Come in, she said, I’ll give you....

My dear friend, Hope Nunnery, was in touch with me today.

I've known Hope for over half of my life. We were in school together at the University of South Carolina. She was a graduate student and I remember really looking up to her. I was a silly, callow undergraduate and she was one of the people I idolized.

Hope can remember when I first started to write, back when I took seminars under William Price Fox. He told me I needed to get out there and "live". I probably took his advice a bit too close to heart...for I have certainly done that. Perhaps with a bit too much enthusiasm. Now I have some real things to write about.

She had and still has a voice as big as the sky. I remember going to the old Grow Cafe in Columbia to hear her. It was a really wacky old place. I remember the dusty floors and the smell of stale Budweiser blended with clove cigarette smoke and old dusty floors. The Grow had this mural of The Incredible Hulk painted on the wall outside. I guess it was sort of a dive...but it seemed sort of exotic and hip to me.

I can see Hope standing up there with her guitar. I can still remember how her voice filled that room. She was one of my "coolest" friends. She still is way up there on the "coolness" factor and lives in New York City.

My main influence was rural South Carolina Southern Baptist church music. And I would attend the Pentecostal churches during revival time and singing conventions. And there was the country music that was played on the radio. Johnny Cash and Hank Williams were like a member of the family. For years I thought Johnny Cash was my Daddy's best friend and in a way I believe he was.She and Steve Tarshis will be releasing their first album, "Wilderness Lounge" in early 2007. They've recently been named finalists for the Independant Music Awards for two of their songs. You can download some of their work from Supersonic EPK.

If you like them...and I know you will...please buy "Wilderness Lounge" when it comes out!

Sweep My Yard Clean
Written by: Hope Nunnery and Steve Tarshis
One baby cooing in the fruit crate
One sleeping in a drawer
An angel kicking in my belly
Jesus please don't send no more, but

Mister Sweet pea standing yonder
Reverend peeking through the crack
Deacon hunkered by the corn crib
Satan crawling up my back

Chorus
Sweep my yard clean
No more tracks 'round my yard
I sure could use some comfort, but I
Keep my broom standing guard

In black dark night of lonesome
A sweet voice called to me
Say "baby my name is Jesus
Let me rock you on my knee"

Never knew my Daddy
Never knew my Daddy name, but
Now I got a Daddy
Sweet, sweet Jesus is His name

Chorus
Sweep my yard clean
No more tracks 'round my yard
I sure could use some comfort, but I
Keep my broom standing guard

Cut a heap of broom straw, it all
Bunched and tied with twine
Gonna whoop that old temptation
I ain't no mans concubine

Chorus
Sweep my yard clean
No more tracks 'round my yard
I sure could use some comfort, but I
Keeps my broom standing guard



Isn't she cool?

PS...This is crossposted from my blog where I'm actively blogging now.  Sorry guys, it's just easier and quicker.  I do miss everyone here, but I so need to get my nose to the grindstone with my writing.  Come visit me at:  http://smokeymountainbreakdown.blogspot.com/

Rosie

Hi guys,

I'm still sort of on a hiatus from Buzznet.  But the bullfrogs woke up in the pond two days ago so things will start to come back to life and I'll once again feel like taking photos.

Both of my new redesigned web sites are up.  The new petfinder page for the rescue is at:

Rosie's Cocker Rescue Referral

The new Angel Dogs site is at:

Angel Dogs

I'm running a rolling raffle on AD for the rescue for my current fundraiser.  It's for a 2007 calendar and I'm raffling off AD portraits for each month of the year.

Angel Dogs Calendar Raffle Project

I'm arranging Bart's transport for this coming weekend.  Please say a prayer or cross your fingers that I get enough volunteer transporters to get my sweet boy to his new home on the Maryland shore.  He's waited so long for this perfect placement I've found for him and I'm going to be so sad when he's gone.

I'm getting together stuff to start soapmaking.  I'm going to start selling my goatmilk soap this spring when I start up the jams and jellies. 

So...that's the news from here. 

Hugs,

Rosie

I spent most of yesterday worming and vaccinating the goats.  I'd go down to the paddock with a bucket of grain and bring them up singly to the house to give shots and feed pelletized wormer to them.  Nod was the toughest to catch.  She's always been a bad girl but I absolutely had to get ahold of her this time.  She'd grown out of her collar and it was way too tight.  I have a festive purple one just for her.

Nod is one of my original three goats.  She was just a wee doeling when she came here with Winkin' and her mother, Blinkin', and she's never calmed down.  This time, I decided to keep her up here at the house for a few weeks to see if I could tame her down.  I don't want her fighting me when I help her deliver her kids this spring.

I honestly think Nod will be happier for being gentled.  She's not like the other goats.  She's actually pretty mean to them.  She's always the ringleader when the other goats decide to play "Throw Lucky against the Electric Fence."  She bites the other goats and pulls their ears and tails.  I've been remiss in not doing this before.  Most herd keepers would just sell Nod for meat rather than fool with her,  but I'm sort of fond of her ornery self.

