vonnia's Open Salon Blog

Hot Organic Farmers-Sign of the Apocalypse?

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:10:37 -0400

Oh, yeah. Hot organic farmers, oh wait, we better capitalize that. Hot Organic Farmers. That’s better. Hot Organic Farmers are probably a sign of the Apocalypse, if for no other reason than the list of hotties includes Michelle Obama.

Maybe I’m a closet Republican but…Michelle isn’t a farmer AND (this is the clincher in my book) she doesn’t even have an organic garden! For reasons that escape me, the Hot Organic White House Garden was fertilized by sludge. Uh, effluvia. Okay, poop. And…prepare for a shock…someone, perhaps her husband’s Organic Czar, discovered, by some mysterious means, possibly involving national security agencies and their Hot Organic testing capabilities, that the poop contained e coli. Quelle surprise! So the Hot Organic White House Garden was discontinued.

That means that Michelle Obama’s first foray into the world of Hot Organic Gardening was cut short by a teensy error in fertilizer. Yes, it was Hot Organic Fertilizer, but it was still deadly fertilizer. If that doesn’t disqualify the woman from the 2009 Hot Organic Farmer Contest, I don’t know what would.

But we still have photos of other Hot Organic Gardeners. Thank goodness.

Daniel Paduano has groves of avocado and citrus trees. His photo shows him kneeling in his khakis and polo shirt, outside a fenced off field, pulling grass. Maybe it was non-organic grass. Or worse, it might have been GMO grass and Daniel was worried about a potential Monsanto lawsuit. Whatever Daniel’s reason, it was nice to see a casually well dressed man, on his hands and knees, pulling grass before it crept into his avocado/citrus groves.

Stacy Brenner is shown, in her puffer vest, holding two “adorable baby sheep.” Maybe you would call them lambs. I would. I truly believe that when it’s beddy-by time at Broadturn Farm Stacy curls up naked in a bottle of Dr Bronner’s Hemp Eucalyptus. Nothing else could explain the aura of wholesome American Farm Goodness that surrounds her.

Mike Irving is shown carrying a peck, or a bushel, or some other giant measure of what looks like green onions grown next to a nuclear reactor. I’ll guess that they’re leeks. The look of grim determination on his face to hold onto way more produce than a tiny guy ought to tote, until the shot is over, ought to at least get him some mercy votes.

Then there’s Jim Dunlop. If I could pry Rebecca Thistlethwaite off of him, his work gloves, tee shirt, and the drill under his arm, combined with his rugged not-good-looks-but-adequate-testosterone face, would cause me to vote for his Organic Farming Hotness.

Head on over to: Hot Organic Farmers: Pick the Cutest Organic Farmers. You can vote for the Cutest Organic Farmer, rate Hot Organic Cuties, share your Hot Organic Cuties or leave a comment.

This makes two stories from Huffington Post that I’ve used to illustrate signs of the apocalypse. I’m not implying anything, heaven forfend! But Hot Organic Farmers? If that’s not a sign of the apocalypse, then somebody at Huffington Post is on the fast track to a Shallow Twits Award.

October 13, 2009

Email To My Brother, Mostly About Illegal Immigrants

Fri, 3 Jul 2009 22:07:39 -0400

This is exactly what it says it is. It isn’t what I usually put out in front of the whole world. However, it is how I think and what I say when I’m off the internet, and among people who know me. This is Middle V.

Hey, kiddo,

Thanks for the much needed injection of humor and for the thoughtful piece on illegal immigration.

I’m forwarding something from the OK food coop about MRSA and its roots in antibiotic-loading animals intended for human food. BTW, going to organic meats (of all kinds) is the best way to keep from getting “Mad Cow” since the prions that cause it cannot be killed by anything, including high heat. Obviously, giving up eating dead animals is the ultimate solution. ;-)

I enjoyed the article about immigrants. Unfortunately, the way to stop “the illegal immigration problem” lies in making the penalties for employing them so onerous that no employer will hire them. No jobs = no immigrants, either legal or illegal.

That this obvious and simple solution is so universally rejected shows who is behind illegal immigration: large corporations who benefit from paying lower wages.

The growth of America’s economy has been based on the low wages of large immigrant populations throughout America’s history, from the Irish to the Chinese to the Italians, and all immigrant groups in between. This became even more obvious after slavery was outlawed in the US.

Every argument being used today to demonize the illegal immigrants from south of the American border was used in former times against whichever immigrant group was the largest at the time.

As long as natural-born Americans believe that immigrants are their economic enemies, both the immigrant workers and the natural-born workers are at the mercy of greedy employers.

