Max "Bunny" Sparber

TODAY, I'M GOING TO introduce a new section to my blog, which I call "The Odd Ingester." I tend to shop in little neighborhood businesses, or ethnic grocery stores, or dollar stores, and there always seem to be a few things on sale that intrigue me. And by "a few," I mean "a few thousand." And by "intrigue," I mean "leave me scratching my head wondering who manufactured the item, why, and who they expected might purchase it."

My first purchase comes from Elliot Park Market, right across the street from where I live, and it isn't much of a head scratcher when you look at it. It's a little cookie filled with a date paste. It's made by a company called Sultan, and produced in Saudi Arabia, and it is not surprising to discover it in a Muslim-owned corner grocery store. Dates are a staple fruit of the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and East Africa. Heck, they're a staple of Jewish cooking.

There is something a bit odd about this cookie though. It's dry. Really dry. If you've ever eaten a plantain by accident, you know the sensation of having a food suddenly drain your mouth of saliva. The Mammoul cookie is a bit like that. It crumbles the moment you put it in your mouth -- literally, the moment it touches your lips, leaving tiny crumbs all over your shirt and the table in front of you. And whatever you get in your mouth briefly leaves you with the sensation of cotton mouth. It passes quickly, though, and the date flavor is actually quite pleasing. I'd suggest that this might be a good cookie for dunking, except I fear it would instantly explode into powder on contact with fluid. I just don't know how to recommend eating this cookie, except, perhaps, to train yourself to salivate excessively at the ringing of a ball, like Pavlov's dog, and then ring a bell a few dozen times before consuming the cookie. Or, I don't know, maybe just get a Nilla Wafer, a dried date, and skip the Maamoul altogether.
More from the Odd Ingester!

SUPPOSEDLY, YOU CAN TAKE any cocktail "to the wall," as bartenders say (or used to day; not many bartenders seem to know this expression anymore), by floating Galliano atop it, and it will improve the drink. I don't know if that's true, but this cocktail, dubbed Vonnie's Delight and created by a gentleman named George H. Cloudas from Mammoth Lakes, California, seems to give the theory some credibility. This cocktail is essentially a White Russian with Galliano added in. At least, that's what it tastes like, although this is made a little differently than the White Russian. Here's how to make one:

Fill tall glass with ice cubes.
Add 1 oz Coffee Liquor.
Fill glass 3/4 full with milk. Stir.
Float 1/2 oz Galliano on top.

Of course, you'll notice immediately that one of the basic ingredients of the White Russian, vodka, is missing, and that we use milk rather than cream. It's an interesting substitution of ingredients. Vodka is essentially flavorless, especially in a cocktail. In the classic White Russian, vodka tends to serve to dilute the flavor of both the Coffee Liqueur and the cream. This version tastes about as creamy, but the Coffee flavor comes out more, and the Galliano flavor is quite noticeable. The flavors blend extremely well, which shouldn't be too surprising -- a lot of people enjoy a little vanilla in their coffee, and the anise flavor is quite subtle in this cocktail. As a result, this is the ideal cocktail for the sort of person who goes into a coffee shop and orders complex, European brands of coffee, and has them made in elaborate mixes, so that the results taste less like a good old cup of coffee and more like some spiced Turkish drink that bears an almost accidental relationship to coffee.

Vonnie's Delight is a sweet drink, but not as sweet as a dessert cocktail. Its sweetness is subtle, and its essential spiciness is rather pronounced -- there's an especially strong hint of cinnamon at the end that I haven't noticed in any other Galliano cocktail. It may, in fact, be an improvement on the White Russian, although I don't expect any drinkers to turn en masse away from the cocktail of choice of Jeff Lebowski. Part of the pleasure of the White Russian is its simplicity, and fancying the drink up, even though it improves the taste, in some ways detracts from the drink. It's the same way that there are a million ways to make a better cup of coffee, but most people just want a good, solid cup of joe.

More Galliano cocktails.

THIS 1973 MADE-FOR-TELEVISION MOVIE should not be mistaken for the classic Twilight Zone episode starring William Shatner, in which the actor is bedeviled by a gremlin while on an airplane flight. That was called "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," and was scripted by Richard Matheson, who was quite a good writer of the fantastic. The similarly titled The Horror at 37,000 Feet was written by Ronald Austin and James Buchanan (based on a story by V.X. Appleton), and they weren't quite in Matheson's league. Let me demonstrate. I'm going to name a few things Matheson wrote, and see if you recognize them: I Am Legend; What Dreams May Come; Hell House. He also wrote the original episodes of the Night Stalker television show, with Darren McGavin as a straw hat and seersucker suit wearing newspaperman who can't help but run into supernatural critters. Some of you might have seen Trilogy of Terror, in which Karen Black gets chased around by a Zuni fetish doll. That's his too. And he worked on Star Trek, writing the episode "The Enemy Within," in which a transporter error creates two Kirks, one crazy, one girly. Some of these titles, if not all of them, should ring bells for even the most causal fan of fantasy and science fiction.

Ronald Austin and James Buchanan, in the meanwhile, wrote a movie starring James Coburn called Harry in Your Pocket, which you might catch very late at night once in a while. And it's just like The Horror at 37,000 Feet, in that it's unmemorable but entertaining, a sort of an artifact of genre filmmaking from the 70s, making use of themes already masterfully explored in better films.

Although, to the writers' credit, The Horror at 37,000, which details a demonic attack on an airplane, came out the same year as The Exorcist and six years before The Amityville Horror, even though the movie seems to be inspired by both films, and then relocated to an airplane. So they were a little ahead of the curve with this film; usually you have to wait until a film actually comes out to see the rip-off version. (Horror also heavily borrows from Airport, which had been released, to great success, in 1970.)

The story is rather simple. A millionaire decides to take an ancient pagan chapel out of England via airplane. The chapel, which is possessed, responds badly, halting the airplane in mid-air, freezing part of the plane (as well as a hapless crewmember), and breaking open the floor, out of which spews green goo. The passengers panic, decide to destroy a child's doll in the hopes of appeasing the demons, set fire to the airplane, and eventually begin to argue about which one of them should be sacrificed.

Shatner plays an alcoholic ex-priest in the weakest of his 70s-era weak man roles; or, more properly, the weakest character who isn't actively insane (his tortured lead performance in Impulse is the nadir of his post-Star Trek film roles.) Shatner spends most of the movie looking bloated in a knit sweater and shaggy hair, staring into a flask, and scowling glumly. When things start getting a little supernaturalish, his expertise as a former man of God is called on, and he responds, in general, by looking as though he is about to burst into tears, and then he runs upstairs to the bar, as this is an airplane with both an upstairs and a bar. He's about as useless in this film as castmate Buddy Ebsen, who plays a bullying millionaire who is the first to start suggesting that human sacrifices might be a solution. Neither are as useless as Will Hutchins, playing a movie cowboy so broadly and stupidly that you expect him to pull out a banjo any moment and reenact the "Dueling Banjos" scene from Deliverance.

