Food, glorious food

What an awfully nice event... I did, in fact, manage to get to Il Fornello recently. Certainly, I didn't explain why, but here's the reasoning. In the effort to promote sustainability in our food chains, and support our rapidly diminishing agricultural sector, this restaurant has started a menu that is made EXCLUSIVELY out of Ontario produce - how exciting! This would probably compose the most exciting thing that I could think of that one could do for food.
At any rate, it was a fabulous dinner. Started with a chilled sweet potato soup, garnished with goat's cheese, had a rib eye steak (gasp! My first taste of cow in about 2 years! We even have photographic evidence of me ingesting cow! It was terribly anti-climactic - I had even forgotten what beef had tasted like, and I really can't understand what the big hoopla over beef is... though ordered and eaten, as it was from a farm that I know and trust, so now I'm good for another, oh, 5-10 years now...) with spring aspgaragus, finished off with a gorgeous strawberry shortcake (all the more sweet in knowing that the aspgaragus and strawberry seasons are within their very last gasps)!
Ironically, as much as I would've liked to have paired this meal with a nice Baco Noir or Cabernet, they didn't actually have Niagara wines available for purchase by the glass, which I found odd.
Highly recommended, if only to demonstrate that care for sustainability in our food chains is important to you...

Lawyers and high-hats

There's something magical about watching men in top hats and tails tap-dancing. Maybe I'm just a throwback to the Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire days, but there's just a je ne sais quoi to watching that kind of stage magic. It's the kind of hand-to-the-forehead, swooning, fan-yourself amazement that strikes you when you watch someone able to stylishly pull off a whole routine of the tappa-tappa-tappa in a tuxedo and still be smiling and singing till the end.... George and Ira Gershwin's My One and Only was a fantabulous show for those reasons... but then, I love that kind of stuff, so if you don't, then likely heading all the way over there likely isn't worth your time...
Also, if you're going to go eat, I think it's always wise to go with a lawyer. I'm just saying...

FFT

This shift has very deep consequences, for if youth no longer aspires to become adult and take the place of the fathers, and if the main motivation is conformity to the peer group, we might witness the death of a future-orientated culture or - to use a theological term - the end of an eschatology. Then we longer witness any desire to leave the safe place and to travel to the father's house which has so many rooms, any hope to reach the promised land or to see Him who is waiting for his prodigal son, any ambition to sit at the right or the left side of the heavenly throne. Then staying home, keeping in line and being in with your little group - becomes important. But that also is an absolute vote for the status quo.

- Henri Nouwen

Hollywood twaddle

Now, it's well known that I am totally not big on celebrity and blockbusters and the like, but, due my love and profound respect for some friends, I went to go see that Silver Surfer movie yesterday. Let's be clear: It's because I love my friends that I went - sometimes one will sacrifice much for love.
I am generally completely baffled by the entertainment industry: is it really that entertaining to have illogical, poorly conceived plotlines acted out by characters that have the depth of a microchip? As I was saying to someone yesterday, entertainment (and it's precursor, art) should be responsible. Art was (and is) always conceived to be the plumb line for the depths of the human condition, to encourage its nobleness, to exhilarate with its beauty, to lay bare the soul. This (sorry! but it's true) crap that gets churned out to be fed to the masses like some over-processed corn feed at the trough is not art, does not ennoble, does not elevate, does not make us better people. Brainless twaddle, it is.
I think someone much wiser than I put it better: "Finally, brothers (and sisters), whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things."
Sigh. Paul has such a way with words. Now that's art...

Tales from the ER

You know, it's been a long time since I've had to do any weird and wacky foreign body removals... the last notable one was probably two years ago when a certain young man told me the stereotypical story of vaccumming naked in his living room...however, I just removed a 3cm rock from the nose of a two year old... I don't think he was terribly happy with me, but the adults, myself included, were astounded by the size of the rock he managed to shove up there... who knew that there was such room in the nose of a child? who knew that the imagination of a child would be such that they would patiently push a rock THAT BIG into such a small nostril? Fortunately, he won't remember a thing, and, if I'm unlucky, I may see him later today with a Tonka truck or something up there... At least I got my first laugh of the day early...

Watoto

Who would've figured that I'd have caught a Ugandan children's choir in the middle of Bruce County? Funny that, when you see broad smiles and gorgeous faces, and you realize that they've lost mothers and fathers to civil war and to AIDS, and it just becomes heart-breakingly beautiful...

Around the World in 80 days....

My sister is currently on a motorcycle tour of Vietnam, and boy, am I jealous! I do realize, of course, that likely between the two of us, we will probably manage to get to all the countries of the world, but I am still very down on the fact that I'm not riding through the paddy fields of southeast Asia...