Who benefits from slavery, from illegal alien workers, and from depressed wages for natural-born workers? Not the slaves, illegals, or the legals. The only group who benefits from free or cheap labor are greedy employers. Period!

As long as the oppressed workers can be separated into artificial groups based on trivialities like race and ethnicity, then they will not be able to unite and demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. They are thus manipulated by greedy employers into fighting each other instead of their common enemy. All of which ensures that wages stay down, corporate profits continue rising, and poor people get poorer, while their government safety net, never very much, is further unraveled.

The American model of economic growth is today being implemented in countries like China, India, Russia, etc. Those countries have large populations of citizens clamoring for improved lives, and as the middle class in America is killed off, it continues strong growth in other countries.

This is a global situation, not an American one. The US is no longer the only country with a voracious appetite for consumer goods. As economies in other countries grow, the market expands until America is no longer necessary as the world’s largest consumer country. Other countries will supplant it, have already begun supplanting it.

America is being economically dismantled. While American workers storm and rail against immigrant social problems, far greater and farther reaching economic damage has been, is being, and will be done.

The American government has become the rubber stamp for corporate greed with its lowering of corporate taxes and accountability. The American worker hasn’t benefitted. Former governors on corporate greed, such as trade unions and corporate taxes, have been gutted. Health care, once a personal choice, has been gutted. Education, once a local community project, has been gutted. Home ownership, once an achievable goal, has been gutted.

All this has been done while the corporate agents of dissent and disinformation have spread the lie that the problem is brown people from south of the US border. If we can all be convinced that “brown people” are the source of our diminishing quality of life, then we will never unite with them in our common goals of improved lives for ourselves and our offspring.

The problem is a top heavy US government passing bloated rewards along to its corporate sponsors, and gutting the laws that formerly made those corporate government sponsors accountable to the American people.

Yes, illegal immigration is a problem in America. But the solution lies in removing the reason people illegally cross our borders to live here: jobs that pay them more than they earned in their home countries, but less than even the artificially depressed “minimum wage” of natural-born American workers.

Stop employers from exploiting illegal immigrants and you stop illegal immigration. Nobody faces the dangers of illegal immigration into a country where they cannot better themselves.

Stop greedy employers from employing illegal immigrants.

Then, face up to the truth about America, your America, my America, our America: we are already a third world country. We just haven’t taken an honest look in the mirror yet. We’ve been too busy worrying about what the corporate mainstream media told us to worry about. And they’ve told us to be afraid, to be very afraid, of everything except how we’re being sold down the river, not by brown people, but by corporations and governments working hand in hand to choke us to death with our own fear, while getting rich off of us.

Much love to you,

Me ================================================================ Note: forwarded message attached.

July 24, 2008 Permalink: http://middlev.wordpress.com/2008/07/24/email-to-my-brother-mostly-about-illegal-immigrants/

Spam Candy-Sign of the Apocalypse?

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:06:14 -0400

Now, I know what you’re thinking so let me stop you before you get all lathered up and start screaming, “WTF! This is a bogus blog entry! Of course Spam Candy is a sign of the apocalypse! What, are you freakin’ kiddin’ me?!?!?!”

Calm down, okay? Put the dust covers back over the exclamation and question mark keys. Ms V isn’t just jerking your chain with this. I merely put the question mark after “Sign of the Apocalypse” to keep a cohesive flow in the series of apocalyptic warnings I’m writing for your edification. I’m not trying to mislead anybody. I’m trying to be a force for good in this world, so bear with me. I’m well aware that Spam Candy is one of the warning signs of the apocalypse.

Luckily, we have recipes and pictures so that future humans will have a record of the method we used to destroy our civilization. First we have this: Spam Candy. Here’s a quote from the first recipe, which he calls Spam Brittle:

You do not want the smell of burnt sugar and spam floatin’ around your kitchen, wakin’ up your maniacal pregnant wife sleeping in the other room.

I haven’t been pregnant since 1984, but if my husband woke me up with the smell of Spam Brittle, well, let’s just say I’d be maniacal too.

The second recipe is for Candied Spam:

They are pretty good munched by themselves, but I am currently trying to come up with a baking/pastry application. I have a couple of ideas, so look forward to a reappearance of these pink, porky delights in the near future.

Ahh, we’ve come to the meat (pun intended) of Ms V’s apocalyptic warning for today. It’s that baking/pastry application where we see the true depravity running amok in the world that is calling down judgement on us all:

Pork and Beans Brown Betty with Chile Chocolate Guinness Frosting

I poured the gloppy mess into a well greased silicon loaf pan. I wanted this to come out easily after baking so that I could shape it. By the way, once you cut into the Spam brittle your nostrils will be assaulted by the sweet porky flavor trapped beneath the candy coating.

