summer pattypan squash
crimini mushrooms
local arugula and tomatoes
FairWay Meatballs
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Friday, August 21, 2015
you’ll never walk alone
When Elvis hit the scene in 1956 he was a shy and skinny kid from Mississippi.
But he grew into a global behemoth.
What drove this?
Turns out he was a “twinless twin.”
It’s a thing.
His twin brother was stillborn but he never grew out of his feeling of loss for another.
According to psychologist Peter Whitmer, surviving twins go to great lengths to assert their uniqueness, and often feel as if they're “living for two people”.
Another common thread is an internal restlessness to be something larger or more significant than just one.
“The drive is always to be two,
yet be unique from all others."
Elvis was counseled about this by another famous twinless twin of his era, Liberace.
Liberace was larger than life; he clearly knew how to be noticed.
The King figured that part out, too.
1971
Have a great weekend!
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Greece is the way we are feeling
Last month I learned the Channel Tunnel between England and France is being tied up by Muslim migrants.
Now poor Greece is getting into the act.
Greece is composed of an enormous archipelago of islands, and the tourist destination KOS (red arrow) is only 2 miles from Turkish shores.
Ferries run but they check documents, so thousands of migrants are turning up by night in rubber dinghies.
7,000 migrants have demanded shelter in recent weeks and about 1,000 more are arriving everyday.
But Greece is broke.
cnn
There is no food. No water.
And the local registration office is overrun.
Thirsty kids break into cars for water bottles...
...and fights are breaking out.
The local cops are getting into it.
Now it is migrant cat and mouse.
cnn
The migrants were gassed.
It has not stemmed the tide from war-torn Syria.
If they can figure out how to stay--and with Greece in the EU-- it’s just a formality to move on to France or England.
pew
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
267 years and counting
ClockTowerTenants take pride in the historic aspect of our SoBro heritage.
But the ClockTower is not the oldest in the Bronx.
Not by a long shot.
That distinction belongs to the Van Cortland House, the Bronx’s oldest surviving building, not far from the end of the 1 train line.
Oloff Stevense Van Cortlandt was a Dutch merchant.
His son Jacobus began to assemble Bronx land in 1691,
and his son Frederick inherited that land and commissioned the house in 1748.
c1844 oil painting by George Harvey
It would have been plastered back then, but today it reveals its combination of brick detailing (expensive) and Bronx fieldstone, dug and cleared from the farmland (free with labor).
It’s built in the Georgian Style, referring to the British monarchs, but it also incorporated idiosyncratic European detail like faces carved in stone, probably to ward off evil.
The Van Cortland family lived here for 140 years until 1886, the year our ClockTower was built, when it was sold to the city for public parkland.
Through the Revolutionary War it was used as shelter by Rochambeau, Lafayette, and even George Washington, himself, but later is was a police precinct and a bunk house for cowboys herding buffalo on the land.
It wasn’t until 1966-67 that it was added to the National Register of Historic Places and was designated a National Historic and NYC Landmark.
The interior is landmarked, too, and we’ll take a tour in the weeks ahead.
1886
For now, know we have the third largest park in NYC after Pelham Bay and Staten Island, 300 acres larger than Central Park.
This beautiful “oldest building in the Bronx” is often used for movie exteriors, most recently for Boardwalk Empire.
Folks walk by every day and may not even notice.
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
made in your shade
Denmark has long accused neighboring Sweden of being repressed and conflict adverse.
They equate the Swede’s politically correct self-censorship as living their lives in unquestioning ways.
But Sweden is desperate to balance immigration with unprecedented violence in their new Muslim neighborhoods.
And at this point, they are willing to try almost anything.
So they’ve launched colored band aids in a range of darker skin tones in the hopes of calming things down.
When Apoteket---a kind of Swedish Duane Reade with 370 stores---announced the initiative, Danish foreign minister Kristian Jensen said “I’m once again happy that I don’t live in Sweden...”.
Then the Danish Children’s minister weighed in with even harsher tones:
In America we have no racial issues because we’ve enjoyed
Ebon-Aide’s for years.
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