Every year the great State Fair of Texas comes up with new things to deep fry. The mind boggles. Chicken fried twinkies were last year's delight.

Fried everything! We'll gain weight just being 20 or so miles from the fairgrounds!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/27/AR2007082700305.html

I never known such a bunch of people so easily side tracked by the mention of food! Chicken fried bacon for cryin' out loud. When I was at Crop Redy, I made dirty eggs wrapped in flour tortillas with fresh avocado Guac on the side (they couldn't believe I left the pit in the bowl as I was squeezin' the lemon). Those UK people acted like they had never experienced such a thing as Huevo's Ranchero's in the mornin' before and they thought I was crazy the way I whooped them up at a camp site (and they call American's barbaric?) I noticed they wolfed them down. Hell, they had never seen anybody roast peppers on an open flame before? Next time I'll make'm some ranch style beans and jalepeno corn bread (with buttermilk, cream corn and loads of cheddar cheese)...that'll get'm feelin' confused!

i never did forget about that jalepeno corn bread! i was going to bring it up earlier but i got all confused when i read about the chicken fried steak!

I'd just like to know who the guy was that taught the chickens how to fry the steak and the bacon. I wonder if it was the same guy that taught the dogs to smell airplanes?

http://www.polishchooks.com/chooks_gallery.html

I will not mention the National Chicken Bones reading HooDooVooDoo woman!

PSB....The BlunderChooks are feeling like Plain Janes after seeing that lot! Poor BlunderChooks.

Hey one of my workmates just got back from a trip home to visit family in her native Ontario. She brought me back a huge jar of Welch's Concord Grape Jam.......yum I had a BIG peanut butter (no sugar no salt of course)and grape jam sandwich when I got home from work. Heavenly and a real treat for me as I don't eat peanut butter and jelly much. OH and she also brought me a jar of Presidents Choice Pure Canadian Maple Syrup. WE get Log Cabin over here so it will be interesting to try a different one. I guess I'll have to ask my beloved to cook some of his heavenly pancakes on the weekend so we can try it.

i do love good corn on the cob!

that thing about roasting peppers over the fire reminded me of some time ago my dad telling me about a lady who had come by the house wanting to raise awareness in the neighborhood about some environmental issues and pointing out ways to liive as simply as we can you know, it makes sense, but there is my dad that day with a fire in the woodstove and a piece of meat on a stick roasting it over the fire in the living room (i imagine the lady might have felt like she was on candid camera)
the visit seemed to have gone well??

okay, see ya later...

Did he have marshmallows too? Roasted marshmallows are pretty nice. All gooey and crunchy at the same time.

i kind of don't think so...but i wonder now if maybe they weren't all sitting around somewhere roasting marshmallows when they came up with the name krispy kreme? i don't go for doughnuts much but that name always tempts!

Remind me of the old Krispy Kreme donut place on Broad St in Richmond. My dad & I would go there & get a donut & coffee.Yum. He'd only let me have on donut claiming if I ate more than one it was bad for my health. Never did keep me from getting bad health tho lol...

Wasn’t much sleep last night,.two dimensional chaotic dreams. Two dimensional dreams, just veneer really. Spectator dreams, like watching TV in your head. Spectator? TV? Me and the world. Dreams are like a flood of images, a great construction, a painting…the best is when you break the plane and become part of that different reality, reality that is only in your head. That is dream satisfaction. Only then do you separate the mind from the cataloging process. That is the brain, a time filter. Time exists in light (for most of us). Stray bits of light filling our brains with images, images. Perception, sound, taste, smell touch, all these things are echoes of time. The passage of time is forever linked to light. The light and the echoes and vibrations it creates fill the head, the great receptacle of time, with the sensations that are all digitalized so the brain can perceive reality. The speed and resiliency of reality surfing is astounding. It all seems so simultaneous but it can’t be. The brain has to be using a prediction process of some sort. The inputs all have to be predicted with differential rates (the prediction of visual inputs is more rapid than sound or taste inputs, etc).Then you think about a continuous segment of coordinated input. A sentence, “That is no man that is my wife!” or ”I like the color tenor!” If these sentences were spoken rapidly you might hear but the comprehension would be uncertain because the endings aren’t predictable. Perfectly reasonable sentences, just not quite predictable.