The sweet porky flavor trapped beneath the candy coating? Okay, I’ll wait until you get back from the vomitorium.

Verdict: All in all, this was pretty good. The deliciousness of the frosting outweighed any of the funkiness of the Spam Brittle. The dry texture of the brown betty was kind of gross with the flecks of peanut and Spam, and the vague smell of pork every time you put fork to it was a little unsettling.

You see, my sweet innocent children, it is not enough that we fly in the face of all that is good and pure in this world, like with Che’s granddaughter covering her naked breasts with carrot bandoliers, no, oh no, we dip even deeper into insanity by covering Spam with butter and sugar and then, horror of horrors, we bake a cake with Spam Candy!

Fortunately, the author of the blog Ridiculous Food Society of Upstate New York, Mr. Dave Guilderland, admits:

Don’t think I will be making this exact confection again, but I will definitely put the frosting into my inventory.

So you see there isn’t any flaw in Mr Guilderland, his taste or his blog. He has a recipe for Mississippi Delta Hot Tamales that I intend to try, and he has many other delicious sounding recipes, and observations on food and those who sell it.

And he certainly seems to have learned his lesson about toying with Spam. I suggest that we learn a lesson from him and not experiment with Spam.

We must all remember that Goddess did not invent Spam for us to mock it. She meant it to be fried and sandwiched between two pieces of Wonder Bread spread with faux mayonnaise, just like my mom fixed it.

Oh, god, I’ve got to hit the vomitorium again just thinking about it.

The Reporter's Dream

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:06:32 -0400

There was a young man who was accused of stealing a bicycle. FedEx made a mistake and delivered it to his house. He was accused of theft when his neighbor complained and the police did a search of his home.

His situation became a national news story and he was cleared of the charges, with the help of the FedEx driver who’d gone missing right after the theft, but was eventually tracked down, and who testified to the alleged thief’s innocence due to his own mistake.

The former accused became a mini-celebrity and made the rounds of talk shows. Although he’d been cleared, and the public saw him as some sort of hero because of his former victimization, there was something that didn’t ring quite true about him and his story.

I was a retired reporter who still retained a following with my internet writings. I was asked by a small group of independent cops/spooks to investigate the guy. I figured he’d been pretty well vetted as innocent by the press and judicial system, but still I had nagging doubts at the back of my mind so I agreed.

The setup was that I was going to write a book about miscarriages of justice, with an emphasis on him, his personal vindication, and his current advocacy of the wrongly accused and mis-judged innocents snared in a broken down justice system. He bit and bit big.

We were to spend several days together so that I could immerse myself in his gloriousness.

He’d rather quickly reached the stage of success that allowed him cauffeurred limousines and a comfortable lifestyle. We met at a luxury lodge and spent all our waking hours together. He was smooth and slick. Which was at odds with his background as a poor victim in a slum.

I kept wondering what had brought this calm, erudite man to one of the most grim poverty pits of the 21st century. I wanted to know what made a classic example of American success get stuck in hopeless poverty and squalor.

And, finally, I wanted to know what had gotten him unstuck.

I had access to every cop and spook file on the man. I had days of close contact. Still I couldn’t crack him or his story. I couldn’t even explain him. But the subtle odor of deception still wafted around him. Were my perceptions skewed? If so, why?

Then my background in reporting, my former informants, my continued contacts in a shadowy world never seen by the public, paid off. I was sent a video, similar to a Google street view, except much better, of his former home as it sat desolately at the end of a block of hopelessness.

A frisson made me sit up straight. This was not the place he’d described, not at all. There were his neighbors, and after a time there he was, out on bail. Oddly, he was dressed in the same type of blazer and slacks he wore today, but he looked shabbier, dirtier. He almost blended in. I watched as he enter his former home.

I asked my contact to continue surveillance of the house, to get what he could, including audio, despite the plywood covered windows. The informant asked if I’d like to see video of the scene as it looked at the time of the alleged crime. Oh boy, did I!

I kicked myself for originally requesting post crime views of his house. I knew better. Was his apparent “innocence” wearing down my reporter’s experience and objectivity? I requested a conference with the people who’d hired me for this gig and explained that I thought I’d lost my ability to be of use to them. They said to at least stick out the next two scheduled days with him.

That evening I questioned him again about his former home, where the alleged crime had taken place.

“Was it a two up two down?” Curious to see if he’d contradict what he’d told me earlier.

