A Flounder By Any Other Name Is Sole

My mother bought fish for dinner tonight --- it IS lent, after all, and I am a lapsed Catholic living with my parents who are determined to remind me of all I am not doing to parental satisfaction. Wait a minute! Did I say I was lapsed? What I meant to say was that I'm already in purgatory, although I'm really feeling like I should've earned some damn wings already!

As usual, I digress... back to the subject: fish.

Mom bought Tilapia, the favored fish of the father (not the FATHER, Son & Holy Ghost, just my father) and she fried it up as she always does with tons of butter, hot grease, shredded cheese and bread crumbs ... you know, a healthy recipe that's heart smart. Cause if you're gonna eat fish, you might want to eat it in a way that's going to do you some good, right? Nah, not in THIS house!

It if ain't been deep-fried, dripping butter, heavy cream or whole milk, then it sure as heck didn't come from my Mama's skillet! (You'd think she was a Southern woman based on that description of her cooking style, wouldn't you? Nope, Northern as they come. New York origins. I don't know where she got this bad cooking habit from.)

As for my taste in fish, I prefer mine raw and accompanied by rice in sushi format, so to be forced to eat fish that has been so manipulated hurts me, emotionally and digestively.

As we are sitting down, me contemplating how small a portion I could take without getting accused of shunning my mother's cooking, my mother happens to mention that she had gone to a different store in her quest for the perfect fish to fry. She described her trip to the counter where she examined the flounder, sole, tilapia, salmon, etc that were lounging seductively on the ice bed and then asked the counterman if they had any flounder that had already been filleted, since she didn't like the skin?

"Yes, it's out there. The Sole."

"Pardon me?" (I'm sure she said it in her most snide, Grey Poupon voice, too.) "I've eaten plenty of flounder, and I've also eaten sole, and the taste is entirely different."

The gentleman 'begged to differ with her' and got my mother's panties in a wad, so she shared every angry word/thought she had from this unfortunate exchange over the tilapia (which, by the way, is its own fish, not a flounder by another name.) I don't know if the tilapia was colored by her anger, but it looked like every type of fish she fixes in her signature deep-fried, bread-crumbed fashion.

After she finished her recounting of the fishwife tale, she laughed sneeringly at the poor ignorant fool who works at the fish counter, but who didn't even know fish. As soon as dinner was over, I scooted to the computer and looked up "Sole" only to find that, yes boys and girls, there IS a Santa Claus!

Sole IS Flounder!

Being the inherently evil, bad seed offspring, I took great delight in relating the 411 to my mother. She glared at me and pretended not to care, but not a minute later took extreme umbrage at the existence of not one but TWO colanders in the dishwasher, and WHAT did I need to use TWO colanders for, when ONE should have done the trick?

Hmm. Well, considering I only used one of them, "I don't know" seemed like the correct answer, but in this alternate universe, it really wasn't. Rather it ignited the ultra-short fuse of my mother and she went off into a really not very amusing tirade about how the dishwasher was too full because I had the insensitivity to use multiple colanders on a night when I KNEW there would be lots of dishes.

Umm, first of all, no clue that this night would require even more utensils and cooking implements than normal and secondly, STILL not responsible for the offending second colander.

At this point, Dad slunk in and admitted that he probably was responsible because he had used a colander for the shrimp he fixed for lunch. My mother then turned the greatly diminished wrath his way. TWO colanders! Obviously Armageddon could not be far behind.

Thus ends a Lenten Friday night in the average Catholic household. Heh-heh-heh!

When the going gets tough, throw some shrimp on the barbie!

I've always loved the rowdy Australian spirit and highly-developed sense of fun, but nothing shows what these people are made of like their actions after the devastation of Cyclone Larry.

Did the victims of the storm curl up and shiver, wailing and weeping? Nope.
Did they go to the media, hands out and demanding help? Certainly not.

These people went out and fired up the barbies and had the grandaddy of all barbecues! Any food that would spoil was cooked up and shared with anyone who cared to partake.

INNISFAIL, Australia - After their town was torn apart by a terrifying cyclone — amazingly without loss of life — the people of Innisfail responded with a most Australian of gatherings: a barbie.

Butchers and restaurant owners in the town offered up their wares to survivors rather than see them rot in refrigerators warming quickly in the tropical heat after the storm cut electricity in this town about 1,200 miles north of Sydney.

More than 1,000 residents turned out to munch on donated lamb chops, steaks and sausages amid twisted metal roofing sheets and palms trees stripped bare.

"It's looking after our home, isn't it?" said Jeff Baines, one of the barbecue organizers, who wore a chef's uniform as he cooked up dozens of sausages. "If we don't look after our home who's going to?"

The barbecue reflected a determination to make the best of things in the town of 8,000 people Tuesday, a day after Cyclone Larry — the most powerful cyclone to hit northeastern Australia in decades — lifted the roofs off scores of homes and devastated hundreds of square miles of sugar cane and banana crops.