So why dreams? Dreams are the time the brain hangs a closed for maintenance sign on the eyes. Now I wonder how the brain chooses to maintain? Beyond just the question of filing and recall and how the daily reality perception system rapidly retrieves material for thought and abstracts, but the long term image recall dream inducing activities

The notes of one observer suggest neural echoes. Sounds cool doesn’t it the neural echo! If you take a mouse and subject him to sudden free fall (mouse on a roller coaster) and monitor the response of the brain you get a strong electrical response (no surprise). This observer says there is a continuing neural echo even after the “free fall” has passed. Same neural response just keeps echoing for a while. The neural echo. So one evening as the sun was setting in Cornwall and we were striking up a fire. I opened up my brain echoes on fires and a giant composite over whelmed my thoughts. All the camp fires and cookouts of the past 50 years and the stories they stimulated. I wondered if this echo firing is the root of the conscious. If I would break it down into units of time, you know, I mean the brain is a time filter after all, if I broke it down, how would it look?

Input: Fire...(time passing in picoseconds) danger, hot, get back, keep others back....(nanoseconds pass)…control (who has it? me or the fire)…this is my fire…what have I got to burn?.....(microseconds pass) ..images of fires past begin…grandfather by fire…brothers by fire….cross function fire echoes from times past with others by fire….cross function echoes…creating fire in the past…milliseconds more images related to fires past and a logarithmic increase in time filtered fire trivia goes through my brain. Before you know it, I went beyond my own images to conjured images of millennia of men with meat at fires…men living on everything from mastodon to field rats….and warning their kids of danger and burns from echoes of grandfathers past… it was all quite cosmic..this brain filter left me contemplating a full moon in the fire light.

I was outside the Pear Tree Pub one night and there was a bunch around drinking pints and talking. I remember there was one fellow there who was of Icelandic origin and he was talking about going to a music festival that had a lot of “World Music” performers. One of the big groups was that AfroCeltic World Experience (new age celtic/synthesizer/acoustic mix with pedal steels and lots of electric chakra chakra chakra)…Peter Gabrial was there..(he mentioned others I can’t recall) but he said he was fascinated by the North African / Moor drumming with electric guitars (walked into some small tent). He talked of how the music was mesmerizing…just the right mix of brain numbing rhythm and electric guitar fills to make that old time religious feeling come from yer brain. Instantly that made neural echoes in my brain of strings and things and fires!

I don’t know. I just went off into cosmic thought for a bit thinking of strings and things and brain echoes and farts and Boolean functions and strings of light and order and chaos and the endo the meso and the ecto and the first worm who folded them back in on each other. I must have been completely consumed and just looking out across the universe when this woman, a native to the Cotswald region, asked me “Do you have stars in America?” As I heard her words, I noticed the night sky, the full moon was days gone and the village had very little extraneous light and there were no clouds and I saw a billion stars shining in my eyes! I said, “Of course, we have Elvis!”

That left her with little to say? I remember she said to me (in a nice way), “I don’t really like the way Americans have bastardized English.” (not an attack, just a comment). I said, “well, I don’t really speak English, it is more of an Okie/American dialect you know.” Then Pete said,”American is a much more direct language than English. When there are English, American and other members of the human race whose native tongue is not English together, he said, they invariably comprehend American better than English. The English tend to speak around things where Americans will go straight for it.” (interesting observation I thought). Then the woman (I wish I could remember names) began stories of her 85 year old uncle. Typical stories of the old folks, short lucid periods and long periods when no one is home…complete with unusual, some might say, crazy, other would call it eccentric behavior. Then she said something you often hear about the old folks, she said something like, “you know, he is uncertain of what room he is in or what happened ten minutes ago but he can describe an event that took place 80 years ago down to the dust on the mantel.”

Then Jon said, “If you look on this plate of glass in this window you can see where a young man from the village inscribed his name before going to war in 1915 never to return.” I looked, and there reflected in the light of the pub I saw his name.

wow...the glass is still there after all that time!

it is funny about this remembering thing and the element of surprise and...
...there is always a hint of surprise even after all of this time of it being up there when i turn out the light and see the glow in the dark constellations and all among the stars on the ceiling, you know, using one of those stencil things to make it look more realistic (even though it did get a little sloppy towards the finish, but navigational issues are minimal, so it is fine) and some of that glow in the dark paint...talk about something causing you to have a tired neck,,,whew!

When do you know it's time to change the light bulb?

when the candle blows out!