There is an old Kids in the Hall sketch in which David Foley tells of getting stranded on a tarmac waiting for a flight to take off, and, inspired by the story of the survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes, begins to eat his fellow passengers. Eventually we discover that he did this after only a 30-minute delay, but his excuse is, hey, you never know. This film feels like a dramatization of that sketch, because the passengers panic quickly and come to such extraordinary decisions. There's a point, very early on, when they cut the hair and fingernails from a woman to create a voodoo doll. I don't care how crazy things have gotten on a trans-Atlantic flight, nobody rushes to make voodoo dolls to solve the problem.

To his credit, Shatner doesn't participate in this nonsense. He's too busy drinking and feeling sorry for himself. Eventually, the film itself seems to get sick of his self-pity, interrupting an attempt self-sacrifice on his part -- Shatner's only selfless gesture in the entire film -- to blow him out an airlock. The other characters seem as startled by this as the audience, speculating that in his last moments, perhaps he rediscovered his faith. After all, they figure, if there are devils, there must be a God.

As for me, I think Shatner's final thoughts were that he was glad to get out of the movie.

More films of William Shatner.

I'M GOING TO give away the ending to this 1975 film right here in the first paragraph. I feel safe in doing so, because if you're watching The Devil's Rain, there is a good chance you already know how it ends. It's a film like Soylent Green or The Planet of the Apes, in that even people who have never seen it already know the shock ending. And, like these films, knowing the ending is not likely to affect your enjoyment of it. So here goes: The Devil's Rain ends with Satanists melting. A lot of satanists. And they melt for a long time. A really long time. How long? I'm not sure. You watch the satanists melt like candles, slowly collapsing into puddles of brightly colored wax, and, after a while, you get bored, and you get up and make some popcorn. Maybe you take a restroom break. Maybe you remember that you've been meaning to write your grandmother a thank you note, so you dash one off. Then you think, hey, wasn't I watching a movie? And you get up and go back to the television, and you look at it, and the satanists are still melting on it.

Shatner costars in the film with Ernest Borgnine and Tom Skerritt, and it's sort of hard to tell whose film this is, for reasons I will detail. Shatner plays Mark Preston, whose family owns a ranch in some unspecified desert -- Mexico, actually, as the film was shot in Durango. Shatner appears at the ranch in cowboy duds, riding a pickup truck, and arrives just in time to discover his father eyeless and melting on the doorstep. Apparently, the Preston family possesses a book desired by Satanists, and so they've gotten into the habit of picking off Prestons, plucking their eyes out, and sending them home in full melt mode as a warning. Shatner doesn't cotton to this and sets out in his truck to confront the satanists in the small western ghost town they inhabit.

Here he meets Borgnine, also in cowboy duds. The film is shot something like a Sergio Leone Western, full of wide, sandswept vistas and craggy men glowering at each other. Of course, this isn't a revisionist Western, it's a modern horror film, so these directorial flourishes don't make much sense; presumably the director, Robert Fuest, got a deal on the location, and so did with it what he could. Feust was genrally a good director: He was responsible for the two Dr. Phibes movies, which were lensed just a half-decade before The Devil's Rain, and married an almost psychedelic deco sensibility with a nastily comical pulp adventure tale. Perhaps he was attempting something similar here, but The Devil's Rain is a pretty humorless affair; any laughs are largely accidental, although Borgnine bites into his role with a gruff malevolence.

Borgnine plays Jonathan Corbis, leader of this strange group of Mexican desert-dwelling Satanists. None of them seem to do much except hang around a ruined old church, dressed in black monks' habits. None of them have eyes, either, except Borgnine. He leads them in Satanic prayers and occasionally turns into a goat, albeit a goat who looks an awful lot like Ernest Borgnine.

Shatner and Borgnine have a battle of wills, but, this being the 70s, when Shatner played almost exclusively gutless or irresolute characters, it is a brief battle. Shatner professes that he has faith in the Bible, which he carries, but we know he doesn't really, as he keeps fingering a pistol he has stashed away. As soon as the Satanists get a little freaky, Shanter panics, abandons his Bible, starts shooting, and hooded and robed figures surrounded him and drag him off. Shatner reappears throughout the rest of the film, but only for a a scene here and there, as the Satanists go through the process of converting him to their ranks. This involves a lot of ceremony, which was actually overseen by Anton LaVey, founded of San Francisco's Church of Satan. Nonetheless, these rituals feel cinematic and hokey, and generally involve Shatner being strapped to something, and then screaming for a while. At some point his eyes disappear, which is some indication that he must be pretty far into the process. It's impossible to tell how long it takes -- the ceremonies are interminable.

They do take long enough that Tom Skerritt arrives from out of town. Skerrit plays Shatner's brother, Tom Preston, and, since Shatner is pretty much out of the picture, one must presume that this is Skeritt's movie. Especially since he brings his wife and a scientist along. The scientist, played by Eddie Albert, specializes in the occult, which is useful. So here we are, 30 minutes into the movie, and we've finally met our protagonist. And, as we've seen from Skerritt's performance in Big Bad Mama, he can be quite a scene-stealer.

Unfortunately, Skerritt is given almost nothing to do here but run around the Satanists' ghost town with a shotgun, looking bewildered and occasionally taking shots at eyeless hooded figures, most of whom seem to be played by a very young John Travolta, in his first film role and almost unrecognizable without eyes. His next three films would be Carrie, Saturday Night Live, and Grease, so he got out of this film okay. The same can't be said for Skerritt, whose next films would be two Italian thrillers and a maudlin drama about ballet dancers. I guess, in the end, it is better for you, careerwise, to be shot by Tom Skerritt than to shoot John Travolta.

There isn't much more to say about this film. Tom Skerritt, with Eddie Albert's help, discovers a huge fish bowl filled with souls. The eyeless Shatner has a moment of humanity and smashes the bowl, and then everyone starts melting. There is an extended flashback to Colonial New England that is worth mentioning, only because it reveals one of Hollywood's stranger clichés: Everyone's ancestors look exactly like them. So Shatner's ancestor looks just like William Shatner, except in the high, flat-crowned black felt hat of the Puritan. Shatner plays his character's ancestor as even more simpering and spineless than the modern descendant, despite the fact that the man is plotting to betray the Satanists. You might remember at the start of this review that the Satanists are after a book. Well, this 17th century Shatner stole it. He doesn't get much reward for betraying Lucifer, however. All of the Satanists are captured by an angry mob of local Puritans, and they do what Puritans in movies always do. They put stakes in the ground, pile up timber, tie people to the stakes, and set them on fire. So William Shatner, who spends most of the film screaming as Satinists steal his soul, and most of the rest of it melting, at least gets to enjoy a brief reprieve in which he is simply burned to death.

More films of William Shatner.

