Hanging With My Bud

Cheyenne and I have spent the past couple of afternoons at West Summerland Key. The area near the water is slightly protected from the north winds of the cold front by the ridge where the Overseas Highway runs down the middle of the island. It's most conspicuous landmark is the old Bahia Homda Flagler railroad bridge just to the north.

We come here often especially on days when I work as it's ten minutes from home, far enough to get us out of the house but not so far as to make getting home and ready for work a problem. In fact we come here so often I am reluctant to add any more pictures of this over-photographed island on the blog. So I decided to play with the camera settings while Cheyenne and I explored familiar ground.

When out of the wind the cold front with temperatures in the mid 60s isn't too cold at all but the slate gray clouds and flat water give it an ominous appeal, almost as though snow is about to fall.

Actually even on a gray day the transparency of the waters shine through:

The brown decaying seaweed pushed up onto the land makes for an impressive swath of cold wet dead vegetation. Crocs don't mind getting wet which is one reason I wear the strange rubber shoes.

I can even risk dunking my feet in seawater when I'm wearing Crocs to look for anemones left behind by the low, full moon, tide.

A few people came and went but this is no one's idea of a fabulous Florida beach, all rocky and covered in vegetation, precious few coconut palms and no sand at all.

I carry a folding beach chair in the trunk of the car and it comes in useful.

Cheyenne liked the old cement platform to lie on so I put down my Kindle and laid down alongside her and felt the warmth of her fur on my leg as we hung out together trying to ignore the strengthening cool breeze. She watched the world while I did my favorite thing...

I looked through the tree branches overhead, the play of leaves and light fluttering in the breeze.

Then home to dinner for Cheyenne and a shower, a uniform and work for me.

She gets on the couch and looks at me accusingly as I get ready to leave. I think she envies the motorcycle as it's with the Bonneville that I am unfaithful to my dog as I chase off on my commute to Key West.

Key West on Dwellable

Posted with Blogsy

The Wild West Burger by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway and Pauline Kael caught in a happy moment in Key West, a suitable image to celebrate the day, forced upon us by the good people at Hallmark. Yes, it's Valentine's day today and I shall spare you the story of St Valentine of Terni (my fair city) whose holiday was never noticed when I was a kid until people everywhere realized there was money to be made from a minor religious holiday and in 1996 my homies started celebrating the Christian Bishop of a Terni who married a Roman soldier and a Christian woman. So now we are all out buying flowers etc etc.. Anyway I saw the BBC story BBC News - Hemingway's favourite burger recipe and I thought that thanks to the fact the man is inextricably linked to the Southernmost City we should probably not let this historic (really? Pardon my skepticism) recipe get away from us. Here's the story with added pictures pulled from the Web. Happy Valentine's Day !

"We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other" wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast. Could it have been a wholesome burger that made them sleep so well, asks Tanvi Misra, of the BBC?

According to Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, Papa's favourite hamburger recipe - made available in digital form by the John F Kennedy Presidential Library on Tuesday - reveals quite a bit about the author and his fourth wife, Mary. It's no surprise that he liked his burger "pink and juicy in the middle" but what about the soy sauce, and the half-teaspoon of Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder? "One of Hemingway's favourite restaurants was in Havana's Chinatown," says Spanier. He loved Chinese food.

Also notable is the sheer range of items thrown into the mix - India relish, capers, wine, parsley... This captures a "gusto that's very characteristic" of Hemingway, Spanier says. "It's indicative of his enjoyment of the pleasures of life," and also the range of his tastes, from low-brow to high-brow. He was as comfortable on a boat with Cuban fisherman, Spanier says, as he was dining at the Ritz Hotel in Paris.

As burgers go, this is quite ritzy.Hemingway's passion for food and drink is often reflected in his writing. Whole paragraphs describe the frothy bubbling of pancake batter in a skillet, and the sip from a tin of apricots in one of his earliest short stories, Big Two-Hearted River, Spanier notes. A Moveable feast, published after his death, contains a loving description of eating oysters with cold white wine. Mary wrote that they ate the hamburgers to fortify them for "tramping through the sagebrush after pheasant, partridge or ducks" in Idaho or Wyoming, which they visited every autumn. She typed the recipe out for the Woman's Day Encyclopedia of Cookery while Hemingway was still alive, Spanier says.

