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Weekend of disappointment.

Mitch Harper advised his read­ers to visit a farm mar­ket over the week­end. I did, but I was going to any­way. I usu­ally go to the East­ern Mar­ket down­town, but Sat­ur­day decided to off­set a lit­tle car­bon and ride my bike to the West Park Farm­ers Mar­ket, down in GPP. Now that I’ve lived here a few years, I real­ize the mis­take of not buy­ing in GPP, Grosse Pointe Park, or just “the Park” around here. That’s where my peo­ple live, but hey, it’s only a cou­ple miles down Kercheval. The mar­ket, alas, is less won­der­ful. It’s fes­tive and market-like, but with only a few sell­ers of actual pro­duce — every­one else is hawk­ing bot­tled gourmet sauces, hand­made jew­elry and that sort of thing. I bought four lovely-looking Geor­gia peaches, took them home, bit into one and imme­di­ately spit it out. It had that inte­rior meali­ness that sug­gests weeks spent in cold stor­age, with a dark hint that per­haps it wasn’t even a Geor­gia peach at all, but maybe one of the loath­some Cal­i­for­nia variety.

Note to Cal­i­for­nia read­ers: I’m sure the peaches you buy are pretty good, and I expect some defense of home-state pro­duce, so save your protests. The lousy Cal­i­for­nia peaches are all exported to the Mid­west, where they sit in super­mar­kets look­ing like the pla­tonic ideal of peach­i­ness, truly beau­ti­ful spec­i­mens. If only they weren’t rock-hard and ined­i­ble. I used to buy them and put them in paper bags on my counter, wait­ing for ripeness to arrive. Ripeness = Godot. When a lovely peach sits for two weeks and can’t soften even incre­men­tally, some­thing very strange is going on.

That was dispir­it­ing. The trade­off in being able to ride a bike to mar­ket is always vari­ety — the East­ern Mar­ket has the crit­i­cal mass of cus­tomers to sup­port such local trea­sures as Mush­room Man, Organic Egg Guy and the vital-to-our-emotional-well-being Gra­tiot Cen­tral Mar­ket, for all — and I mean all — your meat needs, but still. It’s six more days to next Sat­ur­day, and I really wanted some Geor­gia peaches.

Even more dispir­it­ing was that the bike ride sapped my ener­gies, and the rhi­novirus came in for the kill. What’s less excit­ing than a sum­mer Sat­ur­day night spent at home with a wors­en­ing cold? This must be why we pay big bucks for dig­i­tal cable. Noth­ing par­tic­u­larly good was on, but hey, “Sum­mer of Sam” was com­ing around on the Retro chan­nel. I have two major aller­gies in today’s mul­ti­plex — Steven Spiel­berg and Spike Lee. Where crit­ics see (and say, end­lessly) “gifted,” “accom­plished” and “national trea­sure,” I see only “over­rated.” But now that Spielberg’s made a movie I can not only stom­ach but actu­ally enjoyed (“Munich”), it seemed time to see whether my immu­nity had changed with Lee. “Sum­mer of Sam” it was, then. And the short answer is? No. He still sucks*.

Overdi­rected? Check. Half-baked script? Check. Cast­ing of capa­ble actors in parts that hogtie their tal­ent? Check. Obscenity-strewn** dia­logue scenes that go on three times as long as they need to, until you hold your head in your hands scream­ing stop stop some­one please make it stop? Check. Oh, and wait — is there a Mes­sage Stick lying around, and is it used to beat on us at reg­u­lar inter­vals? Cer­tainly, yes. Finally, did Roger Ebert ladle an aston­ish­ing dol­lop of praise over the whole mess, as he has over pretty much the whole Lee cat­a­log, prov­ing every­one has his blind spots? Yup. Am I say­ing there wasn’t one good thing about it? No. I liked Adrien Brody, and I thought the “Baba O’Riley” mon­tage was OK, but then, it’s hard to go wrong with “Baba O’Riley.” So there.

