It’s that time of the year again. As has become a tradition much maligned anticipated in our neighborhood, moiself is hosting a different Partridge, every week, in my front yard’s pear tree. [1]
Can you identify this week’s guest Partridge?
* * *
New Year’s Reflections [2]
I’ve come full circle, and perhaps another 45 degrees, on the whole New Year’s Resolutions Thing ®. As an adolescent I was intrigued by the idea of making New Year’s Resolutions – or at least I was the first time I heard an adult talking about it. Then in young adulthood [3] I thought, oh puhleeeease, what a crock. Whenever I was asked about my NYR‘s I’d reply that I had already, several years ago, made the only resolution I’d ever kept: to never make another NYR ( moiself’s past failed resolutions included, “Be taller,” and “Do not engage in audible eye-rolling when someone mentions their detox cleanse.” ).
Now, I think NYR are a fine idea. Yeah, resolve to “do better,” however and whenever you can and whatever that entails for you. Of course, you don’t have to wait for the start of a new year to do so, but after all, the world is full of arbitrary limits, guidelines and restrictions, [4] so what the heck.
Some of my resolutions for this year are more profound than others; all shall remain private, save for this seemingly hackneyed one which, if kept, has a good chance of turning out to be the most nourishing to body and psyche: Have more fun.
* * *
Department Of It is Too Early To Tell, But I Still Don’t Think It’s Working.
That it’s would be my father’s family tradition to ring in the new year.
☼ Hoppin’ John Spicy Collards and Black-eyed Peas Scramble [5]
☼ Green Chilie Corn bread
Yesterday moiself’s New Year’s Day menu (listed above) once again included a dish featuring black-eyed peas. I have done this for…decades, I guess. I do this in honor of my father and his heritage: specifically, his family’s tradition of eating black-eyed peas, collards and cornbread on New Year’s Day – an act of culinary optimism which was supposed to bring good luck for the coming year.
Despite consuming black-eyed peas every New Year’s day, my father’s family remained dirt-poor sharecroppers. [6] Every year, as I bring whatever black-eyed pea dish I’m making to my family table, I can’t help but wonder: just once, did a brave soul in my father’s family– possibly his adored, spunky younger sister, Lucile – when presented with yet another bowl of black-eyed peas and the directive to, Eat up, y’all, it’ll bring us good luck in the coming year!, look around at the ramshackle farmhouse and her barefooted siblings [7] and mutter, “It still ain’t workin.’ “
* * *
Department Of A Thing I Have Just Now Learned
Sub-Department Of WTF Is Wrong With Me, [8] Adjacent
To The Department Of Starting The Year With A Clean Slate
Dateline: last weekend; listening to one of Fresh Air’s year -end shows, when they replay some of their favorites of the year’s interviews/shows. This one was on the making of the now-iconic Bruce Springsteen song, “Born to Run.”
At the point in the show when FA host Terry Gross quoted some of the song’s evocative lyrics, I snickered to moiself, “That’s so funny – has Terry misheard that line, all these years, or is she being censored?”
I decided to look up the lyrics, for gloating purposes…and…
* apparently, someone was mishearing the line, all these years;
* apparently, that someone wasn’t Terry Gross;
* apparently, the line is indeed, as TG quoted,
“…baby this town rips the bones from your back,”
and not, as moiself has been hearing,
“…baby this town rips the balls from your back…”
* * *
Department Of May The New Year Educate These Abominable Twits
On 12-28 Suzanne Mathis McQueen, my right-on-sister friend who is also an author, entrepreneur, and feminist inspirational leader, [9] posted a most concisely articulate takedown of the right’s miseducation and hysteria re immigration. She was moved to do so in response to recent remarks made by Vice President J.D. “Jeering Doofus” Vance and top White House aide and racist policy formatter Stephen Miller – and oh please, ye deities who do not exist, ease the pain from having Vice President accompany the name of such a festering turd of political, spiritual, and educational fraudulence….
