The Superheroes Project

Some artists in Boston have come up with a creative plan. Read the article on NPR, and then check out their Web site. Tee hee.

Lars and the Real Microphone

I went to see Lars and the Real Girl, which was sweet but predictable, though the dopey charm of Ryan Gosling, greasy hair and all made up for that. Dammmit he's cute. He did not make up for the fact that the microphone kept dipping into the picture in about 30 percent of the scenes. At first it was funny (I think I spotted it in the first scene) but by the end of the movie I had a sore arm from my friend hitting me in the arm and laughing. Cute movie folks, but seeing the microphone is just not very professional. Thankfully there were only two other people in the theater because we got very giggley.

When I got home I had two very exciting packages waiting for me. First, I had my free snack from Kashi. A while ago Kashi had a snack drive where you could select your favorite unhealthy snack and Kashi would send you a healthier 7-grain alternative. I didn't really need any encouragement to try Kashi snacks, they're honestly about the most unhealthy thing I buy (except for bacon sometimes), but the prospect of getting something fun in the mail was too good to pass up. Today I received my mini bag of 7-grain crackers in a cheerful yellow cardboard box. WHY DIDN'T I CHOOSE the 7-grain COOKIE??? Well, I already had a cookie today and it was only 1-grain, so I guess it was for the best.

My other package was a tiny envelope of rhinestones and baubles. I bought the rhinestones to replace the stones that fell out of the smokey grey plastic ring that I bought when I was a jewelry & clothing buyer. (We didn't buy these for the store because they were too expensive and didn't really fit our clientele.) It's 10 years old so I guess it's not that scandalous - that's what I get for liking plastic jewelry. But now you can get anything online, including 7ss rhinestones. And I learned about the rhinestone sizing standards in the process. And they fit perfectly. yay me. The baubles aren't really baubles, but I just like the word bauble. They're dark pink metal flowers that I'm going to sew on a black sweater. Or a winter hat. Or something. Crafty.

RIP Canon Powershot SD 400 Digital Elph

You had a short and sweet life. You've been there with me for the canals of Venice, the family homestead outside of Bologna, the Gothic quarter in Barcelona, the fleamarket and one particularly spangley cafe in Paris, rainbow seafoam in Maine, the Acropolis, natural wonders in Utah, the houseboat in Key West where I woke up on my 31st birthday, chatty bridges in Vermont, a few weddings, 24 paarties, three apartments, three gardens, and more pictures of baked goods and the kitty than I care to admit. After all that now you had to end things by corrupting the data of any flashcard I put into you. I hate you I hate you I hate you I loved you. Well shittle my bezittles, now I need a new camera.

Starting Out in the Evening

photo courtesy of sundance.org

After this summer's Six Feet Under marathon I was delighted to see that Lauren Ambrose and Lily Taylor (along with the inimitable Frank Langella of recent Frost Nixon fame ) were starring in the film Starting out in the Evening. The film premiered in the Boston area at the Museum of Fine Arts as part of the 19th annual Jewish Film Festival, though it will be distrubuted nationally in December. The Sundance Film festival refers to it as "a quietly intense, superbly realized drama about erudite New Yorkers who tug on each other's vulnerabilities as they strive to actualize individual promise at three different stages of life." The audience, comprised largely of elderly couples, seemed to have a mixed reaction but I enjoyed the film. And I am envious of Lauren Ambrose's vintagy/ flashy librarian wardrobe. Andrew Wagner, the film's director, answered questions afterwards which was a pleasant addition.

A stranger influence of the film is the effect it has had on my diet. During the film my craving for toast with creamy peanut butter was reawakened. Just like Frank Langella's character, I let my peanut butter warm up in a pretty little ramekin (because it's supposed to be refrigerated and it doesn't spread nicely when it's cold), and then drizzle it on my buttered wholegrain toast with a little spoon. Thanks Frank (and Andrew Wagner), your bleepin' peanut-buttered Old Man Toast is going to have serious consequences for my ass if I don't watch it.

Thanks to the passes from my local public library I didn't have to spend a billion dollars on entrance fee and had a chance to see some things I'd been wanting to see in the hour and a half or so before the film began. Alas my camera was acting poopy and corrupted my entire flash card card when I tried to take a photo.

This is perhaps the most exciting exhibition title I've seen in a while. It was fun to hunt for Shy Boy, She Devil and Isis. The glass bowl in the press release is a Dale Chihuly - while his name is perhaps the best known among the artists featured I wouldn't say that this was the most impressive piece of artwork. My favorites were ceramic sculptures by Sergei Isupov.