(*“S.O.S.” was made in 1999, so I acknowl­edge “still” may not be accu­rate. One always hopes for growth in an artist. I only saw part one of the Kat­rina thing, and it was OK, but it didn’t make me want to watch parts 2, 3 and 4.)

(**As for “obscenity-strewn,” I yield to no one in my tol­er­ance for rough lan­guage, but there’s a point at which it becomes annoy­ing, dis­tract­ing back­ground noise, espe­cially in an over­long scene, because you want to shake the char­ac­ters and say, “If you’d stop say­ing ‘fuck’ so often you could maybe get to the point, you fuck­ing asshole.”)

Enough about my lit­tle prob­lems. Bloggage!

Evil, evil, evil, evil, stu­pid: A sur­geon general’s report in 2006 that called on Amer­i­cans to help tackle global health prob­lems has been kept from the pub­lic by a Bush polit­i­cal appointee with­out any back­ground or exper­tise in med­i­cine or pub­lic health, chiefly because the report did not pro­mote the administration’s pol­icy accom­plish­ments, accord­ing to cur­rent and for­mer pub­lic health officials.

A dec­la­ra­tion: I don’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary Clinton’s cleav­age — I have my own to worry about — but evi­dently oth­ers do. Thou­sands of words were spent in the last week dis­cussing whether the junior sen­a­tor from New York did or did not dis­play uncon­tro­vert­ible evi­dence that yes, she does indeed pos­sess a pair of breasts, but by far, the stu­pid­est of all came, fit­tingly, from Dan Quayle’s for­mer aide Lisa Schiffren. She, mind you, also doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary’s cleav­age, although being a Repub­li­can wife and mother, she puts it more del­i­cately: I over­came my desire to com­ment on this tem­pest ear­lier this week. But then she does — it’s “legit” to talk about the big C, she opines — and then ends with one of those soror­ity sis­ter, it’s-for-your-own-good-that-I’m-saying-this lemon shake-ups:

But let’s be real here. The fact is, Hillary was wear­ing a fairly low cut sum­mer top. She was not dis­play­ing cleav­age, as the shot on Drudge indi­cates. Some­one else wear­ing the same out­fit might have done. But Hillary Clin­ton does not have cleav­age to dis­play. Period. Indeed, Hillary never for­gave her mother-in-law, Vir­ginia Kelly for point­ing this out decades ago to the young Bill Clin­ton, a cleav­age man if ever there was one. So…it’s OK to dis­cuss some­thing that doesn’t exist? Thanks, girlfriend.

And now, because I believe in sav­ing the most impor­tant, depress­ing, vein-opening stuff for after the triv­ial, whiny, vein-opening stuff about bad peaches, crappy movies and cleav­age, “Inside the Surge,” excel­lent pho­tos and video from Guardian pho­tog­ra­pher Sean Smith, embed­ded with U.S. Marines in Iraq. Just about as depress­ing as you’d imag­ine. But required viewing.

Posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 12:05 am
in Current events, Movies, Same ol' same ol'.

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29 responses to
“Weekend of disappointment.”

  1. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 6:13 am

    Well, Nancy, as I read though your, as always, witty and inter­est­ing blog, I was prepar­ing to write some chirpy lit­tle thing about how we’d spent our week­ends in a sim­i­lar way – wish­ing for good peaches, not feel­ing ter­ri­bly well, being out­raged about the never-to-be-released Car­mona report and irri­tated w/ Lisa Shiffren. I even con­sid­ered past­ing in the clever com­ment I wrote re Lisa Shiffren’s remarks on another blog.

    Then I saw the Sean Smith pho­tos and video. I may go find that post any­way, but it’s going to be tough to come up w/ addi­tional chirpyness.

    In lieu of that, how­ever, how about a quiz? For three points, who was Dan Quayle’s chief of staff?

