Stay Positive: Caribbean Red Habanero

Over twenty years ago I grew Caribbean Red habaneros when I was a grad student at the University of Alabama.

It wasn't until this summer that I grew another Caribbean Red because I had never seen any around these parts in East-Central Illinois. I found the plants at a local place over in Mattoon, the family owned and operated de Buhr's Seed & Feed.   

The Caribbean Reds are twice as hot as a regular habenero. I made some salsa for my wife today, and I could tell a difference once I tested the sales to see if I got the seasoning right. 

The Caribbean Reds have more of fruity/citrusy quality than regular habaneros from my tasting. 

Regardless, I will be growing them again next season if de Buhr's has them again. 

Random Notes from a Crank

My home state of Iowa has become what my nephew, who is a political consultant, describes as "cold Alabama" from a political standpoint. It's been a red state for way too long in presidential contests, but I realized recently that Mississippi is more progressive than the Hawkeye State in one way. 

The Magnolia State allows medicinal marijuana, whereas Iowa does not allow it. Good Gods, even Missouri allows recreational use of cannabis.   

I'm not a smoker of the Mary Jane, but weed policies seem to be a bellwether of political leanings. And Iowa is going in the wrong direction. 

Out of nowhere, which was a surprise to fans and pundits, Tottenham signed Wilson Odobert as a winger in the transfer window. The young Frenchman is likely to play on the right wing behind Brennan Johnson. 

If the window is closed for Spurs, it's been a good one. However, I'd like to see them sign a center back who can also play left back because I assume Ashley Phillips will go out on loan somewhere even though I think Ange should keep him around with the first team. 

Random Notes from a Crank

 If you have a subscription to the New York Times, take time to read "This Is America" by Roxane Gay. 

Over a year ago, the Nasty family booked a vacation in Cancun for over the week of Thanksgiving. I feel a bit shameful about this, but we're still going. If we don't, we would just flush thousands of dollars down the toilet. And from what I gather, Cancun was one of the best places to take precautions for Covid-19 when the pandemic started. 

We've consulted all kinds of info about this trip, and from the sound of it, we're probably safer in Mexico than the United States, which is a sad commentary on how poorly America has dealt with the pandemic. 

Still though, I harbor a good bit of nervousness about the trip. 

Sometime this summer I need to take my family to Cahokia Mounds. 

Back when I was in graduate school, Mrs. Nasty and I visited the Moundville Archeological Park, which was really interesting. It's a smaller, more closely bunched set of mounds. 

Those Mississippians...

Which reminds me of this great song.

Random Notes from a Crank

I watch The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on a regular basis. I watch it so much that when I have the displeasure of hearing MoscowDon's voice, I tend to hear Colbert's funny impression of his voice when he imitates him. 

The Senate race in Alabama was a pleasant surprise. Doug Jones is the guy who put away the KKK members who bombed the church in Birmingham that killed four African American little girls. 

I find it good that Alabama, one of the reddest states on map, voted in a Democrat. When I went to school there from '98-'02, the Governor of the state was a Democrat. And I always thought that if African American voters were mobilized and they combined with the liberals in the state, young voters, and college-educated reasonable people, that more Progressives would get elected to office in the state. 

That happened, but it was way too close. 

Jones barely won by just over 10K votes. What does it say about conservatives that Roy Moore got that many votes? Even conservatives in the state recognize he's simply using religion to dupe people to vote for him. He was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court because of his bullshit. And of course, it seems clear he had/has a thing for young girls. What a creep. 

Random Notes from a Crank

I've had a cold for about a week or so. Yesterday I facilitated a workshop for two hours. Later that evening, my voice started to go. I'm all hoarse. Sounds like a bout of laryngitis, which I checked out on WebMD because I've never had it before. There appears to be no reason to go to a doctor because all that person will tell me to do is drink lots of fluids and rest my voice. I don't need to waste time in a waiting room and spend money on that advice. But this ailment will certainly challenge my work tomorrow night because I teach a class from 7 to 9:30. Time to teach with my mouth shut, which is what Donald Finkel argues for. 

"Roll Tide" is a wonderful expression, but apparently the librarians at one of the libraries on Alabama's campus have had enough of it being yelled in the library. 

I've shared this commercial before, but the phrase can serve as a floating signifier. 




I'm looking forward to two new releases this spring: English Oceans by Drive-By Truckers and Teeth Dreams by The Hold Steady. 

Tennessee Coal Ash Shipped and Polluting the Black Belt of Alabama

The coal-industry related chemical spill in West Virginia has received a lot of coverage. For other bad news related to coal, the article "Something Inside of Us" by Holly Haworth in the Oxford American details how Albert Turner Jr, son of the civil rights leader Albert Turner, cut a deal to ship tons of coal ash to the Black Belt of Alabama. 

He claims the money has helped the community, but by going by others' accounts, it hasn't done anything other than build a hotel. It's a tale of environmental injustice. 