When I was a child, my favorite Christmas myth was "The Night the Animals Talk".  Supposedly, on Christmas Eve, for a time...the animals can speak.  I'm not sure if they are supposed to speak English or not.  I always just assumed that I would be able to understand them in the way I understand people.

My parents foiled numerous attempts on my part as a child to confirm this.  My plan was to sneak out to the stable and finally hear my horse, Sonny, tell me that he loved me every bit as much as I adored him.  I'm not sure what other sorts of horsely wisdom he might have had to tell me. 

We once had a Siamese cat named Itty-Bitty who was taken from her mother too soon.  She had that typically odd sounding cat cry that Siamese cats have.  My root woman nanny was terrified of this cat.  She swore the cat was saying, "Maaa-maaaa, maaaaa-maaaa". 

It's not that I haven't always known exactly what my animals were saying.  I just thought it would be neat to actually hear what their voices sounded like. 

This midnight as the clock heralded in the wee hours of Christmas Day, I went out onto the porch to check on Nod.  I think the part of me who was still eight years old was half-hoping to hear her say something. 

"Blah.  Blah-blah." She said, looking up at me with her topaz colored goat eyes and snorting.

I understood perfectly.

"Screw you!  Give me some damn corn, you bitch!"

Skillet Cookies

My family's traditional Christmas cookie.

1 stick butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 package chopped dates
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 box Rice Crispy cereal
1 cup chopped pecans

Melt butter in a large iron skillet over medium heat.  Cream eggs and sugar together.  Pour into skillet with chopped dates.  Stir constantly until caramelized mixture is a dark brown.  Add vanilla. Remove from heat and whip by hand until cooler (5 minutes). Add rice crispies and nuts to mixture then form small balls and roll in powdered sugar or coconut.

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I have been making these cookies for as long as I have memories.  In my mind's eye, I can see my chubby little four-year old hands in front of me, covered in stickiness and powdered sugar.  I can feel the heat of the mixture of crisped rice, nuts and caramelized dates and creamed sugar.

I hear my mother's voice.  "Be careful...it's still hot!" or "You're rolling them too big!"

I liked to roll them big.  That was because later, after they were chilled, I would slyly select the largest ones when they were offered.  Munching into that cold sweet crispiness and getting powdered sugar all over my shirt.  My face. I loved it when my mother would look exasperated and dust me off with her hand. 

"I swear!....," she would say. 

The recipe was lost for a time.  My sister had gotten rid of the cookbook that the recipe was in.  I was devastated when I realized this particular book was gone.  I thought I was being fair by leaving the sugar-stained tattered book behind for her.  She did not see the old book as the pearl of great price that I did.  My brother and sister have often been bemused by the things I deem valuable, but I think they are coming around to my way of thinking.  History is important.  Even the history of one family is important. 

I reconstructed the recipe from my memories.  My dead mother whispering in my ear the entire time.  She often whispers to me.

I make them alone now to send to my family and friends.  It doesn't seem right somehow, they are the sort of treat that really needs tiny sticky hands to form the warm melange into the little sugar-covered balls.  If you have such little fingers in your house, you may want to give these a try.

It was 1999 and we were all piled in Tree's office with the big glass windows at CNN in Atlanta.  The door had been shut as we five "girls" in our late 30's and early 40's were having an important secret meeting.  We always looked both ways down the hall to make sure no one was coming before doing this.

Tree, ceremoniously, withdrew the glossy 8 X 10 from the envelope to display.  We all gasped and held our breaths.  There he was, in his tweed jacket and impeccably tailored trousers, lounging in the doorway of his book-lined office.  His long lines, graceful, and his weathered face in a world weary half-smile.  His little reporter's notebook just peeking out of a pocket.  You could almost imagine the smell of tobacco and scotch that surely must have infused that amazing tweed jacket and scented his long-fingered hands.  We all swooned.

For women working in broadcast news, Peter Jennings was a rock star.  There was something about his particular mix of extraordinary competence,  stellar journalistic abilities, sardonic wit and easy confidence that just made one go all gushy inside.  It wasn't about looks, though Jennings was very easy on the eye.  Anchors have to be goodlooking, but they don't have to be smart or particularly talented in journalism.  It was about presence, power and ability.

Like a the bumbling teenage nerd, I once was...I just kept saying, "She's gonna freak, man!  She's gonna freak!"

I was speaking of the inscription on the photo.  Tree had pulled some strings and gotten the photo personally autographed, "To Joan and Katy, Many happy regards, Peter Jennings."

Joan was our friend over at Turner Entertainment who had a huge Peter Jennings crush.  Katy was her miniature French Poodle.  Joan's birthday was coming up and she really was the gal who had everything.  At least everything she needed.  Tree really had done something special by pulling this particular rabbit out of the hat.  That she had gotten the French Poodle included on the inscription was nothing short of inspired.

All of us had to trail our fingers over his signature, trying to sense whatever essence he might have left behind. 

