Our recipe comes from Shaker AnnaAnastasia who says:
"I can't vouch for this soda bread recipe's authenticity, but I always look forward to making this for St. Patrick's day to go with my corned beef. The recipe was originally from an early-80s La Leche League cookbook, which specified whole wheat flour and half of the butter. I mistakenly tried it with white flour and more butter, and it was even better, of course!"
Irish Soda Bread
(makes 2 round loaves)
4 cup flour (wheat, white, or mixed), plus extra for kneading 3 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, cut into pieces 1 1/4 cup raisins or currants (optional) 1 egg, beaten 1 3/4 cup buttermilk, or 1 1/2 cup plain yogurt and 1/4 cup milk 1 tablespoon honey Sugar, for dusting.
Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a large bowl (or your standing mixer's bowl). Slowly cut in butter until the mixture reaches a coarse meal consistency. Add raisins/currants, if using.
Combine liquids separately, then add to flour mixture. Mix slowly until soft dough forms. Knead by hand or dough hook until smooth, about 3 minutes. Add flour to the kneading surface or mixing bowl by the tablespoon, until the dough is smooth.
Shape dough into two rounds and place on greased or parchment-lined baking sheet. Flatten the rounds slightly and cut an 1/4" deep "X" into the top of each one. Dust the tops with sugar. Bake for 35 minutes.
If you'd like to participate in Shaker Gourmet, email me (include your Shaker name & blog link if you have one!) at: shakergourmet (at) gmail.com
Pretends to burn someone alive and says it's what President Obama is doing to "the average American" by pursuing immigration reform.
Beck: And President Obama apparently feeling like -- ah, I'm pretty much done, not a lot more to do, you know? I got all those things done. You know what? Why don't I work on immigration reform? Later this year he hopes to create a path for the estimated 12 million illegal aliens here in America to become legal. But yet, we haven't fixed the border and shut the water off! What a sweet, sensitive guy he really is.
...We have Bill Schultz here, he's from Red Eye. And I'm just going to demonstrate at least how I feel, all right? I feel, when I read this story last night, I don't know about you -- let's say Bill is the average American here, and I'm President Obama. This is the way I feel...
He then proceeds to douse Schultz with a clear liquid from a gas can (he promises it's actually water) and then hold up a lit match in his general vicinity.
And then he wonders why people think he's promoting a violent and paranoid right-wing worldview that is bereft of anything approaching reality.
Quick-thinking NY woman snaps picture of man who groped her on the subway, leading to his arrest. He has "30 prior arrests ranging from robbery to sexual assault." (Via.)
So, I've promised a post on this for, literally, years, since it first came up in comments, and Mama Shakes recently scanned pix for me so I could finally write it.
The backstory: Todd (aka Mr. Furious) and I, who have been best friends since the Pleistocene, have birthdays 9 days apart—which, naturally, means we've frequently celebrated them together. The year he was turning 17 and I was turning 18 (1992), we were having a joint birthday party, and we wanted a Morrissey cake. Like ya do.
So Todd's mom arranged for us to have a Morrissey cake. But the day of the party, we picked it up, and it was horrendous!
This cake was, we were certain, the worst thing to happen in the history of America! [/Little Edie] That cakemaker had ruined Morrissey! It was humiliating! He looked like a cartoon, not the serious artist who knew the very roadmap of our souls! And we would die—die!!!!11!—if we had to serve it to our friends (none of whom even gave two shits about Mozza, btw). We were both utterly destroyed and completely hysterical. What were we going to do??!!
Quick-thinking Mama Shakes pulled out her cake decorating supplies and told us to work on the disastrous Mozcake to disguise it, while she worked up an alternative. So Todd and I set to work creating a "Your Mom" cake:
At the time, "Your Mom" jokes were all the rage with the idiots with whom we were forced to attend classes every day in the angst-inducing nightmare for Camus-toting gay boys and fat chicks that is public high school—and we'd taken to shouting it at each other (ironically) almost incessantly. "Who was the woman who did the background vocals on that Iggy Pop song?" "YOUR MOM!"
Todd adds the final touch to the "Your Mom" cake: A dialogue bubble in which "Your Mom" says, succinctly, "Poo!"
Meanwhile, Mama Shakes had been busy in the kitchen, making us the Mozcake of our dreams, complete with perfect pompadour, authentically squared jaw, and—the pièce de résistance—cocoa powder five o'clock shadow:
Now that was a Mozcake of which we could really be proud! There may have been fighting over who got to eat his dimple.
