Easy Rider

The Stealth 1000

She calls to me from her lockup in front of the house. She sings to me as I mix it up with the semis in the heart of town. Squirrels and birds in the road beware. We're upon you before you hear us.

My ten-speed sits where I put it last fall, tires flat, no doubt. Got new saddlebags for Christmas, but they're still in the closet.

I don't use a drop of gas or emit an ounce of pollution, but I don't get any exercise either. All I can say is, “Exercise is overrated.” It must be, because it can't compare to cruising pedal-free at 15 mph.

I get a charge out of this. And so does she...

Clown mower featured in film

Local clown portrayed in lawn documentary

Back in August, 2006, a Canadian film crew was in town to shoot footage of Mark Alexander, aka Biz the Clown, principal of the lawn-care business, Two Clowns Mowing. Their documentary, “American Savannah,” which according to co-director Jean-Francois Méan, “is about lawns as an expression of American culture,” is finally finished and will be screened at the Little Art Theatre on Saturday, June 7, at 4:30 p.m. Admission is free.

According to Méan, he and co-director/cameraman Ian Lagarde met Alexander in Oct. 2005 at a mowing expo in Louisville, Kentucky, where they were looking for ideas for their film. They had originally conceived the documentary some three years before they started filming. They began by writing proposals for funding to CBC and Tele-Quebec and eventually won an annual competition for documentary makers. They hope the final product will be aired on Canadian TV, cable TV in the U.S. and shown at international festivals.

The movie wends its quirky way from Lousiville, to Las Vegas, to Fenway Park in Boston, by-way-of Yellow Springs. Some nine minutes into the film, after interviews with an anthropologist and a lawn historian and footage of lawnmower racing, the lens is turned on Alexander, who, wearing his clown pants and red bulbous nose, is driving his truck with two cow clowns on the roof to a mowing job on Kingsfield Court. In the ensuing scenes we watch him mowing, loading the clippings into his truck and clowning on mowers with clown number two, brother-in-law Rob Hoffman.

Besides poking fun at Americans love of turf and “cellular complexification,” the movie also deals with such environmental issues as insecticides and water usage.

Asked about his new-found stardom, Alexander said, “It was pretty cool, them pickin’ me and everything.” He was happy enough with the outcome to ask friend, Little Art owner Jenny Cowperthwaite-Ruka to hold a sneak preview.

A life-long resident of Yellow Springs, Alexander started his mowing operation in the spring of 2006, because he felt he wanted to run his own business. The idea for the name comes from when he and his friend, Rocky Jones, were rebuilding an old truck ten years ago. On a whim, they started referring to themselves as “two clowns working on an old truck.” When Alexander started his lawn mowing business, he decided to honor his friend, who passed away in 2005, by calling it “Two Clowns Mowing.”

One year later, the name’s promise was fulfilled when Alexander hired the recently retired Hoffman to man the second mower. In addition to mowing, they do tree work, tilling, and snowplowing. Since the filming, the business has taken off, and he now has two trucks on the road and three full-time employees and has expanded to landscaping.

A dozen years ago, Alexander took a course in clowning. Since then he has been known around town as “Biz the Clown” and is often seen entertaining the children around town. It was just natural that he combine his hobby with his work, he said.

Eight years ago, he purchased the first of his cow statues at an auction at Young’s Jersey Dairy. It sat in his living room for five years, he said, before he affixed it atop the Two Clowns truck. The second cow was purchased Young’s auction a few years later, “because the first cow was getting lonely,” he says in the film. In spite of the clowning, Alexander is serious about the lawn care business.

“We’re local and we try to do a good job for people,” he said. “We need to retain our customers.”

(This article by Virgil Hervey appeared in the Yellow Springs News and is subject to any copyrights they might hold.)

Back Story

The norhtern border of Thailand with Myanmar

More from the trip of a lifetime: You may have seen photos of this arch on the news recently. The cyclone that devastated Burma hit just a few miles from this spot. We are pictured with the parents of the exchange student from Thailand we are hosting this year.