This recently published version with the added "Wild West" tag, was for a later edition. After Hemingway's death in 1961, as relations between the US and Cuba deteriorated, Mary needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim documents and memorabilia. President Kennedy and Fidel Castro intervened to make it possible - which explains the JFK library's interest in Hemingway's papers.

This recipe, above reproduced below, was among those left behind at Finca Vigia outside Havana, shown with Hemingway's own notations.

Ingredients:

1 lb. ground lean beef

2 cloves minced garlic

2 little green onions, finely chopped

1 heaped teaspoon India relish

2 tablespoons capers

1 heaped teaspoon of Spice Islands sage,

Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning – ½ teaspoon

Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder – ½ teaspoon

1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork

About one third of a cup dry red or white wine.

1 tablespoon of cooking oil

Spice Islands discontinued Mei Yen Powder three years ago, but you can recreate it with 9 parts salt, 9 parts sugar, 2 parts MSG. If a recipe calls for 1 tsp Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 tsp of this recipe mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.

What to do:

Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.

Key West on Dwellable

}

 

Posted with Blogsy

The Weather

To discuss the weather in the Florida Keys is not typically a very fruitful occupation as of variation there is not usually much. Indeed people Up North treat weather here as a positive bore as it rarely ever changes, they say. I notice heat and humidity in summer along with rain and thunderstorms while winter is usually cooler and drier with just a little rain preceding cold fronts. This winter has been almost as mild as last winter and perhaps even more delightful thanks to occasional cool spells, and one such is upon us now.

However when I say "cold front" it barely merits the title. Years ago February saw a constant round of temperatures plummeting to below sixty, then slowly climbing up over eighty degrees in an endless cycle as the winter progressed. Nowadays everything seems to have evened out and we get less low temperatures but summer last year took months to kick in. Usually it's hot and humid again by April or May but last year it seemed like July was still not up to the usual inferno levels of summers past. I suspect climate change will continue to increase the weird variations in local weather but I'd like to hope that the closer to the equator one is, perhaps less variation there will be. Who knows?

Certainly I have not been alone in enjoying winter, but as I've been working a lot of overtime most of my outdoor walks are spent with my dog in neighborhoods preferred by her and thus possibly less scenic than one might like in the Fabulous a Florida Keys. I've encountered lots of winter residents who seem to enjoy rather more energetic and social forms of exercise than my dog and I, as we amble the lanes and woods by ourselves. I thought I was getting run down by Daleks when I crossed paths with a platoon of nattering elderly tricyclists on Big Pine. They waved cheerfully and pedaled on sweating slightly in summer clothing suitable to the early morning temperatures hovering around seventy degrees (20C).

I have been feeling pangs of guilt as I read about the devastation of drought in California, Montana buried under a giant snowdrift, end endless dreary rain in the Padific Northwest while in Europe epic floods are drowning homes right and left. What about hurricanes? People ask, their first thought about Life in Key West. After a hurricane at least when power goes out you won't die of hypothermia. Far from it, mosquito bites perhaps and a surfeit if warm beer, but hypothermia is not a problem. Even riding a motorcycle home in the rain from work requires nothing more than a light Frogg Togg rain suit.

Unlike our neighbors slightly to the north who are now getting clobbered by snow, ice storms, power outages, snarled traffic, school closures, canceled flights and gruesome widespread misery I am reveling in a weak man's idea of winter weather. These fearsome pictures I found online from Associated Press photographers in the Carolinas and they gave me pause for thought.

Thirteen people have died in conditions that would make Richard in Fairbanks yawn. He rides his sidecar combination in far worse weather than this. Richard's Page frequently talks in winter about temperatures that make my teeth curl just to read about them. Try three hours of sunlight and minus thirty degrees on for size. Not me. Snow tires on a motorcycle? A joke surely, and very funny in my opinion. Yet sadly it's all true.

Some people enjoy this stuff but I am not one of them. I have no idea why we are too far south for much of anything to reach us, but I am pretty sure Cheyenne would welcome temperatures around freezing. Too bad for her I am the driver in the family and we have no snowy road trips planned. No chance.

I might not mind a vacation in a well stocked location set in a snowfield with heat and nowhere to be, but the idea of working in these conditions is beyond anything I can imagine doing with a smile. I am none too keen on being out and about in a strong cold front, while is take pleasure in being out in summers heat, though I do like my air conditioning very much!

