counterclockwise

Peace, plenty, and a solitaire-playing gadget to all!

After a long day of near-continuous eating and talking, there’s nothing quite so refreshing as sinking into an evening gadget-coma.

I firmly believe that Oprah will single-handedly undo every scientific advance from the Renaissance onward, and bring us back to four humors and a bucket of leeches if left unchecked.

Courtesy of GraphJam.com:

It’s fall. In this part of the world, it’s not 100 degrees Fahrenheit out. And there are trees turning seasonal pumpkin shades. This weekend, we took Highway 31 to the fire tower on Clinch Mountain, clambered around up there for a while, and then came back to Knoxville along Highway 131. Wanna see?

View Clinch Ridge, Fall 2009 in a larger map

And many happy returns!

My mother and I were invited to attend Eid ul-Fitr celebrations with her colleague Asmaa, her family, and several members of the Knoxville Muslim Community. It was a wonderful experience.

Eid ul-Fitr, briefly, is the feast at the end of the fasting month Ramadan. We started the morning of 1 Shawwal 1430 Muslim calendar (or 20 September 2009 A.D.) by vising the prayer ceremony held for the community at large. That was followed by a traditional breakfast hosted by a dear friend of Asmaa’s family, a tour of Knoxville’s one Islamic school, the Annoor Academy, a break at Asmaa’s home, and then an excellent Indian meal at the home of Famirah and family.

So all in all, a very busy day (especially for the hosts and hostesses), but lots of fun.

This one is Magic.

Thanks, Young Williams Animal Center!

New car.

New computer.

New cell phone.

New cat.

Melting credit card.

I’m not really charmed by the name her previous owners gave her - Cheesy (or Cheesie, depending on how you feel about Spell Check). Anybody got a better idea?

I’m back in the United States.

I have a phone.

I don’t have anyone else’s number anymore.

E-mail me if you’d like to know the number I do have.

I went to BA’s famous Recoleta cemetery. I know a lot of people who would like it very much. It has three purposes:

1.) A place where people mourn their lost loved ones. I think, at least. I saw memorial plaques here and there, but no actual mourners. The live humans were all carrying cameras and park maps. Hardly any flowers in the joint, and most of those are tacky fake ones on Eva Duarte de Peron’s grave. How fitting.

2.) Who’s who of dead Argentinos. There hasn’t been a non-military pauper buried here since about 1890.

3.) World’s largest amusement park for black-and-white photography afficionados.

The tombs are all above-ground monuments of granite and marble. Lots of epic, baroque, and heroic architecture, writ small enough to fit in the viewfinder of your favorite point-and-click. Brooding statues. Draping garlands. Stolid pillars. Arcane ornamentation. Weeping cherubs. You know the genre.

But it’s fun to go and wallow anyway.

==

And last but not least, here’s an oddball. The monument posted below is to those Argentinos who fell in a 19th century war called the Triple Alliance War if you ask a Paraguayan or “the one with Paraguay” if you ask anybody else in South America.

I’ve spent two years hearing all about this from the Paraguayan side of things, which is just an eensy bit biased.

It’s *the* defining event in Paraguayan history, when the craziest of their many batshit-loco dictators (one Mariscal Fransisco Solano Lopez) picked a fight against Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. Paraguay postured belligerently, built up its military, invaded territory it had no claim to, and then almost got wiped off the map. They lost almost all their adult men to the fighting and more than half of their total population to disease, looting, pillaging, etc.

Now no doubt about it, Mariscal Lopez had his ignoble end coming, and worse besides. And if your country is being invaded by a large army, you’ve got a right to defend yourself. But spending six years trying to kill every hostile man, woman and child was not the right response to the situation. A “decapitation strike” is not supposed to start at the enemy’s left little toe and work its way up from there.

You can make a reasoned argument that Paraguay never actually recovered from the impact. Come to it, you can make a credible argument that people would be better off today if Brazil and Argentina had gone all the way into their proverbial Baghdad, divided up The Territory Formerly Known as Paraguay, and held a nice thorough occupation. The “poor” La Boca sector of Buenos Aires that this morning’s tour passed through looks about like a “middle class” sector of Asunción and “an unattainable pipe dream” in Paraguay’s countryside.

But instead, the Alliance leadership spent years obsessing over one unhinged pissant dictator, killed everyone they could find, got distracted by other concerns, and then left the place in ruins. Now this sordid incident is a modest monument at the back of Argentina’s Recoleta cementary, and still at the center of Paraguay’s national identity.

A note about pizza. Buenos Aires has it. It came across the Atlantic with upteen boatloads of Italian immigrants. BA pizza ranges from utter wretchedness to the sublime, and there’s little predicting which you’ll get without getting inside information. And I’m going guidebook-free at the moment, so just about everything is a surprise, for good or for ill. I did hit on a good one this afternoon, though.

La Casona, Calle Maípu, Buenos Aires

The key to Argentine pizza appreciation is cheese. Let’s go ahead and stipulate that any idiot, in any country, can make a decent crust (although whether that crust should be thick or thin is an issue I’ll leave to the debate of consumers more discerning than I am).

Argentinos also generally don’t get as worked up over toppings as Americans do. There are four sanctioned Argentine toppings - ham, onions, hardboiled eggs, and tomatoes. If you really must make it difficult, you might combine two or more of these on the same pie. I would add olives to the list, except that there is no element of choice about them - they just are. You may have some sauce, but it will be applied with a teaspoon, not a ladle.

So that leaves cheese (mainly mozzarella, but I’ve seen Roquefort offered and had the misfortune of getting served one with pre-sliced processed cheese substitute) as the major differentiating factor between a merely adequate slice  and Something To Write Home About. And the cheese this afternoon, I’m happy to report, was outstanding.