HERE IS ONE OF THE wardrobe items that defined the Sixties. The nehru jacket is named after Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and based on a traditional item of Turkish clothing, the Sherwani. The modern nehru jacket draws much of its influence from traditional Western businesswear, but with a Mandarin collar. The results were perfect for Europe and the United States, which had developed a fascination for the East; additionally, the nehru jacket had a tailored, very mod, and almost futuristic quality. Suddenly nehru jackets were everywhere. Sammy David Jr. wouldn't be seen without one, and he purchased over 200 of them. They became the jacket of choice of both garage bands and cinematic supervillains, and remain the favorite choice of the latter, as demonstrated by Dr. Evil's sartorial sensibilities in the Austin Powers movies.

Alas, the success of the nehru jacket was short-lived. Although the Mandarin collar remains a fixture of many costumes for upscale service profession jobs, such as doormen at four-star hotels and waiters at expensive restaurants, the 60s-style nehru jacket isn't seen much anymore, and can be awfully difficult to acquire, unless you have the money to have one tailored for you. Wearing one feels a bit like dressing for a Renaissance Festival or a Civil War reenactment, as the garment feels as though it is a costume from the 60s, rather than an actual suit jacket. Nevertheless, it's a dapper item, and still looks as futuristic and international as when it first debuted.

OH MAN, BREAD PUDDING. I'm hooked on this stuff, and have been since I was a boy. It's a dessert that is common both in English and Southern cooking, and I reckon I first had it as a boy in England. When I lived in New Orleans, whenever I went out to eat (which was often, this being New Orleans after all), I would get bread pudding for dessert, except on the rare occasion when I wanted to really indulge and have bananas foster. Kieran's Irish Pub, here in Minneapolis, makes a tasty bread pudding, and its a particularly satisfying dessert on a frigid winter night.

So, when I discovered that Harwood and Callahan's Soul Food has a recipe for bread pudding in it, this was bound to me my first culinary adventure. Now, I should take a moment to point out that Harwood and Callahan's bread pudding should more properly be called "Bread and Butter Pudding." The two dishes are similar, but dissimilar enough that its worth distinguishing between the two. Traditional bread pudding is usually soaked in a spicy mixture, sometimes overnight, then dried and baked. Bread and butter pudding is simpler, with its recipe essentially calling for French toast to be doused in milk and slow-cooked for about 40 minutes. Here's the recipe:

4 slices of buttered bread, cut in squares
1/2 cup sugar
3 eggs
1 cup raisins
Vanilla
1/2 pt. rich milk

Bet eggs and sugar, add milk, raisins, vanilla and buttered bread in an over at 300 degrees for 40 minutes.

It's common enough to add whiskey or rum to the dish when its finished. I added Pyrat rum. Delicious.

FRANK OZ, the puppeteer behind Grover and Miss Piggy, among others, is half Jewish. His father, Isidore Oznowicz, was a Dutch/Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust. I mention this to support a piece of pure conjecture on my part. I don't honestly know how much input Oz had into the dialogue spoken by one of his most famous creations, Yoda, the wizened Jedi master from the Star Wars movies. But Yoda sounds to me like he is speaking Yinglish.

For those of you who have never heard the term before, Yinglish is a sort of pidgin English spoken by Jews who immigrated from Yiddish-speaking countries. It's a hybrid of English and Yiddish, and is most distinctive for its use of Yiddish sentence structure in constructing English sentences. Anyone who has grown up around Jews who were native Yiddish speakers knows the sort of sentence I'm talking about. Hell, anyone who has heard old Jews in movies has heard Yinglish sentences. They tend to sound like this: "For this you woke me up?" "Such a pain in my ass he gives me!" "So, don't call; let me wonder instead if you've died."

I'm now one-quarter of the way through my Yiddish textbook, Der Yiddish Lerer, and every sentence is started to sound like that. Today I learned a Yiddish sentence that may the most egregious offender of the lot. In English, the sentence is "Today I will give him my book." But here's how it reads using Yiddish sentence construction: "Today will I him to give my book."

That's just Yoda talk.

Here is my list of quotes from Yoda that sound most like Yiddish. Try saying them in an exaggerated Jewish accent -- pretend you're Jackie Mason, if it helps:

“Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?"

"This one a long time have I watched."

“Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.”

“Not if anything to say about it I have.”

"Much to learn, you still have."

"Great care we must take."

So you tell me. Yoda: 900-year-old tridactyl alien, surviving member of the Jedi council, and Padawan trainer, or just a really, really old Jewish guy?

Hint: Stewart Freeborn, who designed Yoda, based the character's face, in part, on a real person.

HERE'S AN ITEM I picked up at my local Cub grocery store, which is not where you would expect to shop for colognes, much less one with such impressive heft. The bottle, which is about eight inches tall, is a heavy glass container, informing us, firstly, that this is a product from Mexico, and, secondly, that it only has three ingredients. These are alcohol, fragrance, and pentadecalactone, which is a chemical produced by the armpit of the male human, and, apparently, gives off a scent that women find irresistible. This fact may come as a surprise to any man who has tried to make conversation with a woman when he has visible pit stains, but apparently the science of the male armpit pheromone is established enough, at least in grooming circles, that many colognes use a chemically simulated pentadecalactone in their product.

And how does Sanborns Orange Blossom Cologne smell? Well, not like armpit, thank goodness. But not like orange blossoms either. Mostly, it smells like musk. There are some orange undertones, but mostly it just smells like one expects the stomach of a stag might, especially if that deer had rolled around in old orange peels. And then gotten drunk on rubbing alcohol. It's a woodsy, powdery smell with a very strong hint of alcohol. For someone like me, who is used to smelling fruity, it's a strange smell to put on, in part because the sweetness of the odor calls to mind the sickly sweetness you sometimes smell on an indigent who hasn't bathed in quite a while. I don't know if you know the smell I'm talking about. You'll sit down next the back of the bus, and your nose will be assaulted by something really foul. You'll look back, and there is what you first take for a mound of oily rags. But it's not a mound of oily rags. It's an unconscious hobo. You breath through your mouth and cover your nose, desperate to block out the scent. But, in the meanwhile, in the back of your mind, you're thinking "Is there something sweet in there?"

That's the sweetness I'm talking about. So I guess I mean to say that this cologne makes you smell like an alcoholic deer who hasn't bathed in months and is unconscious at the back of a city bus. With a hint of orange.

And, the truth is, a lot of colognes smell like this, to one extent or another, because it is supposed to appeal to the ladies. Which leads me to believe that the science of sexual attraction is much weirder than I had originally assumed.

THIS IS A traditional Yiddish song, although its origins seem somewhat vague. It's either Russian or Polish, and is often used as a lullaby. Some of my pronunciation is a little garbled in the song; I had a strangely hard time memorizing the song. I think I know why. The exact qualities that make this song easy to learn if you're a native Yiddish speaker -- a certain monotony of melody and meter, and an almost punning tendency to use similar sounding words -- make the song a test of the memory of you're not a native speaker. It just all sounds the same, and so you end up sticking regn in where you meant to say ohfern, and the whole song falls apart.

