Red Monkey

May 4, 2008

More Drew Moss practicing

After the vampire Batgirl the other day, I decided to practice the rest of Drew Moss' excellent page.

So, here's the center three panels:

No more rats for her. It's strictly bag lunches from now on. Yum.

She doesn't like to fight but happens to excel in it.

The Bat gives her a bracelet that feeds her hunger. He says it will make her normal but she is always hungry.

I think I'll try the rest of the panels later on this week or next ...

However, there's a slew of things bubbling up this week, so I'm not sure whether I'll have time or not.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:48 PM | Comments (2) | Sketches | Stumble

May 1, 2008

The Island Who Lost Its Name

It's true, Virginia, there really IS a Lesbos.

Seriously. It's a Greek island just off the coast of Turkey, near Ayvalik (which was a Turkish city filled with Greeks until about 1922). Today, it's often referred to as Mytilini - which is actually just the name of the island's capital.

And, they want their name back. They do not wish to be residents of the isle of Mytilini (which sounds vaguely Italian anyway), they want to be ...

Lesbians.

Wait, wait, wait. That came out wrong. ACK! Not "came out" like "came out of the closet" ... I mean, it didn't sound ...

Oh bollox.

It's simple. Waaaaaay back in the 7th century B.C., there was a woman named Sappho. She wrote poetry. Love poetry. Sappho lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. She wrote love poetry to women. Hence, Sappho was a Lesbian lesbian. Or was she a Mytilinian lesbian? Maybe she was bi, we just don't know. At any rate, somewhere along the line, instead of being accurate and calling women who write love poetry to other women Sapphians, which would have been more accurate, they called them lesbians. And then, of course, they attached the word to females who were attracted to other females, instead of being more precise and only referring to women who wrote poetry to women as Sa - I mean lesbians.

So it's quite obvious that the entire process of naming women who happen to be homosexual as lesbians has been very much botched from the beginning. Or at least since the 7th century B.C. Or, to be more precise, B.C.E. (before the common era).

At any rate, the people of the island sometimes called Lesbos and sometimes called Mytilini would actually like to be called Lesbians now. Never mind that there are plenty of people who would prefer to NOT be called a lesbian, these people would like their name back.

It's been badly misused by the media in the United States. All throughout the 1980s, any news story involving Sharon Gless using began in this way: A crazed lesbian broke into Gless' home or perhaps Gless has taken out a restraining order on the crazed lesbian who broke into.

And anyway, why bother to divide the gay community into "gay men" and "lesbians" anyway? Shouldn't the gay community try to band together and show their numbers instead of subdividing into minute special-interest groups? What if the civil rights movement of the '50s and '60s had subdivided into Africans, half blacks, quadroons, Baptists, Catholics, etc, etc, etc?

I say, let the island of Lesbos have their name back. I don't want it, anyway.

Now, if the Dutch start demanding "dyke" back, we're gonna have problems ...

You can read the BBC article here.

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:46 AM | Comments (9) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

April 30, 2008

Ye Olde Family Recipe

We interrupt this program to bring you ...

... a cooking show. I know, I know.

I have never been a big one for cooking. It's usually long, involved and tedious (at least when your attention span for such things is about that of a hyperactive gnat). However, there are a few recipes that I'll suck it up for.

Koogali, is our one "old family recipe." I used to think that we also had a pecan pie "old family recipe" and a chocolate cake "old family recipe." The pecan pie recipe is apparently the standard Karo syrup recipe, and my grandmother's SCRUMPTIOUS chocolate cake recipe (coming from someone who doesn't really like cake) is really just Texas Sheetcake made in a 9x13 pan instead of a sheetcake pan. (No nuts in the icing, please. I like nuts, just not in this recipe. Besides, they tend to make the roof of my mouth itch. Wha? I keep telling you my body is NOT wired like normal people's bodies ... oops, I've digressed again, haven't I?)