A moment’s silence, then, “Yes, it was. Why?”

He stared at me and I wondered if he was waiting for me to say, “You lied.”

Then my phone rang. It was my informant. He had video from the very day of the crime. He had uploaded it to me. I called it a day with my interviewee, and took my laptop and cell phone back to my cabin.

I watched the video, not as good quality as the first. I was trying to place it in some sort of context that could confirm it as what it was purported to be: candidly shot the day of the crime for some purpose other than recording a crime. You know, like was it a birthday party or some other event in which the relevant house appeared in the background. And there it was. The smoking gun.

I whispered out loud, “Gotcha!

There, viewed from across the street, grainy and washed out in the sun, was what looked like our boy carrying a big box out of his neighbor’s enclosed porch. He carried it to his place, where he knocked on the door and his wife answered. Then they disappeared inside. I watched a few more minutes, wondering if this was all a setup and I was the patsy.

Then I hit the pause button and called my cop/spook employers. “I have some video for your guys to clean up and analyze.”

“What have you got?”

“It looks like a smoking gun, but that’s for the experts to determine.”

“We’re sending someone over right now.”

I made a copy of the video and waited. After they picked up my laptop, I ordered a rental from room service and ran the video again, while wondering what was really going on. After the video came again to the point where the “hero” stole his neighbor’s bike, I watched the rest of the story fade as my eyes dimmed the light, then closed.

Then I woke up.

All I know about the dream is that the young man seemed to be some sort of combination of the disappearing Governor Sanford and a young man I’d encountered earlier in the day. He was young man so ignorant of history that he couldn’t see what was right in front of him, and he left the impression that he wouldn’t be caught dead in a navy blue blazer. And I know that the dream wasn’t about a stolen bicycle.

In 80% of my dreams I’m trying to solve a mystery. And, yes, my dreams are usually that cinematic and highly scripted. But, it’s extremely infrequently that I’ve been any character other than myself, and I was in this one. Which is why I’m writing publicly about the dream.

This felt like the few dreams I’ve had in my life where I was in someone else’s head, living their life, except overlaid with enough of me to confuse myself. If anyone has any ideas, I’d really like to hear them.

It’s difficult to explain, but this dream wasn’t just V’s subconscious speaking.

Blog Comments & Hemingway

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:06:49 -0400

You may never have never taken much time to determine exactly why you’re blogging. After all, if what you want is to socially network with people, wouldn’t you be better served with a web camera, a light source, and your friends list? Mmm, maybe, but blogging has the potential to be more than a kaffeklatsch with old friends.

My personal observation of why we write on the internet is that we do it for one of two reasons:

1. You have something to say, and writing is ‘your’ medium.

2. You want to be “popular,” get big hit counts, and land a paying gig.

I have no problem with the second reason for writing. The cynical drive for hit counts, in aid of our writing becoming an income stream, is no more nefarious than juggling to earn a living as a circus performer. It may be that our other, greater and more varied, talents aren’t developed by the limits we’ve imposed on ourselves, but it certainly isn’t a moral wrong. And frankly, it’s nobody’s business how we decide to legally use our gifts, skills, and talents.

Most people on the internet are using their writing skill as a way to socialize, and that’s a darned good use of writing skills. We can connect with a lot of varied people and ideas, and grow from those connections. We can form social groups with our writing, using blog comments as mini forums for those whose interests line up with our blog’s theme and personality.

We can, each of us through our blogs, become a neighborhood pub or park, where like-minded people gather to freely discuss everything under the sun. And isn’t that what human beings have always done? From the ancient agora, through quilting bees and barn raisings, to the internet, we gather in groups and form social relationships. All humans are born with the need to be a functioning member of a group. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Despite the detracting propagandists who promote the agenda of pharmaceutical companies (more depressed people=more profits), Maslow’s hierarchy is born out by even the shortest perusal of human history: humans like to hang out with other humans, and more positive human interaction leads to more human satisfaction.

Now, I know there are those who decry the amount of time spent relating to “flesh and blood human beings” that we lose by being on the internet. Maybe. I can see the argument that we’ve become atomized. Still, the drive for human interaction seems to me to be alive and flourishing on the internet. And blog comments are one place where you can see that. They’re simply another way to communicate, a good way, in fact.

I question how many of us, who do communicate with our fellow man via the internet, would actually be hanging over the back fence gabbing with our neighbors, if we weren’t on the internet. You see, on the internet we get to CHOOSE our neighbors. In real life, not so much.

