This is sooo oddly tempting.
~ This roasted squash crème brûlée perfectly embodies the warmth and taste of Thanksgiving. Watch a video and get the recipe from PBS Food.
Source: Roasted Squash Crème Brûlée
Into the breach, once more.
[It is the countdown, folks – so count along.]
~ What’s your poison, Donald?
~ I know what your poison is, Hillary.
~ What’s that?
~ You drink the Kool-Aid.
~ You’re the one who mixes it, Donald. I don’t touch the stuff.
~ It makes you nasty.
~ I’m starting to think you have a fixation on nasty women.
~ I like women.
~ You like to do things to women, Donald. It’s a big difference.
~ They love it.
~ They’d love to let you know how much they love it – I’ll grant you that.
~ So, you get all the women beating up on me, you think it will make you win?
~ A lot more than that is going to make me win.
~ What’s that?
~ You, Donald. You being you. Really, all I have to do is stand there and be superior.
~…
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With the countdown counting down …
~ What’s your poison, Donald?
~ The USA is poison – believe me.
~ Not to worry. I’m lancing that for you.
~ You use a sword and you stab in the back.
~ Sword of Justice.
~ And you like to twist it.
~ Look at the Statue of Justice.
~ Isn’t she blindfolded?
~ Yeh – so keep your hands to yourself.
~ A man gets certain thoughts, sometimes.
~ A man keeps them as thoughts, Donald.
~ We gotta put our hands somewhere.
~ Try your pockets.
~ Oh – that shit’s for other people. I get what I want.
~ Not this time.
~ You don’t think I’ll be the 45th president?
~ That slot is reserved for a woman.
~ Ugh – such a nasty woman.
~ Hillary cleaned your clock, Donald.
~ You think so?
~ Wiped the numbers right off your face.
~…
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Having written two novels centered around an onion farm, it is always fine to share an onion recipe. Can there ever be too many onions? No! Just this past week I came across onion marmalade. I think I’ll tack that one down.
DE
Learn how to make baked onions from PBS Food. Moist and sweet without any heavy ingredients, these onions perfectly complement a steak.
Source: Baked Onions
Try a shrimp twist on the Chinese-American takeout classic of Kung Pao Chicken for a weeknight meal that comes together in 15 minutes.
Source: Kung Pao Shrimp
So, fifty years ago – Earth Time – Star Trek began to show the voyages of the USS Enterprise on television. It’s future has evolved much in a half century (Earth Time), and certainly over the Star Dates of the future. And into the past. I tried to hitch a ride on this star.
So, eons ago, I wrote a script for Star Trek, The Next Generation. Memory says (and I’ve been told my memory is not up to light speed), this was the only television series that asked for, and actively used, scripts from writers outside their own stable. They used one script per season from these submissions. So I submitted.
I had a response from Lolita Fatjo, and it gave me some quiet thrill to see her name among the STTNG credits at the end of each show. I believe she was classed under “Pre production”. I also thought she had a real nifty name. I note she currently still has dealings with Star Trek, helping to facilitate Star Trek Fan conferences and arranging appearances by some of the Star Trek stars.
I did not have an abundance of communication with Ms. Fatjo (I liked to think of her as Lolita). I think I got a package of information about the type of thing they wanted for a script. Memory says there was a desire to have a main plot line concentrating on just two or three of the main characters. There was to be one additional sub plot. There were arcs to accommodate the commercials. I believe they hoped for some humour. And timing, of course, all was timed to the exact minute. I followed directions and wrote a script and put it into the format and sent it off. I had two further dealings with Lolita. One told me they had received the script. The other – so deliciously close to the end of the season – was to tell me they would not be using it.
The script was called The Minstrel. An alien had a musical instrument (I think a horn, but it might have been strings) that would play tunes which adapted to whomever he was talking to. It had other properties, but I think I’ll keep them tucked away. You never know – there is a new show. Anyway, the Minstrel would interact (per act) with the Star Trek characters. Revelations were forthcoming. Not too many special effects (which was something else Lolita requested).
I received no big cheques or writing credits from this foray into television land. But not all was lost. I was writing my script in tandem with a friend who was writing her own script. News of our endeavours made the local writing circuit, and we were interviewed on regional radio. From that, we were asked to speak to a couple of writing classes, and even invited to an alternate world fan club to give a reading. We boldly went.
(image)http://otium.fundacionasimov.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/star-trek-otium1.jpg
DE
Gerti Wasner
Kafka liked the ladies and he had many relationships.
While in the first year of his ‘love-of-a-lifetime’ affair with Felice Bauer (they were engaged twice but – indeed – never married) he met “The Swiss Girl”. In his diaries she was only referred to as W. or G. W. They were together for ten days in a spa on Lake Garda.
She was a Christian. He was thirty, and she was eighteen. However the relationship (apparently sexually consummated) made a great impression on him for the rest of his life.
Research over the years finally revealed who she is, and Google search even provides photos. Her name is Gerti Wastner.However, very little else (as far as I can find) is known about her.
Where did her life lead after an encounter with Kafka?
Here are some of Kafka’s actual diary entries about the incident.
