COMMON

February 29^th is an uncommon day.

 

The perfect day to consider a concept that was once so universal, it had ‘common’ in its title.

It isn’t fancy or cutting edge. In fact, it’s a throwback.

Technology has made it virtually extinct.

So, too, have grocery store check-out lines, highways and parking lots.

You know. Courtesy.

Nowadays it’s so unusual an occurrence, we ought to call it ‘Uncommon Courtesy.’

Civility. Politeness. Consideration. Respect.   

All wrapped up in a notion that seems as quaint as a Norman Rockwell painting.

I am scanning the headlines this February 29, 2012, thinking that many major news stories would not be major, news, or stories, if courtesy had been considered and employed.

The Rutgers Webcam Spying Trial.

The News Corp Phone Hacking Scandal.

The Resignation of Maine Senator Olympia Snowe.

All things Politics.

Sasha Barren Cohen vs. Ryan Seacrest.

All things Bullying.

Wikileaks and Anonymous Join Forces Against US Intelligence.

Pentagon Rushes to Learn Number of 9/11 Remains Sent to Landfill.

Apple Loophole May Expose Personal Photos to App Developers.

Funeral Home Owner “Horrified” Over Whitney Houston Casket Photo.

What is up with us?

We (I) complain when we have to wait a half hour for a human to answer the phone at a call center, and then we (I) get annoyed when the person who answers the phone takes too long to address our problem.

We (I) chat on our cell phones while ordering coffee, paying for groceries, and dining with friends.

We comment anonymously (or not) in or to Op-Eds, Blogs, Facebook posts, Tweets and Talk Radio, barely able to contain our anger, disgust, and disdain.

And yet we are a citizenry that leaps to our neighbors’ – to the world’s -  aide when tragedy, natural disaster, acts of terrorism or other such momentous events occur.

Perhaps we just need a reminder, on an uncommon day like February 29^th,  that we're all in this together.

And for every ordinary day to come, we must work to return 'common' to courtesy.

Bad for 24/7 news bureaus, bloggers, and reality TV.

Great for humanity.

QUING Hereby Decrees: Paying attention beats paying the price.

METAPHOR

If you think you are thinking “outside the box,” should you be doing your thinking outside of a box?

If you are solving a problem by thinking about it “on the one hand” and then “on the other hand,” should you use both hands to try to solve the problem?

If you consider a particular metaphor (like those above) before jumping into think-mode or creative-mode, will you think better, more creatively?

Research says yes.

Psychologists studying “embodied cognition” have affirmed that “when people literally — that is, physically — embody these metaphors, they generate more creative ideas for solving problems.”

102 undergraduates at New York University are asked to complete a task that measures innovative thinking. Some of the students sit inside a box - made of plastic pipe and cardboard - and complete the task. The others sit outside of the box or next to it. Researchers evaluating the responses to the task find that the individuals actually sitting outside the pipe and cardboard box came up with over 20 percent more creative solutions than the students seated inside the box.

A rectangular path is delineated by duct tape on a floor.  Students are shown pictures of objects made of Lego blocks, and asked to think of original ways to use the objects while either walking along the duct tape path, or walking freely about the floor.

Students who walked freely – outside the duct tape box — came up with over 25 percent more original ideas.

40 undergraduates from the University of Michigan are asked to consider a problem on one hand, and then on the other. Half of the students are asked to lift and hold one hand outstretched while they consider the problem. The others are allowed to switch from hand to hand.

The students who switched hands (thinking about the problem on “one hand” and then “on the other”) had a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of ideas generated.

Apparently metaphors - “catchphrases” - if you will, can affect the way we think.

Doctoral candidate Suntae Kim, and associate professor Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks at the University of Michigan, together with Evan Polman, a visiting assistant professor at New York University have demonstrated that bodily experiences can help create new knowledge, undermining  “the strict separation between mind and body — another box that has confined our thinking for a long time.” 

Mind and body are linked, and bodily experiences clearly influence how individuals construct their social reality.

