Feb 23, 2014

The Dalai Lama and Jerry Brown: Two Cool Dudes--Good Job, Jerry, and Thank You for Your Good Work

Liked · 5 minutes ago

With His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama who is speaking in San Francisco on the nature of mind.

from facebook

Thanks, Jerry, for doing a good job for our state.

Pasta Puttanesca with Gorgonzola Garlic Bread: re-blogging from Thibeault's Table

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Pasta Puttanesca with Gorgonzola Garlic Bread

This is our favourite garlic bread.

Lots of butter and garlic and Gorgonzola cheese to put it over the top.

Served with Pasta Puttanesca.
One of the easiest pastas to make.

Pasta Puttanesca

This is one of those sauces that you don't really need an exact recipe for. Made to personal taste.

olive oil
5 or 6 Anchovies, chopped

2 large cloves of garlic, minced

Large can of quality Italian tomatoes, coarsely chopped

salt and pepper

oregano (fresh or dried)

Chili pepper (Optional)

Black olives Green Olives

Note: Capers are traditional in Puttanesca, but I don't care for capers so I sub in green olives.

Fresh Basil
Heat 2 or 3 tablespoons olive oil. Add chopped anchovies and cook over medium heat until the anchovies break up. Add the garlic, cook for another minute. Add the tomatoes and a little oregano. Season with salt and pepper. Simmer for about 10 minutes and then add the olives (capers if using) and continue to cook until sauce has thickened, about ten minutes. Tear basil and add to sauce and serve immediately with your choice of long pasta.

Italian Bread with Gorgonzola

Long loaf of Italian Bread or long crusty rolls.

1/4 cup butter
1/2 cup Gorgonzola cheese
1 to 2 cloves garlic
Parsley
Salt
Pepper
Fresh grated Parmesan cheese

Optional: Basil or Oregano

Cream the butter with the Gorgonzola cheese.

Mince garlic and add to cheese mixture. Add chopped parsley, and
season with salt and pepper.

If using the basil or the oregano add now as well.

Leave loaf whole, but cut slices so that the loaf stays together.
Spread cheese mixture in between each slice and reshape loaf. Sprinkle
top of loaf with Parmesan cheese and wrap in foil. Place in 400°F oven
for 10 or 15 minutes and serve hot.

Feb 22, 2014

my chanel purse: is it real?

right, this was a gift......

what do you think?

from the facebook page of my girl Greta Van Susteren--the beautiful but lazy kitty

Greta Van Susteren

I would be ashamed if I were THIS lazy. I got up this morning…built a fire because I was cold…and then started daily chores (which, of course, including feeding the cats and the dogs.) When I returned to the fire to get warm, I was stunned – there was Mike. Mike is so lazy that I was absolutely speechless. He looked at me...and I decided to snap a pic with my ipad to show how lazy he is and he happened to yawn. Then he put his head down and went back to sleep. At least, while I am working around the house he could do something constructive - like check for mice or something. And if you look close in the yawning pic, he is actually sleeping next to / on a bag of cat treats. He is so lazy…

from the facebook page of my girl Greta Van.....

Hot Number Alan Rickman: I could listen to him talk all day--Happy B Day

File under: British actors with sexy voices.

Happy 68th Birthday to Alan Rickman who was born on this day in 1946. What's your favorite Alan Rickman role?

from anglotopia

Ronald gives a thumbs up to United's new Pit Bull rule

Pit Bulls, Other Breeds No Longer Banned on United

By Genevieve Shaw Brown
@gsbrownabc
Follow on Twitter

May 9, 2012 11:52am

ht jesse huart jp 120509 wblog Pit Bulls, Other Breeds No Longer Banned on United

Jessie Huart and her dog, Slaw, a pit bull mix. (Courtesy Jessie Huart)

An online campaign to lift a ban on certain breeds of dogs on United Airlines has succeeded. A total of nine breeds, including pit bulls, had previously been banished from the airline.

The banned breeds (and breed mixes) were pit bull terriers, American Staffordshire terriers, preso canario, perro de presa Canario, dogo Argentino, cane Corso, fila Brasileiro, Tosa (or Tosa Ken) and ca de bou.

The effort to lift the ban on the breeds began when Jessie Huart was making plans to move from Hawaii back to the mainland in December 2011. When she and her dog, Slaw, a pit bull mix, had moved to Hawaii, they flew on United. That was before United had adopted Continental’s Pet Safe program as part of the carriers’ merger.

“I had heard great things about Pet Safe and was making plans to fly on Continental. But then I saw that pit bulls were on the banned breed list,” Huart said. She filled out an email form online and then made reservations on another airline. But in late January, she recounted the story to a friend who suggested she start a petition on Change.org, the same site that got Bank of America to lift its proposed debit card fees. She did, with the goal of getting 1,000 signatures.