My grandmother's family came to the U.S. from Lithuania. I cannot for the life of me remember if Grandma Rosie was born in Lithuania or the U.S., however. The Americanized form of the surname became Kalasky (and if you've watched Rugrats, you can probably guess that I enjoy pretending that I'm related to Arlene Klasky), but no one seems to recall what the original last name was. Makes it kinda hard to trace our roots back to the old country. The one really big thing that was passed down was our Koogali recipe.

We had this every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was usually a family production to get it made. I usually proposed that we didn't need a ham or turkey or whatever, that we should just make a meal of the Koogali. Sadly, I was always shot down.

What is it? Well, the short form is that it's a Lithuanian potato dish. Serious Old Country cooking, mind you. Bacon and potatoes and an onion. Then, my other half discovered a few years ago, that it's actually spelled Kugelis ... the link goes to Wikipedia's recipe. Turns out, it's the national dish of Lithuania. Eh, who knew? The name means "flat potato dish" and that about sums it up.

Here's our recipe, complete with photos of the process. Keep in mind, you have to process the potatoes VERY quickly once you've peeled them or they begin to turn brown. It's not that they go bad that fast, but it doesn't look as appetizing and it can affect the flavour.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of bacon (I used low salt this time around - didn't notice a difference, really)


• 4 eggs


• some starch (old world recipe, remember? this equals a palmful to me


• 1/2 of a large onion


• 1 T sugar


• handful of white flour (your guess is as good as mine)


• 6-8 large potatoes


• 1 1/2 cups of milk


• 1 teaspoon of baking powder (NOT baking soda, Chelle)

Fry up all the bacon and then save the grease. I told you this was an old world recipe, right? You should cook the bacon until it's pretty darn crispy rather than chewy. You're going to be breaking the bacon up and it's easier to do if it's crispy. It's gonna wind up soft when it's baked inside the mixture anyway, so you might as well make the shredding part easy on yourself.

Cut up the onion and fry it in some of the bacon grease. I used a shortcut of pre-cut red onion this time. We usually use the white onions, but I like the stronger flavour of the reds, myself.

Next, beat the eggs until they're foaming, then add the sugar, milk, starch, flour and baking powder. Mix this really well.

Now comes the tricky part. You need great timing here and that's why we usually had a slew of family members in the kitchen working on this.

Peel the potatoes and then grate them. You have to do this quickly so they don't turn brown, but if you have about 3 or 4 people doing the grating, it goes fast enough - this is definitely the best way to do it. If you don't have enough people to do it this way, you can use a Cuisineart to "grate" the potatoes, but the texture of the finished product is not as good. Look, I'm not one for the finer details like texture, but even I can tell the difference between the cheat method and the grating method. Grating rocks.

Since I was making this alone, I had to use my bitty tiny Cuisineart. Which is fine, because as you can see, we have a bitty, tiny kitchen as well.

Gotta stop here for a funny story. One of my mom's cousins was making Koogali one year. He was doing it mostly from memory and he SWORE up and down that they had to boil the potatoes first and then grate them. His wife looked at him like he had lost his fricking mind. He insisted, "That's how we've always done it." So they boiled the potatoes and then burned their damn hands trying to grate the things.

There, that bit of family history is now preserved for the ages. Grate boiled potatoes! LMFAO

Oh, you should probably flip the oven on now. Preheat to 350 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Anyhow, I had either five or six of the biggest damn potatoes I have ever seen. I'm telling you these were frigging TEXAS sized potatoes. Normally it's 6-8 large potatoes. I peeled them, cut them up into pieces the teeny tiny Cuisineart thing could handle and put those pieces in water to keep them from turning brown. As you do this, you'll notice the water turning murky-white. This is normal, it's starch leeching out of the potatoes (which is why you put starch in the liquid mixture earlier). Here's the shredded potatoes:

And you can see just in the time it took to take that picture, it was starting to go brown.

Now, quickly, mix that liquid mixture up some more, to make sure the semi-solids didn't fall to the bottom. (This is the milk, egg, flour, baking powder, sugar, and starch concoction from earlier.) Pour the onions and bacon in with the potatoes. Mix with your hands. Using a big-ass spoon does not cut it. Use your clean hands.

