LEMON BASKET 425 JUNE 29, 2007

THE LEMON BASKET: THE BEST & WORST OF THE WEB
#425 JUNE 29th, 2007
Copyright 2007 FRANCIS DIMENNO
http://www.dimenno.gather.com
dimenno@gmail.com

REACTIONARIES

Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Russian, and
Polish immigrants threaten the very fabric of the
Anglo-Saxon race .... If a lower race mixes with a
higher race, history teaches us, the lower race will
prevail.—Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr.

The modernizing elite in the technologically and
economically poor nations responded to colonialism by
seizing the power of the state and using it to change
their societies, hoping to achieve justice at home and
economic and cultural parity abroad. The politics of
changing traditional social structures and processes
by using state power did not always result in social
progress and economic development, but it did lead to
state supremacy and autocracy. In the more extreme
cases autocratic regimes were transformed to either
forward-looking or reactionary totalitarianism-of
socialist-Marxist, fascist, or
religious-fundamentalist types. These systems clearly
failed or are failing. But at the time they were
adopted, to many they represented hope and a promise
of economic change, distributive justice, and a better
future.—Afkhami Mahnaz

Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as
conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. ... It is
not the wish of our government to impose upon you
alien institutions.--Frederick Stanley Maude,
Proclamation to the people of Mesopotamia (Iraq),
Baghdad, March 19, 1917.

There is a lack of planning and preparatory study in
our actions; most of our acts are characterized by
emotionalism, immediate reaction, and a lack of a
thorough calculation of ultimate consequences.—Abd
al-Rahman al-Bazzaz, Prime Minister of Iraq, Kayfa
Yarbah al-Arab al-Harb, 1968

An armed Communist advances against you and you react
against him. Therefore, you are a reactionary!—Winston
Churchill

ON BEING ABBRUZZE
Being Abbruzze, I like to hide in caves.

(Dean Martin was Abbruzze, by the way. That’s why he
never kowtowed to Frank Sinatra, who was a Sicilian.)

True, I may have some German blood.

Certain of my ancestors were apparently from the
Italian Alps.

But I am as Italian as all get-out.

I have a tomato garden.

Some of the plants are flowering and some have even
borne fruit.

I have one large perfect beautiful pink rose in my
back yard.

I recently spent half an hour pulling up weeds and
dousing my peas and tomatoes with watery horse shit.

I eat raw cloves of garlic.

Furthermore, I spit on the street, nod to priests,
have little hairs growing out of the tip of my nose,
and, most of all, I really don't mind it when tomato
seeds get stuck in between my teeth.

Plus, I have about twelve different kinds of olive oil
in the house.

The better to make an old DiMenno family recipe.

TOMATO SANDWICH

Take two slices of bread.

Slice one tomato fresh from the garden, length-wide.

Place one large tomato slice on one of the bread
slices.

Add a little salt.

Top with the other slice of bread.

Cut diagonally.

Mangia!

Note: Save the olive oil. It's too expensive to waste
on a tomato sandwich.

Some people put mozzarella on the sandwich.

The way I heard it, the mozzarell', she has got to be
fresh and hand-made, or why bother?

And, unfortunately, in certain whitebread suburbs, you
can't always get fresh mozzarella.

(Fortunately for me, there's an Italian grocery store,
Carcieri's, less than a block away.)

As for commonly held beliefs about on olive oil...well, hmm, yeah, well,
maybe some people think Berio's is good enough, and
for cooking it's certainly adequate, but you haven't
really tasted olive oil unless you've splurged and
invested in a good extra virgin unfiltered olive oil
like Picual, Arbequina, or Manzanilla.

For ordinary use, I like Merro, from Sicily. There's
an Italian deli up on Route 15 that sells it.

I should mention that I mis-spoke. I only keep about
six different kinds of olive oil in the house.
Certainly not based on the gassy bloviations of some
television harpy. (Talk about malocchio....)

The other oils I keep to hand are speciality oils like
tea tree and grapeseed and black walnut and hazelnut
and avocado and pine nut and pumpkinseed.

No, I learned about fine olive oil from an Italian
cookbook that I bought back in the 1980s.

Whenever I eat a baked potato, I put olive oil and
freshly ground black pepper on it.

I have even been known to put spaghetti sauce on a
potato.

Homemade spaghetti sauce, mind you.

Now, here's another recipe that'll make you healthy.