DE
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15 October 1913
Perhaps I have caught hold of myself again, perhaps I secretly took the shorter way again, and now I, who already despair in loneliness, have pulled myself up again. But the headaches, the sleeplessness! Well, it is worth the struggle, or rather, I have no choice. The stay in Riva was very important to me. For the first time I understood a Christian girl and lived almost entirely within the sphere of her influence. I am incapable of writing down the important things that I need to remember. This weakness of mine makes my dull head clear and empty only in order to preserve itself, but only insofar as the confusion lets itself be crowded off to the periphery. But I almost prefer this condition to the merely dull and indefinite pressure the uncertain release from which first would require a hammer to crush me.
20 October 1913
I would gladly write fairy tales (why do I hate the word so?) that could please W. and that she might sometimes keep under the table at meals, read between courses, and blush fearfully when she noticed that the sanatorium doctor has been standing behind her for a little while now and watching her. Her excitement sometimes—or really all of the time—when she hears stories. I notice that I am afraid of the almost physical strain of the effort to remember, afraid of the pain beneath which the floor of the thoughtless vacuum of the mind slowly opens up, or even merely heaves up a little in preparation. All things resist being written down. If I knew that her commandment not to mention her were at work here (I have kept it faithfully, almost without effort), then I should be satisfied, but it is nothing but inability. Besides, what am I to think of the fact that this evening, for a long while, I was pondering what the acquaintance with W. had cost me in pleasures with the Russian woman, who at night perhaps (this is by no means impossible) might have let me into her room, which was diagonally across from mine. While my evening’s intercourse with W. was carried on in a language of knocks whose meaning we never definitely agreed upon. I knocked on the ceiling of my room below hers, received her answer, leaned out of the window, greeted her, once let myself be blessed by her, once snatched at a ribbon she let down, sat on the window sill for hours, heard every one of her steps above, mistakenly regarded every chance knock to be the sign of an understanding, heard her coughing, her singing before she fell asleep.
22 October 1913.
Too late. The sweetness of sorrow and of love. To be smiled at by her in the boat. That was most beautiful of all. Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.
Translated by Joseph Kresh
Not that it is any surprise that Kafka’s name might arise in discussions about Trump. But, when it is the NPR that does the connection, the revelation does take on more gravitas.
Not to imply that Trump is a character straight out of Kafka, of course. Kafka’s bizarre imagination was a bit more ethereal. Trump is too much with us.
DE
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America
‘Kafka Is Present In U.S. Elections’: Mexican Reaction To Trump’s Visit
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August 31, 201612:52 PM ET
Eyder Peralta
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Alicia Lopez Fernandez paints a piñata depicting Donald Trump at her family’s store, Piñatas Mena Banbolinos, in Mexico City in 2015.
Marco Ugarte/AP
At some point today, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto.
It was a hastily arranged visit by a presidential candidate who has spent much of his campaign insulting Mexico and its people.
“I love the Mexican people, but Mexico is not our friend,” Trump tweeted last year. “They’re killing us at the border and they’re killing us on jobs and trade.” Earlier this summer, Trump joked about a Mexican attack on U.S. soil.
So, how’s his visit going over down there? Here are some reactions:
— Raúl Benitez Manaut, a professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, told the website Animal Politico that the author Franz Kafka must be playing some role in the U.S. presidential election.
“I’m not even going to think about wasting neurons to rationalize Trump’s visit,” he said. “The only thing we need is that they announce that gas prices will go up because the wall is going to cost too much and we all have to pitch in.”
— Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, was more direct. He told Lopez Doriga Digital: “Trump has nothing to do; these are desperate moves. What I don’t understand is why we fell for this trap, why we let him fool us.”
On Twitter, Fox said that Mexico did not want Trump and would never trust him.
“I told you, Trump,” he tweeted, “that ‘a fish dies by his own mouth.’ Now you should quit out of dignity for yourself, get back to your ‘business.’ ”
— Margarita Zavala, a potential presidential candidate in Mexico, tweeted: “Mr. Donald Trump, even though you have been invited, know that you are not welcome. Mexicans have dignity and we repudiate your hateful discourse.”
— Roberto Gil Zuarth, the president of the Mexican Senate, tweeted: “Inviting Donald Trump legitimizes his demagogy and hate. He threatens us with war and walls, but we open up the National Palace.”
— Enrique Ortiz Garcia, a historian, dug into colonial history to explain Trump’s visit:
The caption reads, “And then the foreigner arrived who at first we thought was Quetzalcóatl.”
It’s in reference to Hernando Cortés’ arrival in Tenochtitlán. According to some Spanish texts, the Aztecs at first confused Cortés with an important deity.
Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, welcomed the Spanish conquistador and tried to buy him off. But that backfired; Montezuma lost his empire and the Spanish began their colonial rule.
— At Mexico City’s Angel of the Independence, protesters gathered. One of them called on his president to cancel his invitation. Trump, he said, is an affront to all Mexicans.
— Enrique Peña Nieto explained his thinking with his own tweet. “I believe in dialogue in order to promote Mexican interests across the world and especially to protect Mexicans wherever they may be,” he tweeted.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/08/31/492091611/kafka-is-present-in-u-s-elections-mexican-reaction-to-trumps-visit?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160831
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And my original post:
All governments hate Franz Kafka
Source: WHEN THE GOVERNMENT HATES YOU
At those times I perceive I have made a brilliant observation, I often quote: “Thank God I got a degree when it meant something.” This usually annoys those who hear me but, I confess, I don’t really care. And I have yet to be smeared with the accusation that my education comes from the largess of Wal-Mart.
DE
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On hiring faculty off the tenure track That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Walmart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. I…
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