When that's nicely mixed, pour in the liquid concoction as well and mix with your hands. Then, take some Pam and spray the heck out of a non-stick 9x13 pan. I mean spray like you've never sprayed before. The original recipe calls for greasing the pan with the leftover bacon grease. Umm, in an attempt to not completely and totally clog arteries, use Pam. It works. After you've Pam'd the pan, pour in your concoction.

Now comes the bacon grease. I have tried multiple ways of using Pam instead, but it's just no good. The recipe completely dries out on top and does not taste very good. So, you need to use the leftover bacon grease and pour some of that on top of the Koogali. Spread it out over the entire top, a nice thin layer like so:

Now put it in the preheated oven at 350 ... for about an hour. When is it done? Well, you'll need to cut into the center to check it. It should be moist, but not runny. The top should look something like this:

Thought we were done? No way! While the Koogali is baking, we have to make the topping, but this is an easy-peasy deal. Take a tub of large curd cottage cheese and an equal amount of sour cream. Mix together. There ya go. The topping is ready. (We usually pour it back into the sour cream and cottage cheese containers and mark them with a big K.)

Now, just let me take a moment to tell you this: my dad HATES sour cream and DESPISES cottage cheese. HATES them. They are nasty spoiled uckiness to him. But even he swears by this mixture on top of the Koogali.

And now, I present to you ... the finished product:

But, we're STILL not done. I know, this is like an old Ronco commercial, isn't it? But wait! There's MORE!

Anyhow, every year there is an argument over whether or not Koogali is better the first day, fresh out of the oven ... or the second day.

Prepping for the second day is simple: cut a rectangular slab of Koogali out of the pan, Pam the heck out of a frying pan and make sure to fry the Koogali on all four long sides. After you've done that, you can attempt to fry the short ends, too, if you're silly like I am. The fried Koogali is generally solid enough that you can at least get a touch of browning on those sides before it falls over or your relatives tell you the damn thing is cooked and get the hell outta the way so that they can cook theirs.

I probably shouldn't have put the fried version on my favourite green plate ... but you get the idea:

And there you have it. My family's one claim to ever-lasting fame: Koogali.

(Unless it turns out that we really are related to Arlene Klasky and then she pretty much outshines anything else we've done. Well, unless you take into account that my aunt gets interviewed on NPR and has been quoted in USAToday and ... oh heck, so SHE's famous. The rest of us are schmucks.)

P.S. Want to try the recipe and you don't wanna wade through this long-ass post? Click here for the PDF recipe, text only, no side commentary. :)

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:56 AM | Comments (5) | Blog | Stumble

April 29, 2008

The Dark Side of Belief

Those of you who have read this blog for very long will not be surprised that the news story which has captured my full attention over the last few days is taking place in Austria right now.

A father, Josef, tricked his 18 year old daughter back in 1984, to enter the cellar, where he drugged her, handcuffed her and then confined her in the cellar. He forced his daughter, Elisabeth, to write a letter to her parents stating that she had run away and that they should not look for her. Somewhere between 1988 and 1989, Elisabeth gives birth to a daughter. Then, a son. Nearly 10 years after Elisabeth's "disappearance," she purportedly leaves an infant on the doorstep of her parents' home, with a note stating that she cannot care for the child. This happens again the following year.

The tally so far, a daughter and a son who live in the cellar with Elisabeth. Then 2 infants left on the doorstep for her parents to raise. Four children fathered by her own father. Two she was allowed to keep; two taken from her. All this in the first 10 years of her incarceration.

In 1996, she gives birth to twins, one of whom dies shortly thereafter and her father places the infant in the building's incinerator. The next year, she gives birth to another child who also is left on the parents' doorstep. Then, in 2003, she gives birth to a final son. (source)

Elisabeth and the three children who stayed with her lived in a tiny cellar, which was constantly enlarged over the 24 years that Elisabeth was condemned to the prison. There was a little kitchen, a little bedroom, a little bathroom ... and apparently, a small storeroom as well.

