Late Breaking WeHo News!

Ladies and Germs, bois and gurls, these shocking photos of a message board evening meeting in WeHo have just been eeel-lectronically sent to me so that I might post them for your edification.

Where shall we six meet again!
Scotty, Mikey, Mikey Salad, Dan, Alex, Shane.


I don't have any details of this amazing meeting of the minds at this time, I only have these raw photographs...

Mikey Salad and Alex


Alex, dear, have you been drinking! hehe!

And the most shocking candid photo of all!

a special shot for r@!


This is fabulous!

Oh! The humanity!

Shit, Pussy and Goddam! I wish I had been there!

All photos by j2.

We Are Not Speaking...

lil' Puddin' AKA "Bad Kitty" born 1997


I was sitting at the desk with the screen door open to the front to let the air through the house and to let a certain animal that happens to live here be able to look out on the street and enjoy the activity. Then, I heard the screen door open. I went quickly to the door to see and there was my cat in a cat fight! She was beating the crap out of one of the local males! They were rolling over and over and making a lot of noise, but not as much as I was making! (Not that either of them was listening to me!)

Puddin' had never been that far outside before, let alone in a fight with an alhpa male from the hood. She won. I have to admit that I felt a little bit of pride in her prowess and she didn't seem to be physically hurt at all, but I knew what this meant. Now, she thinks that everything in front of the house is her territory. I spent 45 minutes trying to lure her back into the house. (Robert came out and tried to help. I was freaking out a bit.) I talked to her sweetly, offered her treats, but was she listening? No, she was a wild animal ready to scratch anyone who came near her! And she had to roll and roll in every stinky thing she could find! I finally had to break out the special bird thing on a wire toy to get her back in the house. (I am so mad about this...she'll never see it again..!)

She thinks she is really hot shit now. She is in no way sorry for getting into a fight on the street because she won this time. She has no idea about the bigger cats she could have run into and the cars she could have run under. All she knows is that she owns the front yard.

I'm going to have to re-enforce that screen door.

She is really going to hate the flea bath.

Bad Kitty.

Gardening With A Vengeance!

I think I've mentioned this before in posts on the message boards; gardening in New Orleans is mostly a matter of killing off what you don't want in your yard. Things grow very quickly, (vines will actually grow towards you and curl around your finger, if you let them..) and each season brings an entire new host of different plants that just pop up every year and shade out the stuff that was there before. Ten years ago a neighbor of mine on one end of the block planted Morning Glories and they now have grown through the back yards and clear across to the other side of the block filling most of the middle of it. You would almost have to sterilize the soil to stop it.

The yard today.


As you can see, it's a disaster back there right now. I had about twenty banana trees over 20 feet tall and the freeze did them wrong. It didn't really kill them; it just made them into a large mess, (It's very hard to kill them.). So I've begun to cut them down to get rid of the dead and overgrown stuff. Now, these aren't hardwoods, hehe. They're very soft and full of juice; I can cut through a 12" diameter tree in a minute with a hand saw, but the "juice" sprays all over and stains light clothing forever. And one has to be careful about the 140 pounds plus of stalk coming crashing down. Once they are all cut down to within a few feet of the ground, they will then come back at an almost alarming rate! But, hopefully, they will have been stunted enough not to make a bunch of bananas this year. Once they start making a big bunch of bananas the mess gets worse: first there is a "flower" that is about the size of your head that sheds big gooey bits every day for weeks, and then when the bananas in the bunch start to mature with their ends pointing in the air, the trees start to look all shredded and dry as all the energy goes into the fruit. I should mention here that the fruit of the variety that grows in my yard is more like the plaintains you see in the market.

So why do I allow these messy trees in my yard? Well, they are very hard to get rid of; you need to chop them down and then dig out the roots, and you have to do this year after year because they keep coming back. And they do create a very green and pleasantly moist shade during the hottest days of the summer. And they do it very quickly...

The yard will look like this by early summer.


Yes, they will have come back that much! And although they now shade the back half of the yard so much in the summer that no grass will grow there, they also stop most of the creepy crawler vines from covering the ground. And the light is very soothing beneath the huge green leaves.