  2. alex said on July 30th, 2007 at 7:13 am

    Con­fes­sion, Jolene — I googled it. That lit­tle neo­con twerp? I wouldn’t have guessed it in a mil­lion years. I just assumed chief of staff would have been one of the numer­ous sinecures given to fel­low IU stu­dents of my gen­er­a­tion who took polit­i­cal sci­ence 101, thought they knew every­thing and joined the Nazi Youth Corps. Er, rather, the Young Repub­li­cans. They were even more tedious than the left­ies who took soci­ol­ogy 101 and thought they knew everything.

  3. brian stouder said on July 30th, 2007 at 7:59 am

    Tom Sny­der, RIP

    He was my first late-night fave, many many years ago. It was the age before cable/satellite, when con­ven­tional broad­cast net­works ruled the roost. He was refresh­ingly different.…and he smoked dur­ing his show!

  4. Dorothy said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:10 am

    Good peaches are going to be hard to come by via South Car­olina or Geor­gia this year, as we suf­fered a freeze in early spring. So those prob­a­bly were Cal­i­for­nia peaches you purchased.

    Back to work after being out a week so I’ll have to look at your links later.

  5. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:17 am

    I get a kick out of the idea of Kris­tol being Quayle’s CoS. He’s so impressed w/ his intel­li­gence and elo­quence. It must have killed him to be sub­servient to Dimwit Dan.

    Now, for all the money, what nick­name have blog­gers been using to refer to Kris­tol in light of his recent delu­sional WaPo op-ed?

    Appar­ently, Pres­i­dent Bush liked it a lot.

  6. nancy said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:21 am

    I got Bill Kris­tol out of the depths of mem­ory before read­ing the com­ments, but the nick­name eludes me.

    Your last link is bad, Jolene. Don’t keep me in suspense!

  7. Jeff said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:41 am

    Oh, why not — i feel like being a punch­ing bag this week: when the sur­geon general’s office tries to say some­thing should be part of our nation’s for­eign pol­icy, should they be sur­prised when there’s push­back? Most of the intra-office polit­i­cal ron­de­lay in the White House has to do with traffic-cop-ing all the cross-purposing that nat­u­rally goes on in the Exec­u­tive Branch, let alone when peo­ple are try­ing to tor­pedo their per­ceived com­pet­ing fac­tions (see any inter­ac­tion between Defense and State for the last fifty years, f’r instance). Let’s wran­gle about how naive the Bush Admin was about how bro­ken the Iraqi nation was and how quickly they could put a demo­c­ra­tic coun­try together out of the bits, and what that says about how we use­fully inter­vene in places like Sudan, North Korea, or south­ern Louisiana. But this is much less malign thug­gery than it is an inabil­ity on the part of this admin­is­tra­tion to under­stand the lim­i­ta­tions of their abil­ity to effect change (see entry: absti­nence edu­ca­tion). They think the “bully pul­pit” of Teddy Roo­sevelt is Harry Potter’s magic wand.

  8. danindy said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:51 am

    Geor­gia peaches??!! We ALWAYS waited with patience until the Michi­gan peaches were in sea­son. Sooooo much bet­ter than geor­gia or Cali..gag peaches hands down.

  9. John said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:52 am

    “Magic wand”, hmmmm, not good. Pro­motes Druidism and Witch­craft. Goes against core val­ues. Must get “Turd Blos­som” to weigh in on this.

  10. nancy said on July 30th, 2007 at 9:04 am

    I think one rea­son the polit­i­ca­tion of the sur­geon general’s office is so offen­sive is that it’s one office that should at least give the appear­ance of con­sid­er­ing sci­ence and facts before mak­ing pronouncements.

    In this case, it’s true the report rec­om­mended pol­icy changes/initiatives. But look at what they were: Acknowl­edg­ing that health has an effect on poverty rates. Urg­ing cor­po­ra­tions to work to improve pub­lic health in the coun­tries where they do busi­ness. That’s like approv­ing of moth­er­hood and tasty food. Talk about stat­ing the obvious:

    The draft report itself, in lan­guage link­ing pub­lic health prob­lems with vio­lence and other social ills, says “we can­not over­state … that prob­lems in remote parts of the globe can no longer be ignored. Dis­eases that Amer­i­cans once read about as affect­ing peo­ple in regions … most of us would never visit are now capa­ble of reach­ing us directly. The hunger, dis­ease, and death result­ing from poor food and nutri­tion cre­ate social and polit­i­cal insta­bil­ity … and that insta­bil­ity may spread to other nations as peo­ple migrate to survive.”