Our party was saved. The mix tapes over which we'd slaved for weeks, perfecting every track transition and spoken "Twin Peaks" sample, rocked my parents' basement, and the Mozcake was an unqualified success. For a brief, shining moment, we were the coolest bitchez who ever had birthdays, genuine intergalactic legends in our own minds.
And then we returned to school on Monday, where we were just a couple of queerbaits once again.
Tight Times is the story of an economic recession from a very young child’s point of view. The book appears to be set in New York City (Brooklyn, I think) and Trina Schart Hyman’s drawings capture the beauty and difficulty of the time with great tenderness:
image borrowed from Artslice and enhanced in iPhoto
The child in Tight Times wants the usual things: a dog, time with Mom and Dad, favorite foods and toys. We feel the pinch of tight times the way the child does: less time with Mom as she works more; “Mr. Bulk” cereal instead of the tastier cereal “in little boxes”; “soupy things with lima beans” instead of roast beef. Of course, our perspective is broader than the child’s. When Dad comes home too early and says he “lost something”, we know why he’s crying, and we know what’s in that “special drink” he fixes himself. (We also see Mom’s cigarettes, which I’m sure would not appear in a kid’s picture book written today).
One of the beautiful details of this book is the carefully created ambiguity about the central character’s gender. We don't learn the child's name. Hair, clothing, and toys are also gender-neutral. The publisher’s note refers to the child as “a small boy”, but I think that’s their projection. I love this detail because the child’s gender is simply irrelevant to the human feelings and struggles of the story. Also, any small child can identify with the kid in Tight Times without feeling deep down that the pink-and-purple-sparkly bows or blue-spaceships-and-backhoes are there to exclude them. Finally, just getting away from all that crap is refreshing.
We have a lot of love for this book in our family. When I told my younger sister that I’d gotten a copy for my niece and nephew a few months ago, her eyes went all far away and she said, “when Dad loses his job, the kid says “I told him to look behind the radiator, because that’s where I found my lost puzzle piece”! My niece and nephew also love the book. My nephew, now seven, fancies himself too old for a story about a pre-schooler. But when I read it to his sister, he somehow ends up hanging over my shoulder by the time the kid finds an abandoned kitten in a trash can, feeds it, and names it Dog.
My niece M’s response to the kid’s neutral gender presentation surprised me. While my nephew simply assumes the kid is a boy like him, M. looks for clues as to the gender of the kid, relentlessly, every time I read the book. Well, the hair is sort of like a girl, but the clothes are sort of like a boy, she’ll say. Never mind that she herself has similar clothes and hair much of the time. It reminds me of the day her brother came home from Kindergarten and told her that only boys can be doctors, even though his own pediatrician is a woman (I had to talk him through that one).
M. takes the gender hunt even further, arguing that the kitten in the book (whom the author refers to as “she”) is not a she but in fact a he, “because I think Dog is a boy’s name”. This is a child who, one year ago, was lecturing me about how the crocodile in Taro Gomi's wonderful My Friends/Mis Amigos could very well be a girl and I shouldn't describe it as "he". Something has changed since she was three. I think that she used to project her own identity onto book characters/animals, but now she is trying to figure out where she fits, and that worries me, because I already know society's answer to that question. So every time, I point out that her "clues" are not definitive and moreover, it doesn't matter. All kinds of kids want dogs, like their favorite cereal, and get scared when their parents cry.
For other pro-feminist kids' books, check out the 2009 Amelia Bloomer List, and share your favorites in comments.
What I love about this one is that hopscotch is the ultimate female brand (which is actually quite funny, considering the game was invented by Alexander the Great, but there you go). If "Girls Were Here" had been written in chalk in 10-foot-high letters it wouldn't convey the message any more strongly than does an abandoned hopscotch court, for reasons I will allow Mr. Eddie Izzard to elucidate.
[Transcript below.]
…In my James Mason voice: "Grim Reaper, you could not get the women? What was the problem? Didn't you reap them with your grim reaping equipment?"
"I tried that, but the women—they all know hopscotch! And they leapt over…" [mimes hopscotching away]
They did! And it's a secret, religious, weird, ceremonial rite of passage for girls—the women know. And hopscotch was bizarre for boys, because boys never played. And, as a boy, I was behind walls [mimes peeking around a corner] going, "What—what happened? What did they do? What do they do here?" And they had a track laid out with numbers—mystic numbers—one, five, seven, eight, you know, a bit of a broken doll there, some girl keeping lookout with a skipping rope [mimes skipping rope], in case the clergy came by. "Run, run! It's the clergy! Run—it's the pope and everyone!"