But it's a lovely song, long one of my favorites, and even if my grasp on it is still a little tenuous, I'm glad to have learned it. The lyrics are as follows:

Shteyt a bokher, shteyt un trakht
Trakht un trakht a gantse nakht
Vemen tzu nemen un nisht farshemen
Vemen tzu nemen un nisht farshemen

Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika
Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika
Tumbalalaika, shpil balalaika
Shpil balalaika, freylekh zol zayn

Meydl, meydl, kh'vil bay dir fregn,
Vos ken vaksn, vaksn on regn?
Vos ken brenen un nit oyfhern?
Vos ken benken, veynen on trern?

Narisher bokher, vos darfstu fregn?
A shteyn ken vaksn, vaksn on regn.
Libe ken brenen un nit oyfhern.
A harts ken benken, veynen on trern.

It translates as follows:

A young lad stands, and he thinks
Thinks and thinks a whole night
Whom to take and not to shame
Whom to take and not to shame

Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika
Tumbala, Tumbala, Tumbalalaika
Tumbalalaika, strum balalaika
Tumbalalaika, may we be happy

Girl, girl, I want to ask of you
What can grow, grow without rain?
What can burn and never end?
What can yearn, cry without tears?

Foolish lad, why do you have to ask?
A stone can grow, grow without rain
Love can burn and never end
A heart can yearn, cry without tears

B-DAY WAS OCTOBER 1ST.

Everything came off on schedule. All bridges to Manhattan were blown. Subways and railroads were paralyzed, the police knocked out of the action. A select group of the Super Rich were captured and held as hostages. The Black radio broadcast the rebels' ultimatum.

The uprising had been planned for months, down to the smallest detail, by the brilliant, highly educated underground Black Power Elite.

New York was in Black hands -- a stunned and frightened nation tensed for the next unpredictable move.

More Dirty Books!

STUFFED PASTRIES are beloved the world around, and, in Central and South American, as well as the Mediterranean, they'll stuff them with anything tasty, including potatoes, fish, and chicken, and, in general, call them empanadas. This food probably originated in Galicia, Spain, where it's not really a dessert, but more of a portable meal. That's true in places like Argentina as well, where they fill empenadas with beef. In Mexico, empenadas are generally breakfast or dessert items, and can be filled with a dizzying assortment of sweetened fillings. The one pictured was filled with a sweetened lemon filling, but it might have had sweet potatoes, yams, or pumpkin. Generally, local Mexican bakeries will offer them with fruit fillings, and they taste a bit like Hamantashen, if you're Jewish. The pan fino, or "slim bread," version is pretty recognizable -- empanadas that are meant as meals, rather than desserts, tend to a fuller, more breadlike quality, a little like an English pasty. The dessert version has a thiner shell, in general.

LATELY, ALL I seem to hear is "Bunny, when will you add a dining section to your blog?" Of course, nobody has actually said these words out loud, but I hear them think it. That's right, I can hear your thoughts. In fact, I can hear your mental cries of disbelief right now. But haven't you ever asked yourself why I never seem surprised when you give me presents? Of course you have. I've heard you think it. Also, my ability to read minds is why I am so good at my night job, fighting crime.

Anyway, I've decided to go ahead and add a dining section to this blog. And, to begin with, I will be cooking soul food. Yes. Yes. I know. I know what you're thinking. I'm a vegetarian and soul food is nothing but chicken neck bones, salted pork, and squirrel. Well, I'm here to tell you, firstly, that there is more to soul food than squirrel, and, in fact, it's pretty hard to find squirrel on the menus of soul food restaurants, so I'm not even sure why you would think that. But you're right. Soul food does call for a lot of meat. Not all of it, though.

There is bread pudding, for instance, which I adore, and is generally made without any meat, although, I suppose, some people might toss chunks of opossum in. There are some people who will add meat to anything, in the same way that there are some people who pour ketchup on everything, even ice cream. But it's probably safe to ignore such people, and so there are always some vegetarian options.

Additionally, there are some very good vegetarian substitutions for most meats, almost all made out of curdled soy or something equally bizarre and horrible. But, hey, we're talking about substitutions for the constituent ingredients in soul food here, so we're talking about swapping out things like pig brains and chicken intestines. Soul food was never based on the inherent deliciousness of the basic ingredients, as the basic ingredients tended to be whatever rich folks didn't want to eat and so threw out. Instead, the genius of soul food is in the preparation.

I've eaten vegetarian soul food before, so I'm not just making this up off the top of my crazy head. I had a delicious meatless hamburger called a Marcus Garvey Burger at a vegetarian soul food joint owned by Black Hebrews in Chicago. And, you know, if they can simultaneously manage to make vegetarian soul food and be Black Hebrews, I think I have a real shot at this.

Mind you, I am an Ovo Lacto vegetarian, so I eat eggs and drink milk, although lately I have become suspicious that I might be allergic to both. Nevertheless, I shall press on, as it would be especially difficult to make soul food without either of those two ingredients, although I suspect it would be possible, and I applaud whoever tries it.

I shall be using a book called, simply enough, Soul Food, for my basic recipes. The book was written by Jim Harwood and Ed Callahan back in 1969, and looks to be one of the first recipe books published on the subject, although previously there were churches and other social group who published small quantities of their own cookbooks as fund-raisers. If I locate any of these, I shall certainly look through them. But Harwood and Callahan's book is a great jumping odd point. I mean, they have an entire section on hominy and grits, and there are more corn bread-based recipes in the book than I had expected, so there is plenty to work with. I'm headed out shopping today, and so I might even start out by preparing me a little something or other tonight.

Also, as an additional treat, my dining section will include occasional forays to my favorite Mexican bakery, the El Rey Bakery on Lake Street. I will pick up an occasional pastry there, photograph it, eat it, and then report back on exactly what it is an how it tastes. There are a lot of Mexican bakeries in the Twin Cities, and I sometimes wonder if non-Mexicans are afraid to go in, because they are not sure what those giant sugary-looking things are. Let this be your guide, because the pastries are legitimately delicious, and you're missing out if you don't try them.

THERE'S NOT a lot to say about this 1973 television movie, but it's in the Public Domain, so it's widely available, and is a good example of Shatner's television work during the Seventies. It's a rather by-the-books procedural of the inner-workings of the Los Angeles District Attorney's office; it's well-made, with a great score by Elmer Bernstein, but that wasn't unusual in the Seventies. Television really had a handle on cop shows back then, a fact that is sometimes forgotten nowadays. Quite a few television writers came out of the news industry, some from beats covering crime or City Hall, and so had a keen eye for the world of the criminal justice system. Cop shows of the era, if they were in urban setting, were often glum and gritty, telling of heavyset men in filthy raincoats doggedly chasing down unpleasant low-level criminals. In other words, it looked a lot like real policework. There's a moment in Incident on a Dark Street when a new Assistant D.A., played by Robert Pine (later of CHiPs), has a hallway exchange with a dog-faced security guard, who stares at him with weary humor. "Are you a liberal?" the security guards asks. "That's not an easy question to answer," Pine responds. "Ex-seminarians and ex-liberals, they make the best prosecutors," the guard tells him.

