Thursday, September 15, 2005
Hey! Summer break is over and Knuckleball is back! O.K., so I really didn't plan on a summer break. But when June 30th rolled around and I didn't have anything new to post it just kind of happened.
Kit Kiefer appears to have worked some this summer as the following story indicates.
Just remember: don’t mess with the loss of physics . . .
Sparky
What’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway?
Kit Kiefer
The talk at the coffee break was just talk, the way things go before someone grabs hold of a subject and drags everyone along, the way talk at coffee breaks go. There was what they did over the weekend, the weather, the lawn, the game, the other game, then that got JT talking about a Packer wife that visited Iola couple of days before.
She stopped by the Kwilting Klub where JT’s wife belongs. "Kwilting Klub" is their spelling, or the spelling the ladies of the club chose 50 years ago. Beats "Quilting Qlub," that’s about all JT has to say for it. The Packer wife’s married to Brady Boyer, the linebacker. Not much of a linebacker, really. Managed to stay on the roster for five years through laziness on the part of the front office getting anyone to replace him, but you stay on the Green Bay roster five years and have a chin that’s all right angles and next thing you know a Ford dealer in Pulaski has you doing ads, and pretty soon you’re a sort-of celebrity, a regular on all the Monday-night Packer shows live from the bowling alley in De Pere.
Brady Boyer’s wife was there at the Kwilting Klub meeting trying to sell them a Packer wives’ cookbook for their fundraising, which is a noble gesture on her part excepting that the Kwilting Klub doesn’t do fundraising. Mostly they buy little scraps of fabric, and a couple of weekends rummage-saleing at the start of the summer gets them all the scraps of fabric they can handle. It doesn’t much seem right to hold a fundraiser, making the community buy cookbooks so the Kwilting Klub can go to rummage sales and buy little kids’ rompers. Brady Boyer’s wife was telling them they could sell the cookbooks and give the money to charity, but too many Norwegian ladies in the crowd started wondering why you’d want to do that, why you’d want to have a Kwilting Klub buy cookbooks to sell cookbooks to make money to give to some other charity or maybe the church so they could help people around Iola that need helping. Easier to just cook Odd Evenson a couple meals of tuna casserole and be done with it.
“You think about it, what’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway, enough to write a cookbook about it?” JT says. “First off, she’s got a husband making six hundred thousand dollars a year, and second, she’s living in Green Bay. If she doesn’t hire someone to do the cooking she’s making enough where she can carry out at Kroll’s every day of her life and still have plenty over to buy an SUV for the cat. Think she’s going to spend all day inventing cost-conscious and tasty yet nutritious meals for her and the man of the house? Hell, no.
“Second, even if she does do the cooking she’s not cooking for normal human beings, which is what Packers aren’t. None of them are exactly shaped like you or me.”
“Good thing, too,” says Homer, having a look at JT’s belly, which hadn’t got smaller over break.
“Yeah, I saw that coming,” JT says back. “They’re not shaped like you or me. They’re not. They’re either six-eight and three-fifty or five-eight and one-seventy-five or one percent body fat drinking protein-powder milkshakes four times a day. They either eat 14 steaks smothered in pork chops or nothing you don’t scoop out of a can, or nothing at all so they make weight. You gonna make a cookbook out of that?”
JT opens the cookbook right about then and pretends to read. ‘Glass of water. Take one eight-ounce glass. Fill with water from tap or bottle. Sip or gulp. Serves one to 75,328.’
“’Lead-wrapped filet. Take one eight-ounce filet mignon and wrap with neatly split and cleaned lead pipe salvaged from construction site. Broil until lead melts, about six minutes a side.
“‘Favorite family heirloom recipe for yogurt-whey smoothie,’ my eye. Maybe you want to be married to a Packer, hitch your wagon to a star and all that, but I can’t see where you’d want to cook for one, and then feel comfortable sharing your recipes with the world.’
“I dunno, JT,” Homer says. “I mean, I’ve read some of those cookbooks, read them as much as I’d read any cookbook, and sometimes you get some real good recipes – good recipes to me – for like soul food, cornbread and that kind of thing. Doesn’t make me want to cook hog jowls, okay, but nothing makes me want to cook hog jowls. Just a thing between me and the hog.”
“That’s another thing,” JT says, heading to a specific place in the book this time. “Vegetables … meats and main dishes … protein shakes … vegetables. Collard greens. About five recipes in here for collard greens. Obviously someone eats collard greens ‘cause there’s all these recipes and I’ve heard of people eating collard greens, but what I want to know is what happens to the rest of the collard.”