    I mean: Duh. But this hack, with his PhD in Latin Amer­i­can stud­ies and close friend­ships with the Bush/Cheney orbit, refuses to release it until it con­tains some rah-rah about how much this coun­try is already doing to alle­vi­ate these prob­lems. It goes to the ques­tion of what these reports are even for, and with this admin­is­tra­tion, as always, the answer is: To pol­ish our halos and sub­se­quently cement our power.

    I’m sen­si­tive on this sub­ject because this is what I do at nights in my edit­ing gig — comb the world’s English-speaking media for health-care news, from tiny nuggets about IPOs at biotech com­pa­nies in India to panoramic views of epi­demics and inter­na­tional pol­icy issues. To say it’s been an edu­ca­tion is an under­state­ment; my doc­tor and I now spend more time chat­ting about drug and insur­ance com­pa­nies than we do my puffy knee. I’ve learned a few things, and one of them is that the main points of the report are only STATING THE OBVIOUS, and it’s good to get these things on record some­where. To think they’re blocked and held up — like so many things in gov­ern­ment are blocked and held up — by this col­lec­tion of third-rate hacks is just galling.

  11. Jeff said on July 30th, 2007 at 9:22 am

    Yah, but this report wanted to say from the Sur­geon Gen’l office that cer­tain pub­lic health ini­tia­tives should be part of our for­eign pol­icy. Which, i strongly sus­pect, is cor­rect, but the infight­ing and the fellow’s resume aren’t at odds.

    If this were a pol­icy paper on pub­lic health ini­tia­tives *within* the US, and it got stuffed by polit­i­cal con­cerns, we’ve got a whole new discussion.

    I just worry that look­ing for malign thug­gery in every Bush admin action is going to muddy the path to fig­ur­ing out whose pol­icy approach in the ’08 elec­tion should be affirmed. My biggest con­cern about Hillary Clin­ton is that her approach is Bush-ian in assum­ing the gov­ern­ment can do a bunch of stuff it really can’t … Rom­ney is Bush on smarm-steroids. I’m not really a lib­er­tar­ian, but there’s a breath of com­mon sense that they fan onto the embers of ratio­nal debate that i admire.

  12. LA mary said on July 30th, 2007 at 9:41 am

    I go to an orchard to get peaches. Oth­er­wise we get the sucky hard ones that never ripen. I bought some at the farm­ers’ mar­ket two weeks ago and they stayed hard and tasted like raw potatoes.

  13. Jeff said on July 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am

    Wow, don’t buy the new mutant strain of so-called “grape tomatos.” Like a cherry tomato with an egg shape, and all the taste (and tex­ture) of eggshell. I’m sure these are shelf sta­ble and unbruis­able, but unless you’re a food pho­tog­ra­pher, give up.

    OTOH, the deer love my plot o’ green pep­pers and cherry tomato plants, even despite my fringe of marigolds which has always resisted deer infringe­ment before. So i gotta find a farmer’s mar­ket that has cherry tomatos along­side the peaches …

  14. Connie said on July 30th, 2007 at 11:24 am

    We decided long ago to only buy locally grown peaches. Sat­ur­day we bought our first Michi­gan peaches of the sea­son, at the Orchard Farm Mar­ket between Man­is­tee and Lud­ing­ton, on the way home from our vaca­tion. Sea­son lasts about 6 weeks, so we will be pig­ging out on peaches for the next cou­ple of weeks. And mak­ing our favorite dessert, which we have named “Peach Slop”.

    As for vaca­tion, well if it hadn’t been for the sep­tic tank issues it would have been perfect.