That's not the sort of line that a writer is just going to make up, and, in fact, the writer/director of the series was E. Jack Neuman, who had 20 years of experience creating, writing, and directing crime dramas. You can bet he carefully researched the show, as he was considered one of the best writers working in television. His script has great polish, and is full of well-placed quotes and details, such as the one quoted, that have the sense of a reporter emptying his notebooks of the really fine pieces of color and detail that comes from hours of interviews. He also includes a lot of really quirky elements, and, as you might expect, Shatner is one of them.

Shatner plays a petty government official named Deaver G. Wallace, a fellow who has gotten in over his head with some bad investments and so has started throwing juicy government contracts to businesses owned by a crime boss. This is another of Shatner's "weak man" characters from the Seventies -- men of questionable morals and little backbone. But Shatner brought great variety to these roles. He plays Deaver as a man of bullying bluster. He's thoroughly corrupt, spending his crooked cash on an expansive modernistic home where he keeps the ditzy blond with whom he is having an affair. Shatner wears a dry look hairstyle, a bushy mustache, and long gray sideburns, which seem to leave little of his face exposed but for suspicious eyes and a pinched mouth. He can hardly look at his girlfriend, responding to her advances with impotent evasions, but he's got the temerity to push around the crime boss, played with oily menace by Gilbert Roland. Shatner repeatedly meets with the criminal, in public places, such as art galleries, demanding more money. Finally, when it becomes obvious that the DA's office is closing in on the crooked government functionary, the crime boss turns his hulking henchman on Shatner, beating him to a pulp.

Later, when the police come to round Shatner up at his ill-gotten love nest, he looks at his girlfriend with watery eyes, then stands up, straightens his tie, and goes out to meet the cops. He is the image of a defeated man attempting to preserve a touch of dignity on the face of pure disaster, and it's a very touching moment. Shatner's character may have been a noisy, bluffing failure at everything else, but he's a hell of a man when it's time to face the music.

More films of William Shatner.

A HALF-DECADE AGO, when I was a regular writer for City Pages, I did a story about a local cartoonist named Vincent Stall. I had discovered his self-published comics at Big Brain and had bought them all, and had been introduced to Stall by Big Brain's owner, Michael Drivas. I continue to check in to Big Brain now and again to see if there are any new comics by Stall, who prints them under an imprimatur he calls King Mini International. Sometimes there are, and I always buy them. I like his style of illustration very much -- heavy outlined and shadowed illustrations that borrow from noir-influenced European cartoonists. His comics tell strange stories, and each are quite different from each other, sometimes grim and morose, sometimes whimsical, sometimes puckish.

I discovered Stall has an online shop on etsy last week, and immediately decided to buy something. Stall offers a series he calls "King Mini Affordables," which look to be doodles that have been torn off a much larger page of doodles, expertly colored, and neatly packaged. Stall has a background in advertising, and all of his work is very carefully packaged, but with an oddness of phrasing that suggests he's actually satirizing the language of packaging. The doodle I purchased arrived today, stapled to a piece of brown cardboard that reads "The KMI Trademark is, and always will be, a positive guarantee that the product bearing it contains only clean and wholesome entertainment."

To an extent this is true. My King Mini Affordable contains images of treehouses in leafless tress, a translucent bird, and a padlock -- nothing dirty or unwholesome here. But, of course, I don't care if my art is dirty or unwholesome, and the cleanliness and wholesomeness of the doodle is beyond the point. Actually, for me, the point is that Stall continues to make affordable art, printed in small batches, or, in this instance, a wholly unique creation. And he has done this since I spoke to him, way back when. I like his art, and I respect the fact that he still seems to do it because it gives him pleasure. It gives me pleasure as well, and, while I haven't framed or found a place to hang my King Mini Affordable, when I do it will be something I will be happy to have on my walls.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

CREAM COCKTAILS make a great dessert drink. They're almost like alcoholic milkshakes. Sometimes they are alcoholic milkshakes, come to think of it. The King's Cup is just cream and Liquore Galliano. Some suggest making the drink with two/thirds Galliano, some suggest half cream, half Galliano. Make it to your taste -- the more cream, the sweeter the drink will be. Typically, the Kings Cup is served in a pony glass, but who has those anymore? A shot glass will work fine for a small drink, and if you want more, use an Old Fashioned glass, like you would with a White Russian, which this cocktail resembles.

And how is the drink? Well, if you're a fan of Galliano, it's delicious -- like a Galliano candy. And, if you're not a fan, this may be the cocktail that turns you around. Admittedly, there is something a little girly about sweetening something to make it palatable to unsophisticated tastes, but that's only one way to look at it. There's a long and noble tradition of sweet dessert cocktails, and, for those of us with chronic cases of sweet teeth, it's a welcome opportunity to make our after-dinner sweets grow up a little. I mean, you could have a bowl of ice cream, like the children do, or you could join the world of adults and belt down some liquor. I know what I prefer.

More Galliano cocktails.

HEINRICH HOFFMAN'S SADISTIC little children's book has sort of come into vogue again, thanks to a popular stage play based on the book and retitled Shockheaded Peter. I saw the show on its first run in New York, after reading about it in the Village Voice. I had to see it, because, reading the paper's description of the tales told in the play, including a story of a little boy whose thumbs are snipped off with scissors, I got a chill of recognition. I knew this book. Prior to seeing the show, I went into a bookstore and located a copy of the book, and read it eagerly. Yes, this was it. This was the book. I had thought about it for years, but could not remember its name. I had looked for it for ages, not knowing where to find it, because, when I was a boy, I stumbled upon it at a neighbor's house, and was quite traumatized by it.

The year was 1978, and I was 10, and my father, a university professor, had taken the family to Bath, England, for a year's sabbatical. There is a lot about that year that has stuck with me. We traveled a lot throughout England's West Country, visiting ruined castles and odd little towns. We visited Stonehenge twice, which impressed me quite a lot. We took frequent weekend trips to London and took in the sights. And when I was at home in Bath, I spent a lot of time exploring, taking long walks through verdant fields to the nearby town of Woolley, where Peter Gabriel and his then-wife had a house. (My mother was friends with Gabriel's wife Jill; she tells a story of stopping by one day, only to be greeted by Jill at the door, dressed in a blanket. My mother invited her out, only to be turned down, regretfully. Rolling Stone had come by to take photos, and were in the process of snapping pictures of Jill and Peter Gabriel, unclothed, in bed.)