Consider this: Studies show that an individual holding a warm cup of coffee tends to perceive a stranger as having a “warmer” personality. Likewise one will see things as more serious and important — more “weighty.” If he is holding something heavy.

And though researchers are just beginning to understand how catchphrases shape people’s thinking, they believe “it’s possible to begin prescribing some novel suggestions to enhance creativity.”

Hmmm.  If they can enhance creativity, perhaps novel suggestions can also end addictions.

Like my addiction to sweets. And politics.

Metaphor over Mind.

Kindly do me a favor!

Suggest that America is a Candy Store; stocked with all sorts of remarkable creations.

War Heads.
Starbursts.  
Snicker-ers.
Gummy Worms.
Sour Patch Kids.
Fireballs.
Jawbreakers.
Lifesavers.
Slo Pokes.
Cracker Jacks.
Smoothies.
Goobers.  
Sugar Daddies.
Hot Tamales.
Nerds.
AirHeads.  
Smarties.

Truffles are showcased.

Chocolates are divided by label and price.

Penny candies are stashed in bin after bin, lining the walls.

Nuts, ever copious, occupy a whole corner of the store.

Sweet. Sour. Chewy. Gross.

Some treats are delicious. Others make you sick.  

At best: a collection of bright, shiny beans in a zillion flavors and colors.

At worst: a collection of stale, hard and crack-a-tooth-destructive has-beens.

Like Politicians and their discourse, 2012.

Epiphany.

This kid has zero desire to be in a candy store.

Candy cravings cured!  Passion for politics purged!

Metaphor over mind.


QUING Hereby Decrees: Attempting to lock- up votes by devaluing the education of our youth is henceforth punishable by good old-fashioned tarring and feathering.  In the public square. All are invited to attend.

QUING Parties at the Palace with THE BEST SUGAR COOKIES

Apologies.
 
I was not Partying at the Palace Friday, because I was busy being bludgeoned by Santa.

True story.

For weeks, our adorable 4 ft x 2 ft plywood Lawn Santa rested in a corner of the garage, waiting to be lifted into storage with wreaths, lights and spotlights.

It was a clean-up-the-house-and-garage kind of day. I was tired of looking at Santa every time I walked into the office. So I sent Child up the ladder to a storage area that is 12+ feet above the floor of the garage.

Carefully, I lifted Lawn Santa up to child. Lawn Santa slipped from Child’s hands and unexpectedly fell.
  
On my head.

Five positive results:

1. I have a new-found empathy for Vincent Van Gogh (and thankfully did not experience the lobe-loss he did.)
  
2. I have a new-found understanding of the state of adult emergency hospital care (it stinks.)

3. Husband had a fun afternoon gazing at me - in full head gauze - and wailing in my un-bludgeoned ear, “EBE-NEEEEE-ZER!”

4. My kids clearly understand the meaning of ‘Irony’: “Isn’t it ironic, Mom, that Santa caused blunt force trauma to your head?”

5. That obsession with holiday decorating (and cleaning the garage?)  Over!

My stuck-on-the-couch-for-24-hours-obsession?  Reruns of the first season of Downton Abbey.

Your new obsession?

Sugar Cookies.  Child with the slippery fingers is not happy I am sharing this recipe with you, because “then all the other Moms will know how to make the best cookies ever!”

These sugar cookies are, indeed, a favorite of kids - young and old. Perfect for both lunch boxes and parties. I sprinkle them with different colored sugars when I bake them for holidays or special events.  It’s so much easier, and safer than decorating with plywood!  Gustare!

THE BEST SUGAR COOKIES

(from COOK’S ILLUSTRATED – Makes 2 dozen cookies)

INGREDIENTS
:
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
16 tablespoons (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened but still firm
1 c. granulated sugar, plus 1/2 c. for rolling dough
1 tablespoon light brown sugar
1 large egg
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract


Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Adjust oven racks to upper and lower middle positions. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper.

