Wow! They are gone!

I guess I have Ann to thank, as I came here expecting to continue my battle against pings, only to find all of them blissfully executed.

Thanks!

Blog Maintenance

I have several things I want to write about, but I have been spending far too much time (two hours last night, forty-five minutes today) deleting spam Trackback pings. I think that trackback pings may have sounded niftier when they were created, and I find very little legitimate use for them.

As a result, I have changed my preferences, so that new entries will not have pings enabled. Gradually I will get them turned off on all of the archives, but it has to be done one at a time, so it will take a long time to get there. I am also working backwards on pings, and have gotten as far as mid-day Monday. That was what I did for two hours, and I am simply not willing to put that much time into blog administrivia. So, if you like pings, sorry, but I have neither the time nor inclination to have to spend an hour a day deleting spam pings, so I am taking the Draconian approach.

Censorship...

By the way, today I engaged in a bit of censorship. On a post from last year's Ramalamadingdong, I wished all of the Mohammedans a very happy holiday with the announcement of a contest for the design of the basilica that shall be built in Mecca.

Today I got a very indignant and upset comment from some Mohammedan or Mohammedan-simp. I deleted it and had some great pork, accompanied with a margarita. The next pro-Mohammed comment I get, I will simply edit it so say some funny stuff. You have been warned.

You want Free Speech? Go to Iran. They give lots of Free Speech to Mohammedans. So long as they are the right kind of Mohammedan.

Because it boils down to this: we all want free speech, but we don't want the enemies to have it because we all know that free speech is a useless crock that presumes that ideas are just all harmless fun.

Error has no rights.
Error has no rights.
Error has no rights.

Say that each morning before you read your Syllabus of Errors.

Now repent of that Liberal foolishness before I have to send some fellows out to talk to you. Really nice guys, if you get to know them, and they can even be reasonable, so long as you stop spouting off that garbage you keep muttering.

It really is a shameful thing how some people like to mutter like old ladies in the piazza.

Art and stuff...

This is getting boring, I realize, but if you bear with me, I will eventually get to writing some real posts, probably mostly about art, since I have been thinking about, doing, and reading about art a lot these days. I actually have a few things I want to write about, but have not had the time. I even had ambitious plans for tonight, but am just too tired. If I don't get to bed soon I will not be able to get what I need to get done in order to go to the Marsden Hartley show at the Crocker (I am in Sacramento tonight).

As for cooking, I have not done much that new and unusual, so the next food post will be general ruminations about food and culture, Julia Child and Alice Waters, etc. Go get a copy of the latest Gastronomica, which you should read anyway if you have any interest in these topics, as it is a tribute to Julia Child.

As for baseball, bah humbug. Season's over as far as I care. Football? At least the Raiders won one. I think my aversion to the 49ers might go permanent.

Ah, the wide wild world of the internet...

I finally got around to cleaning up the Trackback Pings on the blog. There are some strange "interests" out there. Anyway, they are gone, and the only pings left are the real ones.

So. For those who came here looking for, well, unusual things involving large animals and "interracial cuckolds", you will probably have to go elsewhere.

The first of a flurious fury. No, a furious flury...

Last night I was to get back to some serious BLOGGING!!! Serious blogging? Sure, right after I drink my alcohol-free vodka, have my solemn somber meditations on the Three Stooges and...

Anyway, something happened. I did not blog, serious or otherwise.

I painted. And painted. And painted. I should be asleep right now, but I am still on post painting mind-weird.

I have been working on a theme, a glance of North Beach, in my usual custom: realist drawings, various abstractions in pencil and pen, color pencil work. That is just dipping one's toe in the water.

Serious work begins when brush hits paint hits paper/canvas/wood.

Last night, due to car troubles (not my own, but my ride's), an uncooperative ragu (c'mon, it's supposed to be done after 2 1/2 hours of cooking!), the arrival of a friend at the airport, etc., I ended up not going to the one bullfight of the year I most look forward to.

Bitter? Not I. It actually ended up a rather pleasant evening. We ate pasta, picked up our friend, who brought a bottle of Amaro Nonino over, chatted, and then, when everyone had gone to bed, I slithered off to the studio, espresso raging through my veins.

Brush hit paint, hit paper (watercolor this time - I needed the challenge last night). I was up late, but completed a major study, simplified the motif, worked the color, and stumbled off to bed at an hour that would make Dracula blush.