Once again, I digress.
Veep J. D. “Judgmental Dickhead” Vance, speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest 2025 in Phoenix, Arizona on 12/21, hyped up the slavering crowd of religious and racial bigots attending the event by claiming that, thanks to the current administration’s war on DEI, “You don’t have to apologize for being White anymore.” A few days later, top White House aide Stephen Miller, after chugging too much bootleg eggnog, [10] posted a batshit crazy anti-immigrant rant after watching a 1967 TV ( The Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra Family Christmas ), featuring two of the USA’s favorite entertainers at the time and – heads up Miller – both sons of first generation immigrant parents.
Really. I can’t make up this shit.
Here is SMM’s post ( my emphases ). The fact that those whom SMM addresses evidently lack the introspection and cognitive flexibility to consider (much less understand, or agree with) her lucid presentation in no way negates the observable truths she so forthrightly states.
Dear JD Vance:
No one’s asking you to apologize for being white.
I’m asking you to apologize for being so appallingly stupid about being white.
Dear Stephen Miller:
My guess is that you have zero percent indigenous (to this landmass) in you
– ya know, the folks who were on this continent for 23-30 THOUSAND years –
which includes the Mexicans.
Whenever your white family came to this land, from wherever they came, they did so to find a better life, which was no more than 400-ish years ago, or less.
Which means, like me, you are a descendant of immigrants.
And…if you came from these first immigrants, your family, as part of a societal group of immigrants, did not assimilate into the local culture. They took resources, were a burden on the local society, nearly wiped them all out, and cruelly forced them out of their lush homelands onto desolate land.
And if your family doesn’t come from these first immigrants, your immigrant family benefitted from what had been set up for them by the first ones.
Stephen, again, you come from immigrants.
Perhaps this is why you’re afraid of not-white people or other immigrants. Perhaps you’re afraid they’ll take back the land of their people, or not assimilate and instead conquer – physically or intellectually. Your fear lives steeped within your cellular memory of history – of not wanting the same to happen to you.
While we can’t change that history, humans are designed to grow and learn if they want to. We can create win-win immigration standards that serve, protect, and respect all.
Repeating history that caused harm is dangerously ignorant.
Repeating history that caused harm and claiming to love Jesus
all in the same philosophy, is blasphemous.
Jesus wasn’t a bigot. End of story. Let’s move on.
* * *
Department Of Maybe Next Year We’ll Tweak This Holiday Tradition
Background: Over the years several of moiself’s Jewish friends, acquaintances and/or coworkers/co-travelers, who told me that they were convinced that I was Jewish but “didn’t know it,” recommended that I go out for Chinese food on Christmas day. I decided that this was the year…so…where to go? When MH and I moved to Hillsboro [11] we were profoundly disappointed in the quality of the Chinese eateries available. [12] Eventually we stopped asking for recommendations from friends and neighbors, so as to not have to disappoint them later when they asked for our reviews. We’d moved up from the San Francisco Bay Area, and had taken for granted the plethora of outstanding Chinese restaurants (not, ahem, Chinese American restaurants ) available…and in our experiences/opinions, none of what Hillsboro (or even Portland) had to offer measured up to Jing Jing. [13]
Dateline: Christmas Day, 12:20 pm; getting ready for our 12:30p lunch reservations; donning my Yule season sock and shoe (singular this year – only my right foot can accommodate festive hosiery as the other is in a surgical boot).
My phone beeps; friend JWW texts me her season’s greetings, which I return.
Moiself:
“And Merry Christmas to you!
MH and K and I are about to celebrate our inner Jew and
go have Chinese food for lunch.”
JWW:
“Great idea. Where are you going to eat?”
Moiself:
” ( restaurant name redacted ). Haven’t been there in years.”
JWW:
“American Chinese. Let me know how it is. I miss American Chinese.”