Whisk flour, baking powder and salt.  Set aside. Beat butter, 1 cup of sugar and brown sugar at medium speed until light and fluffy (about 3 minutes.) Scrape down sides of bowl with rubber spatula. Add egg and vanilla. Beat at medium speed until combined, about 30 seconds. Add dry ingredients, and beat on low until just mixed, about 30 seconds, scraping down bowl if needed.

Place ½ cup of sugar in shallow bowl. Roll heaping tablespoon of dough into 1 1/2 inch dough ball. Roll it in remaining sugar, and space 2 inches apart on baking sheet (12 per pan.) Using butter wrapper, butter flat bottom of drinking glass, dip in sugar, and flatten dough ball to ¾ inch thick.

Bake 15-18 minutes, until golden brown around edges and lightly colored in center. Be sure to reverse position of cookie sheets (front to back, and top to bottom) halfway through baking time.

NONSENSE

Gas Prices.          
Afghanistan.

Syria.

Wacky Winter Weather.

Israel vs. Iran.

Unemployment.

Falling House Prices. 

Super PACs.

Presidential Politics.

So much to consider. Understand.  Debate. 

Alarm.

And now it seems we must fear that Hollywood is brainwashing our kids; indoctrinating them with ‘insidious nonsense.’

So says Lou Dobbs, anchor of Lou Dobbs Tonight.

No, he is not challenging Glee, which appears on his network.

Dobbs is outraged by The Secret World of Arrietty, a film based on Mary Norton’s classic children’s book, The Borrowers, and The Lorax, a film based on the picture book classic by Dr. Seuss.

They may appear to be harmless, family-friendly movies. But actually, they are tools being used by the liberal media to “plainly demonize the so-called 1% and espouse green-energy policies, come what may.”

Gulp.

American kids are being brainwashed by Hollywood!

The Secret World of Arrietty, a film about tiny people living beneath the floorboards of an old house, “borrowing” (i.e. taking) what they need from normal-sized humans, encourages class envy and redistribution of wealth, according to Dobbs.

And that wacky, preachy Lorax is just another example of environmental radicalism.

To Dobbs, these films are a conspiracy: "The President's liberal friends in Hollywood targeting a younger demographic using animated movies to sell their agenda to children."

It doesn’t matter that The Secret World of Arrietty was made by Japanese filmmakers.

Or that Dr. Seuss has been encouraging kids to love and care for trees since The Lorax was published in 1971.
 
Dobbs disdains the Lorax, "a woodland creature that speaks for the trees and fights rampant industrialism." He even compares the movie to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which "forever tried to pit the makers against the takers," and President Obama's calls that "everyone should pay their fair share."

One of Dobbs’ guests, radio host Matt Patrick, agreed with this analysis. "What we're doing is creating Occu-toddlers," Patrick said, joking that the anti-consumerism, pro-environmental messages should be countered by moviegoers who "buy huge tubs of popcorn, ram it in your face," then leave the trash on theater floors and walk out of the movies.

Gas Prices.          
Afghanistan.

Syria.

Wacky Winter Weather.

Israel vs Iran.

Unemployment.

Falling House Prices. 

Super PACs.

Presidential Politics.

All of this.

And now Popcorn Terrorism.

Wonder if Lou Dobbs has noticed that most of the Kid Pix produced by Hollywood have blatantly brainwashed our children, indoctrinating them with insidious nonsense?

Consider the hidden message in these blockbusters:

Alice in Wonderland: Crazy is good- and gorgeous. Tall or small can be fixed. The Tea Party is Hallucinogenic.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Skip the ‘snarky’, and you’ll have all the chocolate and cash that you want.   

Megamind:  Be Blue. Be Evil. Be Happier than Brad Pitt.

How to Train Your Dragon: Be weak. Be geek. Get the girl and the dragon.

Tangled: Fall in love with a Criminal. Live Happily Ever After.

Winnie the Pooh: Honey is addictive. Watch your tail.

Parents, beware.
 
And don’t just blame the liberal media and the President’s friends in Hollywood.