Today, no nap, but a perfect BLT and a bottle of Hop Ottin' IPA. What is a perfect BLT? Recipe to follow. Then nap.

Sleep. Sweet sleep. But first a recipe.

Still swamped

I know, I promised a real entry this weekend, but duty calls (not to mention an entirely pleasant afternoon into evening at our friends' house). The long and the short:

1. My mom is doing much better. She is at home. The pneumonia is gone, but she is tired. I am doing the cooking and other chores for a couple of days at least. If wild mushroom risotto doesn't restore her strength, I don't know what will.

2. Our 419 friend is getting very frustrated at me not responding. My friend Joel has been keeping hope alive in her. I should probably dangle a carrot myself, and then throw a curve ball again.

3. The next bullfight is in Gustine on Monday the 12th. It is usually a good one. If you go, be sure to be there by 6, as it will sell out. If you go, look for me. I will wear a Hawaiian shirt and am six feet tall with a reddish beard. Hopefully I will have gotten a haircut, so I won't be shaggy, but you never know.

4. I totally forgot to mark Amalia's birthday on the blog (as we were in Portland), so wish her a happy fourth birthday by eating some belated cake (or a purple dum dum, her favorite candy).

5. Fishing with a four year old is a blast. You ought to do it sometime. No patience whatsoever, not to mention a tendency to jump up and down on the bottom of the boat whenever a fish jumps nearby (not conducive to luring the little things to the bait, but awfully cute) make for little catch, but oh what fun. Letting her drive the boat is quite a ride, too (even with a parental hand on the tiller).

Update

I am still alive and well, but having to deal with stuff that takes priority (long story, but my mother is in the hospital (in Portland, Oregon, where we were for a family reunion) with pneumonia. She is responding well to antibiotics, but will probably be in there for a couple more days. Prayers appreciated).

I am planning on some new posts tomorrow or Saturday (including some 419 fun - hopefully my contact has not despaired too much of my silence). I will also post some on why I love Portland. A great city, probably the best in the nation, for a number of reasons.

New Comments Procedure

If you posted a comment in the last few weeks, you have undoubtedly noticed that there is a lag before the comment actually appears. What is going on is that ALL comments now come to me first. If I approve them (which I generally do, except for SPAM, animal rights nonsense, and sedevacantists, or other irritants), then they appear as they normally did.

However, if I am away for a couple of days, or simply too busy, then they sit in limbo until I get back. I realize that this impedes the flow of conversation that can make comments boxes enjoyable, but it works wonders for spam control, which has been a persistant headache.

A side effect is that I am more inclined to delete comments that would have slid by in the past, like the anonymous folks who find this site with a google search and then get angry because I am not offering the easy answers to their term paper, or whatever it is that they are looking for. I am also more inclined to send private replies, because the configuration just makes that easier. To post a reply, I have to go to the actual site, post my comment, then come back to the editor to approve it. I will do that if the comment seems of general interest, but if someone is asking for some specific thing that I cannot see anyone else caring about, I am much more inclined to just send an email out.

One last thing. In getting used to this system, I may have made mistakes. I may have neglected to send email replies or have accidentally deleted comments that were fine and should have been approved. If this happened to you, sorry. I think I have the procedure down now.

So, with that, I must finish two restaurant reviews (got to keep the editors at bay), get enough sleep to go to the bullfight in Gustine tomorrow night, and manage to organize two of my bookshelves.

Oh yes, if you ever get a chance to go to confession from one of the priests of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, by all means do so. I have only done it with one priest, but he is outstanding. I imagine that it reflects a certain level of formation that happens with the order.

More Links, not linx, because that makes us think of Manx, and that is just weird. Cats ought to have tails, you know...

Julie asks what it takes to get listed on my links section. She is wondering if she is in exile for drinking tea. I am certainly against tea, although I will drink it once in awhile (Dragonwell Green Tea, Thai iced tea, and Earl Gray, for those who are wondering. Oh, and a good jasmine tea), but not to the point of banishing anyone for it.

The thing about my links sections is that they are completely done at my whim. I might feel like doing it, but then get distracted by photos of Stromboli (I have mentioned Stromboli-on-line, haven't I?), and then the links don't get changed.

Anyway, I am currently changing things, so please check out Julie's two excellent sites: Happy Catholic and The Glad Gastronome. Julie does a great job on these two sites, and I am pleased to link to them.

Comments

For some reason, I added a blank entry to the ISP banning, which effectively banned everyone from commenting. If you tried to comment in the last few days, and were unable to, I am sorry. The error has been fixed, so comment away, unless you are a horrible spammer!

