severe thatching, and then done in when the mower returned for the cross-cut.

The other mower incident was a murder-suicide. The unfortunate fellow perished when his mower burst into flames. Why did he not disembark, you ask? It's so easy for us to second-guess after the fact. But when you're just about done with your acreage and are making that final swing around the crape myrtle, your plastic flamingoes under one arm ready to re-stab into the ground, you always think you have a little more time before you catch fire.

Finishing that mowing job for the week is a powerful motivator. Let us never forget the case of the man in Mississippi whose feet caught fire when he was nearly done. He finished the job and was almost home free, jumped off, grabbed a mattock and began chopping the fire line to keep the flames from spreading to his torso. Bled out, poor guy.

Nuts And Weenies

When I was working, I scavenged my breakfasts and lunches myself, and Dave took care of everything else. I ate exactly the same thing for breakfast and lunch because thinking irks me. On my days off I'd skip breakfast (too fussy) and have a peanut-butter sandwich for lunch (folded over, to save the hassle of precise bread-to-bread placement). Then the big dinner fairy showed up with a heaped plate of eighteen different vegetables, a slab of perfectly-cooked meat of some kind and all the food groups abundantly represented, including butter, salt and alcohol. We never get sick. All the vitamins are bound to be in there somewhere.

If Dave gets hungry of an afternoon, he might call out, "you want a little nosh?" and I'll say, sure. A little something would be nice. Then ten minutes later out he comes with a plate of sliced apples, an orange, salami-cream-cheese-chili-pepper rollups, olives, crackers and cheese, with a spray of celery and carrots hanging off the side, all arranged so attractively that Druids could use it to line up the equinox. The man's a whiz. Also, he doesn't want to eat the same thing twice.

That whole variety thing goes to pieces during the World Series. For however many days it takes, we eat salted peanuts in the shell, Crackerjacks, hot dogs and beer. I really understand the game, having been well coached in softball. You can learn a lot from the end of the bench. In fact, you will not find anyone with my particular dearth of skills who understands this game any better than I do. I love it. Not enough to watch it all season, though. Every year there is some upstart team that I've never heard of that makes a run at the pennant. By the time I start paying attention, it will be down to something like New York versus the Amarillo Crabwhackers. Amarillo Crabwhackers? I'll say, and Dave says, sure, they used to be the Minot Wheatwatchers. Oh.

I'm a Red Sox fan. I lived in Boston during the '75 World Series, when Carlton Fisk waved his hit fair and hopped up and down and clapped all the way around the bases. I've even done a remodeling job on my memory so that I was there at Fenway watching, although I was really in Somerville in front of the TV, but you could hear the whole town roar at once. They didn't win that year, of course. There's a pain associated with being a Red Sox fan that is almost exquisite, a beautiful ache. It's a concrete shoe for the heart. Victorians used to think there was something pale and sexy about tuberculosis sufferers, and I feel the same way about Boston fans. Yankee fans do not have the emotional stamina to withstand what a Boston fan can withstand. Staying with the tuberculosis-victim analogy, Yankees fans are, um, rich fancy boys who will not die.

October 26, 2010

The Red Sox messed up a few years ago when they accidentally won the whole thing, which wasn't nearly as thrilling as getting into that series at all by coming back from 0-3 and beating the Yankees for four straight games. Since then there hasn't been much to interfere with the purity of our suffering. This year the Texas Rangers humiliated the Yankees to get in the series, and they'll be meeting San Francisco. I don't care who wins as long as the Yankees didn't. We've got the giant bag of peanuts ready to go.

But this year the diet got screwed up early. About five minutes before winter, we got our first ripe tomato of the year, in October. That's it: fifteen tomatoes all season, and we've put them to their highest and best use. That means we've already had BLTs every night for a couple weeks. When we run out of Ts, the Series will start. In deference to our age, we've reined in the menu by eliminating Crackerjacks. So it's just peanuts and hot dogs and beer from Oct. 27 for about a week. I've got a massive case of diarrhea penciled in for the 29th through Election Day. I don't care who wins, but my lower GI tract hopes they can do it in four games.