Nearly 46,000 signatures later, Huart is “thrilled” the airline has changed its policy. She believes dogs should be judged individually, not on breed. “To have a major airline like United repeal a breed-specific ban is so huge,” she said. She hopes legislators will see what United has done and reconsider laws that she believes discriminate against certain breeds.

“As a result of feedback, United will now accept previously restricted breeds of dogs traveling in a nonplastic, reinforced crate meeting International Air Transport Association Container Requirement #82. All IATA Container Requirements can be found on IATA.org. Information on breeds and other policies can be found on united.com, “ United Airlines said in a statement to ABCNews.com.

Will she fly on United again? “Absolutely,” she said. “I was a frequent flier on United, and I’m looking forward to flying them again.”

from abcnews

Ronnie

Ronald is in favor of United's new rule:

"You know, I've given it a lot of thought, and for me, the new rule seems like it could be a winner."

"It just makes sense."

"Now, when we want to get out of town, we have options just like every one else; we are no longer just bound to the car. If it takes a law to stop the discrimination, I'm all for it."

Thanks, Ronnie, for telling us your thoughts as every one was waiting to hear your opinion on this very important issue.

Feb 21, 2014

from NDigo: Legacy of a President: A History of Business and Race in the White House

thank you, Hermene Hartman, for telling us about this very important event........cl

Say, do you think this black, leather quilted bag is real, or what.....

please comment......

trying to sell it, don't know how.......

Seriously, Geraldo Runs the Best Show on Radio, Even for a Republican

Can you believe it--he talks to Juan Williams, Bill O'Reilly, Rudy Giuliani.....speaks favorably of Bill Clinton

Mondays with the Commish--former New York top-cop Bernie Kerik, who is his friend.

All of the big talkers call in--agree or disagree--they say what they think.

Geraldo has the uncanny ability to listen to both sides--take it in--say his own opinion--without anger.

Really, very few national news/talk figures are in this category.

A little bit of an expert on this--listening to a lot of news/talk shows--they are almost always way to one side--way to one side with extreme hatred or disdain for any one who disagrees with the host.

.......they cut the people off--it's disgusting--Geraldo listens.......

Every week one of the big reporters call in and congratulate Geraldo on his hospital reporting work.

I will be watching his new show on Fox--Scandalous--starts March 1.

The first show is on OJ--20 years later. This should be a good show; Geraldo Rivera had one of the best OJ Simpson shows on CNBC back in the day.

Right, watching news and talk shows forever--like Piers (even though he is obviously trying to take over the world via CNN) but will miss Larry forever.

CNN-threw off Larry and George Strombo--and they wonder why their ratings are sinking--CNN, find your head and put it on.

Do not do anything to Fred Whitfield and the legal boys, Barbara Star or Candy--or I will personally picket.....and write about it in my blog.

Geraldo Rivera Radio round-Up....every morning on WABC New York.....Yes--it's a good show.

Listening and watching on the Chromebook at 7AM in San Diego

copied from facebook:

Taping OJSimpson@20 special with victims attorney Gloria Allred who says their rights Sacrificed on altar of racial politics

cute lapis earrings...13.88...cute black quilted purse

tax and shipping are included

sterling silver findings and red swarovski cube accent:

purchase with paypal

619-786-4147

chloe.louise.langendorf.louis@gmail.com

cute purse: black, quilted, gold chain

Feb 20, 2014

Do You Even Know George Smiley or Not?

A Brief History of George Smiley by John Le Carré

The first appearance of John Le Carré's wily grey eminence: the first chapter of the first Smiley novel, Call for the Dead

John Le Carré
theguardian.com, Friday 22 May 2009 08.44 EDT

When Lady Ann Sercomb married George Smiley towards the end of the war she described him to her astonished Mayfair friends as breathtakingly ordinary. When she left him two years later in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver, she announced enigmatically that if she hadn't left him then, she never could have done; and Viscount Sawley made a special journey to his club to observe that the cat was out of the bag.

This remark, which enjoyed a brief season as a mot, can only be understood by those who knew Smiley. Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that 'Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou'wester'. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince.

Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest? Where had she got him from? The incongruity of the match was emphasized by Lady Ann's undoubted beauty, its mystery stimulated by the disproportion between the man and his bride. But gossip must see its characters in black and white, equip them with sins and motives easily conveyed in the shorthand of conversation. And so Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard's van of the social express, and soon became lost luggage, destined, when the divorce had come and gone, to remain unclaimed on the dusty shelf of yesterday's news.