It all begins with the authors of these books, plays and screenplays; writers who use paragraphs and chapters to sell their agenda - their nonsense - to children.

Sigh.

At least that kind of nonsense breeds delight.


QUING Hereby Decrees: Will the last sane and rational person in the building, kindly turn on the lights?

VOICELESS

TRIBUTES.

 
Fearless. Tireless. Generous. Funny.

"… a real life Katharine Hepburn heroine but braver and funnier."

"... courageous, dedicated and utterly determined to tell the world of atrocities committed by despotic regimes."

REMEMBRANCES.

She had been wounded in 2001 when a soldier purposely launched a grenade at her as she tried to leave rebel-controlled territory in Sri Lanka. She lost her hearing, and her left eye. “She got her hearing back,” her mother said. “She still had shrapnel in her brain they couldn’t remove.”

It was pointless to try to dissuade her from going to conflict zones. “… it would have been such a waste of words," her mother said. "She was determined, she was passionate about what she did, it was her life. There was no saying ‘Don’t do this.’ This is who she was, absolutely who she was and what she believed in: cover the story, not just have pictures of it, but bring it to life in the deepest way you could.”

"Her legacy is: be passionate and be involved in what you believe in. And do it as thoroughly and honestly and fearlessly as you can." Rosemarie Colvin

HOMAGE.

“She had an absolute compulsion to go to where bad things were happening, and tell the world about it. ‘They're doing terrible things there,’ she told me. ‘We have to be there.’ And she was. 

If there is a scale of courage, Marie was at the top of it. Because she knew the reality of war, and that there are no guardian angels.

So her courage was not the bravado of the foolhardy who imagine themselves invulnerable.  It was the quiet determination of someone who had to do what she believed she was for, knowing the risks and possible consequences. To tell the story and give a voice to the voiceless.” BBC Correspondent Jim Muir.

SACRIFICE.

Journalist Marie Colvin was killed from shelling by the Syrian Army, just five short days after journalist Anthony Shadid died while attempting to leave Syria. Colvin had reported from war zones on three continents in her 26-year career with The Sunday Times. A witness to history like Shadid, she repeatedly risked her life to give voice to ordinary people, particularly women and children whose lives were torn apart by war.

The night before she died, Colvin was interviewed by Anderson Cooper. She described the heartbreaking death of a toddler as emblematic of the atrocities happening in Syria: “These are twenty-eight thousand civilians, men, women and children, hiding, being shelled, defenseless. That little baby is one of two children who died today, one of the children being injured every day. That baby probably will move more people to think, ‘What is going on, and why is no one stopping this murder in Homs that is happening every day?...  It’s a complete and utter lie they’re only going after terrorists. The Syrian Army is simply shelling a city of cold, starving civilians.’”

MISSION.

In November 2010, Colvin gave a speech honoring journalists who had died in war zones.

Her words bear repeating. And internalizing.

“… I have been a war correspondent for most of my professional life. It has always been a hard calling. But the need for frontline, objective reporting has never been more compelling.
 
Covering a war means going to places torn by chaos, destruction, and death, and trying to bear witness. It means trying to find the truth in a sandstorm of propaganda when armies, tribes or terrorists clash. And yes, it means taking risks, not just for yourself but often for the people who work closely with you.

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defense or the Pentagon, and all the sanitized language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers, children.

Our mission is to report these horrors of war with accuracy and without prejudice...

We go to remote war zones to report what is happening. The public have a right to know what our government, and our armed forces, are doing in our name. Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians….

In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are. But war reporting is still essentially the same - someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can't get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you. The real difficulty is having enough faith in humanity to believe that enough people be they government, military or the man on the street, will care when your file reaches the printed page, the website or the TV screen.

We do have that faith because we believe we do make a difference.”

Marie Colvin made a difference.

Justice demands that we, the people on the street, care.

PLANT

“I’ve never met a houseplant I haven’t killed.”

So says a lady I know and admire, for everything but her houseplant skills. 