One hour later, at the restaurant waiting for the check, I let her know.
Moiself (texting) to JWW:
“You *miss* American Chinese? Seriously?
I could make food just as bland and never leave home….
Actually, it’s pretty funny.
I ate all of my dish ( aptly described on the menu as tofu and vegetables with brown sauce, and although there was no discernible flavor, the sauce was indeed brown) because I was very hungry…
but this is some of the most boring food I have ever had.
I guess it’s a good sign when you’re at the type of restaurant where the server never bothers to ask you how things are, because then you don’t have to lie about the food, or say something like, “Well, it’s in my stomach….”
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
One of the many things moiself dares to hope that, in the new year, scientists like the late greats Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall will experience less of the “damage of gender harassment” and The Matilda Effect [15] (note that I am not wishing for a complete elimination of the gender bias – I’m not that naïve).
* * *
May you decide what kind of difference you want to make;
May that difference be the “luck” you make for the New Year;
May you have good luck no matter what you ate on January 1;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Specifically, in the pear tree daughter Belle purchased and (with the help of MH) planted many years ago
[2] As in, from the beginning of my blog of seven years ago.
[3] I think that should encompass ages 20 – 56.
[4] e.g. you are no more capable of making discerning political choices the day before your 18th birthday than you are the day of your 18th birthday; still, you can’t register to vote when you are age 17 years 364 days….
[5] What made John hoppin’ was the addition of black-eyed peas.
[6] Make that, “tenant farmers,” as sharecroppers was considered a pejorative label.
[7] My father’s parents couldn’t afford shoes for all six of their children, so as the elder kids got shoes they handed them down to the younger siblings. You got to wear shoes if there were a pair that happened to fit you. My father went to his proverbial grave not knowing that my mother had shared the story, with my sisters and I, of how our dad was embarrassed as a child when he showed up barefoot at school and was teased by the townie kids, who called him a dumb barefoot farm boy. And the shack house he was raised in literally had dirt floors in some of the rooms.
[8] Don’t answer that.
[9] As per her Wikipedia page, so there!
[10] Can you think of any other reason he made the connection?
[11] Thirty five years ago as of next month. Yikes.
[12] And not just in Hillsboro, even in Portland.
[13] Which closed after 38 years of business – they got priced out of downtown Palo Alto. DAMN.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[15] “Gender harassment…defined as disrespecting, demeaning, and deprecating women and their work, abilities, and accomplishments, simply because they are women…is by far the most prevalent form of sexual harassment in academic science…. (Rosalind) Franklin…is among history’s most prominent subjects of…the Matilda Effect: the practice of ascribing women’s accomplishments to men. An expert in x-ray crystallography, Franklin led the team that created what has been called ‘arguably the most important photo ever taken,’ the celebrated Photo 51, which revealed the helical structure of DNA. When the structure was published in 1953, however, Franklin…was not among the authors. Her crucial contribution was mentioned cursorily at the end of the article as having ‘stimulated’ the authors, James Watson and Francis Crick…who, with their paper, gained priority as discoverers…. Comments from Watson and Crick reveal the gender harassment that Franklin endured in the lab. Throughout The Double Helix, Watson’s famous 1968 book recounting the race to the famous structure, Watson condescendingly refers to Franklin as ‘Rosy,’ a nickname never used to her face. ‘There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents,’ he writes, though neglecting to critique his male colleagues’ cosmetic or sartorial choices…. He adds that her ‘belligerent moods’ interfered with Wilkins’ ability to ‘maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA.’ For that reason, ‘[c]learly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person’s lab.’ In the 1993 book Nobel Prize Women in Science, Crick was quoted as saying, ‘I’m afraid we always used to adopt—let’s say, a patronizing attitude towards her.’ ” ( Excerpts from ITAL Rosalind Franklin and the damage of gender harassment, by Beryl Lieff Benderly, science.org 8-1-18 )
