Last week's recipe resulted in some e-mail from parents asking about something simple for their children. There's a kid's cooking website that I always think I'll add to my links but I only see it during the week (at BuzzFlash with the note that the people are friends of BuzzFlash). Next time I see it, I'll bookmark it. I have visited it and it's a wonderful website with a wonderful idea (getting kids involved in the kitchen). I don't have the web address this week. When I do, I'll make a point to include a recipe by them to make sure everyone who visits here knows about the site.
What I can offer is a steal from ABC's kids TV. Bonnie wrote about needing something easy that wouldn't burn her kids' mouths and Kansas and his wife were looking for something similar. I checked with Cedric and asked him if he'd ever made any form of popsicle? He hadn't but knew the ABC kids thing I was talking about. They ran it throughout the seventies and for sometime later.
Here's what you need:
Kool Aid or a fruit juice. (Something you'd eat as a popsicle. I love tomato juice but I wouldn't want a tomoato juice popsicle.)
Ice trays
Toothpicks
Plastic
Pour the jucie into the ice trays, cover the trays with plastic, poke a cube through the plastic into each cube container and freeze. You'll have little cubes as popsicles.
You can also buy items that are made to pour liquids into for popsicles at many drug stores. If you have small plastic cups, you can use them. Fill them with the liquid, cover them with plastic and instead of poking a toothpick through, poke a wooden or plastic popsicle stick through. (You can buy those at most grocery stores.) I'm thinking of a 3 ounce cup as a small one. You can use larger but if you're using this recipe for kids, they aren't going to wait that long.
Cedric wondered, when we spoke, if fruit could be added. It's going to fall to the bottom of anything you add it to (and will therefore be on the top when you pull the frozen liquid out with the toothpick or stick) so you could do that. I think popsicles are messy enough without adding a piece that will fall off if kids don't eat them quickly.
If you haven't had popsicles in your house before, this is something the kids need to eat outside or at the table in the kitchen. This isn't a snack where they sit in front of the TV watching. Even the ice cube, small though it will be, will lose out to the TV and the result will be drip-drip on the sofa or carpet. I once had to sew new cushion covers for the sofa when a non-kid (my husband) dripped one made out of cherry Kool-Aid on the sofa as he watched a baseball game on TV.
Right now, on the Boston Globe website, there's a photo where you can see the strange hair color of Priscilla Presley and her strange chin that Wally wrote of in "THIS JUST IN! WHERE THERE IS GREED, THERE IS BULLY BOY." (Maybe she intended to make popsicles but decided to use the cherry Kool Aid as hair coloring?) Priscilla never got a great deal of points from me. I can remember when I was in high school and there was this or that remark (negative) about Yoko Ono from males who would often say that John Lennon should have gotten a 'child bride' (which she was and she was a child before they were married and her parents allowed her to live with him) like Priscilla. I don't know that she's ever done anything in her adult life to impress me. She's made a name for herself off her ex-husband. I won't touch on her religion (to each their own) but I did think, for many years, "Well, hopefully she raised a smart daughter." Then Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson.
Mother and daughter are quite amused as a world leader attempts to be Elvis. Maybe Elvis would be as well? He did offer to be some sort of narc at one point for Richard Nixon, after all. But I honestly feel they've found yet another way to continue to live off a dead man. As C.I. said, "I suppose it beats working."
I was surprised to learn Wally was an Elvis fan. Elvis really wasn't much of a figure in my own life. (Wally's mother loves the movies and Wally grew up watching them. Of the movies, the one where Mary Tyler Moore's a nun is probably the only one I really remember in any way at all.) Elvis wasn't really part of the sixties or the seventies. He had a comeback in the late sixties. Then he did nothing with it. Then the sideburns got longer and the waist got wider. Then he died.
Before he died there was a lot of talk, by Priscilla, who was trying to establish herself without the Presley name back then, about the imprisonment of Graceland. If that were true, she's managed to turn her own personal Abu Ghraib into a tourist attraction. Bully Boy, besides looking chubby, looks very out of his element. I doubt Elvis was very big in his life either. I don't know that Elvis had any good drinking songs when Bully Boy was an Ivy leaguer.
There's a whole gallery of photos and, C.I.'s right, the Japanese prime minister does come off like Richard Gere in Mr. Jones (a really bad movie even to someone like me who enjoys Richard Gere films).
I told C.I. this morning that I'd probably note Bryan Bender's "US troops probed in rape, 4 killings: Inquiry into Iraq deaths is 5th in recent months" in the Boston Globe. Last week, two US soldiers raised the issue of what they said they'd heard happened in March in Iraq. Now there's an investigation. The story they heard was that what was trumpeted to the press in some accounts as the death of 'insurgents' in March was actually the slaughter of a family following a rape. (Bender writes that they were attributed to secretarian killings.)
The incident took place in Mahmoudiyah. What the two soldiers seem to have heard was that a woman was raped (by US forces) and following that, her family was killed and her body was burned to dispose of evidence -- after which, an excuse was found for the deaths.