Blogging as social networking has liberated anyone within reach of an internet connection from the stultifying limitations of natal-tribe conformity. By that liberation we become citizens of the world. By that global citizenship we can intellectually grow light-years away from the circumstances of our birth and physical location. By that intellectual growth we can become fully and honestly who we are.

I see a personal blog as a way to attract to ourselves the kind people we like to hang out with, in other words, a way to form ourselves into leaders and members of tribes relevant to who and what we are. If we’re able to parlay that into a paid gig, then that’s gravy, isn’t it?

However——-

If you’re a budding Hemingway, and you know that, if you want your writing to take you in that direction, then consider whether your talent and writing skills might be better nurtured by turning off the hit counters and blog commenting, on at least one of your blogs. Making the focus of your writing the gaining of public popularity is not conducive to the maturation of writing skills, nor does it promote the health of your intellect, which is needed to put those writing skills to the most effective use.

If Hemingway and Fitzgerald were alive today they’d back me up on that. They both had experience in directing their writings to a particular readership. Hemingway escaped that limitation by getting out of the newspaper biz. Fitzgerald was tormented to his dying day by the thought that he could have done so much more, and done it better, had he not had to sell out his writing skills to support a high maintenance lifestyle.

Now that I’ve praised Hemingway and Fitzgerald, let me point out that Hemingway committed suicide, and Fitzgerald drank himself to death. If you’re actually a writer, not just in public opinion, but in your talent, skill and drive to write, you need to guard your abilities, not squander them on the kind of internet “popularity” that leads to nothing more satisfying to your soul than paid blog gigs.

The internet, like any other popular medium, can cage you within its ego stroking. Your ego is a very small part of who you are. Oh, it’s a loud part! But, unless you can train it to serve you, instead of letting it lead you down a lifetime of of blind alleys, you’re never going to write anything that will provide it with lasting peace. For a writer, that peace comes from only one place: knowing that what you wrote changed a mind and a life in a positive and lasting way.

Whether you write humor, science, social commentary, science fiction, political opinions, or any of a number of other things, aren’t you hoping that what you write will resonate with your readers so that they see the world in a new way? Aren’t you trying to provide more than a brief titillation to your readers? Isn’t your ego so big that it would like to know that students fifty years from now will find that your words apply to their lives? Isn’t that the satisfaction you seek? If your hero is someone like Hemingway, instead of someone like Jeff Bezos, your answer is, “Yes.”

Had Fitzgerald made the decision to pursue writing, instead of pursuing rented villas in France and a public image as a “bright young thing,” he’d have been satisfied enough with himself NOT to try to drink away the pain of a self-esteem he lost early, in his quest of a shallow life. You see, it isn’t that Fitzgerald’s work didn’t live on. It’s that he doubted it would, because he knew what he’d done wasn’t the best he could do. His ego knew that, and it wasn’t satisfied.

Fitzgerald’s best work was never written. And I, just one among many, grieve that loss, for the same purely selfish reason as the many grieve it: we know that our lives, changed and improved by his writings, could have been made better still, had he written the best he had inside him.

I’ve read zillions of comments on the writing abilities of this or that blog owner. The comments are uniformly of praise and encouragement for those who write anything readable and resonant, even the most unfortunate of twaddle. My immediate thought, when I read such comments, is “Oh dear, I hope that doesn’t encourage the writer to quit his/her day job.” And, yes, I think the same thing when I’m undeservedly praised. Twaddle is twaddle, even if I’m the one who wrote it.

Don’t judge your work solely by the opinion of the public. Look around you and see what “the public” likes: they like to be stimulated and entertained. If you’re hoping to get a job writing for a sitcom, fire up the hit counter and zero in on the comments. That way you can learn how to come to the attention of the people who make their living off of writers.

If you’re going for the Big Prize, aim for it, right now, and leave the social networking comments behind. You have only the time given to one life to reap any genuine reward for your work, and you and I both know that money alone isn’t enough to qualify as a genuine reward. Can you afford to waste your small amount of alloted time reading blog comments…or pandering to them?

And finally, no matter what your motivation is for blogging, don’t ’settle’ for comments if your blog host makes money off your donated writing. Obviously, the ideal would be to host your own blog, but that means having the money to do so. Until you can afford that, look around the internet for a fair exchange between you and your blog host.

Fitzgerald was well paid by Saturday Evening Post for his stories. The Post attracted readership with his stories, and that readership attracted ad revenue. And ad revenue then meant exactly what it means now: someone (or several someones) got a raise and bonus for being clever enough to ‘own’ the power of Fitztgerald’s writing.

What are you accepting as the currency of exchange for your writing?

March 17, 2009