Our forecast for the next few days is absurdly out of synch with what's happening elsewhere. Yes it's true there is a cold front sweeping the Keys with some rain and thunder while North Carolina and Virginia get raked with ice and snow. Nothing severe enough here to keep me off the Triumph Bonneville for my commute, not even Friday night with a low of 62F/16C. Temperatures will hover below seventy all day Friday but by Sunday it should be back up to 80F/27C during the day.

I wonder how the poor and the homeless and all those dogs and cats and outdoor animals will cope across the Deep South as reporters call our neighbors, rather inanely I think. I would not do well at all in an ice storm. And I'd bitch endlessly and in a boring monotone fashion. I am a weather coward and I would be the first kicked out of the igloo just to restore peace and quiet in the tribe. Now I'd better go and hunt down a pair of socks to confront this wave of cold weather heading our way, as I'll still have to walk the dog in it no matter how cold it gets in the Keys.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Keeping In Touch

The world of television has been turned on its head I am told, by the Internet, a place where traditional broadcasters are threatened by free and easy access, not to the public airwaves but to people's homes by the wizardry of the Web in which we are all entangled. I am not a traditional television viewer owing I suspect to my upbringing, a constant round of moving between boarding schools and different languages and cultures of my peripatetic family. It is my cultural void in a land devoted to ogling broadcasting in its many forms.

These thoughts were prompted by a documentary I watched last week whose subject was a lawsuit brought by the world's largest shipper of fruit against these two rather unremarkable people, below, Swedes with unpronounceable names who made a movie relying on the full faith and credit of the US constitution and found themselves suddenly faced with fending off a devastating legal attack for telling a story in film about Dole of which Dole I'd not approve. Not one bit.

Fredrik Gertten director and Margarete Jangård producer, above contemplating being sued by Dole. They made a film telling a story of the negative effects of chemicals used by Dole on its Nicaraguan workers who apparently had the temerity to complain in the movie titled Bananas!* which was shown amid astonishing controversy at a film festival in Los Angeles. As usual Hollywood caved to the corporation and took the film out of jury competition and tried to distance themselves from a documentary "based on lies" and the whole mess went to court. The story of the fight is told in the documentary Big Boys Gone Bananas!* which is available on Netflix streaming, while the original movie is not. The Netflix model of everything instantly is as threatening to Hollywood as the Swedish documentary was to Dole and thus the Netflix library changes constantly and among the few well known titles one finds a hundred movies and TV shows that would otherwise never be seen by you and me. If you want to see the run of the mill stuff you need the patience to order discs, but that time lag is beyond the ability of most of our neighbors to manage.

So for me television is Netflix, a world of advertising-free explorations of anything I fancy available for one monthly fee of eight bucks I think, and access by disc to anything else. My colleagues mock me for being a year out of date on the plots of water cooler dramas like Dexter and Breaking Bad but because it's all fiction and advertising free I am fine with that. When we take road trips and stay in motels I flip through the cable offerings and marvel how much people pay for stuff that not only doesn't interest me but that annoys the shit out of me with idiotic, transparent appeals to my vanity or my fears in an attempt to sell me crap I don't need. I fear advertising because I know it works and thus I avoid it as much as I can. When I can't avoid it I talk back to it, a technique I learned reading Neil Postman who said arguing with the images keeps you in the real world. As a result watching broadcast television with me in the room can be rather a trial for people not used to questioning the received wisdom.

For someone who doesn't embrace change wholeheartedly Netflix and Kindle have become my staples. I read my phone anytime I am trapped in a line or in a holding pattern of any sort, at the supermarket, at the bank or in any of the daily irritations of being a 95 percenter with no servants to delegate chores to. At home I justify a movie by exercising in front of it and rejoice at the cornucopia of odd and unwieldy films I get to see as a result. On my Kindle I have rediscovered titles of books lost to me for forty years. Like so many people who live long enough I am rediscovering books of my youth and I am reading them again with the wisdom and understanding of age, such as it is. And curiosity has taught me to open the least likely titles as I have idea what treasures I might find.

This particular David versus Goliath melodrama portrayed the film makers in the positive light you might expect, and I have no love for organizations like Dole who has a history it seems like other major corporations of getting tax laws modified to suit their convenience. It takes a British muckraker to figure that out: Bananas to UK via the Channel islands.