“What do you mean the rest of the collard?”, says Donnie B.
“Okay, you got turnip greens – right?” JT says with a little hump-up in his voice. “And at the end of the turnip green there’s a turnip. You plant turnips to eat the turnip and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. Mustard greens, I think they eat mustard greens, you plant mustard to get at the mustard, the seed, and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. But collard greens, you plant collard, eat the greens, and do you ever get to eat the collard? I never heard of it. Just doesn’t strike me as being an efficient use of the collard, that’s all.
“Maybe there’s no such thing as the collard,” Homer says, talking like he’s shrugging his shoulders the way Homer does. “Maybe it’s just a term for the green part of something else, like acorn’s the name for the nut that comes off an oak tree.”
God, JT gets hold of something and he doesn’t want to let it go. “We’re not talking about acorns; we’re talking about collards,” he says. “And I’m not talking about the nut that comes off a collard plant. No one goes around talking about an ‘oak nut’ when they mean an acorn.”
About now Homer’s feeling like he’s got to turn down the heat on this thing before someone gets slugged over a collard, whatever it is. “C’mon, you know it’s not about the nut or the tree or the collard,” Homer says. “It’s about naming one part of a plant one thing and a different part a different thing.”
JT’s starting to let loose a little now. “Okay, but you don’t read in the dictionary under ‘potato,’ ‘The green top of a potato is called collard greens.’ Just inefficient use of the collard, that’s all.”
“Sure they use the collard down on those farms,” Homer says. “Ever hear of a horse collard?”
Before JT could whack Homer Duke pipes up, which is the signal for everyone to pay attention so they don’t miss Duke breaking up the English language like a concrete driveway. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but the moments he smashes the English language into smithereens are worth the times he leaves it all smooth and undisturbed. Everyone listens.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to horse-collard my son – my older son,” Duke says.
“What’d he do now, Duke?” asks Donnie B.
“It’s him and that snowboard. He says just riding the snowboard down the landhill isn’t good enough anymore.”
“The landhill? You mean the landfill hill?” Donnie B. asks. Figures what he meant all along.
“Yeah, that landhill, back behind the powder-milk plant. All the kids ride sleds and snowboards down there when there’s snow. Big hill back there; hadn’t realized the effalation they get down there. Kids ride sleds and snowboards down there, and with them having to dodge old tires sticking up and old lawn mowers and junk you’d think it’d be plenty tough, but Rory says it’s not enough of a challenge for him. He’s got his own idea of what a challenge is for him, riding his snowboard. He wants to ride his snowboard down the ski jump at Norseman Hill.”
Mort about snorts his coffee, cup and all. “Ride his snowboard off a ski jump?”, he asks.
“Yeah, figures that part where he’s in the air will be all kinds of fun. Don’t get that at all. You know me – I like that gravitational pull. I don’t mess with the loss of physics. From the takeoff he figures he’ll gain some levitation so then he can turn a few spins before he comes down. Maybe he’ll get a big hoop and have someone set one of his pals on fire so he can jump through it, like one of those Chipwood thrill shows.”
Donnie B. asks the natural question: “Does he figure on landing?”
“You know how kids are,” Duke says. His hands are real big, and when he wraps them around the Dixie cup full of coffee the cup disappears pretty much. “He’s still kinda vague on landing. I tell him he’s gotta land sometime and it’s like telling him he’s gotta pay taxes sometime. ‘Oh, I know,’ he says, all kinda dreamy, but after he’s jumped through that hoop of fire and turned a triple somersault and the bottom of the snowboard meets the top of the snowbank he’ll find out lots about landing. Or maybe it’s just the bottom of his bottom meeting the top of the snowbank, in which case he’ll find out even more about landing.”
The followup goes to Donnie B. too: “When’s he going to get to Norseman Hill when no one’s watching?”
“Oh, at night sometime, he says. Makes the fire on the hoop look better when he jumps through it. Says he’ll go up there, climb the tower, yell for one of his friends to light the hoop on fire, then slide down the jump and you know, whatever happens happens. I ask him if it won’t be harder to land when it’s dark and he says he doesn’t know how hard it is to land when it’s light, so how will he know if it’s harder in the dark? I couldn’t argue with that, so I just had another helping of those ribs made in a crackpot. Bernie gets those two crackpots going and you can smell it for miles around.”