At some point during this year, I wound up in someone's house, and, bored, went through their book collection. I don't remember any of the details, except that I discovered Struwwelpeter, and mistook it for an ordinary children's book, and read it cover to cover. But it isn't an ordinary children's book. It was written in 1845 by a doctor, and it sort of resembles a Victorian children's book, in that all the stories are little moral tales, and children who misbehave are punished for their transgressions. Except the punishments are absurd, excessive. Augustus, for instance, refuses to eat his soup. So he starves to death. Harriet plays with matches, so she burns to ashes as her pet cats look on, weeping. And then there is poor Robert. Robert actually does nothing wrong at all. He commits no social transgression that he might be punished for. He merely takes his umbrella out with him on a cloudy day, which is what he should have done, and then a gust of wind catches him and blows him away. Forever. He's never seen again.

Each of these grim little stories is written in a jocular verse, which makes me think the author might have found them quite funny, and I appreciate that. In their own wicked way, they are quite funny, and, as a 10-year-old boy, I was quite taken with the book, both appalled and fascinated. I briefly considered stealing it, but bad things happen to children who misbehave. VERY bad things.

More from the Sparber Bookshelf.

CHUBBY CHECKER often lamented his success with The Twist, claiming it ruined his life. "I was on my way to becoming a big nightclub performer, and 'The Twist' just wiped it out," he is reported to have said. "It got so out of proportion. No one ever believes I have talent." But Checker left a lasting mark on popular dance -- he may have introduced more fad dances than any single man in history, almost none of them couples dances, thereby freeing dance from being something both partners must know to being something a solitary dancer could do, alone on the dance floor, if necessary. Of course, in its way, this movement led to the sorry state of dance nowadays, where people are not merely incapable of couples dancing, but also don't seem to know what to do when dancing alone, but for writing around like they expect folded dollar bills to be pressed into their undergarments. How did we forget all the dances that Chubby Checker taught us. How did we forget The Pony?

This was the dance that accompanied Checker's hit "It's Pony Time," and was sort of his fallback dance -- if you look at old videos of him performing, he tends to do The Pony whenever he starts performing, or whenever he takes a break from whatever other dance he's doing. And no wonder -- it's a simple and quite pleasing dance, consisting of almost nothing but moving from foot to foot and shuffling in triple times.

All you do is step down with your right foot, then step down with your left foot, raising the right into the air slightly, then step back down with your right foot, one and two. Then switch feet, one and two. Typically, you hold your hands out in front of you like you're holding a horse's reigns, but you can do other hand motions as well. Someday I will do a video that just shows the various hand motions popular in 60s fad dances, many of which seem taken directly from swimming lessons.

Here's a video of me doing the pony. I'm a little out of practice, and my foot motions are a little excessive as a result. With practice, you should be able to make the foot shuffles subtle and tiny, without any big leaps. That's what I'm shooting for.

ANOTHER PRODUCT from our friends at Clubman-Pinaud, the same folks responsible for an especially stinky aftershave lotion. This is another shaving item, and is essentially a styptic pencil, but in the form of a little container that calls to mind a glue stick. For those of you who have never used a styptic pencil, it's a little stick of medication, usually made from anhydrous aluminum sulfate or titanium dioxide, that men dab on the wounds caused by shaving. I don't know if most men are like me, but shaving is an experience similar to being attacked by razor wielding ninjas, all aiming at my face, and, once I've finished carving my stubble off, I tend to look like the final scenes of an Eli Roth film. So styptic pencils come in handy, because they cause blood vessels to contact. The results are a little startling, as it doesn't exactly close the wound -- it just stops it from bleeding. So there you are, after shaving, with a series of little red holes in your face.

Styptic pencils always call to mind a scene from the television show Taxi, which I watched religiously when I was younger, in part because the character Alex Reiger was played by my mother's cousin Judd Hirsch. In one episode, the show's wacky foreign mechanic Latka, played by Andy Kaufman, has been obsessively shaving himself in preparation for a date, and the result in that his face is a mess of bloody hunks of toilet paper, used to staunch the flow of blood from dozens of nicks. "You need a styptic pencil," Judd tells him, at which moment Reverend Jim Ignatowski, a drug casualty of the Sixties played by Christopher Lloyd, produces one from behind his ear.

"Why do you carry a styptic pencil around with you?" Judd asks. Reverend Jim shrugs. "Considering what just happened," he says, "a better question would be: Why aren't you?"

Styptic pencils are notorious for stinging, often hurting worse than the original injury, and so have fallen out of favor, but, to Clubman's credit, their Dab-On Nick Relief seems entirely painless -- at least, the half-dozen times I've used it, it's never hurt. I'm not certain what ingredients prevent it from stinging. It's principal ingredient is aluminum sulfate, which should hurt like a son of a bitch. But it has some strange inactive ingredients, and I'm going to ascribe magical qualities to them. For instance, the product contains Equisetum Arvense, also known as horsetail, which is popular in herbalism to treat wounds, as well as a form of urea, which, of course, originally came from animal kidneys and is expelled in urine, but is now chemically synthesized. I hope.

HERE IS ANOTHER smallish print I discovered by looking around on Flickr, this time from an artist called pantufla, also known as Alberto Forero, who lives in Minneapolis. I got it because it appealed to my sense of whimsy, which seems to be one of the overriding factors when I purchase art. As you can see, it is a Gocco print of a very large chair marauding through the skyline of a city.

This is the second piece I have identified as a Gocco print, and perhaps I should explain what that is for those who may be unfamiliar with the term. Print Gocco is a Japanese invention that prints images onto a screen using flash bulbs like you might find in an old camera; this screen is then used in much the same way as screenprinting. Gocco is quite popular among artists, because it produces exquisite prints using less space -- and less busy work -- than traditional screenprinting. There's a lovely photo pool on Flickr of artists and hobbyists creating small prints with the Print Gocco device.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE, I pursued a degree in Jewish Studies, and was pretty actively involved in the campus Hillel House. So I set about arranging for a Yiddish class, with the help of the Hillel staff. There were about a half-dozen students or so who were interested, and we tracked down a fellow from the Jewish Community Center who was willing to teach it, and we arranged a time to meet in the Hillel library. Our teacher, whose name I have forgotten, recommended a book we use, Der Yiddish Lerer, or The Yiddish Teacher.

The class didn't continue for long -- maybe a few months, just long enough to get through a handful of lessons. But the class lasted long enough for me to realize that our textbook was quite strange. Some of this was because of the odd choices of vocab words. For instance, in the first few lessons, you learn the words "bear", "father" and "eats," and there's not much you can do with that except make sentences such as "the bear eats the father" or "the father eats the bear."

But, as the vocabulary grows more sophisticated, the books itself begins to construct some very puzzling sentences. I suspect some of this is because of the age of the textbook -- the version we used was published in 1939, but it, in turn, was a revised version of a book published in 1924. Language books then weren't like they are now, with a strong focus on useful sentences. Instead, language books seemed insistent on vocabulary exercises, and sometimes seemed entirely arbitrary in how they selected vocabulary words. And so you were forced to create sentences out of whatever words were on hand.