Albert Turner Sr. words are used at the end of the piece: "The system is where the problem is, and we have not found enough black elected officials who are about changing the system. They want to sit in the same seat that [white power] sat in. That's all they want to do--take the seat that he had, but nothing about changing the whole structure so that the poor or oppressed people will be able to be more a part of this society."

Random Notes from a Crank

As I was driving home after picking up the kids the other day, I noticed a house for sale sign that I had never seen before. Often when realtors put their signs on the front lawns around here, marking their marketing territory, they'll often place an additional sign at the top that provides a positive feature of the property, such as "basement," "sunroom," and "family room." This house, however, offered this enticement: "investment." From the looks of the home, that word needs an adjective before it, such as "long-term" or "bad."

Wednesday night the Alabama softball team won the World Series. That's the Capstone's first National Championship in softball, and the Crimson Tide's win is the first time an SEC team has won the national championship in softball. It's been a great year for Crimson Tide athletics. The football team demolished LSU in the BCS national championship. The ladies gymnastics team won its sixth national championship. The ladies golf team won a national championship. Unfortunately, the men's golf team got second after losing to Texas on the last hole of match play. But now softball got theirs. Roll Tide.

I stumbled across the fact that we have the Documentary Channel via DirectTV. I've already watched documentaries on Levon Helm, Yogi Berra, and The Secret to a Happy Ending, the 2009 documentary about the Drive-By Truckers. And I have five or six taped in my DVR queue. Hello Documentary Channel -- Goodbye productivity.

My neighbor told me this morning that she scared two raccoons out of her year at about 4:30 a.m. One, she said, was quite big. We've had opossums in the neighborhood before, but this is the first incident with raccoons I know of. Those critters are smart and everywhere as evidenced by the Raccoon Nation documentary my son and I watched a while back. The Nature documentary tracked the movements of urban raccoons in Toronto and observed their behavior, tactics, and strategies. Impressive mammals.

Random Notes from a Crank

At a meeting yesterday, I learned that the profile I had when I entered college -- a first-generation college student and an Undeclared major -- would make the higher ups, the muckity mucks, consider me an "at-risk student." I found being undeclared making one "at-risk" a little odd, but local and national statistics provide evidence that those folks don't stick around for their sophomore years as often as the others. I find that metric kind of sad because the whole point of college, for me at least, was exploring different subjects and trying to figure out what I liked and wanted to do.  Because I was interested in psychology, history, sociology/anthropology, philosophy, English, classics, and education, it would have been silly for me to declare a major. Now that I think about it some more, some people -- like Admissions counselors and high school teachers -- sometimes would act a little funny when I would tell them I was an undecided major. While I understand many people see higher education as an avenue toward a job and, sure, they deserve a return on their investment, it's also important to explore other subjects other than just what's in one's major, especially since people are likely to change jobs more than ever nowadays. Or maybe that's just my liberal arts mindset talking...

As I've probably written before, I love small college towns in the summer. When a substantial portion of the nine-month population heads back to their original territories, the town I live in becomes quiet. Sure, we have summer classes, but the character of the town is different. The weather is helping too. It's been gorgeous here in east central Illinois.

Mrs. Nasty was surprised yesterday when I told I'd watch The Hunger Games movie with her. I haven't read the novel, but she loved it. I'm no avid moviegoer, but it sounds like interesting dystopian fiction, which I don't mind. But as for dystopian reality, I don't like that. Now we just need to figure out a date night and arrange a kid sitter.

Speaking of Mrs. Nasty, she has an idea for our back patio area that once had cheap lattice adorning it. I had to tear it down because of wind damage. Since we took off the old shutters and replaced them with new black ones (see Stay Positive below), she wants to try using the old shutters where the lattice used to be. She's going to paint four of the old shutters, and then she wants to rig them up to hang in that area using a eye and hook system and cabling. I don't know if it will work (I think it will), so we'll see what happens. We already have a bottle tree in the front flower bed that I'm sure some people find weird, so a decorative shutter system will be a nice compliment in the back yard. Because of this nascent project, on Monday I got to do some demolition work on the framing that held up the lattice. Tearing up stuff is fun.

As much as I dislike it when people put down Southern states based on Yankee attitudes, I think the article in Mother Jones -- "'It's Just Not Right': The Failure of Alabama's Self-Deportation Experiment" -- is a case study of, as some Southerners say, "the dog catching the car." Be careful about what laws and policies your legislators pass. Hear that, nitwits in Springfield?

With my dog not freely running around and patrolling the backyard because she's rehabbing from surgery to repair a cranial cruciate ligament, the squirrels and birds are no longer vigilant because she would chase after anything that was in the yard. When she's back on her game, she's going to be beating some squirrel ass back there. Or more likely, the neighbors will return to hearing her bark a lot.

Dressing Up for Games

This afternoon after a morning of writing and yard work and then more writing in the early afternoon, I turned on the TV to one of my favorite channels, the MLB Network. And MLB was broadcasting the fourth game of the 1969 World Series that pitted the Mets vs. the Orioles, of which I caught the last 15 minutes.

In the past, I've stumbled upon old pictures of baseball games and broadcasts of old games. And I've always been fascinated by how people used to dress up for sporting events. In the past, I had usually thought of that practice being firmly entrenched in our culture until the 60s came about.

