very cool fish: image and video from from National Geographic

another chocolate birthday cake

Chocolate Cake
4 squares unsweetened chocolate
1-1/2 cups sugar, divided
1/2 cup water
1-2/3 cups flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 stick softened butter
3 eggs
3/4 cup buttermilk or reg. milk with 2 ½ T powdered buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla

PREHEAT oven to 350°F.
In saucepan melt chocolate in 1/2 cup water. When smooth add ½ cup sugar and stir until sugar is melted. Let cool.

Mix together flour, baking soda and salt.
Beat butter and remaining 1-1/4 cups sugar in bowl of electric mixer until light and fluffy. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in flour mixture alternately with the milk. Add chocolate mixture and vanilla; and mix.
Pour into 2 greased and floured 9-inch round cake pans.

BAKE 30 to 35 min.. Cool in pans 10 min.. then remove from pans and cool completely on a wire rack. Frost. I like vanilla frosting with berries or jam between the layers and chocolate frosting on the cake itself.
To make easy frosting mix:
1 stick butter
I box confectioner’s sugar
4 T milk
1 ½ tsp. vanilla
a pinch of salt.
Remove enough vanilla frosting to spread between the layers. To the remaining frosting add 2 squares of melted unsweetened chocolate and mix well.

fleet foxes: white winter hymnal

This has been in my head for several days, so I am posting to share. I find this song so beautiful,wistfully sad and haunting. And so very difficult to let go...

Happy Birthday Taki Mou

From the BBC: Prison Break Shocks Greece

(I am reading this and am astounded,not just once, but TWICE!)

Two of Greece's most wanted men have staged a daring helicopter escape from Athens' highest-security prison - for the second time in three years.

Serial armed robber and kidnapper Vassilis Paleokostas and his Albanian sidekick Alket Rizai were days away from trial for their 2006 escape.

They fled Korydallos prison after a helicopter landed on the jail's roof and threw them a rope ladder.

The aircraft was reportedly later found abandoned by a main highway.

The road leads towards Greece's central mountain range, an area where Paleokostas, 42, was able to hide with impunity during previous years, says the BBC's Malcolm Brabant, in Athens.

Our correspondent says the breakout is a damning indictment of Greece's prison system.

Three years ago both men managed to escape when a hijacked helicopter landed in Korydallos' central yard at exercise time.

On that occasion, the guards failed to react, because they thought it was a visit by prison inspectors.

The architect of that escape, Paleokostas' brother Nikos, has since been captured and jailed, and is now likely to face increased security.

BBC News 2/22/09

Song for a Friday evening

The Shins: Saint Simon

After all these implements and text designed by intellects
So vexed to find evidently there's just so much that hides
And though the saints of us divine in ancient feeding lines
Their sentiment is just as hard to pluck from the vine

I'm trying hard not to pretend
Allow myself no mock defense
Step into the night

Since I dont have the time nor mind to figure out
The nursery rhymes that helped us out and make a sense of our lives
The cruel uneventful state of apathy releases me
I value them but I won't cry if the time was wiped out

I'm trying hard not to give in
Battened down to fair the wind
Read my head, at least pretend
Allow myself no mock defense
Step into the night...

Mercy's eyes are blue
When she places them in front of you
Nothing holds a roman candle to
The solemn warmth you feel inside

There's no measuring of it
As nothing else is love

I'll try hard not to give in
Battened down to fair the wind
Read my head, at least pretend
Allow myslef no mock defense
Step into the night...

Mercy's eyes are blue
When she places them in front of you
Nothing really holds a candle to
The solemn warmth you feel inside of you

the small joy of cherries and pistachios

This dreary, gray February day was made a little bit brighter with the arrival of a package that I had ordered just yesterday. Dried cherries and pistachios from NutsOnline. Cherries may help improve joint health, and I have been feeling the cold in my joints this year, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to try the natural remedy. I ordered three varieties, so good.
And the pistachios are the good kind, imported antep. I am not getting paid to advertise this company, but their products are so good, and their customer service so superior, that I am adding them to my favorite places. Click on the title to link to the NutsOnline site.

a riddle

This verse was on the card attached to my Valentine's Day gift:

I swear by all the saints that be
you are the Valentine for me
This is the truth that must remain
All else is false or not germane.

Th puzzle: What was the gift?
Click on title for answer.

a poem for today

To His Coy Mistress
- Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast;
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart;
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Interpreting Leda: 3 paintings, one sculpture, an engraving, a poem and a synthesized video in French

Leonardo de Vinci's Leda



Leda sculpture by unknown artist, J. Paul Getty Museum


Leda painting by Theodore Gericault


Engraving by Giulio Campagnola


Salvadore Dali's "Leda Atomica"

Leda and the Swan
- William Butler Yeats


A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

one more Yeats

Sailing to Byzantium
- W. B. Yeats

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W.B.Yeats and Donovan

The Song of Wandering Aengus
-W. B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

Litsa Giagousi - Para Poli: Friday Afternoon-Time to Get up and Dance! M'agapas?