However I rather think there was an element of fighting back at US industrial imperialism in this movie, especially when Swedish lawmakers got involved. Certainly it seems more likely that everyone in the Swedish Parliament felt moved to act because Dole is American and was thus an easy target. On the other hand the corporations efforts to silence the movie maker were not pretty. All in all I found it a worthwhile movie to watch as I exercised in my living room.

In a larger sense I find myself amazed at the connectivity of the web. There are those who recall the good old days, especially in an isolated community like Key West as the halcyon days before the outside world intruded via the electron highway. For me the Web has made living at the end of the road enjoyable. I have lived in isolated circumstances and it was not fun for someone like me who enjoys watching the world go by. As a kid I lived thirty minutes by motorcycle from the nearest news stand or movie theater, I lived in a village where television was limited and we preferred village gossip as our douce of entertainment. When I wanted yo read foreign papers or to buy books in English I had to go to Perugia an hour away or more likely to Rome two hours away to visit my cousin and buy a newspaper see a movie and talk about more than who was sleeping with whom. The idea of waking up and getting online was inconceivable. So when someone tells me old Key West was perfect I beg to differ. Indeed I chose to settle elsewhere in 1981 when Key West was as remote as where I had been living! My ability to turn on the world in print or film at will is not something I can take for granted.

That I have to order discs to get many classic movies doesn't bother me as a turn around of a few days gives me literally any movie made in my living room on a whim, thanks to the Postal Service. I am too old to take this sort of contact for granted, and Netflix assures me the ability to stream titles of which I have never heard at no particular cost and no risk. And when I am done with the dumbells I step out into the world of my choosing, into perpetual snow-free summer, just as I like it and still connected by electricity to the world at large. Frequently I am grateful for the Overseas Highway, a tenuous but viable connection to the rest of the continent even though we are far from most of it. Six hundred miles to Savannah, eight hundred to Pensacola, and sixteen hours to New Orleans, but I can have Australian newspapers delivered in millionths of a second to my lap. Amazing!

This sense of being able to connect even from somewhere as putatively "remote" as the Lower Keys is excellent, especially when snowbirds aren't around to suck up bandwidth (!) but the fortitude to turn it all off is a great thing too. Turn your back on the world from time to time...we even have NPR loud and clear these days (at 91.5) in addition to the a Web and satellite radio because we are part of the continental US, so tuning out the world, though possible is not always easy. I remember listening to NPR from Ft Myers years ago, at anchor on my boat near Christmas Tree Island and as my boat swiveled yo the breeze the signal would come and go, fading always at the critical parts of the stories...and I am not sorry that irritation is history. Yet there are times in my life when I set aside these technologies and I take my fig for a winter walk. Afterwards she settles in the shade by the car whirl I pull my folding beach chair out of the trunk and I sit back and read. Not necessarily from my beloved Kindle either. On my trips to Italy I scoop up reissued albums of the newspaper of my youth, carton strips, early versions of illustrated novels we used yo trade all summer long as kids, westerns, detective stories, soldiers and adventurers. And even today Tex Willer Texas Ranger has not gone online, so I have to buy paper copies when I go back to Italy.

In a village without much radio or reliable TV, Tex Willer was a small burst of color, of exotic places, a world outside of simple morality and instant satisfying justice, and the good guys always won.

 

 

Tex Willer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And there it is, at our fingertips, the past, a simpler place, flip the page listen to the insects buzzing drowsy in the afternoon heat and stillness. The Internet is far away, work is later, and Cheyenne is happy to be still together for a while. And even today the weight of paper, the rustle of the page and the inconvenience of a large album are all reminders of how far technology has taken us yet how close we are to where it all began. A book of any type in your lap and a snoring dog alongside, an image that is timeless and unsullied by modernity.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Watching The World Go By

I sat myself down to give my hard walking dog a break. We chose a plastic chair in front of the former city hall at Angela Street. More precisely I occupied a resting spot generally used by the firefighters of Station 2 which is a decaying fire station still housed in the mouldy husk of the city hall building. A new fire station is to be built in the new parking building that is supposed to be rising, Phoenix-like, in the construction site next door.

As we sat and watched the passersby I have a tendency to think, and indeed owing to I know not what, I have a tendency to over think. And in this town when one sits and thinks there is much upon which to cogitate! My dog compensates by not thinking too much while resting. Cheyenne is properly measured in all things.

