WhimsyLand

So I'm making potato-leek soup listening to Jackson Browne's The Pretender which, in part, could serve as the soundtrack for An Inconvenient Truth, but 30 years earlier on the job. 

Junie and I had potato-leek soup at a small, excellent and reasonable restaurant in Breckenridge called Relish and I'm trying to replicate it, including the roasted red peppers that were mentioned in the waitperson's spiel.

But, I digress.  I was living in LA when I first heard it and connected with:

I'm going to rent myself a house
In the shade of the freeway
I'm going to pack my lunch in the morning
And go to work each day
And when the evening rolls around
I'll go on home and lay my body down
And when the morning light comes streaming in
I'll get up and do it again

Cath makes excellent potato-leek soup, so I have a call into her.  I've also combed through my Cook's Illustrated back issues and googled up another dozen recipes.  Curious, as Ollivander intoned to Harry.  Cook's illustrated calls for 5 pounds of leeks to meld with a mere pound plus of potatoes.  Surely, that can't be right, unless they mean 5 pounds before cutting off the green stalks.  One recipe has you getting the leeks and potatoes in chicken broth, and brewing up.  Another has you doing something similar, but Cuisinarting it all into chunkless sustenance.  I know that the recipe from Relish was saltier and smooth.  Also, I'm thinking that a few thread of saffron would do wonders.  I'll tell you how it turns out.

Oh, my.  NPR reports that World Weekly News will soon issue its last printed edition, and then be Internet-only.  As Scott Simon noticed, WWN is not a parody like The Onion, it is pure comedy:  Aliens serve in the Senate.  BatBoy fights in Iraq.  A man finds 120 pounds of lint in his bellybutton.  That kind of thing.  I stopped at Safeway to get my hands on the last issue.  Here's the highlights:  France is producing edible comic books!  The US government has funded two men to actually dig a tunnel to China!  Researchers in Java have discovered an amazing new breed of Merpeople!  The International Library of Poetry says you could win $10,000 for your poem!  Spacemen are abducting bathing beauties!  Lester the Typing Horse tells us why fiber is necessary!  When I used to drive Der to New Vista, a charter high school in Boulder, I would first pick up a WWN and we would do the Bigfoot crossword puzzle together.  I'll miss seeing WWN in the supermarket checkout aisle.

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OK, I admit it's a difficult segue to the Colorado Review, but I did receive one today.  Mainly because Stephanie G'schwind always writes this nice note on the re-up notice, and how are you going to ignore that?  This month has fiction and essays I actually want to read (including the ubiquitous Floyd Scoot, whom I once included by name in a poem), and poetry that seems, strangely, more balanced and interesting as time goes on.  This time the poetry editor is Donald Revell, and I don't know what happened to Jorie and it's probably impolite to ask.  There was very little work that I didn't like, but the most interesting included:

Molly Bendall, A Home Never Tried:  "If I listened to the truant weather, then I'd know / what to pull from your head"

Joseph Capista:  History of the Inevitable:  "Fire wants to be ash ... // The bucket wants to be the moon ... // The trees envy the slow moving cow".

A.E. Clark, One-Sided Conversation:  "i say, on a tough ocean an archipelago can't help // but yearn // for the continent before"

James Cushing, The Scar Giver:  "I tried each pen, and found I wrote truth with not one of them."

Jessica Fisher, Looking For You In The OED:  "More like an angel than architecture now,"

James Galvin, Stop Whimpering and Speak:  "..// My love is the death of kisses, I live / with her apart in the wind of constancy".

Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, From Figures For A Darkroom:  "A swallow fits across the painting, gets tangled, breaks like a / key in the lock".

MC Hyland, Propaganda Suite (selected by GC Waldrep for the AWP Intro Journals Project):  "Look out, Chairman!  There's a tiger everywhere!"

Craig Morgan Teicher, Eye Contact:  "As if bees are known for their pride, / But what's so great about horses? ..."

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I've been watching a lot of The Fairly Oddparents on my morning treadmill routine.  Very funny, and a lot of camp allusions.  See you tomorrow.

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Post Scriptum:  I've realized that the longer you post on your blog, the less it is entertainment and the more it is confession.