As a result, many of the sentences created in Der Yiddish Lerer are not the sorts that you might expect to need when traveling abroad and stumbling into a Yiddish-speaking community. You would expect to find phrases like "Your sidelocks are so long, they nearly drag to the ground," or "Where can a thirsty man find some slivovitz around here?"

There's none of that. In fact, a lot of the sentences in the book wouldn't be very useful, unless you lived in an Edward Gorey universe, full of strange phrases riddled with unexplained menace. Here are a few of my favorites:

The sister always cries at night.

Why is the woman always laughing?

Who is sick in his house today?

He says that he does not know where my father's hammer is.

Your country is very small.

Mother, where are my spoons?

Our mother does not love you, because you are bad.

Why did he run like that when we saw him in the village?

The old man says that in his town there is a man with two heads.

Their little sister always spends her money on cherries.

Our little sister is very lazy; we wake her and wake her, but she does not get up.

Her father is not well; he always lives in the forest.

If your little brother will come to our house, we will give him a small knife.

Her little brother is not very smart; he never cries and he never laughs.

A very big black bird flew over the court-yard, and all ducks and geese screamed and squeaked.

The man, old, without strength, lay about in the street all night, and no one knew it.

The wicked wind is whistling through the trees in the forest; we will not bathe today.

Girls, you must not burst out laughing when you see a poor man at the door.

So, of course, now that I am back to studying Yiddish, this shall be my first textbook.

THERE ISN'T MUCH you need to know about Kingdom of the Spiders. Indeed, you need only know two facts: It stars Bill Shatner and 5,000 live tarantulas. There's something irresistible about the idea of having Shatner match wits with murderous arachnids; it's as though Snakes on a Plane had been conceived of in 1977, but had been called Spiders on a Shatner.

The resulting movie is pretty much what you would expect. Shatner has to play a character who might conceivably run into a lot of spiders, and so he's a veterinarian, and he has to be someplace where thousands of tarantulas might conceivably go unnoticed for a while, and so the film is set in a small farming community in the scenic Verde Valley of Arizona. If the film's frequent exterior shots are to be believed, Verde Valley has the sort of imposing rock formations that the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote might chase each other through.

Kingdom of the Spiders opens with spiders stalking a calf through the sagebrush. Anyone who has had experience with cattle knows that they are skittish creatures, the sort of animals that will eye you warily as you approach, and, when you come within a few feet of them, will physically leap away from you in terror. But these spiders are clever -- they rush the calf from all angles. As it turns out, the spiders are not only crafty, but also extremely poisonous, and the young cow quickly dies from its bites.

Enter Shatner, riding on horseback and spinning a lasso, wearing blue jeans and a cowboy hat. He successfully ropes a cow, with the help of his widowed sister-in-law, played by Marcy Lafferty, a cute brunette who also happened to be Shatner's wife at the time. She often appeared in his films and television shows as a result, including Impulse, Crash of Flight 401, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Airplane II: The Sequel, and T.J. Hooker, on which she played four different characters. I mention this not to slight Shatner, nor Lafferty; both were expert riders (nowadays Shatner raises horses as a hobby) and the horseback scene in Kingdom of the Spiders has an easy, comfortable flirtatiousness.

In fact, Shatner doesn't treat Kingdom of the Spiders like a horror film. His character, Dr. Robert Hanson (who goes by the unlikley nickname "Rack"), is subdued and jokey. Shatner plays his scenes in the movie staring at off into the distance or down at the ground, and often takes long pauses before answering a question, as though veterinary sciences were a thing of vital importance, and so must be done with due consideration. Which, if you think about it, would actually be true in a farming community. He only really gets rambunctious when an entomologist from a nearby university shows up to research the spider bites that killed the calf. She is a statuesque blond played by Tiffany Bolling, and one can only assume that Shatner had seen her 1971 Playboy appearance, because he instantly and incessantly starts flirting with her. He attempts the typical Shatner technique of simply getting his face very close to hers, but is rebuffed, and so he does what any gentleman of the late 70s would do: He forces her car off the road, physically throws her into the passenger seat, then drives her to a restaurant and buys her beer. Strangely, this seems to work, as the two are soon locking lips in preparation for throwing gasoline on a massive spider mound and burning it down.

Alas, it's not enough to burn a single spider mound. As it turns out, there are hundreds -- and perhaps thousands -- of similar mounds scattered throughout the dessert, and the spiders have adapted into something quite terrifying. We know this because the movie's screenwriter, Alan Caillou (who was also responsible for such masterpieces as Village of the Giants and Clarence, the Cross-Eyed Lion), tells us in elongated, awkward scenes of pure exposition, the sort that start out "As you know." As everybody apparently knows, but Shatner and Bolling need to remind them anyway, tarantulas don't usually live together in huge subterranean nests. Because, as you know, they are cannibals, and would otherwise eat each other. And, anyway, as you know, they don't hunt in packs. And, as you certainly know, they don't attack cattle. And you must know that they don't hide out in trucks and single-prop airplanes and attack drivers and pilots. And they don't wrap their victims in web cocoons to eat them later. You did know that, didn't you?

Except everything that spiders don't do, these spiders do. We get some sort of garbled explanation, in which DDT has killed off the spiders' natural food supply, so they have adapted to hunt larger game, but it's all a pretext to get Shatner, Bolling, and a group of annoying strangers into a hotel, where spiders lay siege to them. They can't prod a vent or go near a fireplace without huge clumps of tarantulas falling down upon them. Spiders break windows to get in, they come in through the oven fan, and, in a notorious scene, they all leap upon Shatner from the rafters, causing him to burst into a room covered in hundreds of tarantulas, bleeding from hundreds of raised spider bites. Because the filmmakers used real tarantulas throughout the film, the cast seems suitably spooked by them -- every time Shatner must brush a large clump of spiders away, he lets out very believable moans of horror.

Unfortunately, because real spiders were used in the movie, and because this was not a film made under the careful supervision of the SPCA, we see far more tarantulas die than people, and they really die. They get roasted, they get stepped and sat on, and, in one scene of mass chaos in the film's small rural town, they get stomped by screaming crowds and squashed by cars. The spiders are supposed to be the villains in, but it is easy to imagine the spiders making their own version of this film, in which the humans would be the heartless mass murderers. And that film would be a documentary.

More films of William Shatner.

TIMES ARE TOUGH for the turtle-neck sweater, also known as the polo neck. Most stores don't carry them for men, and, when they do, it's not the proper turtle-neck, which folds over, but rather the mock turtle-neck, which rather resembles a military outfit, or something from Star Trek. Sure, some stores carry turtle-necks for women, and this deserves applause, as the form-revealing female turtle-neck is one of the great garments for the bosomy sweater girl, and for the black clad female beatnik.