The newspaper ran editorial recently on the subject of noise. Most of the editorial is not ground breaking, pointing out that "this is a small island" (no really?) and airplanes fly overhead, without asking why the commercial runway is oriented right over the city, and on the ground lots of noise is necessary to permit the wheels of commerce to turn, without explaining exactly why. Then the irritated author of the leader column takes issue not with leaf blowers, but with scooters with damaged or altered mufflers. Clearly the author is in the habit of strolling Flagler early in the day and wage slaves making their way to one of their many jobs is irritating this august personage. So even as the city commission turns to making revisions of the noise ordinance the newspaper wants to see scooters stopped and checked for muffler violations. Who I wonder is qualified to say which mufflers are authorized for use on say, a Yamaha Zuma? Ah, but that is just a detail and personages do not deal in details.

I am an avid rider of motorcycles and scooters of course, but I am not an avid customizer and I dislike noise, so I am no defender of loud mufflers. I also resent noisy mufflers when they used to support a claim that "loud mufflers save lives." Training and paying attention saves lives if you ask me and making noise just gets people like me and the author of the Citizen's editorial all riled up. The difference between me and the newspaper is that they are important and I have no doubt when the question of noise comes up it won't be loud music or leaf blowers but suppression of "bees in beer cans" which will become the priority.

Noise is one of the issues that strikes newcomers to the city and as sensible as city residence might be the fear of noisy neighbors fills me with dread. It takes special training to learn how to live in a tight knot community like Key West. And most people who move to Old Town have no idea how to live and be civil in each other's pockets when your million dollar home is only offset by eighteen inches from your neighbor's grossly overpriced shack.

If your neighbor has a short term rental license your home may be next door to party central. Eighteen inches away. Apparently the Citizen editorial author does not suffer from these problems as it's "bees in a beer can" that need immediate attention. Whatever, I suppose it can't hurt, unless the owners can't afford to repair them but hey, scooter riders are just out having fun of course!

The other page in the paper that I greatly enjoy is the Citizen's Voice, a column of anonymous contributions that regularly irritates the people in charge who call on the paper to abolish the people's voice. Despite many unwelcome changes at the paper, abolishing letters for instance, the voice holds out. In the same edition of the paper the first comment complains of noisy leaf blowers, while the second complains of slow drivers in the left lane (my pet peeve!) Key West Diary: For Pity's Sake! The third comment attacks Key West PD for not catching a notorious prowler plaguing homes around the cemetery, all standard fare for the Citizen's Voice.

Rental scooters are limited to 29mph as state law limits "mopeds" to thirty on flat ground so they lack the kind of get up and go that modern traffic sometimes calls for. They are properly mufflered but renters do like to beep their blessed horns as they express they joy at being on vacation in winter sunshine on a toy scooter in a town devoted to play.

I do find it massively annoying when locals whinge about "having to go to work" and I try not to do it because after all no tourists means no money, at some level we all understand that, but Good God Almighty, do you suppose tourists could cut us done slack dimply because they don't have to be anywhere? Nah, not a bit of it. It becomes something of an antagonistic relationship which is disappointing considering how much pleasure everyone seeks to mine from this small rock.

A lot of the comments lately have been busy attacking a city commissioner. I don't know Tony Yaniz nor do I know what to think. He gets stuck with a variety of comments, some praising him extravagantly for being the last bastion defending the people while others excoriate home for being a public idiot. The only sensible conclusion us that he is somewhere in the middle and pissing off people at either end of the spectrum is frequently a sign that a leader is charting a middle course. These days though everyone is polarized at all levels the middle of the road is usually seen as a bad place for a politician to be.

Then another city commissioner, a sensible thoughtful voice usually, has been the subject of a complaint that she built a fishpond without a permit. It's lawyers drawn at fifty paces now Commissioner's koi pond, garage draw complaint | KeysNews.com and the commissioner pointed out rather tersely that neighbor disputes can afflict anyone. Ah yes, life in paradise!

Happily the fire truck returned from a mission and we had to yield our place in the sun to their proper owners. Thinking had to cease for a while as we resumed walking.

There's a new food truck at Duval and Angela so I checked the menu: burritos tacos and salads. Where have I seen that before? Food trucks are popular they say, though in a Key a West there are three now and none if them is a truck in any mobile sense of the word. Though why should they be in a small noisy island where everyone loves to get along?

Posted with Blogsy