Pray for Something Good for Christ's Sake!

There was an article about this wall street pentecostal preacher guy and his wife in the New York Times Sunday Magazine this week - complete with scary pictures of these people. The wife used to "pray to God to send her a husband." And HE sent her one! Good-oh! One up for GOD.

Then the beloved C came home and told me that her boss had told her that the beloved C was the answer to her prayers and that the boss knew that God had sent her (beloved C) to UCLA so that she (the boss) could give her (C) another department currently being run by a nimrod.

So here are two examples of GOD actively intervening in the lives of prayerful christians. And here's my question for GOD. Why is GOD interested in someones marital status? Or UCLA's alumni fundraising? Is GOD a BRUIN? With so much going on in the world, why is GOD listening to someones pray for a good data processing manager? Hello, GOD, I don't care about Margaret's period, I care about the fact that people, actual people are being raped and killed in Darfour. Triage? Priorities? Get GOD a damn PDA and a prioritized to do list before it's too late!

And here's my question for those who pray. What's Christian about praying to GOD to fix your SEX LIFE? Or to solve a little work issue? What kind of solipsistic, dumb-ass, personal, itty bitty kind of thing to pray for. Pray to stop civil war in Iraq.

Reviews: The Coronation of Poppea

Well, yes, I know that there was no PBGV action happening when Monetverdi was around, but still, Beso is adorable and happy.

So we, the beloved C and I, went to see Monteverdi's Coronation of Poppea by the L.A. Opera at the music center.

The Coronation of Poppea is a very long opera, 3 acts, two intermissions, 4 hours, one murder suicide, one attempted murder, three exiles and some royal adultery. A lot happens.

The Coronation of Poppea is one of the earliest operas and is a baroque opera. The orchestra was not a modern one, but one filled with a disarming lack of wind and percussion instruments. There were violins and a viola, harps, harpsichords, baroque cello, baroque guitar and best of all three, count 'em three theorbos. They were like lutes for Atlas-sized giants. I'll just let you google them, but dear me they were large - and we could see them big as ever from our outpost at the top of the balcony.

Anyway, it's a very long opera and it is not a "classic" opera, the music is baroque, the narrative arc is odd. It's about Nero and his girlfriend Poppea, who wants to be empresses so they need to get rid of the current legal empress who wants to get rid of Poppea.

Often in Operas the wronged wife is this noble character - like the Marchande in der Rosenkavalier, though obviously this was not a trope in Opera when Poppea was composed since it is one of the first operas, but Octavia, the empress, she sings sweetly about love and how her husband, Emperor Nero, is her one true love and how heartbroken she is that he's cheating on her, etc., etc.

And I thought, you know, if my husband was Nero - I might have a few other issues with him. Like the poisonings, murders, assassinations, thefts and the horse in the bedroom. Sleeping around is nothing.

Poppea and Nero arrange to murder Seneca, the stoic philosopher. He kills himself after the villagers sing to him asking him not to die. There are a few goddesses running around quarrelling. Mercury pops down and hovers around to tell Seneca that he's going to go. Seneca, being a stoic is a baritone and is glad to leave handling Nero to go take his chances with the gods. Nero and Seneca's nephew sing about love and feel each other up. (STOIC=BARITONE)

And that's just part of the first two acts!!!! The song where the villagers ask Nero not to die is absolutely gorgeous as is the duet between Nero and the nephew.

So (we're going to go faster now) Poppea's jilted boyfriend, Otho is told by Occtavia, Nero's wife, that he has to kill Poppea by dressing as a woman. He asks Drusilla, the woman who loves him to borrow her clothes and declares his love for her. She is stupid, so she believes this and gives him her outfit. Otho goes to kill Poppea who lies asleep in her garden but Amore, the goddess of love, stops him from killing Poppea, he is discovered and escapes though all can say that it was Drusilla who tried to kill Poppea. Did I mention that Otho is a counter tenor? That means he sings higher than I do. Love duets between men and women where they are both in the same vocal range are rare.