'Cuz they do all that skipping stuff, don't they, young girls? Young girls and huge fuck-off boxers are the two groups of people that have a joining line. [Elaborate and hilarious mime about little girls and boxers skipping rope and doing double-dutch.]
…So I was talking about hopscotch! Hopscotch—this strange religious experience. All the numbers there, and there was one girl on the course, they go girl by girl, and they go [sings]: "Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques: Dormez vous? Dormez vous?" [mimes hopscotching] …And at some point, you go, "Oh no! Fucked it up! Ahhh!"
And boys watching [mimes peeking around a corner] were going, "What? Did what wrong? Fucked up what? What did they do right?! It makes no sense!"
And then [the girls would] all drift off and boys would walk over the course: "What happened here? We should do an archaeological dig."
The Washington Postreports that faith groups are losing legal battles against gay rights.
The lawsuits have resulted from states and communities that have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those laws have created a clash between the right to be free from discrimination and the right to freedom of religion, religious groups said, with faith losing. They point to what they say are ominous recent examples:
-- A Christian photographer was forced by the New Mexico Civil Rights Commission to pay $6,637 in attorney's costs after she refused to photograph a gay couple's commitment ceremony.
-- A psychologist in Georgia was fired after she declined for religious reasons to counsel a lesbian about her relationship.
-- Christian fertility doctors in California who refused to artificially inseminate a lesbian patient were barred by the state Supreme Court from invoking their religious beliefs in refusing treatment. ad_icon
-- A Christian student group was not recognized at a University of California law school because it denies membership to anyone practicing sex outside of traditional marriage.
"It really is all about religious liberty for us," said Scott Hoffman, chief administrative officer of a New Jersey Methodist group, the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, which lost a property tax exemption after it declined to allow its beachside pavilion to be used for a same-sex union ceremony. "The protection to not be forced to do something that is against deeply held religious principles."
But gay groups and liberal legal scholars say they are prevailing because an individual's religious views about homosexuality cannot be used to violate gays' right to equal treatment under the law.
"We are not required to pay the price for other people's religious views about us," said Jennifer Pizer, director of the Marriage Project for Lambda Legal, a gay rights legal advocacy group.
This is what it comes down to: your religious rights and the freedom to practice your religion do not automatically endow you with the right to impose them on people who do not share them or are even aware of them. In addition, just as there are reasonable limits on all the rights in the Bill of Rights -- for example, you really don't think child pornography is covered by the First Amendment, do you? -- your right to practice your religion ends when it interferes with the rights of others.
I don't have a problem with providing exemptions for organizations that wish to hire only those people who are members of their faith. That is a reasonable accommodation, and besides, who would want to work for a group that is contrary to your own beliefs? (I sincerely doubt that as a Quaker I would feel comfortable teaching at an evangelical university that requires I file a statement of belief with my application. I don't think they'd get the subtle implication of a blank piece of paper.) However, if you are a company that provides a service to the public, be it a food bank, a hotel, a hospital or a drug store, you should not be able to deny someone your services based solely on your personal beliefs. If you're a doctor and you don't want to treat gay patients, whether it's in the E.R. or in a counseling session, you need to re-think your choice of profession: what kind of doctor are you that allows you to refuse to treat a patient? The same goes for a pharmacist being told to prescribe emergency birth control; you do not get to impose yourself between a doctor and the patient.
The larger issue here isn't really about faith-based homophobes losing their rights; to be brutal about it, they have no right to institutional bigotry masquerading as religious freedom. It's about their inability to grasp the concept that rights are not, as Boatboy noted, a zero-sum game: granting equal rights to one group does not take away the rights of another; straight people will still be able to marry people of the opposite sex, and churches will not be forced to perform marriage ceremonies for non-members of their congregation.
Second, these people do not seem to grasp the concept that this entire discussion is not about them; the fight for equality was not started in order to defeat the Religious Right and remove Christianity from our society. Many of the people who are in the forefront of the effort to promote marriage equality are members of the clergy in a lot of religious denominations ranging from mainstream Protestant to hard-shell Roman Catholic. The so-called Christian Coalition chose to make themselves the victims, which tells you more about their ability to engage in self-promotion (and fund-raising) than it does about their own religious beliefs.
If any organization is conspiring to remove Christianity and so-called "traditional family values" from our society, it isn't those of us who are promoting marriage equality; it's the people like the National Organization for Marriage and the National Review that are making a mockery of their own faith and practice. In their desperate attempt to marginalize the gay community, they are turning their own weapons on themselves.
An 11-year-old Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hung himself Monday after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother’s weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. This is at least the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying this year.
I am a former elementary school teacher. I am a current parent. Bullying is not just harmless words--that sticks and stones shit is for the birds, and I get pissed every time I hear about teachers and school officials ignoring it.
There are all kinds of excuses, of course. Children who bully are just being kids. There's nothing a teacher can do because it will continue out of our eyesight in the quiet corners of playgrounds and bathrooms. And all too often, teachers' disdain turns toward the victim of bullying: "Toughen up," "Don't be a tattle-tale," or "Get over it, people are always going to talk about you." (Re: that last excuse, I swear I heard this from teachers and parents: "They even talked about Jesus; why are you any different?")
The author notes that Carl did not identify as gay*, an effort to drive home the point that
[Y]ou do not have to identify as gay to be attacked with anti-LGBT language. ... From their earliest years on the school playground, students learn to use anti-LGBT language as the ultimate weapon to degrade their peers.
[snip]
Nearly 9 out of 10 LGBT youth (86.2%) reported being verbally harassed at school in the past year because of their sexual orientation, nearly half (44.1%) reported being physically harassed and about a quarter (22.1%) reported being physically assaulted, according to GLSEN’s 2007 National School Climate Survey of more than 6,000 LGBT students.
Most of the kids who are bullied and harrassed never report.
They've learned that their teachers and administrators will not effectively address the abuse.**
(Crossposted) ______________________________________ *Of course, there are many reasons that he might not have identified as gay--I don't mean to dismiss the possibility that he was. I am struggling with that part of the article. I get that the intent is to show the anti-gay bullying can hurt anyone, but I also get a slight, "This is even more tragic because he might not have even been gay" sense from it--not that I think it was intentional.
And there you have a peek into this meandering mind.
The weather was so nice [yesterday] in fact, that, after President Obama received his economic briefing and met with Defense Secretary Robert Gates in the Oval Office, the POTUS and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to hold their 4:15 meeting out behind the White House—next to the swing set installed for the Obama girls in March.
Striding out from the West Wing, the two seemed thick as thieves—smiling, Secretary Clinton casually swung her leg over the bench on the east side of the playground, and the president grinned and waved to gawking reporters and staff as he sat down across from her. (Link; Photo Credit: Dayo Olopade)
The ironic thing about this picture is that it reminds me how thrilled I am to have grown-ups in charge again.
What is the toughest decision you've ever had to make?
The hardest decisions I've had to make include deciding with Iain whether to live in the US or the UK, ending my first marriage, whether to report being raped, or even tell anyone at all, and keeping the blog going.
I don't know which was the toughest. It's never easy when the potential of hurting people about whom you care hangs in the balance.
This will be Ms. McCain's second book. Her first, a biographical picture book about her father entitled My Dad, John McCain, was published last September through the Alladin imprint of Simon & Schuster.
So, last Saturday, Morrissey played the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago—and everyone who is aware of this fact, and also knows that I have lived a life of fervent devotion to the man whose song "Shakespeare's Sister" is whence came the title of this space, has emailed me to ask where the fuck my post about the show is.
Here it is, mofos!
I don't really do concert reviews, but I will say that it was a stunning show at which I had an awesomely good time. Mozza was in great form, the band was kicking ass, the place was packed to the rafters, the setlist was superb, and I got to go with two of my favorite people on the planet—Iain and my best friend Todd, with whom I've shared every Mozza-related adventure since I was 15. It doesn't get much better than that.
My best bit of the show for me was the performance of "Death of a Disco Dancer," which is one of my favorite Smiths' songs: Love, peace, and harmony—oh, very nice, but maybe in the next world. I've been listening to that song for almost 20 years and that was the first time I've heard it live. By the time the band got to the crescendoing breakdown at the song's end, tears were streaming down my face, just from the pure joy of being in that moment.
Here's a good clip from the show of two songs: "Black Cloud," off the new album, and the classic Smiths' track, "How Soon Is Now?"
His voice is better than it has ever been—and he looked like a nonillion bucks in that tux. Moz turns 50 next month on May 22, just 11 days after I turn 35. I remember when he turned 35. Oldness.
Don't forget the songs that made you cry, and the songs that saved your life...
OAKWOOD, Texas (AP) — The chief of a small Central Texas town's police department has been fired and jailed for allegedly using a Taser gun on his wife.
Former Oakwood police chief Oly Ivy is in Leon County Jail in Centerville on Wednesday, charged with aggravated assault. Bond is $100,000.