That was enough for us, so we crumpled our cups and headed back to the mags.
Kit Kiefer appears to have worked some this summer as the following story indicates.
Just remember: don’t mess with the loss of physics . . .
Sparky
What’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway?
Kit Kiefer
The talk at the coffee break was just talk, the way things go before someone grabs hold of a subject and drags everyone along, the way talk at coffee breaks go. There was what they did over the weekend, the weather, the lawn, the game, the other game, then that got JT talking about a Packer wife that visited Iola couple of days before.
She stopped by the Kwilting Klub where JT’s wife belongs. "Kwilting Klub" is their spelling, or the spelling the ladies of the club chose 50 years ago. Beats "Quilting Qlub," that’s about all JT has to say for it. The Packer wife’s married to Brady Boyer, the linebacker. Not much of a linebacker, really. Managed to stay on the roster for five years through laziness on the part of the front office getting anyone to replace him, but you stay on the Green Bay roster five years and have a chin that’s all right angles and next thing you know a Ford dealer in Pulaski has you doing ads, and pretty soon you’re a sort-of celebrity, a regular on all the Monday-night Packer shows live from the bowling alley in De Pere.
Brady Boyer’s wife was there at the Kwilting Klub meeting trying to sell them a Packer wives’ cookbook for their fundraising, which is a noble gesture on her part excepting that the Kwilting Klub doesn’t do fundraising. Mostly they buy little scraps of fabric, and a couple of weekends rummage-saleing at the start of the summer gets them all the scraps of fabric they can handle. It doesn’t much seem right to hold a fundraiser, making the community buy cookbooks so the Kwilting Klub can go to rummage sales and buy little kids’ rompers. Brady Boyer’s wife was telling them they could sell the cookbooks and give the money to charity, but too many Norwegian ladies in the crowd started wondering why you’d want to do that, why you’d want to have a Kwilting Klub buy cookbooks to sell cookbooks to make money to give to some other charity or maybe the church so they could help people around Iola that need helping. Easier to just cook Odd Evenson a couple meals of tuna casserole and be done with it.
“You think about it, what’s a Packer wife know about cooking, anyway, enough to write a cookbook about it?” JT says. “First off, she’s got a husband making six hundred thousand dollars a year, and second, she’s living in Green Bay. If she doesn’t hire someone to do the cooking she’s making enough where she can carry out at Kroll’s every day of her life and still have plenty over to buy an SUV for the cat. Think she’s going to spend all day inventing cost-conscious and tasty yet nutritious meals for her and the man of the house? Hell, no.
“Second, even if she does do the cooking she’s not cooking for normal human beings, which is what Packers aren’t. None of them are exactly shaped like you or me.”
“Good thing, too,” says Homer, having a look at JT’s belly, which hadn’t got smaller over break.
“Yeah, I saw that coming,” JT says back. “They’re not shaped like you or me. They’re not. They’re either six-eight and three-fifty or five-eight and one-seventy-five or one percent body fat drinking protein-powder milkshakes four times a day. They either eat 14 steaks smothered in pork chops or nothing you don’t scoop out of a can, or nothing at all so they make weight. You gonna make a cookbook out of that?”
JT opens the cookbook right about then and pretends to read. ‘Glass of water. Take one eight-ounce glass. Fill with water from tap or bottle. Sip or gulp. Serves one to 75,328.’
“’Lead-wrapped filet. Take one eight-ounce filet mignon and wrap with neatly split and cleaned lead pipe salvaged from construction site. Broil until lead melts, about six minutes a side.
“‘Favorite family heirloom recipe for yogurt-whey smoothie,’ my eye. Maybe you want to be married to a Packer, hitch your wagon to a star and all that, but I can’t see where you’d want to cook for one, and then feel comfortable sharing your recipes with the world.’
“I dunno, JT,” Homer says. “I mean, I’ve read some of those cookbooks, read them as much as I’d read any cookbook, and sometimes you get some real good recipes – good recipes to me – for like soul food, cornbread and that kind of thing. Doesn’t make me want to cook hog jowls, okay, but nothing makes me want to cook hog jowls. Just a thing between me and the hog.”
“That’s another thing,” JT says, heading to a specific place in the book this time. “Vegetables … meats and main dishes … protein shakes … vegetables. Collard greens. About five recipes in here for collard greens. Obviously someone eats collard greens ‘cause there’s all these recipes and I’ve heard of people eating collard greens, but what I want to know is what happens to the rest of the collard.”