Is it true? We don't know. Is it shocking? Yes, it is. If true, the ones complicit are guilty and hopefully we've all gotten over our shock in May enough that we won't live in self-denial and just point at the Bully Boy while blustering with threats to anyone who notes that someone in the US military killed in cold blood. ("14 US troops," Bender writes, "have been convicted in the deaths of Iraqi civilians.") Fog of war isn't an excuse. (This alleged incident happened in a "non-combat" area, Bender reports.) The fact that Bully Boy started an illegal war isn't an excuse. It's true that Bully Boy sent them over there and that he keeps them over there, but people do have to be responsible for their own actions. That an illegal war has resulted in war crimes isn't surprising. That Bully Boy still hasn't been charged with them may be.
Howard Zinn has a column worth reading and, once upon a time, many years ago, I believe we could have read this in the Boston Globe. (Supposedly, they got nervous about his columns.) Here's some of his "Put Away the Flags:"
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
Here's C.I's "Iraq snapshot" from Friday:
Chaos and violence continue. So much so that Jeffrey Snow (US "Army Col.") tells Reuters the obvious, "I think since we have started Operation Together Forward, you'll find that the number of attacks are going up." He's referring to the "crackdown" in Baghdad. As other news emerged, the latest allegations of crimes committed by US forces, Snow began making noise that "bad" media coverage could "lose" the war. Considering bad media sold the war it would be poetic if "bad" media could end it -- poetic but not likely.
Also continuing is the confusion regarding Romania. AP leads with the withdrawal is now a dead issue which isn't correct. The Supreme Defence Council said no to "withdrawal." Kind of, sort of. What they're doing (today, at this moment) is dropping the number of troops from 890 to 628. That's today's comprise with an emphasis on "today." Why? The council's decision is meaningless if parliament doesn't back it up. (A point Edward Wong failed to grasp in the Times this morning.) For that reason as well as the fact that it will be parliament who will make the decision whether or not the Romanian troops mission is extended at the end of the year (six months away), Calin Popescu Tariceanu (Romania's prime minister) stated: "The decision was only delayed today."
Meanwhile, AFP reports: "In a new blow to the coalition, Poland said it will pull its troops out of Iraq by the middle of next year."
Noting the indifference to Iraq (which I would place with the media), Danny Schechter wonders if we need a "War Clock" to bring the economic costs home since "[t]he drama of human beings dying and a country like Iraq being devastated doesn't seem to register"?
We need something. Iraq's not registering. We'll probably hear some of it even though it's the 4th Weekend so everyone's rushing off to their vacations. What will we hear? Ryan Lenz (Associated Press) reports: "Five U.S. Army soldiers are being investigated for allegedly raping a young woman, then killing her and three members of her family in Iraq" in Mahmoudiyah. The alleged crimes are said to have taken place in March and the five are alleged to have burned the body of the rape victim.
CNN is reporting that it was a "deadly" day for children, noting that a clash "between gunmen and Iraqi soldiers left a teenage girl dead" in Latifiya and that one of six corpses discovered in Baghdad was "a boy believed to be between 4 and 6. . . . shot . . . signs of torture." Corpses? AFP reports that four corpses were discovered in Al-Rashaad, near Kirkuk ("bullet-riddled"). That's ten corpses total reported thus far.
CBS and AP report that, in Abu Saida, Sunni Sheik Hatam Mitaab al-Khazraji was gunned down. RTE News notes that three are dead and at least seven wounded from a roadside bomb that went off Kirkuk.
AFP is currently estimating that "at least 14 people" died in violent attacks today (Iraiqi civilians) and the AP notes that Kyle Miller, member of 682nd Engineer Battalion, has been identified by Dean Johnson ("Guard Brig. Gen.") as the National Guardsman who died today in Iraq (a bomb "detonated near his convoy").
Now some suggested readings:
"And the war drags on . . . (Indymedia Roundup)"
"NYT: The oversimplifier in residence, Edward Wong"
"gaza""Where's the Iraq coverage?"
"Listen but be prepared for groaners"
"2nd entry today"
"Shifting Winds on Iraq"
"NYT: Dexy wants to process, everyone in a group circle!"
"NYT: Covering the spin and not much more"
"pissed"
"Specter thinks he might be angry, Dave Zirin and more"
"Guns and Butter"
"Fast on the fourth"
"An Iraqi Withdrawal From Iraq"
"Michael Smith's speech from Law and Disorder"
"The spying goes on"
"Not much tonight"
"NYT: Does that red light ever burn out, Dexy?"
"When Docker Boy Met Diva . . ."
"Law and Disorder interviewed Suzanne Vega and Collective Soul"
"NYT: Gordo's all excited (so you should be scared)"
"THIS JUST IN! CONDI TRIES OUT THE NAH-NAH DIPLOMACY"
"Holla' Back Girl Uses Nah-Nah Diplomacy"
"THIS JUST IN! BULLY BOY CAUGHT SMELLING THE JONESES!"
"THIS JUST IN! A SMELL WAFTS IN AND BULLY BOY POINTS TO OTHERS!"
