The pot rush is on....

        Doonesbury has been a hoot the past few weeks.
The slacker Zonker has moved to Colorado, where he plans to be a pot farmer.
This reflects real life.
In the small town where I live Jerry, a cattlemen who runs his herd on leased acreage, has been talking up plans for growing marijuana.
Another local, Tony, has offered to supply the seed and expertise if Jerry comes up with the land, water and work.
They mapped out their ambitious plans while other old timers watched them from the sidelines at the same table.
What is not known is how serious Jerry is.  In some ways he has a reputation to uphold. He used to be a banker, and still is in some offhand part-time way that is not fully explained but alluded to.
Tony is very serious.  He may or may not have been a player in the past. But he drives a nice looking truck, while Jerry continues to do his chores in older, beaten trucks because he says that is how cattlemen stay in business.  I am not sure about that.  If all cowmen drove just old battered trucks then how would Ford have come up with its King Ranch edition? But then, maybe just yuppies from the Silicon Valley who have hobby ranches buy those spiffed up trucks.
I would think that if Jerry were to become a big producer of pot, that he would have to drive a much nicer truck in line with his image.  The book Freakonomics has shown that most big city street dealers live with their mothers and don’t make much off drugs, while taking a lot of the risk.
But the people upstream, or downstream, depending on how you diagram it, have bling and the projection of wealth and power from their expertise in managing major distribution and or production enterprises.
I have often chided Jerry for not buying a new truck, for not helping Obama by stimulating the economy.  Jerry thinks that is what Democrats are for and Republicans are supposed to drive old vehicles and be very conservative and let someone else stimulate the economy, just so it is not the government.
Meanwhile, in Denver police expected up to 80,000 to show up at a pot smoke in at Denver’s Civic Park downtown.  There were some rumors of a shooting at the smoke in but I cannot confirm that since I could not access my free trial digital subscription of the Denver Post and I usually do not buy the Pueblo Chieftain because I generally boycott the mainstream news media for not reporting real news anymore.  It just regurgitates government handouts. Or tells us what Madonna or Justin Timberlake or Anne Hathaway are up to. Or lets us know about the latest attempts of an impoverished immigrant child to get free tuition as a reward for their parents breaking and entering into our country because the rich millionaires of Mexico refuse to tax themselves to provide opportunity and education for the Indian blooded Mexicans.  Because the Mexican rich think the disappearing American middle class should help support the less fortunate of foreign lands.
The huge mass of people who smoked pot show how well government policies are working.
In the prisons, administrators allow a steady slow stream of heroin and other drugs to flow in to sedate the prisoners and keep them under control.
In the same way, the powerful government institutions in the United States have allowed drugs to flow in to the nation to sedate the population, pacify them, and make sure they do not care how the nation is being ripped off and by whom.
When the banksters wrecked the western world by dumping non-existent mortgages onto unsuspecting sovereign funds and pension plans and widows who have orphans, the resulting collapse put up to a quarter of the U S work force out of work.
Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements draw a crowd in the low hundreds at best.
But the American libertarian right to dull one’s mind with pot can draw 80,000.
The government has won. The cartels have won. The banksters have won. Jerry and Tony think they will.
And of course the pot smokers of Colorado are celebrating because they have won too.
As for Colorado, it has lost.  It has shown that spectacular scenery and a vibrant performing arts culture and sometimes very successful professional sports teams are not enough.  The majority of Coloradoans need to drink and smoke marijuana to help them get through the boredom of post modern life in the Queen City of the western plains.
        People will bristle that marijuana does not kill brain cells, is healthy for you, is not addictive.
       But in Doonesbury Zonker is spacey, forgetful.
       A joke on Soda Head a few days ago was that someone drunk will drive through a stop sign. Someone stoned will stop at the sign and wait for it to turn green.
      A study claimed that kids who start smoking marijuana have less brain development.
      Yes, as I say, that is what the government wants.   Citizens who are less intelligent. Citizens who will mass together in the tens of thousands for the right to smoke pot. Citizens who will not mass in the tens of thousands to throw the bankster and government regulators in prison for derailing the western world economy with greed and unethical behavior.
      Many citizens now seem to welcome the more free time they have, the freedom from work. It gives them more time to smoke up and tune out.
     

Would Frances Mayes Call It Oysters della Rosotto?

The dwindling town of Las Animas and the surrounding dried up pasture lands of southeastern Colorado are a far cry from the Tuscany ofcelebrated and beloved author  Frances Mayes.

And yet there are similarities. Tuscany province has Roman ruins.  Bent County province has Native American petroglyphs. (Though technically Colorado would be the province and I guess Bent County an area within it.)

But I have to admit Ms. Mayes can sound a little pretentious when she arrives at the Trattoria del Leone and is excited to "spot" Olive all'Ascolana on the menu.  She notes how the ...uh delicacy is a mixture of textures and flavors.

We're usually a little more subdued out here on the high plains of Norte Americano.

Though, we have our culinary delights too. When they have the annual Santa Fe Trail Day in Las Animas along the...yes,..Santa Fe Trail, the fire department takes delight in attracting a huge crowd to its delicacy...Rocky Mountain Oysters. Nothing pretentious sounding  there. Just good indigenous food.

I guess when the Italians make Olive all'Ascolana they remove the nut, or pit, from the olive and stuff it with salami or some other meat and then fry it.  Well, when the Coloradoans make Rocky Mountain Oysters they keep the nut of the castrated young bull and toss that into the frying pan. It would seem that women are drawn to the Oyster of the Rocky Mountains as men are drawn to the Olive of Italy.  But of course both dishes are androgynous as  both men and women actually enjoy both delicacies in probably roughly even numbers.

And if anyone is offended by Americans eating bull nuts, then those same people would be offended by French and Italians eating snails.

It would seem that indigenous cultures everywhere get hungry and they have over time learned what they can eat, and live to tell about it.

And how the cultures tell about it can vary.

 Ms. Mayes in her book Everyday Life in Tuscany takes great delight in throwing out the name of everyday food by using a long drawn out flowery title.  For example, on page 55 she gleefully passes on the recipe for Giusi's Crespelle ai Procini e Ricotta.  She adds that "for variety in the pommarola...try using odori."  I am not making that up. She is a former college level teacher in the City by the Bay, so she knows her stuff.  Of course, she does explain what odori is, but I won't because that is something you could buy her book and find out about for yourself.  And I am not cheating her out of a book sale by revealing what she has copyrighted and protected from appropriation other than for fair use from review or reference, and this is a reference.

Ms Mayes went thousands of miles and across the sea to find the culture she resonates with.

I have found I can stay in my humble home and resonate in my own kitchen.  It is not uncommon for me to simmer potato, carrot, onion and zucchini (to throw in a sophisticated Italian word) in broth of the chicken.  And I can cook up a chicken Marsella, even if I just pour the flavor out of a bottle rather than simmering the ingredients from scratch for hours.

A few weeks ago I placed a frozen Safeway Select pizza on my perforated pizza pan and roasted it in my electric oven, and the result was good, very good.  But I will not be pretentious and say it was as good as a home made pizza that Mayes and her husband baked in an outdoor stone kiln fueled by a roaring wood fire. But my pizza was good for me.  And I do not have to throw out any foreign words to describe what I did if I choose not to.

As I said, I will not be pretentious.

After all, I live in a broad river valley on the windswept plains.  What is there to brag about?