What finally gave Josef away and revealed the four people living in the cellar dungeon? The oldest child became deadly ill and he took her to hospital, claiming she'd collapsed in front of his building. A call went out for the girl's mother ... and eventually it all came to light, quite literally.

When we are confronted with an example of pure malice and evil, our first reaction is generally one of denial and disbelief. Even as we marvel at the evidence in front of us and know intellectually that the buildings at Auschwitz were used in the ways that they were used ... a portion of our mind finds the concept of such cruelty too large to hold and the first words uttered are generally, "no, this can't be."

I spoke last month of Merrily Melson who was faced with a similar situation on a personal level. A partner whom she trusted suddenly began attacking her with an ax. Think about this for a moment. Think about your partner suddenly hefting an ax and come running toward you. What would your first thought be? Would it be "Hey, you're not Jack Nicholson, put that damn ax down before you hurt yourself?" Would the time it took to realize this was NOT a joke mean the first stroke was fatal?

How do you cope with finding out that you are NOT safe?

Merrily Melson was lucky. She reacted to the situation quickly enough to escape with her life and that, trust me, is no small feat. When you are confronted with such an extreme act, your ability to think is essentially cut off. Your brain cooks up a batch of chemicals which rather locks the reasoning areas down and strips you to reflexes. So it's no surprise that in the heat of being attacked by her partner wielding an ax in some bizarre scenario, that it didn't immediately occur to her to grab her son (who was not being threatened at the time). This is an immediate fight or flight response. Had Melson's partner begun threatening their boy in front of her, her instincts would have been to snag him and run.

But without seeing that immediate threat ... we are programmed more toward denial than thought at such a time.

It is the same with child abuse and particularly true of abuse in its most extreme forms. As humans, we accept, intellectually, that some sick people force themselves on children or beat their children or neglect them.

But unless confronted with some concrete evidence or very compelling circumstantial evidence (behavioural clues from the child, perhaps) - we do not believe that it will happen to anyone we know ... to the person next door. To us. It happens to other people. Not people we know and care about. Other people.

It's one of the fictions we live with daily in order to not worry 24/7. Just as we trust that the walls of our homes will not be breached, that our health will not suddenly disappear, that the people we love will care for us. We trust that helicopters will not fall from the sky, that big brother is listening to someone else's phone conversations, that our bosses do not read our blogs.

We trust, essentially, that those around us are worthy of our trust because the world is far too big and dangerous if we have to go it completely alone.

But this trust also means that many people try to say that these cases of extreme abuse don't really happen. Or that they don't happen in the U.S. - and it makes me want to scream. We have an example in Austria where it really shows just how easy this can be. Is it common for abuse to happen at this type of level? No, I don't believe it is common. But I am convinced that it happens more often than we want to think.

What confuses people, I think, is the plethora of wild abuse stories told in the '80s. We had the Atlanta abductions in the news, then there were reports of mass abuse happening in day care centres, and people claiming multi-offender, satanic abuse rings were popping up all over the nation.

If you read very carefully the 1992 FBI report by Kenneth V. Lanning (read the report here), Lanning is pretty thorough and logical with his analysis of the phenomenon. He begins with the history of how the U.S. has handled everything from "stranger danger" to the claims of the 80s. By the fifth part of the report, entitled "MULTlDlMENSlONAL CHILD SEX RINGS," he gets to the core of what I believe has confused the American public.

Lanning, in 1992, had found no evidence supporting a large, multi-offender, multi-victim, multi-murder cult. Look at all the words there. Large. Multi-offender. Multi-victim. Multi-murder.

He states quite clearly that smaller groups are possible and it's possible that smaller groups could even evade the law, particularly (this is a bit more my interpretation, but I think his text indicates he might agree with this) particularly when the victim is a young child, under the six at the onset of the abuse.

An important quote from the report:

Most people would agree that just because a victim tells you one detail that turns out to be true, this does not mean that every detail is true. But many people seem to believe that if you can disprove one part of a victim's story, then the entire story is false. As previously stated, one of my main concerns in these cases is that people are getting away with sexually abusing children or committing other crimes because we cannot prove that they are members of organized cults that murder and eat people.