Next we moved on to "Contemporary Outlook: Japan". While there were a number of things I liked, things I wouldn't mind having hung on my wall, I was most smitten with Akino Kondoh's animated film Ladybird's Requiem. Here's a wiggley bootleg copy.

And here's another of Kondoh's films (apparently she's into insects and great haircuts):

I also liked this jewelry exhibit:



Starting out in the evening I had no idea what to expect, but it turned out to be a pleasantly entertaining multimedia kind of night.

matchy-matchy

I forgot about this picture from the summer because I downloaded it to a not very intuitive storage spot. Alas, I never match my porch, and my sneakers never look good with my garage.

Alice Medrich's Pure Desserts

Last Thursday I went to listen to cookbook author Alice Medrich talk about her new book, Pure Dessert. She's written five books about chocolate, but this book celebrates more unusual ingredients and is organized by type of ingredient instead of by type of baked good. (There is still a small chapter about chocolate.) She said that "the only reason to write a cookbook is to learn something new and turn around and share it." As a nice surprise she literally shared the results of her creativity and brought samples.

Among the samples were Olive Oil and Sherry Pound Cake:

and Dried Fruit and Nut Cake:

The third sample was chocolate brownies dusted with freshly ground nutmeg. Nice.

Finger Food

Our sister department threw a Halloween breakfast this morning. I made lady finger cookies. Spooky! Crunchy! I wish I had taken photos of the vanilla fingers before I put them in the oven because they were much more life-like. Post baking they're kind of bloated.


October's calendar is oddly appropriate - I'll miss it! There was some debate as to whether I was a Viking or an opera singer. One of my colleagues (who was leaning towards Viking) had a funny story. He said that he encountered a very sturdy looking blond child on hotwheels. He asked what his name was, and the kid yelled, "THOR!!!. . . T-H-O-R!!!!" So apparently this kid's parents taught him to not only say his name with gusto when asked but spell it.


Gummy brains were handed out as prizes.

Brooklyn Part III

My weekend plans changed at the last minute and before I knew it I was in the car on the way to Williamsburg for a Halloween party. Held in a loft lodged among a neighborhood of hipsters and Hasids, it was one of the best Halloween parties I've been to; if nothing else it had the highest percentage of people in costume that I've ever seen. There were maybe oh, five people out of 75ish who weren't dressed up. Who was there? Let's see. Nefertiti, Smurfette & Gargamel, a pinata, Global Warming, the unicorns from Planet Unicorn, Waldo, a couple vikings (including me), a few zombies, a tiger, a guy with arrows sticking out of him, a Freudian slip and many more. I got a great idea for next year from someone on the street, but I'm not going to tell.

I also had a chance to visit with my sister as well as to see where she works, and we all had another brunch at Patois in Cobble Hill (Carroll Gardens?). It was good, but not as good as the first time when we were able to sit outside in the garden and were there right when they opened - before menu items were gone and the waitstaff was burned out.

CHOW has an article (and recipes) about making your own candy bars. I especially like that when you mouse over the recipes you can see photos of cross sections of mass produced candy bars next to the Chow versions.

Spike Lee was a Cute 5th Grader

I just saw his 5th grade school photo. My goodness he was cute - he had the best smile in the entire class of little Brooklynites and sharp glasses even then.

The Return of the Turkeys

A couple years ago when I was living in Brookline I saw a turkey running down the sidewalk. I thought I was hallucinating at first, but it was definitely a turkey, bloop bloop bloop gobble gobble gobble. The turkey ran straight into Kenmore Square rush hour traffic and miraculously arrived safely on the other side of the intersection. I think he was heading to Fenway for a Red Sox game. I found out later that my turkey had escaped from a nearby church. Here's an article from yesterday's Boston Globe about the return of the turkeys.

Turkeys Take to Cities, Towns


A wild turkey strolled along a sidewalk on Beacon Street in Brookline. The birds can grow to weigh roughly 20 pounds and stand 4 feet tall. (Globe Staff Photo / Mark Wilson)

By Keith O'Brien, Globe Staff | October 23, 2007

BROOKLINE - On a recent afternoon, Kettly Jean-Felix parked her car on Beacon Street in Brookline, fed the parking meter, wheeled around to go to the optician and came face to face with a wild turkey.

The turkey eyed Jean-Felix. Jean-Felix eyed the turkey. It gobbled. She gasped. Then the turkey proceeded to follow the Dorchester woman over the Green Line train tracks, across the street, through traffic, and all the way down the block, pecking at her backside as she went.

"This is so scary," Jean-Felix said, finally taking refuge inside Cambridge Eye Doctors in Brookline's bustling Washington Square. "I cannot explain it."