So I was surprised when a Met hit a foul ball to the right field and I saw some shots of the stands, and there in '69 most of the men were in sport coats and ties, and the women were in dresses and some had fancy hats, at least in the lower echelons of the stands, the good seats. I didn't get to see the upper decks since I only caught the last part of the game.

Unlike games in the 40s and 50s, I didn't notice any men wearing hats, but in the late 60s, people were still dressing up for games. When did this practice of dressing up for game die out I wonder? When was the tipping point?

Nowadays at least, you have all kinds of people dressing for comfort, especially on college campuses where some students seem to revel in dressing like flippin' slobs. And when I've gone to pro baseball games in the past, fans are dressing "up" in their team's gear, not in coats and ties and fancy dresses.

The exception I can think of, however, is college football in the South ~ how people in Greek organizations dress up in formal attire for football games. It's a big deal. You'll see shaggy headed frat boys in sport coats and ties sweating away during games as sorority girls show off fashionable sundresses and outfits.

My one disclaimer is that I don't know if this is predominant across all of the South. I've just seen it first-hand at Bryant-Denny (Alabama) and Vaught-Hemingway (Ole Miss), and I've seen such attire being worn in the stands when I've watched games on TV played in Starkville, Athens, Auburn, Columbia, and Baton Rouge. I'm not clear on whether this Greek formal attire phenomena also happens at Kentucky, Vandy, Florida, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

Last Lecture Series

As probably many universities are doing now, the University of Alabama is doing one of those last lecture series. At UA, students submit votes on which professor they want to deliver a lecture, and that person presents at the end of the spring. This year's winner is a Professor of History who specializes in the antebellum period. Click HERE for a short PR blurb from the university if you're interested.

I really like this idea, especially how a person is selected by students. But there is a herd mentality that goes on with colleges and universities. The "one book ~ one college" phenomenon has been happening for a good while on college campuses, and those initiatives have sometimes strong and sometimes limited success depending on the book. At least with the last lecture deal, it's an honor, whereas the one book ~ one college concept has issues since students get tired of talking about that book by usually about midway through the fall semester. You get to, say, November and "That horse, he dead."

When I read or hear about a last lecture series though, I get a grin on my face because it reminds me of a story of the "senior lecture series" that my fraternity did one year before I had joined. At that series, all seniors would have to deliver a lecture at a designated party (I believe it took place at a house affectionately called "The Stove"), and they would have to present while standing on top of a keg. I'm told one of the best presentations by a fellow who eventually earned his PhD in Chemistry was titled "Chemistry, Beer, and You."

That's higher learning.

Yet I wonder how many professors would be willing to deliver an entertaining and thought provoking lecture while teetering atop a keg of the Beast.

Random Thoughts on Music

I was listening to Blind Melon's debut album today, and like other albums and songs out there, certain songs or bands rekindle memories.

When listening to Blind Melon, I recall the Gin Mill, its parties, Anchorman, and brotherhood. "Tones of Home" reminds me of Roy.

Songs from Gun 'n Roses provide multiple memories: "Paradise City" (theme for senior year homecoming), "Patience" (living with Chuck), and of course "Welcome to the Jungle." 

Camper Van Beethoven, R.E.M., and The Replacements remind me of high school. I listened to them a lot.

The Kudzu Kings & Blue Mountain recall Oxford, Mississippi in all of its splendor.

The Drive-By Truckers are quintessential Alabama--"Never Gonna Change."

The Gourds' version of "Gin & Juice" brings back a memory of when I was listening to the song at a stop light on Bryant Drive in Tuscaloosa and I noticed two frat boys in a 4Runner next to me smoking a huge Bob Marley joint. 

And Jay Farrar's "Cahokian" and "Feel Free" remind me of St. Louis because of the references.

(Not So) Good Day to Be a Music Fan

Both North Mississippi All Stars and the Drive-By-Truckers have new albums out. Those are very good things.

But speaking of other music matters, I'm still trying to adjust to the cruddy music stations around these parts. While I'm told there's a decent station up in Champaign, I'm rarely up that way. And most of the stations around here are either country or crap.

While EIU has its own college radio station, it's an odd duck. They call themselves "Hit Mix" (groan), and they tout that they play "all hits" from all decades. It's not uncommon to be driving in town and hear this type of lineup of tunes in succession: a George Jones song, a Lionel Ritchie hit from the early 80s, some classic rock, and a recent song from a pseudo-alternative band.

I will say that the station keeps a listener guessing, which can be interesting at times, but I pine for my days in T-Town ('98-'02) when I would hear on Alabama's college radio station this type of lineup of tunes in succession: the wonderful country version of Dr. Dre's "Gin and Juice," a live recording of Widespread Panic's "Makes Sense to Me," a Rage Against the Machine sonic diatribe, and "Banana Pudding" by Southern Culture on the Skids.

And I also miss the community radio station in St. Louis, KDHX.

Media consolidation has killed our chances of hearing good radio stations. Bastards.