I think most people in the '80s looked at the extreme allegations made, read the FBI report and came to a sort of conclusion of denial - "he said these things don't happen," when, in fact, the most important part of his report is that the stories of murder and cannibalism and satanic ritual may be exaggerated stories used to conceal very real abuse or crimes.

What he said was, these things don't happen with large groups of offenders and victims.

We have evidence that they do happen on a much smaller scale.

Who would have thought that a father of seven children would kidnap one of his children, imprison her, father seven children on her and then raise three of them himself and imprison three of them (and burning the body of the infant who died)? How did he choose which of the children to raise and which to consign to life in the dungeon? Why did he choose to bring any of them out? Was it simple overcrowding?

The case in Austria simply brings to light all of the questions I have about how humanity treats humanity ... and how tenaciously we cling to the idea that the world is a safe place even as we mouth the words about how unsafe it is.

The dark side of our belief and our hope that such things do not happen ... is that those who perpetrate such things get away with their crimes.

It was unfathomable that any government would kill some six MILLION members of a single group of people and for that to be just one segment of the deaths. Intellectually, we seem to recognize this possibility now - but even as we do, there's a rising number of vocal people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen. Whether that is simple political expediency or not, I think it also demonstrates just how deeply our denial goes.

We do not wish to believe such evil occurs.

The dark side of our belief that evil does not happen is to allow that evil to continue happening.

How do we keep these things from happening? The short answer is that we cannot. Josef and his family were insular. But even if they had been outgoing people, the cellar dungeon would likely not have been detected. Josef was quite good at concealing it and concealing sound. And, not every shy person or introvert is hiding some deep, evil secret.

With the facts we have about Josef's case, I'm not sure that he made many mistakes ... that he gave much reason for investigation. It all sounds so plausible once the daughter was first tricked into her incarceration.

But what about another case where people in the neighborhood knew that dead animals were nailed to the fence and they were pretty sure from which house this was happening? Why did they choose to look the other way? Isn't this a neon sign that bad things are happening?

Or were they just grateful that strays and vermin were gone from their neighborhood? Did the dark side of their belief in humanity convince them to be grateful that's all it was? that what they saw was the worst of it?

How do we balance the need to believe we are safe ... with the evidence that we are not?

Why do we choose to believe some stories ... and not others?

Why do we often choose to believe in grand, large conspiracies ... and ignore the smaller contrivances around us?

Why do we hear so often "I knew how I was treated ... but I never thought 'Pat' would hurt the children"?

Our belief can be a very power and positive agent in our lives ... but it also has a darker side which can cause us to completely deny actions we should take or allegations we should investigate.

We cannot live in a constant state of suspicion ... but there are times when we need to take out the cloth of our beliefs and shake it, examine it carefully and analytically before once again cloaking ourselves in it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:55 AM | Comments (2) | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

April 27, 2008

Holy Vampire Bats!

So my favourite way to improve my drawing - particularly drawing people standing in poses that aren't utterly stiff - is to find someone else's work and copy it. It's a time-honoured tradition and it's earned me a few friends along the way. I first practiced some of Mike Rohde's excellent SketchToons back in December of '05. Later it was "RubberyJido" over at deviantArt just this past September as I learned how to use my Copic markers.

Earlier this month, I discovered Drew Moss over at deviantArt. I instantly adored this comic book page he drew introducing a "new" Batgirl. So far as I can tell, this isn't something from DC officially, just a concept that Drew came up with. You should check out the full page he did - the text and design had me thinking this was going to be an actual Batgirl book.

His Batgirl concept is on the left and is inked, so the blacks are quite stark. Mine is on the right and is just a pencil sketch, so the blacks are muted.

Not too shabby. I can always see plenty of flaws, the most irritating of which are the changes I made to the face. Stare at it long enough and it's quite obviously off-balance. Meh. Still, it was good practice for me and I think I'll probably try to draw the bulk of the remaining panels as well. I need the practice and I enjoy the stark b/w drawings to help me really concentrate on shadows and light.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:33 PM | Comments (2) | Sketches | Stumble