So Otho escapes, but Drusilla is easily caught and Nero threatens her with torture so she admits to wanting to kill Poppea and she is sentenced to death. But wait! Lo! There is Otho, striding forward and declaring that it was he who tried to kill Poppea! At the request of Ottavia! So Otho is exiled, Drusilla goes with him, and Ottavia is exiled. Now is Poppea's chance to be empress, Ottavia is gone and the way is clear!

The opera notes made a great deal of the fact that there is no moral compass for the audience to root for. Seneca the stoic baritone is killed off in the begining of the second act and didn't do to good of a job teaching Nero ethics. Ottavia wants to kill her rival but isnt' appalled at a husband who routinely murders his relatives and former teachers. Drusilla is willing to sacrifice herself for her lover, but she is also quite happy to help her lover kill her rival. Otho is totally willing to point the finger at the Empress, there goes loyalty. Nero is an adulterer and murderer. Ditto Poppea.

But my word, the closing duet between Poppea and Nero, declaring their love; gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous!

Show Dogs

Here are the heebiegeebies all lined up in a row at the Eukanuba Invitational Dog Show in Long Beach last week. We took the our pbgvs and did a stint of oh, about 30 seconds at the Meet the Breed booth and then looked at the pbgv competition. Which was thrilling. Our Host, the wonderfully knowledgable pbgv breeder who was responsible for our irrepressible Beso knew a lot about hounds and competition. Her guy, Champion Janvan Gandalf, is pictured here, is a totally gorgeous, well-put together peeb, with beautiful movement. So we had a great time and it was so fun to go to the dog show with your dogs. That was totally fun.

Well I have to walk the dogs and get ready to go to the Opera, so I'll check in later this week.

Okay I Project Managed this site: http://www.myroboreptile.discovery.com So go and take a look, play the game, watch the video and let me know how you like it.

Oh yeah, it keeps the number up. So thanks for checking it out.

Things I Wonder About: Holiday Decorations

So you know that I am against overdone privacy plantings, this is because they are antithetical to new urbanism, discourage pedestrians and also because I like to look into other people's windows. Our neighborhood is an old one, with "spanish style" houses set back and front yards that are grass. Very sweet. (Well don't get me started on GRASS in Southern California that's another rant!) But some people, like the house above, have done a few privacy plantings. This house is a drag to walk by because you can't tell what's behind it, and the dogs bark but you don't know if they're outside or not and the plants are taking over the sidewalk.

But from the street, as you can see, there is no way to see the house. So what's up with the holiday decorations gone crazy? It started the first week of October with this extravagant Halloween display that no one can see. That was then re-done with stuffed chickens and turkeys for the thanksgiving holiday. Now of course it is a winter wonderland with christmas elves and trees. Stuck behind the privacy plantings. It is odd to think of this outpouring of public civic mindedness in decorating for the holidays and hiding it. An even odder note is that our neighborhood is predominantly and rather pointedly orthodox jewish and so the happy secular christmas theme hidden behind the privacy plantings takes on this subversive tone.

I don't get it. Going to all this decor galore "public" work and keeping it hidden.

Things I wonder about

So day after day I read the LA Times and there are terrible stories about gang members pulling up to people's houses and firing shots at families and killing young children, teens and people who are either in or not in gangs. Just last August, while Mayor Villaregosa was down the street comforting a family of a young boy shot in a drive by killing, a teenage girl who was going to the memorial service was shot to death - on the two blocks from the Mayor of Los Angeles.

Now, I don't know, but I wonder. Why are these things called "gang" related and not militia related? How come we have "gangs" and Iraq has "militias?" Both have guns and ammo. Both have economic means of survival through black market activities. Both have support among some members of the community who are willing to shelter members and are willing to buy the goods controlled by the militia. The people who are randomly dead from their activities are all really dead. So when is a gang a militia? When is a militia a gang?