Nothing like shaking it to a good old fashioned club tune to stretch out the kinks of the work week.
Everybody...stand up...let LOOSE!!!

a poem by Robinson Jeffers

The Stars Go Over The Lonely Ocean
-Robinson Jeffers

Unhappy about some far off things
That are not my affair, wandering
Along the coast and up the lean ridges,
I saw in the evening
The stars go over the lonely ocean,
And a black-maned wild boar
Plowing with his snout on Mal Paso Mountain.

The old monster snuffled, "Here are sweet roots,
Fat grubs, slick beetles and sprouted acorns.
The best nation in Europe has fallen,
And that is Finland,
But the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
The old black-bristled boar,
Tearing the sod on Mal Paso Mountain.

"The world's in a bad way, my man,
And bound to be worse before it mends;
Better lie up in the mountain here
Four or five centuries,
While the stars go over the lonely ocean,"
Said the old father of wild pigs,
Plowing the fallow on Mal Paso Mountain.

"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy
And the dogs that talk revolution,
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks.
Long live freedom and damn the ideologies,"
Said the gamey black-maned boar
Tusking the turf on Mal Paso Mountain.

Savina Yannatou - Dedication (live)

Variations on a theme.

Manos Hadjidakis - Dedication

Variations on a theme.

yum

My father's birthday was January 30, I made this cake and we celebrated last night. It is incredibly rich and calorie laden but for a special occasion I think it well worth the indulgence, I would have to say it is one of my all-time chocolate favorites. Here is the recipe,originally published in "Gourmet Magazine" in June 1992, I have made only slight changes.
Bittersweet Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Cake

For the cake

- 6 ounces fine-quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped
- 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
- 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
- scant 3/4 cup sugar
- large eggs, separated
- 1/4 cup (or so) Maker's Mark bourbon
- 1 rounded tablespoon all-purpose flour
- 1/2 to 3/4 cup pecans, toasted lightly, cooled, and chopped fine

For the glaze

- 6 ounces fine-quality bittersweet chocolate, chopped
- 1/2 cup heavy cream

pecan halves for decorating
lightly sweetened bourbon-laced whipped cream as an accompaniment (OPTIONAL)

Directions
To make the cake:
Line the bottom of a buttered 8 1/2-inch springform pan with parchment , butter the paper, and dust the pan with flour, shaking out the excess. In a metal bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water melt the chocolates, stirring until the mixture is smooth, remove the bowl from the pan, and let the chocolate cool until it is room temperature. In the bowl of an electric mixer cream together the butter and the sugar until the mixture is pale and fluffy, add the chocolate, and beat the mixture until it is combined well. Beat in the egg yolks, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition, and beat in the bourbon and the flour. In a large bowl beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until they just hold stiff peaks, stir one third of them into the chocolate mixture to lighten it, and fold in the remaining whites and the chopped pecans gently but thoroughly. Turn the batter into the prepared pan and bake the cake in the middle of a preheated 350°F. oven for 35 to 40 minutes, or until a tester inserted 2 inches from the rim comes out clean. (The center of the cake will remain moist.) Transfer the cake to a rack and let it cool completely. Remove the cake from the pan, invert it onto the rack, and remove the wax paper carefully. The cake may be made 1 day in advance and kept wrapped in plastic wrap at room temperature.

Make the glaze:
Put the chocolate in a small bowl, in saucepan bring the cream to a boil, and pour it over the chocolate. Stir the mixture until the chocolate is melted and the glaze is smooth.

Invert the cake onto rack set on wax paper, pour the glaze over it, smoothing the glaze over the top and side with a spatula, and arrange the pecan halves in the center of the cake. Let the cake stand 2 hours, or until the glaze is set. If you wish, serve with the whipped cream. YUM!!!!!

February Greek Name Days

Feb 1- Tryfonos
Feb 2- Ypapanti tos Sotiros
Feb 5- Agathis (Agatha)
Feb 6- Voskolos, Fotios
Feb 7- Parthenios
Feb 8- Zaxarios, Theod. Stratilatos
Feb 9- Nikiforos
Feb 10- Charalampous, Zinonos, Haralambos, Hara, Hariklia
Feb 11- Vasios
Feb 12- Meletios
Feb 13- Akula and Priskillis (Priscilla)
Feb 14- Ayxentios, Valentini, St. Valentine
Feb 15- Eusevios
Feb 17- Theodoros Tironos, Poulcherias
Feb 18- Leontos Romis
Feb 20- Agathonos, Vissarionos
Feb 22- Anthi (Anthea)
Feb 23 Polykarpos
Feb 23- Nestoros
Feb 25- Tarasios
Feb 26- Porfurios

sunset

Florida

where I was

Two pictures from my winter vacation: Mexico. I was also in Florida, on the sea and on Grand Cayman Island where I watched the inauguration at a beach bar, mojito in hand.Huzzah!

gyro

It's always nice to come home through TF Green airport. Nothing quite says home like this sculpture of a giant gyro!!!