UPDATE: Two hours after I corrected the error, I had 35 spam comments. I should have known something was up when I went spam free since last Tuesday.

Post of Substance

I know, I know. I promised something of substance. At least more than just Sicilian jokes, although Sicilian jokes are so much fun. At least until horse heads get involved.

Seriously, though, why are none of my Sicilian friends "connected" that way?

Anyway, the post I was thinking about, talking about art and important things, is going to have to wait. Sorry. The day slipped by. I read a lot, though, including some stuff that will probably influence what I wanted to say about art.

I will give you a preview:

Are the definitions of liberal arts in need of rewriting? Has the understanding of visual arts changed so that they should be seen as a liberal art? Does the distinction between the servile nature of craftsmanship and the liberal nature of content need to be redrawn?

I will be off to my Godfather's cattle ranch tomorrow, and will not be posting until Monday at the earliest, but these are the things to think about for when I come back, refreshed, and thinking happy thoughts of beef.

The Second Anti-Spam A-bomb

The word "casino" has been added to the blacklist, for the same reason as "poker." I have far more joy in adding this one, although it may prove troublesome when dealing with public policy discussions of indian gaming. Perhaps we should use "houses of blight" when referring to Indian casinos, especially when they pop up in otherwise beautiful places like the Anderson Valley.

As to Kenny Rogers, I used to think of him as bland pseudo-country, but the other day I was listening to a country station in the Central Valley, and "The Gambler" came on, and I realized that it isn't a bad song. I pulled out the album it was from, and was pleasantly surprised.

Anti-spam A-bomb

I just did something that I was reluctant to do: I banned the word "poker" from the comments boxes. It is not that I have anything against poker, in fact, I have been known to play it once in a great while (although it has been so long I really cannot remember the last time - I am not much of a gambler, although I like Kenny Rogers).

However, it seems that every day I have to delete combox and ping spam advertising on-line poker, so I finally took the drastic step of banning the word itself. If you wish to discuss poker use some sort of creative substitute (I know that the spammers will soon anyway), and I can change it to "poker" from the inside.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Two things...

First, there are some great Catholic stereotypes popping in at the Mackerel Snap post below. Keep 'em coming.

I do find it funny that when I ask for folks to contribute stories of how they grew in their art appreciation I get a barrage of, well, silence. C'est la vie, as those people over there say. Or perhaps they c'est it. I dunno. Remember that horrid song "Say, Say, Say" (and bully for you if you don't)? Perhaps we could do the French version and call it "C'est, C'est, C'est." Or perhaps not.

Also, I am really overdue in updating my links. There are many people I read daily or at least weekly, who should be there (sorry, TSO). However, these things take time, so I am doing a little here and a little there. Right nowish would be the right time to pester me if I have cruelly forgotten you.

One long neglected person is Edouardo Costa. Costa is not a blogger, probably because he spends his time perfecting his riding and horsebreeding. He is the most exciting of the Californian Portuguese bullfighters, has a great style on horseback, and breeds beautiful horses. I should have linked to him a long time ago.

So, without further ado, be sure to check out Costaslusitanos.com, especially if you are interested in fine horses, bulls, or the like. Also, I highly recommend checking Costa out in performance. He is really quite good. It is too bad that he is not in Portugal where he would have more opportunities, but their loss is our gain.

Welcome Ft. Wayne Readers!

Naturally, when the Contra Costa Times article gets reprinted in the Fort Wayne newspaper, I am asleep at the wheel and have a paucity of posts going.

Well, I have not been asleep at the general wheel, only the blog wheel, being under a bunch of deadlines for the CCT's competitor!

So, welcome new readers. I wrote a post welcoming the Contra Costa Times readers last month, and you can read it in the archives. Hopefully I will have more and more interesting (hah!) posts for y'all to read later this weekend. Perhaps a good recipe, perhaps a screed on art (I will be seeing a show of Rubens oil sketches at the Berkeley Art Museum, so perhaps something blogworthy will come of that).

Welcome New Readers! 12 Things...

Naturally I would not be at my onry self if I didn't have a long, harsh, and illiberal post greeting those who came to this site from the Contra Costa Times article. So, anyway, read the one below this one, and if you are wondering, "what sort of right wing crank is this," well, Howdy!