Car thoughts

The Insurance Institute comes out with Auto Safety ratings every year and they make their criteria known in advance. So last year they said that no car that didn't have ECS technology, electronic control systems reduce skids, slides and roll overs.

No American cars made the safety list this year. Why? Because they didn't have ECS. GM, Ford have been having terrible years financially, they have made money on trucks for years but high gas prices have had sales plummeting. Lack of good design has made Americans buy hondas and toyotas and vws. Ford and GM are laying off workers and going to Washington for handouts and bailouts.

But isn't it telling, that with an entire year to install already existing technology, technology that would actually make their products safer, the American car industry could not CHANGE ONE SINGLE assembly line to insure that one of their makes of cars were on that safety list.

Shouldn't these corporations stop paying their execs huge salaries and start actually firing the CEOs and not the workers?

National Gluttony Day

So the beloved C and I were going to have people (actual family) over for national gluttony day. Because I'm just having issues or I'm contrary, I decided that we would not have a "groaning board" for the holidays, that we would have a reasonable feast. That I would not make gazillions of dishes. That I would be freed from the tyranny of hor d'ouevre. Just say no to excess, to greed, to gluttony, to Americans using all of the resources!

So we decided to have a first course of butternut squash soup, a turkey breast, cornbread dressing, green beans. A friend who grows her veggies was bringing the salad. Desert a little apple pie. A lot of food, actually, but missing a few dishes from the traditional thanksgiving holiday overload. No biscuits, no potatoes, no mashed veggies.

Of course, we didn't have enough soup bowls for eight, so we bought little 1 cup bowls for the soup - actual chinese rice bowls. Little. But that was okay, since you just needed a little bit of soup, there was more food coming. It would just be a little taste. And so that weekend I made butternut squash soup and while I doubled the recipe, we ate it that Sunday for dinner and saved the rest. C spent the Sunday sorting through linens and ironing them, just like women were doing all over the nation. A little pre-cooking, a little ironing before the festivities.

I had been intending to make a free-form apple pie with puff pastry, and to use the left over pastry to make little cheese sticks. An hor d'ouevre! But don't tell anyone. Of course I couldn't find any puff pastry. Well I could find stuff masquerading as puff pastry. But, having made puff pastry, I know that puff pastry is made of flour and butter. Not transfat loaded salt flour with ingredients that no one can pronounce. So a little change in plan, I made pie dough pastry, and gave up the idea of little cheese sticks.

I had gone to Whole Paycheck and ordered a free range organic turkey breast, on bone, 8 to 10 pounds. I was scheduled to pick it up between 9:00 and 9:30 on Wed. Notice that if there was a problem I wasn't going to be giving myself a whole lot of time to fix the problem. To salt or brine a turkey I needed a couple days lead time. Obviously I didn't have time to defrost anything by then either. C came back and said, turkey breasts don't come in 8 to 10 pound increments, 6 pounds is the biggest that they come. So now I have a turkey that is less than one pound per person before cooking, when it shrinks. But that's okay, because there was going to be enough food. And people could fill up on dressing.

C asked how much ice cream I had bought for the ala mode aspect of the pie. 2 pints I said. I don't think that's enough she said as we were blocks from Whole Paycheck on Wed. But we didn't want to go back. Just a little drop of ice cream on the pie, we don't want to over do it.

So on Thursday I start making the dinner. I roll out the pastry dough into a tart pan and pour in the caramelized apples and realize that the apples don't fill the tart shell as abundantly as I had imagined. There are bare patches. A pie with negative space.

I start to make the dressing. I had made a loaf of cornbread on Sunday and another one on Tuesday. One of the loaves had mold on it. So I had half the amount of stuffing that I had planned.

And teeny, tiny soup bowls.

And a negative space pie.

And two to four pounds less turkey than planned.

And no hor d'ouevre.

We're the only people who spent hundreds of dollars on a Thanksgiving meal with not enough food.