I have the opposite problem.

I’ve never met a plant that I can bear to let perish. (Yes, that is a sentence. Sorry. My kids are on Spring Break. So, too, my ability to write a coherent sentence!)

Wilting. Gray. Dropping leaves by the dozen. It doesn’t matter.

I’ll try to save the plant.

Shower it with attention, water, fertilizer, sunlight.  Give it a chance to live.  To bloom again.

The ferns that adorned our front porch last summer and fall? They are presently more black than green, more shriveled than leafy; but still they live and breathe beneath the skylights in the master bath (there’s nowhere else to put them.)

The geraniums that survived the first (only) frost last December? They are now a sparse, yellow-green array of leaves and branches that, but for three and a half summer-red blossoms, would join the garbage and recycling on the curb.   

Jerusalem Palm, Chinese Evergreen, Aglonomena, Jade, Calathea, Spider Plant, Japanese Aralia, Ficus, African Violet, Cacti – as well as numerous plants I cannot find in Google Images - happily coexist with the people and dogs in our house.

We (I) relocate them from room to room, and indoors to outdoors as seasons change.

We (I) sometimes even rescue strays from neighbors’ curbs (yes, I did recently save five hydrangea bushes from death by ground-yanking and three-point turns.)

Husband has begged me to give some plants away; the schefflera meandering across the kitchen ceiling, for instance. “I’ll trim it back,” I promise. But Husband knows that severing a portion of a plant is almost as traumatic to yours truly as terminating it.

This Mardi Gras, he will be happy to know that I am not the only certifiable plant lady in the world. 

In north-northern Norway, more than two million seeds -  one of every plant we eat -  are being stored in an ultra-high security, ultra-low temperature bank called the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.  More than 100 nations have left seeds in this vault, so that important plant species can be recovered in the event of some cataclysmic event.

The vault was established in 2008, though many scientists doubted it would ever be necessary or useful.

Until recently, when once skeptical Russian scientists began singing along with The Monkees (or Smash Mouth, for all you youngsters.)  Believers, all, they now agree that the Global Seed Vault is “of great interest and importance.”

Why the change of heart?  

Because these Russian scientists have succeeded in growing a flowering plant that is older than agriculture, older than writing, as old as the end of the last Ice Age.  

Yup.

Seems they regenerated the plant from frozen cells they discovered beneath 125 feet of permafrost in northeastern Siberia.  The plant was cultivated in their lab, with help from some “clonal micropropagation,” using seeds and leaves thought to be collected long-ago by a species of squirrels.  Researchers imagine that the squirrel’s burrow was frozen over quickly, and remained undisturbed until they happened upon it.

Stanislav Gubin, an author of the study, spent years searching for the burrows. “The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber,” he said. “It’s a natural cryobank.”

A 30,000 year old Seed Vault. 

Radiocarbon dating says this flowering plant - a species of Silene stenophylla - is 31,800 years old, plus or minus 300 years. 

It was buried for 300 centuries in Russian Permafrost, before being revived and grown in a conventional pot. Showered with attention, the plant blossomed, bore fruit, and dropped seeds.

It’s now growing and flourishing as if 30,000 years had never transpired.

Scientists are excited.  “The first generation cultivated from seeds obtained from regenerated plants progressed through all developmental stages and had the same morphological features as parent plants,” reports Svetlana Yashina and a team at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science, Russian Academy of Sciences.  “We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface.”

Remember Quing’s ‘Matter’ blog from early January? Remarkably, we are revisiting permafrost, and all that gunk in our trunk, just six weeks later.  

Scientists say the world’s permafrost - about 20 percent of the planet’s surface - could be a “vast time capsule, a place where ancient life is preserved, could be revived, and could speak volumes about the evolution of life on Earth.”

Cool. 

Another reason to save every plant I own and/or discover! 

You never know what could happen in 30, 000 years. 

QUING Hereby Decrees:  Permafrost: Somebody figure out how to invest in the cool stuff.......