So there it is: you have stumbled onto the website of someone who is:

1. So far to the Right that he sometimes pops his head out of a gopher hole on the Left. Someone who would rather slice off his testicle than vote for Al Gore, but would prefer to never, ever, ever have to live in one of those so-called "red states." A right winger who is more at home in Berkeley than Peoria (OK, quit whining. I never heard of the Peoria Symphony, or the Peoria Museum of Modern Art. Will it play in Peoria? Who cares?)

2. A Triumphalist, Papal Maximalist, Traditionalist, Fanatical, Doctrinaire and Uncompromising Child of the Second Vatican Council (and all prior councils as well).

3. A foaming at the mouth, drooling enthusiast of the painting of Richard Diebenkorn, the films of Fellini (and Wenders), the poetry of the French Symbolists, the cooking of Alice Waters, and the music of Domenico Scarlatti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Thelonious Monk.

4. A Grateful Dead fan. Really. Don't ask. I stopped counting after 20 shows.

5. A meat eater. No I mean a real meat eater. Sweetbreads. Tripe. Tongue. Look, I make my own headcheese. From pigs' heads. I took my little daughter with me to slaughter and butcher cattle. And she loves meat as much as she loves animals. She gave them their last supper. It was cute, and she still gets excited when I pull out a chunk of one of those bulls from the freezer.

6. Something else I share with my daughter is a love of the bullfight. Where else can you see horses and bulls and hear great brass band music?

7. I can tolerate just about anyone. Heretics. Infidels. I get along quite well with Mormons, even. But not animal rights activists. I would rather drink a martini made with vodka than hang out with one of them.

8. I consider the East Coast as starting at stateline, Lake Tahoe.

9. As much as I am a foodie, my real culinary love is espresso. If I were to wake up and only have one of my cooking abilities left, it would be the ability to make a perfect doppio espresso molto ristretto (and that is something I only do once in a great while).

10. I hate suburban sprawl, private air conditioning, garage door openers, and lawns.

11. I used to be in favor of Starbucks, until they gutted the quality of their product. I will point out to anyone willing to listen that Starbucks used to do a decent job until about 1998. I will also defend Budweiser (not Light, however, as Light beer is an abomination in the sight of the Lord). Especially if you give me a few of them. I fear that Peet's is following Starbucks (although the quality of the beans has stabilized in the last few months. I don't know anything about the internal workings of the company, but it was slipping and seems to have stopped).

12. I am the only person in my house who likes the Teletubbies. Everyone else finds them boring or creepy. I find them inspirational. I want an grinning baby in the sun! I want little loudspeakers popping up in the garden giving me orders and nursery rhymes! It is like The Prisoner, but with fuzzy colorful things. We are all Wiggles fans, though. Just saw them live at the Oakland Arena. Great show.

Spam with cheese...

The text of a recent comment hawking drugs:

I do like this blog a lot. thanks for keeping all the spammers off it.

No problem. Bye!

DeSpamization

I recently ran into a problem with MT Blacklist. It would not take any new entries. I emailed my designer, who dug around and found that there is a maximum number of entries on the blacklist (around 3900). So, for those of you using MT-Blacklist, you might want to check your housekeeping and be sure to get rid of things that are covered already (for instance, no need to have commies.jerks.org if you already have jerks.org). Since the stupid thing would not let me check off the offenders and delete them en masse, I had to take a long time to pick out each individual one. So far I am halfway through the "b's."

Now, to be more efficient in my Blacklist utilization, I added some a-bomb type strings, for instance, ".info" and ".us" since I have never found a real domain worth going to with either of those. Unfortunately I need to learn some syntax, because it seems to have attacked anything that has "us" in it, which was certainly not my intent. For example, "music" gets nixed. So I dropped ".us" but there might be some other strings that I did not drop, so if your comment gets rejected for something seemingly innocuous, please drop me a line at EKeilholtz [at] aol [dot] com.