Bent Pot Turkey Chili (con carne)

Bent Pot Turkey Chili (con carne)

Ingredients (substitute freely):

2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 medium onion
salt
ground black pepper
garlic salt
Mexican chili powder
1 lb ground turkey
1 16 oz can stewed tomatoes
2 16 oz cans mexican chili beans
2 oz beer
Tabasco sauce

Preparation:

Peel and dice the onion roughly, allowing some larger pieces to remain. Brown in the vegetable oil in the bottom of an old bent pot, adding salt and pepper, mostly so the cook can enjoy the aroma this will produce. Careful – not too much salt as garlic salt will be added later. Once the onion is browned, add the ground turkey and brown it too, being sure to break it up into smaller bits. Once the turkey is browned, stir in the stewed tomatoes and all the liquid from the can. Cook for five minutes before adding the beans, as it takes longer for the tomatoes to soften . Stir in both cans of beans and all the liquid. Add a couple pinches of garlic salt. Cover the mixture with a layer of chili powder and stir it into the mix, then repeat this procedure at least once more, tasting to see if you will have to add more to suit your taste. Somewhere during this procedure you will want to add a couple dashes of Tabasco, also to suit your taste. Cover and let simmer on medium-low heat for one half-hour, then stir in the beer and cook for five more minutes.

Suggestion:

Open a bottle of beer when you start cooking and sip it throughout, being careful to leave two ounces for the recipe. If you accidentally finish the entire beer before it is time to add it to the chili, you will have to open and consume another. Repeat this procedure until you have successfully managed to get two ounces of beer into the mix. This last part explains how the pot got bent in the first place.

Grandma Maberino's Tomato Gravy

Grandma Maberino's Tomato Gravy
(“Tomato gravy” is what Italians from Brooklyn, NY call spaghetti sauce)

Ingredients (all amounts are approximate as my grandmother never measured):

3-4 tbsp olive oil
1 large onion
salt
ground black pepper
1 peeled clove of garlic
½ tsp garlic salt
1 tbsp dried oregano
2 tbsp dried basil
1 32 oz can of tomato puree
1 32 oz can of peeled tomatoes in puree
2 tbs sugar (my mother is rolling over in her grave)

Preparation:

Peel and dice the onion roughly, allowing some larger pieces to remain. Brown the onion in the olive oil in the bottom of a large pot, adding a dash of salt and pepper as it browns. Add the garlic, garlic salt, oregano and basil before adding the the puree and the tomatoes in puree. Stir in the sugar. You may want to add more to taste later. Simmer in a loosely covered pot for 2 ½ hours.

Confession:

My grandmother and mother never made this recipe without meat. When I decided to make a meatless version, I realized that to have some texture, I would have to chop the onion roughly and substitute a can of tomatoes in puree for one of the cans of puree. For the authentic version, dice the onion more finely, brown one pound of mixed beef and pork, finely ground, and use a second can of puree instead of the tomatoes in puree.

Serving suggestion:

Serve over spaghetti #8 (never use angel hair or fine spaghetti) and add liberal amounts of grated cheese (mixed Romano and Parmesan). For “Spaghetti La Luna” top with liberal amounts of shredded mozzarella cheese and melt in the microwave for one minute on high.

Note: My friend Vito from Queens once told me taht they call this tomato gravy there too. Then we hugged and called each other “gumba.”

Recommendation: See the movie “Moonstruck” with Cher, Nicholas Cage, Danny Aiello, and Olympia Dukakis.

Recipe: Joe's Fried Rice

Joe's Fried Rice (or the world's simplest known recipe):

Ingredients:

2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 medium onion
2 cups of cooked white rice
ketchup

Preparation:

Peel and finely dice the onion – brown lightly in the oil in a large skillet. Stir in the rice with a few dashes of ketchup – just enough to turn it a pink color. Cook for 5-10 minutes over medium heat. Do not cover.