HITCHED

Fifty-seven years ago, Frank sang that they go together like a Horse and Carriage.

Love and Marriage.

These days, they have gone the way of the Horse and Buggy.

 
Quaint. Outdated.

Consider Love and Marriage in the news this week:

As catalyst to destruction and untimely death. Talk of Whitney Houston’s tragic fate highlights the influence of ex-husband Bobby Brown and the reality TV show that aired the couple's crumbling marriage, drug use, lifestyle excess and bad behavior – a show that “sent Houston's reputation…to new lows," a show Houston claimed she did to try and save her marriage.

As passé. The New York Times reports that for the first time in history, more than half of the babies born to American women under the age of 30 occur outside of marriage: “Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America.”

The words of Amber Strader, 27:“I’d like to do it, but I just don’t see it happening right now. Most of my friends say it’s just a piece of paper, and it doesn’t work out anyway.”

The words of Teresa Fragoso, 25: “Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore. We support ourselves. We support our kids.”

As politics. Stating that “The institution of marriage is too serious to be treated like a political football,” New Jersey Governor Christie called for state voters to decide whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal- rather than politicians and the courts.

As the road not taken. The remarkable and dramatic story of Dolores Hart leaving a promising Hollywood career to live a cloistered spiritual life behind the walls of the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Connecticut is documented in an Oscar nominated Best Documentary Short Subject film God Is The Bigger Elvis. On the verge of signing a million-dollar contract during her short, but successful film career, Hart chose God - and 48 years of convent life - ultimately becoming a Mother Prioress instead of a movie star. 

Rebecca Cammisa directed the film, chronicling Hart’s choices and life in the abbey. “Here you have a young woman who at age 23 had it all," she says. "Her next two leading men were Beatty and Brando. But at 23 she left. She also had a fiancee. She decided that world wasn’t for her. That was pretty amazing.”

  
Hart’s fiancee, Don Robinson, became her lifelong friend. In an interview in 2004, Robinson divulged that after Dolores became a nun, he never married. The night she told him of her decision, it was a shock, but by the next day he had accepted it. "I was crushed," he said. "...Are you kidding? I'm a human being. I loved her deeply and still do, and I always will." Robinson had relationships with other women, but they "never worked." He visited Hart at the abbey every year until his death this past December.

(Sidetrack to an old, but amusing and relevant anecdote from that same 2004 interview. Actress Patricia Neal revealed that she wrote her autobiography at the abbey so she could confide in her friend of 30+ years. "It was a good place to write a book," she said. "I told (Mother Dolores) I was having trouble with my husband." (Her husband was Roald Dahl.) "He had problems….He found another lady. He's dead now.")

Sigh. Old Blue Eyes sang that song with such verve.
 
"Love and marriage, love and marriage
It's an institute you can't disparage…"

But disparaged, it is.

 
So what’s a really fortunate, happily married (most-of-the-time) old gal to do with all of this?

Write a blog In The Defense of Marriage.

Not today.  I'm already blogged down in this post.

So I looked for happier Love and Marriage news, and discovered that Clooney says he hasn't totally ruled out the idea of one day settling down for good.

His buddy Brad wants to marry his girl, too.

And there's always Matthew and Mary: She in a stunning, sleeveless gown and satin gloves, he in a tux, declaring their love in a fairy-tale snowfall, outside a window that illuminates the roaring fire in their castle-to-be.

Or Bates and Anna, declaring a love for each other that will transcend the hangman’s noose.

Oh, yeah.

Downton Abbey is fiction. A time period sandwiched between Horse and Carriage and Frank.

Nonetheless, as the institution of marriage transitions in this present day era, it’s worthwhile to consider a quote from Downton Abbey's brilliant character Lady Violet: “Life is a game in which the player must appear ridiculous.”

Thank goodness we have a place called marriage where players can appear ridiculous, and be loved, regardless.