When Lady Ann followed her star to Cuba, she gave some thought to Smiley. With grudging admiration she admitted to herself that if there were an only man in her life, Smiley would be he. She was gratified in retrospect that she had demonstrated this by holy matrimony.

The effect of Lady Ann's departure upon her former husband did not interest society – which indeed is unconcerned with the aftermath of sensation. Yet it would be interesting to know what Sawley and his flock might have made of Smiley's reaction; of that fleshy, bespectacled face puckered in energetic concentration as he read so deeply among the lesser German poets, the chubby wet hands clenched beneath the tumbling sleeves. But Sawley profited by the occasion with the merest of shrugs by remarking partir c'est courir un peu, and he appeared to be unaware that though Lady Ann just ran away, a little of George Smiley had indeed died.

That part of Smiley which survived was as incongruous to his appearance as love, or a taste for unrecognized poets: it was his profession, which was that of intelligence officer. It was a profession he enjoyed, and which mercifully provided him with colleagues equally obscure in character and origin. It also provided him with what he had once loved best in life: academic excursions into the mystery of human behaviour, disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.

Some time in the twenties when Smiley had emerged from his unimpressive school and lumbered blinking into the murky cloisters of his unimpressive Oxford College, he had dreamt of Fellowships and a life devoted to the literary obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But his own tutor, who knew Smiley better, guided him wisely away from the honours that would undoubtedly have been his. On a sweet July morning in 1928, a puzzled and rather pink Smiley had sat before an interviewing board of the Overseas Committee for Academic Research, an organization of which he had unaccountably never heard. Jebedee (his tutor) had been oddly vague about the introduction: 'Give these people a try, Smiley, they might have you and they pay badly enough to guarantee you decent company.' But Smiley was annoyed and said so. It worried him that Jebedee, usually so precise, was so evasive. In a slight huff he agreed to postpone his reply to All Souls until he had seen Jebedee's 'mysterious people'.

He wasn't introduced to the Board, but he knew half of its members by sight. There was Fielding, the French medievalist from Cambridge, Sparke from the School of Oriental Languages, and Steed-Asprey who had been dining at High Table the night Smiley had been Jebedee's guest. He had to admit he was impressed. For Fielding to leave his rooms, let alone Cambridge, was in itself a miracle. Afterwards Smiley always thought of that interview as a fan dance; a calculated progression of disclosures, each revealing different parts of a mysterious entity. Finally Steed-Asprey, who seemed to be Chairman, removed the last veil, and the truth stood before him in all its dazzling nakedness. He was being offered a post in what, for want of a better name, Steed-Asprey blushingly described as the Secret Service.

Smiley had asked for time to think. They gave him a week. No one mentioned pay.

That night he stayed in London at somewhere rather good and took himself to the theatre. He felt strangely light-headed and this worried him. He knew very well that he would accept, that he could have done so at the interview. It was only an instinctive caution, and perhaps a pardonable desire to play the coquette with Fielding, which prevented him from doing so.
Following his affirmation came training: anonymous country houses, anonymous instructors, a good deal of travel and, looming ever larger, the fantastic prospect of working completely alone.

His first operational posting was relatively pleasant: a two-year appointment as englischer Dozent at a provincial German university: lectures on Keats and vacations in Bavarian hunting lodges with groups of earnest and solemnly promiscuous German students. Towards the end of each long vacation he brought some of them back to England, having already earmarked the likely ones and conveyed his recommendations by clandestine means to an address in Bonn; during the entire two years he had no idea of whether his recommendations had been accepted or ignored. He had no means of knowing even whether his candidates were approached. Indeed he had no means of knowing whether his messages ever reached their destination; and he had no contact with the Department while in England.

His emotions in performing this work were mixed, and irreconcilable. It intrigued him to evaluate from a detached position what he had learnt to describe as 'the agent potential' of a human being; to devise minuscule tests of character and behaviour which could inform him of the qualities of a candidate. This part of him was bloodless and inhuman – Smiley in this role was the international mercenary of his trade, amoral and without motive beyond that of personal gratification.

Conversely it saddened him to witness in himself the gradual death of natural pleasure. Always withdrawn, he now found himself shrinking from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty; he guarded himself warily from spontaneous reaction. By the strength of his intellect, he forced himself to observe humanity with clinical objectivity, and because he was neither immortal nor infallible he hated and feared the falseness of his life.