  15. LA mary said on July 30th, 2007 at 12:54 pm

    For some­thing to be sold in a cer­ti­fied farm­ers mar­ket here it has to be grown within a cer­tain num­ber of miles. Don’t know what that num­ber is but it makes every­thing essen­tially local.

    Other than the funky peaches, I got some great things on my last trip. Great corn, toma­toes, straw­ber­ries, blue­ber­ries, black­ber­ries, rasp­ber­ries and dif­fer­ent let­tuces. I’ll buy my peaches at Blum Ranch start­ing next month. Pears and plums too.

  16. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 12:59 pm

    Sorry, I had to leave. Sev­eral blog­gers have begun to refer to Bill Kris­tol as “Kris­tol Meth”. Fits w/ the delu­sions he seems to be suf­fer­ing from.

  17. Danny said on July 30th, 2007 at 2:07 pm

    I rarely eat raw peaches because good ones are hard to come by.

    But this does remind me of a song I saw a music video for years ago where the main lyric was some­thing like, “Gonna move to the coun­try and eat a lot of peaches.” The video was pretty funny. The band mem­bers had to use there mar­tial arts skills in the peach orchard where they are attacked by a bunch of nin­jas. Still didn’t make up for the fact that the song wasn’t very good and noth­ing will ever make up for the fact that video killed the radio star.

    I’m going to see Rush tonight. First time since I saw them in their hey­day (Hemi­spheres tour twice in 1979, and the 1980 and 1981 tours). I watched a 1975 video of them last night. They def­i­nitely would not have made it in the MTV era.

  18. brian stouder said on July 30th, 2007 at 2:10 pm

    I saw Meet the Press dis­cussing HRC’s cleav­age, which took me aback; I hadn’t heard any of this before. Being a red-blooded Amer­i­can man, I imme­di­ately Googled up the pic­ture (Meet the Press let me down by not show­ing me what they were talk­ing about), and I thought I had mis-Googled, and got­ten the wrong pic. The Sen­a­tor is seen address­ing the cham­ber, and she looks for­mally dressed, and that’s it.

    BUT — didja see the arti­cle on her 40 year old let­ters to a col­lege friend? Inter­est­ing stuff; she sounds like a great friend

    http://​www​.msnbc​.msn​.com/​i​d​/​2​0​0​33163/

    Although, I felt like a snoop read­ing the article

  19. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    I thought those let­ters were inter­est­ing too, Brian. They were soooo baby-boomerish. Hillary seems to have gone through the same kind or polit­i­cal trans­for­ma­tion as did many white-bread Amer­i­can kids her age, and I’ve often read that she is a great friend.

    It struck me as pecu­liar, though, that she was not really friends w/ that guy. She seemed to have been barely acquainted with him before they left the Mid­west; they never met dur­ing all the time they cor­re­sponded; and they never com­mu­ni­cated again after they stopped writ­ing toward the end of their time in college.

    Odd, but I can’t say it both­ered me. Grow­ing up is a weird process.

  20. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm

    Re your com­ment about HRC being a great friend, Brian, see this WaPo story re her staff. They are devoted to her and she to them.

  21. nancy said on July 30th, 2007 at 5:43 pm

    My last word on peaches:

    Michi­gan Red Haven peaches are fine, but you can’t beat Geor­gia and South Car­olina for those free­stone vari­eties that seem to slice them­selves in your hand. And Peach Slop sounds very good, a lot like my own Peach Crisp, which is awe­some (if the peaches are good).

  22. Jeff said on July 30th, 2007 at 7:53 pm

    But Michi­gan cher­ries, from Berrien County hard by the lake … mmmm, cher­ries … on oat­meal, in cob­bler, or just eat ‘em fresh ’til ya get sick, and then eat three more.

  23. Connie said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm

    Mmmm, Michi­gan cher­ries. But Jeff they really come from far north of Berrien County — we just spent our vaca­tion up north, pig­ging out on cherries.