But the turtle-neck was originally a man's sweater, and, while I'm not going to kick about the fact that it has become a unisex item, it doesn't seem fair that men should lose use the garment altogether. After all, it is one of the essentials of the male wardrobe from the 60s and 70s. Steve McQueen wore them under pea coats. James Brown wore them under tight, shiny suits. And everybody in Superfly wore them, all the time. And why not? You can change the tone of an entire outfit just by swapping out your turtle-neck. Take a look at the four photos above, demonstrating four different colors of turtle-neck under the same leisure suit top. It's like a slide show of the many moods of Max "Bunny" Sparber.

First there is the gray turtleneck, which is sporty, yet casually sophisticated; it is the color preferred by Ron Burgundy for his casual wear. Then there is the orange turtleneck, which suggest a very modern, playful look. The white turtle-neck, in the meanwhile, is pure class, the sort of thing you would wear for a night of theater and fine dining. And the blue turtle-neck is calming and thoughtful, the sort of thing the brains in a casino heist might wear. I, Bunny Sparber, am all these things, and you need only look at my turtleneck to know it.

ALL RIGHT, one of my stated goal for this year is to lose some weight. However, I don't find this an especially interesting topic. Anyone who has ever read the blog of a dieter knows that it's something that's really only interesting to the dieter. And weight loss is slow. We're designed to add pounds, and the human body is really loathe to take them off again. You decrease your calories to any extent, your body is going to freak out and go into starvation mode, refusing to lose weight, as we're apparently genetically programmed to mistake any amount of hunger as evidence of a famine. If you really want to keep the weight off, you're going to look to lose, at most, a pound a week. That just doesn't make for scintillating writing.

Additionally, losing weight is not especially fun. It can hurt. The stomach cramps, and sends out desperate messages, often late at night, waking the dieter up in an adrenalin-induced panic. Dieters rebound, gaining back the weight they've lost, and more. Or they simply plateau, their bodies apparently sick of losing weight and petulantly refusing to lose any more. Dieters become obsessed with the scale, constantly hopping on and off it, jotting down whatever the scale reads. Ugh. I bore myself even describing it. Imagine how dull it is to read it. Imagine how dull it is to live it.

Well, I won't be doing things that way. I refuse to start counting calories. I refuse to weigh myself. I refuse to trade out my current approach to eating for one read in a book: Atkins, say, or, I don't know, the grapefruit diet. Or excessive mastication, although Horace Fletcher's approach to dieting is at least a little novel.

No. This is what I shall do. I shall make small changes to my eating habits, eliminating things that aren't especially good for me or adding in things that are better for me. I shall do this one at a time, and only mention it when I do it. Then I shall not bring the subject up again, until I make another change in my diet. I won't concern myself with how much I weigh at all. This approach should cause me to lose weight without my having to think about it. I should just start looking thinner at some point, although it will probably take some time, and so what? It took time to gain the weight. I can take a little time to lose it.

So today, Monday, February 4, I am giving up soda. Just giving it up. I've done it before, and gone without the stuff for months and months. It's just not very good for you -- high in calories, bad for the teeth, bad for the bones, bad for the digestion, and a high sugar diet tips the body's pH level in a direction that encourages fungal infections, and, ew. Who wants that?

So goodbye, soda. I hate to break things off so abruptly, but, as much joy as you might bring me, you're just not worth it. You're very sweet, but I just feel better when you're not around, and that's not balanced out by the brief pleasure you give me. If I want to drink for fun, there's always alcohol. And, on occasion, I might break my ban on soft drinks for a really good cocktail recipe. Because we have to be reasonable about this, don't we?

I DISCOVERED this Gocco print while putzing around on Flickr one day, a gorgeous representation of the spectacular signage for Minnesota's Cottage View Drive In, based on this photograph. I immediately contacted the artist, known as e50e, (I've only been able to figure out her first name, Erin) and ordered a copy.

I have a great love for American signage of the Fifties and Sixties, and I tend to take pictures of them whenever I see them. So I found this print irresistible.

More from The Sparber Gallery.

EVERY SO OFTEN I get a hankering for some Yiddish. I'll go into detail about this later, but suffice it to say that the Yiddish language, and the secular culture that grew out of it, is my only ongoing connection to Judaism. I'm not a religious fellow, and can't recall the last time I went to a synagogue. I've never been to Israel, and am one of the current generation of Jews that isn't rabidly Zionistic. I was adopted by a family whose background was Eastern European Jewry: Belarus, Poland, and Moldova.

Many American Jews have a similar history. And I was probably more immersed in the experience of American Jewry than most: I went to a Jewish high school, and I spent several years working on a degree in Jewish Studies. And yet, when we learned about the Jews of Europe, it was almost exclusively in the context of the Holocaust. An important topic, certainly, but Jews were in Europe from about the 10th century on, and it seems a shame to only study the Jews of Europe at the moment of their destruction. Otherwise, especially at classes offered by synagogues, we tended to learn about Judaism in relation to Israel, both in ancient history and in the modern State. It was as though Jewish history had stopped at the siege of Masada and only really picked up again when Hitler rose to power. Further, a lot of what we learned about the Holocaust was framed as a pretext to the founding of the State of Israel.

Admittedly, there were some glimpses, here and there. We sometimes heard about the Golem, a fantastical creature made out of clay, who was supposedly brought to life by Rabbi Judah Loew, a 16th century rabbi who lived in Prague. But we often learned about it while studying antisemitism, and, again, this was tied into a long, unspoken narrative that cast the entirety of the Jewish experience in Europe into a series of antisemitic uprisings that eventually led up to the Holocaust. The day-to-day experience of European Jews was rarely explored, except if you wanted to watched Fiddler on the Roof, which, you might recall, ends with a pogrom and an entire village packing up and leaving for America.

I'm interested in the Jews of Europe when they weren't getting beaten by their non-Jewish neighbors. I'm interested in the culture they developed around Yiddish, and brought to America with them. I've studied up, on and off, about Yiddish theater and music. I'm especially interested in the Jews who moved into organized crime in Europe and America, or worked in carnivals, or as boxers, or other low-rent professions. And there were a lot of them, and their story has been left behind.

It's a pretty big subject, but I thought I'd start simply, with Yiddish songs. I've decided to teach myself about a song a week, for as long as it interests me, and then I'll move on to some other Yiddish related project.

Here's my first song, in video form. The title is "Di Mama iz Gagangen," and the lyrics are as follows:

Di mame iz gegangen in mark arayn noch koyln,
Hot zi mir gebracht a yingele fun Poyln.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mit di shvatse eygalach, ketsale du mayns.

Di mame iz gegangen in mark arayn noch kroyt,
Hot zi mir gebracht a yingele fun boyt.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mitdi vayse tseyndelach, ketsale du mayns.

Ich hob gegesn mandlen, ich hob getrunken vayn,
Ich hob gelibt a yingele, un kon on ir nit zayn.
Oy iz dos a yingele, a sheyns un a fayns,
Mit di shvartse heralach, ketsale du mayns.

Roughly translated, the song tells of a girl's conversation with her cat, in which she fantasizes about getting a gift of an attractive boy from her mother, who has gone to market.