“What do you mean the rest of the collard?”, says Donnie B.
“Okay, you got turnip greens – right?” JT says with a little hump-up in his voice. “And at the end of the turnip green there’s a turnip. You plant turnips to eat the turnip and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. Mustard greens, I think they eat mustard greens, you plant mustard to get at the mustard, the seed, and in the meantime you get to eat the greens. But collard greens, you plant collard, eat the greens, and do you ever get to eat the collard? I never heard of it. Just doesn’t strike me as being an efficient use of the collard, that’s all.
“Maybe there’s no such thing as the collard,” Homer says, talking like he’s shrugging his shoulders the way Homer does. “Maybe it’s just a term for the green part of something else, like acorn’s the name for the nut that comes off an oak tree.”
God, JT gets hold of something and he doesn’t want to let it go. “We’re not talking about acorns; we’re talking about collards,” he says. “And I’m not talking about the nut that comes off a collard plant. No one goes around talking about an ‘oak nut’ when they mean an acorn.”
About now Homer’s feeling like he’s got to turn down the heat on this thing before someone gets slugged over a collard, whatever it is. “C’mon, you know it’s not about the nut or the tree or the collard,” Homer says. “It’s about naming one part of a plant one thing and a different part a different thing.”
JT’s starting to let loose a little now. “Okay, but you don’t read in the dictionary under ‘potato,’ ‘The green top of a potato is called collard greens.’ Just inefficient use of the collard, that’s all.”
“Sure they use the collard down on those farms,” Homer says. “Ever hear of a horse collard?”
Before JT could whack Homer Duke pipes up, which is the signal for everyone to pay attention so they don’t miss Duke breaking up the English language like a concrete driveway. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but the moments he smashes the English language into smithereens are worth the times he leaves it all smooth and undisturbed. Everyone listens.
“Yeah, well, I’d like to horse-collard my son – my older son,” Duke says.
“What’d he do now, Duke?” asks Donnie B.
“It’s him and that snowboard. He says just riding the snowboard down the landhill isn’t good enough anymore.”
“The landhill? You mean the landfill hill?” Donnie B. asks. Figures what he meant all along.
“Yeah, that landhill, back behind the powder-milk plant. All the kids ride sleds and snowboards down there when there’s snow. Big hill back there; hadn’t realized the effalation they get down there. Kids ride sleds and snowboards down there, and with them having to dodge old tires sticking up and old lawn mowers and junk you’d think it’d be plenty tough, but Rory says it’s not enough of a challenge for him. He’s got his own idea of what a challenge is for him, riding his snowboard. He wants to ride his snowboard down the ski jump at Norseman Hill.”
Mort about snorts his coffee, cup and all. “Ride his snowboard off a ski jump?”, he asks.
“Yeah, figures that part where he’s in the air will be all kinds of fun. Don’t get that at all. You know me – I like that gravitational pull. I don’t mess with the loss of physics. From the takeoff he figures he’ll gain some levitation so then he can turn a few spins before he comes down. Maybe he’ll get a big hoop and have someone set one of his pals on fire so he can jump through it, like one of those Chipwood thrill shows.”
Donnie B. asks the natural question: “Does he figure on landing?”
“You know how kids are,” Duke says. His hands are real big, and when he wraps them around the Dixie cup full of coffee the cup disappears pretty much. “He’s still kinda vague on landing. I tell him he’s gotta land sometime and it’s like telling him he’s gotta pay taxes sometime. ‘Oh, I know,’ he says, all kinda dreamy, but after he’s jumped through that hoop of fire and turned a triple somersault and the bottom of the snowboard meets the top of the snowbank he’ll find out lots about landing. Or maybe it’s just the bottom of his bottom meeting the top of the snowbank, in which case he’ll find out even more about landing.”
The followup goes to Donnie B. too: “When’s he going to get to Norseman Hill when no one’s watching?”
“Oh, at night sometime, he says. Makes the fire on the hoop look better when he jumps through it. Says he’ll go up there, climb the tower, yell for one of his friends to light the hoop on fire, then slide down the jump and you know, whatever happens happens. I ask him if it won’t be harder to land when it’s dark and he says he doesn’t know how hard it is to land when it’s light, so how will he know if it’s harder in the dark? I couldn’t argue with that, so I just had another helping of those ribs made in a crackpot. Bernie gets those two crackpots going and you can smell it for miles around.”
That was enough for us, so we crumpled our cups and headed back to the mags.