Note: Joe used to cut our hair at Coast Guard Loran Station Miyako Jima. He also had a restaurant and supplied the local teahouses with black market food items, such as fried chicken, which he made like I have never seen anywhere else. He fileted a chicken leg, so the meat hung from the thigh end of the bone and fried it with the bones sticking up – kinda like a chicken pop. He has a saying that he repeated as he cut our hair, “In Miyako Jima everything grow tall, sugar cane grow tall, peter grow tall.”

Back from Singapore, Malaysia & Thailand

Sabu and Mona in Chiang Mai, Thailand

the saxophone player's daughter

used to smile and wink
at me when I took a solo
wore tight pants
when I would visit
her father’s house
had a smoky voice
on the telephone
was always in one
relationship or another
as was I, too many
missed opportunities
the time, never right

this was a bad day
to go driving
two days before Christmas
cars straddling the center line
left turns everywhere
on a foot of snow
melting in 35 degrees
I waterproofed my boots
smeared on lip balm
and drove for ten miles
but when I got
to the funeral parlor
the lot was empty
misinformed by one
of the other trumpets
I missed her
one last time

(12/96)

Appeasement

“I’m sorry I shot
those two raccoons
last year,”
I tell her.

“But you’re not sorry
about the hawk…”

I think about it.

“No, I’m not.”

It never knew
what hit it.
One minute it was alive,
the next it was nothing.
No trembling,
no death-throes,
as in the case of the raccoons,
not even a shudder.
It just remained
perched there
atop my favorite chicken.
My dead chicken.

Son-of-a-bitch!

We are looking out the glass doors
into the dark on the deck.
A raccoon
on its haunches
is watching us
in the kitchen,
its arms outstretched,
its eyes
as sad as Zorba.

In the dark behind it,
sits the coop I built,
locked up tight
against the coons,
the skunks,
and the weasels.

I toss him
some stale hamburger buns,
An offering
of sorts.

They were supposed to be
for the chickens.

02/15/08

The power of eight

I have eight chickens in a coop that was designed for six. Don’t ask – it’s a long story.

To accommodate my two newcomers, I added a second roost and a second egg laying box. However, they have eschewed the new roost all together, with seven of them crowding onto the old one at night and one silly bantam sleeping in one of the laying boxes below. The banty is broody most the time and spends much of the day in there as well.

That leaves one laying box for seven hens. So there is often a cue of uncomfortable ladies waiting their turn. It looks like the line for the ladies room at a rock concert. Every now and then one of them will lose her patience and peck the comb of the banty until she finally gives up her place and angrily scurries outside.

I have thought about building an addition to the coop, but it took me the better part of a week to construct what I have. I can’t imagine the torture I would go through to add a second room. Besides, knowing my fussy flock, they probably wouldn’t use it anyway.

Except for foul weather, they spend their days outside scratching for bugs. The coop is like a barracks. What soldier in their right mind would hang around in the barracks when they didn’t have to? The problem is when it is time for taps.

As the sun starts to set, the smarter chickens go in early to find a good spot. The dumber ones, especially one in particular, will wait outside until it is almost dark. One of the meaner ones will invariably wait by the door and peck her as she tries to get in. As they finally begin to sort things out, the dumb one will be allowed entry, but will have difficulty finding an open spot on the roost.

Have you ever heard a chicken growl? As Dumb Dora pumps up and down telegraphing her intent to jump up and join the others on the roost, the six who are already settled in growl at her, as if to tell her, “Don’t even think of it, sister!” But of course she does and eventually squeezes in between two annoyed old biddies, who give her a peck for good measure. Then, as if to reinforce the entire pecking order, there is a flurry of clucking as they all peck each other one last time before dozing off.

The little chicken in the egg box is oblivious to the turmoil above her. She has learned from experience that the sky is not falling. She is no dumb cluck, after all.