QUING Hereby Re-Decrees (from Shakespeare, via Daughter):   Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, nor bends with the remover to remove... If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

QUING Parties at the Palace with UNCLE JOHNNY SOUP

There are hundreds of recipes for Beef Soup. But there is only one recipe for Uncle Johnny Soup, because there is only one Uncle Johnny. He is the patriarch of my big Italian family. The man who babysat us, cooked for us, and shouldered all the blame when we were insisting to our parents, “we didn’t do it!”  Uncle John is 97 years old. He has always been a man of few words and immeasurable action. He taught us to love our faith, family, heritage, the ballet, and Puccini.  He also taught us to love the wholesome, simple cooking that he learned from his mama. Years ago, I called him, from many miles away, to ask for the recipe for Uncle Johnny Soup. Here is what he said (after, "Good afternoon, Zi Zi!):

Buy a beef shank and some bones. Rinse them and put them in a pot.  Fill the pan 3/4 full with water. Boil and skim. Add celery, ½ can chopped tomato, salt, pepper, parsley, a little bit of oregano, onion and carrots.  Later on.  Cook all afternoon. Add Acini de pepe. Add some cheese. I serve it with oil bread and a salad."

There you have it. The actual recipe I use for Uncle Johnny Soup. If you are a maker of soup, you understand just how simple this is to make. If you are not a maker of soup - and would like to be - start with this recipe, because once you taste this soup you will actually wake up many a day in the future and think to yourself, “Today’s a day for Uncle Johnny Soup!”  Below, you’ll find my translation of Uncle John’s Recipe. After you make it the first time, however, use Uncle Johnny’s recipe, instead of mine. It has very little prose. It's authentic. And near perfect. Just like Uncle Johnny.  GUSTARE!

UNCLE JOHNNY SOUP

INGREDIENTS:

Two meaty beef shanks and one package of beef bones  (optional)

4 cups of water

2 cups of Beef Broth

2 yellow onions

1 Bay Leaf

Celery

Carrots

2 teaspoons  Kosher salt

1 teaspoon pepper

1 teaspoon of dried oregano

1 teaspoon of parsley

8 ounces (1/2 box) of Acini De Pepe

Directions:

Rinse shanks and bones.  Place in large stock pot and add water and beef broth.  Bring to a low boil on medium high heat, skimming any foam that rises to the top.  Peel skins from whole onions and drop into broth.  Add bay leaf, tomatoes, two or three peeled and rinsed carrots, and a couple rinsed stalks of celery. Add salt, pepper, parsley and oregano.  

Reduce heat and simmer, partly covered, for 4 hours. Add water or broth if necessary and stir once or twice. In the meantime, rinse three stalks of celery and four or five peeled carrots, and cut into 1/4 - 1/2 inch chunks.  When broth is done, remove beef shanks and set them aside until cool enough to remove the meat from bones. Discard bones, saving leaner chunks of meat for soup. Using a colander, carefully strain broth into a second large stock pot, discarding vegetables and seasonings.  Bring broth back to a simmer, and remove any fat on top (I use a metal measuring cup or ladle to do this.) Add meat chunks, chopped carrots and celery to broth.  Simmer for 1/2 hour.  Taste for seasonings, and add salt, pepper and a dash of oregano to your liking. Add Acini De Pepe and cook, stirring occasionally for an additional 10-12 minutes.  Serve with grated parmesan or pecorino romano cheese. 

HERO

Imagine that you spent an entire day making vegetable soup, salad, and fresh bread.

  

Sustenance.

It's dinner time. Your child dips her spoon into the soup bowl, lifts broth and veggies to nose level, then flips the spoon, dropping soup back into bowl. Over and over.

 

She doesn't want to try one bite. Or pay attention.

You snap. Say something like, "Do you have any idea how many kids in this world are starving, and would give anything to eat a bowl of home-cooked soup?"

You'd like to think you're teaching your children to be appreciative; to understand that there's a great big world out there with plenty of people who suffer, and are in dire need of what most of us take for granted.

But the real purpose of making such a comment is to shame that child into eating the soup.