Speaking of which, I got the following comment, but it seems to have been zapped, which is too bad, as it is a rather thoughtful one. Obviously, I think that the commenter has some errors in his thinking, but there is something of a grain of truth in it. He (or she, I don't know) was commenting on my post on the problems of canonizing the deceased at funerals:

Agree completely with Erik. Modern Catholic funerals (not Requiem Masses any more, mind you, but "Masses of Christian Burial") have become pretty much a testimonial, show-and-tell and gabfest about the deceased, rather than a genuine opportunity for mourning and grief before burying the dead, commending their souls to God and moving on with our lives. Anyone who has ever lost someone close knows that the real, bone-numbing grief goes on for a significant period -- sometimes years. Only with the passage of time do we come to balance our sense of loss -- and sometimes anger -- with a reasuring sense of satisfaction and completion over the endearing and enduring memories we have of the deceased loved one. But today's Catholic funerals try to make everyone recall jolly incidents about "good old Joe" and enjoy several good rounds of laughter at his expense just days after losing him. This is forced, unnatural and contributes to our frustration at the lack of being able to genuinely grieve without looking like a party pooper or a weak person emotionally. This is completely foreign to the centuries-long purpose of Catholic Requiems. If one goes to a grief counselor after a loss, no such trained person would make one feel bad about breaking down into hysterical sobbing, because that is often an important part of the process of overcoming and recovering from grief and loss. But Catholic funerals are now supposed to be times for "celebrating so-and-so's life." There's plenty of time for that once our grieving process starts to heal and we can carry on with a less raw sense of loss. There will be black vestments at my Requiem, and no happy-talk story-telling. They can do that at my wake or at a non-religious memorial service, of those left behind are so inclined. The Catholic hierarchy wonders why they can't enforce their "culture of life" on millions of Catholics, who shun church doctrine on abortion. Maybe it's because the church has abandoned it's own teachi
ngs on what death is all about, and how solemn and dignified an undertaking is a Requiem Mass. If every death is just an opportunity for "celebration" and merriment, how do they think they can get the faithful to take too seriously opposition to abortion and the death penalty. Don't they get it? (That's one of the reasons I'm not a Catholic, in the interests of full disclosure.)

To this commentator, I must point out that the reasons to be Catholic far outweigh the nonsense that one too frequently encounters in the liturgies. I would rather endure a century of hippy-dippy liturgies, guitars and pianos and "On Eagles' Wings" over a minute of beautiful High Anglitic liturgy, even if the High Anglitic liturgy were breathtaking in its grandeur and solemnity.

And that will have to do...

With that last post, you will hear little from me for the rest of the weekend. Tomorrow I will be cooking gumbo for the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi's Mardi Gras party, which is on Sunday. After we finish the gumbo, I will be off to review a restaurant (with one of those nightmarish overnight turns on the review). Then Sunday after mass I will be in the kitchen until the night.

If you are in the Bay Area, there are still tickets available for the party, which should be a good one: Zydeco music, decorations, as well as great Creole food (some catered and some prepared by us).

Laissez les bons temps roulet (or is it laissez les bons tons roula, as I have seen Louisiana folks spell it? Remind me to tell you a Boudreaux and Marie joke later)!

Dutch! Not Deutsch!

I was reading Julie D.'s fine food blog and read a comment that corrected her spelling of "Manhatten." She was using a poor authority (yours truly) and thus spelled it that way and not "Manhattan", the correct spelling. As I pointed out in my mea culpa on her blog, I do not speak Dutch. I assumed that it was spelled as it would be in hoch deutsch, at least if it were pronounced the way we pronounce it.

I offer this solution to the problem (and myriad other problems of Germanic dialects): abandon these silly swamp deutsch variants and use proper German! This goes to the islanders as well, although after the thwacking that the Normans gave to Englisch, it probably really should be seen as a distinct language at this point.

In many ways I am grateful that I do not have to write in deutsch all the time. Englisch really has a better structure, although it lacks some of the great sounds of German (the "ch" in "hoch" for example. The "ch" in the Scottish "loch" is good, but is not nearly as poetic as it would be pronounced with the German "ch"). And as far as I am concerned, if no one ever writes another opera in any Germanic tongue, the world will not be any worse off. Italian is meant for singing, neither German nor Englisch (nor French, for that matter) come even close. One time I heard a Swedish opera. It was quite good, but hearing THAT language sung in an operatic context is painful.

So, I'll take Manhattan, then.

For All Of Your Italian Caribou Needs

Well, if you use quotes I am number one! Yipppeeeee! Without quotes you get Italian restaurants in Caribou, Canada, or WI, or one of those Transsierran sort of places.

What, you might ask, is an Italian Caribou? Funny thing, that Italian Caribou. It spins pizza in the tundra, all the while singing arias about igloos.

If this is making your head spin and you can't figure heads from tails from it, don't worry, it is only a game. Something to do with Irish Elk or Polish Moose or whatever they are.

By the way, Mark, the recipe they would have used is simple. Given the era, they would have preferred the cut known as the Filet Magnon, served with a Chausseur and Gathereur sauce.