Three Unconnected Thoughts

Cal

If I my be so bold as to borrow an image from the late, great Bill Hicks, every time Cal Thomas speaks, it is like turds falling into my drink.

I recently tried to give Cal the benefit of the doubt, to attribute his recent rantings, ravings, and wild accusations to personal difficulties... ass lesions, and the like. The sort of things that would cloud a person's thinking, make a man irritable and irrational.

But even ass lesions aren't enough to get Cal off the hook this time. Cal's piece in the papers today can only be attributed to indecency.

Cal stooped to race baiting plain and simple today. The recent prayer gathering of 3000 Muslims in Washington was, according to Cal, part of a subtle plot to "bring America down" from the inside.

"Are we being infiltrated," Cal asks, after rambling on about Hugo Chavez and Iranian missile tests as if there was some sort of connection here, "by people who want us dead and our country destroyed? Try a little experiment: Google 'Islam near' and then type in the name of any city or town. When I tried the small town of Bryn Mawr, Pa., 10 Islamic-related sites came up. In larger cities, there are as many, or more."

I'm not sure how else to take this other than as an assertion that the existence of Islamic groups near your hometown is evidence that terrorists are trying to kill you. Because, of course, all Muslims-- and by extension, probably all Arabs-- are really terrorists, in spite of anything they might say or do. What they say or do is just a part of the deception, and, as Cal teaches us, "Deception is part of the terrorists' battle strategy."

Incidentally, I tried that Google thing, and I didn't come up with 10 Islamic groups near my hometown. I came up with one Islamic group, one Islamic blogger who happened to mention my city in a post, a few news articles, and one anti-Islam hate site.

I guess that means my town is safer than Cal's.

Squash

Completely unrelated, I finished the last day of my CSA work share over the weekend. I am glad to be done with that, not because I didn't like actually getting out there and doing the work (I loved it, though I don't know that I am very good at any of it), but because it was hard to find the time to put in the time. Weekends get so busy, the summer goes by so fast, and I usually find myself scrambling to complete my hours before the season is done.

Now, with the weather turning colder and a few more weeks of CSA deliveries left, I have a problem.

I have lots and lots and lots of squash. All kinds of squash. Spaghetti squash, acorn squash, flattish white almost star-shaped squash, "creamer" squash (I think), and varieties of squash that I don't have a name for.

I don't know what to do with all that squash. It will keep for a while while I try to figure it out. I mean, that's the point of squash, it keeps. It lets you eat over the winter.

But eventually, I'm going to have to figure out what to do with it before it goes bad. Right now, I just don't have a clue. If you have a great recipe, please share it with me. For the most part, I don't really like squash, so if you know a way to make it really unsquashy, that's great.

Macaulay

I read a quote in the most recent NEA Bulletin that I liked today. It goes like this:

"A democracy cannot survive as a permanent form of government. It can last only until its citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority (who vote) will vote for the candidates promising the greatest benefits from the public purse, with a result that a democracy will always collapse from loose fiscal policies, always followed by a dictatorship."

Lord Thomas B. Macaulay, May 23, 1857, in a "letter to an American friend"

I don't have a particular reaction to that, but I like it.