Notify the neighbors: The turkeys are spreading through suburbia. Wild turkeys, once eliminated in Massachusetts, are flourishing from Plymouth to Concord and - to the surprise of some wildlife officials - making forays into densely populated suburban and urban areas, including parts of Boston, Cambridge and, most recently, Brookline.

Some Brookline residents have welcomed the birds, happy to see wildlife strolling amid the nannies with $300 strollers and Trader Joe's shoppers. But many others worry what the keen-eyed, sometimes ornery birds might do, prompting as many as a dozen calls to the police department every day.

"Some people are getting very upset," said Brookline police animal control officer Pierre Verrier. "One of the biggest things is, they're afraid. They don't want the turkeys to get hurt. And the other thing is, they're afraid of the turkeys around their children. They don't know what they'll do."

As such, Brookline police issued a statement last month, telling residents what they should - or should not - do if they meet a wild turkey in town. The basic advice: stay away from the turkeys. But still, people keep calling police headquarters to report the strangest sight: Turkeys in downtown Brookline.

* * *

July 20, 9:31 a.m., Rawson Road: Caller reports 18 turkeys in her backyard. "Something must be done," caller says. "It's just not right." Requests animal control officer.

* * *

Wild turkeys - the official game bird of Massachusetts - are impressive animals that can grow to be roughly 20 pounds and 4 feet tall. By 1851, they had been eliminated from Massachusetts, a victim of hunting.

"We were turkey-less for many years," said Wayne Petersen, director of the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Important Birds Area Program. "And then we decided it would be quite nice to get them back on the landscape."

Efforts to revitalize the state's turkey population between 1911 and 1967 failed. Then, in 1972 and 1973, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife released 37 turkeys in the Berkshires. These turkeys survived and bred. And between 1979 and 1996, wildlife officials trapped more than 500 turkeys in the Berkshires and released them elsewhere in the state.
Biologists were pleased; today's turkey population in Massachusetts lingers around 20,000. But Marion Larson, an information and education biologist at MassWildlife, said officials had not counted on the turkey's appetite for suburban - and even urban - living.
"That was something that surprised us," Larson said. "Who knew? The last time there were turkeys in Massachusetts there weren't a whole heck of a lot of suburbs."

This time around, of course, that is not the case, and turkeys have proven especially adaptable to residential living. By his last count, Verrier said, there are at least two dozen wild turkeys living in Brookline, feeding off everything from bird seed to gutter trash and, sometimes, scaring the wits out of the townspeople.

* * *

September 4, 11:01 a.m., Chatham Circle and Chatham Street: Caller - who had gone under some beech trees to take a picture of turkeys - reports four turkeys chasing him. Requests animal control officer.

* * *

The problem, according to some Brookline residents, is that the turkeys can be aggressive at times. Dr. Ruth Smith, an internist from New York City, was staying with a cousin in Brookline a couple of weeks ago when she was stalked by what she describes as a 3-foot-tall turkey.

"He came at me and, at first, I tried to shoo him away," Smith recalled. "I figured I'd just go 'Shoo!' and he'd go. But he was very aggressive."

Smith said she escaped by ducking into the Dunkin' Donuts on Beacon Street. But some of the hounded do not have the luxury of going inside. Brookline postal carrier Rosanne Lane said she has skipped houses on her mail route because turkeys dissuaded her from approaching.

"They make a lot of noise and I just take off," said Lane.

Under state law, an animal control officer can kill a turkey if it creates a public safety threat. In 2005, for example, Canton police killed three. But for now in Brookline, it has not come to that, said Verrier. When dispatched to the scene of a turkey, Verrier offers advice instead.

He tells people not to feed them, not to be intimidated by them, and to keep their distance. Still, some people cannot help themselves. They need to be near the turkeys.

* * *

September 7, 7:39 a.m., Druce Street: Two packs of turkeys (15) in the road . . . Two not getting along.

* * *

Over an eight-hour stretch last week in Brookline, a lone turkey walked Beacon Street, strutting at times, preening at others, and napping every now and again in the landscaping near the sidewalk.

Most people did not even notice. And those who did simply edged a few feet away from him and kept right on walking.

But as afternoon turned to dusk - and the turkey, a male, moved down Beacon Street into the heart of Washington Square - a crowd began to gather.

Some, like Jessica Dolber, snapped pictures. Others, like Kelly Stearn, called police.

But not Kettly Jean-Felix, the woman who had been followed by the turkey earlier that afternoon.

When she finally left the optician's office on the corner just an hour after being stalked by the turkey, she headed straight for her car. And this time the bird did not notice Jean-Felix. He was too busy eating peanut shells in front of the 7-Eleven and gobbling to the delight of the crowd.
© Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.