Jodi said, "I bet he has stacks of these photos that he sends out to women." 

"Yeah." We agreed. 

Today, I'm sobbing into my kitchen sink as I'm loading the dishwasher.  Large, tearful, heart-wrenching sobs of mourning.  I'll always remember exactly what I was doing, the moment I heard that Peter Jennings had died.

I've been putting up a bushel of peaches for the freezer.  There is something soothing about the strong sweet smell that transports me back in time.

I remember eavesdropping on my grandmother and her sisters.  They were in my grandmother's bedroom in the house on Abercorne Street in Savannah, GA.  My great aunt Emmy Jo had come up from Florida with a box of mangos and oranges from her grove.  Great aunt Baby Dear had come from Tennessee and had stopped in Spartanburg for a few bushels of peaches.  It must have been summer. In my memory, their gatherings were always garnished with fruit and the work that went into putting the fruit up for the winter.

I can hear them talking, sisterly, about mango peelings and rashes.  One of the sisters would take a rash from peeling mangoes, which are related somehow to poison ivey, they said.  I don't think that's true, somehow, but it sounded right at the time and I felt I had learned something special.

They are in the bathroom washing their hands and giggling.  I am very small and sitting on my grandmother's rice bed with the nobbly white bedspread and wondering if she has any rock candy in her dresser.  She always did. I think about the peaches and wonder if my grandfather will whittle monkeys from the peach pits as he sometimes did for me.

Today, the scent of peaches clings to my hands like gloves.   I inhale the scent and for a moment I am five.

When that whole "Freedom Fries" thing came up...I was cringing.  As if our french fries could even hold a bic lighter to pommes frites.  There is absolutely no comparison and we should feel lucky that the French even allow us to call our pale, greasy imitation a "french" fry.

It's true...I drew a "moue" or seven while I was there.  Particularly in Paris, where the tone is a bit higher.  The coat check ladies at the Louvre were particularly offended by my smelly Barbour jacket that I wore everywhere.  They thought I was a Brit.  And everyone pleaded with me to please not speak French.  That's how amazingly bad my French is....plus it is spoken very slowly with a thick South Carolina Lowcountry accent. 

"ou est la toilette, y'all". 

But I think I got points for at least trying to speak the language.  I always loved David Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day"....because that was so me as well.

It is one thing to love France.  Many people love France.  But it is another thing entirely to love the French.  I know my sister loves France...and she goes there quite often.  I wish I could travel there as often.  But I'm not sure she loves the French as I do. 

Loving the French means submersing yourself in a set of priorities that are quite foreign to Anglo sensibilities.  It means being violently passionate about certain things....and suffering from a dreadful ennui about others.  It means caring deeply about human rights, tradition, food, wine, leisure time and sex, while at the same time having an abiding concern and devotion to Catholicism, family and privacy.  As I do with any culture, I identified more with the country folk than with the Parisians.  I just don't enjoy "putting on the dog" as we say, as much as other people.  Paris is all about "putting on the dog".

I'm probably putting it poorly.  I'm fairly certain that I don't actually "get it".  But I've tried awfully hard to do so.  I was probably as much of an ugly American as the next guy. 

But I think I got points for not asking directions to the Bastille.

I couldn't make up my mind as to what to put in the Gullible's Travels gallery today.  Did I want to do the psychic dog?  Or maybe MoonFakers?  There are just so many wacky things to choose from.

If you are wondering why this is important to me...it's because I see an enormous amount of zeal flowing into things that aren't real.  We have big problems.  Big problems that are real.  If we could channel the energy we spend on the things that aren't real into the things that are...I just wonder if maybe we could actually do something about things like global warming, wars, food safety, the environment, the rise of fundamentalist extremism, the awful political situation the US is in....ad nauseum.

These are taken from Robert L. Park's excellent article, The Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, that appeared in the January 31st 2003 issue of The Chronical of Higher Education.  I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.  While most of the skeptical articles I refer to deal with science...the principles hold true for politics, commerce and day to day living.  You will readily recognize many of these warning signs from advertising.

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
"An attempt to bypass peer review by taking a new result directly to the media, and thence to the public, suggests that the work is unlikely to stand up to close examination by other scientists."

2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
"The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government."

3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
"All scientific measurements must contend with some level of background noise or statistical fluctuation. But if the signal-to-noise ratio cannot be improved, even in principle, the effect is probably not real and the work is not science."

4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
"If modern science has learned anything in the past century, it is to distrust anecdotal evidence. Because anecdotes have a very strong emotional impact, they serve to keep superstitious beliefs alive in an age of science."

5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
" Ancient folk wisdom, rediscovered or repackaged, is unlikely to match the output of modern scientific laboratories."

6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
"Scientific breakthroughs nowadays are almost always syntheses of the work of many scientists."

7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
"A new law of nature, invoked to explain some extraordinary result, must not conflict with what is already known. If we must change existing laws of nature or propose new laws to account for an observation, it is almost certainly wrong."

Also check out Robert L. Parks book, Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud.