1. It was a pleasure to watch today's Billy Collins Poetry Broadcast. Last Friday, in a broadcast which mysteriously disappeared from Facebook, Billy Collins presented a short seminar on the ode with special emphasis on Keats' ode, "To Autumn". Billy Collins was still in the mood for odes when today's broadcast opened and after we listened to a few minutes of Art Pepper, he read a great poem by the 18th century poet Thomas Gray entitled simply "Ode", but with the lengthy subtitle, "On the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes" (sometimes the title and subtitle are put together to form a long title). It's a witty poem that treats the sad drowning of a beloved cat as a tragic moment in a Homeric epic with a solemn moral attached to it. Billy Collins followed up this poem with another ode written by Kenneth Koch (of the 20th century) called, "To My Twenties".
Billy Collins closed the broadcasts with two splendid poems from his book, Picnic, Lightning: "Moon" and "Passengers".
2. I guess I'd always thought that cooking with green tomatoes only happened when a gardener surrendered to the elements and decided that there were a bunch of tomatoes that were never going to ripen. Now, I think about green tomatoes differently. You see, Debbie harvested a bunch of green tomatoes, not out of dismay, not out of impatience, but because she wanted to prepare a batch of green tomato curry and can it.
The curry I've been preparing and we've been eating over the last several years has been exclusively Thai curry. Debbie's green tomato curry is not -- it's a Middle Eastern curry. She used curry powder (my Thai curry is made from curry paste). It's not a coconut milk curry. This curry has a sweetness underlying it, thanks to the tomatoes and the brown sugar, but it's also earthy, thanks to the cumin and curry powder. It's not a mouth burning curry (thank goodness), but it has a little heat.
In short, it's awesome. I could imagine adding small bits of boiled potatoes to this curry; I'd like to try it with sliced apples and sprinkle cinnamon on the apples. Debbie's green tomato curry opened up many possibilities. Tonight, we simply served it over brown rice and we both loved it and are very happy to have another new meal we can draw upon for dinner.
Oh! One more thing. We ate this curry without meat, but I can imagine it tasting very good with chicken, beef, shrimp, or lamb -- and, possibly other meats.
3. Before watching some news programming this evening, Debbie and I watched the last hour of
All the President's Men.
The movie finished and Debbie said, "I love that movie! I could watch it every day. I wonder what it is about certain movies that make them ones you can watch over and over and over again."
I responded that I couldn't really say what it was, but Debbie's comment moved me to start listing movies I can watch repeatedly and enjoy more and more with each viewing. In no particular order, here is a partial list of such movies for me:
The Conversation
The Godfather
Godfather II
Apocalypse Now
Breaker Morant
Hoosiers
Harold and Maude
All the President's Men
Tootsie
Much Ado About Nothing (Kenneth Branagh)
Henry V (Kenneth Branagh)
The Big Lebowski
Stop Making Sense
The Last Waltz
The Band's Visit
Pieces of April
The Station Agent
Into the Wild
The Lavender Hill Mob
My Dinner with Andre
The Stunt Man
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
That's enough for now. I'm sure there are many more. Making this list off the top of my head was fun.
Here's a limerick by Stu:
Hurray for the folks who’ve retired.
Going to work is no longer required.
Can take a trip, golf or read,
Help out folks in need.
Hope they enjoy whatever’s desired.
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