ROASTED PUMPKIN SEEDS

Go to a health food store, you cheap bastid, and buy
some raw pumpkin seeds. They should be as fresh as you
can get them. Green, and flexible to the touch. If
they're refrigerated, that's a very good sign.

(I get mine from a place in New Bedford MA called Down to
Earth Natural Foods.)

Either heat them in a dry frying pan over medium heat
for about ten minutes, stirring frequently, or roast
them in the oven on an ungreased flat pan at 300 for
about 10-20 minutes, checking frequently to make sure
they're not burning. (They're done when they turn a
tannish brown.)

Once they're roasted, immediately add some good olive
oil to the roasted seeds and stir the mixture around
to ensure the oil covers the seeds.

Add fresh-ground sea salt.

You may also add freshly ground black pepper to taste.

You'll feel like a million, or my middle name ain't
Salvatore.

1*SALUTATION
From NEWSWEEK 20060625
ADVANCED BLOGGING
http://www.doshdosh.com

2*REFERENCE
POLITICAL QUOTES
http://www.politicalquotes.org

3*HUMOR
WHEN COMMUNISM COMES TO YOUR TOWN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_DaMKUP3Og&mode=related&search=

4*NOVELTY
From ATLANTIC 6-07
FREE MEDIA
http://www.thepiratebay.com

5*AVATAR OF THE ZEITGEIST
CHICKEN-FRIED BACON WITH GRAVY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfbTO0GlONU

6* DAILY UTILITY
From NEWSWEEK 20070618
CHILD FITNESS
http://www.bam.gov
http://www.kidnetic.com
http://www.kidshealth.org
http://www.my-gym.com
http://www.verbnow.com
http://www.ymca.net

7*CARTOON
From NEWSWEEK 20070611
ABOUT GAMES
http://www.blog.wired.com/games
http://www.gamesetwatch.com
http://www.tigsource.com

8*PRESCRIPTION
VITAMINS
I trust the FDA a lot more than the proprietors of
Oofty Goofty's Vitamin Bazaar, featuring Dr. Whacky's
Bee Pollen and Laetrile penis power cocktail....

http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/projects/projects.htm?ACCN_NO=408448&showpars=true&fy=2006

9* RUMOR PATROL
BARACK OBAMA
http://quiz.ontheissues.org/Barack_Obama.htm

10*LAGNIAPPE
From FORBES 20070702
VIDEOS
http://www.dailymotion.com

11*DEVIATIONS FROM THE PREPARED TEXT: A REVIEW OF
OTHER MEDIA
THE HISTORY OF BOSTON ROCK  Triple B Recordings
Here and Now   16-song CD Compilation

If you’re not a fan of  good-old-fashioned
hammer-and-tongs rock, you might wish to look
elsewhere, though if you are, you could do worse than
Noble Rot’s anthemic rabble-rouser “Rocket Fuel
Mayhem,” The New Frustrations’ classy garage-rock
thumper “Changed My Mind,” The Doom Buggies’
Byrds-like “Bruce’s Lament,” and Over the Edge’s
over-the-top punk raver “Invincible.” Rounding out the
bill are outstanding tracks by the somewhat twangy
Acro-Brats (“Gone for Good”), and reformulated
classics interpreted by Three Day Threshold (“Drunken
Sailor”) and The McGunks (“Whiskey in the Bottle”).
The final four songs are not for the fainthearted but
will satisfy aficionados of old-style radio-unfriendly
Boston punk: Nothing’s “Woo Dog,” Zippo Raids’ “At the
Bar,” Rock City Crimewave’s “Red on the Razor” and The
Illegals’ “Dream Date.” The fine folk at triple B
recordings are doing us an inestimable service by
preserving some representative recordings by (mostly)
hard rock bands, many of whom have been around for a
goodly long time, and more than a few of whom have
been flying forever below the radar of pretentious
fashionableness.

331. CONTROVERSIES IN POPULAR CULTURE
ORIGINS OF THE WORD ‘WOP’
In their endlessly fascinating U.S.A.CONFIDENTIAL,
Mortimer and Lait allege that the term Wop comes from
WP, for Western Pacific. Apparently, Italians were
among the first immigrants to San Francisco, and that
was the name of the railroad that brought them there.

It sounds spurious to me, as does the explanation that
the term comes from the expression With Out Papers.

Nope, I'm sure it comes from the Spanish expression, 'los guapos':
"The Pretty Boys."