This morning as I read about the sudden death of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid, I felt a similar shame. Shadid, a giant in modern American journalism, spent two decades traveling throughout the Middle East, immersing himself in the region so he could understand the lives of the men, women and children so dramatically affected by political turmoil, revolution and war. 

An American of Lebanese descent, Shadid had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the resistance to the government of President Bashar Assad. Attempting to leave the country, he apparently suffered an asthma attack and died. New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks carried his body across the border to Turkey.

The recollections of Shadid's colleagues speak volumes about the man:

“Anthony was a model for every journalist and a warm, generous human being... he displayed a nuanced understanding of the region but also a special sensitivity for ordinary people whose lives and livelihoods were at stake. No one was more committed to getting the full story of the Middle East and, above all, conveying its human dimensions.’’

“Anthony wanted to be as close to the action as possible, to see firsthand what was happening. He respected the people he wrote about. And he was as good a person as he was a journalist, which is saying a lot.’’

“He mastered Arabic so he could talk to people, unfiltered by others. No other reporter covered the region with as much depth of knowledge, cultural awareness, and historical context as Anthony Shadid.’’

"He brought a poet’s voice, a deep empathy for the ordinary person and an unmatched authority to his passionate dispatches.”

 “He changed the way we saw Iraq, Egypt, Syria over the last, crucial decade. There is no one to replace him.”

 “.... he wrote poetry on deadline... .He was one of the kindest, most compassionate, most empathetic people I ever met. He’s such a great friend. And that’s what made him so great as a journalist—he was able to somehow find compassion and empathy in everything he touched and wrote about.”

Mr. Shadid’s determination to write the story led to great risk and peril. He was shot in the shoulder while reporting in the West Bank. He and three other journalists were kidnapped in Libya by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces, held for six days and beaten before being released. His final assignment in Syria was arranged through a network of smugglers. Traveling by night to a mountainous border area in Turkey, he entered Syria with Mr. Hicks after pulling the wires on a barbed-wire fence apart and squeezing through them - all the while avoiding being discovered by pro-government authorities.

In an interview last December on NPR's "Fresh Air," Shadid recalled a previous journey into Syria: "I've done things that maybe I wouldn't have done in hindsight," he said. "It was scarier than I thought it would be.... [but] I did feel that Syria was so important, and that story wouldn't be told otherwise, that it was worth taking risks for. But the repercussions of getting caught were pretty dire....I don't think I'd ever seen something like what I saw in Syria... You're dealing with a government that's shown very little restraint in killing its own people to put down an uprising. ... And I got to spend a lot of time with [the activists] because I spent a lot of time in safe houses."

Connecting with people on the ground.  And all across the globe.

The loss of the talent, character and voice of Anthony Shadid is profound. His work explained in vivid, human detail how policy decisions affected ordinary lives, and how ordinary people had been forced to pay an extraordinary price for living in a region, practicing a religion, or belonging to a particular ethnic group or social class. Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remarked that she read Shadid's  work very carefully, as he "had his pulse on what was happening."

Shadid's prose was beautiful and brilliant. In the opening of his new book, “House of Stone, Shadid writes, "Some suffering cannot be covered in words. This had become my daily fare as reporter in the Middle East documenting war, its survivors and fatalities, and the many who seem a little of both. In the Lebanese town of Qana, where Israeli bombs caught their victims in the midst of a morning’s work, we saw the dead standing, sitting, looking around. The village, its voices and stories, plates and bowls, letters and words, its history, had been obliterated in a few extended moments that splintered a quiet morning.”

Anthony Shadid died while attempting to understand and explain the transformation of the Middle East and the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces.

He lived, attempting to teach his readers - and the world - that there's a great big world out there with plenty of people who suffer, and are in dire need of what most of us take for granted.

Freedom. Peace. Hope.

 

RIP Anthony Shadid. Your death was an immeasurable sacrifice, that has shamed this child into eating the soup.

QUING Hereby Decrees: Heroes don't demand our attention, but they deserve it.