There are other things that grow vorasciously in the yard: Night Blooming Jasmine grows everywhere and the smell of it makes me ill; certain times of the year it is just so pervasive. The Confederate Jasmine (a vine) that has grown over from Robert's yard and now covers my lattice work over the area by the back door doesn't stink so much and doesn't get out of control. There's quite a bit of wisteria, which looks like a bunch of deadwood most of the year and then suddenly in the spring explodes in a huge array of delicate blossoms. And there's this stinky nasty vine with ugly flowers that actually tries to grow into my house! I traced a vine to it's base 50 feet away and cut it. It was over two inches think at the base. Did it die? No, It wilted a bit and then put new roots into the ground every few feet and continued to thrive better than ever. My vigilence must be never ending. But in the fall, a whole 'nother bunch of plants comes in, including a kind of large leafed clover with tiny little flowers that covers the ground completely and overcomes what was there before.

In a way, I kind of like the way it all works in my yard. I grew up on a farm in upstate NY and I love horrifying my Dad with the tales of the "incredible creeping vines" and killer plants. Up north, we spent so much effort nurturing our plants so they would make for us something to eat. The "weeds" were fairly easy to get rid of; we just hoped for enough rain and sun so that our hard work would pay off. In New Orleans, it's like vampire gardening

Junk Food and the Food Nazis

A ways back I started talking about food and how bad most of the pre-prepared, "quick-to-fix" stuff is. This expensive garbage takes up a lot of shelf space in the average chain supermarket, so it must be selling. The question is, why are people buying it?

With the huge popularity of the Food Channel and the hundreds of other cooking shows on TV, you would think that many people were cooking more at home, and yet the microwavable "something in a bowl" is the fastest growing retail grocery item. Have we become food voyeurs, getting off on great cuisine when it's on the screen, but settling for a culinary hand job in real life?

I think people settle for less than good when it comes to the food that they eat for two reasons. The first is that they haven't learned basic cooking skills. Maybe they feel that it's not interesting enough or too difficult. Yet most people learn how to drive a car or do some kind of job and isn't being able to feed yourself at least that important? And being able to have friends over for meal is certainly one of the great things in life. Yet many people lack this ability. I've even met quite a few people who are indifferent about food and a great many who are afraid to try anything new. This isn't just a matter of taste, it's a thing we learn from the people around us as we grow up.

The second reason has to do with advertising and the Food Nazis. The health establishment and the popular press have given us some very strange ideas about food and health. The most extraordinary ideas about what is good and bad for you have been put forth over the years; much of it contradictory and very little of it based on good science. (The basics of good nutrition really haven't changed that much over the centuries; it just doesn't make for exciting reading.) There has been so much of this because people want to hear it. We want some magic simple diet or pill that will make everything all right so we can live forever, even if we don't enjoy it very much, and the food industry and their ad agencies are more than ready to pander to that. The fact that people fall for this line of thinking on their own is bad enough, but now there are some who would like to make laws about what is good to eat. These Food Nazis say that not eating right kills more people and causes more expensive health problems than tobacco or alcohol, therefore they should be able to decide what you eat based on whatever popular scientific belief is in vogue at the time. For me that's just going too far. We need to get back to the idea of really taking care of ourselves and not expecting the government to do it all. We need to stop thinking of food as medicine and tell the Food Nazis we don't want them in our lives.

Take some time to stop and smell the pot roast! The major part of living well is learning how to recognize and enjoy the good things in life. Don't cheat yourself.

Bikkies!







I got addicted to these "cookies" during my month in Australia. (People there call them biscuits, or bikkies.) They are fantastic! Every so often, my friends David and Glennie send me a little package from Oz... and I got one today! Thank you guys!



Happy durlx with Tim Tams, which were named
after the 1958 Kentucky Derby Winner



There was a package of the original and one of the Tim Tam White, which is also very good. I was dancing around the room yelping with happiness over my good fortune, when I was overcome with a strange impulse; I would give Robert one! (Usually, I snatch the package from the postman and look up and down the street to make sure no one saw it and then keep them all for myself.) Robert seemed to enjoy his Tim Tam and I had this wonderful feeling of having shared something precious. I thought about offering him another one, but, well there are limits...

Well, I just moments ago discovered that the original Tim Tams are being test marketed in California under the name "Double Trouble"! I am so excited! (Although I hate that name.) Those of you in California; buy them, write to Arnott's and tell them how much you love them. Make this test marketing a big success! Please. I can't live without them.




Yesterday, I went to the dentist. I no longer have the lousy dental insurance that came with my last job, so I was able to go back to the dentist that I like. He has an office with a glass wall on the 14th floor, he plays nice classical music and murmers reasuringly as he works. I love this dentist. I have had bad experiences with dentists in the past; filings that don't stay in, bad root canals, etc. This guy is good, not too expensive and everyone in the office is pleasant. I'm so glad I decided to go back to him.



I've mentioned Noah before in this journal. He's going through some weird health problems right now and could use your good wishes and thoughts.