Happy eating

OK, you know where I want to eat next? Il Fornello. Consider yourself warned...

FFT

We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside... but one we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.
- The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King

Hawaii-Five-O

When my parents visited Hawaii, they returned with, unfortunately, some of the most ghastly Hawaiian shirts this side of the Pacific... which, I had thought (or maybe vainly hoped) would be a souvenir, a memento of some sort. Not so! When my father appeared wearing a turquoise (turquoise!) shirt with magenta (magenta!) orchids, blooming with bright yellow stamens like there's no tomorrow, with (non-)matching blue track pants, announcing he was going to go for a walk, I was completely flabbergasted. Had my father lost colour vision? Perhaps the macular degeneration had just been tipped over the edge? Maybe he had had a small stroke that prevented him from seeing himself? It was a horrifying, stereotypical Asian-father-mowing-the-lawn vision.
At any rate, I didn't stop him, despite the fact that my jaw was dragging along the floor of the kitchen... this does, however, perhaps explain my utter lack of fashion sense as well...

Obviously, I need a little help...

I did a quiz recently to figure out which theologian my views most closely align to: Apparently, I scored most in line with a guy named Anselm, Karl Barth and Martin Luther.... I'd never even heard of Anselm before, and, to be completely honest, I don't really know what the distinct theological viewpoints of the others are (though I am sure that I agree with most of Luther's points, except for the anti-semitism)... weird...

Out of curiosity...

I know I've mentioned this before in the context of North Bay, but I am noting that I am getting regular readers out there from places and times that I didn't think were possible... Some of you, I know for sure, are regular avid readers, which is great, but I haven't been able to pinpoint who the other ones are... are you able to come out of the woodwork, just so I know who you are? If you'd like to remain anonymous, that's cool, it's just that I'm curious...

Locked in the space-time continuum

I must say, one expression that I have using a lot of late has been: "three-dimensional space and linear time", which, of course, is the nature of the constraints in which we live and breathe. Which, of course, has great impact on how we understand time and space (duh). In discussions about heaven and hell, judgement and mercy, love and relationship and mountain-moving change, it is sometimes hard to wrap one's mind around the idea that we have a really hard time thinking outside of that box. Praise God that we don't have to, and He DOES. Which makes the whole idea of life very reassuring.

FFT

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church's prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.
-Soren Kierkegaard

FFT

This may come as a surprise to you: Christianity is not an invitation to become a moral person. It is not a program for getting us in line or for reforming society. It has a powerful effect upon our lives, but when transformation comes, it is always the aftereffect of something else, something at the level of our hearts. At its core, Christianity begins with an invitation to desire.... Christianity has nothing to say to the person who is completely happy with the way things are. Its message is for those who hunger and thirst- for those who desire life as it was meant to be. Why does Jesus appeal to desire? Because it is essential to his goal: bringing us life.... When it comes to the moral question, it is not simply whether we say yes or no to desire, but always what we do with desire. Christianity recognizes that we have desire gone mad within us. But it does not seek to rectify the problem by killing desire; rather, it seeks the healing of desire, just as it seeks the healing of every other part of our human being.
- John Eldredge

More baby-catching

So far on this shift (which, admittedly, is over in about four hours), I've had a 75% C-section rate, which is wayyyy beyond the national average... sigh... why can't women just have normal births anymore? Oh wait, I know the answer to that one...

Fallen comrades

Tragically, one cardiac surgeon, one pediatric cardiothoracic fellow, as well as four others on the organ transplant team from the University of Michigan, have had their plane crash en route to retrieve organs for a patient. Even though I am totally not smart or brilliant enough to have anything to do with organ transplantation, it still is poignant when one of your own dies 'in the line of fire', doing what we usually do.

Food for ingestion and digestion

I was talking with a friend the other day who, surprisingly to me, told me she was reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. That made me sooo happy! Now, I had read that book a few months ago, but I must say: it's brilliant. I believe I told my friend that it seemed to encapsulate most everything that I felt about food, to be honest. So, this is a plug for a brilliant book - go and read it! And, if you don't want to buy it or steal it, then ask real nicely, and I'll lend it to you! This would be particularly helpful if you've been scratching your head trying to figure out what the heck I'm usually ranting about on the issues of food and agriculture...

Iiiii wanna beeee..... (with apologies to Delirious?)

I am very puzzled by the notion that a Jesus-person would not want to be an eternity-maker... it doesn't seem to make sense to me, that they could somehow exist as two separate entities one from the other... hearing that assertion that sometimes, maybe we wouldn't want to participating in making this creation a better place, in helping bring about justice for widows and orphans, in bringing a voice to the voiceless, that we would want to be normal, and safe, and fade into the background... that just seems odd and out of place, and frankly, inconsistent, to me...