What fortitude and generosity, very humbling and heart-warming at the same time.

Good on ya, mates!

The Dumbing of America

I logged into Amazon today and found my new favorite feature, PLOGS (Personal web Log) had been updated with a new excerpt from Diana Killian, one of my favorite authors, who unfortunately, is not as prolific as I'd like her to be right now so I could find more of her writings to read!

Anyway, she said that her latest book in her Poetic Death series has not been renewed by the publishing house that picked up her first three books, (YET, we will give them chance to see the error of their way by stipulating a "YET" in there) so she branched off into a different kind of story while her agent continued to market her 4th in the series book that some of us are salivating over ...

She did get her new series picked up, but received numerous rejections from other publishing houses because her cozy mystery wasn't funny enough, or as light as they'd like it to be.

Now this brings me to the question of who decided that the only way you can present a murder is in classic comedian style?

In my opinion, a cozy should present a mystery with very little or no blood/guts/gore, as you'd find in some of the more hard-boiled ones. It should be well written, have a structured a plot and likeable characters. Some authors I have read try too hard to be funny, which distracts from the story. I would like to ask some of these authors (who shall remain nameless, because, again, this is just my opinion, not a bashing session) what they are trying to write? A mystery--which usually involves the death of a character, a pretty somber occasion, wouldn't you think?--or a contender to be the next Irma Bombeck?

Personally, I think the publishing industry could benefit from holding up the Poetic Death series and saying to potential authors "THIS should be what you strive for! A tight plot, good character development, the creation of believable characters who wrestle with morality. Intellectual and well-researched. Don't contribute to the dumbing of America by assuming that all readers are looking for the same thing that teens are looking for in a mindless movie."

I actually read and go to the movies for fun and some harmless escapism. Doesn't everyone? However, I don't consider myself an intellectual flunky, although I'm now wondering if movie producers and publishing houses would differ with me?

Have you ever watched a movie from the 1940's? Yes, they are in black in white, but don't let is scare you. Sit down and watch one. You should be prepared to be amazed and astonished by the vocabularies and accents of the various characters you will see onscreen. Now flip the channel and watch a mainstream movie of today like, oh, I don't know, say "Dumb and Dumberer" "Scary Movie 200" (or maybe one of the many 'gangsta' movies, if you really want to see an assessment of the intelligence level of today.) Just to compare a comedy to a comedy, go see one of the many Marx Brothers classics, after you view one of today's offerings.

The average person in 1940 seems a whole lot smarter than the average person in today's world, based purely on Hollywood's interpretations.

If you can comprehend that, take note and think about changing. If you could understand all of the words used in the 1940's movie thank a teacher for not letting you slide through the cracks and become a victim of the Dumbing of America.

Glass Slipperless

Sorry about the temporary blahg hiatus, but I've been really busy. Really.

I've been a cleaning machine, and within a week cleaned tw houses, count'em ... one house, two house ... sore muscles, dry hands, stuffy nose from all the dust. TWO houses! The second house was that of the parentals and I would clean 1,000 other houses instead of having to clean this one. My mother possesses the soul of Atilla the Hun when it comes to cleaning, and she is BRUTAL when she doesn't believe you have cleaned properly.

Have I mentioned before that when you live with your parents, as an adult, you revert to the age of 12 in their eyes? Something for you to think about before blithely saying "I think I'll move back in with my parents temporarily before my new house is ready." You've been warned.

Anyway, back to the cleaning ...

When cleaning the bathrooms in my mother's house, one uses 5 different cleaning products: Lysol Direct spray cleaner, Scrubbing Bubbles, Clorox toilet bowl cleaner, Spray 409 with the power of oranges, and Comet.

Then you have the cleaning implements: rubber gloves, sponge, scrungee (a sponge with a rough side for scrubbing), scrub brush, tooth brush, Clorox toilet wipes (WONDERFUL invention, get some of these!) and Q-tips.

"Q-tips?"

Yes, Q-tips. It's really gross, why they are needed, so if you are an easy queasy, skip this part. Q-tips are used to clean around the toilet, the part that holds the seat on, because 'dark stuff' gathers there and it needs to be removed. When I was about 10 I remember my mother yelling at me because I hadn't cleaned the 'dark stuff' and she informed me (as she waved a dark stuff encrusted Q-tip under my nose) that the 'dark stuff' is 'SHIT' ... since that day, I have been very careful not to let any 'dark stuff' accumulate anywhere on MY toilets! Screw flash cards, you want a child to learn something, use a Q-tip! THAT makes a real impact.

So, I cleaned and cleaned and now the house sparkles. Which is good because relatives are coming for their first view of the new parental castle. I, Sharondarella, shall hide in my princess tower until they are gone, when I shall come out to mop the floors, do the dishes, clean the grout, do the laundry, scrub the walls, wash the windows ... where the hell is that Prince with my glass slipper, already?