I don't have a lot to add--we know that abusive police officers prey on vulnerable and marginalizedpeople and communities. So it's no surprise that women who live with men who are abusive and who are trained how to restrain people and how to use deadly force, are at risk.
They might be, as this fact sheet describes, "uniquely vulnerable."
I'm guessing that things are a tad chilly in the Washington Post offices now between George F. Will and Eugene Robinson, Jill Eilperin, Mary Beth Sheridan, and Chris Mooney.
That's because in February, Mr. Will wrote a column for the Post that very carefully examined historical evidence and came to the conclusion that the shrinkage of the Arctic ice cap was negligible, and therefore climate change, mistakenly referred to by some as "global warming," was claptrap.
As global levels of sea ice declined last year, many experts said this was evidence of man-made global warming. Since September, however, the increase in sea ice has been the fastest change, either up or down, since 1979, when satellite record-keeping began. According to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
Small problem: The University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center said no such thing, and they even put up a post on their website to refute Mr. Will's assertion. That, however, did not stop Mr. Will; after all, Rule #1 of right-wing punditry is to never admit that you're wrong because to do so undermines your credibility. The fact that admitting you're wrong actually proves that you learn from your mistakes and therefore enhances your credibility would never occur to a right-wing pundit because if it did, well, then you wouldn't be a right-wing pundit in the first place.
True to right-wing punditry form, Mr. Will uses facts from scientific research that prove the opposite of what he's trying to prove. He picks and chooses them in such a way that they fit exactly the way he wants them. But again, it's punditry not science that he's going for. All of his critics who pointed out -- politely or otherwise -- that he was playing fast and loose were merely doomsayers churning up fear of hypothetical threats. Calls to the Post's ombudsman to correct Mr. Will's story resulted in a shrug: he's a columnist; we don't really have to check his facts all that much. And Mr. Will went on his merry way.
It took over a month, but finally Chris Mooney wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that took Mr. Will's arguments apart and neatly pointed out that he was mistaken.
Will wrote that "according to the University of Illinois' Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979." It turns out to be a relatively meaningless comparison, though the Arctic Climate Research Center has clarified that global sea ice extent was "1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979." Again, though, there's a bigger issue: Will's focus on "global" sea ice at two arbitrarily selected points of time is a distraction. Scientists pay heed to long-term trends in sea ice, not snapshots in a noisy system. And while they expect global warming to reduce summer Arctic sea ice, the global picture is a more complicated matter; it's not as clear what ought to happen in the Southern Hemisphere. But summer Arctic sea ice is indeed trending downward, in line with climatologists' expectations -- according to the Arctic Climate Research Center.
Mr. Mooney is too nice to say that he thinks Mr. Will is willfully playing fast and loose with the facts. But Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, in an article -- not an opinion piece -- published on April 7, 2009, cited new scientific data that the Arctic sea ice cover continues to shrink, and they contradict Mr. Will by name.
The new evidence -- including satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 and 2006 was nine feet thick, a significant decline from the 1980s -- contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.
And then Eugene Robinson, another columnist for the Post, was interviewed on the Rachel Maddow Show on April 8, 2009, and had this to say about his colleague:
What George Will did was cherrypick a sentence in a report, be very persnickety in the way he parsed his sentences, and end up making it sound as if the report had said the exact opposite of what it actually said. He was persnickety enough that his editors, who happen to be my editors, felt he didn’t cross the line. I thought he did.
As Matthew Yglesias points out, this situation puts the editors of the Washington Post in a rather uncomfortable spot:
If they think that Juliet Eilperin [...] and Eugene Robinson are slandering Will, then it seems that they ought to do something about that. But if they think that Robinson is right, and Will is cherry-picking phrases in order to make it sound as if reports say “the exact opposite” of what they really say, then it seems that they ought to do something about that.
My theory is that the editors at the Post will give the outward appearance of letting this squabble work itself out without their interference; after all, Mr. Will is an opinion columnist, not a news reporter, and they are given a great deal of latitude as long as they stay out of libel territory. (After all, they just hired William Kristol. What more proof do you need that they believe in fact-free op-edding?) But it's clear that someone on the editorial staff thinks Mr. Will is full of it; it's highly unlikely that a news article that contradicts one of the paper's columnists by name would have gotten into print if they weren't trying to send him a message. Let him parse that one.
Welcome to Shakesville, a progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, social justice, cute things, and all that is in between. Please note that the commenting policy and the Feminism 101 section, conveniently linked at the top of the page, are required reading before commenting.