But Smiley was a sentimental man and the long exile strengthened his deep love of England. He fed hungrily on memories of Oxford; its beauty, its rational ease, and the mature slowness of its judgements. He dreamt of windswept autumn holidays at Hartland Quay, of long trudges over the Cornish cliffs, his face smooth and hot against the sea wind. This was his other secret life, and he grew to hate the bawdy intrusion of the new Germany, the stamping and shouting of uniformed students, the scarred, arrogant faces and their cheapjack answers. He resented, too, the way in which the Faculty had tampered with his subject – his beloved German literature. And there had been a night, a terrible night in the winter of 1937, when Smiley had stood at his window and watched a great bonfire in the university court: round it stood hundreds of students, their faces exultant and glistening in the dancing light. And into the pagan fire they threw books in their hundreds. He knew whose books they were: Thomas Mann, Heine, Lessing and a host of others. And Smiley, his damp hand cupped round the end of his cigarette, watching and hating, triumphed that he knew his enemy.

Nineteen thirty-nine saw him in Sweden, the accredited agent of a well-known Swiss small-arms manufacturer, his association with the firm conveniently backdated. Conveniently, too, his appearance had somehow altered, for Smiley had discovered in himself a talent for the part which went beyond the rudimentary change to his hair and the addition of a small moustache. For four years he had played the part, travelling back and forth between Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. He had never guessed it was possible to be frightened for so long. He developed a nervous irritation in his left eye which remained with him fifteen years later; the strain etched lines on his fleshy cheeks and brow. He learnt what it was never to sleep, never to relax, to feel at any time of day or night the restless beating of his own heart, to know the extremes of solitude and self-pity, the sudden unreasoning desire for a woman, for drink, for exercise, for any drug to take away the tension of his life.

Against this background he conducted his authentic commerce and his work as a spy. With the progress of time the network grew, and other countries repaired their lack of foresight and preparation. In 1943 he was recalled. Within six weeks he was yearning to return, but they never let him go.

'You're finished,' Steed-Asprey said: 'train new men, take time off. Get married or something. Unwind.'

Smiley proposed to Steed-Asprey's secretary, the Lady Ann Sercomb.

The war was over. They paid him off, and he took his beautiful wife to Oxford to devote himself to the obscurities of seventeenth-century Germany. But two years later Lady Ann was in Cuba, and the revelations of a young Russian cypher-clerk in Ottawa had created a new demand for men of Smiley's experience.

The job was new, the threat elusive and at first he enjoyed it. But younger men were coming in, perhaps with fresher minds. Smiley was no material for promotion and it dawned on him gradually that he had entered middle age without ever being young, and that he was – in the nicest possible way – on the shelf.

Things changed. Steed-Asprey was gone, fled from the new world to India, in search of another civilization. Jebedee was dead. He had boarded a train at Lille in 1941 with his radio operator, a young Belgian, and neither had been heard of again. Fielding was wedded to a new thesis on Roland – only Maston remained, Maston the career man, the war-time recruit, the Ministers' Adviser on Intelligence; 'the first man,' Jebedee had said, 'to play power tennis at Wimbledon.' The NATO alliance, and the desperate measures contemplated by the Americans, altered the whole nature of Smiley's Service. Gone for ever were the days of Steed-Asprey, when as like as not you took your orders over a glass of port in his rooms at Magdalen; the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, under-paid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy and intrigue of a large Government department – effectively at the mercy of Maston, with his expensive clothes and his knighthood, his distinguished grey hair and silver-coloured ties; Maston, who even remembered his secretary's birthday, whose manners were a by-word among the ladies of the registry; Maston, apologetically extending his empire and regretfully moving to even larger offices; Maston, holding smart house-parties at Henley and feeding on the success of his subordinates.

They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept, his insincerity when he defended the vagaries of his subordinates, his flexibility when formulating new commitments. Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants. Ostensibly, his position was an odd one. He was not the nominal Head of Service, but the Ministers' Adviser on Intelligence, and Steed-Asprey had described him for all time as the Head Eunuch.

This was a new world for Smiley: the brilliantly lit corridors, the smart young men. He felt pedestrian and old-fashioned, homesick for the dilapidated terrace house in Knightsbridge where it had all begun. His appearance seemed to reflect this discomfort in a kind of physical recession which made him more hunched and frog-like than ever. He blinked more, and acquired the nickname of 'Mole'. But his débutante secretary adored him, and referred to him invariably as 'My darling teddy-bear'.

Smiley was now too old to go abroad. Maston had made that clear: 'Anyway, my dear fellow, as like as not you're blown after all the ferreting about in the war. Better stick at home, old man, and keep the home fires burning.'

Which goes some way to explaining why George Smiley sat in the back of a London taxi at two o'clock on the morning of Wednesday, 4 January, on his way to Cambridge Circus.

from the guardian

would you like to actually see a picture of the real George Smiley......click on this link if you dare:

http://theronnierepublic.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-real-george-smiley.html