    When we lived in south­ern Indi­ana we once gave some of those vaca­tion cher­ries to the old guy next door. He told us he had been camp­ing up there years ago and was delighted to have some of the cher­ries he remem­bered so fondly. Then he leaned over and said, “but you know what hap­pens when you eat too many cherries?”

    Thank you Dick, we do.

  24. nancy said on July 30th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

    We just fin­ished the one non-disappointing part of the weekend’s activ­ity: A cherry pie made with none other. The cook­book calls it Once a Year Cherry Pie, and notes the short­ness of the sea­son. I think you only make it once a year because it takes that long to for­get what a pain in the ass it is, pit­ting three pints of those suckers.

    But mmm, good.

  25. Mitch Harper said on July 30th, 2007 at 9:16 pm

    I just fin­ished eat­ing sweet corn that was picked this morn­ing and sold in the early evening. Great stuff. Not a farmer’s mar­ket but just a house that had posted a sweet corn sign.

    I deposited my buck-fifty in the honor box and took home 6 ears. Marvelous.

    As for Michi­gan peaches — enjoy. Two years ago, Dawn and I drove through Michi­gan dur­ing peach time. I think we stopped at three road­side stands. Delicious!

    I was expect­ing what my grand­mother would have called “sum­mer com­plaint.” How­ever, that was not the result from indulging in so much peach essence.

    I was at Hardy’s Farm Mar­ket in Fort Wayne on Fri­day. A pickup truck had rolled in just before I got there. It was loaded with crates of Michi­gan peaches. As I walked up to the farm­stand the truck turned out of the park­ing lot and went back on the gravel lane.

    I had expected to see peaches for sale. How­ever, the clerk told me that she was unsure about OKing the pur­chase and had sent the truck up to the owner to get his approval. She said that, gen­er­ally, Hardy’s had got­ten south­ern Illi­nois peaches (which ripen about two weeks before Michigan’s) but that a spring frost had destroyed the Illi­nois crop.

    Unfor­tu­nately, there were not Michi­gan peaches to be had. I hadn’t checked back today. There bet­ter be some tomor­row or Wednes­day when I visit or I will be sorely tempted to head toward Grand Rapids.

  26. Jolene said on July 30th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    This talk of cher­ries and peaches and pies is mak­ing me both hun­gry and nos­tal­gic. I grew up on a farm, long enough ago so that can­ning fruits and veg­eta­bles was just what peo­ple did.

    My mother used to buy peaches by the crate; she’d can lots of them, but we also had pies and sliced peaches w/ sugar and cream for sup­per. The peaches, as I recall, were from Geor­gia and con­sis­tently won­der­ful. Of course, that was back in the good old days, when, as we know, there were so many more con­sis­tently won­der­ful things.

    One more note re Hillary. Like Brian, I watched MTP yes­ter­day AM. I had already heard the cleav­age brouhaha, but I hadn’t pre­vi­ously heard of her visit to the con­ven­tion of the National Beauty Cul­tur­ists’ League last Fri­day. Here is the poster for this event, which I guess was also on her website.

    I liked the humor. It’s another instance of human­iz­ing Hillary. Her deci­sion to appear before this audi­ence shows, as if we needed another exam­ple, that she is a smart politi­cian. It’s hard to imag­ine any pro­fes­sional group whose mem­bers have had more expe­ri­ence in lis­ten­ing to and sym­pa­thiz­ing with women who’ve been done wrong by men than hair­styl­ists. Or so I hear. I always talk about movies w/ mine.

  27. basset said on July 30th, 2007 at 10:09 pm

    »I have my own to worry about

    So when’s Nance going to address the Senate?

  28. michaelj said on July 31st, 2007 at 3:59 pm

    On the other hand, Spike Lee did Inside Man, which was an excel­lent movie. If I’m aller­gic to any­thing about movies, it’s def­i­nitely Kevin Spacey.

  29. LA mary said on July 31st, 2007 at 4:08 pm

    I just saw Inside Man on cable. I thought it sort of sucked.
    I’m with you on Kevin Spacey, though.

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