Daily Archives: 5/13/2012

Current events - global, Current events - national, Politics

Crumbling

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The world financial markets show fraying around the edges. The Euro-zone is finally realizing that all the billions they dumped into Greece to bolster its financial situation just got shoved up Europe’s collective keester by a Greek electorate who decided that austerity sucks and the government better darned well keep giving things away or there’s gonna be hell to pay.

There will be hell to pay.

France’s electorate basically said the same thing: Keep giving us stuff. PRETEND you have money, but keep the goodies coming.

One of the German states just elected a left-leaning bunch, weakening Germany’s position on the side of fiscal good sense.

And lest you think that all this fun is just in Europe, there are rumblings about Kuwait.

Mexico, on our south border, is ever-chaotic. Forty-nine headless bodies.

And California doesn’t need the San Andreas Fault to sink into the Pacific. They’re succumbing to a flood of red ink, a sixteen billion dollar budget deficit. Wanna be that our president tries to bail them out with money we don’t have?

And speaking of our president, while the world is falling down around his ears, what’s his BIG news?

I think I know how the Romans felt with Nero…

Domestic Bliss

Mother’s Day

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Yes, it’s a repost.  With updates.

So it’s Mother’s Day. It’s been almost nine eleven years since we lost Mom to a mix of cancers. I don’t pick up a pot without remembering the smells that came out of Mom’s kitchen.

Mom was Cajun, the offspring of a Fontenot (five pages of Fontenots in the local phone book) and a Johnson (Johnsons have been here for a hundred and fifty years and so intermarried that “Johnson” is a Cajun name). For the first ten years of my life we lived next door to her mom. She and Mom used to visit and talk to each other in Cajun French. Then we lived twenty years next door to Dad’s grandmother. Another couple of Cajun women talking to one another in Cajun French. That’s called “roots”.

Mom was a ground-breaker in some ways. I used to have an old newspaper clipping from the beginning of World War II. It was my mom, showing her to be the FIRST female Western Union telegram “delivery boy” in the area.

Mom and Dad married in the middle of WW II. She followed him to the West Coast when he was in the Navy, and they managed to set up housekeeping in the housing shortage there. At one time their ‘home’ was a chicken house converted to an ‘apartment’.  And they had my older sister.

After the war they ended up back here in southwest Louisiana, and in 1950 they had me. Then two more.

Mom stayed at home raising us four kids for much of her life, but she worked, too, from time to time.

We had a pretty good life out of all of that. Mom was queen of the house. At times when money was tight, we never ate a bad meal, because Mom was one of a long line of frugal Cajun cooks who knew how to turn out a feast from whatever was at hand. The kitchen wasn’t drudgery to Mom. She was in her element, and she could orchestrate a feast.

My best efforts pale beside hers, and since her passing, I have yet to find anything close to her lemon meringue pies, made from scratch. I’ll never again savor the queen of crawfish dishes, crawfish bisque, where Mom put a couple of days into the preparation. And you can add a hundred other recipes. I can find stuff named like that. I can cook some of it myself, but it’s like looking at a photograph of the ocean instead of standing on the beach with the water slapping at your toes.

Mom loved us kids, and then our kids, and then grandkids and even great grand-kids, just the way moms are supposed to do. Mom & Dad’s house was the family center for us, and any given Sunday afternoon was likely to find the whole bunch of us there laughing and living life like we thought it was paradise. In many ways, it was.

Because Mom & Dad made it that way.

I miss you, Mom.

The Name Game

The Name Game #277

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Weather is a little cooler than last week, with a low in the lower sixties last night and expected high in the lower eighties today. It was pleasant to walk out to retrieve the paper.

Wading through front page (!) stories about a local singer who’s doing well on “American Idol” I soaked up dribbles of new and opinion and finally landed on the birth announcements. This week we have thirty announcements from the one big hospital across the river. Eleven of those are to mommies who aren’t married and two are to mommies who don’t have a clue as to how this whole thing came about in the first place.

Let’s just jump right on in:

We can start out with a couple of future bricklayers as Calvin & Alisha D.  do a son with Mason Isaiah and on the same day in the same hospital Chris & Tina L. bring out little Mason Joseph.

Dereck & Donetta(!) J. do a baby girl with Rylee Hivanna.  So, your guess:  did they mean “Havana” but wanted to spell it funny?  They didn’t KNOW how to spell it?  Or third , they don’t have a freakin’ CLUE that there’s a city of Havana and they just randomly strung together some syllables?

Jonathan L. & Latoya(!) R. tag a baby girl with Jalayah Monae’.  The apostrophe is so that when their relatives read the name, they’ll know when to quit making letter noises.

Cody & Ashley C. name their son after somebody else, giving us  Cayson Wayne.

Michael & Denise D. show a love of pro football quarterbacks and tag their son with Payton Drew.

Zachary & Chelsea M. do up a daughter with Shaleey Renea  Do you think they meant “Renee” but they’re victims of an ineffective education system?

Wesley & Amy H. triple up on their new daughter, little  Carrie-Helen Shea.

Peters & Courtney F. name their son after somebody else, presenting little Jackson Kole, because “K” confers an air of intelligence and sophistication that a common old “C” misses.

Keeping the idea of “My son needs to be names after somebody else”, Jordan & Chelsey M. do it with a Scandinavian twist, tagging their son with Jansen Scott.

And then Brett & Hailee(!) F. to a pair of twins, naming the daughter Kennedy Grace after a clan of Massachusetts criminals and the son Carson Michael after Lord only knows who.

Whoever this “Car” was, he impressed a pretty good segment of the population because Douglas & Courtney H. did their daughter with  Carsyn Claire.

Miss Kareka(!) N. drops an apostrophe in her son’s name to make up for the big blank space ont he birth registration where it asks for a father’s name, and we get little Ja’Khory Lee.

David & Mary W. know that most forms have a space for first name – middle name- last name, but they had a LOT of people to make happy and only one little girl to do ti with, so she’s RhiannaJayde Olliemay.

Brad ‘n’ Brandie N. just picked a random word and used it to name their son, little Brooks James.

And that’s the end of the list for this week.

History

Today in History – May 13

1787 – Captain Arthur Phillip leaves Portsmouth, England with eleven ships full of convicts (First Fleet) to establish a penal colony in Australia. Another successful nation forms from England’s rejects…

1846 – Mexican-American War: The United States declares war on Mexico. We’d already been fighting for two weeks.

1865 – American Civil War: Battle of Palmito Ranch – in far south Texas, more than a month after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, the last land battle of the Civil War ends with a Confederate victory. They must’ve missed the email…

1913 – Igor Sikorsky becomes the first man to pilot a four-engine aircraft. He’s good with conventional aircraft. Then he comes to America and turns to the helicopter…

1940 – World War II: Germany’s conquest of France begins as the German army crosses the Meuse River. Winston Churchill makes his “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons.

1942 – A helicopter makes its first American cross-country flight . Probably that darned Sikorsky’s stuff…

1943 – World War II: German Afrika Korps and Italian troops in North Africa surrender to Allied forces.

1948 – 1948 Arab-Israeli War: the Kfar Etzion massacre is committed by Arab irregulars, the day before the declaration of independence of the state of Israel on May 14. 129 Israelis are slaughtered.

1958 – The trade mark Velcro is registered.